Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France 0754636194, 9780754636199

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
1 DISJECTA MEMBRA
Cosimo’s Black Widow
‘How to Paint a Dead Man’
Corpse to Corpus: Bodies (of Scholarship) that Matter
Recuperative Narratives and Other Crutches
PART I: THE ANATOMY OF MOURNING
2 MNEMONIC V(O)ICES
Talking Trauma from Day One
Drama Queens
Tongue-Tied
Rhetorical Mutations
Augustine’s Concessions
The Mother Tongue
3 THE WIDOW’S CLEAVAGE
Merry Widows
A Flash in the Pants
Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down
Eyes Wide Shut
‘QUID TUM’
The Black Market
Taking the Veil, and Taking it Like a Man
PATR II: THE MELANCHOLY OF ANATOMY
4 THE DEATH OF THE FATHERS
Mourning Face to (Ef)faced
Humoring Ficino
Freudian Slept
A Re-Interpretation of Dreams
Rolling Over in Dürer’s Grave
Michelangelo’s Legacy
Grave Matters
5 PHANTOM LIMBS
Deadbeat Dads
Portrait Parings
Prosthetic Fittings
Addenda
Bodies in Limbo
Black Holes
AFTERWORD
6 THE BIG STIFF
B(l)ackstory
Re-dressing ‘Renaissance Man’
Playing Dead
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence

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Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA Abby Zanger, Tufts University, USA Women and Gender in the Early Modern World reaches beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Titles in the series Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe Edited by Allison Levy Boccaccio’s Heroines Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society Margaret Franklin Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580 Negotiating Power Katherine A. McIver Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350–1530 Experience, Authority, Resistance Andrea Pearson Ottoman Women Builders The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan Lucienne Thys-Senocak Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew Matthew Biberman Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe Edited by Helen Hills Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe Edited by Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam

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Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence Widowed Bodies, Mourning and Portraiture

Allison Levy Wheaton College, USA

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First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2006 Allison Levy Allison Levy has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices .. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Levy, Allison M. (Allison Mary), 1968 Re-membering masculinity in early modern Florence : widowed bodies, mourning and portraiture. - (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. Portrait painting, Italian - Italy - Florence - 15th century 2. Death in art 3. Art, Renaissance - Italy Florence 4. Masculinity in art 5. Widows in art I. Title 709.4'551'09024 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levy, Allison M. (Allison Mary), 1968 Re-membering masculinity in early modern Florence : widowed bodies, mourning and portraiture / Allison Levy. p. cm. -- (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5404-9 1. Portrait painting, Italian--Italy--Florence. 2. Portrait painting, Renaissance--Italy- Florence. 3. Memory in art. 4. Death in art. 5. Masculinity in art. 6. Medici, House of- Portraits. I. Title. II. Title: Re-membering masculinity in early modern Florence. ND1318.2.L48 2006 704.9'42094551--dc22

2006021563

ISBN 9780754654049 (hbk)

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Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments

vii xvii xix

Introduction 1 Disjecta Membra Cosimo’s Black Widow ‘How to Paint a Dead Man’ Corpse to Corpus: Bodies (of Scholarship) that Matter Recuperative Narratives and Other Crutches

3 3 6 10 17

PART I The Anatomy of Mourning 2 Mnemonic V(o)ices Talking Trauma from Day One Drama Queens Tongue-Tied Rhetorical Mutations Augustine’s Concessions The Mother Tongue

33 33 35 37 41 44 47

3 The Widow’s Cleavage Merry Widows A Flash in the Pants Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down Eyes Wide Shut ‘QUID TUM’ The Black Market Taking the Veil, and Taking It Like a Man

59 59 62 66 68 70 73 76

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vi

Re-membering Masculinity

PART II The Melancholy of Anatomy 4 The Death of the Fathers Mourning Face to (Ef)faced  Humoring Ficino Freudian Slept A Re-Interpretation of Dreams Rolling Over in Dürer’s Grave Michelangelo’s Legacy Grave Matters

95 95 97 99 103 104 106 109

5 Phantom Limbs Deadbeat Dads Portrait Parings Prosthetic Fittings Addenda Bodies in Limbo Black Holes

119 119 122 124 126 128 130

Afterword 6 The Big Stiff B(l)ackstory Re-dressing ‘Renaissance Man’ Playing Dead

143 143 144 147

Bibliography Index

153 185

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List of Illustrations 1

Disjecta Membra

1.1

Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece, 1438–40. San Marco Museum, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

1.2

Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece, 1438–40; detail of the central panel, Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici as Saint Cosmas. San Marco Museum, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

1.3

Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece, 1438–40; detail of the predella panel, Miracle of the Black Leg. San Marco Museum, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

1.4

Master of the Rinuccini Chapel, Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, c. 1370–75; detail of the left predella panel, Saints Cosmas and Damian Transplant the Leg of a Moor. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

1.5

Andrea di Giusto, Saints Cosmas and Damian, 1430; detail of the predella panel, Miracle of the Black Leg. Duomo, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

1.6

Hans Holbein the Younger, Dead Christ, 1521. Kunstmuseum, Basel. Giraudon/Art Resource, New York.

1.7

Rembrandt van Rijn, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, 1632. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

1.8

Edouard Manet, Dead Toreador, probably 1864. Widener Collection, Image © 2005 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

1.9

Andrea Mantegna, Dead Christ, c. 1500. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Scala/ Art Resource, New York.

1.10 Giovanni Bellini, Pietà, c. 1460, Museo Correr, Venice. Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 1.11 Master of the Straus Madonna, Christ as the Man of Sorrows, c. 1400. Accademia, Florence. Photo source: Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz. 1.12 Giorgione, La Vecchia, c. 1507. Accademia, Venice. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

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1.13 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Old Man with a Child, 1488. Louvre, Paris. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York. 1.14 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Head of an Old Man, c. 1488. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. 1.15 Fra Bartolomeo, Portrait of Savonarola as Saint Peter Martyr, 1508–10. San Marco Museum, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 1.16 Masaccio, Holy Trinity, c. 1425. Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 1.17 Book cover, William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), showing detail of Willem van Haecht, The Picture Gallery of Cornelius van der Geest, 1628. 1.18 Book cover showing the split portrait of Henry VIII and Sigmund Freud. Copyright 2000, from Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture by Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, eds. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. 1.19 Willem van Haecht, The Picture Gallery of Cornelius van der Geest, 1628. Stedelijke Musea Stad, Antwerp. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 2

Mnemonic V(o)ices

2.1

Niccolò dell’Arca, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, completed 1463. By kind permission of Servizio Sanitaria Regionale Emilia-Romagna, Azienda Unità Sanitaria Locale di Bologna, Museo della Sanità e dell’Assistenza, Oratorio di Santa Maria della Vita – Bologna. Photo by Andrea Samaritani, Meridiana Immagini, Voli Soc. Coop.

2.2

Niccolò dell’Arca, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, completed 1463; detail of Virgin Mary. By kind permission of Servizio Sanitaria Regionale EmiliaRomagna, Azienda Unità Sanitaria Locale di Bologna, Museo della Sanità e dell’Assistenza, Oratorio di Santa Maria della Vita – Bologna. Photo by Andrea Samaritani, Meridiana Immagini, Voli Soc. Coop.

2.3

Niccolò dell’Arca, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, completed 1463; detail of Mary Salome. By kind permission of Servizio Sanitaria Regionale EmiliaRomagna, Azienda Unità Sanitaria Locale di Bologna, Museo della Sanità e dell’Assistenza, Oratorio di Santa Maria della Vita – Bologna. Photo by Andrea Samaritani, Meridiana Immagini, Voli Soc. Coop.

2.4

Niccolò dell’Arca, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, completed 1463; detail of Mary Cleophae and Mary Magdalen. By kind permission of Servizio Sanitaria Regionale Emilia-Romagna, Azienda Unità Sanitaria Locale di Bologna, Museo della Sanità e dell’Assistenza, Oratorio di Santa Maria della

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List of Illustrations

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Vita – Bologna. Photo by Andrea Samaritani, Meridiana Immagini, Voli Soc. Coop. 2.5

Niccolò dell’Arca, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, completed 1463; detail of Mary Cleophae and Mary Magdalen. By kind permission of Servizio Sanitaria Regionale Emilia-Romagna, Azienda Unità Sanitaria Locale di Bologna, Museo della Sanità e dell’Assistenza, Oratorio di Santa Maria della Vita – Bologna. Photo by Andrea Samaritani, Meridiana Immagini, Voli Soc. Coop.

2.6

Niccolò dell’Arca, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, completed 1463; detail of St John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalen. By kind permission of Servizio Sanitaria Regionale Emilia-Romagna, Azienda Unità Sanitaria Locale di Bologna, Museo della Sanità e dell’Assistenza, Oratorio di Santa Maria della Vita – Bologna. Photo by Andrea Samaritani, Meridiana Immagini, Voli Soc. Coop.

2.7

Domenico Veneziano, The Miracle of Saint Zenobius, c. 1445. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

2.8

Giuliano da Sangallo, Tomb of Francesco Sassetti, 1485–90; detail of frieze depicting the death of Francesco Sassetti. Church of Santa Trinità, Florence.

2.9

Follower of Verrocchio?, Death of a Woman in Childbirth, c. 1480. Bargello, Florence. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

2.10 The Death of Meleager, relief from a sarcophagus built into the east façade of the Villa Borghese, right half 160–270 CE, left half completed in the 17th century after antique models. Louvre, Paris. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York. 2.11 Caravaggio, Medusa, 1597–98. Uffizi, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 2.12 Bernardo Rossellino, Tomb of Leonardo Bruni, after 1444. Church of Santa Croce, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 2.13 Botticelli, Saint Augustine in his Cell, 1490s. Uffizi, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 2.14 Botticelli, Saint Augustine in his Study, 1480. Church of the Ognissanti, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 2.15 Benozzo Gozzoli, The Death of Saint Monica and Return to Carthage, 1465. Church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 2.16 Master of the Osservanza, The Burial of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine Departing for Africa, after 1430. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. 2.17 Benozzo Gozzoli, The Funeral of Saint Augustine, 1465. Church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

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3

The Widow’s Cleavage

3.1

Baldessare Lanci, View of Florence, 1569. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

3.2

Merry Widows condom tin, c. 1920. Permanent Collection, Museum of Sex, New York.

3.3

Venetian Woman with Moveable Skirt, flap-down, c. 1590. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1955 (55.503.30), Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

3.4

Venetian Woman with Moveable Skirt, flap-up, c. 1590. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1955 (55.503.30), Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

3.5

Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, late 1450s. Palazzo della Signoria, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

3.6

Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545–54. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

3.7

Leon Battista Alberti, Self-Portrait, c. 1435. Samuel H. Kress Collection, Image © 2005 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

3.8

Leon Battista Alberti, the flying eye enclosed by a wreath with the inscription QUID TUM, ink sketch on manuscript of Della famiglia (c. 1438), MS. II.IV.38, c.II9v. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali della Repubblica Italiana.

3.9

Giorgio Vasari, Caterina Sforza, 1556–59. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

3.10 Giorgio Vasari, Maria Salviati, 1556–59. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Alinari/ Art Resource, New York. 3.11 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, c. 1475. Samuel H. Kress Collection, Image © 2005 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 3.12 Bronzino, Maria Salviati, c. 1540. Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Gift of Mr. Samuel H. Kress, 53670. 3.13 Pontormo, Maria Salviati, c. 1543. Uffizi, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 3.14 Attributed to Jacometto Veneziano, Portrait of a Lady, c. 1480/1490. John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

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3.15 Giuliano Bugiardini, Portrait of a Lady, called La Monaca, c. 1516. Uffizi, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 3.16 Raphael, Baldesare Castiglione, c. 1514. Louvre, Paris. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 3.17 Jacometto Veneziano, Alvise Contarini (?), c. 1485–95. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.86). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 3.18 Jacometto Veneziano, A Woman, possibly a Nun of San Secondo, c. 1485– 95. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.85). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 3.19 Attributed to Giuliano Bugiardini, Portrait Cover with Mask and Grotesques, c. 1516. Uffizi, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 3.20 Cesare Vecellio, Venetian widow, from Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo, published in Venice in 1598. 3.21 Cesare Vecellio, Venetian prostitute, from Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo, published in Venice in 1598. 3.22 Cesare Vecellio, Roman widow, from Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo, published in Venice in 1598. 3.23 Cesare Vecellio, Roman prostitute, from Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo, published in Venice in 1598. 3.24 Attributed to Niccolò Fiorentino, Portrait Medal of Caterina Sforza (obverse), bronze, c. 1488. © Copyright The Trustees of The British Museum. 3.25 Attributed to Niccolò Fiorentino, Portrait Medal of Caterina Sforza (reverse), bronze, c. 1488. © Copyright The Trustees of The British Museum. 3.26 Anonymous, Portrait of Caterina Sforza, woodcut, in Jacobus Philippus, De claris mulieribus, 1497. By permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. 3.27 Michelangelo, Study of a Mourning Woman, n.d. Private collection. 4

The Death of the Fathers

4.1

Pontormo, Alessandro de’ Medici, 1534–35. Philadelphia Museum of Art: John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

4.2

Vermeer, Girl Asleep, c. 1657. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913 (14.40.611). All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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4.3

Sigmund Freud seated in a chair next to his analytic couch in his summer residence in Vienna, 1932. © Sigmund Freud Private Foundation.

4.4

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, New York.

4.5

Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait, 1491–92. Universitäts-bibliothek, Erlangen.

4.6

Erwin Panofsky, n.d. Reprinted from Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History. © 1994 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

4.7

Monogrammist F.B., Melancolia, 1561. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.

4.8

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1547–55. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

4.9

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1547–55; detail of Nicodemus’ head (self-portrait). Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Nicolo Orsi Battaglini/Art Resource, New York.

4.10 Michelangelo, Pietà, 1538–44. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. 4.11 Michelangelo, Tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1519–34. Medici Chapels, Church of San Lorenzo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 4.12 Michelangelo, Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1519–34. Medici Chapels, Church of San Lorenzo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 4.13 Michelangelo, Study of legs for the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1530. Medici Chapels, Church of San Lorenzo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 4.14 Michelangelo, Saints Cosmas and Damian and Virgin and Child, 1519–34. Medici Chapels, Church of San Lorenzo, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 5

Phantom Limbs

5.1

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro, c. 1487?. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection,1949.

5.2

Giorgio Vasari, Cosimo I. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York

5.3

Pontormo, Cosimo ‘il Vecchio,’ 1519. Uffizi, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

5.4

Giorgio Vasari, Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ as St Cosmas, c. 1558. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

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List of Illustrations

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5.5

Giorgio Vasari, Cosimo I as San Damiano, c. 1558. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

5.6

Bronzino, Cosimo I as Orpheus, c. 1537–39. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.

5.7

Bronzino, Cosimo I, 1545. Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Kassel. Foto Marburg/ Art Resource, New York.

5.8

Francesco Salviati (attrib.), Giovanni delle Bande Nere, c. 1545. Galleria Sabauda, Turin.

5.9

Carlo Portelli, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, 1565–70. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Putnam Dana McMillan Fund.

5.10 Alessandro Allori, Cosimo I. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 5.11 Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1540–45. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs H.O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.16). 5.12 Bronzino, Ugolino Martelli, 1540. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York. 5.13 Pontormo, Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi?), 1529–30. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 5.14 Bronzino, Lodovico Capponi, 1550–55; before 1949 restoration. Copyright The Frick Collection, New York. 5.15 Bronzino, Lodovico Capponi, 1550–55; after 1949 restoration. Copyright The Frick Collection, New York. 5.16 Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man. Edinburgh. In a private collection. 5.17 Pontormo, Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s ‘On Friendship,’ c. 1524. Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. 5.18 Pontormo, Study for Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s ‘On Friendship,’ c. 1524. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 5.19 Andrea del Sarto, Lady with a Book of Petrarch’s Verses, c. 1515/25. Uffizi, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 5.20 Bronzino, Laura Battiferri, 1555–60. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, New York. 5.21 Tomasso di Stefano Lunetti (?) or Andrea del Sarto (?), Portrait of a Man and His Wife, n.d. Palazzo Pitti, Florence. 5.22 Pontormo, Maria Salviati with little girl, probably Giulia de’ Medici, c. 1537. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

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5.23 Giovanni Battista Naldini, Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Maria Salviati, c. 1585. Uffizi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 5.24 Lorenzo Vaiani, called Lo Sciorina, Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici and Caterina Sforza, c. 1585. Uffizi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 5.25 Florentine School, Cosimo II and Costanza della Gherardesca, 1590. Uffizi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 5.26 Pontormo, Study of a Woman, Possibly Maria Salviati, c. 1543. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 5.27 Pontormo, Study for a Portrait of Maria Salviati, n.d. © Copyright The Trustees of The British Museum, London. 5.28 Jacques Callot, Study for a Portrait of Cosimo II, n.d. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 6

The Big Stiff

6.1

Giotto, Raising of Lazarus. Church of San Francesco, Assisi. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

6.2

Leonardo da Vinci, Drawing of ideal proportions of the human figure according to Vitruvius’s 1st-century AD treatise, De architectura (called Vitruvian Man), c. 1492. Accademia, Venice. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

6.3

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Memory is your image of perfection). Courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

6.4

Robert Mapplethorpe, Thomas, 1986. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission.

6.5

Robert Mapplethorpe, Man in a Polyester Suit, 1980. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission.

6.6

Don Cheadle as ‘Renaissance Man,’ Neiman Marcus catalog, October 2002.

6.7

‘GET IT RIGHT,’ Barneys New York.

6.8

Woody Allen as Sperm, from Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), 1972.

6.9

Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I AM A MAN), 1988.

6.10 George Dureau, John Slate, 1983. Courtesy: Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans.

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6.11 George Dureau, Wilbert Hines, 1983. Courtesy: Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans. 6.12 Jazz funeral of Anderson Stewart, 1997, New Orleans. Photo: author. 6.13 Jazz funeral of Anderson Stewart, 1997, New Orleans. Photo: author. 6.14 Jazz funeral of Anderson Stewart, 1997, New Orleans. Photo: author. 6.15 Bernardino Licinio, Woman Holding the Portrait of a Man. c. 1525. Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 6.16 Lee Friedlander, Look Smart, 1957–74. New Orleans. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 6.17 Lee Friedlander, Kid Thomas Valentine, 1957–74. New Orleans. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 6.18 Lee Friedlander, ‘Big Head’ Eddie Johnson, 1957–74. New Orleans. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 6.19 Lee Friedlander, Edmund Washington, 1957–74. New Orleans. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 6.20 Lee Friedlander, Sunny Henry, 1957–74. New Orleans. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 6.21 Lee Friedlander, John Handy and Melvin Lastie at Mama Lou Washington’s Church, 1957–74. New Orleans. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 6.22 Lee Friedlander, Self-Portrait, 1966. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 6.23 Members of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club applying whiteface, Mardi Gras, 1998. New Orleans. Photo: author. 6.24 Louis Armstrong as King Zulu, Mardi Gras, 1949. New Orleans. Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong Archives, Queens College, New York. 6.25 Gary Levy, temporary member of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, in whiteface, Mardi Gras, 1998. New Orleans. Photo: author. 6.26 Gary Levy, temporary member of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, in whiteface having blackface applied by member, Mardi Gras, 1998. New Orleans. Photo: author. 6.27 Allison Levy, temporary member of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, in whiteface having blackface applied by member, Mardi Gras, 1998. New Orleans. Photo: author.

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for Gary and Jan

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Preface This book, Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning and Portraiture, is the extensive revision of my doctoral dissertation, ‘Early Modern Mourning: Widow Portraiture in Sixteenth-Century Florence.’ As such, my purpose, here, is two-fold: On the one hand, I study the complex nature of the representation of the widow – perhaps no more complicated than that of the woman, or even the man, but differently complex, nonetheless. In this addition to the historiography of Italian Renaissance portraiture, I attempt both to describe and account for this complexity by distinguishing and defining, within the genre of portraiture, a new category – the widow’s portrait within the Medici family during the sixteenth century. But on the other hand, after many years of reflection, I now understand these women – and their portraits – to be only half of my story. That is, it is the ambivalent relationship between the widow and the man she is meant to remember that I find most provocative. The precariousness of that relationship has always been signal to my project, but what I wish to do in the chapters that follow is suggest the failure of widow portraiture as well as its alternative – what I read as the equally unconvincing enterprise of male portraiture. Indeed, mine is not a celebratory account. Exploring the possibilities as well as the impossibilities of commemorative portraiture, this revision calls attention to the ambiguous cultural situation of both male and female bodies – and their representations – within the early modern memorial process. In so doing, I use both historical texts – from Leon Battista Alberti to Vespasiano da Bisticci, from Boccaccio to Moderata Fonte, from Francesco Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, from Aristotle to Marsilio Ficino – but also some of the possibilities of contemporary theory – from Judith Butler to Katharine Park, from Jacques Lacan to Patricia Simons, from Juliana Schiesari to Sharon Strocchia, from William Bouwsma to Mark Breitenberg – that allow us, tentatively yet I hope productively, to think about the forms and meanings of these representations and to imagine, in some way, the social, even the psychological, context of such representations. At its core, this is a book about loss and the rhetoric and representation of recuperation; thus, I also draw upon critical theories of disability and performance studies insofar as these ideas may be brought to bear upon the interpretation of early modern bodies, which I read as fractured and fictive. In sum, I am interested in those interpretive possibilities that might suggestively redirect our approach to Renaissance portraiture, interrupting the familiar narrative and nuancing our understanding of the widowed body – both male and female.

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When possible, I have cited quotes in their original language as well as in English translation. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appears as ‘Cosimo’s Black Widow,’ in Erin J. Campbell’s edited collection, Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations (Ashgate, 2006); that essay provided an opportunity to map out the larger project presented here. And parts of Chapter 2 appeared in ‘Augustine’s Concessions and Other Failures: Mourning and Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany,’ in Grief and Gender: 700–1700, co-edited by Jennifer C. Vaught and Lynne Dickson Bruckner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

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Acknowledgments This book is based upon my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote at Bryn Mawr College, and I would like to thank David Cast, Steven Levine and Lisa Saltzman of the Department of History of Art for their many years of unparalleled guidance and support. Isabelle Wallace and Jennie Hirsh have also played an important role in the transformation of this project from dissertation to book, providing thoughtful feedback as well as the necessary entertainment. While at Bryn Mawr, my research was generously funded by the Graduate School and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. I completed the writing of the dissertation in New Orleans, as a Visiting Scholar at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, and there I wish to thank Beth Willinger and MaryAnn Maguire, both of whom have fostered my interests in gender and visual culture since my days as an undergraduate at Newcomb; returning home, then, to write on questions of origin and memory was especially meaningful to me. Over the years, many colleagues have offered valuable comments and suggestions, and I thank all of those who have taken a special interest in this project: Cristelle Baskins, Rudy Bell, Erin Campbell, Stanley Chojnacki, Joyce de Vries, Sheila ffolliott, Mary Garrard, John Paoletti, Katharine Park, Andrea Pearson, Sharon Strocchia, Natalie Tomas and Diane Wolfthal. My participation in seminars at the Folger Institute – those led by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass on ‘Renaissance Fetishisms,’ by Mary Carruthers and Lina Bolzoni on ‘The Force of Memory’ and by Patricia Fortini Brown on ‘Artifice and Authenticity in Venice’ – and in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at Columbia University, led by David and Sheila Rothman on ‘The History of Death in America,’ provided productive time and space, at various crucial moments, in which to think about men and widows. I very much enjoyed working again with my editor, Erika Gaffney, and I thank her warmly for her patience and continued commitment to this book. I am also happy to have this opportunity to thank Jacqui Cornish at Ashgate, whose assistance during the final stages was much appreciated. At Wheaton College, I have particularly enjoyed the friendship and support of my colleague, Tripp Evans. Research assistants, Colby Anderson, Laura Kalafarski, Peter Kunhardt, Jr and Alice Martin, deserve a special thank you. I am especially grateful to my Provost, Susanne Woods, whose support, in the form of a junior sabbatical, enabled me to spend the 2003-2004 academic year in Florence. That year

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was also funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Finally, I wish to thank my friends, especially those in Florence, for providing endless entertainment. My greatest thank you, as always, is due to my family, and it is to my parents, Gary and Jan, that I dedicate this book. A.L. Florence

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Introduction

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CHAPTER 1

Disjecta Membra I take as my subject the Renaissance body – cut up and cut off – amputated and amnesiac. In short, this is a project on loss. Yet it is less concerned with absence than with the illusion of presence or permanence, less with the inevitability of death than with the probability of being forgotten. It is, rather, a project on the anxieties of loss. It is about recuperative narratives and other crutches. Cosimo’s Black Widow ‘More completely than any work … Fra Angelico’s San Marco altarpiece embodies the ideals of the new phase of the Florentine Renaissance. The pictorial space … provides place and scale for every figure and thing.’1 So frequently heralded as the classic textbook example of Renaissance artistic principles and perfectionism, this celebrated altarpiece, painted by Fra Angelico between 1438 and 1440 for the Dominican monastery of San Marco in Florence, has long occupied a privileged position in the canon of Western art (Fig. 1.1). Following the recommendation of Leon Battista Alberti in his enormously influential Della pittura, published first in Latin in 1435 and then in Italian a year later, the central panel depicts the enthroned Madonna and Child surrounded by angels and saints, all appropriately assembled and balanced according to the rational, mathematical laws of one-point perspective and the intellectual, rhetorical devices of successful story-telling.2 In addition, insofar as control of the spectator’s attention was a primary objective of the organizational principles and didacticism a goal of the compositional arrangement, the inclusion of an intercessor does much to reinforce the science and theory operating behind the scenes: In an istoria, I like to see someone who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there; or beckons with his hand to see; or menaces with an angry face and with flashing eyes, so that no one should come near; or shows some danger or marvelous thing there; or invites us to weep or to laugh together with them. Thus whatever the painted persons do among themselves or with the beholder, all is pointed toward ornamenting or teaching the istoria.3

Thus, part stage manager, part precautionary preceptor, Alberti’s supplemental figure plays a pivotal role in determining the success of the narrative.

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It may come as little surprise, then, that the intermediary, in this case, is none other than Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici (1389–1464), the ambitious and imaginative donor of the altarpiece who had a vested interest, both personal and political, in convincing the Florentine audience of his part in the pictorial project.4 Kneeling conspicuously at stage right (Fig. 1.2), Cosimo appears in the guise of his patron saint, Cosmas, who extends an invitation via glance and gesture to take the metaphorical leap through Alberti’s window, as, indeed, so many have always done. But whereas Cosimo-as-Cosmas directs our gaze inward, I now point downward, offering another perspective and another istoria. For all its exemplarity and totality, this celebrated Renaissance altarpiece shows signs of imperfection. It is now disfigured – the surface abraded by a poor restoration – and dismantled – the predella cut off and scattered.5 But even from the start, I propose, the San Marco altarpiece was always already fragmented. A closer look at Cosimo’s commission and, in particular, the detached predella panel that takes as its subject the amputation and miracle of the black leg (Fig. 1.3) – a lost appendage precisely about detachment – reveals a politics of gender and sexuality, race and disability intertwined with Medicean identity, memory and the anxieties of loss. As recounted in the Golden Legend, Sts Cosmas and Damian, third-century twin brothers and physicians-turned-martyrs, posthumously encounter a man, the Deacon Justinian, whose leg has been badly infected by a cancer: While he was asleep, the two saints appeared to their devoted servant, bringing salves and surgical instruments. One of them said to the other: ‘Where can we get flesh to fill in where we cut away the rotted leg?’ The other said: ‘Just today an Ethiopian was buried in the cemetery of Saint Peter in Chains. Go and take his leg, and we’ll put it in place of the bad one.’ So he sped to the cemetery and brought back the Moor’s leg, and the two saints cut off the sick man’s leg and inserted the Moor’s in its place, carefully anointing the wound. Finally they took the amputated leg and attached it to the body of the dead Moor. The man woke up, felt no pain, put his hand to his leg, and detected no lesion. He held a candle to the leg and could see nothing wrong with it, and began to wonder whether he was himself or someone else. Then he came to his senses, bounded joyfully from his bed, and told everyone about what he had seen in his dreams and how he had been healed. They sent at once to the Moor’s tomb, and found that his leg had indeed been cut off and the aforesaid man’s limb put in its place in the tomb.6

In abbreviated form, Sts Cosmas and Damian, having amputated the cancerous leg of the deacon, exhume a recently buried Moor, amputate his leg, and attach it to the sick white body before reburying the black one. The deacon wakes up and is unable to remember ‘whether he was himself or someone else.’ The Moor’s body is exhumed a second time, and the presence, there, of the cancerous white leg confirms the miracle. In more critical terms, in an effort to make whole again the vulnerable male body, the diseased white limb is compromised and replaced with the severed black limb; and vice-versa, the decayed white leg is transferred to the presumably once healthy though now dead ­­– yet disturbingly disposable – black body.7

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Fra Angelico illustrates the moment of prosthetic attachment, providing an antiseptic representation of what should otherwise be a gruesome scene (Fig. 1.3). Swapping the Early Christian cemetery for a Renaissance domestic interior, discounting all peripheral elements from grave robbers to grave goods, and erasing the amputation scenes altogether, Fra Angelico parts the curtains of his simple, box-like stage-set to reveal the deacon, sleeping peacefully (even smiling), as the saints set the black leg in place. Here, as in the central panel above, one is a mirror image of the other, a position that would seem to anticipate the ‘mirror stage,’ one of the fundamental concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis; but rather than reflecting a recognition of the self – broken or otherwise – these twin brothers appear disappointingly immune to the Other – fraternal as well as external.8 Providing more narrative details, two earlier examples show the miraculous attachment as well as the moments of exhumation and exchange: a panel by the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel, dated around 1375 and now in North Carolina (Fig. 1.4), and another attributed to Andrea di Giusto, completed in 1430 and still on display in the Duomo in Florence (Fig. 1.5).9 In these relatively uncensored accounts, each presents the supine donor – an anonymous African (even going so far as to render him featureless) – as a seemingly consenting depository of spare parts. Further, in both panels, the continuous narrative seamlessly fuses the disparate fragments of the story much as the miracle scene itself successfully blends displaced cadaver with privileged amputee, yielding a scene of convalescence rather than collision. But one rupture remains literally on the surface. Occupying an awkward space somewhere between medieval quackery and modern medicine, we become sideshow spectators, intermediary witnesses much like the darkly-clad crouching figure who stares intently at the black leg in the lower left-hand corner of the North Carolina panel. Disconnected yet attached, peripheral yet present, I might here ask, what becomes a widowed body most? Further, in this story of body snatching and bodybuilding, of amputation and recuperation, of negation and negotiation, what becomes of the self? Insofar as the deacon cannot remember himself – identity and memory having been cut off – his already disabled body is again impaired. How, then, in this intersection of nobody and somebody is the male body both re-membered and remembered? I suggest that this double deficiency is countered by the presence of the black prosthetic leg, which does more than just re-connect the broken body. Necessarily phallic, definitively fetish, the widowed black leg also overcompensates.10 Extending this narrative of absence and excess, I revisit the portrait of Cosimoas-Cosmas, Medici as medicine man, Pater Patriae as patron saint who makes man whole again, body double as antibody – immune to disease, decay and death. Consider that Cosimo ‘il Vecchio,’ like St Cosmas, also had a twin brother named Damian, although Damiano de’ Medici (1389–1390) died in infancy. Thus, we might read the rotated representation of St Damian, opposite Cosimo-as-Cosmas in the central panel, as another body double – a reference to the deceased Damiano de’ Medici. Moreover, if we alter this discourse to read the black leg as Cosimo’s

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phantom limb, the miraculous transfusion that results in transfiguration now takes on added significance. Is the purposeful twinning by Cosimo himself with St Cosmas a preventive strategy employed to re-member and remember the inevitability of the widowed self? Can the doubled portrait in the central panel, then, be read not only as corporeal mnemonic but also as corporeal supplement – pictorial prosthesis supplied to counter lack and loss and to extend Cosimo’s own istoria? ‘How to Paint a Dead Man’ We shall next speak about the way to paint a dead man, that is, the face, the breast, and wherever in any part the nude may show. It is the same on panel as on wall: except that on a wall it is not necessary to lay in all over with terre-verte; it is enough if it is laid in the transition between the shadows and the flesh colors. But on a panel lay it in as usual, as you were taught for a colored or live face; and shade it with the same verdaccio, as usual. And do not apply any pink at all because a dead person has no color; but take a little light ocher, and step up three values of flesh color with it, just with white lead, and tempered as usual; laying each of these flesh colors in its place; blending them nicely into each other, both on the face and on the body. And likewise, when you have got them almost covered, make another still lighter flesh color from this light one, until you get the major accents of the reliefs up to straight white lead. And mark out all the outlines with dark sinoper and a little black, tempered; and this will be called ‘sanguine.’ And manage the hair in the same way, but not so that it looks alive, but dead, with several grades of verdaccio. And just as I showed you various types and styles for beards on the wall, so on panel you do them in the same way; and so do every bone of a Christian, or of rational creatures; do them with these flesh colors aforesaid.11

The central themes of this book – pictorial practice, death and masculinity – were already of concern at least as early as the late fourteenth century, as signaled by Cennino Cennini’s entry, ‘How to paint a dead man,’ in his practical manual, Il libro dell’arte. I cite the lengthy passage in its entirety to underscore the meticulousness with which Cennini records his step-by-step instructions on depicting the end of life; but why, on his part, such precision? We might assume that such images, whatever form they took, were in popular demand insofar as they warranted not just a mention but also a considerable entry in Cennini’s how-to book. And we might further assume that this pictorial requirement/ request posed a particular set of challenges to the Renaissance artist as suggested, ironically, by the foolproof color-by-number rhetoric employed throughout. Even Alberti expressed noteworthy concern with the topic, cautioning, in his Della pittura, ‘anyone who tries to express a dead body, which is certainly most difficult, will be a good painter.’12 But why such a concerted effort to ‘get it right’ and praise for those who do? And what was so difficult about painting a dead man, anyway, as opposed to, say, painting a wound, the next topic taken up by Cennini but with incredible concision?13 In other words, what might these practical and theoretical directives disclose – merely

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professional advice or, perhaps, pictorial preoccupation? I am suggesting that, despite Cennini’s calculated formula, Alberti’s cautionary tone seems to forewarn of a challenge far greater than potential technical difficulty. So precisely what is it that looms so large? This book revolves around two primary questions: How does one paint a dead man and, second, why? To expand, I wish to unpack and complicate the terms of Cennini’s subheading, nuancing our understanding of the relationship(s) between pictorial practice, death and masculinity. For example, does representation reinforce ritual, or does it restructure it? Insofar as representation is perpetual and iconic whereas the death ritual (defined throughout this study as funereal, burial and mourning ceremonial) is ephemeral and spontaneous, a painting of a dead man might be thought to prolong commemoration. Such a picture remembers the dead; it fixes a particular memory. But what else can it fix? In other words, does commemorative representation reinforce memory, or does it re-inscribe it? If a painting of a dead man perpetuates memory, with which memory (or memories) do we come face to face? Does the manipulation of memory privilege one history or identity over another? For instance, does representation reinforce masculinity, or does it reconstruct it? In sum, what does it mean to paint a dead man? What form do such images take, how do they operate and for whom? We might begin by asking what, exactly, constitutes a painting of a dead man. Within the Western traditions of art practice and art history, the corpse – from martyrdom to medicine to massacre – has characterized the corpus. Simply consider Holbein’s Dead Christ, Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp or Manet’s Dead Toreador, all canonical examples seemingly as certain and final as death itself (Figs 1.6–1.8). Yet such representations of the dead male body inherently contain a significant suggestion of performativity and theatricality – from sentimentalism to sensationalism – and it is precisely that element of constructedness and posturing – of playing dead – that prompts me to reconsider the presumed primacy and authority of both corpse and corpus. Take Andrea Mantegna’s Dead Christ (Fig. 1.9) or Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà (Fig. 1.10); both posit peripheral mourner against prominent cadaver and raw emotion against absolute silence, underscoring the centrality and fixity of death. A closer look, however, at the dead body, as arranged and displayed, unveils a detail that would seem to contradict death. Mantegna provides us with a deliberate experiment in foreshortening with the endowment of Christ, so to speak, dead center. And Bellini presents a devotional display of flesh with a bulging loincloth that suggestively defies gravity. In these two examples, the corpse may be the site of pain and suffering – of death – but it is also the locus of vitality and virility – of manhood.14 Behold: The body is penetrated and yet still potent; the Passion of Christ is also the passion of Christ. Ecce Homo? Another contestable corpse, a stiff Christ as the Man of Sorrows by the Master of the Straus Madonna, provocatively superimposes the iconic veil of Veronica upon the covert crotch of Christ (Fig. 1.11). This genital gesture, conflating portrait

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and phallus, restores life to the emasculated body; like an embalming agent, the portrait preserves our memory of the man just before his death. And yet, this coverup is as diaphanous as the veil itself. Just as the body of a dead man, enhanced and endowed, may be said to belie death, the portrait, though so instrumental in establishing masculine identity and memory, is equally precarious. Consider the (con)fusion that results from the strategic placement of Veronica’s veil: Is Christ’s manhood replaced, or is it displaced? What, exactly, is signified by this gendered signifier? Of note, it is the woman’s head cloth – a cultural marker of femininity and a material trace of the female body – that becomes the canvas for this portrait of Christ; her agency – the absorption of the bodily fluids of Christ – enables his memory.15 Such gendered multi-layering calls to mind Giorgione’s La Vecchia, another picture of conflated corporealities (Fig. 1.12). The exaggerated geriatric body – senescent if not putrescent – might underscore the memorial message of this allegorical image, ‘Col tempo’ (‘with time’), but this portrait-like picture that inevitably evades any such categorization also encourages us to read the memorializing body and its message as contestable and vulnerable. A series of inventories, originally mistranscribed and/or later mistranslated, link La Vecchia with a portrait of a man dressed in black fur; one served as a cover for the other, though there is no consensus concerning who was on top.16 Did this aged female body support or conceal our picture of the male body? Does La Vecchia’s wrinkled visage acknowledge the unavoidability and absolutism of death, or does it mask it? As fate would have it, the male portrait has been lost, and memory of it relatively buried in the archives. Portraiture does not simply preserve or forget; it can also rearrange and re-order what we picture ‘Col tempo.’ Consider Ghirlandaio’s Old Man with a Child (Fig. 1.13), a double portrait likely of a grandfather with his grandson, the elder having been painted posthumously from a sketch made on his deathbed (Fig. 1.14). The painted version is a likeness – a dead ringer, if you will – of a representation made at the time of death. It is a portrait of a portrait of a corpse. And yet, this very dead man appears to be very much alive. Why is that? Quite simply, he’s faking it. But who isn’t? Fra Bartolomeo’s Portrait of Savonarola as Saint Peter Martyr, a picture of an acolyte with an axe wound to the head, further blurs the boundaries between death, portraiture and performance (Fig. 1.15). Savonarola, the prior of the Dominican monastery of San Marco, poses, like Cosimo before him on the high altar, in the guise of his favorite saint.17 But is this merely play-acting or, rather, playing dead, and if so, to what end? This is, after all, a portrait of a dead man playing a dead man, all the while playing himself and his character as alive. Trumping even Ghirlandaio’s Old Man’s remarkable resuscitation, Savonarola, who had been hung and burnt at the stake for heresy in 1498, reappears a decade later with bona fide martyrial – and now immortal – status. To be sure, this posthumous poseur’s smirk hints at something unorthodox.

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And the award for best performance by a corpse goes to … Masaccio’s Holy Trinity (Fig. 1.16). At the base of this monumental funerary fresco lies a celebrated, if inaccurately rendered, skeleton. Its anatomy is not the only thing in question; to whom does it belong – Death, Adam, Everyman or Domenico Lenzi, the presumed though problematic donor of this illusionistic image?18 Pictorial fictions and debatable ownership aside, to whom does it speak, and what does it say? In other words, reading between the lines of its cryptic message (‘I was once what you are, and what I am, you also shall be’), is this simply a classic memento mori, or, within the present context, is it a reminder not of the transience of life but of the transferability of identity, not of the fixity and finality of death but of the fluidity and inevitability of bodily performance?19 Having loosely interpreted Cennini’s interrogative, we might now better understand Alberti’s anxiety, or what he referred to as difficulty, especially so if a painting of a dead man can mean several different things, from a picture of a dead body to a portrait of a dead man, perhaps even to an allegorical representation of an aged woman. As I have demonstrated above, it might be narrative or iconic or both. It might be religious or secular or both. A painting of a dead man may or may not have been painted posthumously. It might represent the sitter, although alive, as dead; conversely, it might represent this so-called sitter, although dead, as alive. A painting of a dead man might portray the subject as someone else entirely, as someone of a different historical period, geographical place, even class, race, gender or sex. That is, it might portray the male subject without portraying him at all – dead or otherwise. Such elusiveness – or our not knowing how to identify the corpse – may have been exactly the point. Peripheral participants, much like Mantegna’s amputated mourners, we stare suspiciously up at the drastic rendering of the dead body of Christ, rumpled sheets and all. Similar to the fragmented mocking heads in the Master of the Straus Madonna’s Christ as the Man of Sorrows, we have doubts about what constitutes this erect Christ’s manhood, much like Christ himself, who, in Bellini’s Pietà, looks in disbelief with his mouth agape at the anamorphic lump in his loincloth. Like Ghirlandaio’s seemingly perplexed grandson, we are unsure of what to make of gramps, who, with his post-mortem nose job, looks better ‘dead’ than he did alive. And like the google-eyed Virgin Mary in Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, who, contrary to her slanted expression, gestures emphatically toward the crucified corpse of Christ, our vision of death is skewed by the continually re-inventive, enigmatic skeleton below, who, despite the artist’s rigid perspectival grid, refuses to be compartmentalized. In sum, the ambiguity of what constitutes a painting of a dead man contributes to a privileged picture of manhood and masculinity. And yet, that very ambiguity or uncertainty could also prove fatal insofar as such a painting of a dead man, though it may prolong commemoration and perpetuate a particular memory, also acknowledges – by its very insistence on denying – the end of life. And, thus, perhaps, herein lay the difficulty of Alberti’s task.

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Corpse to Corpus: Bodies (of Scholarship) that Matter ‘Even in our own times, it could be argued, we do not find ourselves in a more comfortable or more favorable situation than that in which Florentines found themselves during the Renaissance.’20 With this caveat, the historian, Alberto Tenenti, begins his late-twentieth-century attempt to historicize early modern death, an especially ambitious and challenging task that has haunted generations of writers from a variety of disciplines – myself and the history of art included. And so, recognizing and sharing that timelessly uncomfortable position, I proceed with my own set of provisos as I position my project among those discourses that have enabled and disabled the account that follows.21 There are multiple historiographies of death on which this book is predicated yet does not belong. There are the foundational studies of the French historians; those, such as Philippe Ariès, whose agenda has been to identify collective attitudes toward death using an eclectic and wide-reaching array of documents, and those less awesome, more quantitative projects that make use of select archival sources to better understand cultural continuities yet also cleavages.22 And then there is the growing body of scholarship on dying, death and the dead that successfully shifts the focus from attitudes to associations, from beliefs to bodies, from statistics to sex.23 I have in mind those recent interdisciplinary investigations that interrogate the role of gender within the death ritual, a critical stance first assumed by Sharon Strocchia in her groundbreaking work on funerals in Renaissance Florence.24 Mine is most closely aligned with this latter category, which, recognizing death as a gendered experience, is concerned with the socio-cultural and -political practices and experiences surrounding the corpse. Yet my queries might also be understood as disconnected from those newest death studies for the simple reason that my subject is still alive, or so we are led to believe. That is, my focus is on corporeity, the quality of having a physical body or existence, as opposed to the corpse, that body recognized as dead. In other words, I am concerned with bodies – even dead ones – but not corpses. Another subtle difference is my concentration on pre-mortuary or, more precisely, pre-emptive mourning practice. To expand, this book recognizes a sociocultural phenomenon – the fear not merely of death but, rather, of being forgotten ­– and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. I am specifically concerned with the construction and maintenance of what I call masculine memory: the memory not merely of an individual – of a dead man – but more so of a collective identity – of manhood and masculinity. Still, even though my primary queries revolve around issues of masculinity, I maintain that the role of women and the female experience of death are of signal importance. To explain, I stress the role of the woman not as caregiver, who cleanses and prepares the corpse for death, but as memory giver, or ‘memory specialist,’ whose presence may serve to prolong life.25 Thus, I am less interested in how women mourn than in how they remember.26 Moreover, I am interested in the

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image and memory of ‘Man’ before death – a picture, I propose, dependent upon the image and memorial work of the female body. This phrase, ‘man before death,’ of course, calls to mind the classic study by Ariès, entitled L’homme devant la mort, which, as addressed above, offers up a strikingly different view from the one presented here.27 As Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin have already pointed out, the very title of his book assumes several problematic binary oppositions, namely the positioning of man/life before woman/ death, prompting them to caution, ‘part of historicizing death, we are beginning to see, will entail looking at the history of gender.’28 Indeed, as this overview suggests, that work is now being done from a variety of critical perspectives. In the present poststructuralist account, my objective is not to privilege one body over another but, rather, to call attention to the precarious position of both male and female bodies – and their representations – within the early modern memorial process. My argument works with the premise that early modern masculinity was inherently anxious, but this borrowing, too, must be qualified. Writing on the situation in early modern England, Mark Breitenberg understands anxiety, ‘so endemic to patriarchy that the issue becomes not so much its identification but rather an analysis of the discourses that respond to it,’ as ‘an instrument (once properly contained, appropriated or returned) of [patriarchy’s] perpetuation.’29 Along these lines, I, like many others in recent scholarship, read the male body as a locus of crisis and fragmentation yet, in its dependency, simultaneously as a site of presence and wholeness, and I read masculinity as continually threatened though also continuous.30 But I also subscribe to the idea, convincingly put forth by William J. Bouwsma, that ‘in the background of anxiety lurked the fear of death, the ultimate unknown.’31 I wish to foreground that anxiety – what I would nuance as memorial anxiety – within early modern visual culture and gender studies, uncovering what, perhaps, has been lurking all along. In his analyses of the early modern preoccupation with death, Bouwsma references a macabre procession that took place in mid-sixteenthcentury Florence under Cosimo I: A huge black cart drawn by black bison and crowded with human bones and white crosses, carried an enormous Death wielding a sickle and surrounded by tombs. At each station where the cart stopped, the tomb slabs parted and the public could see frightening beings simulating decomposing cadavers, emerging from the graves. There followed other terrible personages, or ‘death masks’ who carried torches and sang hymns to intensify the horror of the spectators.32

With this citation, Bouwsma gestures toward material culture, performativity and spectatorship within the context of early modern anxiety, but it is his book jacket – of which he curiously does not remark – that literally illustrates what is on the surface yet has gone unnoticed in this and other accounts. Willem van Haecht’s The Picture Gallery of Cornelius van der Geest, of 1628, is, in many ways, no different from other pictures of this kunstkammer genre: a group of men stand about dwarfed by an eclectic and seemingly endless

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collection of painting and sculpture; they point, they stare, they talk about pictures, of history, mythology, religion (Fig. 1.17).33 For a book that attempts to provide a chronological account of the intellectual history of the West, this encyclopedic picture seems fitting. But within the context of doubt and anxiety, one detail stares directly out at me. In the lower left-hand corner, a man holds up a small, framed picture of a widow. Dressed in black and dark gray and equipped with her ‘widow’s peek’ head covering, she somberly stares downward; but because of the angle and distance at which her portrait is held, she stares at him – and he back at her. Why does he orchestrate this awkward exchange? And precisely what site/sight does she occupy within this cultural milieu? In other words, how and why does this painting locate the widow – and her gaze – among anxious men and other pictures? The shared skepticism of that strained relationship between a man and his widow might be read as a metaphor for the productive tension between history and memory, the former ‘perpetually suspicious’ of the latter, according to Pierre Nora: Memory is life … It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer … History is perpetually suspicious of memory.34

Returning to van Haecht’s kunstkammer, we might now situate the widow – framed – within this ‘dialectic of remembering and forgetting.’ His handling of her memorial and memorable body enables an afterlife even before the end of life. Indeed, as Nora continues, ‘the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de mémoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting … [yet] lieux de mémoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications.’35 Hence the distance at which he keeps his object of desire. The tension between history and memory, distance and desire calls to mind another strained relationship – that between history and psychoanalysis – and another book jacket – that of Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (Fig. 1.18).36 On the cover, gazing directly toward the reader-viewer, is a suggestive synthesis – the vexed visage of Henry VIII and Sigmund Freud. At once intimately intertwined and yet contestatory and ever-shifting, this provocative portrait – a seemingly disparate diptych forced into fruitful dialogue – reads as a compelling metaphor for the split subject within. Indeed, it is precisely the ripped seam – the tattered edge that both joins and divides the likenesses of Henry VIII and Sigmund Freud – that initially speaks volumes. Acknowledging the convergence and conflation of traditions, narratives and discourses, encouraged by the reconfigurations of once distinct boundaries, the authors ‘attempt to map out new histories of early modern subjectivity,’ returning ‘to questions of identity and subjectivity from a postBurckhardtian, cultural materialist perspective’ and, in so doing, they uncover that

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the practices of historicism and psychoanalysis, no matter how tenuous, are deeply entwined.37 Similarly, my analyses of memory and mourning in early modern Florence, grounded in psychoanalysis, come face to face with a variety of critical theorists, echoing Juliana Schiesari’s gendered tempering of Freudian and Lacanian theories of mourning and melancholia in the context of Renaissance literature, or the intersection of Freudian and Marxian concepts of the fetish brought to bear upon Renaissance fashion and fashioning by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass.38 These dialogues enable the interpretations that follow, such as my reliance upon Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek on death and (female) objects of desire, which seek to better locate the early modern widow – and her gaze – among anxious men, nuancing our understanding of the oblique orchestration on Bouwsma’s book jacket.39 For example, the anonymous man’s gesture is simultaneously one of fear and desire insofar as he both distances himself from and stares back at his appropriated widow, that ‘memory specialist’ who stands in already for the inevitability of his loss. And yet, if his posture and positioning both betray and sustain his own recuperative narrative, how convincing (or comforting), then, is this memorial project if, after all, its success is contingent upon the ruination of the male body? To explain, historically, strategies of deferral or transcendence have been consciously devised as a response to what Henry Staten calls thanato-erotic anxiety – the fear, within the dialectic of mourning, not of loss of object but of loss of self.40 The fear of one’s own death, and the subsequent fear of being forgotten, could and did result in auto-mourning – a premature and self-inflicted process of grieving. However, more than just an act of benign self-preservation, this initial compensatory strategy is eventually and vengefully transferred onto the bodies of women, for it is the woman’s sexuality that undermines the man’s authority, an idea Staten refers to as ‘thanatoerotophobic misogyny.’41 By such a process, the social designation of women as primary mourners would seem to do much to allay fears and alleviate anxiety. For instance, within this cultural situation, a husband might rightfully presume that his wife will not only mourn him but also mourn him properly (read as sincerely and for the remainder of her life), comfortingly contributing to his expectations of a socalled ‘good death.’ But for all that widowhood promises – from perpetuity to transcendence – it is undermined by its very performativity and mere prevalence. A critical examination of the realities of widowhood, both during and after mourning ceremonial, reveals a marked discrepancy between the rigidity of expectation and the ambiguity of experience.42 The death ritual stands as a cultural mechanism designed and performed in order to reaffirm social order after a rupture in the natural order of things. As the ritual process unfolds, social structures and hierarchies, including gender roles, are re-asserted. Thus, the culturally designated primary mourners assume the greater part of public grieving, reminding the living of their duties to the dead. Yet ritual, though certainly authoritative, is, by its very nature, artificial. As carefully scripted as ritual must be and as well concealed as the subtext of

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this cultural maintenance program might be, it is precisely that basic, underlying element of constructedness and the inevitability of interpretation that leads to ritual failure.43 A more grave deficiency is the uncertainty of mourning after ceremonial, when supervision of the primary mourners, outside of the public sphere, proved more difficult. Widows simply remarried (among other things), not all of them but enough that, as Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has recorded, the consistently uncertain social, economic and interfamilial mobility of approximately 25% of the adult female population in Florence caused a heightened degree of ‘anxiety among men.’44 Thus, if the widow simultaneously remedies and aggravates the memorial situation – her role just as tenuous as memory itself – what was the alternative? In other words, anxiety re-instated (if ever alleviated), how would the early modern subject ensure his memory? I necessarily read portraiture as central to the memorial task. Of course, already in the fifteenth century, Alberti famously opined that painting ‘makes the dead seem almost alive.’45 But before then and since then, so many – from Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond – have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice.46 Appropriating Samuel K. Cohn, Jr’s critical response to recent scholarship, aptly entitled ‘Collective Amnesia,’ I make the case for my own argument: ‘With few exceptions, discussions of the instruments and strategies for family memory in Renaissance Florence have been presented in an ideological vacuum. That is to say, they have not explored the other side of the coin – forgetfulness.’47 It is, precisely, a rhetoric of forgetting that structures my contribution to the field.48 Specifically, I wish to nuance our understanding of commemorative portraiture as something complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-emptive mourning, arguing that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. My investigations engage critically with early modern male portraiture and with the more modern concept of ‘Renaissance Man.’ As such, my account is influenced by – as much as it is isolated from – the work of John Pope-Hennessy, whose seminal, if contrasting, study, The Portrait in the Renaissance, subscribes to the Burckhardtian narrative of Fame and Individualism, re-instating the notion of ‘Renaissance Man’ as self-assured, whole, omnipotent and eternal.49 I will return shortly, and repeatedly, to this notion of ‘Renaissance Man,’ but for now we agree on much: ‘In the sixteenth century the Medici showed an almost morbid interest in self-perpetuation, which resulted from a dynastic insecurity,’ which, in turn, led to ‘a bias in favor of a class of portrait that was durable, timeless, and detached.’50 I, too, recognize an obsessive memorial project and a discourse of insecurities and detachment. But whereas PopeHennessy credits political uncertainty with the development of a certain practice of portraiture, I ascribe that same pictorial project of self-perpetuation to memorial uncertainty – the fear not of loss of nation but of loss of self, the fear not of loss of fatherland though, perhaps, of loss of father.

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This last phrase, ‘loss of father,’ resonates all too clearly within the amputated dialogue and fragmented discourse I have laid out here. Indeed, my simultaneous reliance upon and refusal of Pope-Hennessy’s argument has much to do with genealogies and generations, and this unavoidable gap leads me to our next (dis)agreement – the shared yet dissimilar rhetoric of detachment. The so-called ‘detached’ portrait may simply have appeared aloof and objective to PopeHennessy’s period eye, but to my postmodern eye it represents something altogether different. This, of course, is inevitable, as Harry Berger, Jr astutely cautions in his own work on conflict and conflation, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance: ‘Portraits tell stories … they come to us framed within the interpretations, representations, and self-representations of art historians.’51 If my own stories of ‘detached’ portraiture will not be immune to growing old, nor to forgetfulness, Berger’s assurance of a frame alleviates some anxiety before proceeding. A frame, after all, suggests a rigid, box-like structure that surrounds a picture, supporting and protecting it – not to mention privileging it. Tempting offer, but my objective is, precisely, to disconnect early modern portraiture and Italian Renaissance art history from these protective frames, laying out the subject – myself included – for examination, dissecting both story and storyteller. So, within my narrative, detachment might, first, be understood as fiction and Renaissance portraiture as false, imaginary, invented – fabricated. ‘Commemorative portraiture,’ Richard Brilliant tells us, ‘must often reject the present in favor of a fictive image.’52 Emphasizing artifice and performance over both physiognomic likeness and realistic (even if idealized) referential substitution, Brilliant’s productive account of portraiture encourages us to re-read Pope-Hennessy’s ‘detached portrait’ no longer in terms of emotional objectivity and distance but, now, in terms of conscious and purposeful posing, suggesting an implicit discourse of power and politics operating behind the invention of the fabricated image. Invariably, however, such ‘fictions of the pose’ – the act of commissioning and posing for one’s portrait – result in a particular type of performance anxiety, what Berger refers to as ‘the anxiety of selfrepresentation,’ ‘based on the awareness that the power of representations is always contingent on the ability at once to disguise and to convey the representation of power. And it is partly an anxiety about the obligatory fictiveness or illusoriness of the “self” conveyed by the performance.’53 This so-called ‘self’ traces its origins back to Jacob Burckhardt’s so-called ‘Discovery of Man.’ His nineteenth-century sixteenth-century Individual has understandably and relentlessly come under attack from twentieth-century early modern scholars, from political science to social history to literary criticism to women’s studies, who have sought to extract the Burckhardtian ‘self’ from its problematic narrative of privilege and praise.54 Reluctant to settle even for Stephen Greenblatt’s now commonplace story of self-conscious self-fashioning, my contribution inserts the Burckhardtian ‘self’ into a narrative of self-forgetfulness, suggesting that what Berger has recognized as an inherent performance anxiety associated with picturing the self-serving ‘self’ can also be understood as an inevitable memorial anxiety

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inseparable from a project of self-preservation.55 For example, Burckhardt credits ‘the Renaissance’ with ‘discerning and bringing to light the full, whole nature of man,’ and asserts that ‘man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such.’56 Yet such claims are directly contradicted by the narrative of the amputation and miracle of the black leg, as performed by Sts Cosmas and Damian, in which the post-op deacon, now both black and white, wonders ‘whether he was himself or someone else.’ What, then, becomes of the ‘self’ when combined with the Other? If a political discourse of power and privilege enables the de-fragmentation of the deacon, it also leads to his own mis-recognition. Memory loss and loss of the self may be one and the same, but at whose expense? This seems the best place to discuss a major undercurrent running through my work – the body politic in/of art history ­– and to credit those whose scholarship has led me to engage with the early modern ‘bodies that matter.’ This phrase is borrowed from Judith Butler, who establishes the basis for my discussion of the performance of identity that follows.57 But it is the work of Cristelle L. Baskins, who reconciles Italian Renaissance art history, ‘tentative so far in its embrace of feminist theory,’ with contemporary debates on gender, and that of Adrian W.B. Randolph, who ‘seeks to test the boundaries that often are associated with art historical analysis, with its emphases on technique, style, attribution, and intrinsic worth,’ that has been most influential, especially their investigations of early modern masculinity.58 Such art historical analyses contribute to the revisionist picture, to which I subscribe, of the gendered body as multivalent message-bearer.59 Back, then, to an earlier narrative: If detachment can be understood as fabrication, it might also be understood as fragmentation, and the portrait of ‘Renaissance Man’ might be read as disconnected and incomplete. I am not the first art historian to propose a new picture of the early modern male body, as evidenced by Patricia Simons’s series of influential critiques on the subject: ‘Rather than relying on a notion of identity as a fixed, self-contained essence, Renaissance portraits of men employ a framework of multiple selves which are contextual, not universal, and suggest sexualities which are multi-layered, not self-evident.’60 Yet, sparked by her feminist and psychoanalytic questioning of previously accepted notions of wholeness, perfection, measure, proportion and balance in both male and female portraiture, what I wish to do, here, is position that now broken body in and against a rhetoric of widowhood and disability. Whereas the central objective of my earlier publications was to establish widow portraiture as a new genre of female portraiture and to explore the memorial function of such images, this investigation broadens the socio-cultural context, interpreting widow portraiture as only one pictorial element in a multi-dimensional project that also includes the use of male portraiture to ensure masculine memory.61 More importantly, the rhetoric of widowhood remains central to my work, and in this new project on loss and grieving it is employed both literally (the body without a spouse) and metaphorically (the body in parts, the body fragmented; further, as

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socio-cultural construct, the body as irreparable detachment – without self, without identity, without memory). My piecing together of the widowed early modern body as memorially disadvantaged may be read as an appendage to current research in disability studies within the humanities – a category of analysis that situates the body within a cultural rather than a medical framework and positions that body among other identity categories, such as race, gender and sexuality; this, of course, is a body born of Michel Foucault, yet it has since been reborn.62 My understanding of memorial impairment hinges upon an intersection of discourses of disability with postmodern theories of the early modern body, nuancing our understanding of fracture and fragmentation.63 Thus, in my account, the widowed body is always already disabled insofar as ‘Renaissance Man’ cannot re-member his self, nor can he remember himself. If the early modern body is both amputated and amnesiac, portraiture, then, becomes pictorial prosthesis supplied to counter lack and loss and to extend masculine memory – this is portraiture as corporeal supplement and portraiture as corporeal mnemonic. But this, too, is a precarious project, for just as the prosthesis can be added it can also be taken away. Hence the waning relationship between man and widow as played out upon Bouwsma’s book jacket, which, of note, illustrates only half of the story, nearly slicing in two the portrait of the man and leaving intact the portrait of the widow (Compare Figs 1.17 and 1.19). Perhaps, together, these two widowed bodies can both re-member and remember the Other. In sum, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art-historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. An extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, is examined in and against both historical writings (theoretical and practical treatises, conduct manuals, eulogies, letters, legal documents and an array of literary sources, from plays to poetry) and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and recent ideas on race and disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new theories of both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more research questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of the identity problematics of masculinity and manhood. Recuperative Narratives and Other Crutches In the present chapter, I have set out to productively complicate my subject or, rather, to suggest that early modern portraiture – as commissioned, conceived, created, copied and curated – has always been and still is a largely convoluted and precarious enterprise. The objective of my approach, which focuses on widowed subjects and objects, is to nuance our understanding of the topic at hand and – despite my title, Disjecta Membra – to present an ironically less fragmented picture of gender relations, mourning and portraiture in early modern Florence.

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The remainder of this book is divided into two parts: ‘The Anatomy of Mourning’ and ‘The Melancholy of Anatomy.’ These section titles underscore the centrality of the ritual body, but they also suggest its fragility and adaptability, limits yet longevity. Part I begins this study with the assumption that mourning ritual is inherently susceptible to failure, a vulnerability that threatens memory and identity for both mourner and mourned. In Chapter 2, ‘Mnemonic V(o)ices,’ I provide an overview of mourning practice and preference, focusing on the memorial function of the widow within the death ritual. As primary mourner, the widow plays a critical cultural role in maintaining her husband’s memory; standing in for the one she mourns, her presence marks his absence. Yet the widow also occupies a precarious position within the memorial discourse insofar as she is simultaneously representative of commemoration and of death itself. In light of this dualism, I address the performativity, or drama, of mourning, suggesting the traumatic repercussions of her dichotomous memorial role for an already anxious audience. Building upon the important work of Sharon Strocchia, Diane Owen Hughes and Juliana Schiesari on gender and ritual, I also examine women’s traditional mourning practice, characterized by bodily and vocal performance, and the socio-political re-orchestration of such grieving from Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni. Within this context, I introduce a series of literary and visual texts that both adhere to and subvert prescribed mourning practice. Of particular interest are episodes from the life of Augustine, specifically those surrounding the death, burial and mourning of his mother, Monica, the patron saint of widows, both as recounted in his Confessions and as reintroduced within the politico-patriarchal context of fifteenth-century Florence. I argue that what were deemed mourning failures or inadequacies necessitated a strategic response system even beyond ritual revision. But perhaps most menacing is the widow post-ritual, the topic of Chapter 3, ‘The Widow’s Cleavage.’ Primarily concerned with the widow’s appearance, this followup chapter revolves around what she might do the mo(u)rning after. In other words, the widow may appear mournful, but does she remember? Sexually experienced and, again, available, will she mourn her husband or take a lover? Does the widow ever switch to celibacy, or is she forever insatiable? But this is not simply a matter of playing naughty or nice; indeed, there are larger concerns – from cross-dressing to cross-identification. This chapter offers up a queer reading of early modern widowhood, interrogating sexual transgression(s) within and, especially, beyond mourning practice, from transvestism to lesbianism. If the precariousness – if not perversion – of widowhood both remedies and aggravates the memorial situation, the merry widow will have to clean up her act. I examine both literary attempts to manage the widow, from sermons to conduct books, and pictorial regulation, in the form of widow portraiture. Such representations play an obvious key role in recording masculine memory; and yet, if portraiture muffles the voice, it also amplifies the body. Having argued that the body problematizes memory but that representation of that body might recuperate loss, in the second part of this book, ‘The Melancholy

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of Anatomy,’ I shift my focus from ritual revision and social sanction to theoretical strategy and pictorial practice. Chapter 4, ‘The Death of the Fathers,’ identifies theories of mourning as one such response to ritual failures and tarnished reputations. In this chapter, I discuss the classical, early modern and twentieth-century theoretical debates on mourning and melancholia offered up by Aristotle, Ficino and Freud. Yet I also present feminist responses to these discourses, including those of Juliana Schiesari, Luce Irigiray, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, which recognize a gender politics at work in past and present analyses of grieving. Building upon these contemporary interpretations, I move the discussion back to early modern Florence to reconsider pictorial contributions to the discourse on mourning and melancholia, from Pontormo’s portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici in mourning for his father to Michelangelo’s self-portrait mourning Christ, both of which imply pre-emptive auto-mourning. Particular attention is also paid to Dürer’s Melencholia I and the problematic nature of male identification, including that of the so-called fathers of art history, with the female personification of Melancholy. Chapter 5, ‘Phantom Limbs,’ revisits the San Marco altarpiece and the miracle of the black leg. Just as Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ had a personal and political interest in the purposeful twinning of himself with St Cosmas, so, too, did Cosimo I (1519–1574) understand the significance of perpetuating – and performing – the family istoria. In the sixteenth century, despite the purposeful incorporation of Sts Cosmas and Damian into the self-generated Medici myth, the family intercessors would fail to repeat their medical miracle when Cosimo I’s father, Giovanni delle Bande Nere (1498–1526), died from a botched amputation to his right leg. I suggest that this episode from the family narrative had significant resonance for the young Cosimo and his future patronage projects, especially his portraiture commissions. I am particularly interested in his appropriation of established Medicean imagery, from representations of his namesake to those of his patron saint. Culminating my narrative of portraiture as both corporeal supplement and corporeal mnemonic, I interpret the phantom limb not merely as the sensation of the presence of the widowed part but, rather, as the desire and longing for the widow herself; along these lines, this chapter interprets the prosthesis not only as an extension – as an artificial body part – but also as a replacement – as an artificial body. Within this context, I examine a selection of double portraits that position Medici men alongside Medici widows – pictorial attempts at reconciliation. In sum, this chapter offers a critical analysis of the ways in which portraiture not merely reflects but rather contributes to the multidimensional memorial task at hand, reading the commemorative portrait – male and female, contemporaneous and posthumous – as a pictorial device adapted for the recovery of masculine memory. If, ultimately, this project suggests the death of masculinity, the Afterword acknowledges the inevitability of its resurrection. Chapter 6, ‘The Big Stiff,’ returns, once again, to the San Marco altarpiece and the miracle of the black leg, drawing parallels between that story of exhumation and the raising of Lazarus, both of which offer up the male body that refuses death. Yet, the insistence on re-claiming the

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male body has not been reserved for the early modern subject alone. Resuming my examination of the recycling of corpse and corpus, I ask how our own identities and memories have been informed by responses – celebratory and critical – to the male body and masculinity within both the historiography of Italian Renaissance art and contemporary discourse. Redressing ‘Renaissance Man,’ I explore the alternative iconic bodies of George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe, the re-inscribed gendered bodies of Barbara Kruger and Glenn Ligon, and the always sexually anxious body of Woody Allen. Reflecting on my larger study of mourning men, I close with a critical account of the New Orleans jazz funeral; significantly, this Southern AfricanAmerican mourning ritual is performed publicly by men and for men, and, thus, it complicates the early modern script presented in Chapter 2 by offering a reversal of that gender-specific performance. Visual analyses revolve around a series of photographs of jazz musicians taken by Lee Friedlander between 1957 and 1974, which, I suggest, both contribute to and challenge the cultural constructions of Southern black masculinity and memory. I conclude by offering a brief glimpse into a related New Orleans ritual, the annual carnival procession of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, an all-male burial society that occasionally and temporarily opens its membership to women – myself included – on Mardi Gras Day. This autobiographical account, influenced by the writings of Bakhtin, Bhabha and other cultural theorists, traces my public performance of race and gender, underscoring the topsy-turvy nature of ritual, the artificiality of the body and the mimicry of men and memory in both early modern and postmodern culture. Notes 1 Frederick Hartt and David G. Wilkins, History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, 5th ed. (New York: H.N. Abrams, 2002), 250. The account offered by Laurie Schneider Adams, Italian Renaissance Art (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), esp. 107, is equally celebratory and makes explicit the didactic qualities of the painting; a diagram of Alberti’s perspectival system and ‘veil’ are superimposed over the altarpiece, illustrating for the reader the tools employed to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. For a more extensive study, see William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 97–121; see also Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. 155–59. 2 Situated to the Virgin’s right are Sts Mark, John the Evangelist and Lawrence; to her left are Dominic, Francis and Peter Martyr. Sts Cosmas and Damian kneel in the foreground, on the Virgin’s right and left, respectively. 3 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer, rev. ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966), 78. For the Latin, see Alberti, Opere Volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson, vol. 3 (Bari: Laterza, 1973), 73–76: Tum placet in historia adesse quempiam qui earum quae gerantur rerum spectatores admoneat, aut manu ad visendum advocet, aut quasi id negotium secretum esse velit, vultu ne eo proficiscare truci et torvis oculis minitetur, aut periculum remve aliquam

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illic admirandam demonstret, aut ut una adrideas aut ut simul deplores suis te gestibus invitet. Denique et quae illi cum spectantibus et quae inter se picti exequentur, omnia ad agendam et docendam historiam congruant necesse est.

For the Italian, see Alberti, Opere Volgari, 72–74: E piacemi sia nella storia chi ammonisca e insegni a noi quello che ivi si facci, o chiami con la mano a vedere, o con viso cruccioso e con gli occhi turbati minacci che niuno verso loro vada, o dimostri qualche pericolo o cosa ivi maravigliosa, o te inviti a piagnere con loro insieme o a ridere. E così qualunque cosa fra loro o teco facciano i dipinti, tutto apartenga a ornare o a insegnarti la storia.

4 See, esp., Janet Cox-Rearick, ‘The Two Cosimos,’ in Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 233–50, esp. 248. 5 Of the nine predella scenes, all but one, a centrally-placed Lamentation (Munich), are dedicated to the legend of Sts Cosmas and Damian, not coincidentally Cosimo’s patron saints: The Healing of Palladia (Washington), Sts Cosmas and Damian before Lycias (Munich), Demons Attacking Lycias (Munich), Sts Cosmas and Damian at the Stake (Dublin), The Crucifixion of Sts Cosmas and Damian (Munich), The Beheading of Sts Cosmas and Damian (Paris), The Burial of Sts Cosmas and Damian (Florence) and Sts Cosmas and Damian Healing the Deacon Justinian (Florence). 6 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 196–98, citation at 198; italics mine. For the Latin, see de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, vol. 2 (Florence: SISMEL: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998), 977–81, citation at 980–81: Et ecce, dormiente illo sanctus Cosmas et Damianus deuoto suo apparuerunt unguenta ac ferramenta secum portantes. Quorum unus alteri dixit: ‘Vbi carnes accipiemus ut abscissa carne putrida locum uacuum repleamus?’ Tunc ait alter: ‘In cimiterio sancti Petri ad uincula hodie Ethiops recens sepultus est. De illo ergo affer ut huic suppleamus.’ Et ecce, ad cimiterium properauit et coxam Mauri attulit. Precidentesque coxam infirmi coxam Mauri eius loco inseruerunt et plagam diligenter ungentes coxam infirmi ad corpis Mauri mortui detulerunt. Euigilans autem cum se sine dolore sensisset manum ad coxam apposuit et nihil lesionis inuenit. Apponensque candelam cum in crure nihil mali uideret cogitabat an non ipse qui erat, sed alius alter esset. Rediens autem ad se pre gaudio de lectulo prosiliit et quid in sompnis uiderat et qualiter sanatus fuerat omnibus enarrauit. Qui conciti ad tumulum Mauri miserunt et coxam Mauri precisam et coxam predicti uiri loco illius in tumolo positam repererunt. See also Elena Giannarelli, ed., Cosma e Damiano; dall’Oriente a Firenze (Florence: Edizioni della Meridiana, 2002) for a recent account of the legend, cult and iconography of the saints. 7 Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. and ed. Hellmut Wohl (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 99, recounts Michelangelo’s reliance upon ‘the corpse of a Moor, a most handsome young man and, insofar as one could say, most suitable’ for anatomical study. For the Italian, see Condivi, Vita di Michelangolo Buonarroti, ed. Giovanni Nencioni (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1998), 57: ‘un corpo morto d’un moro giovane, bellissimo e quanto dir si possa dispostissimo.’ On the use and abuse of cadavers in early modern Florence, see Fredrika Jacobs, ‘(Dis)assembling:

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8 9 10

11

Marsyas, Michelangelo, and the Accademia del Disegno,’ Art Bulletin 84/3 (2002): 426–48; Katharine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy,’ Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 1–33; and her Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). See also Sergio Tognetti, ‘The Trade in Black African Slaves in Fifteenth-Century Florence,’ in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds T.F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 213–24. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,’ in Écrits: A Selection, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 1–7. For additional representations, see, most recently, Ludovica Sebregondi, ‘Cosma e Damiano. Santi Medici e Medicei,’ in Giannarelli, Cosma e Damiano, 75–105. The concept of the fetish will be discussed throughout this book, primarily within psychoanalytic discourse, but here, on African origins, see, esp., the influential series of articles by William Pietz: ‘The Problem of the Fetish, I,’ Res 9 (1985): 5–17; ‘The Problem of the Fetish, II,’ Res 13 (1987): 23–45; and ‘The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa,’ Res 16 (1988): 105–23. See also his ‘Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,’ in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, eds Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119–51. Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr (New York: Dover, 1960), 94–95. For the Italian, see Cennini, Il libro dell’arte (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982), 153–54: Appresso di questo parleremo del modo del colorire un uomo morto, cioè il viso, il casso e dove in ciascun luogo mostrasse lo ignudo, così in tavola come in muro: salvo che in muro non bisogna per tutto campeggiare con verdeterra; pur che sia dato in mezzo tra l’ombre e le incarnazioni, basta. Ma in tavola campeggia all’usato modo, sì come informato ho d’un viso colorito o vivo; e, per lo usato modo, col medesimo verdaccio aombra. E non dare rossetta alcuna, ché ‘l morto non ha nullo colore; ma togli un poco d’ocria chiara e digrada da questa tre gradi d’incarnazion, pur con biacca, e temperati a modo usato, daendo di queste tali incarnazioni catuna nel luogo suo, sfummando bene l’una con l’altra, sì in nel viso, sì per lo corpo. E per lo simile, quando l’hai appresso che coperta, fa’ di questa chiara un’altra incarnazion più chiara, tanto che riduca le maggiori stremità di rilievi a biacca pura. E così proffila ogni contorno di sinopia scura con un poco di nero temperato; e chiamerassi sanguigno. E per lo medesimo modo le capellature (ma non che paiano vive, ma morte) con verdacci di più ragioni. E come ti mostrai più ragioni e modi di barbe in muro, per quel modo fa’ in tavola; e così ogni osso di cristiano o di creature razionali, fa’ di queste incarnazion sopraddette.

12 Alberti, On Painting, 74. For the Latin, see Alberti, Opere Volgari, 65: ‘Quod quidem omnium difficillimum est, nam omni ex parte otiosa in corpore membra effingere tam summi artificis est quam viva omnia et aliquid agentia reddere.’ For the Italian, see Alberti, Opere Volgari, 64: ‘ciò che ve si dà ad espriemere uno corpo morto, qual cosa certo è difficilissima, però che in uno corpo chi saprà fingere ciascuno membro ozioso, sarà ottimo artifice.’ 13 Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, 95: To do, that is, to paint, a wounded man, or rather a wound, take straight vermilion; get it laid in wherever you want to do blood. Then take a little fine lac, well tempered

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in the usual way, and shade all over this blood, either drops or wounds, or whatever it happens to be.

For the Italian, see Cennini, Il libro dell’arte, 154: A fare o ver colorire uno uom fedito, o ver fedita, togli cinabro puro; fa’ che campeggi dove vuoi far sangue. Abbi poi un poco di lacca fina, temperata bene a modo usato; e va’ per tutto aombrando questo sangue, o gocciole o fedite, o come si sia.

14 See Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also the following writings by Robert Mills: ‘Ecce Homo,’ in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, eds Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 152–73; ‘A Man is Being Beaten,’ New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 115–53; and ‘“Whatever you do is a delight to me!”: Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom,’ Exemplaria 13/1 (2001): 1–37. 15 This reading is influenced by Michael Camille’s critical account of a similar Man of Sorrows image; see his ‘Seductions of the Flesh: Meister Francke’s Female “Man” of Sorrows,’ in Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter: politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksformen, eds Klaus Schreiner and Marc Müntz (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), 243–69. 16 See Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 18–19 and 29–30. 17 It is worth mentioning here that St Peter Martyr, the first martyr of the Dominican Order, is credited with miraculously reattaching the amputated leg of a young man; he also appears in the central panel of the San Marco altarpiece to the Virgin’s left. 18 See Rona Goffen, ed., Masaccio’s Trinity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. the essay by Katharine Park, ‘Masaccio’s Skeleton: Art and Anatomy in Early Renaissance Italy,’ 119–40. 19 ‘IO. FU. GA. QUEL. CHE.VOI SETE: E. QUEL. CHI. SON.VOI. ACO. SARETE.’ 20 Alberto Tenenti, ‘Death in History: The Function and Meaning of Death in Florentine Historiography of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,’ in Life and Death in FifteenthCentury Florence, eds Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt and Rona Goffen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), 1–15, citation at 1. 21 The reader should note that bibliographical references for the following section on historiography and methodology are not meant to be comprehensive but, rather, are intended to highlight works of signal importance – representative studies that, in most cases, will be discussed, along with others not mentioned below, extensively in the chapters that follow. 22 See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981); and his Western Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). See also Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age, vers 1320–vers 1480 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1980); Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle: les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973); and Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1978). In this same category, the following

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27 28 29

works on the macabre and the Black Death, though a topic generally beyond the scope of the present study, do deserve special mention here: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, ‘The Black Death: The End of a Paradigm,’ in Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times, eds Joseph Canning, Hartmut Lehmann and Jay Winter (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 25–66; and his The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study in the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York: Dover Publications, 1999), first published in London in 1924; and Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). Such accounts are too numerous to mention here; a very useful, partly annotated bibliography can be found in Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 215–21. For more recent publications, see Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See Sharon Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); see, more recently, Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Lucinda M. Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). One should also consider Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 17. Let me clarify: I am most certainly interested in the role of women within mourning ritual (funereal and burial ceremonial), the topic of Chapter 2; yet my broader concern is with the relationship between women and memory before and after mourning ritual. See the important edited volume by Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. ‘Part One. Memory and Its Materials,’ with contributions by Patrick Geary, Giovanni Ciappelli, Nicolai Rubinstein and Lauro Martines; and Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Women’s Memory and Renaissance Culture,’ Michigan Quarterly Review 26/1 (1987): 266–71. See also the useful, if concerned with an earlier period, Elisabeth M.C. Van Houts, ed., Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, eds, Gender and Cultural Memory, special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28/1 (2002), though significantly broader in scope, should also be consulted. See note 22 above. Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, eds, Death and Representation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 5. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2.

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30 Two works, in particular, on masculine anxiety deserve special mention here: Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003); and Kathleen P. Long, ed., High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001). 31 William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance: 1550–1640 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 124. See also his chapter, ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture,’ in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 157–89; and his abbreviated remarks, ‘Conclusion: Retrospect and Prospect,’ in Facing Death: Where Culture, Religion, and Medicine Meet, eds Howard M. Spiro, Mary G. McCrea Curnen and Lee Palmer Wandel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 189–98. 32 As cited by Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 124–25. 33 Generally, see Gary Schwartz, ‘Love in the Kunstkamer: Additions to the Work of Guillam Van Haecht (1593–1637),’ Tableau 18/6 (1996): 43–52. 34 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,’ Representations 26 (1989): 7–24, citation at 8–9. 35 Ibid., 19. 36 Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, eds, Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2000). 37 Ibid., 3 and 4. 38 See, for example, Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). By Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, see Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and their ‘Fetishisms and Renaissances,’ in Mazzio and Trevor, Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, 20–35. See also the essays collected in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, eds Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. the introduction, ‘Worlds Within and Without,’ 3–15. 39 I have in mind Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind; The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment; Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 1994), esp. ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,’ 89–112. 40 Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 41 Ibid., particularly 108. 42 For two recent collections that call attention to the ambiguities of widowhood, see Allison Levy, ed., Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003); and Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, eds, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1999). 43 My ideas on ritual have been informed, esp., by Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980). See also Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Strocchia, Death and Ritual, on the Florentine death ritual.

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44 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘The “Cruel Mother”: Maternity, Widowhood, and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 117–31, esp. 122. See also David Herlihy and Klapish-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985). 45 Alberti, On Painting, 63. For the Latin, see Alberti, Opere Volgari, 45: ‘Nam habet ea quidem in se vim admodum divinam non modo ut quod de amicitia dicunt, absentes pictura praesentes esse faciat, verum etiam defunctos longa post saecula viventibus exhibeat.’ For the Italian, see Alberti, Opere Volgari, 44: ‘la pittura forza divina non solo quanto si dice dell’amicizia, quale fa gli uomini assenti essere presenti, ma più i morti dopo molti secoli essere quasi vivi.’ 46 The literature on Renaissance portraiture is vast and will be reviewed extensively in Chapters 3 and 5 on widow and male portraiture, respectively; within the context of the present overview, see, esp., the following studies: Alison Wright, ‘The Memory of Faces: Representational Choices in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Portraiture,’ in Ciappelli and Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family, 86–113; Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture; Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson, eds, The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance (London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by British Museum Press, 1998); Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Representing the Family: Portraits and Purposes in Early Modern Italy,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17/1 (1986): 7–38; David Rosand, ‘The Portrait, the Courtier, and Death,’ in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, eds Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 91–129; and John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966). On visual representations, but not necessarily portraits, produced in conjunction with and/or as a result of funeral and burial ceremonial in medieval and early modern Europe, see Binski, Medieval Death; and Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500–c. 1800 (London: Published in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum by Reaktion Books, 1991), both of which connect European (mainly English and French) ritual and representation through a study of commemorative objects and monuments. Less directly connected to death rites, additional essays in Ciappelli and Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family, explore the relationship between object and memory and the significance of family within that relationship; and Levy, Widowhood and Visual Culture, contains essays that examine representations of, for and by widows. 47 Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, ‘Collective Amnesia. Family, Memory, and the Mendicants: A Comment,’ in Ciappelli and Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family, 275–83, citation at 277. 48 Influential studies that foreground forgetting or forgetfulness include Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams, eds, Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), esp. the following essays: Williams and Ivic, ‘Introduction: Sites of Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture,’ 1–17; William E. Engel, ‘The Decay of memory,’ 21–40; and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, ‘Lethargic Corporeality On and Off the early Modern Stage,’ 41–52. See also Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler, eds, The Art of Forgetting (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999). 49 Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait; Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London and New York: Penguin, 1990). For an important

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55 56 57

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critical response to the question of Renaissance individualism, see John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait, 180–81. Harry Berger, Jr, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 107. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 130. Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 142–43. For criticisms, as well as celebrations, of Burckhardt and his politics, see, esp., the following: Richard Sigurdson, Jacob Burckhardt’s Social and Political Thought (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Maurizio Ghelardi and Max Seidel, eds, Jacob Burckhardt: Storia della cultura, storia dell’arte (Venice: Marsilio, 2002); Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,’ in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 17–28; and Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, ‘Burckhardt Revisited from Social History,’ in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 217–34. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980). For a useful criticism of Greenblatt’s term, ‘self-fashioning,’ see Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 19–20. Burckhardt, The Civilization, 198; italics mine. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); see also her Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). Cristelle L. Baskins, ‘Gender Trouble in Italian Renaissance Art History: Two Case Studies,’ Studies in Iconography 16 (1994): 1–36, citation at 1. See also her ‘(In)famous Men: The Continence of Scipio and Formations of Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Domestic Painting,’ Studies in Iconography 23 (2002): 109–36; ‘Cassone’ Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and ‘Donatello’s Bronze David: Grillanda, Goliath, Groom?’ Studies in Iconography 15 (1993): 113–34. Adrian W.B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 12. See also his ‘Art for Heart’s Sake: Configurations of Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Florence,’ in Mittelalter: Facetten der Genderforschung, eds Susan Marti and Daniela Mondini, special issue of Frauen Kunst Wissenschaft 24 (1997): 67–72. The scholarship of Patricia Simons is equally influential and is acknowledged below within the context of portraiture studies. I have in mind the following works on early modern sexuality by cultural historians and literary critics: Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds, Premodern Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); and Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994). Along these lines, though broader in scope, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). See also the following works by Stephanie H. Jed: ‘Reorganizing Knowledge: A Feminist Scholar’s Everyday Relation to the Florentine Past,’ in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, eds Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt

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(Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 254–70; and ‘Making History Straight: Collecting and Recording in Sixteenth-Century Italy,’ in Reconfiguring the Renaissance: Essays in Critical Materialism, ed. Jonathan Crewe (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1992), 104–20. I would also here point to Domenico Zanrè, Cultural Non-Conformity in Early Modern Florence (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). 60 Patricia Simons, ‘Homosociality and Erotics in Italian Renaissance Portraiture,’ in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 29–51, citation at 29. See also her ‘Portraiture, Portrayal, and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women,’ in Brown, Language and Images, 263–311; ‘Alert and Erect: Masculinity in Some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,’ in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 163–75; and ‘Women in Frames: the Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,’ in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 35–87. 61 See ‘Framing Widows: Mourning, Gender, and Portraiture in Early Modern Florence,’ in Levy, Widowhood and Visual Culture, 211–231; ‘Good Grief: Widow Portraiture and Masculine Anxiety in Early Modern England,’ in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, eds Dorothea Kehler and Laurel Amtower (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 147–64; and ‘Early Modern Mourning: Widow Portraiture in Sixteenth-Century Florence’ (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2000). 62 For example, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965) has had a considerable impact on the field of disability studies. See also Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985). For more recent scholarship, see, esp., Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchinson, eds, Gendering Disability (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Robert McRuer and Abby L. Wilkerson, eds, Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies, special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9/1–2 (2003); Marquand Smith, ed., The Prosthetic Aesthetic: Between Bodies and Machines, special issue of New Formations 46 (2002); Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, eds, Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2002); Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, eds, Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2002); Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds, The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000); Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1998); Lennard J. Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1997); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan

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Press, 1997); and David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 63 See, esp., Katharine Park, ‘Was There a Renaissance Body?’ in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, eds Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002), 321–35; Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton, eds, The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2000); David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Widowed Words: Dante, Petrarch, and the Metaphors of Mourning,’ in Discourse of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, eds Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Dartmouth College, 1989), 97–108; and her ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,’ Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–79.

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PART I The Anatomy of Mourning

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CHAPTER 2

Mnemonic V(o)ices ‘History is in mourning and eloquence is dumb.’ Coluccio Salutati

Talking Trauma from Day One ‘All we ever hear is “So-and-so’s dead” and “So-and-so’s dying.”’1 And so it goes that ten traumatized Florentines, assembled in the church of Santa Maria Novella, ‘which was otherwise almost deserted,’ decide to escape the catastrophe and chaos of the Black Death by fleeing the city, where people ‘dropped dead in the open streets,’ for the ‘less harrowing’ countryside, temporarily taking their minds off of the devastation and disruption of plague by recounting 100 tales over ten days; this is, of course, the story of The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s celebrated narrative of narratives.2 But is there yet another story still to be told? From what, precisely, do these Florentines flee? What are they trying so hard to forget? And, curiously, if determined not to remember, why, then, so many recitations? That is, against the socio-historical backdrop of silence and erasure, why such loquaciousness and repetition? But is this apparent fluency just that or, rather, just a series of false starts? I suggest that we read this early modern project of purposeful yet selective remembering and forgetting in and against the cultural discourses of trauma and commemorative practice, locating the site/sight of anxiety for Boccaccio’s protagonists in the functions – and failures – of the Florentine mourning ritual: It had once been customary, as it is again nowadays, for the women relatives and neighbors of a dead man to assemble in his house in order to mourn in the company of the women who had been closest to him; moreover his kinsfolk would forgather in front of his house along with his neighbours and various other citizens, and there would be a contingent of priests, whose numbers varied according to the quality of the deceased; his body would be taken thence to the church in which he had wanted to be buried, being borne on the shoulders of his peers amidst the funeral pomp of candles and dirges. But as the ferocity of the plague began to mount, this practice all but disappeared entirely and was replaced by different customs. For not only did people die without having many people about them, but a great number departed this life without anyone at all to witness their going. Few indeed were those to whom the lamentations and bitter tears of relatives were accorded; on the contrary, more often than not bereavement was the signal for laughter and witticisms and general

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jollification – the art of which the women, having for the most part suppressed their feminine concern for the salvation of the souls of the dead, had learned to perfection … in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown towards dead goats.3

Boccaccio’s passage on the complete breakdown of social order during the 1348 plague summarily lays out the rules of ritual, but it also makes clear the paradox of performance. To begin with, he provides insight into the binary structures underlying mourning ceremonial: public/private, visibility/invisibility, witness/ weeper.4 This is a system organized according to gender, whereby women, visible and audible within the private sphere, offer ‘lamentations and bitter tears’ inside the home, preparing the corpse for burial; men, in opposition, perform a public work of mourning that is emotionally tempered, stoically witnessing and removing the body that has already been cared for and cried over by women. This is the standard division of labor, at least when ritual goes according to plan. And yet, bodies are memorable not only for what they do but also for what they do not do, and Boccaccio also tells us what happens when bodies – female bodies, in particular – act up and act out. To his dismay and dissatisfaction, women have a mind of their own, having ‘learned to perfection’ how to ‘suppress their feminine concern’ by replacing wailing with wit and lamentation with laughter. Indeed, as any reader of The Decameron knows, these bodies are bold and bawdy – irreverent and indecent, flirtatious and feckless. In short, they do not do what they are told. Just as Boccaccio introduces his über-narrative with uncooperative bodies, I begin my story of mourning and memory with the body that is both overworked and yet does not work. My composition focuses on decomposition or, rather, decomposure – not the natural decay of the diseased body but the social malfunction of the ritual body. This, then, is also a story of disappearance insofar as, for Boccaccio’s protagonists, the site/sight of anxiety is not the presence of the corpusculent body but the absence of the commemorative body. These traumatized (and traumatic) Florentines flee to forget (their own) forgetfulness; so as not to remember the failed discourse of remembrance, they repetitiously recount other narratives, performing in Fiesole instead of Florence.5 This chapter explores both bodily performance and performance failure – the insistence on recuperative narrative yet the inevitability of the debilitating st … st … stutter. The story told here attempts to answer what Peggy Phelan asks in Mourning Sex; Performing Public Memories: ‘To what end are we seeking an escape from bodies? What are we mourning when we flee the catastrophe and exhilaration of embodiment?’6 I share Phelan’s interest in what she calls ‘the deep relationship between bodies and holes, and between performance and the phantasmatical.’7 In the following pages, I begin to re-think the dialogue between the uncooperative and the incorporeal, between the widow and the one she is meant to remember. Let me suggest, here, that the mnemonic voice – no matter how fleeting – will unforgettably haunt the one it is meant to remember.

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Drama Queens If the traumatic body cannot be located, the dramatic body is conspicuously present: ‘“In Tuscany there is lacerating of the face, rending of garments, and pulling of hair.”’8 This vivid literary account of the grieving female body, offered up by the medieval Florentine chronicler, Boncompagni da Signa (c. 1165–c. 1240), finds visual parallels as late as the end of the fifteenth century, in and beyond Tuscany. For example, in Niccolò dell’Arca’s emotionally-charged Lamentation over the Dead Christ of 1463, in the church of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna (Fig. 2.1), women wring their hands (Fig. 2.2), clench their flesh (Fig. 2.3) and shriek wildly (Figs 2.4 and 2.5).9 This dramatic, gender-specific performance is both fact and fiction; Mediterranean women have long mourned in this manner (‘“They beat their breasts, scratch up their faces and toil to tear out their hair without ceasing their shrill cries”’), yet these are merely cultural customs, performative practices.10 Posing, or, rather, purposefully posed, women play the part, cast in supporting roles opposite their male counterparts. The juxtaposition of a male and female mourner from the same sculptural group, St John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalen, underscores this point (Fig. 2.6). Her uncontrolled ululation is countered by his rational restraint, her flailing body is steadied by his fixed stance, her chaotic convulsions are calmed by his stoic contemplation. In sum, the drama of mourning is defined as much by the disorder of her body as it is by the order of his. Other representations, both religious and secular narratives, share this iconography of grief.11 A predella panel by Domenico Veneziano, The Miracle of Saint Zenobius, painted around 1445, locates this gendered division in urban Florence (Fig. 2.7). The story unfolds as follows: St Zenobius (337–417), Bishop of Florence, who, of note, was well-known for resuscitating dead boys, temporarily takes as his charge the young son of a widow, who then dies under his care.12 Shown kneeling in prayer over the dead body in Borgo degli Albizzi, Zenobius, ramrod straight, echoing the medieval palaces behind him, appears in striking contrast to the grieving mother, whose collapsed posture and frenzied reaction take center stage. The segregated chorus, whose presence and participation bolsters this mourning narrative, further divides the composition – and the culture. Eliding narrative events yet maintaining gender differences are the frieze of the arcosolium tomb made for Francesco Sassetti by Giuliano da Sangallo between 1485 and 1490 for the Sassetti Chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Trinità (Fig. 2.8) and the marble slab depicting the death of a woman in childbirth, thought to be from the tomb of Francesca Pitti Tornabuoni, attributed to a follower of Andrea del Verrocchio, carved around 1480, and originally erected in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome (Fig. 2.9).13 Violent gestures, agitated limbs and disheveled bodies in such dramatic depictions as these find their source in the story of Meleager, as depicted in Roman sarcophagi (Fig. 2.10); clearly, this gendering of the iconography of grief is a longstanding tradition, but what interests me most is

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how and why such representations, despite cultural and stylistic adaptations, remain constant.14 These dichotomous narratives, but particularly the explicit subtext of women’s grief, suggest to me more than just universal ‘gestures of despair.’15 Rather, seeking ‘to put Iconography and Social History in productive conversation,’ as Cristelle L. Baskins has successfully done working on representations of widowed Rome, I read these repetitive representations of unbridled bodies as visually defining and reinforcing a specific set of gender roles at the especially vulnerable and disruptive time of death.16 And so, my own conversation necessarily continues with Judith Butler: The action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimization … this ‘action’ is a public action … gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.17

Insofar as the public mourning ritual stands as a cultural mechanism designed and performed in order to reaffirm social order, the categorization and repetition of gender roles within that ritual are a necessary element of the dramatic performance. But bodies have problems, especially these, insofar as this mnemonic performance borders on the demonic. Kathy Lavezzo has recognized queerish aims, specifically female-female identification and desire, in the excessive emotional display of women’s mourning practice; concerned with late medieval Europe, she argues that ‘the female homoeroticism produced at the site of female lamentation constitutes a disruptive act in which the proper turns improper, and the pious strays into the perverse.’18 I will take up a similar position in the next chapter on early modern widowhood, speculating that identification boundaries, despite reconfigurations of female mourning, continue to be collapsed. But, already here, I suggest that even more so than the shock of the unbridled body, it is the crazed, hysterical scream of the performance that will be cause for concern. Lamentation, a necessary yet disturbing part of the mourning narrative, is not a sweet song. Moreover, the voice leaves the body in unpredictable ways, sometimes with smooth incantation, other times with catastrophic results.19 In other words, the body that acts up also breaks down, and the voice, so startlingly seductive in its subversiveness that it must be separated from the body, cracks. This discordant tension between body and voice might be best understood in the context of opera and queer theory.20 If ‘opera is the reflection of our historical reality, and this mirror breaks in those places where the image is split with a sudden incongruity,’ as Catherine Clément clearly articulates in Opera, or the Undoing of Women, then the figure of the grieving woman, at once favored yet faulty, validated yet vulnerable, is a body severed.21 This may be starting to sound like a broken record, but that is precisely my point. Like the decapitated, bloodied head of

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Caravaggio’s hysterical Medusa (Fig. 2.11), the mourner’s cry, separated from the body, still screams – the distant echo that is, perhaps, Hélène Cixous’s ‘laugh of the Medusa.’22 There is much more cutting to come; for now, however, the widowed body, exhausted by her compulsory performance, may have a sore throat, but she has not yet lost her voice. I end this narrative, for now, by borrowing another passage from Clément: …One must know the truth about hysterical women. They have centuries of memory, they have bodies filled with memory, they tell the truth about oppression, they bore holes in the family, they are right with delirious reason. But Freud was immensely surprised at their resistance to misfortune. Beaten, tortured, defeated, down, the next day the hysteric (all fresh and ready to go) takes on a new battle and produces a new symptom. Another pimple has appeared on her lip. The prima donna, whom you just saw weeping real tears and suffering with all her bodily force, gets back up, smiling, scarcely affected. Hysterics with their beautiful indifference!23

For Clément, this is the last word, her ‘Finale;’ for me, this is just the beginning. If this section has introduced the drama queen, the next will confront her audience, their anxieties and their desires. Tongue-Tied Historically within the Western tradition of grieving, women have been designated – and remain – primary mourners. But if, according to Sharon Strocchia, ‘the fundamental human obligation to bury the dead was inextricably bound up with the social imperative to bury them well,’ then memory required the proper type and amount of mourning. In other words, a good death was determined by good grief.24 To that end, a system of pre-established rules dictated ritual behavior. As Richard Trexler has pointed out in his work on Florentine public ritual, ‘men’s and women’s behavioral forms were of course carefully distinguished, but so were the behaviors of young, nubile, married, and widowed females … There was a right behavior for each social actor in every conceivable social situation.’25 Leonardo Bruni’s ‘Panegyric to the City of Florence,’ composed between 1403 and 1404, boldly proclaims the magnificence of the city on these terms; especially praiseworthy, according to Bruni, are the ‘internal order’ of Florence and the ‘harmonious cooperation’ of its citizens, who move and act properly within its ‘clearly defined’ spaces: So we see that in the beginning Florence observed a principle of great wisdom: Do nothing for ostentation nor allow hazardous or useless display, but instead use great moderation and follow solid proportion … Nowhere else do you find such internal order, such neatness, and such harmonious cooperation … There is nothing here that is ill-proportioned, nothing improper, nothing incongruous, nothing vague; everything

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occupies its proper place, which is not only clearly defined but also in right relation to all the other elements.26

A successful ritual performance, therefore, revolved around the strategic staging of gesture and behavior, as well as of access, movement and visibility, within an urban space temporarily transformed into a ritual space.27 In an attempt to get things right, or to perform well, the structures and rules of ceremonial underwent constant permutation. Indeed, death rites have been interpreted not as fixed, static models but as social and cultural moments, which, constantly in a state of flux, enabled Florentines to identify and re-identify themselves, to communicate within and across social groupings and to impart honor to both themselves and the deceased, pointing to a marked fluidity and multiplicity within Florentine ritual and society.28 This delicate operation, if well orchestrated, could, in turn, result in remembrance. Thus, control of such an ephemeral performance within an equally ephemeral and penetrable ritual space would become essential. In a letter written in 1373 to Francesco da Carrara, Lord of Padua, entitled, ‘How a Ruler Ought to Govern His State,’ Petrarch specifically argued for a reconceptualization of the role of women within the death ritual, advocating the banishment of women’s vocal mourning practices, what he called ‘loud and uncontrolled shrieks,’ from the public streets: What then am I asking? I shall tell you. A coffin is carried out, a crowd of women bursts forth, filling the streets and square with loud and uncontrolled shrieks, so that if anyone does not know what is happening were to come on the scene, he could easily suspect either that they had gone mad or that the city had been captured by the enemy. Then when they have arrived at the church door, the horrible outburst doubles; and where hymns ought to be sung to Christ or devout prayers poured out for the soul of the departed in a subdued voice or in silence, there sad complaints echo and the sacred altars shake with the wailing of women, all because a mortal has died. This custom, because I consider it contrary to a decent, honorable society, and unworthy of your government, I not only advise you to reform, but if I may, I beg you. Order that no women should set foot outside her house on this account. If weeping is sweet for those in misery, let her weep at home to her heart’s content, and not sadden the public spaces.29

Considered disturbing and un-civilized, the female voice, put simply, was problematic at this time, and a considerable amount of legislation was enacted to restrict such female lamentation within public space. The codes and complications of the early modern death ritual deserve special attention.30 The events unfolded in this order: The body of the deceased, having been prepared by female relatives and laid out in the home for vigil and lamentation, was transported on a bier as part of a social hierarchy in procession to the church; there, the requiem took place, preceding a final procession to the place of burial, and, from there, the cortege returned to the home of the deceased

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for a funeral banquet. The funeral achieved and maintained its political power through its tripartite processional structure, which had to be strictly regulated as each social group competed for the most prestigious and strategic positions nearest to the corpse. The cortege consisted, first, of the clergy, followed by decorative elements, such as banners, flags, swords and shields, which marked the social identity of the deceased; second was the decorated body, holding the most important place in the cortege; and third, behind the corpse, were the mourners: kin, friends, neighbors and colleagues. The funeral and requiem were the most important parts of the public death ritual; each of these components functioned differently yet complementarily. The other components of the death ritual were private, or domestic, and privileged the role of women; as such, they were treated less strategically. Women were not only segregated but were often excluded altogether from the funeral procession. For example, in Lombardy, Milan and Como, as early as 1210, rulers tried to separate male citizens from what was deemed ‘the business of women.’31 More specific were the laws passed in 1255 in San Gimignano, whereby women were not only prohibited from directly following the funeral cortege but were also banned from using the church door through which it entered, and in Siena, according to extreme laws passed in 1262, all women were excluded entirely and at all times from the procession.32 In Bologna, beginning in 1276, where legislation was only slightly less restrictive, women were prohibited from leaving the house until after the body had been buried.33 The widow, in particular, only participated in the processional when the body of the deceased was not included. Generally, concerning the exclusion of women from the funeral, the determining factor was the sex of the deceased and not of the mourner, at least for funerals of the urban elite. That is, funerals for men stressed the agnatic, or the father’s, line, and those for women, because of their lack of permanence within either household, concentrated on both the agnatic and cognatic family lines. Thus, this ‘formal tableau of hierarchy in action’ stressed social and gender distinctions, as well as competition within and among those groups.34 The route and manner with which this active, tension-laden procession moved through urban space were as strategic as its composition, and manipulation of both procession and space could be overt. For example, the sixteen wards, or gonfaloni, of Florence were further divided into competing neighborhoods; there, social networks were formed and maintained within dynamic spaces bound by defining, yet always penetrable, streets and squares. The absence of rigid borders meant that public space could be claimed and, if need be, re-claimed for private use. Certainly, familial or organizational interest in these spaces at funeral time was strong, resulting in informal possession, whereby benches could be used as makeshift viewing stands, and familial arms and mottoes might decorate the urban landscape as crowds congregated in and temporarily controlled public/ritual space. However, possession, constantly contested by competing groups, was never

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permanent because boundaries, both literal and figurative, were always under negotiation. By contrast, the requiem served to unite and renew distinct social groupings, especially those which had been excluded entirely or relegated to the margins during the funeral procession. Women, for example, were given a more central ceremonial role or, if need be, were fully re-introduced into ritual; to be sure, both their presence and performance were now deemed crucial. In addition, with the requiem, women were marked publicly as primary mourners; dressed in black, their mourning costume called attention to their dictated place within this part of the ritual. And yet, not surprisingly, despite the general tone of reunion within the community, the elements of the requiem, like those of the funeral, could also be manipulated to reaffirm similarities among groups. For instance, this tweaking could be accomplished by burning expensive candles, wearing extravagant mourning dress or increasing the number of mourning participants; also strategic were the use of heavily decorated catafalques and the selection of strongly rhetorical funeral sermons. These choices allowed certain groups to stand out, to show off, to be remembered. As a result, the requiem, too, had to be heavily regulated by strictly-enforced, yet successfully-circumvented, sumptuary laws.35 In sum, within public death rites, the funeral and requiem could be used together to define and re-define social groups, as well as memory of those groups. To that end, temporary transformation of public space into ritual space and manipulation of movement through and within those spaces were essential. The use and abuse of urban space for memorial purposes inevitably varied from place to place and over time, but always signal to these ritual revisions was the role of gender and, particularly, the re-orchestration of the female mourner. This attempt on the part of the new humanist elite to territorialize public space by suppressing women’s mourning, calling for an end to dramatic ostentation and display, has been called ‘the defeminization of the public sphere.’36 Writing from a psychoanalytic perspective, Juliana Schiesari asks of this politicized re-staging: Were these women’s ritualized expressions of grief really disorder? How could they be disorder when mourning was part precisely of a symbolic order? I think what we need to see is that in the transition from a feminized symbolic (or one at least in which women had a more central role) to a masculinist symbolic, the ‘disorder of women’ becomes part of an ideological apparatus that would empower men to hegemonize the public sphere, hence to phallicize the symbolic.37

Indeed, the desired result of this strategic revision of female lamentation was a masculinization of the death ritual and the spaces of that ritual. Thus, concerning the role of women within ritual, there is a notable shift from ritual sound to ritual silence, from incomprehensibility to inaudibility, and even, at times, from ephemerality to total absence.38 If the ‘domestication of female lament served to deprive women of a public voice of memorialization,’ how, then, does the female

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mourner compensate for the fact that within the symbolic realm of language, to which she has been given limited access, she has no voice?39 In other words, silenced yet still required, how can the female mourner do her job? The censoring of the female mourner, though relatively successful, created a new set of challenges for the early modern humanist. In sum, I suggest, ritual silence threatened masculine memory in unexpected ways. The task of mourning – of marking memory – would have to be reassigned. Rhetorical Mutations An exemplary memory specialist soon emerged – the early modern humanist. In keeping with prescribed gender codes, the critic-turned-actor displayed outward decorum and control. For example, upon the death of his wife, Piera, Coluccio Salutati prided himself on the sense of civic order conveyed by his composure at her funeral: ‘“I dried my tears, I ended my weeping and, giving thanks to God, I composed myself with his assistance so that, feeling the loss, I was made absolutely insensible to the pain;”’ of note, Salutati left the funeral early in order to attend to his professional duties.40 A new memorial form – the humanist oration – accompanied this newly scripted and choreographed manner of mourning.41 Written and spoken by men and for men, this classicizing funeral oration contributed to the socio-cultural construction of masculinity insofar as it celebrated male rhetoric over female emotion. Moreover, in addition to stressing political and civic accomplishments, the humanist oration also publicly praised the masculine ethos considered responsible for such achievements. However, this new memorial form did not immediately take center stage. The political and rhetorical strategy of translating what had been women’s inarticulate vocality into a more civilized, commemorative language developed gradually and co-existed with other memorial forms. Indeed, if rituals, as has been said, ‘speak with many voices,’ the various styles and practices of commemoration ‘meant that Florentines no longer enjoyed a standard set of death rites as their common cultural property.’42 Thus, the ‘many voices’ of the death ritual were competing – some literally screaming – for attention; I am interested, precisely, in this cacophony and what has been interpreted as a result of this early modern humanist re-orchestration – cleavages dividing women and men.43 Women in Florence, for example, were excluded from the particularly masculine convention of the funeral oration. Instead, if there was praise for Florentine women, it generally took the form of the private consolatory letter. Exchanged between close family and friends and meant to be read privately, or at least semi-privately, these letters acknowledged women’s accomplishments though those accomplishments usually revolved around other family matters. And if Florentine women did demonstrate political or administrative acumen, recognition was only contingent upon the successful accomplishment of their domestic duties. Leonardo Bruni’s

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letter to Nicola di Vieri de’ Medici upon the death of Nicola’s mother, Bice, reads as follows: Being detained by some necessary public business, I was unable to attend the sad funeral of that excellent woman and best of mothers; I can only try to fulfill my duty in this literary fashion … The excellences of a woman’s life are reckoned to be (unless I am mistaken) good family, a good appearance, modesty, fertility, children, riches, and above all virtue and a good name … And married to a most fortunate man, the outstanding man of his day in our city for his wealth, resources, and celebrity of name, she bore a numerous progeny, and lived to see a multitude of grandchildren, nieces and nephews sprung from her … The greatness of her prudence can be estimated from the way she governed a very large household, a large crowd of clients, [and] a vast and diversified business enterprise for more than thirty years after the death of her husband. So great were her powers of administration that no one felt the loss of her husband’s advise and prudence, and there was no falling-off in the regulation of morals, or the discipline and standards of integrity and honor … let us not then, I pray, lament or weep for her good fortune. Finally, she herself, who was all benevolence, would surely bear it ill that we are overcome by grief, and would bid us cease and desist. Let us obey her even though she is dead, set aside our grief, and as far as nature allows, bear our loss with moderation.44

Despite Bruni’s self-complimentary beginning (he could not attend her funeral precisely because he was ‘detained by some necessary public business’) and his purposeful privileging of mind over body (‘I can only try to fulfill my duty in this literary fashion …’), and despite the obvious limitations of what he considers the primary ‘excellences of a woman’s life,’ Bruni does acknowledge her accomplishments during widowhood.45 This commemorative rhetoric, when employed for memorializing women, arguably served as a means of praising men – sons and, once again, deceased husbands and fathers. As another example, when Piccarda Bueri died in April 1433, Carlo Marsuppini wrote a consolatory letter for her sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici; it was, in many ways, for them. That is, the letter addressed their achievements and, further, provided a strategic tool for re-shaping and idealizing the public, political image of Cosimo.46 By contrast, several distinguished women, residing north of Florence, did receive praise in the same or similar format as their male contemporaries – in the form of a relatively unclouded humanist oration.47 For instance, Elisabetta Malatesta and Caterina Visconti were eulogized anonymously in 1405 in Pesaro and in 1410 in Milan, respectively; Guarino da Verona eulogized Margherita Gonzaga in 1439; and Antonio Lollio praised Laudominia Piccolomini, the sister of Pius II, at mid century. Moreover, some of these women, who, again, lived outside of Florence, such as Malatesta, were even praised for their eloquence; along these lines, Battista Sforza, who, at the age of four, had herself delivered a Latin oration, a rhetorical skill frowned upon by humanists such as Bruni, was commended in a eulogy read by Giannantonio Campano.48

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To reiterate, one objective of the humanist oration was to celebrate the deceased in order to set an example for the community. Another was to reconfirm social placement and privilege. Despite the rhetorical insistence upon stressing – and praising – difference, there was also a need to communicate across groups. A paradox soon becomes apparent: the early modern audience was large and diverse. If the community turned a deaf ear to what seemed to be Bruni’s babble, this caveat posed a particularly large challenge, especially if the orator had to compete against other memory specialists. According to Bruni, the early modern humanist had to distinguish between the majority of listeners, who could understand the eulogy just as they did an average Latin mass, and the ruling class, whose comprehension skills would be more refined.49 Thus, insofar as the orator directed his message mainly toward fellow humanists – specifically, toward men – Bruni’s socio-political campaign, to re-write the codes of public mourning, fails to convert the masses. Moreover, for those for whom the humanist orator did not seem to be speaking in tongues, some of the most famous Florentine orations, those by Bruni for Nanni Strozzi, and by Poggio Bracciolini for Niccolò Niccoli and Lorenzo di Giovanni de’ Medici, were never delivered. That is to say, circulated only in written form, these texts were never read aloud.50 Thus, if the audience never heard, the deceased was never mourned, at least not according to the new humanist standard, whereby the reading of the Latin text during the requiem, which translated what had been women’s inarticulate vocality into a more civilized language, was meant to commemorate the deceased and celebrate a specific community in a particularly well-ordered manner. Like the female mourner before him, whose ‘loud and indecent wailing’ he sought to counter, the early modern humanist, ultimately, is silenced. His memorializing speech interrupted, fragmented, ruptured, incomplete – we might now even say feminized – how does the early modern humanist perform his text?51 As a short aside, we might look toward Bruni’s own tomb, after 1444, by Bernardo Rossellino in the church of Santa Croce in Florence (Fig. 2.12).52 The inscription, written by Carlo Marsuppini, reads as follows: ‘History is in mourning and eloquence is dumb, and the Muses, Greek and Roman alike, cannot restrain their tears.’53 Ironically, on the funerary monument of one of the strongest advocates for a re-orchestration of public mourning, tears are unrestrained, and rhetoric, of all things, is challenged. If incomprehensible, even inaudible, how does the humanist orator negotiate this seemingly unsuccessful performance within his self-orchestrated mourning ritual? In other words, how does he compensate for the fact that within the symbolic realm of language, the sights and sounds of which he increasingly yet precariously controls, he has no voice? Recall that the sanctioned female mourner – muted and silenced – was similarly challenged, having to negotiate the necessity of her role as primary mourner within a newly censored ritual site. The early modern humanist, then, would have to continually redirect his own role. Of course, ‘orators have always worked in the realm of probable truth. By approaching truth as probable, humanists could blur

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distinctions … .’54 Yet, should these distinctions have remained cleavages? In other words, what will become of this collapsed body? Social historians have pointed to an inherent ambiguity in the function and meaning of ritual.55 I recognize, even beyond that provocative reading, an inherent anxiety and, thus, an already unstable subject. More specifically, if death rites, constantly in flux, point to a marked fluidity and multiplicity within ritual and society, the performers of those rites are equally unstable insofar as ritual performance is conditioned by the complexities of early modern gender roles: Rituals marked important sites for the creation of gender identity. Ritual activities provided the stage settings for women and men to carry out socially appropriate behaviors … In the process, rituals posited a set of gender expectations that were complicated by the realities of everyday life, for ritual practices embodying definitions of masculinity and femininity were alive to other variables.56

As we have seen, these roles, too, could be re-shaped or re-directed to suit the particular needs and/or desires of an anxious and vulnerable community. And yet, what happens when too great a transgression occurs? Augustine’s Concessions Augustine, according to Botticelli, has writer’s block (Fig. 2.13).57 That is to say, in the Uffizi panel dated to the 1490s, the delinquent-turned-Divine Doctor appears to be scholastically challenged: Cloistered and cramped, he struggles with re-writes and revisions; surrounding him, limp and broken quills and illegible scraps signal exhausted efforts if not defeat. In striking contrast to this frustrated Augustine, Botticelli also painted a scripturally talented Augustine, this one of a decade earlier in the church of the Ognissanti in Florence (Fig. 2.14).58 Inspired and enlightened, this prolific Augustine demonstrates his productivity, the fruits of his calligraphic labor on display. Why two different characterizations of this Church father – the latter procreative, the former seemingly impotent? Further, why is the fourth-century Roman North African philosopher-saint twice repositioned by a fifteenth-century Florentine artist within a Renaissance studiolo? In other words, why so many conversions? A recent survey of Italian Renaissance art history recognizes these two conflicting characterizations of Augustine, though the comparison is employed mainly to call attention to the increasingly spiritual interests of the artist and the corresponding stylistic change evident in his work during the last decade of the fifteenth century.59 Stylistic differences aside, split personalities and anachronisms point toward a double and divided subject, suggesting that there may be something covert about this Christian convert. Within the context of grief and gender, I wish to examine episodes from the life of Augustine, specifically those surrounding the death, burial and mourning

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of his mother, St Monica, both as recounted in his Confessions, written between 397 and 401, and as illustrated approximately one thousand years later in early modern Tuscany. Central to this discussion, I propose, is the rise of the Italian cult of Monica, the patron saint of widows at this time.60 In particular, I read the early modern literary and visual texts of Augustine’s mourning of Monica in and against the early modern discourse on mourning cited above: the socio-political re-orchestration of public grieving from Petrarch to Bruni. But even beyond this, I examine the gender dichotomy implied there, suggesting that insofar as the popularity of Augustine’s Confessions can be interpreted as contributing to a legitimization and perpetuation of gendered mourning patterns in early modern Tuscany, Augustine’s concessions ultimately challenge and complicate those gender codes, specifically the cultural construction of masculinity. By way of introduction, I cite Augustine’s account of his mother’s death and funeral, as described in Book IX, chapter xii of the Confessions: I closed her eyes and an overwhelming grief welled into my heart and was about to flow forth in floods of tears. But at the same time under a powerful act of mental control my eyes held back the flood and dried it up. The inward struggle put me in great agony. Then when she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus cried out in sorrow and was pressed by all of us to be silent. In this way too something of the child in me, which had slipped towards weeping, was checked and silenced by the youthful voice, the voice of my heart. We did not think it right to celebrate the funeral with tearful dirges and lamentations … But in your ears where none of them heard me, I was reproaching the softness of my feelings and was holding back the torrent of sadness. It yielded a little to my efforts, but then again its attack swept over me – yet not so as to lead me to burst into tears or even to change the expression of my face … When her body was carried out, we went and returned without a tear. Even during those prayers which we poured out to you when the sacrifice of our redemption was offered for her, when her corpse was placed beside the tomb prior to burial, as was the custom there, not even at those prayers did I weep.61

In contrast to Augustine’s ‘inward struggle’ to repress ‘an overwhelming grief,’ Monica ‘never ceased,’ by Augustine’s account, her grieving for him, albeit her mourning is a loss of a different sort – Augustine’s loss of faith.62 Book III, chapter xi of the Confessions reads as follows: For my mother, your faithful servant, wept for me before you more than mothers weep when lamenting their dead children … You heard her and did not despise her tears which poured forth to wet the ground under her eyes in every place where she prayed … During this time this chaste, devout, and sober widow, one of the kind you love, already cheered by hope but no less constant in prayer and weeping, never ceased her hours of prayer to lament about me to you.63

Read in conjunction, these two passages call attention to a distinct dichotomy between male and female manners of mourning: Monica’s loud and constant lamentation is

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countered by Augustine’s stoicism and silence; presumed female hysteria is checked by male composure. The Death of Saint Monica and Return to Carthage, a fifteenth-century fresco in the choir of the church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano, illustrates the importance of Augustine’s account one thousand years later (Fig. 2.15).64 Painted by Benozzo Gozzoli and dated to 1465, the scene depicts Monica’s burial at Ostia and Augustine’s subsequent departure for Africa. This representation follows the prescriptions and proscriptions of male mourning as self-imposed in the Confessions, including the physical and emotional separation implied there. The prototype, The Burial of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine Departing for Africa, a miniature in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, also dated to the fifteenth century, is especially suggestive (Fig. 2.16).65 Just as the literary text presents the reader with a distinct dichotomy, there is a marked split – or cleavage – between the two realms of the miniature. Divided down the center, the left half depicts Monica’s body enclosed in a sarcophagus that is tightly framed by a ciborium; to the right, Augustine, depicted in a traditional melancholic pose with his head tilted and supported by one arm, sets sail, departing from the architectural structure that retains the boxed-in body of Monica. Of particular curiosity, the Fitzwilliam miniature is cut from a choir book; thus, the words and music are hidden by the mount. What might this obscurity, in turn, reveal? In other words, does the concealment of the score reflect the stoic silence of Augustine, or does it point toward a different sort of cover-up? Similarly, might the drawn curtain of the constricted studiolo in the Uffizi Augustine unveil more than just writer’s block? That is to say, if Augustine’s self-flattering discourse of control and composure can be interpreted as privileging a masculine manner of mourning, the early modern humanist critique of public grief and mourning offered from Petrarch onward, insofar as it can be generally characterized as discouraging if not altogether restricting female lamentation within public space, also reveals a gender politics at work. Returning to Augustine, having understood his Confessions as an early example of the strategic, rhetorical construction of masculinity evident in the humanist reorchestration of the death ritual, we might now re-examine his performance, calling attention to and considering the implications of his ultimate concession. Augustine eventually confesses in Book IX, chapter xii: Alone upon my bed … I was glad to weep before you about her and for her, about myself and for myself. Now I let flow the tears which I had held back so that they ran as freely as they wished. My heart rested upon them because it was your ears that were there, not those of some human critic who would put a proud interpretation on my weeping. And now, Lord, I make my confession to you in writing. Let anyone who wishes read and interpret as he pleases. If he finds fault that I wept for my mother for a fraction of an hour, the mother who had died before my eyes who had wept for me that I might live before your eyes, let him not mock me but rather, if a person of much charity, let him weep himself before you for my sins … .66

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The implications of Augustine’s gender transgression – his regressive, feminine performance of mourning – suggest repercussions not only for his own selffashioning but also for that of the early modern humanist, who takes his cue from the literary and visual texts of Augustine’s mourning of Monica. One last fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli in the choir of the church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano, The Funeral of Saint Augustine, deserves special attention (Fig. 2.17). This historical death scene, perhaps not surprisingly, is set within a well-ordered and organized urban landscape; for example, Augustine’s funeral bier is centrally placed before a Brunelleschian arcade. However, in striking contrast to this rationally planned space, one of the contemporary characters, probably a portrait of one of the Augustinians at San Gimignano, grieves dramatically, arms flailing and mouth agape, at the feet of Augustine, breaking all cultural and gendered codes of mourning, as prescribed from Augustine to Petrarch to Salutati to Bruni.67 Of note, two of these figures also appear in The Death of Saint Monica and Return to Carthage (Fig. 2.15), although, there, they appropriately play the role of silent and stoic witness. Here, perhaps even as there, transgressions abound, leading us to re-evaluate the desired outcome of gender and ceremonial performance for the sake of legitimizing and perpetuating masculinity and its memory. Thus, returning to the Uffizi Augustine, we might conclude the cause of the author’s writer’s block. If this confessant’s masculinity is threatened by his ultimate concession, his attempt to re-script his role within ritual, yet again, becomes urgent. All the while, discarded scraps – still illegible – and phallic instruments – always limp – cannot but suggest constant failure. The Mother Tongue As a short aside, I wish to conclude this chapter on the vice of the voice by turning to another mother and son pairing and the sins of the grieving tongue, locating an unexpected parallel between Augustine’s private mourning of his mother, Monica, the patron saint of widows, and Cosimo I’s public mourning of his mother, Maria, a sixteenth-century model widow. From the time of his birth, Cosimo’s mother, Maria Salviati (1499–1543), granddaughter of Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico,’ was unusually devoted to her son’s political future, a destiny set into motion with her advantageous marriage to Giovanni delle Bande Nere, a distant cousin and celebrated war hero, and finally realized in 1537 with the assassination of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici. Upon her husband’s death in 1526, Maria shunned remarriage, opting, instead, to live out her remaining 17 years as a chaste and virtuous widow, dedicating herself almost entirely to her son’s political ambitions. That devotion, to both her husband’s memory and her son’s future, was celebrated in eulogies delivered by the Spanish nobleman, Don Diego di Sandoval de’ Castro, and the Florentine court historian, Benedetto Varchi, at the Accademia Fiorentina, a literary academy founded in

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1541 to promote Tuscan language and literature and supported by Cosimo I. Despite the relatively private venue, it remained highly unusual for a woman to be the recipient of such commemorative speeches, even if she was the mother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. So, can we recognize, here, another case of a grieving son’s self-aggrandizement – and, subsequently, an aggravated agenda? In other words, although recited in Tuscan at a closed lecture for Petrarchan academicians, will even this censored emotional exposure lead Cosimo to bite his own mother tongue?68 Just as Carlo Marsuppini’s consolatory letter, written on the occasion of the death of Piccarda Bueri, mother of Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, strategically praised the public, political image of Cosimo ‘il Vecchio,’ Sandavol’s eulogy to Maria Salviati celebrates the rule of Cosimo I and opens as follows: ‘“THE POET WEEPS FOR THE DEATH OF THE MOTHER OF COSIMO AND TAKES THE OPPORTUNITY TO SING HIS PRAISES.”’69 Mother and son are both commemorated; and yet, there is a built-in concession: ‘the poet weeps,’ somewhat unexpectedly insofar as the humanist tradition of funeral oration stifles such public expressions of grief. Even more surprising is Benedetto Varchi’s eulogy, with its over-the-top description of the uncontrolled emotion apparently felt throughout the city of Florence: … the dismay of the artisans, the cries of the convents, the screams of the hospitals and of other sacred and pious places, the sorrows of the merchants, the laments of the citizens, the plaints of the soldiers, the regrets of the widows, the anguish of the married women, the grief of the orphans, the tears of the young girls, the sighs of the troubled and finally the desperation of the people of both sexes, great and small.70

This is a palpable grief, but is it also problematic? In other words, at once extremely flattering, bestowing honor upon both mother and son, this laudatory language is also questionable, exaggerating the very lamentation that was considered threatening to the public sphere. Eventually, even Cosimo I, who publicly ‘“weeps and sighs,”’ is made vulnerable by Varchi’s vernacular.71 Notes 1 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G.H. McWilliam, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Penguin, 1995), 15. For the Italian, see Boccaccio, The Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 34: ‘né altra cosa alcuna ci udiamo, se non “I cotali son morti” e “Gli altretali sono per morire.”’ 2 Boccaccio, The Decameron (1995), 13, 11, 16. For the Italian, see Boccaccio, The Decameron (1980), 29, 25, 36: ‘nella venerabile chiesa di Santa Maria Novella … non essendovi quasi alcuna altra persona,’ ‘E assai n’erano che nella strada publica o di dí o di notte finivano’ and ‘Per ciò che, quantunque quivi cosí muoiano i lavoratori come qui fanno i cittadini, v’è tanto minore il dispiacere quanto vi sono piú che nella città rade le case e gli abitanti.’ See also Elissa B. Weaver, ed., The Decameron First Day in

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Perspective: Volume One of the Lecturae Boccaccii (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004), esp. Thomas C. Stillinger, ‘The Place of the Title (Decameron, Day One, Introduction), 29–56. 3 Boccaccio, The Decameron (1995), 9–11. For the Italian, see Boccaccio, The Decameron (1980), 23–24 and 25–26: Era usanza, sí come ancora oggi veggiamo usare, che le donne parenti e vicine nella casa del morto si ragunavano e quivi con quelle che piú gli appartenevano piagnevano; e d’altra parte dinanzi la casa del morto co’ suoi prossimi si ragunavano i suoi vicini e altri cittadini assai, e secondo la qualità del morto vi veniva il chericato; e egli sopra gli omeri de’ suoi pari, con funeral pompa di cera e di canti, alla chiesa da lui prima eletta anzi la morte n’era portano. Le quali cose, poi che a montar cominciò la ferocità della pistolenza, o in tutto o in maggior parte quasi cessarono e altre nuove in lor luogo ne sopravennero. Per ciò che, non solamente senza aver molte donne da torno morivan le genti, ma assai n’eran di quegli che di questa vita senza testimonio trapassavano: e pochissimi erano coloro a’ quali i pietosi pianti e l’amare lagrime de’ suoi congiunti fossero concedute, anzi in luogo di quelle s’usavano per li piú risa e motti e festeggiar compagnevole; la quale usanza le donne, in gran parte postposta la donnesca pietà, per salute di loro avevano ottimamente appresa … anzi era la cosa pervenuta a tanto, che non altramenti si curava degli uomini che morivano, che ora si curerebbe di capre.

4 5

6 7 8 9

For a useful, general account of trauma, see Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), esp. 3– 12. For a reading of The Decameron in and against the trauma of the Black Death, see, esp., Aldo S. Bernardo, ‘The Plague as Key to Meaning in Boccaccio’s Decameron,’ in The Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth-Century Plague: Papers of the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, ed. Daniel Williman (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982), 39–64. On the Black Death, more generally, see Ch. 1, note 22. See Marilyn Migiel, A Rhetoric of the Decameron (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2003), esp. Ch. 1, ‘Woman as Witness,’ 17–28. See Thomas M. Greene, ‘Ceremonial Play and Parody in the Renaissance,’ in Urban Life in the Renaissance, eds Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F.E. Weissman (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1989), 281–93, esp. 283, who, writing on the initial and repeated act of coronation, recognizes ‘a minimal simulacrum of order that replaces the ceremonial order that has at least momentarily collapsed.’ Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 2. Ibid. As cited by Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 88. For the Latin, see Barasch, 149: ‘“In Tuscio fit excoriacio uultuum, pannorum scissio, et euulsio capilorum.”’ See, esp., Randi Klebanoff, ‘Passion, Compassion, and the Sorrows of Women: Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ for the Bolognese Confraternity of Santa Maria della Vita,’ in Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image, eds Barbara Wisch and Diane Cole Ahl (Cambridge and New York:

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Cambridge University Press, 2000), 146–72. See also Cesare Gnudi, Niccolò dell’Arca (Turin: Einaudi, 1942), 49–66. 10 For this citation of Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s description of a funeral procession on the island of Crete, see Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Mourning Rites, Memory, and Civilization in Premodern Italy,’ in Riti e Rituali nelle Società Medievali, eds Jacques Chiffoleau, Lauro Martines and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Spoleto: centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1994), 23–38, citation at 23. 11 There is not always a clear division between religious and secular representation. See, for example, Eckart Marchand, ‘The Representation of Citizens in Religious Fresco Cycles in Tuscany,’ in With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage, 1434–1530, eds Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright (Aldershot, Eng. and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 107–27. 12 See Hellmut Wohl, The Paintings of Domenico Veneziano, ca. 1410–1461: A Study in Florentine Art of the Early Renaissance (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 48–49. 13 See, esp., Eve Borsook and Johannes Offerhaus, Francesco Sassetti and Ghirlandaio at Santa Trinità, Florence: History and Legend in a Renaissance Chapel (Doornspijk, Holland: Davaco, 1981), 20–27; and Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. 237– 39. 14 See Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 143–47. 15 This phrase is borrowed from Barasch, Gestures of Despair. 16 Cristelle L. Baskins, ‘Trecento Rome: The Poetics and Politics of Widowhood,’ in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison Levy (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 197–209, citation at 197. 17 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 140. 18 Kathy Lavezzo, ‘Sobs and Sighs between Women,’ in Premodern Sexualities, eds Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 175–98, citation at 191. 19 See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 20 This reading has been informed in important ways by the following studies: Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: The Art of Dying (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004); their Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds, En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Carolyn Abbate, ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,’ in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 225–58; and Catherine Clément, Opera, or The Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 21 Clément, Opera, 118. 22 For a general overview of the Medusa story, see Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers,

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eds, The Medusa Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). The present discussion has been informed by Charles Segal, ‘The Gorgon and the Nightingale: The Voice of Female Lament and Pindar’s Twelfth Pythian Ode,’ in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, eds Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17–34; and Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ trans Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1/4 (1976): 875–93. On Caravaggio’s Medusa, see, esp., Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Decapitation, in relation to castration anxiety, will be addressed in Ch. 3. Clément, Opera, 180. Sharon Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 5–6. Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), 108. Leonardo Bruni, ‘Panegyric to the City of Florence,’ in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, eds Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth B. Welles (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 135– 75, citations at 136–37 and 168–69. For the Latin, see Hans Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 233 and 258–59: Principio igitur, quod prudentie maxime est: nichil ad ostentationem facere nec periculosam et inanem iactantiam sequi potius quam tranquillam stabilemque commoditatem, hoc Florentiam quidem cernimus observasse … Sed cum foris hec civitas admirabilis est, tum vero disciplina institutisque domesticis. Nusquam tantus ordo rerum, nusquam tanta elegantia, nusquam tanta concinnitas … Nichil est in ea preposterum, nichil inconveniens, nichil absurdum, nichil vagum; suum queque locum tenent, non modo certum, sed etiam congruentem.

27 On the gendering of urban space, see Robert C. Davis, ‘The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance,’ and Strocchia, ‘Gender and the Rites of Honour in Italian Renaissance Cities,’ in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, eds Judith C. Brown and Robert Davis (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 19–38 and 39–60. See also Charles Burroughs, ‘Spaces of Arbitration and the Organization of Space in Late Medieval Italian Cities,’ in Medieval Practices of Space, eds Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michael Kobialka (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 64–100; and Richard Trexler, ‘Ritual Behavior in Florence: The Setting,’ Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 4 (1973): 125–44. 28 See, esp., Strocchia, Death and Ritual, as well as her following publications on funerals: ‘Funerals and the Politics of Gender in Early Renaissance Florence,’ in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, eds Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 155–68; ‘Remembering the Family: Women, Kin, and Commemorative Masses in Renaissance Florence,’ Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 635–54; and ‘Death Rites and the Ritual Family in Renaissance Florence,’ in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, eds Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt and Rona Goffen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), 120–45. 29 Francesco Petrarch, Letters of Old Age; Rerum senilium libri I-XVIII, trans Aldo Bernardo,

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Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo, vol. 2 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 521–52, citation at 552. For the Italian translation, see Francesco Petrarch, Lettere Senili, ed. Giuseppe Fracassetti, vol. 2 (Florence, 1892), 333–81, citation at 380–81: Ma che chiedi dunque? dirai tu. Eccomi al punto. Si cava di casa il morto, e una caterva di donne si getta sulla strada empiendo le piazze e le vie di mesti ululati, di clamori, di grida, che a chi ne ignori la causa farebbe sospettare o esser quelle maniache, o venuta la città in man del nemico. Quando il funebre corteo tocca la soglia della chiesa si raddoppia il frastuono, e mentre dentro si cantano i salmi, o a voce bassa e in silenzio l’anima del defunto con divote preci a Dio si accomanda, percosse dai femminili ululati orrendamente rimbombano le volte, e sembran tremarne commossi gli altari dei santi. E tutto questo perchè? Perchè un que nacque a morire è morto. Questa è la costumanza, che contraria ad ogni legge di decenza civile e di buon ordinamento della città, siccome indegna del tuo saggio governo io ti consiglio, e se fa d’uopo, ti prego che tu corregga. Comanda che nessuna donna esca di casa per codiare il corrotto. Se dolce ai miseri è il pianto, piangan pur quanto vogliono, ma dentro le domestiche pareti, e non turbino co’loro schiamazzi la pubblica quiete.

For the Latin text, see Petrarch, Rerum senilium liber XIV. Ad magnificum Franciscum de Carraria Padue dominum. Epistola I. Qualis esse debeat qui rem publicam regit, ed. V. Ussani (Padua, 1922), 1–47, esp. 47: Quid peto igitur dicam. Effertur funus, matrone cateruatim prodeunt in publicum uicosque et plateas altis complent inconditisque clamoribus, ut siquis rei nescius interueniat, facile possit aut illas in furorem uersas aut urbem captam ab hostibus suspicari. Inde, ubi ad templi fores est peruentum, geminatur fragor horrisonus et, ubi Cristo laudes cani siue pro defuncti anima deuote preces uel submissa uoce uel in silentio fundi debent, illic meste reboant querele et femineis ululatibus altaria sacra pulsantur, quia scilicet mortuus sit mortalis. Hunc morem, quia graui et nobili contrarium politie tuoque regimine indignum, censeo ut emendes, non tantum consulo, sed, si licet, obsecro. Iube ne qua prorsus hanc ob causam pedem domo efferat: si flere miseris dulce est, quantumlibet domi fleat, faciem publicam non contristet.

30 The account that follows is based on Strocchia, ‘The Rules of Order,’ Ch. 1 in Death and Ritual, 5–29. 31 Hughes, ‘Mourning Rites, Memory, and Civilization,’ esp. 25–6, citation at 26. 32 Ibid., 31. 33 Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 11. 34 Ibid., 8. 35 On the enforcement and circumvention of sumptuary laws, esp. in relation to mourning costume, see Ch. 3, note 78. 36 Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 163. 37 Ibid., 164. 38 This humanist silencing of women can be understood within the larger context of

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41 42

43 44

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women losing a broad range of rights and privileges. See Joan Kelly, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ in Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19–50. See also Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The ‘Heroic’ Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 245, note 3, who offers a summary of subsequent supporting publications. Hughes, ‘Mourning Rites, Memory, and Civilization,’ 34. As cited by Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1983), 313–16, citation at 313. The passage is taken from a letter written by Salutati to Jacopo Manni on 15 June 1396: ‘siccavi lacrimas, finivi fletus et gratias Deo referens, sic me, ipso donante, composui, quod damnum sentiens, dolori prorsus insensibilis factus sum;’ for the complete text of this and three more letters written by Salutati describing Piera’s death and his emotional state during and after her funeral, see Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. Francesco Novati, vol. 3 (Rome, 1891–1911), 126–28 and 133–42, esp. 138. See also Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 116–17, who contextualizes Salutati’s manner of mourning within the new humanist tradition. See, esp., John McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5; Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 106. See also Lauro Martines, ‘Ritual Language in Renaissance Italy,’ in Chiffoleau, Martines and Bagliani, Riti e Rituali, 59–76, on the paradoxical nature of verbal ritual. Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 106. Leonardo Bruni, The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts, trans and eds Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins and David Thompson (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with the Renaissance Society of America, 1987), 337–39. For a summary of this letter in Italian, see Francesco Paolo Luiso, Studi su l’Epistolario di Leonardo Bruni, ed. Lucia Gualdo Rosa (Rome: Nella Sede dell’ Istituto, 1980), 120–21: Dolente di non aver potuto, perché impedito dai pubblici uffici, esser presente ai funerali della madre, cerca di consolare l’amico con tutte quelle ragioni con cui egli cerca tuttora di consolare sé stesso. Invece di piangere, ci sarebbe argomento di rallegrarsi della felicità di quella santa donna, che dopo una così lunga e pericolosa navigazione, ha fortunatamente raggiunto il porto. Niente a lei mancò in questa vita. Figlia della nobile famiglia dei Malatesta da parte di madre, e di padre fiorentino non meno nobile e illustre di casato, bella e adorna di ogni virtù, andò sposa a un uomo fortunato per ricchezze e per fama, cui rese padre di numerosi figliuoli. Vissuta fino a 74 anni, ebbe una morte placida e serena come il corso della sua vita. Or sciolta da ogni vincolo terreno, gode in cielo il premio dovuto alle sue virtù. Non si sarebbe ingiusti e ingrati a piangere e anteporre l’utile nostro alla beatitudine di quella fortunata?

45 See Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 147. 46 Ibid. See also Alison M. Brown, ‘The Humanist Portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici, Pater Patriae,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24 (1961): 186–221, esp. 190.

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47 It should be noted, here, that humanist consolatory writing, undoubtedly a maledominated literary form, was occasionally authored by women. See, for instance, Isotta Nogarola, Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations, trans and eds Margaret L. King and Diana Robin (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004); Cassandra Fedele, Letters and Orations, trans. and ed. Diana Robin (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Laura Cereta, Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, trans. and ed. Diana Robin (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). 48 On these orations, see Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 146, and McManamon, Funeral Oratory, 113–14. See also Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr, eds, Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992); Constance Jordan, ‘Feminism and the Humanists: The Case of Sir Thomas Elyot’s Defense of Good Women,’ Renaissance Quarterly 36 (1983): 181–201; Margaret L. King, ‘Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance,’ in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 66–90; and Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars,’ in Labalme, Beyond Their Sex, 91–116. 49 On the constitution of the humanist’s audience, see McManamon, Funeral Oratory, 3. 50 McManamon, ‘Continuity and Change in the Ideals of Humanism: The Evidence from Florentine Funeral Oratory,’ in Tetel, Witt and Goffen, Life and Death, 68–87, esp. 68–9. 51 For the present discussion of the failed performance of the orator, I found particularly useful Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), esp. Ch. 2, ‘Discovering the Body,’ 59–86; Patricia Parker, ‘Virile Style,’ in Premodern Sexualities, eds Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 201–22; and Cristelle L. Baskins, ‘Corporeal Authority in the Speaking Picture: The Representation of Lucretia in Tuscan Domestic Painting,’ in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 187–200. 52 See Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, ed. H.W. Janson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964), esp. 74. 53 ‘POSTQUAM LEONARDUS E VITA MIGRAVIT HISTORIA LUGET ELOQUENTIA MUTA EST FERTURQUE MUSAS TUM GRAECAS TUM LATINAS LACRIMAS TENERE NON POTUISSE.’ 54 John McManamon, ‘Continuity and Change,’ 81. 55 For a particularly useful explanation, see Muir, Ritual, 5: In practice it is often tricky to determine whether a specific performance is modeling or mirroring. Rituals tend to blur these two processes, which is perhaps the very source of the creative tension in rituals, the tension between a conservative mirroring of what is and the utopian modeling of what might be. Rituals are inherently ambiguous in their function and meaning. 56 Strocchia, ‘Gender and the Rites of Honour,’ 42. 57 In striking contrast to the interpretation offered here, an early reading describes the same

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59

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subject as ‘very busy writing.’ See Wilhelm Bode, Sandro Botticelli, trans F. Renfield and F.L. Rudston Brown (London: Methuen, 1925), 125. See also Ronald W. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 85–86. Dated to 1480, this fresco was painted as a pendant to Ghirlandaio’s Saint Jerome in His Study, also in the church of the Ognissanti in Florence. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, vol. 3 (New York: AMS Press, 1976), 248, describes this early version of Augustine as follows: ‘this work won very great praise, for in the head of that Saint he depicted the profound meditation and acute subtlety that are found in men of wisdom who are ever concentrated on the investigation of the highest and most difficult matters.’ For the Italian, see Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanese, vol. 3 (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), 311: ‘la qual opera riuscì lodatissima, per avere egli dimostrato nella testa di quel Santo quella profonda cogitazione ed acutissima sottigliezza, che suole essere nelle persone sensate ed astratte continuamente nella investigazione di cose altissime e molto difficile.’ Laurie Schneider Adams, Italian Renaissance Art (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 234–37. See also Daniel Arasse, Pierluigi De Vecchi and Jonathan Katz Nelson, eds, Botticelli and Filippino: Passion and Grace in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painting (Milan: Skira, 2004), 130–35. On the popularity of the cult of Monica in fifteenth-century Italy, see Catherine Lawless, ‘“Widowhood was the time of her greatest perfection”: Ideals of Widowhood and Sanctity in Florentine Art,’ in Levy, Widowhood and Visual Culture, 19–38, esp. 36; Kate Lowe, ‘Nuns and Choice: Artistic Decision-Making in Medicean Florence,’ in Marchand and Wright, With and Without the Medici, 129–53, esp. 138–41, which addresses the patronage patterns of the Augustinian convent of Santa Monaca in Florence; and Clarissa W. Atkinson, ‘“Your Servant, My Mother:” the Figure of St. Monica in the Ideology of Christian Motherhood,’ in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, eds Constance H. Buchanan and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 139–72, esp. 147–52. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 174–5; italics mine. The following excerpts from the Latin text are taken from Augustine, Confessionum (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898), 187–88: Premebam oculos eius, et confluebat in praecordia mea maestitudo ingens et transfluebat in lacrimas, ibidemque oculi mei violento animi imperio resorbebant fontem suum usque ad siccitatem, et in tali luctamine valde male mihi erat. tum vero, ubi efflavit extremum, puer Adeodatus exclamavit in planctu atque ab omnibus nobis cohercitus tacuit. hoc modo etiam meum quiddam puerile, quod labebatur in fletus, iuvenali voce, voce cordis, cohercebatur et tacebat. neque enim decere arbitrabamur funus illud questibus lacrimosis gemitibusque celebrare … Quid ergo, quod intus mihi graviter dolebat, nisi ex consuetudine simul vivendi dulcissima et carissima repente dirrupta vulnus recens? … quoniam itaque deserebar tam magno eius solacio, sauciabatur anima et quasi dilaniabatur vita, quae una facta ex mea et illius … at ego in auribus tuis, ubi eorum nullus audiebat, increpabam mollitiam affectus mei et constringebam fluxum maeroris, cedebatque mihi paululum: rursusque impetu suo ferebatur non usque ad eruptionem lacrimarum nec usque ad vultus mutationem … Cum ecce corpus elatum est, imus, redimus sine lacrimis. nam neque in eis precibus, quas tibi fudimus, cum offerretur pro ea sacrificium

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62 See Nancy A. Jones, ‘By Woman’s Tears Redeemed: Female Lament in St. Augustine’s Confessions and the Correspondence of Abelard and Heloise,’ in Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts. The Latin Tradition, eds Barbara Gold, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 15–39. 63 Augustine, Confessions (1991), 49–51. For the Latin, see Augustine, Confessionum (1898), 49–50: cum pro me fleret ad te mea mater, fidelis tua, amplius quam flent matres corporea funeral … exaudisti eam nec despexisti lacrimas eius, cum profluentes rigarent terram sub oculis eius in omni loco orationis eius … cum tamen illa vidua casta, pia et sobria, quales amas, iam quidem spe alacrior, sed fletu et gemitu non segnior, non desineret horis omnibus orationum suarum de me plangere ad te. 64 On the fresco cycle, see Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 121–41. 65 The miniature, which was probably commissioned after 1430, is attributed to the Master of the Osservanza, whose name derives from a triptych in the church of the Osservanza outside of Siena; active in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, this painter probably worked with Sassetta. See Keith Christiansen, Laurence B. Kanter and Carl Brandon Strehlke, Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420–1500 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1988), 99–102. 66 Augustine, Confessions (1991), 176. For the Latin, see Augustine, Confessionum (1898), 189: ut eram in lecto meo solus … et libuit flere in conspectu tuo de illa et pro illa, de me et pro me. et dimisi lacrimas, quas continebam, ut effluerent quantum vellent, substernens eas cordi meo: et requievit in eis, quoniam ibi erant aures tuae, non cuiusquam hominis superbe interpretantis ploratum meum. et nunc, domine, confiteor tibi in litteris. legat qui volet et interpretetur, ut volet, et si peccatum invenerit, flevisse me matrem exigua parte horae, matrem oculis meis interim mortuam, quae me multos annos fleverat, ut oculis tuis viverem, non inrideat, sed potius, si est grandi caritate, pro peccatis meis fleat ipse ad te. 67 See Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 125, for the suggestion that this cycle contains portraits of Fra Domenico Strambi and his superior. On the identification of bystanders in other frescoes from the choir, see Marchand, ‘The Representation of Citizens,’ 1998. On Petrarch’s appropriation of Augustine, see Carol Everhart Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998). 68 On Cosimo’s gendered commemorization and memorialization of Maria Salviati, see Natalie Tomas, ‘Commemorating a Mortal Goddess: Maria Salviati de’ Medici and the Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I,’ unpublished paper. See also Gabrielle Langdon, ‘Pontormo and Medici Lineages: Maria Salviati, Alessandro, Giulia and Giulio de’ Medici,’ RACAR 19/1–2 (1992): 20–40. 69 As cited by Tomas, ‘Commemorating a Mortal Goddess,’ 8. ‘IL POETA PIANGE LA MORTE DELLA MADRE DI COSIMO E PRENDE OCCASIONE PER CELEBRARE LE LODI DI LUI.’

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70 Ibid., 10; italics mine. For the Italian, see her note 57: lo sbigotimento de gl’artefici, le grida de’ monasteri, l’urla de gli spedali et de gli altri luoghi sacri et pii, le doglienze de’ mercatanti, i lamenti de’ cittadini, le querele de’ soldati, rammarichi delle vedove, l’angoscia delle maritate, il cordoglio de pupilli, le lagrime delle fanciulle, i sospiri de’ tribulati, et finalmente la disperazione di tutte le genti dell’un sesso, et dell’altro, così piccole, come grandi. 71 Ibid., 7; see also, 9, for the suggestion that Varchi’s eulogy may also have been read aloud at Maria’s funeral in the church of San Lorenzo.

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CHAPTER 3

The Widow’s Cleavage ‘I’ve got you under my skin.’ Cole Porter

Merry Widows Mourners – both male and female, as we have seen – act up and act out, but perhaps most menacing is the widow, whose presence after ritual poses a new set of problems. As primary mourner, the widow plays a critical cultural role in maintaining her absent husband’s memory. This is particularly so during ceremonial, as discussed in the previous chapter, but what will she do the mo(u)rning after? A provocative text, La vedova, contextualizes the uncertainties of widowhood in early modern Florence. The story, written by Giovan Battista Cini in 1569 in Florence and performed in the Palazzo Vecchio that same year under the reign of Cosimo I on the occasion of the visit of the Archduke Carl of Austria, unfolds as follows: Federigo feigns his death only to return to Florence in disguise with one eye patched in order to gaze upon his newly ‘widowed’ wife, Cornelia. What he quickly discovers is a multitude of suitors, each with a strategic – and comic – manner of possessing the, again, available Cornelia. Devastated, he tries desperately, and with great difficulty, to deter each of his potential replacements. Ultimately, the disguised, monocular Federigo reveals himself to the relief of Cornelia, and he and his everchaste ‘widow’ live happily ever after. In sum, Cini’s comedy revolves around an endless layering of shifting identities, deception and masquerade. Afraid of being forgotten and not sure that his wife will mourn him, Federigo prematurely imposes widowhood upon his wife, which, in turn, opens up a world of possibilities for his widow, her suitors and, necessarily, himself, creating chaos and mischief in the streets of Florence.1 Of particular note, the accompanying stage set, known from a design by Baldessare Lanci, an architect in Cosimo’s court, depicts an identifiable civic site – the political heart of Florence (Fig. 3.1).2 Clearly visible from Vasari’s Uffizi (still being constructed) are an edge of the Loggia dei Lanzi, the Palazzo Vecchio (inside of which Cini’s comedy was performed), the expanse of the Piazza della Signoria and, in the background, Brunelleschi’s dome and Giotto’s campanile. Previous studies of Lanci’s drawing have been from a technical point of view, concerned with the problems of stage perspective and scenery rotation.3 I would like to suggest,

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however, that, in the context of this study, this rationally planned public space deserves further critical attention. How and why does this particular civic site function as the setting for a play about widowhood in early modern Florence? Sixteenth-century Italian comedy is typically set within a markedly less specific, or even unidentifiable, neighborhood than that of La vedova.4 Does urban planning, in this example, serve to manage, in some way, the anxiety caused not by Federigo’s ‘death’ but by the subsequent uncertainties of Cornelia’s ‘widowhood?’: will she play the role of chaste widow and mourn her husband? Or, independent again, will she forget her duty to mourn and take a lover? To be sure, rapacious widows abound in the Florentine literary imagination. Especially memorable is Elena, Boccaccio’s young widow, who ‘pined away in tears and bitter lamentation,’ not for the death of her husband but for the loss of her lover.5 So desperate to win him back, she sheds her widow’s weeds, climbs a deserted tower on the banks of the Arno and awaits an ill-fated magic spell, leaving this hapless widow with nothing but extreme sunburn. Taking matters into her own hands, so to speak, satisfaction came often for Giovanni Sercambi’s lascivious widow of the Strozzi family, who, eager ‘to satisfy her sexual rabbia after the death of her husband, consumed sausages in her bocca senza denti.’6 Niccolò Franco gets right to the point in his frank sonnet of 1541, La Priapea, on ‘“cocks of every estate,”’ unabashedly including ‘“cocks for widows”’ in his line-up.7 From these accounts it would seem that promiscuous widows come a dime a dozen or, in the mid-twentieth century, three for a dollar, when a buck could buy a handful of prophylactics aptly branded Merry Widows (Fig. 3.2). But some desiring widows required protection of a different sort. We might think at length of Alberti’s pregnant widow, who, fearing that her transgression might be noticed, flees neighbors and neighborhoods until an older widow offers this counsel: Such are our arts, and such our talent: we dupe and deceive … we’ll say that you’re tired of the city and are leaving for the country to relax … A woman who wishes to deceive always finds a way … Just take my advice. Let us drink, laugh, and love.8

Alberti’s dialogue is provocative on several counts. It points to the centrality of the city in defining early modern widowhood, the social and geographical transgressions of the widow and, subsequently, her ambiguous position within the urban landscape. The city is the place of ritual, the social space that first marked her widowhood and continues to signify her new status. Indeed, her new social position allows her to move through neighborhoods in ways previously unavailable to her, bringing recognition of her widowhood and, thus, ideally, her husband’s memory. And yet, her transgressions, meant to mark her as one man’s widow, also mark her as available. In other words, without a husband, Alberti’s widow gains mobility and a pregnancy.9 Fortunately, she learns how to fake it – duplicity and deception being the art of the widow.10

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But the merry widow is not just the stuff of Florentine comedy. In Venice, Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne, published in 1600, tells the story of Leonora, the young widow who adamantly refuses remarriage: ‘I derive the greatest happiness from living in peace, without a man. For we all know what a marvelous thing freedom is.’11 Similarly, in Rome, Horatio Fusco Monfloreo D’Arimini’s La vedova del Fusco, published in 1570, begins with the following declaration of independence: “‘The tight knot of marriage broken by her husband’s death, the woman becomes a free being – like a bird flying in the air that goes wherever it pleases …’”12 And in Bernardo Trotto’s Dialoghi del matrimonio e vita vedovile, published in Turin in 1578, we hear from Hippolyta, a widow who, “‘no longer subject to a man’s bestiality,’”13 shuns remarriage on the following grounds: You who have experienced how much anguish matrimony brings, you who have tasted such a fill of carnal food that it made you fastidious and caused you to vomit, why would you now want to return to the same position, like a dog licking its own vomit, like a pig washed of so much filth returning to the miserable mud?14

And the following surprising yet powerful historical accounts reflect similar attitudes. Lodovico Dolce, in his Dialogo della institutione delle donne, of 1557, remarked upon widowhood that women ‘“rejoice at the death of their husbands as if they had been freed from the heavy yoke of servitude,”’15 and a witness at the court of Catherine de’ Medici made the following observation: They want friends and lovers, but no husband, out of love for the freedom that is so sweet. To be out from under the domination of a husband seems to them paradise, and no wonder, they have the use of their own money … everything passes through their hands … they can pursue their pleasures and enjoy companions who will do as they wish. They remain widows in order to keep their grandeur, possessions, titles and good treatment.16

Briefly looking towards Elizabethan England, Thomas Whythorne cautions, ‘“He that wooeth a widow must not carry quick eels in his codpiece … but show some proof that he is stiff before.”’17 Indeed, these are demanding widows. Remarriage, then, may not have been the grave threat that mere availability could be. With one in four adult women in fifteenth-century Florence widowed, such practical considerations as demographics and designations were equally cause for concern.18 Upon widowhood, that ‘challenging anomaly to patriarchal norms everywhere,’ women’s lives were suddenly in flux, and the events and experiences that followed affected everything from emotional states to economic ones.19 Indeed, with this new social label, which, itself, was non-negotiable, came a multitude of pregnant moments and, subsequently, dramatic changes. Widowhood could last anywhere from one year to the remainder of a lifetime and could mean significant fluctuation in socioeconomic status, for better or for worse.20 Whether staying within the marriage household, whether returning to the agnatic household or whether rejecting the traditional household altogether and living independently, these ‘passing guests’ could – and did – negotiate both place and position.21

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A Flash in the Pants There were other ways, too, it was feared, that widows might stray. Valerie R. Hotchkiss, writing on the abandoned wife in medieval literature, observes that ‘without a husband, the woman is no longer a wife … the absence of the husband literally results in a loss of sexual identity.’22 In order to exist in a man’s world, the deserted woman re-defines her female role, acting – even dressing – like a man, until her husband reappears, at which point she reverts to her normative sociosexual identity. This gender inversion was usually short-lived, but it opened up the possibility of prolonged gender transgression – and scandal. Beyond the literary tradition, wives who were not just ambiguously abandoned but were simply widowed could also assume another sexual identity, exchanging convention for non-conformity. San Bernardino of Siena and Sant’Antonino of Florence, among others, advised that widows should be ‘“both mother and father”’ to their children, conflating social roles for the good of the family.23 Indeed, Maria Salviati heeded this recommendation and upon her death was cast by contemporaries as her husband’s surrogate, eulogized as both mother and father to the young Cosimo.24 Giovanni Giorgio Trissino even opined, in his Epistola … de la vita che dee tenere una donna vedova of 1524, ‘“that first of all you ought to consider yourself born a man [nata homo], in spirit and in body.”’25 But some widows took this permission to perform as an opportunity to extend the transgression and, in so doing, tested the tolerance of a patriarchal society tempted to fill a (male) void. Caterina Sforza, for example, reconfigured behavioral boundaries immediately upon her widowhood, when her first husband, Girolamo Riario, was assassinated in Forlì in 1488. Fra Filippo da Bergamo’s De plurimis claris selectibus mulieribus novissime congestum praises her on these terms: ‘“Like a man she cast away those womanly tears and took care to show her prudence and her greatness of spirit.”’26 Though held prisoner and separated from her children, she refused to surrender possession of the fortress of Ravaldino, famously/reputedly dismissing the threat to kill her children by announcing another pregnancy and by matterof-factly lifting her skirt, indifferently exposing the means by which she could easily produce more, as recounted by Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy of 1513: Some Forlì conspirators killed Count Girolamo, their lord, and took his wife and his children, who were small. Since it appeared to them that they could not live secure if they did not become masters of the fortress, and the castellan was not willing to give it to them, Madonna Caterina (so the countess was called) promised the conspirators that if they let her enter it, she would deliver it to them and they might keep her children with them as hostages. Under this faith they let her enter it. As soon as she was inside, she reproved them from the walls for the death of her husband and threatened them with every kind of revenge. And to show that she did not care for her children, she showed them her genital parts, saying that she still had the mode for making more of them.27

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The Florentine historian, Lodovico Guicciardini, also reported this irreverent gesture, citing her as having proclaimed, ‘“Oh, can’t you see, foolish men, that I have the mold to make others?”’28 As quick as Caterina’s exaggerated flash in the pants may have been, this particular war widow’s political exposure was anything but hollow. If many more children could be had, so, too, could much more power. Her maternal concern clearly superseded by her drive to regain control of her territory, Caterina, serving as widow regent for her son, Ottaviano, would soon take back her political power and, while she was at it, take on two new lovers, Giacomo Feo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, both of whom she may have secretly married and with whom she would bear even more children, including, with the latter, Giovanni delle Bande Nere. Much is revealed by Caterina’s indecent exposure, but what, exactly, did her male captors find there under her skirt? To be sure, her indecorum is indelible, made legendary first by whispers and then by the writings of Machiavelli, yet we are still kept guessing – did her enemies get an eye full, or were they blindsided? A late sixteenth-century engraving of a Venetian courtesan hints at what Caterina may have kept hidden and what she may have let slip (Fig. 3.3). This literally multilayered picture of a woman, seemingly dressed demurely in a full, floor-length dress with laced-up bodice, includes a removable flap, which, when lifted, reveals under her skirt a pair of men’s breeches (Fig. 3.4). This was not an uncommon costume, according to Cesare Vecellio, who describes Venetian courtesan dress in his contemporaneous Habiti antichi e moderni di tutto il mondo, published in Venice in 1590: ‘“ … most of them wear a somewhat masculine outfit: silk or cloth waistcoats adorned with conspicuous fringes and padded like young men’s vests … Next to their bodies they wear a man’s shirt … Many of them wear men’s breeches … .”’29 This transvestism surely must have been titillating, especially given the predilection for sodomy, as disclosed, for example, in Pietro Aretino’s letter of 1548 to La Zufolina, a courtesan from Pistoia, describing two of their recent encounters: Twice my good fortune has sent your fair person into that house which is mine and others – the first time as a woman dressed like a man and the next time, as a man dressed like a woman. You are a man when you are chanced on from behind and a woman when seen from in front … Now please understand me right-side-up even if I say everything upsidedown. Your showing yourself sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly has made me neglect the intellect of my tongue for the fantasy of my pen. Certain it is that nature has so compounded you of both sexes that in one moment you show yourself a male and in the next a female. Indeed, Duke Alessandro [de’ Medici] did not wish to sleep with you for any other reason than to find out if you were a hermaphrodite in reality or merely in jest. For look you, you talk like a fair lady and act like a pageboy. Anybody who did know you would think that you are now the rider and now the steed – i.e. now a nymph and now a shepherd; that is, now active and now passive. What more can I say? Even the clothes which you wear upon your back, and which you are always changing, leave it an open question whether my she-chatterbox is really a

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he-chatterbox, or whether my he-chatterbox is really a she-one. Meanwhile, even Dukes and Duchesses are diverted by the entertainment of that very salty, very spicy prattle of yours. Vaporishly it escapes from your lips. Your conversation is like pine-nut tartlets, like honey on the comb, like marchpane, to those who find it amusing. Neither Florence nor Ferrara would want you to be a housecat, who are a sly fox amid the hens and roosters. Old Time is the fellow who rusts, wears out, consumes, devours, ruins, unhinges, foreshortens, breaks, lops away, cuts short, unmakes, spoils and slaughters everything, but he would not dare get into a contest with you.30

Aretino offers a straightforward account of a sexual encounter that was anything but. Cross-dressing enables La Zufolina – and Aretino – to have it both ways: ‘as a woman dressed like a man’ and vice-versa, La Zufolina/Il Zufolino shows herself/himself, ‘sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly,’ to be full of contradictions. Aretino credits his ‘good fortune’ for being privy to these sexual surprises, but one man’s ‘fantasy’ is another man’s fear of ‘find[ing] out.’ According to Aretino, Alessandro de’ Medici, afraid of what he will – or will not – see, avoids La Zufolina, taking up a position of abstinence rather than risk being duped by a woman, especially one who can outfox even death itself. But cross-dressing did not necessarily signify homosexuality; it could also suggest sexual availability, according to the author of Hic Mulier: Or, the Man-Woman, a popular pamphlet published, along with a rebuttal, Haec-Vir: Or, the WomanishMan, in London in 1620.31 Nor was transvestism reserved for the Venetian courtesan, as a carnival song from fifteenth-century Florence makes clear: Women want to become husbands They seek to wear breeches, and dominate Poor virtue has almost been dispersed Because the world is all upside-down.32

Surely she has come undone, but to what end? Cross-dressing, according to Jonathan Dollimore, ‘epitomizes the strategy of transgressive reinscription, whereby, rather than seeking to transcend the dominant structures responsible for oppression and exclusion, the subject or subculture turns back upon them, inverting and perverting them.’33 Indeed, this is a world ‘all upside-down;’ even Aretino implored, ‘please understand me right-side-up even if I say everything upside-down.’ ‘Women on top’ may play the patriarchal part in this privileged position, but this topsy-turvy behavior is hardly par for the course.34 And transvestism – whether a sign of sexual deviance or simply defiance – remains ‘an open question.’ Such indecipherability – and the early modern curiosity yet caution associated with that not-knowing – calls to mind the hermaphrodite, the conflated body that would come to stand for sexual ambiguity of all sorts.35 Moreover, that surplus body can prompt us to re-think the ways in which the deficient body makes up for absence. Yet, insofar as bodies – no longer read as segregated but as surrogates – and parts – no longer considered irreplaceable but objects to be exchanged – can be permutated ad infinitum, we must also re-think the (w)hole project:

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For if the Renaissance hermaphrodite suggests that categorical fixity is inevitably unstable … he/she equally embodies the fact that there was no absolute categorical fixity to begin with. All attempts to fix gender are thus revealed as prosthetic: that is, they suggest the attempt to supply an imagined deficiency by the exchange of male clothes for female clothes or of female clothes for male clothes; by displacement from male to female space or from female to male space; by the replacement of male with female tasks or of female with male tasks. But each elaboration of the prosthesis which will supply the ‘deficiency’ can secure no gender essence … he/she articulates gender itself as a fetish.36

In her attempt to fill the male void, the widow takes on an alternative socio-sexual identity, becoming ‘both mother and father,’ both absent husband and abandoned wife. In this way, the widow, in her indeterminateness, might be read as hermaphroditic. And her performance, a reversal of normative behavior, not only underscores the arbitrariness of gender but, in so doing, also reveals her to be – like the one she impersonates – nothing but a fraud. Enter Jacques Lacan, whose 1958 essay, ‘The Signification of the Phallus,’ furthers our understanding of this relationship – fraught with anxiety – between the sexes: Let us say that these relations will turn around a ‘to be’ and a ‘to have,’ which, by referring to a signifier, the phallus, have the opposed effect, on the one hand, of giving reality to the subject in this signifier, and, on the other, of derealizing the relations to be signified. This is brought about by the intervention of a ‘to seem’ that replaces the ‘to have,’ in order to protect it on the one side, and to mask its lack in the other, and which has the effect of projecting in their entirety the ideal or typical manifestations of the behaviour of each sex, including the act of copulation itself, into the comedy … I am saying that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that a woman will reject an essential part of femininity, namely, all her attributes in the masquerade … Perhaps it should not be forgotten that the organ that assumes this signifying function takes on the value of the fetish.37

Returning to the peep show paper doll (Fig. 3.4), though not exactly a pop-up image, it does give rise to the question of phallic transferability. In other words, it is the possibility of what those knickers reveal – or conceal – that gives women agency and, consequently, makes men anxious. Or, as Valeria Finucci, writing on the female masquerade, has pointed out, ‘That there may be no phallus at the center of a (woman’s) narrative is indeed the real, frightening story.’38 So who/what does Caterina – cross-dressing or just going against the grain – expose? To be sure, her flirtatious flaunt flouts convention, but, more than simply transgressing gender roles, this widow also blurs the boundaries of sexual difference. Somewhere in between having and lacking, being and see(m)ing, she continues to slip in and out of categorization. Ironically, if the early modern widow is expected to fill a void, she herself falls right through the cracks. Insofar as she may be said to occupy a liminal space, this ‘sex which is not one’ is, in her double Otherness, what Judith M. Bennett calls ‘lesbian-like,’ enabling a more nuanced

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understanding of early modern widowhood: ‘the “like” in “lesbian-like” decenters “lesbian,” introducing into historical research a productive uncertainty born of likeness and resemblance, not identity.’39 Indeed, as Valerie Traub proposes, ‘If there are good reasons to resist applying the modern terms “lesbian” and “queer” to early modern women, there are equally good reasons to pursue the range of alternatives that both “lesbian-like” and “queer” are meant to invoke.’40 To be sure, these readings allow us to recognize the widow – marginal, though hardly invisible – as co-defining while simultaneously single-handedly undermining the patriarchal, heteronormative project. In other words, the widow both legitimates and threatens the gender hierarchy; she does not merely subvert it, she also collapses it; no longer content to be even the ‘woman on top,’ the widow readily assumes both positions – or perhaps none at all. In sum, upon widowhood, there were many expectations but just as many opportunities, from remarriage to merriment. Still, one thing remains constant: the presence and prevalence of the widow’s body – both sexually experienced and, now, sexually available. Thus, the potential penetration of geographical, social and corporeal boundaries could and did cause considerable confusion within an otherwise strictly regulated urban landscape. If ‘“a widow living it up doesn’t make the best impression in the world,’” as we learn in Carlo Goldoni’s La vedova scaltra, what could be done?41 In other words, if the consistently uncertain position of the widow during and after the mourning ritual magnified masculine anxiety, widowhood would have to be better managed. Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down The destabilizing autonomy of the widow led to a substantial production of prescriptive and proscriptive literature, from sermons to conduct books, ‘governing’ (there was a thin line between recommendation and law) the comportment of widows.42 For instance, the uncertainties of widowhood were threatening enough to prompt Savonarola to compose his 1491 Libro della vita viduale: A widow must fast also from all superfluous bodily pleasures, because her position and her dress indicate mortification and sadness. Because of this, Saint Paul says: ‘That widow who lives in pleasure is dead’ [1 Tim 5:6] with respect to God and to his grace. Thus she must restrain her eyes everywhere so that they do not see vain things, especially in church or in public places, otherwise she will be a source of scandal to herself and to her neighbours. I should warn you that one can well recognize a woman’s modesty and the seriousness of her life from her eyes, and for this reason the Sage says in his Ecclesiasticus: ‘The fornication of a woman is recognized in the elevation and the exaltation of her eyes.’ [Ecclesiasticus 26:12(27:9)] Thus a widow must always, in every place and especially in the presence of men, lower her eyes and keep them lowered to the earth and with great modesty and gravity raise them as the place and the person with whom she is speaking requires it.43

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Savonarola’s admonition – she is scolded for wandering through the streets, she is discouraged from standing at windows, she is told to lower her gaze – echoes the counsel offered earlier in the fifteenth century by St Bernardino of Siena: ‘“bury your eyes, too, with him [your husband]; keep them modestly cast down.”’44 A century later, these ideas were reiterated in the most influential women’s conduct book of the sixteenth century, De l’istitutione de la femina christiana, written by Juan Luis Vives in 1523: In public, exposed to men’s eyes, in contact with many people, little by little she assumes a bold air; chastity and shame waver and are exposed to danger. If she is not defeated in the battle, she is surely under assault … there are some [widows] who are so corrupt and dishonorable that they render their decisions not according to fairness but motivated by shameless lust.45

Contributing to this politically-charged, disciplinary discourse is Giulio Cesare Cabei’s Ornamenti della gentil donna vedova, of 1574, which, primarily concerned with external appearances, states that widows are always under scrutiny, constantly observed by those who wish to find fault; the widow, therefore, must not have any libidinous thoughts, for such indiscretions would be immediately betrayed by her eyes.46 But we should be careful to read between the lines of this rhetoric. Despite such attempts to tie down the widow, other literary accounts, from Cini to Alberti to Dolce, as we have seen, suggest that she continued to evade containment, even if marginally. We might now look back at Lanci’s strategically constructed Florentine landscape, reading it as a metaphor for an ordering of the uncertainties of widowhood in sixteenth-century Florence, interpreting the strict orchestration of this urban stage as a determined attempt to control the presumed dangers of female sexuality. That is, Lanci’s drawing – a seemingly neutral, if oblique, architectural rendering of the political heart of Florence – carefully sets the stage for a calculated comedy that ultimately keeps the tempted ‘widow,’ who is never out from under the watchful eye of her ‘deceased’ husband, off the streets and in her home. And yet, if Renaissance comedy reflects an unraveling of social order, not only does the very performance of widowhood in Cini’s play point towards an insistence upon instability, but, moreover, the compulsive realism of Lanci’s stage set suggests a potential failure of patriarchal fixity.47 Indeed, if Lanci’s staged set can be viewed as an illustration of early modern socio-sexual control, the widow will inevitably escape invisibility insofar as the compulsive realism of the scene renders it ambiguous: does the application of a hyper-real perspective close off space, containing the widow, or does it open up space, allowing for her potential transgression? We might even read the flexibility of the creased and limp paper as suggestive of the malleability of the ritual city and the tenuousness of memorial strategy – at least in this early modern Florence. Moreover, fixing our gaze on Brunelleschi’s oculus, the vanishing point of Lanci’s compulsive

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perspective drawing, who stares back? The cycloptic – omni(m)potent – Federigo? Or is this the omnipresent widow’s peek? Eyes Wide Shut Lanci’s backdrop, though encyclopedic, is hardly indifferent (Fig. 3.1). That is, it may carefully reproduce Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus, Michelangelo’s David and Ammanati’s Neptune fountain, yet there is one very curious omission: conspicuously absent is Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, the politically problematic representation of a decapitating widow (Fig. 3.5). Of course, Donatello’s statue had already been removed from the heroic line-up in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, as ‘“it is not proper that the woman should kill the man,”’ and eventually reinstalled in 1506 under the western most arch of the Loggia dei Lanzi.48 Judith may have disappeared from Lanci’s stage set but she is hardly out of sight. Indeed, as Mieke Bal suggests, the simultaneous ‘thrill and horror of Judith’ adds a new dimension to the dilemma of her (in)visibility: When returning home from a busy day full of aggravation, the lord of the house would catch the bitch in the act, first on his way home at the piazza, then again on his living room wall, before turning the pages of his book, where she appeared again, doing her trick.49

And, of course, any anxious spectators in the Salone del Cinquecento, who surely must have enjoyed Lanci’s censured view, nevertheless would encounter her as soon as they stepped out into the Piazza della Signoria. It is worth noting that the absence of Donatello’s Judith in Lanci’s drawing is tempered by the presence, in the east arch, of Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa, the politically celebrated representation of decapitation, a sliver of which is barely glimpsed through the distorted south arch (Fig. 3.6).50 In short, a sharp contrast is drawn between these two Medici commissions: two decapitations but only one worthy of witness – but even this picture is sketchy at best. This is a story of (di)vision, of diverting the gaze from the severed body. In ‘Drama Queens,’ in the previous chapter, I suggested that the female mourner, censured, is severed, like the head of Medusa; that is, her voice interrupted, she is cut off. Yet in the present chapter, in ‘A Flash in the Pants,’ I have proposed that the merry widow, turning tricks, cuts up; in other words, ignoring politico-patriarchal censure, she misbehaves and, like Cixous’s Medusa, laughs about it.51 But now there is Judith to consider, the widow who, cutting across behavioral boundaries, both mourns and plays tricks, tempting Holofernes with her will she/won’t she performance just long enough to dismember him, all under the guise of remembering her husband. Lest we forget Caterina Sforza, the widowed mother, who, like Medusa, stares down her enemies, threatening her captors with her does she/don’t she striptease. Let me cut to the chase: widowed – separated – bodies are ubiquitous to my story, but the underlying danger in this tale is not so much looking at those bodies – male or

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female, cut up or cut off – as it is seeing what has been severed, recognizing what is no longer – if ever it was – there. If it sounds like I am beating around the bush, I am; so let me be even more blunt. In my attempt to better see the sight/site of anxiety – namely, the female genitalia ­– I subscribe to psychoanalytic readings of the Medusa myth but also, and imperatively so, to feminist re-inscriptions of those essays. For starters, for an explanation of the obvious connection between decapitation and castration anxiety, we need only look as far as Sigmund Freud’s classic essay, ‘Medusa’s Head,’ of 1922: To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something … it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother. The hair upon Medusa’s head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as the mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration. The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect! For becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact … If Medusa’s head takes the place of a representation of the female genitals, or rather if it isolates their horrifying effects from their pleasure-giving ones, it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in oneself will produce the same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself … The erect male organ also has an apotropaic effect, but thanks to another mechanism. To display the penis (or any of its surrogates) is to say: ‘I am not afraid of you. I defy you. I have a penis.’ Here, then, is another way of intimidating the Evil Spirit.52

The castration complex, spelled out here and in other essays, is pivotal to Freud’s theory of sexual difference. In abbreviated terms, the boy, upon first sight of his mother’s genitals, regards her, without a penis, as castrated and fears that he, too, will be castrated, punished by the father for desiring the mother. The girl, on the other hand, will desire what she lacks (‘She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.’), blaming the mother for her shortcomings and, in her envy, shifting desire to the father.53 To be sure, much is lacking in this narrative of deficiency.54 Consider Mary Jacobus’s important criticism of Freud’s castration complex, particularly his telling of it through the Judith and Holofernes story in his essay of 1917, ‘The Taboo of Virginity:’

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Judith allows us to see what Freud himself is blind to, or obscures … namely, that the phallus is an arbitrary and divisive mark around which sexuality is constructed. To put it another way, it is not the possession of the phallus which brings the castration complex into being, but the castration complex which privileges the phallus. That the sword (the instrument of castration) can occupy the place of the cut (the mark of castration) returns us to the stick with two ends, or, if you like, the knife that cuts both ways – to the oscillation of meaning or ‘irresolution’ which both Freudian theory and the little boy must repress in order to make sense of what they see.55

Indeed, this is not merely a story of (di)vision; it is also one of double vision insofar as the widowed body is not necessarily deficient. In other words, if possession of the phallus is relative, so to speak, can Judith, who decapitates/castrates by remembering, also re-member the severed male body? Jacobus continues: If representations of castration can serve to protect the viewer against castration anxiety, it might by the same token be said that representations of the phallic woman protect the viewer against doubts about his masculinity. Making her like a man conserves the small boy’s narcissism, his belief in the universal possession of the phallus.56

She who taketh away, also giveth. Judith, who simultaneously dismembers and remembers, stands for both castration and recovery. As such, she serves an apotropaic function. Serving a similar ‘consoling function,’ Donatello’s statue acts ‘as a narcissistically invested, fetishistic “erection.”’57 Finally, I wish to flesh out this castration narrative by returning to the epitome of the phallic mother, Caterina Sforza, whose body politic exposes the sight/site of early modern psychosexual anxiety. If ‘her sex is the proleptic representation of her vengeance, an emblem of political survival through reproductive power,’ as John Freccero keenly argues, then the showing of her genitals also prophesizes her oscillation, in perpetuity, between possession and non-possession of the phallus, closing the gap between the haves and the have-nots.58 In conclusion, as regards Caterina without her skivvies, with what do her male captors come eye to eye? Absolutely nothing. The widow is just a tease, but this is the terror – and that is a kick in the pants. ‘QUID TUM’ Reading Cini’s Federigo as representative of Florentine masculinity, if anxiety was caused as much by the threat of socio-sexual misconduct as by the threat of forgetfulness, how, then, might the early modern Florentine both control the widow and ensure his memory? This next section is concerned with pictorial representation – not with how widows look back but, rather, with what widows look like. In the following revision of Italian Renaissance portraiture, I attempt both to describe and account for the complex nature of the representation of the widow – perhaps no more complex than that of the woman, or even the man, but

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differently complex, nonetheless – by distinguishing and defining, within the genre of portraiture, a new category, what I call widow portraiture. Moreover, I examine how those particular representations, in turn, might perpetuate or even complicate the culturally coded performance of mourning: How does the uncertain or ambiguous position of the widow within and beyond ritual inform her representation? Conversely, how might representation be used strategically to fix the fluidity of the widow? I begin by re-introducing Alberti, who, in 1435, made the following observation: ‘Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present … but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.’59 And indeed, Alberti’s bronze selfportrait (Fig. 3.7), dated to approximately the same year, can be read as an image of ‘Renaissance Man,’ the individual who seeks – and achieves – fame and immortality through commemoration, as memorably defined by Jacob Burckhardt in 1860 and reiterated by Erwin Panofsky and John Pope-Hennessy a century later.60 Even a recent catalog entry describes Alberti’s bronze portrait medal on these terms: ‘No one better personifies the ideal of the Renaissance man … Alberti’s relief self-portrait … transforms a classical prototype into the proudly confident image of an individual Renaissance man as master of the perceptible universe.’61 At the beginning of this new century, however, turning my millennial gaze toward Alberti, I read his selfportrait as a failed strategy of remembrance, interpreting ‘Renaissance Man,’ in this example, as an always already unstable – and anxious – socio-cultural construct. That is to say, if Alberti gains immortality through the classicizing, commemorative profile, why does he also insist upon staring out? Alberti’s personal device – the winged eye – appears three times on the self-portrait plaque: once in the lower left corner and twice more along the right edge, framing his signature, ‘L. BAP;’ it also can be seen on the reverse of another portrait medal of Alberti created by Matteo de’ Pasti around 1450. But perhaps most suggestive is Alberti’s pairing of the winged eye with his motto, ‘QUID TUM’ (‘What next?’), and an encircling laurel wreath on a manuscript version of Della famiglia, dated around 1438 (Fig. 3.8). Alberti’s signature impresa can be read either as omnipotent or impotent. Patricia Simons has suggested that male profile portraiture was shortlived because it posed the threat of castration; that is to say, with the sole eye averted, disengaged – we might say ‘blind’ – the inactive male cannot defend himself against the stony, deadly stare of Medusa.62 Read in conjunction with Simons’s account of male profile portraiture, can Alberti’s winged eye be seen as an emblem meant to counter masculine anxiety? Or, staring out and insightfully asking, ‘QUID TUM’ (‘What next?’), can Alberti’s large eye be interpreted as overcompensating in advance for art history’s potential oversight? What I clearly see as a newly separable category of female portraiture that is contingent upon early modern masculine anxiety has gone largely unnoticed. I am suggesting that, by eventually transferring the task of commemoration from ritual to representation, and specifically from male portraiture to female portraiture, this is how the early modern Florentine attempted to ensure his memory, and this, as Alberti asks, is what’s next.

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The category of widow portraiture – depictions of the woman during and after her husband’s funeral when she is recognized as his widow – can generally be characterized as follows: the widow is depicted in a three-quarter or bust-length pose; she is set in profile or frontally against a plain, dark background; she is depicted with a sober or severe expression; and, most importantly, she is simply veiled and dressed in dark colors. For the purposes of this introduction, we might look toward Giorgio Vasari’s portraits of Caterina Sforza (Fig. 3.9) and Maria Salviati (Fig. 3.10) as representative of sixteenth-century widow portraiture within the Medici family.63 Painted between 1556 and 1559, these two frescoes of the grandmother and mother, respectively, of Cosimo I decorate the Sala di Giovanni delle Bande Nere, named after Cosimo’s father, in the Palazzo Vecchio. Overall, widow portraiture tends to be noticeably static, though necessarily so; for this paradigm and its frequent repetition became a standard means of marking the social status of widowhood. For example, Caterina Sforza was married – and widowed – three times; different portrait medals were cast to commemorate her various states of widowhood.64 Similarly, Maria Salviati’s frequent and repetitive portrayal originated only with her husband’s death.65 Portraits on panel, after religious pictures, accounted for the most numerous type of painting found in domestic interiors. By the fifteenth century, there was a significant increase in the number of secular images used to decorate the home, and, at that time, independent panels were framed and hung in the most private rooms of the home, where such luxurious possessions could be displayed. By the sixteenth century, however, portraits had become commonplace in the home and were hung in the most public reception spaces, such as halls and galleries. If we use a Medici inventory of 1492, we can make the following general assumptions about the placement of portraits, as determined by the sex of the sitter: women’s portraits were surrounded by paintings with religious or devotional subject matter, whereas men’s portraits were surrounded by paintings with both religious, or devotional, and secular subject matter.66 Yet, it is difficult to determine how many of the portraits of women there in the house were of widows because the inventories tend to describe female portraits simply, as in ‘head of a woman;’ moreover, they generally do not describe details, such as costume or attributes. However, a large Tornabuoni inventory of 1497 records, among others, a portrait of a woman, ‘1º quadretto c’una testa e busto di Mona Lucrezia de’ Medici,’ located in the ‘Camera terrena in sul androne,’ or ground-floor entrance hall.67 This entry is generally understood to be a reference to the portrait of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, widow of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio around 1475 (Fig. 3.11); and, in fact, she is depicted with the identifying thin, black ribbon running through her sheer head covering.68 Thus, we now can imagine, in some way, the social context of similar representations. Of those female portraits securely identifiable as representations of widows, other documents, such as contracts, show that the majority of them were commissioned, as we would expect, by male patrons – fathers, sons and grandsons; some portraits

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of wives as widows were even commissioned prematurely, disclosing a project of pre-emptive mourning, by which the husband positions his wife as the one who will be his widow and will have mourned for him.69 In other cases, wives were portrayed as widows even though, predeceasing their husbands, that role would never be filled. On the one hand, then, widow portraiture can be read as a successful visual strategy for controlling women because, as commissioned and as displayed, it kept women in the home. In so doing, widow portraiture seems to forestall the potential transgressions of these single women; literally contained, they seem to occupy their proper place while performing their prescribed role as primary mourner.70 A closer look, however, suggests that the early modern widow, though framed in this way, was able to manipulate even her representational containment. If social and bodily boundaries seem to be, at once, strategically fixed and yet ever shifting, even the most obvious and socially sanctioned marker of widowhood – black mourning dress – could be contested. The next section will consider sartorial attempts to obscure the exposure of the widow while recognizing, there too, the inevitable blurring of sexual boundaries. That is, the remainder of this chapter will attempt to undress the early modern widow, but only insofar as she is always already undressing herself. The Black Market In 1450, the Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci, praised Alessandra Bardi, an ideal widow, for her black mourning costume, which ‘was quite plain, her dress high up to her neck, as becomes a widow, with a veil over her eyes.’71 Apparently following such social prescriptions, Maria Salviati, 15 years into her widowhood, was still dressing in black costume as we learn from a letter of 1541 written by Caterina Cibò, Duchess of Camerino, to her sister, Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino: ‘The Signora Maria … is wont to wear bombazine of course black silk, and oft it seems as it were of plain camlet, without a pattern, and ‘tis heavy, as if of wool, and by no means contents me … . ’72 Less critical, the chronicler Antonio Marucelli, writing after Maria’s death in 1543, recorded how, as preferred, she ‘“dressed with humility at home and outside it.”’73 But Maria’s simple costume is far more complicated than either of these descriptions – dismissive or celebratory – reveal. Maria was a tertiary of the Dominican order closely affiliated with the Florentine convent of Santa Caterina near the church of San Marco, and so she also wore a black nun’s habit throughout her widowhood and, perhaps, even in death, as reported upon the exhumation of her black-clad corpse in 1857.74 And, indeed, in a portrait painted by Bronzino around the time of her death in 1543, Maria is depicted in what had become her trademark sober black dress (Fig. 3.12). But what has remained buried – and what, perhaps, always has been obscured – is the cultural connotation of this costume. In other words, black dress does not always denote mourning but nor does it rule it out completely. And in the case of Maria Salviati, it is precisely the suggestion of something surreptitious about this shade that sheds an additional light on the widow’s

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costume. From the accounts of Caterina Cibò and Antonio Marucelli, it would seem that black dress successfully ‘effaced and desexualized’ the widow; however, such understated costume should not be underestimated.75 An earlier portrait of Maria Salviati, painted by Pontormo, depicts her in a similar yet what might be interpreted as a decidedly compromising costume (Fig. 3.13).76 With its revealing bodice, her black dress exposes her décolleté and in so doing rips the seams of the early modern discourse on costume and control. Vespasiano’s admonition, in the form of praise for Alessandra Bardi, would prove necessary; barely 10 years later, a 1459 statute cited women’s growing taste for wearing mourning dresses with slits and necklines so low that ‘“they exposed half their chest”’ beneath more modest mantles.77 A series of sumptuary laws, which regulated expense and conspicuous consumption, had already been passed; but, as we might expect, as early as 1384 in Florence, exemptions from such restrictions could be bought and sold.78 Still, in 1464, legislation limited frontal exposure to no more than three centimeters from the collarbone and about twice that from the back of the neck; but by the end of the century, Savonarola would draw the line at two fingers – placed horizontally – beneath the collarbone.79 Two disparate, though striking, examples suggest that women continued to take great liberties: Portrait of a Lady, attributed to Jacometto Veneziano (Fig. 3.14), and Portrait of a Lady, called La Monaca, painted by Giuliano Bugiardini (Fig. 3.15).80 Simultaneously obeying and disobeying by manipulating costume and, thus, rejecting, to a certain degree, an imposed moral prescription, early modern widows acquired a sense of personal expression and socio-sexual recognition. But what else could be gained from these blatant violations of official regulation? In other words, what could be traded on the black market? According to Baldesare Castiglione, dressing the part in an early sixteenthcentury portrait by Raphael, more or less contemporaneous with his Book of the Courtier, ‘the most agreeable color [for men] is black, and if not black, then at least something fairly dark’ (Fig. 3.16).81 Among princes and courtiers, the color is understood as having signified grace, seriousness, respect and distinction – not necessarily mourning. In the fifteenth century, the Florentine merchant, Marco Parenti, in his Memorie, recorded between 1464 and 1468, described the city under the rule of Cosimo, commenting upon the dress of its male citizens: “‘On ordinary work days, men of all ages wore elegant clothes of rose, scarlet, or black, and silks of every color with luxurious linings.’”82 Thus, in the second half of the fifteenth century, black, for men, was considered an everyday color, carrying no primary designation of grief. Similarly, in Venice, as we learn in Marin Sanudo’s ‘Praise of the City of Venice, 1493,’ black was a staple in men’s wardrobes: The gentlemen are not distinguished from the citizens by their clothes, because they all dress in much the same way, except for the senatorial office-holders, who during their term of office have to wear the coloured robes laid down by law. The others almost always wear long black robes reaching down to the ground, with sleeves open to the elbows, a black cap on the head and a hood of black cloth or velvet. Formerly they wore very large

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hoods, but these have gone out of fashion. They wear trimmings of four sorts – marten, weasel, fox or even sable – which are worn a lot in winter; also skins and furs of vair and sandal. Soled stockings and clogs are worn in all weathers, silk [under]shirts and hose of black cloth; to conclude, they wear black a lot. And when they are in mourning for a dead relative, they wear shoes and a long gown with a hood over the shoulders, but only for a few days before they change back.83

Interestingly, Sanudo’s attention to detail, specifically his identification and description of black dress, from robes to accessories, lessens when he offers an account of mourning costume. In fact, there, he excludes any mention of the color black, and his remark that men ‘change back’ after a few days suggests that black clothing for men, at least as he describes it, does not necessarily signify mourning. By contrast, black dress for women, as prescribed by male writers at this time, marked them, at least on the surface, as we have seen, primarily as mourners.84 And yet, despite these social significations of black dress, gender distinctions and memorial duties were often blurred. If black costume, once the marker merely of mourning, could be appropriated by men – adopted to represent not what they lack or have lost but what they have, signifying ‘the privileges claimed by grief,’ – might not women, in turn, reappropriate that same black costume, claiming for themselves the authoritative and empowering gestures reserved for men in black?85 In other words, can we read women’s manipulation of mourning dress as ‘part of a larger set of social strategies’?86 Catherine de’ Medici cleverly dressed in black and white not only as a sign of eternal mourning for her husband, Henry II, whose colors were the same, but also in order to serve as his stand‑in, having been left with the responsibility of overseeing the education and administrative duties of the future ruler. Purposefully tailoring a connection between the two identities, Catherine gained power formerly unavailable to her; moreover, this strategy enabled her to possess the virtues of a male ruler without losing the female virtues of an ideal widow.87 The observations of Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass are especially fitting in this context: ‘clothes were material mnemonics, the bearers of names. Yet as bearers of names, clothes inscribed conflict. Whose name is materialized in cloth? … One function of clothes was to name, unname, rename.’88 If colors are used and re-used, abused and confused, the politics of black costume deserve further attention. In sum, what happens when costume fails to signify, as demonstrated by Catherine de’ Medici’s blending of black and white, by Maria Salviati’s conflation of religious and secular dress or by a curious portrait pair of man and woman by Jacometto Veneziano (Figs 3.17 and 3.18)?89 Each in black – he, now, in costume ‘quite plain, [his] dress high up to [his] neck, as becomes a widow … ’ – who mourns whom?90 If mourning is part performance, is costume not always already masquerade? Returning to La Monaca (Fig. 3.15), frequently understood as a portrait of a nun despite the presence of a thin, black band woven through her veil, it is noteworthy that the accompanying portrait cover is decorated with a theatrical mask and the inscription,

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‘Sua cuique persona’ (‘To each his own persona’) (Fig. 3.19), suggesting that this widow, if she is, in fact, a widow, ‘is not what she appears to be.’91 Taking the Veil, and Taking It Like a Man Savonarola addresses the appropriately dressed female mourner: ‘widows dress in black and go about very much veiled for the entire length of their widowhood… .’92 His is a perfectly pressed picture, but the fabric of this widow’s costume is starting to wrinkle. If black dress, increasingly fashionable, can be read as a fictive signifier of grief, the veil, too, is an arbitrary accessory.93 That is, the widow’s head covering, a traditional marker of mourning, can be easily manipulated, worn for all the wrong reasons. Intended to conceal female sexuality, the veil also confuses it. Meant to honor and preserve the chastity of the wearer, the veil, despite its protective purpose, is penetrable. Indeed, this is a superficial marker, a porous membrane, especially insofar as noblewomen and courtesans alike took the veil.94 Even Vecellio complained of the difficulty in distinguishing between the two groups of marginalized women, an erasure of difference evident in his costume book illustrations: Compare his Venetian widow (Fig. 3.20) and prostitute (Fig. 3.21), or the Roman widow (Fig. 3.22) and prostitute (Fig. 3.23).95 In each case, surprisingly, it is the prostitute who makes the grand gesture of covering herself, using the veil to conceal the body that is most attainable, while the widow, whose body was thought to be off-limits (perhaps looked upon but never to be touched), reveals her body to be the one most available. A similar (con)fusion occurred 20 years earlier; a Venetian Senate debate of 1578 records that prostitutes had been seen attending church dressed as widows, ‘“performing lewd gestures, setting a bad example, and arousing the disapproval of many.”’96 Also in Florence, reports indicate that prostitutes ‘“went dressed as widows,”’ as Francesco de Urbino, who knew from first-hand experience, testified in 1605.97 This not unmeaningful masquerade blurs socio-sexual boundaries, re-affirming the precarious place of the widow and unveiling her own performance. Speaking of lewd gestures … We have already been privy to Caterina Sforza’s Freudian slip, but her flair for gaining and maintaining authority was not limited to below the belt exposure; she also used her head. Culturally obliged to wear the veil upon her widowhood as a sign of grief, she also used it to re-fashion herself a powerful ruler. Caterina’s widowhood – but, more precisely, the public recognition of her widowhood – was the key to her social and political power. She was legally acceptable as regent to her son only as long as she remained chaste and loyal to her dead (first) husband, Girolamo Riario, and properly educated his heirs, her children. Thus, Caterina cleverly constructed an official image as Riario widow, even though she would marry (and become widowed) twice more during her regency. Caterina’s contemporary portrait medals offer evidence of her self-fashioning as both widow and regent, forging an identity that combined the feminine ideal of virtue with masculine authority. A medal cast around 1488 by Niccolò Fiorentino,

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corresponding to the first year of her widowhood, clearly portrays Caterina as Riario widow/surrogate (Fig. 3.24). Heavily veiled, her stoic, solid body is surrounded by the inscription, ‘CATHARINA SF DE RIARIO FORLIVII IMOLAE’ (‘Caterina Sforza de Riario of Forlì and Imola’), which purposefully abbreviates her Sforza identity and foregrounds the Riario name. On the reverse, she combines the traditional imagery of a triumphal cart with a personification of Victory, aligning herself with a masculine model of courtly power (Fig. 3.25). Caterina’s successful manipulation of image and imagery convinced the public that she was, in fact, poised to rule. Almost 10 years later, a woodcut of 1497, from Jacobus Philippus’s De claris mulieribus, positions Caterina, veiled, as a male ruler, situated before her territories with erect baton in hand, attributes and associations generally reserved for male rulers (Fig. 3.26). The iconography of this woodcut illustration is underscored by Caterina’s biography, which opens with praise for her ‘“steadfastness and great-spiritedness characteristic of men.”’98 A master of selffashioning, she was no (fashion) victim. Along the way, her political fortune may have faltered, but one thing that was never lost on Caterina Sforza was the power of performance. Writing a year later, in 1498, in a letter to her uncle, Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, she conditionally admits defeat: ‘“ … and if I have to lose, although I am a woman, I want to lose in a manly way.”’99 Conflating more than just gender roles, the wearing of the veil could also become unwieldy – indeed, even perverse. Consider the following excerpt from Petrarch’s sonnet 182: full of desire, always, full of fear, as if a lady hid a living man beneath her simple dress or veil100

The tension between desire and fear, so central to the current discourse on the role and representation of the widow in the service of maintaining masculine memory, calls to mind Lacan’s take on the phallus, possession of which, never fully resolved, revolves around ‘a “to be” and a “to have;”’ this anxiety-inducing performance, resulting in a fractured relationship between the sexes, is mediated by ‘a “to seem,” … in order to protect it on the one side, and to mask its lack in the other.’101 Thus, it would ‘seem,’ Petrarch’s Lady is a cazzo in cognito – a sexual act coming to a head. Regarding the widow’s head cloth in early modern France, Nicole Pellegrin has observed how the light, thin, wrinkled crêpe of the veil resembles a fallen penis, a detail not overlooked by the demonologist, Pierre de Lancre, writing in 1612 on the widows of Béarn: ‘“[they] wear a morion without a crête in order to signal the male that they lack.”’102 Nor did Montaigne miss the point; his essay, ‘On Some Lines from Virgil,’ recorded between 1585 and 1588, recounts what he considers to be a deification of the phallus: ‘The married women near my place twist their headscarves into the shape of one [‘the sexual organ’] to revel in the enjoyment they derive from it; then on becoming widows they push it back and bury it under their hair.’103

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Both provocative pictures are, perhaps, realized in Michelangelo’s Study of a Mourning Woman (Fig. 3.27), whose hooded, prolapsed head, like a cleft foreskin, fills the male void but, in so doing, forecasts the widow’s cleavage. That is, if this is celebratory costume, it is also menacing masquerade insofar as the manipulation of the widow’s head cloth to resemble a phallic hood simultaneously hoodwinks the one she is meant to commemorate. Standing in for the male she lacks, it is precisely lack that she replicates; like a ‘phallus abattu’ – downcast, despondent, exhausted – her fetishized veil uncovers both his and hers shortcomings.104 But if it is the widow who seemingly gets the shaft in this Lacanian discourse, she also has le dernier cri. In conclusion, we might return to Veneziano’s Portrait of a Lady (Fig. 3.14), with its bizarre, prophylactic head covering, that logo of power, once ‘alert and erect,’ now suggestively tucked away into her laced-up bosom; the phallus – limp – is finally laid to rest. He may be able to manage a second coming but only, as we shall see, by the skin of her teeth. Notes 1 Of interest, in 1569, Cosimo I was a widower. His first wife, Eleonora of Toledo, died in 1562; he would not remarry until 1570, at that time to Camilla Martelli – she would mourn him upon his death four years later. Cini’s play was published in Florence in 1569; a modern edition is published in Benedetto Croce, ed., Scrittori del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento (Naples: Philobiblon, 1953). For a summary of the plot, see Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1960), 166–68; the prologue is reproduced in Aldo Borlenghi, ed., Commedie del Cinquecento, vol. 1 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1959), 1037–1040. On Alessandro Striggio, who wrote the music for the intermedii, see Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993); and Angelo Solerti, Musica, Ballo e Drammatica alle Corte Medicea dal 1600 al 1637 (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1968). 2 See, esp., Anna Maria Testaverde, ‘Spectacle, Theatre, and Propaganda at the Court of the Medici,’ in The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, ed. Cristina Acidini Luchinat (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2002), 123–31; Elvira Garbero Zorzi and Mario Sperenzi, Teatro e spettacolo nella Firenze dei Medici; modelli dei luoghi teatrali (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001), esp. 154; Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. 188–93, 354–56 and 361–65; Mario Fabbri, Elvira Garbero Zorzi and Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, eds, Il Luogo Teatrale a Firenze: Brunelleschi, Vasari, Buontalenti, Parigi (Florence: Electa, 1975), 100–101; Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà and Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani, Feste e Apparati Medicei da Cosimo I a Cosimo II: Mostra di Disegni e Incisioni (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1969), 25–29; Alois Maria Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, trans. George Hickenlooper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 41; and Elena Povoledo, ‘Lanci, Baldessare,’ in Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo, vol. 6 (Rome, 1959): 1192–94. Also useful for this discussion is the work on Medici theatre by James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi

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(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). 3 See, for example, Nagler, Theatre Festivals, 44–46, who cites Ignazio Danti’s 1583 edition of Vignola’s Le due regoli della prospettiva pratica, which includes a discussion of Cini’s comedy focused on the technical advances of Lanci’s scenery. 4 For example, Il granchio, a comedy written by Leonardo Salviati and performed in Florence just three years earlier than Cini’s La vedova, employs an idealized urban landscape, which is based on Serlio’s composite model of 1545. See, esp., Louise George Clubb, ‘Italian Renaissance Comedy,’ in Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 29–48. 5 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G.H. McWilliam, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Penguin, 1995), 585–615, citation at 593. For the Italian, see Boccaccio, The Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 954: ‘essa in lagrime e in amaritudine si consumava.’ See also Robert M. Durling, ‘A Long Day in the Sun: Decameron 8.7,’ in Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C.L. Barber, eds Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 269–75; and Guido Almansi, ‘Alcune osservazioni sulla novella dello scolaro e della vedova,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1974): 137–45. 6 Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 117. For the Italian text of ‘De vidua Libidinosa; delle salsicce adoperate per Monna Orsarella vedova da Firenze,’ see Giovanni Sercambi, Novelle, ed. Giovanni Sinicropi (Bari: Laterza, 1972), 310–12. 7 As cited by Ian Frederick Moulton, ‘Introduction: The Greatest Tangle of Pricks There Ever Was: Knowledge, Sex, and Power in Renaissance Italy,’ in Antonio Vignali, La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick, ed. and trans. Ian Frederick Moulton (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1–70, citation at 51–52; the Italian reads: ‘“I cazzi d’ogni stato … cazzi da donne vedove.”’ 8 Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces, trans. David Marsh (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987), 190–97, citation at 196–97. For the Latin, see Alberti, Intercenales, eds Franco Bacchelli and Luca D’Ascia (Bologna: Pendragon, 2003), 700–22, citation at 720–22: Nostre sunt artes huiusmodi, nostrum hoc est ingenium, viros nostros minime malos decipere, fallere … fastidisse te urbem, rus animi causa divertisse dicemus … Volenti fallere mulieri nunquam deerit modus … Tu demum nobis obtempera. Bibamus, rideamus atque amemus.

The Italian can be found in Alberti, Intercenales, 701–23, citation at 721–23: Queste sono le nostre arti; in questo siamo davvero geniali: ingannare quei galantuomini dei nostri mariti … diremo che eri stufa della città, che sei andata in campagna per svagarti … Se una donna vuole imbrogliare, il mezzo non mancherà mai … Tu, intanto, dammi retta: beviamo, divertiamoci e amiamo!

9 This story may not be entirely fictive; it is worth noting that Alberti, himself, was born to a widow, Bianca di Carlo Fieschi. See Thomas Kuehn, ‘Reading between the Patrilines: Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia in Light of His Illegitimacy,’ in his Law, Family, and Women: Towards a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 157–75, esp. 160–61.

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10 See Marjorie Garber, ‘The Insincerity of Women,’ in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, eds Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 19–38. 11 Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 47. For the Italian, see Fonte, Il merito delle donne: ove chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne e più perfette de gli uomini, ed. Adriana Chemello (Mirano: Eidos, 1988), 17: ‘Parmi – soggiunse Leonora – che io mi viva in riposo e che io senta una somma felicità nel ritrovarmi senza, considerando quanto sia bella cosa la libertà.’ See also Janet Levarie Smarr, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), esp. Ch. 6. 12 As cited by Rudolph Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 271. 13 As cited by Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 154–60, citation at 156. 14 Bell, How to Do It, 266–67, citation at 266. 15 As cited by Giulia Calvi, ‘Reconstructing the Family: Widowhood and Remarriage in Tuscany in the Early Modern Period,’ in Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650, eds Trevor Dean and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 275–96, citation at 276. This is borrowed from Juan Luis Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, eds Charles Fantazzi and Constantinus Matheeussen, trans. Fantazzi, vol. 2 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1996), 205: ‘There are some women who rejoice at their husband’s death as if they had shaken off some cruel yoke, as if liberated from the fetters of a despot, almost exulting in a new-found freedom.’ The Latin appears on 204: ‘Sunt quae maritos ablatos gaudeant tamquam triste excusserint ivgum et ceu nodo ac dominatu solutae nactaeque libertatem prope exsultent.’ 16 As cited by Nancy Lyman Roelker, ‘Widowhood and Rational Domesticity: Modes of Independence for Women in Early Modern Europe,’ Journal of Family History 7 (1982): 376–78, citation at 377. 17 As cited by Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Marrying the Experienced Widow in Early Modern England: The Male Perspective,’ in Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 108– 24, citation at 121. See also Jennifer Panek, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 18 See Ch. 1, note 44. 19 Bell, How to Do It, 260. 20 Isabelle Chabot and Thomas Kuehn have examined the economic and legal situations of widows, both of which could change dramatically depending upon the length of widowhood. For example, after her husband’s death, it was extremely difficult for a widow, competing with male heirs, guardians and future husbands, to regain her dowry; the tensions and biases surrounding the Florentine dowry system usually resulted in extreme economic situations for the widow – either poverty or independence. See the following works by Isabelle Chabot: ‘Lineage Strategies and the Control of Widows in Renaissance Florence,’ in Cavallo and Warner, Widowhood, 127–44; ‘“La sposa in nero.” La ritualizzazione del lutto delle vedove fiorentino (secoli xiv–xv),’ Quaderni Storici 86/2 (1994): 421–62; ‘Widowhood and Poverty in Late Medieval Florence,’ Continuity and

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Change 3/2 (1988): 291–311; and ‘Sola, donna, non gir mai: Le solitudini femminili nel Tre-Quattrocento,’ Memoria 18 (1986): 7–24. On legal issues, see Thomas Kuehn, ‘Law, Death, and Heirs in the Renaissance Repudiation of Inheritance in Florence,’ Renaissance Quarterly 45/3 (1992): 484–516; and his Law, Family, and Women. On the dowry system, see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘The Griselda Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento,’ in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 213–46; Diane Owen Hughes, ‘From Bridepiece to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe,’ Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 262–96; Julius Kirschner and Anthony Molho, ‘The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence,’ Journal of Modern History 50 (1978): 403–38; and David Herlihy, ‘The Medieval Marriage Market,’ Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976): 1–27. Elaine Rosenthal, ‘The Position of Women in Renaissance Florence: neither Autonomy nor Subjection,’ in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, eds Peter Denley and Caroline Elam, (London: Westfield College, University of London Committee for Medieval Studies, 1988), 369–81, has noted the variety of experiences – both negative and positive – affecting a widow’s economic situation and calls for a fuller re-reading of women’s lives than that most frequently offered. Others have examined the opportunities, consequences and strategies of remarriage. See Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and his ‘Deception and Marriage Strategy in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Women’s Ages,’ Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988): 193–217. See also Giulia Calvi, ‘Maddalena Nerli and Cosimo Tornabuoni: A Couple’s Narrative of Family History in Early Modern Florence,’ Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 312–39; her ‘Reconstructing the Family,’ 275–96; and Heather Gregory, ‘Daughters, Dowries, and the Family in Fifteenth-Century Florence,’ Rinascimento 2d ser., 27 (1987): 215–37. On the widow’s decision not to remarry, when, according to David Herlihy and Klapish-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 112–13, ‘movements achieve visibility,’ see Bell, How to Do It, esp. 265–78, who suggests, based on the frequent discrepancies between didactic, male-authored texts and women’s writings (letters and poetry, for example), that a great number of women preferred to remain unmarried as a means of gaining relative emancipation. 21 On alternative living spaces for widows, see P. Renee Baernstein, ‘In Widow’s Habit: Women between Convent and Family in Sixteenth-Century Milan,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 25/4 (1994): 787–808; and Richard Trexler, ‘A Widow’s Asylum of the Renaissance: The Orbatello of Florence,’ in The Women of Renaissance Florence, vol. 2 (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), 66–98. In this context, see also Klapisch-Zuber, ‘“The Cruel Mother”: Maternity, Widowhood and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ in Women, Family, and Ritual, 117– 31, citation at 118; and Giulia Calvi, ‘Widows, the State and the Guardianship of Children in Early Modern Tuscany,’ in Cavallo and Warner, Widowhood, 209–19. 22 Valerie R. Hotchkiss, ‘Gender Transgression and the Abandoned Wife in Medieval Literature,’ in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 207– 18, citation at 218.

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23 As cited by Ann Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 50. 24 See Gabrielle Langdon, ‘Pontormo and Medici Lineages: Maria Salviati, Alessandro, Giulia and Giulio de’ Medici,’ RACAR 19/1–2 (1992): 20–40, esp. 24. Adriani’s remarks appear at 35, note 49: … imperocchè la Signora Maria madre del Duca … era trapassata all’altra migliore, lasciando nome di buona e valorosa donna, la quale rimasa vedova del Signor Giovanni de’ Medici nel fiore della giovanezza con l’unico figliuolo molto piccolo, travagliata da molte noje mantenne la case in buona riputatazione, e il grado suo con dignità; e di maniera allevò il figliuolo, che di lui s’era presa si fatta speranza, che mancando principe alla città, a lui ricorsero I cittadini, che n’ebbero a deliberare. Dolse assai al Duca la morte di lei, come quegli, a cui ella era stata invece di padre, di madre, e d’ogni altra persona cara, non avendo conosciuto altri, che gli avesse fatto benefizio, e tenutone cura. Increbbene a tutto il popolo, perciocchè ell’era molto umana, e a molti bisognosi e afflitti soccorreva … 25 As cited by Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 71. See also Kevin Brownlee, ‘Widowhood, Sexuality, and Gender in Christine de Pizan,’ The Romanic Review 86/2 (1995): 339–53, who observes, 340, that ‘widowhood transforms [Christine] from a woman into a man.’ 26 As cited by Joyce de Vries, ‘Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals: Power, Gender, and Representation in the Italian Renaissance Court,’ Woman’s Art Journal 24/1 (2003): 23–8, citation at 26. The Latin, also cited there, reads: ‘“muliebres lacrimas pro virili a se reiecit, et suam prudentiam, suamque animi magnitudinem.”’ 27 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), III.6.18, citation at 231–32. For the Italian, see Julia L. Hairston, ‘Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza,’ Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 687–712, citation at 690: Ammazzarono, alcuni congiurati Forlivesi, il conte Girolamo loro signore, presono la moglie ed i suoi figliuoli che erano piccoli, e non parendo loro potere vivere sicuri se non si insignorivano della fortezza e non volendo il castellano darla loro, Madonna Caterina (che così si chiamava la contessa) promise ai congiurati, che se la lasciavano entrare in quella, di farla consegnare loro, e che ritenessono a presso di loro i suoi figliuoli per istatichi. Costoro sotto questa fede ve la lasciarono entrare; la quale come fu dentro, dalle mura rimproverò loro la morte del marito e minacciògli d’ogni qualità di vendetta. E per mostrare che de’ suoi figliuoli non si curava, mostrò loro le membra genitali, dicendo che aveva ancora il modo a rifarne.

Machiavelli’s account was repeated in 1513 in The Prince, in abbreviated form, and later in his Florentine Histories of 1525. On this episode, and Machiavelli’s manipulative telling of it, see Joyce de Vries, ‘Casting Her Widowhood: The Contemporary and Posthumous Portraits of Caterina Sforza,’ in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison Levy (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 77–92; Sharon L. Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), 38–43; Hairston, ‘Skirting the Issue;’ and John Freccero, ‘Medusa and the Madonna of Forlì,’ in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, eds Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 161–78. This was a standard gesture during wartime; see,

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for example, Hans Peter Duerr, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). 28 As cited by Hairston, ‘Skirting the Issue,’ 692. The Italian, also cited there, reads: ‘“E non vi pare egli, stolti, ch’io abbia le forme da farne delli altri?”’ 29 As cited by Lynne Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 20. On Vecellio, see also Jeannine Guérin-Dalle Mese, ed., Il vestitio e la sua immagine: Atti del convegno in omaggio a Cesare Vecellio nel quarto centenario della morte (Belluno: Provincia di Belluno, 2002). 30 Pietro Aretino, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, trans. Thomas Caldecot Chubb (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967), 249. For the Italian, see Aretino, Lettere, ed. Sergio Ortolani (Turin: Einaudi, 1945), 199–200: Due volte la mia sorte bona ha mandato la vostra persona bella in casa mia e d’altri: una, vestita da uomo, essendo donna, e l’altra, vestita da donna, essendo uomo. Voi sète uomo nei casi di drieto e donna nei conti dinanzi … Intendetemi per il dritto, se ben dico ogni cosa al roverscio. Imperò che il vostro comparirvi innanzi, ora visibile ed ora invisibile, mi fa trasandare il cervello della lingua con la fantasia della penna. Certo, che la natura vi ha in modo composta in l’utriusque sesso, che in uno istante vi dimostrare maschio, ed in un súbito femina; né per altro vòlse il duca Alexandro copularsi insieme con voi, che per chiarirsi s’eravate ermafrodito da senno o da beffe. Ecco: il favellar di voi è di donzella, ed il proceder vostro di garzone; talché chi non vi conosce per quella, né per questo, vi giudica or cavaliere ora alfana, idest, ninfa e pastore, cioè agente e paziente. Che piú? Sino agli abiti, che vi travasano continuamente il dosso, stanno in forse se la zufolina è zufolone o se il zufolone è zufolina. In tanto i Duchi e le Duchesse se intertengano con lo intertenimento delle vostre chiacchiare molto insalate e molto appetitose, sentenzie che fumano vi scappano di bocca e tra i denti. Di pinocchiato, di savonia e di marzapane sono le ciancie che voi date a qualunche si crede che voi siate una baia. Né Fiorenza né Ferrara vuol la gatta con voi, volpe da galline e da galli. Né anco il tempo, che inrugginisce, logora, consuma, divora, immarcisce, rovina, disgàngara, scortica, rompe, iscavvezza, tronca, disfà, gusta ed asassina ogni cosa, non si arischia di travagliarsi con voi. Within this context, see also Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004), esp. 44–45; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994); his Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986); and Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 31 See, esp., Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 31, who adds: In Haec-Vir the ‘mannish woman’ gets to speak her piece, and offers a strong assertion of women’s rights – an assertion which is complicated rather than clarified by the fact that she offers this opinion when cross-dressed as a man. Is to be free and verbal, then, necessarily to be dressed like a man?

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See also Julia Epstein, ‘Either/Or – Neither/Both: Sexual Ambiguity and the Ideology of Gender,’ Genders 7 (1990): 99–142; and Sandra Clark, ‘Hic Mulier, Haec-Vir, and the Controversy over Masculine Women,’ Studies in Philology 82/2 (1985): 157–83. For a useful account of cross-dressing, see Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Antitheatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 32 As cited by Sara F. Matthews Grieco, ‘Pedagogical Prints: Moralizing Broadsheets and Wayward Women in Counter Reformation Italy,’ in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, eds Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 61–87, citation at 71. The Italian is reprinted in Anne Jacobson-Schutte, ‘“Trionfo delle done”: tematiche di rovesciamento dei ruoli nella Firenze rinascimentale,’ Quaderni Storici (1980): 474–96, citation at 484: Voglion le donne diventar mariti, Cercan portar le brache, e dominare; La povera virtù quasi è dispersa, Perché ‘l mondo va tutto alla riversa.

33 Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, Feminism and Marxist Humanism,’ New Literary History 21/3 (1990): 471–93, citation at 483. 34 This phrase is borrowed from Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top,’ in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 124–51. 35 See Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, ‘The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France,’ in Premodern Sexualities, eds Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 117–36. 36 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe,’ in Body Guards: the Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 80–111, citation at 105–106. More generally, on the fetish, see their ‘Fetishisms and Renaissances,’ in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, eds Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 20–35. 37 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus,’ in Ècrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 281–91, citation at 289–90. Lacan writes in response to Joan Rivière’s 1929 essay, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’ in Formations of Fantasy, eds Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 35–44, in which she posits that the woman, masking her masculinity by exaggerating her femininity, gains prolonged access into the masculine world. Mary Ann Doane argues that the female masquerade, rather than defining femininity, allows the woman to distance herself from it; see her ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,’ Screen 23/3–4 (1982): 74–88; and her ‘Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator,’ Discourse 11/1 (1988–89): 42–54. In turn, Sue-Ellen Case challenges the heterosexual context for the masquerade; see her ‘Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,’ Discourse 11/1 (1988–89): 55–73. 38 Valeria Finucci, ‘The Female Masquerade: Ariosto and the Game of Desire,’ in Finucci and Schwartz, Desire in the Renaissance, 61–88, citation at 81. 39 This phrase is borrowed from Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985). Judith M.

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41 42

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Bennett, ‘“Lesbian-Like” and the Social History of Lesbianisms,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 9/1–2 (2000): 1–24, citation at 14. See also Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn, eds, Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001), esp. ‘Introduction: Charting the Field,’ 1–47; and Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, eds, Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151. On the fluidity and instability of categories, see also her essay, ‘The Ambiguities of “Lesbian” Viewing Pleasure: The (Dis)articulations of Black Widow,’ in Epstein and Straub, Body Guards, 305–28. As cited by Maggie Günsberg, Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present Day (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 118. For a useful survey of conduct literature for women, see Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1978), esp. 121–35 on widowhood. See also Caroline P. Murphy, ‘“La Vita vedovile”: The Art of Widowhood,’ in Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 137–59; and Bell, How to Do It, esp. 258–78. Girolamo Savonarola, ‘The Book on the Life of the Widow,’ in A Guide to Righteous Living and Other Works, trans. and intro. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 191–226, citation at 213–14. For the Italian, see Savonarola, Operette Spirituali, ed. Mario Ferrara, vol. 1 (Rome: Belardetti, 1959), 11–62, citation at 43–44: Terzo, debbe digiunare ancora la vedova da tutte le delettazione superfrue degli sentimenti corporali, perché lo stato suo e l’abito dimostra mortificazione e tristizia, onde san Paulo dice: Quella vedova che vive in delizie è morta quanto a Dio e alla grazia sua. E però debbe in ogni luogo raffrenare li occhi sua che non veghino le vanità maxime nelle chiese e luoghi pubblici, altrimenti darà scandolo a se medesima e al prossimo suo: avvisandovi che molto si conosce agli occhi la pudicizia della donna e la gravità della sua vita, onde dice el Savio nello Ecclesiastico: La fornicazione della donna si conosce nella elevazione e estollenzia degli occhi suoi. E però sempre la vedova, e in ogni luogo e massimamente nel conspetto delli uomini, debbe deprimere e abbassare li occhi in terra e con grande modestia e gravità elevarli secondo che richiede il luogo e la persona con chi parla.

44 As cited by Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 60. 45 Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, 229–31. The Latin appears on 228–30: In publico, sub oculis vivorum, multis contrectantibus, paulatim effricatur frons, nutat cum verecundia pudicitia, adducitur utraque in discrimen. Et si expugnata non est, certe oppugnata dicitur … nam sunt quidam usque adeo pravi et flagitiosi ut in his iura non aequitate, sed turpi libidine regantur.

The book was first published in Latin in 1523 and, underscoring the popularity of the book, soon thereafter appeared in Castilian, English, French, German and, in 1546, Italian, dedicated to Eleonora of Toledo, wife but not widow of Cosimo I. 46 See Bell, How to Do It, 270.

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47 See, esp., Thomas M. Greene, ‘Ceremonial Play and Parody in the Renaissance,’ in Urban Life in the Renaissance, eds Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F.E. Weissman (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Association of University Presses, 1989), 281–93. 48 Francesco di Lorenzo Filarete, herald of the Signoria, made the remark in 1504 as reason to move the statue, freeing up a space for Michelangelo’s recently completed David; as cited by Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 295. On the placement and political significance of Donatello’s statue, see, esp., Adrian W.B. Randolph, ‘O Puella Furax; Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes and the Politics of Misprision,’ in Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 242–85; Yael Evan, ‘The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,’ in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 1992), 127–38; and Sarah Blake McHam, ‘Public Sculpture in Renaissance Florence,’ in her edited collection, Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 149–88. On the iconography of Judith, see, esp., Elena Ciletti, ‘Patriarchal Ideology in the Renaissance Iconography of Judith,’ in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, eds Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 35–70. Though concerned primarily with the iconography of David in this context, see Laurie Schneider Adams, ‘Donatello and Caravaggio: The Iconography of Decapitation,’ American Imago 33/1 (1976): 83–91. 49 Mieke Bal, ‘Women as the Topic,’ in Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art, ed. Annette Dixon (London: Merrell in association with The University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002), 61–78, citations at 68 and 65. 50 On Cellini’s statue, particularly its placement in the Loggia, see the accounts of Evan, ‘The Loggia dei Lanzi;’ and McHam, ‘Public Sculpture.’ But for critical accounts of the artist’s sexuality in relation to the sexualized body of Perseus, see Margaret A. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). See also Michael W. Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 51 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ trans Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1/4 (1976): 875–93. On this essay, see also, in the present study, ‘Drama Queens’ in Ch. 2. 52 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 273–74. 53 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,’ The Standard Edition, 19: 252. 54 The present discussion has been informed in valuable ways by Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003). 55 Mary Jacobus, ‘Judith, Holofernes, and the Phallic Woman,’ in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 110–36, citation at 121–22. 56 Ibid., 127. 57 Ibid., 128.

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58 John Freccero, ‘Medusa,’ 177. 59 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spenser, rev. ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966), 63. For the Latin and Italian, see Ch. 1, note 45. 60 See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London and New York: Penguin, 1990), 104: ‘To this development of the individual corresponds a new sort of outward distinction – the modern form of glory.’ See also Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, ed. H.W. Janson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964); John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon, 1966); and his Italian Renaissance Sculpture, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985), esp. ‘The Humanist Tomb,’ 34–44. 61 Stephen K. Scher, ed., The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (New York: Abrams in association with The Frick Collection, 1994), 41–43, citation at 41. But see also Robert Tavernor, ‘Self-Portraiture and Alberti’s Eye for the Future,’ in On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 31–36; and Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 71–77. 62 See Patricia Simons, ‘Women in Frames: the Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,’ in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 38–57, esp. 50. 63 See Karla Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici: 15th–18th Centuries, 3 vols (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1981–1989), 360–61 and 1264–65. 64 For a description of the portrait medals and their copies, see Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 358–60. For an investigation of the sociopolitical function of these medals, see Joyce de Vries, ‘Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals;’ and her ‘Casting Her Widowhood.’ See also ‘Taking the Veil, and Taking It Like a Man’ in the present chapter. 65 These include more than a dozen paintings on panel, frescoes, drawings, engravings and medals. The most exhaustive survey of the portraiture of Maria Salviati can be found in Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 1262–1267. See also Langdon, ‘Pontormo and Medici Lineages,’ esp. 32, note 3; and her ‘Decorum in Portraits of Medici Women at the Court of Cosimo I, 1537–1574’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1992), Chs 3 and 4. 66 See Marco Spallanzani, Inventari Medicei, 1417–1465: Giovanni di Bicci, Cosimo e Lorenzo di Giovanni, Piero di Cosimo (Florence: Associazione ‘Amici del Bargello’: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1996); Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 145; Frank Zollner, ‘Leonardo’s Portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo,’ Gazette des Beaux Arts 121 (1993): 115–38, esp. 125; Marco Spallanzani and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Libro d’inventario dei beni di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence: Associazione ‘Amici del Bargello,’ 1992); Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior, 1400–1600 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991); John Kent Lydecker, ‘The Domestic Setting of the Arts in Renaissance Florence,’ (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1987); his ‘Il patriziato fiorentino e la committenza artistica per la casa,’ in I ceti dirigenti nella Toscana del Quattrocento (Atti del V Convegno, 1982; Florence, 1987), 209–21; Howard Saalman and Philip Mattox, ‘The First Medici Palace,’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44 (1985): 329–45; John Pope-Hennessy and Keith Christiansen, ‘Secular

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72 73 74

Painting in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany: Birth Trays, Cassone Panels, and Portraits,’ Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 38 (1980): 2–64; and Rab Hatfield, ed., ‘Some Unknown Descriptions of the Medici Palace in 1459,’ Art Bulletin 52 (1970): 232–49. Part of this inventory of the estate of Lucrezia’s brother, Giovanni Tornabuoni, taken on 25 September 1497, is reproduced in Lydecker, ‘The Domestic Setting,’ 63–64, note 84. See Natalie Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 66–67; Dale Kent, ‘Women in Renaissance Florence,’ in David Alan Brown with contributions by Elizabeth Cropper and Eleonora Luciano, Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2001), 26–47, esp. 38; Simons, ‘Alert and Erect: Masculinity in Some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,’ in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 163–75, esp. 165; her ‘Women in Frames,’ 52; and Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art: 1979), 203–204. On the black ribbon as a ‘widow’s mark,’ see Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 175. See my essay, ‘Good Grief: Widow Portraiture and Masculine Anxiety in Early Modern England,’ in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, eds Dorothea Kehler and Laurel Amtower (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 147–64, esp. 149–50. As Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Representing the Family: Portraits and Purposes in Early Renaissance Italy,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17/1 (1986): 7–38, esp. 25, has pointed out in her study of female portraiture in relation to the Renaissance family, women were painted on the walls of funerary chapels in order to act as witnesses. Despite their removal from the agnatic family, women were represented in a state of perpetual mourning for their fathers and brothers during baptisms, weddings and funerals. In addition to serving a didactic purpose by instructing future generations, this type of portrait, Hughes suggests, served not only as a memento mori but also as an absit omen – ‘a representation that is meant to avert a dreaded or feared condition or to transform a state of affairs perceived as painful, unacceptable or dangerous into its desired opposite.’ Vespasiano da Bisticci, Renaissance Princes, Popes, and Prelates; The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of Illustrious Men of the XVth Century, trans William George and Emily Waters (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 460. For the Italian, see Vespasiano, Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV (Florence: Barbèra, Bianchi and co., 1859), 554: ‘La cioppa accollata, come vedova; il mantello in capo senza crespe; una benda in sugli occhi; il mantello le copriva in mod oil viso, che non si poteva vedere.’ See also Sharon Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 170–77, esp. 173–74. As cited by Cecily Booth, Cosimo I. Duke of Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 117. As cited by Natalie Tomas, ‘Commemorating a Mortal Goddess: Maria Salviati de’ Medici and the Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I,’ unpublished paper, 6. For the Italian, see her note 33: ‘“vestiva humile in casa et fuora.”’ See Janet Cox-Rearick, Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 263. See also Maurice Brock,

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75 76

77 78

79 80

89

Bronzino, trans. David Poole Radzinowicz and Christine Schultz-Touge (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 79–81. This phrase is borrowed from Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 174. See Elizabeth Pilliod, Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 17–19; Carlo Falciani, ‘Maria Salviati ritratta dal Pontormo,’ and Rossella Lari, ‘Nota sul restauro del Ritratto di Maria Salviati del Pontormo,’ both in Rosso e Pontormo: fierezza e solitudini: esercizi di lettura e rendiconti di restauro per tre dipinte degli Uffizi, ed., Antonio Natali (Italy: Gruppo VéGé, 1995), 119–33 and 135–39; and Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 1262–64. As cited by Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 174–75. On the purchase of licenses, see Strocchia, ‘Death Rites and the Ritual Family in Renaissance Florence,’ in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, eds Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt and Rona Goffen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), 120–45, esp. 130. On sumptuary legislation, see also Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, esp. 88– 90; Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University, 2000); Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Mourning Rites, Memory, and Civilization in Premodern Italy,’ in Riti e Rituali nelle Società Medievali, eds Jacques Chiffoleau, Lauro Martines and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Spoleto, 1994), 23–38, esp. 32–34; her ‘Regulating Women’s Fashion,’ in A History of Women in the West. Vol. II: Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 136–58; Ronald Rainey, ‘Dressing Down the Dressed-Up: Reproving Feminine Attire in Renaissance Florence,’ in Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr, eds John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New York: Ithaca Press, 1991), 217–37; James A. Brundage, ‘Sumptuary Laws and Prostitution in Late Medieval Italy,’ Journal of Medieval History 13/4 (1987): 343–55; Rainey, ‘Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1985); and Hughes, ‘Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,’ in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69–99. Within this context, we should also consider goods as gift, specifically the presentation of mourning costume, as stipulated in wills, as another means of circumventing sumptuary restriction. Cosimo ‘il Vecchio,’ for example, left money in his estate to cover the expense of mourning costume for members of the household, including four widows. See Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 89; and Janet Ross, Lives of the Early Medici (London: Chatto and Windus, 1910), 81, for a list of those who received mourning costume. More generally, on gift-giving, I found useful Helmut Puff, ‘The Sodomite’s Clothes: Gift-Giving and Sexual Excess in Early Modern Germany and Switzerland,’ in The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, eds Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 251–72; and Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). Hughes, ‘Sumptuary Law,’ 83. Brown, Virtue and Beauty, 160–61 and 208–13. There is no consensus that these two sitters, each dressed in black with a revealing bodice, are widows; however, it is precisely that ambiguity of identity and, more specifically, the literal and metaphorical slippage of costume that underscore my argument.

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81 Baldesare Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin, 1967), 135. For the Italian, see Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, ed. Vittorio Cian (Florence: Sansoni, 1929), 177: ‘però parmi che maggior grazia abbia nei vestimenti il color nero, che alcun altro; e se pur non è nero, che almen tenda al scuro.’ 82 As cited in Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art, eds Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 69–71, citation at 70. 83 As cited in Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630, eds David Chambers and Brian Pullan, with Jennifer Fletcher (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 4–21, citation at 6–7; italics mine. For the Italian, see Marin Sanudo, De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae, ovvero, La città di Venetia (1493–1530), ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò (Milan: Cisalpino-Goliardica, 1980), 22: Li zentilhomeni da’ cittadini in habito non sono conosciuti perché tutti vanno vestiti quasi a un modo, eccetto li Senatori delli magistrati mentre sono in officio – come dirò al luoco suo – che vanno vestiti di color, per lezze. Li altri portano sempre quasi veste negre longhe fino a terra, con maneghe a comedo, barretta negra in testa, et becheto de panno negro, et anco di veluto; et zà si portava capuzzi molto grandi, la qual foza fu buttata zoso. Si porta 4 sorte de veste: di martori, fuine, o volpe, overo ancora zebellini, che molte ne sono d’inverno; poi dossi, poi vari, poi zendadi; si porta calze solate con zoccoli di ogni tempo; et zipponi di seta, calze di panno negro et, conclusive, usano molto il negro; et quando hanno corrotto di qualche suo parente morto portano // scarpe in piedi, mantello longo con capuzzo su la spalla, ma pochi zorni, però che lievano vesta et barba certo tempo. 84 In the sixteenth century, black dress for women would increasingly come to be recognized as fashionable dress, although the mourning signification would never be separated, particularly in Florence. See Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 175. 85 John Harvey, Men in Black (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 51. For more on the changing significance of black dress as worn by men and women through the centuries, see Ann Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 86 Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 176. 87 Sheila ffolliott has written extensively on the strategic fashion choices made by Catherine de’ Medici following Henry II’s death in 1559 and the subsequent authority granted to her. See, esp., her ‘Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow,’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 227–241. See also Margriet Hoogvliet, ‘Princely Culture and Catherine de Médicis,’ in Princes and Princely Culture, 1450–1650, vol. 1, eds Martin Gosman, Alasdair MacDonald and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 103–30, esp. 105–13. 88 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32. 89 See Brown, Virtue and Beauty, 154–57. 90 See note 71, in the present chapter, for this appropriation of Vespasiano’s praise of Alessandra Bardi’s costume; here, italics mine. 91 Brown, Virtue and Beauty, 209.

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92 Operette Spirituali, 34: ‘le vedove vestono di nero vestimento e vanno molto velate tutto el tempo della sua vedovitade.’ 93 My interpretations of the early modern widow’s veil have been informed in important ways by Gen Doy, Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), esp. Ch. 3, ‘Fetishism, Drapery and Veils,’ 98–138; and Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 94 See Hughes, ‘Sumptuary Law,’ 92. 95 Illustrations from Vecellio’s Costume Book (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977), based on the second edition of Vecellio’s book, Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo, printed in Venice by Giovanni Bernardo Sessa in 1598. 96 As cited by Elizabeth Rodini and Elissa B. Weaver, eds, A Well-Fashioned Image: Clothing and Costume in European Art, 1500–1850 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago, 2002), 29. See Rita Casagrande di Villaviera, Le cortigiane veneziane nel cinquecento (Milan: Longanesi, 1968), 132: ‘facendo atti disonesti con mal essempio e mormoratione de molti.’ 97 As cited by Tessa Storey, ‘Clothing Courtesans: Fabrics, Signals, and Experiences,’ in Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. Catherine Richardson (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 95–107, citation at 104. 98 As cited by de Vries, ‘Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals,’ 26. The Latin, also cited there, reads: ‘“vivorum constantiam, et animi magnanimitatem.”’ 99 As cited by Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women, 7. 100 As cited by William J. Kennedy, ‘Is That a Man in Her Dress? Transvestism, Cuckoldry, and Petrarch’s Sonnet 182 in the Sixteenth Century,’ in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies; Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo, ed. Peter C. Herman (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 27–53, citation at 28. For the Italian, see Petrarch, The Canzoniere, or, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 272: sempre pien di desire et di sospetto pur come donna in un vestire schietta celi un uom vivo, o sotto un picciol velo. 101 See note 37 in the present chapter. 102 As cited by Nicole Pellegrin, ‘Le Sexe du Crêpe: Costumes du Veuvage dans la France d’Ancien Régime,’ in Veufs, Veuves et Veuvage dans la France d’Ancien Régime: Actes du Colloque de Poitiers (11–12 juin 1998), eds Nicole Pellegrin and Colette H. Winn (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), 219–45, citation at 227; trans. (unpublished) M. Cheyne. The French, also cited there, reads: ‘“les veuves portent le morion sans crête pour marquer que le male leur défaut.”’ 103 Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. and ed. M.A. Screech (London and New York: Penguin, 1987), 947–1016, citation at 969. For the French, see Montaigne, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1965), 858: ‘Les femmes mariées, icy pres, en forgent de leur couvrechef une figure sur leur front pour se glorifier de la jouyssance qu’elles en ont; et, venant à estre vefves, le couchent en arriere et ensevelissent soubs leur coiffure.’ 104 Pellegrin, ‘Le Sexe du Crêpe,’ 227.

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PART II The Melancholy of Anatomy

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CHAPTER 4

The Death of the Fathers ‘In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin.’ Derrida

Mourning Face to (Ef)faced A cryptic portrait, Alessandro de’ Medici, painted circa 1534 by Pontormo, hangs in Philadelphia (Fig. 4.1).1 If the sitter is, as is generally accepted, the illegitimate son of Giulio de’ Medici, later Pope Clement VII (1478–1534; 1523–1534), then Alessandro (1511/12–1537; first duke of Florence, 1532–1537), dressed in black, here mourns the death of his father, who died in September of that same year. From the start, this is an unusual portrait insofar as it represents a man mourning another man; such representations are rare in the early modern period.2 Also curious, infrared reflectography reveals a provocative pentimento – the absent presence of a second male figure in what has been loosely identified as a background window or open doorway to the right of Alessandro’s head.3 The identity of the enigmatic ‘repressed figure’ remains elusive, though the male figure – and his erasure – may be related to the ambiguous situation at Palazzo Pazzi, which then served as the Cybo/Malaspina residence, where Pontormo is thought to have painted the portrait and where Alessandro conducted his political – and personal – affairs.4 Indeed, there is still another portrait to consider. Alessandro is shown sketching the head of a woman, perhaps that of his lover, the (merry) widow, Taddea Malaspina, mother of at least two of his illegitimate children, Giulio and Giulia.5 Resident of Palazzo Pazzi, she was also, according to Vasari, recipient of the painting: Jacopo [Pontormo] having executed … a picture with the portrait from life of Amerigo Antinori, a young man much beloved in Florence at that time, and that portrait being much extolled by everyone, Duke Alessandro had him informed that he wished to have his portrait taken by him in a large picture … Jacopo afterwards made a portrait of the same Duke in a large picture, with a style in the hand, drawing the head of a woman; which larger portrait Duke Alessandro afterwards presented to Signora Taddea Malaspina, the sister of the Marchesa di Massa.6

If Alessandro’s mistress is, in fact, his model, Pontormo’s painting can also be read as a double mourning portrait: Alessandro in mourning for his father, Pope Clement VII, and Taddea for her husband, Count Giambattista Boiardo di Scandiano. But this is a pair at play, so what, precisely, do these lovers lament?

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Moreover, this double portrait is both a representation of representation and a presentation of representation. Alessandro is depicted in the act of drawing, a ‘highly important’ skill encouraged by Castiglione in his Book of the Courtier: ‘I think our courtier should certainly not neglect [it].’7 If practice makes perfect, Pontormo’s perpetuation of Alessandro’s courtly gesture ensures that neither he nor his study will be neglected. But Alessandro, an accomplished – if merely a social – draftsman, was not the only one in his circle with a gift. Vasari also tells us that Alessandro presented the painting to Taddea. How is such a gift received, and can it ever be re-gifted? What I wish to un-pack is this: Is his gift of drawing the gift of death?8 Pontormo’s double portrait underscores the distinct dichotomy between male and female manners of mourning, a line originally drawn more than a century earlier by Petrarch, who called for a re-orchestration of the role of women in the public mourning ritual.9 Here, Alessandro’s active mourning is culturally inscribed in and against Taddea’s passive mourning. That is, in an authoritative gesture, he literally outlines his ideal mourner; with her head sketched in profile and separated from her potentially problematic body, she is reduced to a silenced silhouette. As prescribed and as portrayed, both bodies become sites of mourning and memory. But who and/or what are being remembered? In other words, whose identity is being constructed, whose is being served and whose, in turn, is ruined? Substituting the early modern widow for Slavoj Žižek’s idealized Lady of the Middle Ages, I suggest that Alessandro simultaneously invents and destroys Taddea: Deprived of every real substance, [the widow] functions as a mirror on to which the subject projects his narcissistic ideal … She stands for the man’s narcissistic projection which involves the mortification of the flesh-and-blood woman … That is to say, if men are to project on to the mirror their narcissistic ideal, the mute mirror-surface must already be there. This surface functions as a kind of ‘black hole’ in reality, as a limit whose Beyond is inaccessible.10

Immortalized as a widow, Taddea stands in, already, for Alessandro’s inevitable loss. An empty screen, she is an effigy-in-waiting. She is both Death and Death contained, a cipher of masculinity. Put simply, it is she who is ruined in one fell Derridean stroke: ‘In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.’11 And yet, insofar as the distinct dichotomy between male and female models of grieving, as sketched by Alessandro himself, cannot but eventually be blurred, his ‘compensatory or transferential’ strategy of continuation, of ensuring his own memory by appropriating the Count’s widow as his own will, perhaps, eventually be erased.12 After all, from the start, we are left with only a trace of a widow who always already looks the other way.

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Humoring Ficino Pontormo’s picture of active male mourning and passive female mourning was bolstered by a philosophical discourse – the early modern appropriation and manipulation of the ancient discourse on melancholia. Previously considered unwelcome and an unfortunate malady by both ancient and medieval writers, the temperament came to be viewed as a positive virtue – both privileged and preferred.13 Under the re-interpretation of the Florentine philosopher, Marsilio Ficino, primarily in Book 1, De vita sana (On a Healthy Life), of De vita libri tres (A Book on Life Divided into Three Books), published in 1489, melancholia is celebrated as a mark of genius, a condition afflicting learned men.14 Ficino identifies three causes of melancholy. The first is celestial: ‘Mercury and Saturn impart from birth to their followers, learned people, and preserve and augment [the melancholic nature] day by day;’ from this astronomical alignment ‘come original philosophers … filled from above with divine influences and oracles … .’15 The second and natural cause of melancholy is thought to be an excess of black bile, a bodily build-up of the humor that ‘continually incites the soul both to collect itself together into one and to dwell on itself and to contemplate itself … Contemplation itself, in its turn, by a continual recollection and compression, as it were, brings on a nature similar to black bile.’16 The human cause only aggravates the situation: ‘Because frequent agitation of the mind greatly dries up the brain … the nature of [it] becomes dry and cold,’ much like the blood, which ‘is rendered cold, thick, and black.’17 The intellectual pursuits of learned men result in the separation of mind and body, not to mention the neardestruction of the corporeal: But of all learned people, those especially are opposed by black bile, who, being sedulously devoted to the study of philosophy, recall their mind from the body and corporeal things and apply it to incorporeal things. The cause is, first, that the more difficult the work, the greater concentration of mind it requires; and second, that the more they apply their mind to incorporeal truth, the more they are compelled to disjoin it from the body. Hence their body is often rendered as if it were half-alive and often melancholic.18

Still, Ficino’s pathological diagnosis is positive. Indeed, bile is the new black. This celebration of melancholy led to a genius boom in early modern Florence, from inspired artists – retiring craftsmen – to enlightened Dukes – aspiring draftsmen. Michelangelo has long held the title of melancholic artist, but, in the context of the present study, Pontormo deserves special mention.19 In a letter written by the artist to Benedetto Varchi on the paragone, the popular debate on the respective worthiness of painting and sculpture, Pontormo characterizes the painter as ‘“bodily ill-disposed through the fatigues of his craft, which perturb the mind rather than augment life.”’20 And Vasari, in his biography of the artist, points to ‘“the bizarre eccentricity of [Pontormo’s] mind, which never rested content with anything.”’21 Even the vita of

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Bronzino, for whom Pontormo was both teacher and surrogate father, perpetuates this account of the artist’s natural melancholic disposition. What I wish to do here is not continue this cause célèbre but, instead, call attention to an absence implied by Ficino’s discourse and drawn out in Pontormo’s painting. If Alessandro, inspired and enlightened, channels his grief by actively sketching the passive profile of Taddea, in so doing, he not only re-inscribes the humanist division between male and female manners of mourning, but he also delineates another cleavage in this already gendered discourse: the gap between male melancholia – valued and validating – and female mourning – disparaged and relatively valueless. In other words, Alessandro is elevated to the status of gifted intellectual; Taddea, by contrast, is reduced to a silent cipher. Consider the following excerpt from Giovanni Tolosani’s La Nuova Sfera, published in Florence in 1514: The melancholic is cold and dry Like earth, and always has a bitter heart; He is pale and spare and seems lost, And he is mean, grasping and miserly: He lives in anguish, grief, pain, and mourning, And for his sickness there is no remedy: He is solitary, and seems like a monk, Is without friends, and has a fantastical mind.22

‘Cold and dry,’ ‘pale and spare,’ this melancholic may be moody and mournful, anti-social and anguished, but he retains his ‘fantastical mind;’ the ailments of his body accelerate his creativity. The opposite is true for women in a chronic state of grieving, according to Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, of 1621; despite his promising chapter title, ‘Symptoms of Women’s Melancholy,’ women’s grief is posited not as a pathology to be celebrated but as one to be condemned: Many of them [‘maids, nuns, and widows’] cannot tell how to express themselves in words, or how it holds them, what ails them, you cannot understand them, or well tell what to make of their sayings; so far gone sometimes, so stupefied and distracted, they think themselves bewitched, they are in despair … yet will not, cannot again tell how, where, or what offends them, though they be in great pain, agony, and frequently complain, grieving, sighing, weeping, and discontented still, sine causa manifesta.23

From social sanctions and rhetorical revisions, recounted in Chapter 2, to philosophical and psychological pathologies, introduced here, the female mourner, inarticulate and incomprehensible, now ‘stupefied’ and ‘bewitched,’ remains a disadvantaged player in the game of public grieving. ‘Anguish, grief, pain, and mourning’ are acceptable symptoms of male melancholia, but those same symptoms, ‘pain, agony … grieving, sighing, weeping,’ deem the female melancholic too ‘far gone.’ How much longer can we humor the early modern humanist?

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Freudian Slept Subsequent analyses of grieving have both reaffirmed and challenged Ficino’s discourse, specifically his celebratory re-inscription of male melancholia. For example, Juliana Schiesari has read Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ as prolonging the binary mourning patterns established 500 years earlier in Florence. That is, the underlying assumptions of Freud’s essay, she argues, are structured by a gender bias that can be traced back to Ficino’s discourse on melancholia, which, in privileging men’s detachment, effectively devalues women’s ‘despair.’ A review of Freud’s essay and a summary of Schiesari’s critical re-assessment of both it and Ficino’s early modern discourse follow. According to Freud: mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one … We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.24

On the other hand, melancholia, which also ‘may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object … is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness.’25 Whereas the work of mourning, when completed, results in a free and uninhibited ego, the melancholic, who is unable to initiate and/ or complete the task of mourning, incorporates the lost other, takes on the attributes of the other and sustains the other through imitation. Loss, then, for the melancholic, is eventually overcome through the specific act of identification, and this internalization becomes a permanent structure of identification: An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not a normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different … The object-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced onto another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.26

This dichotomy between mourning and melancholia, Schiesari argues, maintains the cultural and historical discourse of Ficino, which privileges male loss over female loss; in fact, the mere title of Freud’s essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ prolongs

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the gendered division implied in Ficino’s writing: female mourning as lack, male melancholia as gain. Thus, as re-read by Schiesari, Freud’s essay, like Ficino’s discourse, reveals a gender politics at work. Indeed, sometimes it hardly works at all. In a letter written to Wilhelm Fliess, dated 2 November 1896, Freud describes a recent dream, in which he arrived late for his father’s funeral: Dear Wilhelm, I find it so difficult to write just now that I have put off for a long time thanking you for the moving words in your letter. By one of those dark pathways behind the official consciousness the old man’s death has affected me deeply. I valued him highly, understood him very well, and with his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic light-heartedness he had a significant effect on my life. By the time he died, his life had long been over, but in [my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened by this event. I now feel quite uprooted … I must tell you about a nice dream I had the night after the funeral. I was in a place where I read a sign:

You are requested to close the eyes.

I immediately recognized the location as the barbershop I visit every day. On the day of the funeral I was kept waiting and therefore arrived a little late at the house of mourning. At that time my family was displeased with me because I had arranged for the funeral to be quiet and simple, which they later agreed was quite justified. They were also somewhat offended by my lateness. The sentence on the sign has a double meaning: one should do one’s duty to the dead (an apology as though I had not done it and were in need of leniency), and the actual duty itself. The dream thus stems from the inclination to self-reproach that regularly sets in among the survivors … . 27

Freud expands his recollection and analysis of the dream three years later in The Interpretation of Dreams: During the night before my father’s funeral I had a dream of a printed notice, placard, or poster – rather like the notices forbidding one to smoke in railway waitingrooms – on which appeared either or,

‘You are requested to close the eyes’ ‘You are requested to close an eye.’

I usually write this in the form: the ‘You are requested to close eye(s).’ an

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Each of these two versions had a meaning of its own and led in a different direction when the dream was interpreted. I had chosen the simplest possible ritual for the funeral, for I knew my father’s own views on such ceremonies. But some other members of the family were not sympathetic to such puritanical simplicity and thought we should be disgraced in the eyes of those who attended the funeral. Hence one of the versions: ‘You are requested to close an eye,’ i.e. to ‘wink at’ or ‘overlook’. Here it is particularly easy to see the meaning of the vagueness expressed by the ‘either-or.’ The dream-work failed to establish a unified wording for the dream-thoughts which could at the same time be ambiguous, and the two main lines of thought consequently began to diverge even in the manifest content of the dream … .28

Freud’s secondary witnessing of himself inadequately mourning the death of his father prompts us to re-view his project on mourning and melancholia and what it means to ‘do one’s duty to the dead.’ In the scenario he describes, his performance is insufficient, having almost missed his father’s funeral. But in his analysis, what or, rather, who is forgotten, and who is fulfilled? Twice in his attempt to make sense of the warning sign, he cannot read between the lines but, instead, interprets ‘two versions;’ just as ‘the dream-work failed to establish a unified wording,’ Freud prefers the ‘vagueness expressed by the “either-or,”’ maintaining the division between dead father and dutiful son. Yet, I would ask, are they not both one and the same – an ‘eye’ for an ‘I’? That is, in seeing ‘the old man’s death,’ does Freud also see his own? If so, the somatic son had better wake up. There is even more at play in this gendered discourse of mourning and melancholia. If gender is enacted by means of repetitive performance, and if that performance, now understood as selective, can be employed strategically to construct identity – even memory – can the dichotomy outlined above be reversed? That is to say, can a woman become melancholic or, rather, perform melancholia, suggesting an eventual, if not inevitable, subversion of this gender-biased rhetoric of mourning? Luce Irigaray argues that women cannot become melancholic precisely because they are denied access to the public, masculine sphere of the symbolic: ‘It is not that she lacks some “master signifier” or that none is imposed upon her, but rather that access to a signifying economy, to the coining of signifiers, is difficult or even impossible for her because she remains an outsider, herself (a) subject to their norms.’29 Similarly, Schiesari recognizes the historic exclusion of women from the realm of melancholia, and she stresses the importance of the cultural discourse in determining the possible existence of female melancholia: One must see melancholia not simply as a psychological construct but also as part of a cultural order, one that has en-gendered the male subject in terms of a loss that he can represent – and that represents him – as a legitimate, if not privileged, participant in the Western tradition.30

Schiesari does, however, suggest the possibility of representation of women’s depression.31

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Building upon yet complicating these readings, I wish to explore the possibility of women’s melancholia as well as its representation. If Pontormo’s painting of Alessandro’s drawing perpetuates Taddea’s performance of mourning, is she not, thereby, necessarily melancholic, according to the Freudian formula? In other words, immortalized as a widow, Taddea’s position as mourner is made static, always grieving the loss of her husband and already grieving the eventual loss of Alessandro. Always in the process of mourning, Taddea cannot process loss, she can never complete her cultural assignment. Because Taddea’s portrait was painted/ sketched by a male artist/amateur for a male patron/himself, could it not follow that her pictorial inability to work through the work of mourning can be read as an unwillingness, on the part of the male artist/patron, to accept his own inevitable death? In other words, if she cannot complete the task at hand, masculine memory is, perhaps, perpetuated. The analysis of melancholia offered by Julia Kristeva is especially insightful when considered in conjunction with this interpretation of the double-portrait of Alessandro and Taddea: Riveted to the past, regressing to the paradise or inferno of an unsurpassable experience, melancholy persons manifest a strange memory: everything has gone by, they seem to say, but I am faithful to those goneby days, I am nailed down to them, no revolution is possible, there is no future … .32

Indeed, Taddea remains a marker of masculine memory. And yet, this suspended, melancholic performance, though not entirely socially-sanctioned, allows her access into the privileged, masculine public realm. Still, in the words of Irigaray, ‘(a) subject to their norms,’ she no longer ‘remains an outsider’ – even if she is just an outline.33 I might ask, at this point, not whose identity but which identity does Taddea’s performance determine? Building upon his ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ Freud, in The Ego and the Id, of 1923, makes the following supposition: an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego – that is, that an object‑cathexis has been replaced by an identification … this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character.’34

Judith Butler has interpreted Freud’s process of internalization as problematic. In her view, not only is the ‘character’ of the lost other acquired but the gender identity is acquired as well. In other words, identifications cannot be distinguished from internalizations; this alternative reading suggests ‘that multiple and coexisting identifications produce conflicts, convergences, and innovative dissonances within gender configurations which contest the fixity of masculine and feminine placements with respect to the paternal law,’ positing that ‘“the” Law is not deterministic and that “the” law may not even be singular.’35 Moreover, Butler asks, ‘If the identifications sustained through melancholy are “incorporated,” … where is this incorporated

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space? If it is not literally within the body, perhaps it is on the body as its surface signification such that the body must itself be understood as an incorporated space.’36 How, then, might the memory and identity of both mourner and mourned be further complicated if woman is not only melancholic but also Melancholia? The next section will examine the iconography of Melancholia, suggesting that the female personification of Ficino’s privileged, preferred temperament, once reserved exclusively for men, further challenges both the new humanist ideology and, more broadly, masculine identity and memory. A Re-Interpretation of Dreams Girl Asleep, painted by Vermeer around 1657, is another curious double-portrait, which takes as its subject the once-distinct, now-problematic dichotomy between mourning and melancholia (Fig. 4.2). If Pontormo’s painting of Alessandro’s drawing, as I have suggested, positions the widow as melancholic, Vermeer’s painting, I propose, positions her as Melancholia. I begin by re-reading the subject of Vermeer’s painting. The identity of the young woman, dressed in dark brown satin with a ‘widow’s peak’ head covering and seated at a table with her downward tilted head propped up by a bent arm, has long been questioned. An early sale inventory, dated 16 May 1696, records the painting as number eight, ‘Een dronke slapende meyd aen een tafel’ (‘A Drunken Sleeping Maid at a Table’). Art historians have disagreed on the subject matter, generally reading the sitter as a personification of Sleep or Sloth, or as a maid or mistress.37 And then there’s this: ‘If Vermeer’s picture was meant as an admonition to use alcoholic beverages moderately, it was probably a failure. The chance of looking as beautiful as Vermeer’s sleeping young woman is enough to drive a woman to drink.’38 These interpretations sound a bit weak to me; the latter, by Seymour Slive, seems especially diluted. A stronger reading is served up by Edward Snow: The ‘grief’ of the young girl has more to do with death, with absolute loss, than with the sorrows of disappointed love. The cap that she wears is a ‘widow’s peak’: and though it was evidently no longer worn exclusively by widows in Vermeer’s day, the signs of male absence that surround it in his painting are strong enough to evoke, if not pin down, the experience to which its name refers.39

Widow or not, Snow hits it on the head – this is a picture about loss and mourning but even more so about the slippage of experience and the blurring of identification.40 Rather than reading Vermeer’s painting within the traditional genre category, Snow, recognizing ‘the signs of male absence,’ foregrounds issues of death, grief and gender:

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It is only when men disappear from the space of representation, and the painter’s characteristic subject changes from the relationship between the sexes to an isolated female presence, that the troubled conscience of the early painting yields to that inner peace which is Vermeer’s special gift to Western art … As this shift occurs sexuality ceases to be a threat, a negative force for the artist, even if it remains his central problem … Male absence becomes, in Vermeer’s dialectic, the space of ‘the feminine’ – the space that the figure of woman fills, if not yet with being, then with a reverie and a desire in which being gestates.41

I wish to nuance Snow’s reading, suggesting that the space of ‘“the feminine”’ in Vermeer’s Girl Asleep is one, not of absence, but of presence – male presence. Like Pontormo’s painting, which, in the beginning, represented a figure standing in the background window or doorway, technical examinations of Vermeer’s painting have revealed that originally a man wearing a hat stood in the back room, and a dog, a traditional symbol of fidelity, appeared in the doorway.42 Gone but not entirely forgotten, ruinous yet not himself ruined, the invisible man’s memory is contained within or upon the space of the visible mourning woman’s body; and yet, like Pontormo’s Taddea, I read Vermeer’s girl as a complicator of masculine memory. That is to say, not only is she guaranteed access into the privileged, masculine realm, but, suspended, she also personifies that from which she has been historically excluded, (im)posturing herself as Melancholia. Vermeer’s veneer, it would seem, is Freud’s fascia. Girl Asleep bears an uncanny resemblance to a 1932 photograph of the Interpreter of dreams, who, (im)posturing himself as Melancholia, with one bent arm raised toward the head, is seated in a studded chair next to his analytic couch (Fig. 4.3); in each, the excrescence of the oriental rug, folding back onto itself, reveals the collapsed projections of self and Other in both Delft and Vienna. Rolling Over in Dürer’s Grave Writing on mourning and method in art history, Michael Ann Holly muses on the melancholic nature of the discipline: I take it as axiomatic that history writing is a psychic activity; that both its traditional and revisionist tales are always narratives of desire, doomed searches after lost origins. The urge to recover meaning, context, precedents, whatever, presses on the scholar, but so, too, does the recognition of the futility of the search, thus converting him or her into a melancholic subject who nonetheless often possesses an ethical commitment to the past. Quite a quandary. Given that the works of art with which we deal professionally can themselves be metaphorical expressions of a lost presence, art historians, in their attempts to make words match images, are doubly fated to experience loss, twice removed from originary meanings. Like a souvenir, an object of art is regarded as standing in place of a past event to which it was once metonymically related. Paradoxically, it is the writing that gets in the way.43

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If the tension between ‘lost’ objects and analysis – that obsessive project intended to reclaim what has gone missing, from materiality to meaning, that results in perpetually open-ended interpretation – characterizes the practice of art history, then art historians are predisposed to melancholy in their inability to mend the cleavage between past and present, the tear between old and new methodology, the wound between image and text. I am precisely interested in the melancholic performance of the art historian, specifically twentieth-century engagements with Dürer’s canonical image, Melencolia I, of 1514 (Fig. 4.4). It is well known that Panofsky read Dürer’s personification of Melancholia as a spiritual self-portrait of the artist himself.44 Much like the 1491–92 self-portrait of Dürer in the melancholic pose (Fig. 4.5), Melencolia I ‘reflects his high-strung and excited state of mind: gloomy yet ardent, passionate yet observing, perplexed by conflicting impressions and emotions yet hungry for more.’45 Yet, as Panofsky points out, the 1514 engraving is ‘no ordinary Melancholy.’46 And for Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘without any recognizable likeness of Dürer himself,’ it is no ordinary self-portrait.47 Indeed, Dürer’s (mis)recognizable image makes clear the slippage of the self: ‘Melencolia seems designed to generate multiple and contradictory readings, to clue its viewers to an endless exegetical labor until, exhausted in the end, they discover their own portrait in Dürer’s sleepless, inactive personification of melancholy.’48 Keith Moxey has put the analyst on the couch: Panofsky, in revealing Dürer’s identification with Melencolia I, projects himself onto his analysand’s image: Just as Dürer is said to have identified with the melancholic temperament because his theoretical ambitions were compromised by empirical practice, so Panofsky may have identified with Dürer because he saw in the artist’s struggle an allegory of the battle between reason and unreason which characterized the political events of his own time.49

A German Jew, Panofsky struggled with his double identity, a serious conflict of interest in the Weimar Republic. Haunted by the impossible synthesis of his two selves, he seeks salvation in Dürer’s Melencolia I, what he describes as both ‘the objective statement of a general philosophy and the subjective confession of an individual man.’50 A portrait of Panofsky in the familiar melancholic pose reveals his identification with Melencolia I, prompting us to read Dürer’s numerical ‘I’ as Panofsky’s autobiographical ‘I’ (Fig. 4.6). Panofsky’s identification with his subject’s melancholy or, for that matter, any such projected self-portrait, might be read as a particular project of pre-emptive auto-mourning. Recall, according to Henry Staten, that man has historically and consciously devised strategies of deferral or transcendence as a response to what he calls thanato-erotic anxiety – the fear, within the dialectic of mourning, not of loss of object but of loss of self. The fear, then, of one’s own death and, with that, the fear of being forgotten, could and did result in a premature and self-inflicted process of grieving. Consider the following excerpt from a letter written by Ficino to his friend, Bernardo Bembo:

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What is it that you mourn in a friend’s death? Is it death? Or is it the person who is dead? If it is death, mourn your own, Bernardo. For as surely as he is dead will you too die; or rather, you are dying; for from moment to moment your past life is dying.51

However, more than just an act of benign self-preservation, this initial compensatory strategy is eventually and vengefully transferred onto the bodies of women, for it is the woman’s sexuality that undermines the man’s authority, an idea Staten refers to as ‘thanatoerotophobic misogyny.’52 How, then, are we to understand male identification with the female personification of Melancholia? Necessarily, such engagements also disclose an anxiety of influenza.53 As Panofsky, himself, points out, anxiety is precisely what Dürer’s Melancholia seems to experience. Winged, yet cowering on the ground – wreathed, yet beclouded by shadows – equipped with the tools of art and science, yet brooding in idleness, she gives the impression of a creative being reduced to despair by an awareness of insurmountable barriers which separate her from a higher realm of thought.54

Despondent if not defeated, desiring yet doomed, what, precisely, is the cause of this Melencolia’s melancholy? What does s/he mourn – the imposition of the Other, the slippage of the self? We might look towards Melancolia of 1561 by Monogrammist F.B. (Fig. 4.7). This representation of Melancholia points to those complications and vulnerabilities of masculine memory and (art) history merely suggested by Dürer’s Melencolia I. Set within an enclosed space, this female personification of Melancholia seems to be situated securely within a grid.55 Thus, perspective, here, might be read as a metaphor for the ordering or stabilizing of female uncertainty, much as Baldessare Lanci’s stage set, from approximately the same date, attempts to control the potentially problematic body of the widow during the particularly disruptive time of death. And yet, though this subject is contained or, rather, domesticated, the overly ambitious perspectival grid renders this an ambiguous image. For example, is she seated before a mirror or an open doorway? If a mirror, her self is not reflected; if a doorway, we find her at the threshold of an empty hollow. Either way, she fills a void, literally pointing to what is lacking. This is melancholic detachment, and this is what s/he mourns. Michelangelo’s Legacy ‘The spirit and genius of Michelangelo could not rest without doing something,’ Vasari tells us, and so, probably in 1547, at the age of 72, Michelangelo began work on his own cryptic image (Fig. 4.8): he set to work on a piece of marble, intending to carve from it four figures in the round and larger than life, including a Dead Christ, for his own delight and to pass the time,

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and because, as he used to say, the exercise of the hammer kept him healthy in body. This Christ, taken down from the cross, is supported by Our Lady, by Nicodemus, who bends down and assists her, planted firmly on his feet in a forceful attitude, and by one of the Maries, who also gives her aid, perceiving that the Mother, overcome by grief, is failing in strength and not able to uphold Him. Nor is there anywhere to be seen a dead form equal to that of Christ, who, sinking with the limbs hanging limp, lies in an attitude wholly different, not only from that of any other work by Michelagnolo, but from that of any other figure that ever made. A laborious work is this, a rare achievement in a single stone, and truly divine; but, as will be related hereafter, it remained unfinished, and suffered many misfortunes, although Michelagnolo had intended that it should serve to adorn his own tomb, at the foot of that altar where he thought to place it.56

This, then, was a particularly anxious project; perhaps for that reason, what we find in this sepulchral monument is Michelangelo’s altar-ego – another self-portrait projected onto a melancholic icon in the hope of eternal salvation (Fig. 4.9). Yet from the beginning, his project was ruined. After working on the group for more than eight years, Michelangelo attempted to destroy it in 1555: either because it was hard and full of emery, and the chisel often struck sparks from it, or it may have been that the judgment of the man was so great that he was never content with anything that he did … This Pietà, when it was broken, he presented to Francesco Bandini. Now at this time Tiberio Calcagni, a Florentine sculptor, had become much the friend of Michelagnolo by means of Francesco Bandini and Messer Donato Giannotti; and being one day in Michelagnolo’s house, where there was the Pietà, all broken, after a long conversation he asked him for what reason he had broken it up and destroyed labours so marvellous, and he answered that the reason was the importunity of his servant Urbino, who kept urging him every day to finish it, besides which, among other things, a piece of one of the elbows of the Madonna had been broken off, and even before that he had taken an aversion to it, and had had many misfortunes with it by reason of a flaw that was in the marble, so that he lost his patience and began to break it up; and he would have broken it altogether into pieces if his servant Antonio had not besought him that he should present it to him as it was. Whereupon Tiberio, having heard this, spoke to Bandini, who desired to have something by the hand of Michelagnolo, and Bandini contrived that Tiberio should promise to Antonio two hundred crowns of gold, and prayed Michelagnolo to consent that Tiberio should finish it for Bandini with the assistance of models by his hand, urging that thus his labour would not be thrown away. Michelagnolo was satisfied, and then made them a present of it.57

Another gifted artist gives it all away. Almost. Vasari is correct to point out that this multi-figured marble Pietà is ‘altogether different;’ yet, despite his lengthy description of the memorial project, we still do not know why Michelangelo attempted to destroy the Pietà, partially mutilating the lower section, including the complete removal of the left leg of Christ. Nor do we know why he superimposed his features on the elderly figure of Nicodemus or, as he is alternatively identified,

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Joseph of Arimathea; both dutifully embalmed and interred the body of Christ, the latter even provided his own tomb. In an attempt to answer these questions, art historians and psychoanalysts alike have projected everyone and everything onto Michelangelo’s Pietà.58 But looking for definitive answers, Michael Ann Holly has warned, is a dead end. Determined not to piece together yet another ‘complete’ picture of Michelangelo, I, instead, propose a purposefully amputated narrative, but, admittedly, this approach, too, has its lim(b)its. So what is Michelangelo’s relationship to the monstrous amputee, who is Christ? By all accounts, the missing leg is the missing link. But, first, the standard diagnosis goes something like this: Michelangelo, traumatized by the death of his mother, Francesca, when he was six years old, self-identified with Christ, the victim-Son, idolizing the Virgin Mary as the ideal Mother, the one who would never abandon him; in so doing, his loss becomes Hers. That is, the mournful Virgin Mary, replacing his absent mother, plays Mother/Daughter to his Father/Son. Michelangelo further re-defines dogma in a presentation drawing made between 1538 and 1544 for his friend and muse, Vittoria Colonna, the widow he referred to as ‘a man within a woman’ (Fig. 4.10).59 In this probable source for the Florentine Pietà, Mary assumes the authoritative position of God the Father; thus, displacing the Oedipal complex with a pre-Oedipal relationship, the father is omitted and the role of the mother is emphasized. In the Florentine Pietà, a third dimension is added. Putting himself in the traditional paternal role, now re-indoctrinated as a maternal role, Michelangelo becomes the M(O)ther in mourning for the dead Son – himself. These identifications are prefigured in a madrigal composed between 1538 and 1541, written on the same sheet as a letter to Vittoria Colonna, which contains a reference to one of his Crucifixion drawings that he presented to her: From what sharp, biting file does your tired skin keep growing thin and failing, O ailing soul? When will time release you from it. so you’ll return to heaven, where you were pure and joyful before, your dangerous and mortal veil cast off? For even if I change my hide in my final brief years, I cannot change my old established habits, which, as more days pass, weigh down and compel me more. Love, I won’t hide it from you that I envy the dead, being so confused and terrified that my soul, while with me, trembles and fears for itself. O Lord, in my last hours, Stretch out toward me your merciful arms, take me from myself and make me one who’ll please you.60

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In his ‘last hours,’ Michelangelo envisions salvation in metamorphosis, replacing, with his ‘sharp, biting file,’ his aged skin, ‘thin and failing,’ with a ‘hide’ more pleasurable, grafting himself onto the envied dead. But his project was flawed, and so he cut his losses. Michelangelo dismembered the body of Christ, removing the leg that had hung ‘limp’ over the Virgin’s thigh. Vasari blames the destruction, at least partially, on a vein in the marble. But in another vein altogether, Leo Steinberg recognizes the symbolism of the ‘slung leg,’ ‘a common and unmistakable symbol of sexual union … of sexual aggression or compliance,’ as the reason for the attack, Michelangelo, you see, having realized something much more perverse between Mother and Son than just a mystic marriage between the Virgin and Christ.61 Either way, Michelangelo’s wound is left wide open. Total destruction unsuccessful, he deserted his Hol(e)y amputee; nothing further was done despite his donation to Tiberio and Bandini. The octogenarian would live nine more years in his ‘tired skin.’ But even in death, he would not rest. Following an initial burial in the church of Santi Apostali in Rome, his body was exhumed in 1564 and returned to Florence. His Pietà did not arrive home until 1674, more than 100 years after his death, and, even then, it was never placed on his tomb. Thus, neither he nor his ideal Mother would mourn his loss, his marble forget-me-not failing to re-member his fractured self. Grave Matters Put simply, what began with the death of the father ends with the death of the self. I have suggested that Alessandro de’ Medici, in mourning the death of his father, Pope Clement VII, actively and authoritatively sketches the head of Taddea Malaspina, appropriating this passive widow as his own. Yet, if Taddea is effectively effaced by Alessandro’s thanatoerotophobic misogynistic gesture, she was not alone. Costantino Ansoldi, a member of the Duke’s court, is said to have reported to Francesco de’ Medici that Alessandro’s portrait ‘“lacks only speech.”’62 Ultimately, then, his memorial rhetoric fails. Moreover, if Taddea’s barely visible portrait can be read as an ambiguous container of Alessandro’s memory, so, too, can his tomb. Murdered by his distant cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, on 6 January 1537, Alessandro’s body was quickly and quietly removed to the church of San Giovannino, near the Palazzo Medici, where it remained until the following evening, when it was then deposited in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo. Two months later, the body was transferred to the New Sacristy, the Medici Chapel, a massive project begun by Michelangelo in 1519. There, Alessandro was interred – without procession, without ceremony, without eulogy – in the sarcophagus created for Lorenzo di Piero di Lorenzo (d. 1519), who was publicly recognized as his father (Fig. 4.11).63 Thus, the tomb made for the ‘father,’ still unoccupied, was used for the ‘son.’ The only consolation would seem to be that ‘father’ and ‘son’ were eventually joined together and the shared sarcophagus

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positioned under the melancholic pensono, described by Vasari as a representation of ‘the pensive Duke Lorenzo, the very presentment of wisdom, with legs so beautiful and so well wrought, that there is nothing better to be seen by mortal eye.’64 But if that translation to an eternal resting place beneath the portrait of his ‘father’ – what is arguably a personification of Melancholia – promised Alessandro a perpetual mourner, this, too, would prove problematic. Michelangelo transposed the personalities of the dukes, assigning the pensono to Giuliano de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s uncle, who is buried in the pendant wall tomb (Fig. 4.12), and the bastoniere to Lorenzo. Michelangelo admitted as much when he made the following remark, as recorded by Niccolò Martelli, in 1544: When Michelangelo had to carve the illustrious Lords of the most happy house of Medici, he did not take from the Duke Lorenzo nor from the Lord Giuliano the model just as nature had drawn and composed them, but he gave them a greatness, a proportion, a dignity … which seemed to him would have brought them more praise, saying that a thousand years hence no one would be able to know that they were otherwise … .65

Indeed, Michelangelo would get the last laugh, including his concealed self-portrait, appropriately in the form of a mask, under the left arm of the statue of Night on the tomb of Giuliano.66 But Michelangelo had another under-the-surface identification with this tomb. One of the mural drawings discovered in a room beneath the New Sacristy consists of a larger than life-sized pair of legs, a curious sketch of the lower limbs of the bastoniere (Fig. 4.13).67 Might we consider this a pre-emptive appendage to his amputated Florentine Pietà? The Medici Chapel, characterized, here, by truncated legs and mistaken identities, brings us back to the Medici patron saints, Cosmas and Damian, and the episode of the black leg, specifically the moment when the deacon, his limp – we might now even say ‘slung’ – leg miraculously replaced with the presumably once healthy though now dead and, thus, equally limp leg of a Moor, ‘began to wonder whether he was himself or someone else.’68 Indeed, with all of these mixed up bodies, it is a wonder that anyone can remember – let alone re-member – himself. Fortunately, we also find in the Medici Chapel statues of Sts Cosmas and Damian, who, flanking the Virgin and Child on the altar wall, offer the joint promise of re-connection and resurrection (Fig. 4.14). But their presence may also serve another purpose: Alessandro was not only the illegitimate son of Pope Clement VII, patron of the chapel, but, more problematic, he was his son by his Moorish mistress, Simunetta.69 Of African descent, this melancholic Medici had bad blood – hence the pruning, by Sts Cosmas and Damian, of the family tree.70 Notes 1 See, esp., Carl Brandon Strehlke, ed., Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press; Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004), esp. 112–15.

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See also Elizabeth Pilliod, Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 11, 14–69; Vanessa WalkerOakes, ‘Representing the Perfect Prince: Pontormo’s Alessandro de’ Medici,’ Comitatus 32 (2001): 127–46; David Franklin, Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500–1550 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 207–208; Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 225; Gabrielle Langdon, ‘Pontormo and Medici Lineages: Maria Salviati, Alessandro, Giulia and Giulio de’ Medici,’ RACAR 19/1–2 (1992): 20–40, esp. 26–28; Carl Brandon Strehlke, ‘Pontormo, Alessandro de’ Medici, and the Palazzo Pazzi,’ Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 81/348 (1985): 3–15; and Karla Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici: 15th– 18th Centuries, 3 vols (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1981–89), 223–24. For portraits of men in mourning, see Ch. 5. See Mark S. Tucker, Irma Passeri, Ken Sutherland and Beth A. Price, ‘Technique and Pontormo’s Portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici,’ in Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici, 34–54, esp. 40–43. Strehlke, ‘Pontormo, Alessandro de’ Medici, and the Palazzo Pazzi,’ esp. 12–13, citation at 12. See Elizabeth Cropper, ‘Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia: A Double Portrait,’ in Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici, 1–33, esp. 21. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, vol. 7 (New York: AMS Press, 1976), 173. For the Italian, see Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanese, vol. 6 (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), 278: Avendo Iacopo [Pontormo] … ritratto di naturale in un quadro Amerigo Antinori, giovane allora molto favorito in Fiorenza, ed essendo quel ritratto molto lodato da ognuno, il duca Alessandro avendo fatto intendere a Iacopo che voleva da lui essere ritratto in un quadro grande … ritrasse poi Iacopo il medesimo duca in un quadro grande, con uno stile in mano disegnando la testa d’una femina: il quale ritratto maggiore donò poi esso duca Alessandro alla signora Taddea Malaspina, sorella della marchesa di Massa.

7 Baldesare Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin, 1967), 96. For the Italian, see Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, ed. Vittorio Cian (Florence: Sansoni, 1929), 122: ‘perciò che di molta importanzia la estimo, penso che dal nostro Cortegiano per alcun modo non debba esser lassata adietro.’ See also Leo Steinberg, ‘Pontormo’s Alessandro de’ Medici, or, I Only Have Eyes For You,’ Art in America 63 (1975): 62–65, citation at 63. More generally, on drawing, or disegno, in Florence, see Patricia L. Reilly, ‘Drawing the Line: Benvenuto Cellini’s On the Principles and Method of Learning the Art of Drawing and the Question of Amateur Drawing Education,’ in Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor goldsmith writer, eds Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo L. Rossi (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26–50. On presentation drawings, see Cropper, ‘Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia,’ 19; and Alexander Nagel, ‘Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,’ Art Bulletin 79/4 (1997): 647–68. 8 The latter part of this question is borrowed from Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). 9 See Ch. 2 for a full discussion of the humanist revision of the public mourning ritual.

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10 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,’ in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York and London: Verso, 1994), 89–112, citation at 90–91. 11 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 65. 12 Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. 13 The classic text is Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson; New York: Basic Books, 1964). See, more recently, Noel L. Brann, The Debate over the Origins of Genius during the Italian Renaissance: Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the Threshold of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2002). For an overview of melancholy in the Western European tradition, see the anthology edited by Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 14 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, eds and trans Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with the Renaissance Society of America, 1989), 106–63. 15 Ibid., 113, 121–23. The Latin, also found there, reads: ‘eandemque naturam Mercurius ipse Saturnusque litterarum studiosis eorum sectatoribus impartiunt ab initio ac servant augentque quotidie … Hinc philosophi singulars evadunt … Unde divinis influxibus oraculisque ex alto repletus.’ 16 Ibid., 115. ‘Igitur atra bilis animum, ut se et colligat in unum et sistat in uno contempleturque, assidue provocat … Contemplatio quoque ipsa vicissim assidua quadam collectione et quasi compressione naturam atrae bili persimilem contrahit.’ 17 Ibid. ‘Quoniam frequens agitatio mentis cerebrum vehementer exsiccat … unde natura cerebri sicca frigidaque evadit … sanguis inde frigidus crassusque et niger efficitur.’ 18 Ibid. The Latin reads as follows: Haec omnia melancholicum spiritum maestumque et pavidum animum efficere solent, siquidem interiores tenebrae multo magis quam exteriores maerore occupant animum atque terrent. Maxime vero litteratorum omnium hi atra bile premuntur, qui sedulo philosophiae studio dediti mentem a corpore rebusque corporeis sevocant, incorporeisque coniungunt, tum quia difficilius admodum opus maiori quoque indiget mentis intentione, tum quia quatenus mentem incorporeae veritati coniungunt, eatenus a corpore disiungere compelluntur. Hinc corpus eorum nonnunquam quasi semianimum redditur atque melancholium. 19 See, esp., Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963); and their The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy’s Homage on His Death in 1564 (London: Phaidon, 1964). See also Piers Britton, ‘“Mio malinchonico, o vero … mio pazzo”: Michelangelo, Vasari, and the Problem of Artists’ Melancholy in Sixteenth-Century Italy,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 34/3 (2003): 653–75. On ‘the melancholy that saturates much of Pontormo’s painting,’ see David Franklin, Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500–1550 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 207–11, citation at 207.

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20 As cited by Britton, ‘“Mio malinchonico, o vero … mio pazzo,”’ 664. The Italian, also cited there, reads: ‘“male disposto del corpo per le fatiche dell’arte, più tosto fastidi di mente che aumento di vita.”’ 21 Ibid., 666. For the Italian, see Vasari, Le vite, vol. 6, 272: ‘la bizzarra stravaganza di quel cervello di niuna cosa si contentava giammai.’ 22 As cited by Britton, ‘“Mio malinchonico, o vero … mio pazzo,”’ 656; italics mine. The Italian, also cited there, reads as follows: Il maninconico è freddo ed asciutto Come la terra, e sempre ha il core amaro; Resta pallido e magro e par distrutto Ed è tenace, cupido ed avaro: E vive in pianto, pena, doglia e lutto, Ed a sua infermita non è riparo: È solitario e pare un uom fantastico, Senz’amicizia, ed ha ingegno fantastico. 23 As cited by Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 14–15. See also Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). On hysteria, see Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 24 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 14: 243–58, citation at 243–44. 25 Ibid., 245. 26 Ibid., 248–49. 27 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1877–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 202–203. 28 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in Strachey, The Standard Edition, 4–5, citation at 317–18. 29 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 71. 30 Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 74. 31 Ibid., 75–76. 32 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 60. 33 See note 29. 34 Freud, ‘The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego-Ideal),’ The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 18. 35 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 67. See also her ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,’ in Constructing Masculinity, eds Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 21–36. 36 Butler, Gender Trouble, 67. 37 On Vermeer scholarship and reception, see Christiane Hertel, Vermeer: Reception

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38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51

and Interpretation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Interpretations of Girl Asleep are numerous and have included the following: Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 51, writes of Sleep and Love; Madlyn Millner Kahr, ‘Vermeer’s Girl Asleep: A Moral Emblem,’ The Metropolitan Museum Journal 6 (1972): 115–32, posits Sloth; Flavia Rando, ‘Vermeer, Jane Gallop, and the Other/Woman,’ Art Journal 55 (1996): 34–41, accepts the identity of the young woman as a maid; and Arthur Wheelock, Vermeer and the Art of Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 39–47, esp. 40, interprets her as the mistress of the household, rather than as the maid, and he suggests a connection between her pose and that associated with the traditional iconography of melancholia. Seymour Slive, ‘“Een Dronke Slapende Meyd Aen Een Tafel” by Jan Vermeer,’ in Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Company, 1968), 452–59, citation at 457. Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 156–58; italics mine. For a survey of seventeenth-century Dutch widow portraiture, see Wayne E. Franitz, ‘Wedowe,’ in Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 161–94. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 52–54; italics mine. See Wheelock, Vermeer and the Art of Painting, 39. It should be noted that the dog has a range of associations, from fidelity to prostitution. Michael Ann Holly, ‘Mourning and Method,’ Art Bulletin 84/4 (2002): 660–69, citation at 667. See also her ‘Cultural History, Connoisseurship, and Melancholy,’ in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, eds Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002), 195–206. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), esp. 171. Ibid., 24. On the 1491–92 self-portrait, see, esp., Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘Albrecht Dürer and the Moment of Self-Portraiture,’ Daphnis 15 (1986): 409–39, esp. 410–11. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 164. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 21–27, citation at 27. Ibid., 23. Keith Moxey, ‘Panofsky’s Melancolia,’ in The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 65–78, citation at 75. Panofsky was not the only twentieth-century German Jew to identify with Dürer’s female personification of Melancholia. Walter Benjamin explored issues of mourning and melancholia in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1977). See O.K. Werckmeister, ‘Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Angel of History,’ Oppositions 15 (1982): 103–25. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 171. As cited by Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 161. For the Latin, see Ficino, Lettere, ed. Sebastiano Gentile, vol. 1 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1990), 172–73, citation at 172: Dic age, Bernarde, si licet, quid in amici obitu luges, mortemne an mortuum? Si mortem, luge, Bernarde, tuam; nempe quam certus es obiisse illum, tam certus es te moriturum, immo te mori: quolibet enim momento vita preterita interit.

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52 Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), particularly 108. 53 Here, my own influence is a title by Joseph Koerner, ‘Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-Century Influenza,’ in Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist, ed. Giulia Bartrum, with contributions by Günter Grass, Joseph L. Koerner and Ute Kuhlemann (London: The British Museum Press; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 18–38, though I interpret Dürer’s ‘influenza’ not as the impact of his style but as the effect of his symptom – his melancholy, the copy of his psycho-cultural condition. 54 Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 168. 55 See James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. 167. 56 Vasari, Lives, vol. 9, 62–63. For the Italian, see Vasari, Le vite, vol. 7, 217–18: Non poteva lo spirito e la virtù di Michelagnolo restare senza far qualcosa … si messe attorno a un pezzo di marmo per cavarvi drento quattro figure tonde maggiori che ‘l vivo, facendo in quello Cristo morto, per dilettazione e passer tempo, e, come egli diceva, perchè l’esercitarsi col mazzuolo lo teneva sano del corpo. Era questo Cristo, come deposto di croce, sostenuto dalla Nostra Donna, entrandoli sotto ed aiutando con atto di forza Niccodemo fermato in piede, e da una delle Marie che lo aiuta, vedendo mancato la forza nella Madre, che vinta dal dolore non può reggere. Nè si può vedere corpo morto simile a quel di Cristo, che, cascando con le membra abbandonate, fa attiture tutte diferenti, non solo degli altri suoi, ma di quanti se ne fecion mai: opera faticosa, rara in un sasso, e veramente divina; e questa, come si dirà di sotto, restò imperfetta, ed ebbe molte disgrazie; ancora ch’egli avessi avuto animo che la dovessi servire per la sepoltura di lui, a piè di quello altare, dove e’ pensava di porla. 57 Vasari, Lives, vol. 9, 83–84. For the Italian, see Vasari, Le vite, vol. 7, 243–44: perchè quel sasso aveva molti smerigli, ed era duro, e faceva spesso fuoco nello scarpello, o fusse pure che il giudizio di quello uomo fussi tanto grande, che non si contentava mai di cosa che e’ facessi … Questa Pietà, come fu rotta, la donò a Francesco Bandini. In questo tempo Tiberio Calcagni, scultore fiorentino, era divenuto molto amico di Michelagnolo per mezzo di Francesco Bandini e di messer Donato Giannotti; ed essendo un giorno in casa di Michelagnolo, dove era rotta questa Pietà, dopo lungo ragionamento li dimandò per che cagione l’avessi rotta, e guasto tante maravigliose fatiche; rispose, esserne cagione la importunità di Urbino suo servidore, che ogni dì lo sollecitava a finirla; e che, fra l’altre cose, gli venne levato un pezzo d’un gomito della Madonna, e che prima ancora se l’era recata in odio, e ci aveva avuto molte disgrazie attorno di un pelo che v’era; dove scappatogli la pazienza la roppe, e la voleva rompere affatto, se Antonio suo servitore non se gli fussi raccomandato che così com’era gliene donassi. Dove Tiberio, inteso ciò, parlò al Bandino che desiderava di avere qualcosa di mano sua; ed il Bandino operò che Tiberio promettessi a Antonio scudi 200 d’oro, e pregò Michelagnolo che se volessi che con suo aiuto di modelli Tiberio la finissi per il Bandino, saria cagione che quelle fatiche non sarebbono gettate in vano; e ne fu contento Michelagnolo: là dove ne fece loro un presente. 58 Modern scholarship on the Florence Pietà is vast and divisive; the following sources have been particularly useful, though many of the arguments conflict with the account offered here: Jack Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (Princeton: Princeton University

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Press, 2003); Phillip Fehl, ‘Michelangelo’s Tomb in Rome: Observations on the Pietà in Florence and the Rondanini Pietà,’ Artibus et Historiae 45/23 (2002): 9–27; Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); John T. Paoletti, ‘The Rondanini Pietà: Ambiguity Maintained through the Palimpsest,’ Artibus et Historiae 42 (2000): 53–80; William E. Wallace, ‘Michelangelo, Tiberio Calcagni, and the Florentine Pietà,’ Artibus et Historiae 42 (2000): 81–100; Nagel, ‘Observations on Michelangelo’s Late Pietà Drawings and Sculptures,’ Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 59/4 (1996): 548–72; Jane Kristoff, ‘Michelangelo as Nicodemus: The Florentine Pietà,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 20/2 (1989): 163–82; Valerie Shrimplin-Evangelidis, ‘Michelangelo and Nicodemism: The Florentine Pietà,’ Art Bulletin 71/1 (1989): 58–66; Leo Steinberg, ‘Animadversions. Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg Twenty Years After,’ Art Bulletin 71 (1988): 480– 505; Irving Lavin, ‘The Sculptor’s “Last Will and Testament,”’ Bulletin. Allen Memorial Art Museum 35/1–2 (1978): 4–39; Robert Liebert, ‘Michelangelo’s Mutilation of the Florentine Pieta: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Alternative to the “Slung Leg” Theory,’ Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 47–54; Charles De Tolnay, Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Frederick Hartt, Michelangelo’s Three Pieta’s (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975); Steinberg, ‘Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg,’ Art Bulletin 50 (1968): 343–53; and Wolfgang Stechow, ‘Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus?’ Studien zur toskanischen Kunst; Festschrift für Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1964), 289–302. 59 Michelangelo, The Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. James M. Saslow (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 398–99. The Italian, also cited there, reads: ‘un uomo in una donna.’ 60 Ibid., 317–18; italics mine. The Italian reads as follows: Per qual mordace lima discresce e manca ognor tuo stanca spoglia, anima inferma? or quando fie ti scioglia da quella il tempo, e torni ov’eri, in cielo, candida e lieta prima, deposto il periglioso e mortal velo? Ch’ancor ch’i’ cangi ‘l pelo per gli ultim’anni e corti, cangiar non posso il vecchia mie antico uso, che con più giorni più mi sforza e preme. Amore, a te nol celo, ch’i’ porto invidia a’ morti, sbigottito e confuse, sì di sé meco l’alma trema e teme. Signor, nell’ore streme, stendi ver’ me le tuo pietose braccia, tomm’a me stesso e famm’un che ti piaccia. 61 Steinberg, ‘Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà,’ 343. 62 As cited by Cropper, ‘Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia,’ 21. The complete text, in Italian, can be found in Frederick Mortimer Clapp, Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo: His Life and Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 280–82.

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63 On the funeral and burial of Alessandro, see, esp., Richard C. Trexler and Mary Elizabeth Lewis, ‘Two Captains and Three Kings: New Light on the Medici Chapel,’ Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (1981): 93–177, esp. 141–60. See also Richard C. Trexler, ‘True Light Shining: vs. Obsurantism in the Study of Michelangelo’s New Sacristy,’ Artibus et Historiae 42 (2000): 101–17; and Charles Burroughs, ‘Monuments of Marsyas: Flayed Wall and Echoing Space in the New Sacristy, Florence,’ Artibus et Historiae 44 (2001): 31–49. 64 Vasari, Lives, vol. 9, 468; italics mine. For the Italian, see Vasari, Le vite, vol. 7, 196: ‘il pensono duca Lorenzo nel sembiante della saviezza, con bellissime gambe talmente fatte, che occhio non può veder meglio.’ 65 As cited by Frederick Hartt, Michelangelo. The Complete Sculpture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1968), 173. 66 John T. Paoletti, ‘Michelangelo’s Masks,’ Art Bulletin 74/3 (1992): 423–40, esp. 40. 67 See Frederick Hartt, ‘Michelangelo, the Mural Drawings, and the Medici Chapel,’ in Michelangelo Drawings, ed. Craig Hugh Smyth (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 179–211. 68 See Ch. 1, note 6. 69 See, esp., John Brackett, ‘Race and Rulership: Alessandro de’ Medici, First Medici Duke of Florence, 1529–1537,’ in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds T.F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 303–25. See also Langdon, ‘Pontormo and Medici Lineages,’ note 73; and Joaneath Spicer, ‘Pontormo’s Maria Salviati with Giulia de’ Medici: Is this the Earliest Portrait of a Child of African Descent in European Art?” The Walters (2001): 4–6. More generally, on early modern race, see Thomas Hahn, ed., Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages, special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31/1 (2001); Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, eds, Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds, Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 70 This account is informed by Valeria Finucci, ‘Maternal Imagination and Monstrous Birth: Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate,’ in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe, eds Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 41–77.

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CHAPTER 5

Phantom Limbs ‘I found her so beautiful in black only because I dreamt of her dead. In fact, it was because I dreamt of her as a widow. What I was in love with in her was the allegory of my own death.’ Jean Baudrillard1

Deadbeat Dads What follows is a report of missing persons and missing parts, specifically the fractured relationship between father and son and the surfacing of the widow’s suture. I begin by calling up, once again, Raphael’s portrait of Baldesare Castiglione, the epitome of courtly cool and composure, now read, in conjunction with its accompanying ‘Elegy,’ as an allegory of anxiety and artful alleviation (Fig. 3.16): Only your portrait, painted by Raphael’s hand, bringing back your features, comes near to relieving my sorrows. I make tender approaches to it, I smile, I joke or speak, just as if it could give me an answer. By an acknowledgement and a nod it seems to me often to want to say something, and to speak with your voice. Your son recognizes his father, and greets him with childish talk. This is my solace, and thus I cheat the long days. 2

And ‘cheat’ it did. Penned as though by his mournful wife, Ippolita Torrello, Castiglione’s elegiac text, entitled ‘Elegy that Baldesar Castiglione pretends was written to him by his wife Ippolita,’ is actually his own; passing for his sorrowful wife by using, yet improving upon, her narrative voice, he exhibits literary as well as emotional transvestism.3 That is, he not only imposes grief upon her but he also sublimates that grief, prematurely mourning himself as would – presumably – his ideal widow. Thus, in what might be read as an anxiety-induced gesture, Castiglione, hoping that his portrait by Raphael will, in his temporary absence, prolong his memory for both wife and son, surreptitiously conflates mournful word and image to ensure that the memorial purpose of this portrait would not be lost on the viewer/ reader. Providing a daily prompt for the widow to mourn the sitter, this portrait reassures the male viewer, still alive, that he, too, will one day be remembered – at least as long as his portrait hangs in the home. But the success of such commemorative portraiture depends upon recognition. A portrait of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, now lost but perhaps painted by Baldessare da Reggio, went so far as to even trick the viewer, his son, into accepting representation as reality, according to a letter of 1471:

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The illustrious Count [the infant, Gian Galeazzo Maria Sforza] is well, happy and good humoured and very eager to see your Excellency [Galeazzo Maria]. This morning I took him into your Lordship’s room where your portrait is and had been uncovered. As soon as the Count saw it with the greatest pleasure and amusement he began to ask, ‘ho pa opa’ making a great show of wanting to go into your arms and it was very difficult to take him away from this.4

This father and son pair would eventually be reconciled, but what about in the ultimate absence, in death itself, can we read male portraiture as extending not just memory but also the illusion of life itself? In other words, if representation is nothing more than regulatory fiction, how else might one ‘cheat’ death? Already in the fifteenth century, Alberti understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice, famously opining that painting ‘not only makes absent men present … but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.’5 And an excerpt from Francisco de Hollanda’s ‘First Dialogue,’ from the Four Dialogues on Painting of 1548, a mid-sixteenth-century observation on the power of portraiture, reads as follows: And what of the way in which [painting] makes present to us men long dead, whose very bones have perished from off the face of the earth, so that we may imitate their noble deeds … It transmits memory of the living to those who come after them … And not only does the noble art of painting do all this but it sets before our eyes the likeness of any great man, whom on account of his deeds we desire to see and know … It prolongs for many years the life of one who dies, since his painted likeness remains; it consoles the widow, who sees the portrait of her dead husband daily before her; and the orphan children, when they grow up, are glad to have the presence and likeness of their father and are afraid to shame him.6

Like Castiglione, whose son, Camillo, ‘recognizes his father, and greets him with childish talk,’ de Hollanda’s ‘great man’ maintains a familial hierarchy, asserting his authority even from the grave, ‘the orphan children … afraid to shame him.’ The elder on display, the son literally looks up to his father, much like Domenico Ghirlandaio’s double portrait, Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro (Fig. 5.1), though this is a pictorial reunion of a different sort.7 The absent one in this relationship is not the father but the son, Teodoro, who died in 1479; he is replaced – remade – by his younger brother, who, born in the year of the eldest son’s death, was also named Teodoro.8 Emotional detachment is not the only separation implied here. This father mourns the death of a son, but he also grieves the severance of the lineage – a double loss that must be repaired.9 But reconciliation will not always be possible, as indeed, Franco Sacchetti writes of a different sort of filial abandonment: ‘“A man wants to have sons. But five times out of six they become his enemies, desiring their father’s death so that they can be free … abandoning those for whom they should [be willing to] die a thousand deaths.”’10 But what happens when the father’s painted likeness goes unrecognized? Vasari’s Ragionamenti sopra le invenzioni delle storie dipinte ne le stanze nuove del Palazzo

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Ducale, which records an imaginary dialogue between himself and Duke Cosimo I’s seventeen-year-old son, Francesco, points to just such a failure. The following conversation takes place in the Sala di Giovanni delle Bande Nere, one of the rooms of the Palazzo Vecchio; this town hall-turned-private residence was a prime seat for Cosimo’s political and familial propaganda, and one of the most visible visual vehicles of that power was Vasari’s decorative program: Francesco: The partitioning of this vault is as rich as any we have seen so far. You’ve accommodated the arms of the house of Medici and the house of Salviati particularly well. Why did you join the arms of the house of Sforza to these? Vasari: Because Giovanni, the father of Signor Giovanni, was married to Caterina Sforza, as you know. I also painted these trophies for the embellishment and greater charm of the room. Francesco: Excellent. Tell me about the portraits in the tondi supported by putti in low relief under these stories. Amongst them I think I see Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Signor Giovanni’s father. Vasari: You recognized him correctly, Your Excellency. The one opposite is Signor Giovanni himself. Francesco: I could have recognized him myself, just as I do Signora Maria, the daughter of Iacopo Salviati and mother of the duke my lord. But I don’t recognize the young man in the last tondo. Vasari: That is your father Cosimo, the son of Signor Giovanni, portrayed just six years before he was made duke.11

Vasari paints a particularly pruned family tree. The Palazzo Vecchio frescoes celebrate Cosimo’s maternal ancestry, including the Sforza and Salviati arms, just as a female-centered genealogy of Cosimo purposefully positions Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lucrezia Salviati and Maria Salviati as primary bodies in the Medicean istoria: Madonna Lucrezia, daughter of Francesco di Messer Simone de’ Tornabuoni, previously Tornaquinci, died on the 25th of March 1482, was left a widow by Piero de’ Medici, son of Cosimo, Father of the Country, on the 2nd of December 1469. She was mother of the Magnificent Lorenzo, [who was] father of Pope Leo X, and of Lucrezia Salviati married to Jacopo Salviati, [who was] mother of the Lady Maria, and grandmother of the most serene Grand Duke Cosimo I.12

That Francesco immediately recognizes his paternal grandmother, Maria Salviati, suggests that Cosimo’s creation of a female-centered ancestral record in order to align himself politically with traditional Florentine values and concerns was successful.13 But if his was also a project of self-survival, it was already dead on arrival. Despite Cosimo’s fixation on his own flesh and blood, Francesco fails to recognize his father,

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‘the young man in the last tondo’ (Fig. 5.2). Granted, Cosimo is portrayed there at the prepubescent age of 12, without his trademark beard, symbol of manhood and masculinity.14 Still, if this is what separates the men from the boys, Cosimo will have to grow up. Portrait Parings If ‘the Medici showed an almost morbid interest in self-perpetuation,’ as PopeHennessy has already told us, we might now return to those ‘detached’ portraits, asking, again, not so much how to but why paint a dead man.15 During the sixteenth century, dozens of posthumous portraits of Cosimo ‘il Vecchio,’ who had died in 1464, were produced, including paintings, miniatures, graphics, sculpture, medals, glyptics, monumental paintings and festival decorations and tapestries.16 One of those portraits on panel deserves special mention: the posthumous portrait painted by Pontormo in 1519, now in the Uffizi (Fig. 5.3). Depicted in profile, his head turned to the left, Cosimo is seated before the broncone, the laurel trunk with two branches – one abundant in full leaf, the other not just bare but severed – encircled by a scroll inscribed with a line from Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘When one branch is broken off, the other is not deficient.’17 It has been suggested that the new branch may represent another Cosimo – the future Cosimo I, son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Maria Salviati, the two Medici cousins whose marriage fused the divergent branches of the family tree.18 In fact, upon his accession, Cosimo I re-dated the portrait of his namesake to correspond to his political victory, and he adopted the truncated branch as his own.19 I would like to propose that the severed limb may have less to do with Cosimo I’s politico-ancestral father, ‘il Vecchio,’ than with his own father, Giovanni. I will return to this point shortly, but, for now, I already read the severed limb as suggestive of the limits of commemorative portraiture and, indeed, someone will come up short. Just as Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ had a personal and political interest in the purposeful twinning of himself with St Cosmas, so, too, did Cosimo I understand the significance of perpetuating – and performing – the family istoria. Of the dozens of posthumous portraits of Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ produced during the sixteenth century, the majority of those were commissioned during Cosimo I’s reign.20 One of those, a portrait of Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ as St Cosmas (Fig. 5.4), was paired with a portrait of Cosimo I as St Damian (Fig. 5.5), both painted by Vasari around 1558, flanking Raphael’s Madonna dell’Impannata in the chapel of the apartment of Leo X in the Palazzo Vecchio.21 The portrait of Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ is unmistakably based on Pontormo’s 1519 portrait (Fig. 5.3), but here Pater Patriae becomes patron saint. Of course, ‘il Vecchio’ had already positioned himself in that role during his lifetime in the central panel of the San Marco altarpiece, but here we find a double doubling. In this detached diptych, the two Cosimos are transfigured, each holding a large book and palm branch and portrayed with a nimbus. Moreover, Cosimo I plays the part of the dead twin brother, ambiguously standing in for both St Damian, the dead twin

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sibling of the posthumous miracle-worker, and Damiano, the deceased infant twin brother of his ancestor. Cosimo I’s commission gives new meaning to the term, antibiotic medicine, but why the insistence on immunity if ‘when one branch is broken off, the other is not deficient?’ On the contrary, Cosimo I seems to have been quite susceptible to deficiency. As a short aside, in a portrait painted by Bronzino most likely between 1537 and 1539, contemporaneous with his appropriation of ‘il Vecchio’s motto of Medicean infallibility, Cosimo I poses as Orpheus (Fig. 5.6), the widowed mythological figure who would be ripped apart, dismembered limb by limb – a striking reversal of his namesake’s miracle-work.22 Is the double doubling of the two Cosimos as Sts Cosmas and Damian, then, a preventive strategy employed to re-member and remember the inevitability of the widowed self? If Cosimo I’s memorial deficiency was remedied by overcompensation, the following pair of analgesic, prosthetic portraits further contributed to his commemorative project. In 1545, Bronzino painted a portrait of Cosimo I that would be copied dozens of times and would become a prototype for a series of official ruler portraits (Fig. 5.7).23 The composition is somewhat familiar: Cosimo I is shown standing before the broncone, just as Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ had been positioned by Pontormo some 25 years earlier. But here, I suggest, the inclusion of the truncated branch may have held a more particular and personal meaning for Cosimo I. Despite the purposeful incorporation of Sts Cosmas and Damian into the self-generated Medici myth, the family intercessors would fail to repeat their medical miracle when Cosimo I’s father, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, having suffered a botched amputation to his right leg, died in battle. Yet in a posthumous portrait attributed to Francesco Salviati, Giovanni’s leg is ‘miraculously’ reattached – no thanks to the family saints nor to any ancestral or filial performances but courtesy of the artist’s brush (Fig. 5.8).24 Thus, Cosimo I’s commission both re-members and remembers the lame, dead body of his father. Moreover, Cosimo I, posing in his dead father’s armor, reclaims the amputated leg for himself and, in so doing, pre-meditatively recuperates – at least pictorially – the inevitability of his own widowed body. In light of Ficino’s assessment that ‘“the son is mirror and image in which the father after death almost remains alive for a long time,”’ consider another father and son pairing: a portrait of Giovanni, by Carlo Portelli (Fig. 5.9), read in and against a portrait of Cosimo I by Alessandro Allori (Fig. 5.10).25 Here, as before, the sharing of armor re-connects the two separated bodies. Indeed, the bequeathing of armor by a father to his son can be read not only as an aristocratic transmission of authority but also as a perpetuation of the name and memory of the elder. Building upon both Lacan’s ‘mirror stage,’ which produces a ‘“succession of phantasies that extend from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that [he calls] orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity,”’ and Derrida’s ‘“prosthetic body,”’ Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, offering up a provocative account of the armor worn by Hamlet’s father, interpret the Ghost’s armor as masking the memory of his fractured body.26 Might we read Giovanni’s armor as doing the same – as covering up his lost limb? And, in turn, might we

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understand Cosimo I’s wearing of his father’s armor as masking the broken lineage? Armor is monumental, enduring and protective; yet, composed of individual pieces of metal, it can also rust, be taken apart and melted down. This especially castrationanxious son (not only was his father’s leg amputated but his patron saints were beheaded) will have to try harder. Luckily, something else stands out in these portrait pairings – the codpiece, the predominant material mnemonic of this machismo costume. In the next section, reading the sartorial prosthesis as a fetishistic device, I will argue that such fanciful tailoring, offering up the illusion of a perpetual erection, simultaneously exaggerates manhood and alleviates the anxiety of loss. Prosthetic Fittings ‘Let the Court stop liking those vulgar codpieces which make a parade of our hidden parts … untidy and unbuttoned, as though he had just come straight from the privy.’27 Montaigne’s admonition, though later, is still pointed, suggesting that Cosimo I was not the only fancy pants at court, where the faux fashion was anything but a fashion faux pas, despite even a contemporaneous disdain for the effeminate accessory as stated in Giovanni della Casa’s courtesy book, Galateo, written between 1552 and 1555: ‘Your garments should not be extremely fancy or extremely ornate, so that no one can say that you are wearing Ganymede’s hose.’28 Indeed, we need only look up Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man (Fig. 5.11) or his Portrait of Ugolino Martelli (Fig. 5.12), both influenced by Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi?) (Fig. 5.13); these cocky poseurs, arrogant and affected, stand endowed with elbow akimbo, asserting their supposed masculinity in a very feminine, albeit in-your-face, manner.29 But if part of a heteronormative project, such primping and preening also went unappreciated by some members of the opposite sex. In The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, Lucrezia Marinella writes ‘Of Men Who Are Ornate, Polished, Painted, and Bleached’: What are all these things but artifice and tinsel? … [men] make great efforts to appear handsome and appealing, not only by putting on clothes made of silk and cloth of gold as many do, spending all their money on an item of clothing, but by wearing intricately worked neckbands? … Let us not even mention the time they spend perfuming themselves and putting on their shoes and blaspheming against the saints because their shoes are small and their feet are big, and they want their big feet to get into their small shoes. How ridiculous! … In truth there are innumerable men who indulge their vanity and use artifice in order to appear sleek and polished.30

I wish to take a closer look at these decorated bodies, especially their exaggerated extremities, proposing that the emphasis on phallic accessories and attachments further contributed to the already padded discourse on memory and masculinity in sixteenth-century Medicean court culture and portraiture. Try this on for size: Between 1550 and 1555, Bronzino painted a portrait of Lodovico Capponi, a page in Cosimo I’s court (Fig. 5.14). An ornately dressed

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Capponi is depicted in three-quarters length against a bright green, loosely draped curtain; he is shown wearing a black taffeta and velvet vest over a white satin blouse with pinked, or slashed, sleeves. Also parted is his black overskirt, revealing his starched and, thus, as was the technique, perhaps, even urine-stained pants. He wears deeply pleated white satin trousers with a strikingly swollen and ribbed codpiece. Stiff and starched, slashed and pinked, perforated and pricked – let me suggest, here, that this sitter and his portrait are, indeed, much like his courtly colleagues, stained and full of holes from the start. In his left hand, lowered below his waist, Capponi carries a pair of leather gloves; loosely bound, the folds of this padded object echo the vaginal form of both of his fingers, which barely sheathe it, and the elliptical pinking of his white satin sleeve. In his right hand, which also peeks out, much like his ribbed codpiece, from under a black taffeta drape, he holds or, rather, conceals a portrait medal. Inscribed ‘SORTE’ (‘FATE’ or ‘FORTUNE’), the medal probably depicts the Florentine woman, Maddalena Vettori, with whom he had fallen in love and to whom he wished to be betrothed. Cosimo I had arranged for Maddalena to marry one of his cousins; Capponi is said to have ignored family and political pressures to end their affair until, eventually, Cosimo I allowed them to marry.31 Focusing on the detail of the simultaneously concealed and revealed medal, art historians have traditionally interpreted Bronzino’s portrait of Lodovico Capponi simply as a wishful sort of pre-nuptial portrait.32 Most recently, Patricia Simons has looked away from the portrait medal and toward Capponi’s previously neglected ‘alert and erect’ codpiece, reading it as ‘a symbol of sexual, generational, or Oedipal rivalry’ between men – a rivalry played out upon or for possession of the bodies of women.33 Building upon Simons’s much-appreciated gaze downward, I read Capponi’s attachments – specifically his swollen codpiece but also his gloves and the portrait medal – as fetishistic devices, which, when worn together as costume, constitute a particularly fashioned memory system, a sartorial strategy against loss, death and oblivion. I suggest that Capponi prematurely mourns not just the possible loss of his beloved, Maddalena, but also the inevitable loss of an even greater love object – himself. In brief, as ‘FATE’ would have it, sometime in the last century, Capponi’s too full-of-himself codpiece was concealed by a restorer’s overpainting, making him an effete elite (Fig. 5.15). Thus, his strategic memory system, stained and full of holes from the start, eventually fails. If, in Marjorie Garber’s account, Lacan’s phallus, though it may dictate the relations between the sexes, becomes merely ‘a stage prop, a detachable object,’ then the phallic myth of masculinity is finally exposed when Capponi loses his erection.34 Yet, ultimately, we remember the always already stiff Capponi as re-membered; a 1949 restoration removed the earlier overpainting and returned life to the once deflated dandy.35 But insofar as ‘dismantling and assembling are inseparable,’ these prosthetic fittings will continually need re-adjusting.36 Turning to another of Bronzino’s courtly characters, we find a young man dressed in black with deeply pleated trousers looking away from his pictorially amputated leg (Fig.

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5.16). Symbolically castrated, his tourniquet-like tying up of his hose suggests that both he and his costume have come undone; this will need reinforcing. Addenda Extending the argument that the body, accessorized, can be read as a mnemonic device, this follow-up to ‘Prosthetic Fittings’ reads ever more closely between the lines of male and female portraiture, specifically those images that contain representations of books – open and closed, legible and illegible. The bibliophiles in question do not read these books; they carry them, hold them, even wear them. Their books are – literally and literarily – accessories. Picture Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man (Fig. 5.11) or his Portrait of Ugolino Martelli (Fig. 5.12), bookish types who pose and point but rarely peruse.37 The presence of the book upon the body, I suggest, in these and other examples, underscores the memorial function of the portrait and encourages a metaphorical re-reading of the body as a specific memorial text – as a book of memory.38 Like a pair of bookends, Pontormo’s Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s ‘On Friendship,’ painted around 1524, depicts a black-clad couple offsetting a single sheet of white paper (Fig. 5.17).39 The handwritten text, a passage from Cicero’s De amicitia, reads as follows: In short, all other objects of desire are each, for the most part, adapted to a single end – riches, for spending; influence, for honor; public office, for reputation; pleasures, for sensual enjoyment; and health, for freedom from pain and full use of the bodily functions; but friendship embraces innumerable ends; turn where you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never untimely and never in the way. Therefore, we do not use the proverbial ‘fire and water’ on more occasions than we use friendship.40

The message of the message bearers seems legible enough: their friendship is omnipotent and omnipresent. Yet it is also multidimensional and multivalent, adapted to ‘innumerable ends.’ In this queered relationship, precisely who and/or what does the other desire?41 Cicero continues: he who looks upon a true friend looks, as it were, upon a sort of image of himself. Wherefore friends, though absent are at hand; though in need, yet abound; though weak are strong; and – still harder to say – though dead, are yet alive; so great is the esteem on the part of their friends, the tender recollection and the deep longing that still attends them.42

This melancholic relationship revolves around the self, but an ‘absent,’ ‘dead’ self. ‘[The dialectic of mourning],’ according to Henry Staten, ‘begins with the process of attachment to, or cathexis of, an object, without which mourning would never arise …’ The object of desire promises presence or, at the very least, memory of the

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one who is absent. Yet, ‘as soon as desire is something felt by a mortal being for a mortal being, eros (as desire-in-general) will always be to some degree agitated by the anticipation of loss … the loss of the beloved is a loss of self.’43 Thus, if the narcissistic projection of one’s fractured self onto the image of the other would seem to ensure not just life but also ‘recollection,’ the success of that auto-memorial project will depend upon the presence of a homogeneous other. Re-viewing Pontormo’s double portrait, the highlighted text reminds these bosom buddies of the power and privilege of their friendship; it joins them together, re-membering what both life and, of course, death will separate. This is, indeed, a dialogue of absence. Elizabeth Cropper, writing on friendship in the context of long-distance relationships, points to the significance of the written word exchanged between friends by citing Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s letter to his friend, Paolo Cortesi: It seems to me that between a portrait and a letter there is the following difference, that the former represents the body and the latter the mind … The portrait, as is its office, emulates the colors of the flesh and the form [figura]; the letter represents thoughts, advice, pains, pleasures, cares, and finally all the emotions, … and sends faithfully the secrets of the soul to the distant friend. In the end the letter is a living and efficient form, and the portrait is a silent and dead simulacrum.44

In Pico’s paragone, which posits the visual text against the literary text, the latter, letter-writing, ‘a living and efficient form,’ is triumphant over portraiture, ‘a silent and dead simulacrum.’ (Hence, I suppose, the need for mail bonding.) Thus, Pontormo’s double portrait is a double failure. In other words, the projection of the desiring self onto the homogeneous other results in nothing but a copy, a duplicate ‘dead’ self.45 This erasure is made visible in a study for Two Men, in which bodies, once of ‘flesh’ and ‘form,’ are, ‘in the end,’ or, rather, from the beginning, erased (Fig. 5.18). If, inevitably, the male subject and his corporeal subtext remain not just abbreviated but altogether absent, the memorial narrative, translated here as fictive, will have to be re-inscribed. I am guided here by Jeffrey Masten, who has stressed ‘that texts are produced within a particular sex/gender context and that gender and sexuality are themselves in part produced in and by texts.’46 If the marking of masculine memory becomes or, rather, always has been, a project of re-inscription, the voice that has been silenced by Petrarchan policy finds its calling, again, in écriture féminine.47 That is, writing the male body will require writing on the female body. Though still marginal, her presence – as anything but homogeneous other – remains signal to the memorial task at hand. She may not be able to laugh out loud but she can surely crack a smile, as does Andrea del Sarto’s Lady with a Book of Petrarch’s Verses, painted between 1515 and 1525 (Fig. 5.19). Coyly looking out toward the viewer, she holds open a book, displaying Petrarch’s sonnets 153 and 154 on the right-hand page; however, she points to the left-hand page, which is, significantly, not seen by the viewer but should only display sonnet 152, including the line, ‘“she makes uncertain my every

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state.”’48 Indeed, her différence disrupts the normative narrative.49 Yet she remains the object of desire, playing muse to Petrarch’s verse, ‘a silent … simulacrum’ of his lost beloved, just as Laura Battiferri, portrayed by Bronzino with an open book of Petrarchan verse positioned parallel to her body, wears his heart upon her sleeve (Fig. 5.20).50 But what else does she wear/we read upon her body? In performing the body/performing the text, the body of mourning, I suggest, becomes a book of memory – but with a few pages ripped out.51 Turning the page, I wish to highlight a double portrait that literally points to the handing off of the memorial task. In what might be read as a conflated diptych, Portrait of a Man and His Wife by Tomasso di Stefano Lunetti (?) or Andrea del Sarto (?) (Fig. 5.21), an emotionally distanced husband manages to remain attached to his wife, his right arm stretching to rest uncomfortably on her right shoulder.52 With his left arm he gestures towards her gesture; she holds a single sheet of paper, unfolded as though containing something to be read, yet the page is (now) blank. Whatever may have appeared there must have referred back to him, if we follow the direction of her pointing finger. Clearly, something is missing here. This is a dysfunctional relationship, discriminatory at best, for it is the woman’s culturally inscribed role to maintain her husband’s memory, even if he is still in the picture. Thus, this double portrait may be read as illustrating the issuing of a decree – the delegation of the work of mourning – as well as the difficulties inherent in such ordering – namely, this woman’s calculated yet unconvincing compliancy with that cultural dictate. To put it simply, seemingly co-dependent, this couple is decidedly disconnected. Indeed, this is a demanding portrait insofar as there is a determined duplicity here, deceptive in its doubleness. Bodies in Limbo Culminating my narrative of portraiture as both corporeal supplement and corporeal mnemonic, I turn to a few suggestive pairings that make explicit my notion of the literal and metaphorical widowed body. If the precariousness of widowhood, as I have suggested, both remedies and aggravates the memorial situation, widow portraiture – insofar as representation fixes the ambiguous role of the primary mourner – plays an obvious key role in recording masculine memory. Yet if such pictures promise the perpetuation of memory, the overcompensatory inclusion of male portraiture would seem to guarantee it. In other words, fusing the disjecta membra of the widow, her portrait and the man for whom she is the Other object of desire, I examine a selection of double portraits that position Medici men alongside Medici widows, a pictorial attempt at reconciliation. But, first, I re-introduce the genre of widow portraiture by purposefully calling up a problematic double portrait painted by Pontormo c. 1537 (Fig. 5.22). Maria Salviati, dressed plainly in black with a widow’s veil, holds a medal, perhaps commemorating the death of her husband, Giovanni delle Bande Nere; she also holds the hand of a small child, previously identified as her young son, Cosimo, but now understood to be the

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illegitimate daughter of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, Giulia de’ Medici, whose mother was his widowed mistress, Taddea Malaspina.53 Curiously, Cosimo I commissioned this painting, the first official portrait to commemorate Maria Salviati’s widowhood. Did Cosimo commission this portrait of his mother as widow in order to maintain his father’s memory? Or did Cosimo, fearing not only his death but also a potential lapse into oblivion, appropriate his father’s widow as his own? That is to say, seeing his mother mourning her husband, his father, does this widow’s portrait serve to reassure Cosimo that he, too, will be remembered? Further, did this image function for Cosimo as a reminder that his father was dead, and, by so doing, did it reinforce his authority, power and masculinity? If widow portraiture confirms the death of the father, Cosimo is here victorious, especially so if this painting was commissioned in the very year he rose to power – 1537; thus, his new control of the state may also reflect his victory at home. And yet, if this portrait of Maria Salviati can be read as asserting the masculinity of Cosimo and situating the role and representation of the widow within the politicopatriarchal culture of early modern Florence, it can also be interpreted as challenging such gendered codes altogether insofar as it is a very androgynous child who clutches the doubled, phallic fingers of a woman whose erect body and prophylactic-like veil necessarily masculinize her. Some portraits of Medici widows disclose a curious project, whereby the woman is represented mourning her husband prematurely. Such is the case with the double portrait painted by Giovanni Battista Naldini of Maria Salviati and her husband, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, commissioned by Cosimo I’s sons, Dukes Francesco and Ferdinando, in 1585, to record the Medici lineage (Fig. 5.23).54 Indeed, this is a dubious pairing, arguably an arrangement of convenience. Giovanni predeceased his wife by 17 years, but he is portrayed as though alive during her mourning of him. As a short aside, a similar performance plays out in another double portrait of this series, that one painted by Lorenzo Vaiani, called Lo Sciorina, of Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici and Caterina Sforza; there, Maria’s mother-in-law prematurely mourns her ‘husband,’ who predeceased her by 11 years (Fig. 5.24).55 But returning to the Naldini double portrait, something else is wrong with this picture: Giovanni died from a botched amputation to his right leg; here, however, the severed limb is re-attached to the fractured male body, while his truncated ‘widow’ simultaneously mourns his loss. The prosthesis, then, is understood not only as an extension – as an artificial body part – but also as a replacement – as an artificial body. This compromising picture, an awkward blending of displaced widow with privileged amputee, may be interpreted as yielding a scene of convalescence rather than collision. And yet, if this double portrait celebrates the virtuous performance of Maria Salviati’s widowhood – her body veiled, submissive and passive – and if it inscribes the memory of Giovanni’s manhood – his body armored, potent and active – there is, nonetheless, a precarious and ambiguous fissure discernible in this painting. Her downward gaze, which could be interpreted as directed toward his prominent, exaggerated codpiece, is, then, like the castrating gaze of Medusa, ultimately fatal. That is, she may seem blindsided by his second coming, but this widow’s peek still cuts deep.

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If memorial deficiency might be remedied by overcompensation, this was not the only fabricated, prosthetic representation of fragmented, widowed bodies to serve the Medicean istoria of (re)generation and commemoration. A double portrait of 1590, depicting Cosimo II, grandson of Cosimo I, at the age of six months with his widowed governess and cousin, Costanza della Gherardesca, likewise, prompts us to interpret the phantom limb not merely as the sensation of the presence of the widowed part but, rather, as the desire and longing for the widow herself (Fig. 5.25).56 Cosimo holds in one hand a long black walking stick, though, literally supported by his widow, this is not his only crutch. I read this suggestive synthesis as another pre-emptive memorial strategy; however, if she stands in as his eventual widow, predeceasing him, that role would never be fully realized. The Medicean istoria – from Sts Cosmas and Damian to Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ to Cosimo I to Cosimo II – offers up the male body that refuses death, a desire that is realized in and against the widow’s body. The double portrait may appear to reconcile the seeming incompatibility of man and widow – that awkward conversation between memory and memory loss – and yet the relationship between remembering and forgetting remains estranged. In other words, the inclusion of the woman as widow might contribute to a recuperative narrative, but her presence also betrays that regulatory fiction insofar as widowhood presumes male absence. And, indeed, painting, Alberti is careful to note, merely ‘makes the dead seem almost alive.’57 Black Holes Here and in the preceding chapters, I have begun to re-think the dialogue between the mnemonic body and the incorporeal, between the widow and the one she is meant to remember. But if these are the ‘bodies that matter,’ these are merely black holes. That is, if the open wound – the trauma of memorial deficiency – is temporarily closed by the widow’s suture, that corporeal promise of re-membrance will soon again rupture. I end on a purposefully sketchy note, turning to three graphics and the grafting – and erasure – of identity implied there. First, Pontormo’s studies (Figs 5.26 and 5.27) for the portrait of Maria Salviati (Fig. 3.13) remind us that the corporeal project is fractured from the start, for hers, too, is a body severed – cut up and cut off. In other words, if the early modern widow is expected to fill a void, she herself falls right through the cracks, slipping in and out of any and all socio-corporeal boundaries, flirting with her very own fiction. And yet, though amputated and amnesiac, this project is not a total loss. ‘They have centuries of memory, they have bodies filled with memory … they bore holes in the family;’ these are the hysterical women about whom Catherine Clément so eloquently writes, but her provocative words also speak to the grieving woman, whose compulsive and compulsory performance has now been silenced – indeed, practically erased – by this widow’s portrait.58 Still, if what we find in Pontormo’s representation is the pictorial persistence of the widow’s precarious

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memorial performance, we also are presented here with an empty hollow. Indeed, as Pontormo’s drawings suggest (esp. Fig. 5.27), the mnemonic body, no matter how fleeting, will unforgettably haunt the one she is meant to remember.59 And yet, hers is not the only hole in this story. Cosimo – that nominal palimpsest so pertinent to the Medicean istoria of recuperation and (re)generation – is about to collapse. Indeed, without his crutch – that prosthetic project compromised with the death of his widow, Costanza della Gherardesca (Fig. 5.25) – Cosimo II will have to learn to stand on his own. Of all the prostheses that mark the history of the body, the double is doubtless the oldest. But the double is precisely not a prosthesis: it is an imaginary figure, which, just like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again, which haunts the subject like a subtle and always averted death.60

Ultimately, in Jacques Callot’s study for the funerary portrait of the Medici Duke, Cosimo becomes, or, rather, is revealed to be, just an(O)ther trace of himself (Fig. 5.28).61 And yet, as this passage from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation suggests, the trace of the self is, perhaps, far more haunting than the presence/erasure of the widowed body. Notes 1 Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1991–1995, trans. Emily Agar (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 35. 2 As cited by Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 55. See also David Rosand, ‘The Portrait, the Courtier, and Death,’ in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, eds Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 91–129, esp. 92–95, and, for the Latin, 126: sola tuos vultus referens, Raphaelis imago picta manu curas allevat usque meas. Huic ego delicias facio arrideoque iocorque alloquor et, tanquam reddere verba queat. Assensu nutuque mihi saepe illa videtur dicere velle aliquid et tua verba loqui. Agnoscit balboque patrem puer ore salutat: Hoc solor longos decipioque dies.

The classical model, the elegy of Aretusa for her absent lover, Lycotas, written by Propertius in the first century BCE, reads as follows: ‘“And when evening brings round for me the bitter nights, I kiss what weapons of yours remain here;”’ as cited by John Shearman, Only Connect – : Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 135–36.

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3 See Jonathan Goldberg, ‘The Female Pen: Writing as a Woman,’ in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, eds Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy Vickers (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 17–38; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 4 As cited by Evelyn Samuels Welch, ‘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, citation at 166. The Italian, also cited there, reads: Gratia dio lo illustrissimo conte sta bene, alegro, di bona voglia e molto dessideroso de vostra excellentissima signoria. Questa matina lo portai ala camera de vostra signoria dove lì hè il retracto de quella et il fece scoprire. Unde subito che lo prefacto conte il visti con grandissima alegreza et feste comenza ad domandare ‘ho pa opa,’ facendo gran vista de volerli andare in brazo dove me fu molto deficile levarlo da la impresa. 5 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, rev. ed., trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966), 63. For the Latin and Italian, see Ch. 1, note 45. 6 Francisco de Hollanda’s ‘First Dialogue,’ from the Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. Aubrey F.G. Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 25–26; italics mine. For the Portuguese text, see de Hollanda, Quatro Diálogos da Pintura Antiga, ed. Angel González Garcia (Lisbon, 1983), 246–47: Que direi de como nos mostra presentes os varões que ha tanto tempo que passaram, e de que já não parecem nem os ossos sobre a terra para os poderemos emitar em seus feitos claros? … Deixa dos presentes memoria para os que hão de vir depois d’elles … E não sómente estas cousas faz esta nobre arte, mas põe-nos diante dos olhos a imagem de qualquer grande homem, por seus feitos desejado de ser visto e conhecido … Ao que morre dá vida muitos annos, ficando o seu proprio vulto pintado, e sua mulher consola, vendo cada dia diante de si a imagem do defunto marido; e os filhos, que mininos ficaram, folgam, quando são já homens, de conhecer a presença e o natural de seu caro pai, e hão d’elle medo e vergonha. 7 See Federico Zeri, Italian Paintings: Florentine School; A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; distributed by the New York Graphic Society, 1971), 133–35. See also Jill Burke, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), esp. 91–92; Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 278–79; and Christopher Fulton, ‘The Boy Stripped Bare by His Elders: Art and Adolescence in Renaissance Florence,’ Art Journal 56/2, How Men Look: On the Masculine Ideal and the Body Beautiful (1997): 31–40, esp. 31–32. 8 See Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘The Name “Remade”: The Transmission of Given Names in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 283–309. 9 On fathers in mourning for their sons, see, esp., Juliann Vitullo, ‘Fatherhood, Citizenship, and Children’s Games in Fifteenth-Century Florence,’ in Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, eds Rosalynn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,

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2005), 183–94; and Margaret L. King, The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). More generally, on fathers and sons, see John M. Najemy, ‘Giannozzo and His Elders: Alberti’s Critique of Renaissance Patriarchy,’ in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. William J. Connell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 51–78; Louis Haas, The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence 1300–1600 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Fulton, ‘The Boy Stripped Bare;’ Patricia Simons, ‘Alert and Erect: Masculinity in Some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,’ in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 163–75; Richard C. Trexler, ‘Father and Son,’ in Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), 159–86; and Trexler, ‘In Search of Father: The Experience of Abandonment in the Recollections of Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli,’ History of Childhood Quarterly 3 (1975): 225–52. See also Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. ‘Boys and Men,’ 94–101. 10 As cited by Fulton, ‘The Boy Stripped Bare,’ 32. For the Italian, see Franco Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, ed. Vincenzo Pernicone (Florence: Sansoni, 1946), 290: ‘E fu molto savio; però che, delle sei volte, le cinque, l’uomo ha volontà d’aver figliuoli, li quali son poi suoi nimici, desiderando la morte del padre per esser liberi.’ 11 As cited by Jerry Lee Draper, Vasari’s Decoration in the Palazzo Vecchio: The Ragionamenti Translated with an Introduction and Notes (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1973), 353–54; italics mine. For the Italian, see Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanese, vol. 8 (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), 183–88, citation at 186–87: P. Lo scompartimento di questa volta è così ricco, quanto altro che fin ad ora aviamo veduto, ed in particolare avete molto bene accomodate queste armi di casa Medici e Salviati; perchè avete voi messo rincontro a queste l’arme di casa Sforza? G. Perchè Giovanni padre del signor Giovanni ebbe per moglie Caterina Sforza, come la sa, e ci ho dipinti questi trofei per abbellimento e maggior vaghezza di questa stanza. P. Benissimo; dichiaratemi questi tondi sostenuti da que’ putti di basso rilievo sotto queste storie, ove sono que’ ritratti, e fra gli altri in questo mi par vedere Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, padre del signor Giovanni. G. Vostra Eccellenza l’ha cognosciuto benissimo, e quest’altro qua al dirimpetto è il signore Giovanni. P. Lo riconoscevo da me, sì come in quest’altro riconosco la signora Maria, figliuola di Iacopo Salviati, madre del duca mio signore: ma in quest’ultimo qua non raffiguro quel giovanetto. G. Quello è il signor Cosimo, padre di Vostra Eccellenza, e figliuolo del signor Giovanni, ritratto a punto sei anni avanti che fusse fatto duca.

See also Janet Cox-Rearick, ‘Art at the Court of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici,’ in The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, ed. Cristina Acidini Luchinat (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2002), 35–45, esp. 38–41; Paola Tinagli, ‘Claiming a Place in History:

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Giorgio Vasari’s Ragionamenti and the Primacy of the Medici,’ in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2001), 63–76; and Tinagli, ‘The Identity of the Prince: Cosimo de’ Medici, Giorgio Vasari and the Ragionamenti,’ in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, ed. Mary Rogers (Aldershot, Eng. and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 189–96. 12 As cited by Natalie Tomas, ‘Commemorating a Mortal Goddess: Maria Salviati de’ Medici and the Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I,’ unpublished paper, 12. For the Italian, see her note 67: Madonna Lucrezia, figliuola di Francesco di Messer Simone de’ Tornabuoni, già Tornaquinci morì e’ 25 di Marzo 1482, resta vedova di Piero de’ Medici, figliuolo di Cosimo, Pater Patriae a dì 2 di Dicembre 1469 – fu madre del Magnifico Lorenzo, padre di Papa Leone X, e della Lucrezia maritata a Jacopo Salviati, madre della Signoria Maria, et avola del Serenissimo Gran. Duca Cosimo Primo. 13 Ibid. 14 See Will Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England,’ Renaissance Quarterly 54/1 (2001): 155–85. 15 John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), 180–81. 16 This calculation is based on the inventory provided by Karla Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici: 15th–18th Centuries, 3 vols (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1981– 1989), 385–406. 17 Ibid., 387. ‘VNO AVV / LSO.NO(n).DEFIC / (it) ALTER.’ 18 See, esp., Janet Cox-Rearick, ‘The Two Cosimos,’ in Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 233–50. 19 Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 387. To clarify, Cosimo I did not commission this posthumous portrait of his ancestor, Cosimo ‘il Vecchio,’ painted around the time of his birth in 1519; still, he made sufficient use of it during his lifetime. 20 Working with Langedijk’s calculation, I have included only those portraits that have been securely dated, discounting many undated, anonymous portraits, even if they appear in sixteenth-century inventories. 21 Ibid., 389 and 435; and Ludovica Sebregondi, ‘Cosma e Damiano. Santi Medici e Medicei,’ in Cosma e Damiano; dall’Oriente a Firenze, ed. Elena Giannarelli (Florence: Edizioni della Meridiana, 2002), 75–105, esp. 92. A similar ‘portraits-as-saints’ double pairing occurs in Bronzino’s altarpiece for the Chapel of Eleonora, also in the Palazzo Vecchio; the wings depict Giovanni delle Bande Nere as St John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence and name-sake of Giovanni, and Cosimo I as St Cosmas (this wing, ironically, lost). For this and still other instances of the Medici posing as their patron saints, see Janet Cox-Rearick, Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 260–71. 22 See, most recently, Carl Brandon Strehlke, ed., Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press; Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004), esp. 130–33; and Elizabeth Cropper, ‘Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia: A Double Portrait,’ in Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici, 1–33, esp. 27–29. See also Robert B. Simon, ‘Bronzino’s Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus,’ Philadelphia Museum

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of Art Bulletin 81/348 (1985): 17–27; Mark S. Tucker, ‘Discoveries Made During the Treatment of Bronzino’s Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus,’ Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 81/348 (1985): 28–31; and Kurt W. Forster, ‘Metaphors of Rule: Political Ideology and History in the Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici,’ Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 15 (1971): 64–104. Most influential for the current reading of Cosimo’s portraits are Patricia Simons, ‘Homosociality and Erotics in Italian Renaissance Portraiture,’ in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 29–51, esp. 31–32; and Cristelle L. Baskins, ‘Gender Trouble in Italian Renaissance Art History: Two Case Studies,’ Studies in Iconography 16 (1994): 1–36. There is disagreement concerning which portrait served as the prototype and how many copies were made. See Robert B. Simon, ‘Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I in Armour,’ Burlington Magazine 125 (1983): 527–39; and Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 407–530. I am less concerned with numbers and more concerned with iconography and socio-cultural function. For the sake of consistency, I have relied on Langedijk for dating and attribution. I should mention here that Simon, 531, disagrees with Langedijk, 412–14, that the portrait in Kassel was the prototype; in addition, he assigns the Kassel portrait to the Workshop of Bronzino. Again, there is disagreement between Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 1031, and Simon, ‘Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I in Armour,’ 534, who assigns the Turin portrait to an anonymous painter. For additional portraits of Giovanni, see Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 1027–41. See also Mario Scalini, ed., Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Florence: Banca Toscana, 2001). As cited by Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 236. For the Italian, see Marsilio Ficino, Supplementum ficinianum, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller, vol. 2 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1937), 113: ‘il figliuolo è uno specchio et imagine, nella quale el padre dopo la morte sua quasi rimane lungo tempo vivo.’ Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Of Ghosts and Garments: The Materiality of Memory,’ in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 245–68, citation at 256. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On sumptuary laws,’ in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. and ed. M.A. Screech (London and New York: Penguin, 1987), 300–302, citation at 301. For the French, see Montaigne, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1965), 269–70: ‘Qu’ils se desplaisent de cette vilaine chaussure qui montre si à descouvert nos membres occultes … tout esbraillé et destaché, comme s’il venoit de la garderobbe.’ Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, trans Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1986), 55. For the Italian, see della Casa, Il Galateo, ed. Ugo Scoti-Bertinelli (Turin: Paravia, 1913), 144: ‘Niuna tua vesta vuole essere molto molto leggiadra, nè molto molto fregiata; acciò che non si dica, che tu porti le calze di Ganimede.’ On Pontormo’s portrait, see, esp., Elizabeth Cropper, Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997). On the codpiece in Italian Renaissance portraiture, see, esp., Simons, ‘Alert and Erect;’ and Konrad Eisenbichler, ‘Bronzino’s Portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere,’ Renaissance and Reformation 24/1 (1988): 21– 33. See also Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and

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30

31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38

Early Modern Europe, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2001), 162–68; Jeffery C. Persels, ‘Bragueta Humanística, or Humanism’s Codpiece,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 28/1 (1997): 79–99; and Grace Q. Vicary, ‘Visual Art as Social Data: The Renaissance Codpiece,’ Cultural Anthropology 4/1 (1989): 3–25. On the jutting elbow as a gendered gesture, see Zirka Z. Filipczak, ‘Poses and Passions: Mona Lisa’s “Closely Folded” Hands,’ in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, eds Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary FloydWilson (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 68–88; and Joaneath Spicer, ‘The Renaissance Elbow,’ in A Cultural History of Gesture, eds Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 84–128. Lucrezia Marinella, ‘Of Men Who Are Ornate, Polished, Painted, and Bleached,’ in The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, ed. and trans. Anne Dunhill (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 166–75, citations at 167, 168 and 170. See Luisa Becherucci, ‘Per un Ritratto del Bronzino,’ in Studi in Onore di Matteo Marangoni (Florence: Vallecchi, 1957), 202–209. I am grateful to Janet Cox-Rearick for this reference. See also Maurice Brock, Bronzino, trans. David Poole Radzinowicz and Christine Schultz-Touge (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 140. See, for example, The Frick Collection: An Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 210–15. See also Charles McCorquodale, Bronzino (London: Jupiter, 1981), 137–39. Simons, ‘Alert and Erect,’ 171. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 120. Occasionally, Capponi still appears without his symbolic erection. As only one example, a 1989 publication reproduces the portrait as it appeared before the 1949 restoration. See Gabrielle Langdon, ‘A Reattribution: Alessandro Allori’s Lady with a cameo,’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 52/1 (1989): 25–45, Fig. 5. Marquand Smith, ‘The Uncertainty of Placing: Prosthetic Bodies, Sculptural Design, and Unhomely Dwelling in Marc Quinn, James Gillingham, and Sigmund Freud,’ New Formations 46 (2000): 85–102, citation at 85. See Brock, ‘To Each Their Own Mask: The Non-Allegorical Male Portraits,’ in Bronzino, 105–61, esp. 124–32. On mnemonic systems and techniques, see, esp., Lina Bolzoni, ‘Trees and Other Schemas: Some Examples of Their Use,’ in The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from Its Origins to St Bernardino da Siena, trans Carole Preston and Lisa Chien (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 83–115; Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, trans. Stephen Clucas (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000; Claire Richter Sherman and Peter M. Lukehart, eds, Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion, eds, Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of

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the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966). 39 See Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici, 64–66; Cropper, ‘Pontormo and Bronzino,’ esp. 14–19; Elizabeth Pilliod, Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 90; and Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture, esp. 67–68. 40 As cited by Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici, 64. The Latin, also cited there, reads: Denique ceterae res quae expetuntur / opportunae sunt singulae rebus fere singulis divitae / ut utare opes ut colare honores ut / laudere voluptates ut gaudes valetudo / ut dolore carceas et muneribus fungare / corporis Amicitia plurimas res / continet quoquo te verteris praesto est / nullo loco excluditur Numquam / [intem]pestiva numquam [molesta est] / Itaque non aqua non igni ut aiunt / pluribus locis utimur / Quam Amicitia. 41 Here, I draw primarily upon Jeffrey Masten, ‘Between Gentlemen: Homoeroticism, Collaboration, and the Discourse of Friendship,’ in Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 28–62. My reading of this double portrait is also informed by Robert S. Lubar, ‘Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture,’ Art Bulletin 79/1 (1997): 57–84; and Patricia Simons, ‘Homosociality and Erotics.’ 42 As cited by Cropper, ‘Pontormo and Bronzino,’ 17. For the Latin, see Cicero: De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, ed. and trans. William Armistead Falconer (New York: Putnam, 1923), 132: Verum etiam amicum qui intuetur, tamquam exemplar aliquod intuetur sui. Quocirca et absentes adsunt et egentes abundant et imbecilli valent et, quod difficilius dictu est, mortui vivunt; tantus eos honos memoria desiderium prosequitur amicorum, ex quo illorum beata mors videtur, horum vita laudabilis. 43 Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xi–xii. 44 As cited by Cropper, ‘Pontormo and Bronzino,’ 18; see also Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 331–32. 45 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994). 46 Masten, Textual Intercourse, 5. 47 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ trans Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1/4 (1976): 875–93. 48 As cited by Cropper, ‘Pontormo and Bronzino,’ 15. For the Italian, see Petrarch, The Canzoniere, or, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 242: ‘mi rota sì ch’ogni mio stato inforsa.’ 49 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 50 See Brock, Bronzino, 93–103; Deborah Parker, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 96–103; Victoria

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54

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Kirkham, ‘Dante’s Phantom, Petrarch’s Specter: Bronzino’s Portrait of the Poet Laura Battiferri,’ in Visible Parlare: Dante and the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Lectura Dantis, ed. Deborah Parker, 22–23 (1998): 63–139; and Graham Smith, ‘Bronzino’s Portrait of Laura Battiferri,’ Source: Notes in the History of Art 15/4 (1996): 30–38. See also Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Widowed Words: Dante, Petrarch, and the Metaphors of Mourning,’ in Discourse of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, eds Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Dartmouth College, 1989), 97–108. The phrase at the start of this sentence borrowed from Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, eds, Performing the Body/Performing the Text (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). See Andrea del Sarto, 1486–1530: Dipinti e disegni a Firenze (Milan: D’Angeli-Haeusler, 1986), 181–83. The young child, whose identity is disputed, had been painted out at an unknown date. When the painting was restored in 1937, the overpainting was removed, leading to the hypothesis that the child may be Cosimo. For this, see the following: Janet Cox‑Rearick, The Drawings of Pontormo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 241, 300ff, and 310ff; Herbert Keutner, ‘Zu einigen Bildnissen des frühen Florentiner Manierismus,’ Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 8/1–4 (1957–59): 139–54, esp., 146–50 and 152; Edward King, ‘An Addition to Medici Iconography,’ Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 3 (1940): 75–84; Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 1263; and Federico Zeri, Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1976), 325–28, esp. 325; Zeri also suggests that Maria holds the medal struck by Francesco da Sangallo in 1522 in honor of Giovanni delle Bande Nere. Bernard Berenson, in private correspondence with King, stated that the young child is not Cosimo but is, instead, a girl; for this reference, see Elizabeth Cropper, Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier, 4. More specifically, Gabrielle Langdon, ‘Pontormo and Medici Lineages: Maria Salviati, Alessandro, Giulia and Giulio de’ Medici,’ RACAR 19/1–2 (1992): 20– 40, esp. 27–30, has proposed that the young child is Giulia de’ Medici in the care of Maria Salviati. This identification is accepted by Carlo Falciani, ‘Maria Salviati ritratta dal Pontormo,’ in Rosso e Pontormo: fierezza e solitudini: esercizi di lettura e rendiconti di restauro per tre dipinte degli Uffizi, ed. Antonio Natali (Italy: Gruppo VéGé, 1995), 119–33; Brown, Virtue and Beauty, 222–25; and Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici, 120–21. Luchinat, The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, 67–68, entertains both identifications. Of course, none of these sitters was alive when the portraits were painted in 1585. Giovanni had been dead for 59 years and Maria for 42; Cosimo I for 11 years. Maria’s grandsons, Francesco and Ferdinando, were approximately 41 and 36 years old, respectively, when they commissioned the double portrait. See Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 357, 1028, 1043–44 and 1262. On Medici portrait collections, see Linda Klinger Aleci, ‘Images of Identity: Italian Portrait Collections of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,’ in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, eds Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by British Museum Press, 1998), 67–79. Caterina’s is not merely a pictorial performance of widowhood. Because her marriage to Giovanni was never formalized, no announcement was made upon his death in 1498, and in her ‘widowhood’ she did not receive condolences. See Sharon L. Jansen, The Monstrous

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57 58 59

60 61

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Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2002), 47. On the portrait, see Joyce de Vries, ‘Casting Her Widowhood: The Contemporary and Posthumous Portraits of Caterina Sforza,’ in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison Levy (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 77–92, esp. 90–91. See Caterina Caneva, I Volti del Potere: La Ritrattistica di Corte nella Firenze Granducale (Florence: Giunti, 2002), 50–51; Caroline P. Murphy, ‘Il ciclo della vita femminile: norme comportamentali e pratiche di vita,’ in Monaca, moglie, serva, cortigiana: Vita e imagine delle donne tra Rinascimento e Controriforma, eds Sara F. Matthews-Grieco and Sabina Brevaglieri (Florence: Comune di Firenze, 2001), 15–47, esp. 45–46; Jo-Ann Conklin, ed., Crafting the Medici: Patrons and Artisans in Florence, 1537–1737 (Providence: Brown University, 1999), 30–31; Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 533; and Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del Cinquecento. Palazzo Vecchio: committenza e collezionismo Medicei, vol. 5 (Milan-Florence, 1980), 299–300. See note 5 above. Catherine Clément, Opera, or The Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 180. See Peter Stallybrass, ‘Hauntings: The Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance Stage,’ in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe, eds Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001, 287–316, esp. 312, who writes of Gertrude, the widow ‘who remains to haunt Hamlet, to assert, against the monopoly of male inheritance, the material place of women in the system of memory.’ Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 95. See H. Diane Russell and Jeffrey Blanchard, Jacques Callot: Prints and Related Drawings (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1975), cat. no. 22; and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà and Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani, Feste e Apparati Medicei da Cosimo I a Cosimo II: Mostra di Disegni e Incisioni (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1969), 192–94 and cat. no. 67.

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Afterword

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CHAPTER 6

The Big Stiff ‘A woman is a woman and a man ain’t nothin’ but a male. One good thing about him, he knows how to jive and wail.’ Louis Prima ‘Basin Street, that’s the street Where all the white and the black folks meet Down in New Orleans, the Land of Dreams You’ll never know how nice it seems Or just how much it really means.’ Basin Street Blues

B(l)ackstory If, ultimately, this project suggests the death of masculinity, it also acknowledges the inevitability of its resurrection. I invoke, once again, the San Marco altarpiece, specifically the crucifix attached to the surface of the central panel (Fig. 1.1). Anachronistic and impermeable, this visual interruption may disrupt Alberti’s innovative istoria, but this gilded icon, with its pictorial promise of salvation, also flatly reinstates the master narrative. Recuperation, just as below, in the predella panel that takes as its subject the miracle of the black leg (Fig. 1.3), is dependent upon the prosthetic – a welcome, if jarring, imposition. Lowering my gaze one last time, I wish to suggest an uneven parallel between the hagiographic account of the exhumation of the Moor’s body and his amputation in order to revive the cancerous body of the deacon and the biblical story of the Raising of Lazarus, both of which offer up the male body that refuses death – two big stiffs but only one second coming. Survival, it seems, remains dependent upon the availability of an (in)visible Other. That is, in Fra Angelico’s predella panel, the sacrificial body is nowhere to be seen – telltale limb aside. Yet that disposable black body remains an imperative narrative element, and, indeed, though always a marginal body, the b(l)ackstory sometimes appears front and center. In an earlier painting by Giotto, the Raising of Lazarus in the church of San Francesco in Assisi (Fig. 6.1), overlapping the bandaged – and, thus, very white – body of Lazarus, the black body, shown lifting aside the coffin lid, enables the resurrection of the sterile dead. But Lazarus’s winding sheet is beginning to unravel. Indeed, something doesn’t smell quite right here.

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Re-dressing ‘Renaissance Man’ I begin by calling up Leonardo’s anatomical drawing of a well-proportioned man, commonly known as ‘Vitruvian Man’ (Fig. 6.2), seemingly ideal, complete and measured in every sense, much like, at first glance, so many of the early modern male portraits reproduced in this book. And yet, if this icon has come to represent the universal man, it also must be underscored here that, like his contemporaries, whose representations, in the preceding chapters, I have attempted to re-view through the lens of fracture and fiction, his is, precisely, a circumscribed body – limited and restrictive. In this section, I explore a series of critical engagements with Leonardo’s image, from the alternative iconic bodies of George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe to the re-inscribed gendered bodies of Barbara Kruger and Glenn Ligon to the always sexually anxious body of Woody Allen, visual responses that realize the identity problematics of manhood and masculinity. We might first remind ourselves that bodies are constructions. Consider Cennino Cennini’s calculated formula, ‘The Proportions Which a Perfectly Formed Man’s Body Should Possess,’ from his popular Il libro dell’arte: Take note that, before going any farther, I will give you the exact proportions of a man. Those of a woman I will disregard, for she does not have any set proportion. First, as I have said above, the face is divided into three parts, namely: the forehead, one; the nose, another; and from the nose to the chin, another. From the side of the nose through the whole length of the eye, one of these measures. From the end of the eye up to the ear, one of these measures. From one ear to the other, a face lengthwise, one face. From the chin under the jaw to the base of the throat, one of the three measures. The throat, one measure long. From the pit of the throat to the top of the shoulder, one face; and so for the other shoulder. From the shoulder to the elbow, one face. From the elbow to the joint of the hand, one face and one of the three measures. The whole hand, lengthwise, one face. From the pit of the throat to that of the chest, or stomach, one face. From the stomach to the navel, one face. From the navel to the thigh joint, one face. From the thigh to the knee, two faces. From the knee to the heal of the leg, two faces. From the heel to the sole of the foot, one of the three measures. The foot, one face long. A man is as long as his arms crosswise. The arms, including the hands, reach to the middle of the thigh. The whole man is eight faces and two of the three measures in length. A man has one breast rib less than a woman, on the left side. A man has … bones in all. The handsome man must be swarthy, and the woman fair, etc. I will not tell you about the irrational animals, because you will never discover any system of proportion in them. Copy them and draw as much as you can from nature, and you will achieve a good style in this respect.1

Strange that for such a measured method, which would seem to leave no margin for error, Cennini, in fact, leaves something out. He is unsure about the number of bones belonging to a man; indeed, the ellipsis is his, not mine. The next generation, sharing his deep interest in the make-up of the male body, specifically the composition of the skeleton, would make up for Cennini’s lapse: Alberti advised, in Della pittura,

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‘“first … sketch in the bones,”’ and Ghiberti, in his Commentaries, wrote that ‘“it is necessary … to know how many bones there are … in the male figure.”’2 But if Cennini is determined to ‘Know thyself,’ he will have to re-member his incomplete, structurally unstable, irregular body. I would direct him to Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Memory is your image of perfection) (Fig. 6.3). Yes, this despite the fact that Cennini is absolutely certain that the proportions of a woman, as with ‘the irrational animals,’ should be disregarded. But this female body has something to offer. If Kruger’s x-ray reveals the inner framework of the human body for a pre-dissection era Cennini, it allows us to see right through his ‘Perfectly Formed Man’s Body,’ bringing to light both the constructedness and interdependency of bodies (male and female) and memory. That is, as this book has argued, memory is defined upon and contained within the manipulated body of the Other; and, in this case, memory is, literally, written upon what is, presumably, Kruger’s female body. But Kruger’s gendered image also exposes, in black and white, the racial politics operating beneath the surface of the early modern body, specifically below the central panel of the San Marco altarpiece (nearly contemporaneous with Cennini’s handbook), where the ‘Perfectly Formed Man’s Body’ is re-membered courtesy of the purposefully deformed Moor’s body. Similarly, the early modern/postmodern pairing of Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ (Fig. 6.2) and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Thomas (Fig. 6.4) forces us to face the fiction of the pose and to think outside of the box. In other words, this juxtaposition reminds us that bodies are interchangeable, but at whose expense? According to Peggy Phelan, Mapplethorpe’s ‘photographs confirm and reproduce the dominant ideology of a normative whiteness, an ideology which employs blackness as a commodity to be purchased and/or appropriated.’3 Thus, this virile black body – marked by a rhetoric of sexuality and race, desire and fetish, disease and death – remains a depository of spare parts; Thomas, then, like the Moor before him, is just a standin for ‘Renaissance Man.’4 But Man in a Polyester Suit exposes the members only mentality of this aforementioned inner circle and pointedly prompts us to re-fashion our picture of ‘Renaissance Man’ (Fig. 6.5). Turning to a page from a recent Neiman Marcus fall catalog, we find the AfricanAmerican Hollywood actor, Don Cheadle, playing the part (Fig. 6.6).5 Discolored and disconnected, he is, by all accounts, disadvantaged. That is to say, he doesn’t quite match the profile to which we are accustomed. We might, instead, think of Raphael’s portrait of Baldesare Castiglione, the epitome of purpose and perfection (Fig. 3.16). Yet browsing the pages of this men’s catalog, the reader, in fact, finds this ‘Renaissance Man’ portrayed with attributes and attitudes seemingly styled by none other than Castiglione himself: armor and affettazione, shields and sprezzatura, mannerisms and memento mori. Cheadle lands the role and pulls it off, to be sure, but his precariously arranged props and perforated poses underscore the arbitrariness and artificiality of his self-fashioned subject; and yet, he also manages to upstage his own character insofar as he acknowledges that ‘Renaissance Man’ – both couture and

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courtier – is, from the start, just a performance. Still, life is not a dress rehearsal, and Barneys New York implores the male shopper, black or white, to ‘GET IT RIGHT’ (Fig. 6.7). But dressing the part is only half of the performance. Under many layers of costume and make-up, waiting in the wings, there remains a vulnerable and anxious male body. However, the show must go on and, so, who better to play the part than Woody Allen? In Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), of 1972, Allen plays a neurotic, reluctant sperm with impotence looming large; petite, pale and bespectacled, his already weak body is dressed in an effeminate white leotard equipped with hood and tail (Fig. 6.8). His character starts to become undone when Mission Control, headed up by Tony Randall, announces, ‘Prepare for Launching! … Attention sperm, Attention sperm: Stand by.’ The following dialogue takes place as the sperm await climax: Sperm 1 (routine): ‘Well, here we go again.’ Sperm 2/Allen (worried): ‘You think we’ll get out this time?’ Sperm 3 (frustrated): I hope it’s not another false alarm. They’re having trouble down in engineering.’ Sperm 2/Allen (dismissive): ‘Yeah, but I heard it was all mental.’ … Sperm 1 (with excitement): ‘Well, this looks like it.’ Sperm 2/Allen (more frantic): ‘You guys know what it’s like out there?’ Sperm 1 (comforting): ‘It’s like they told us in training school – it’s an ovum.’ Sperm 2/Allen (whining): ‘I’m scared. I don’t want to go.’ Sperm 1 (insistent): ‘This is what all this training was for.’ Sperm 2/Allen (scared): ‘Yeah, but who knows what it’s going to be like out there? Sperm 1 (reassuring): ‘You saw slides in class.’ Sperm 2/Allen (panicked): ‘Yeah, but … you hear these strange stories … what if it’s a homosexual encounter?’ Sperm 1 (annoyed): ‘Look. This is no time to doubt our mission. You took an oath when you entered sperm training school – to fertilize an ovum or die trying.’ Sperm 2/Allen (desperate): ‘No! I’m scared. I don’t want to go out there!’ … Black sperm (confused): ‘What am I doing here? What am I doing here?’ … Sperm 2/Allen (more desperate and whining): ‘I’m due at my parents for dinner.’ [plays self-elegiac hymn on harmonica] Sperm 2/Allen (giving up): ‘Well, at least he’s Jewish.’6

The eventual ejaculation of Woody Allen’s character reminds us that Other bodies – Jewish, black, queer – cannot be contained within certain fixed-as-normative identity categories. Allen dresses the part in his white leotard but is reluctant to assimilate completely; though determined not to join the other sperm in what may very well become his final journey, he eventually takes the plunge, acting like a man – but on his own terms.7

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Insisting from the start is Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (I AM A MAN), of 1988, which demands the recognition and validation of an uncertain male identity, a ‘MAN’ provocatively and productively undefined by categories of region, race and sexuality (Fig. 6.9).8 Still, the politico-historical reference to placards held by striking black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968 is not altogether invisible in this non-figurative image. But whereas Ligon leaves it up to the viewer’s imagination to figure out what this ‘MAN’ might look like, the New Orleans photographer, George Dureau, presents us with a picture of the Southern black male body that, in its incompleteness, similarly calls into question the very definition of manhood and masculinity; and yet, Dureau’s photographs of amputated black male bodies also bring us face to face with that Other who has been made so available and yet has remained so invisible (Fig. 6.10).9 Standing on his one black leg, John Slate stares right down at us, forcing a confrontation with the detached, displaced body that has long enabled the privileged, if equally fractured, picture of the ‘Perfectly Formed Man’s Body.’ But it is the bionic, prosthetically-enhanced body of Wilbert Hines, whose fetishized mechanics are the manifestation of the perfection Cennini desired, that altogether displaces the always superficial but now superseded ‘Renaissance Man’ (Fig. 6.11).10 From Florence to New Orleans and back again, the black male body – dead and buried, exhumed and amputated, resurrected and restored – has come full circle, but there is still one more body to cut loose. Playing Dead In these final pages, I examine the ways in which the cultural constructions of Southern black masculinity – and memory – are both perpetuated and challenged in the ritual and representation of the jazz musician, underscoring the artificiality of the New Orleans body. Specifically, I read the jazz funeral as spectacle, inseparable from other carnivalesque performances and masquerades of my city – a precarious fusion of tradition and transformation, of continuity and re-negotiation. And so I begin with a double account, one verbal and one visual, offered up by two natives, Louis Armstrong and myself (Figs 6.12–6.14): Once a year, on a certain day, all the social clubs would have a parade … And if they have a member that died, they all turn out. It’d be a beautiful thing. Night before a funeral they have a wake, everybody sitting all night around the body singing … Boy, they shouting! Brother’s rocking in that coffin … And in those early days, before embalming, some bodies used to come back to life. The body would raise up and sit there on that slab, and goddam, imagine all them people trying all at once to get out of one little bitty door. Next morning at the funeral the musicians have to stand around outside waiting for the ceremonial to be over … After the sermon’s over, they’d take the body to the cemetery with the band playing the funeral marches – maybe Nearer My God to Thee. And when that body’s in the ground, man … rolls that drum and everybody gets together and they march back to their hall playing When the Saints [Go Marching In] or Didn’t He Ramble.

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They usually have a keg of beer back there and they rejoice, you know, for the dead. Marching back, the funeral’s going along one side of the street, and on the other side is the ‘second line’ – guys just following the parade, one suspender down, all raggedy, no coat, enjoying the music … In those days in New Orleans, there was always something that was nice and always with music … .11

This temporary transformation of urban space into ritual space takes place on the edges of the French Quarter in Faubourg Treme, which was once Storyville, the famed red-light district and birthplace of New Orleans jazz. Today, in the neighborhood where Louis Armstrong first learned to wail, the bodies of musicians and spectators still process along the precarious boundaries of the St Louis cemeteries and the aptly named Desire Street housing project, accompanied first by traditional dirges and then by cacophonous jubilation. Constantly in a state of flux, this ephemeral performance is both active and interactive; neighborhood becomes theater, street becomes stage, balcony becomes viewing stand, crowd becomes congregation.12 Significantly, the New Orleans jazz funeral is performed publicly by men and for men; thus, this unique memorial complicates the traditional Western formula, whereby woman mourns man (compare Figs 6.12 and 6.15). Instead, in New Orleans, the emotional labor – the work of mourning – is re-distributed across gender lines. With the collective performance of the assembled jazz musicians, the male body now becomes the symbolic site of memorialization within a public sphere no longer dominated/disrupted by female mourners. Indeed, the actress may be relegated to the sidelines, as we see in Lee Friedlander’s provocative photograph, Look Smart (Fig. 6.16), but the script and score remain.13 For example, in performances of The Westlawn Dirge, a New Orleans funeral classic, the solemnity of the traditional dirge is punctuated throughout with emotionally charged shrieks and ululations, and with the transition into the upbeat and celebratory Didn’t He Ramble, almost inarticulate shouts accompany the change in cadence and tempo; but these sounds stem from his corporeal project, not hers. And yet, if the performance of the jazz musician re-inscribes a space for such masculine mourning, I would also argue that his memorial wail is just another riff on playing dead. In other words, an askance look at Friedlander’s photograph might also reveal a jazz musician, who, anxious in his role as hired mourner, about to cross paths with the ‘Stop Ahead,’ grieves in advance the inevitability of his own death. Friedlander seems to suggest as much in his series of portraits of jazz musicians, in which suggestively placed instruments, not without phallic overtones, can be read as serving an apotropaic function: Kid Thomas Valentine tightly grasps the shaft of his monumentalized instrument (Fig. 6.17), ‘Big Head’ Eddie Johnson blows hard (Fig. 6.18) and Edmund Washington overcompensates, amplifying both memorial voice and body (Fig. 6.19). And yet, if, in so mourning, the jazz musician quells his anxiety by re-asserting his masculinity, the necessarily accompanying erection of his blown instrument will eventually go limp and his masculinity gone with the wind (Fig. 6.20). Still, there is the promise of salvation, offered up in the double portrait

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of John Handy and Melvin Lastie at Mama Lou Washington’s Church, where we find the black male body superimposed upon the white Christian Savior (Fig. 6.21). Returning to Friedlander’s picture-within-a-picture (Fig. 6.16), to be sure, the Pepsi-Cola girl, seductively touting her long black bottle, prescribes a certain ‘look,’ but what else does she have to offer? Is this a call for the musicians to ‘look smart,’ to play well? Instead, or perhaps simultaneously, is this a sign for us, as spectators, to alter our gaze, to ‘look smart[er]’ – that is, to look closer and more critically at both performance and performer? For example, the exaggerated portraits of jazz musicians discussed above are hardly unaffected, improvisational arrangements, a point that prompts us to look behind as well as in front of the camera lens.14 If a doubleness or split is discernible in the ritual and representation of Friedlander’s African-American subject, a similar crack or fissure can be read in his own Euro-American self and work. In a self-portrait of 1966 (Fig. 6.22), quite unlike his photographs of jazz musicians, which appear as carefully-ordered and orchestrated as the mourning ritual itself, here, instead, reflection and shadow come together to create a discontinuous and discomforting image, deliberately distorted and purposefully difficult to read.15 One interpretation would be to see the projected white male body of Friedlander as an imposition or intrusion upon his black female subject; another would be to read this ambiguous image as one of affirmative hybridization. If Friedlander is here performing both white masculinity and black femininity, searching for a self in this Lacanian-like mirror, then my own staging of the self reveals a similar doubleness or, rather, creolization. In between funerals, the all-male, all African-American members of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, one of the few surviving and still active burial societies in New Orleans, parade once a year, attempting to turn the traditional white upper-class Carnival on its head through mimicry – its members wear blackface upon whiteface upon (natural) black face (Fig. 6.23).16 Louis Armstrong reigned as King Zulu in 1949, supposedly remarking, ‘I’ve always been a Zulu, but king, man, this is the stuff…’ (Fig. 6.24). Echoing that bodily re-negotiation, my father and I, granted temporary membership in Zulu in 1998, underwent – not without some anxiety – a similar corporeal transformation (Figs 6.25–6.27). But my own Bakhtinian performance on Mardi Gras Day subverted even his subversion as I paraded my ‘grotesque’ body through the streets of New Orleans, both black and white, both male and female.17 Drawing upon Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘doublevision,’ the menace and promise of this particular mimicry is that the ambivalence of identity here makes problematic the very notion of essence and origin – origins both of gender and race, and of history and memory.18 Indeed, insofar as this has been a story about the masquerade of death – the pre-emptive auto-memorial insistence upon playing dead, it is also a story about the death of masquerade – the inevitable fiction of the pose, the ultimate failure of passing.19 And yet, the performance persists. ‘I make my peace with death, Since I am tired and near the end of speech.’20

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Notes 1 Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr (New York: Dover, 1960), 48–49; italics mine. For the Italian, see Cennini, Il libro dell’arte (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982), 81–83: Le misure che de’ avere il corpo dell’uomo fatto perfettamente: Nota che, innanzi più oltre vada, ti voglio dare a littera le misure dell’uomo. Quelle della femmina lascio stare, perché non ha nessuna perfetta misura. Prima, come ho detto di sopra, il viso è diviso in tre parti, cioè: la testa, una; il mento, l’altra; e dal naso al mento, l’altra. Dalla proda del naso per tutta la lunghezza dell’occhio, una di queste misure: dalla fine dell’occhio per fine all’orecchie, una di queste misure: dall’uno orecchio all’altro, un viso per lunghezza: dal mento sotto il gozzo al trovare della gola, una delle tre misure: la gola, lunga una misura: dalla forcella della gola alla sommità dell’omaro, un viso; e così dall’altro omero: dall’omero al gomito, un viso: dal gombito al nodo della mano, un viso ed una delle tre misure: la mano tutta per lunghezza, un viso: dalla forcella della gola a quella del magon, o vero stomaco, un viso: dallo stomaco al bellico, un viso: dal bellico al nodo della coscia, un viso: dalla coscia al ginocchio, due visi: dal ginocchio al tallone della gamba, due visi: dal tallone alla pianta, una delle tre misure: il pié, lungo un viso. Tanto lungo l’uomo, quanto per traverso aver le braccia: distenda le braccia con le man per fino a mezza la coscia. È tutto l’uomo otto visi e due delle tre misure. Ha l’uomo, men che la donna, una costola del petto dal lato manco, Ha, in tutto, l’uomo ossa … De’ avere la natura sua, cioè la verga, a quella misura ch’è piacere delle femmine; sia i suo’ testicoli piccoli, di bel modo e freschi. L’uomo bello vuole essere bruno, e la femmina bianca, ecc. Degli animali irrazionali non ti conterò, perché non n’apparai mai nessuna misura. Ritra’ ne e disegna più che puoi del naturale, e proverrai in ciò a buna pratica.

2 3 4

5 6

On the careful attention to bones in the context of anatomical disegno, see Patricia L. Reilly, ‘Drawing the Line: Benvenuto Cellini’s On the Principles and Method of Learning the Art of Drawing and the Question of Amateur Drawing Education,’ in Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor goldsmith writer, eds Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo L. Rossi (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26–50. As cited by Katharine Park, ‘Masaccio’s Skeleton: Art and Anatomy in Early Renaissance Italy,’ in Masaccio’s Trinity, ed. Rona Goffen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 119–40, citations at 132 and 133. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 47. See, esp., Gen Doy, ‘Desire, Fetishism and Black Beauties,’ in Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 156–203. See also William Hood, ‘A Lazy Man’s Approach: Robert Mapplethorpe and the Language of Sculpture,’ in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 199–212. This fashion spread appeared in the October 2002 Neiman Marcus catalog, 140–49. Woody Allen, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) ( MGM/UA: 1972).

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7 This account informed by Ann Pellegrini, ‘Jewishness as Gender: Changing Freud’s Subject,’ in Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 17–37, useful also for its summaries of the related arguments of Daniel Boyarin and Sander Gilman. 8 See Judith Tannenbaum, ed., Glenn Ligon: Unbecoming (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art and University of Pennsylvania, 1997). 9 See Melody D. Davis, The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), esp. ‘The Specularized and Specularizing Other: George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe,’ 65–107. 10 See Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2004), esp. ‘A Missing Part,’ 303–39. 11 As cited by John Miller and Genevieve Anderson, eds, New Orleans Stories (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992), 24–25. 12 The New Orleans jazz funeral has received little critical attention; one exception is the important study by Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), esp. 277–81. See also, Karla F.C. Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–78. 13 See Lee Friedlander, The Jazz People of New Orleans (New York: Pantheon, 1992). 14 See Allison Levy, ‘Representations of Jazz Musicians,’ in Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2, eds Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 440–41. The following jazz studies have informed the present critical re-viewing of the jazz musician: Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Alfred Appel, Jr, Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); Robert G. O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and the following studies by Krin Gabbard: Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996; and his edited collections, Representing Jazz (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995) and Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995) 15 See Lee Friedlander, Self-Portrait, 2nd ed. (San Francisco; D.A.P. in association with Fraenkel Gallery, 1998). See also Friedlander (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005). 16 For a critical account of New Orleans Carnival, see Roach, Cities of the Dead; see also James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997). On blackface, see W.T. Lhamon, Jr, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998); Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). But see also Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 17 See Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’ in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 213–29;

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and, of course, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984). 18 See, in particular, Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,’ October 28 (1984): 125–33, but consult also his other essays collected in The Location of Culture (London and New York, Routledge, 1994). See also Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967). Other studies that have informed the current essay include Daniel Boyarin, ‘What does a Jew Want? or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus,’ in The Masculinity Studies Reader, eds Rachel Adams and David Savran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 274–91; and Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Desire and Difference: Homosexuality, Race, Masculinity,’ in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, eds Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 17–44. 19 Consult Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed., Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996). 20 Michelangelo, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, trans Creighton Gilbert and R.N. Linscott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), no. 266.

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Index Note: For further details, please refer to the List of Illustrations and the Bibliography which have not been included in this index. African-American masculinity 149 Alberti, Leon Battista 3, 6, 71, 120 widow in Dinner Pieces 60 Della famiglia (see Plate 3.8) Self-Portrait (see Plate 3.7) Alessandro de’ Medici (Pontormo) 95 (see also Plate 4.1) Allen, Woody 146 Allori, Alessandro. Cosimo I 123–4 (see also Plate 5.10) altarpiece, San Marco 3–5, 143 Alvise Contarini (?) (Jacometto Veneziano) (see Plate 3.17) amnesia see memory amputation of legs 4–6, 16, 110, 123, 125–6, 129, 147 of Christ 107, 109 Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (Rembrandt van Rijn) (see Plate 1.7) Angelico, Fra. San Marco Altarpiece 3–5, 143 (see also Plates 1.1–1.3) Antinori, Amerigo 95 Antonino of Florence, Sant’ 62 anxiety 11, 13, 105, 146 Arca, Niccolò, dell’. Lamentation over the Dead Christ 35 Aretino, Pietro 63–4 Ariès, Philippe 10, 11 Arimini, Horatio Fusco Monfloreo D’. La vedova del Fusco 61 armor 123–4 Armstrong, Louis 147–8, 149 (see also Plate 6.24) art history, melancholy 104–5

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Augustine, Saint 44–7 Burial of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine Departing for Africa, The (Master of the Osservanza) 46 Confessions 45–6 Funeral of Saint Augustine, The (Benozzo Gozzoli) 47 Saint Augustine in his Cell (Botticelli) 44 Saint Augustine in his Study (Botticelli) 44 auto-mourning 13, 105–6 Bal, Mieke 68 Baldesare Castiglione (Raphael) 74, 119, 145 (see also Plate 3.16) Bande Nere, Giovanni delle (Cosimo I’s father) 123–4 Bardi, Alessandra 73, 74 Bartolomeo, Fra. Portrait of Savonarola as Saint Peter Martyr 8 (see also Plate 1.15) Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation 131 behavior, ritual 37–41 Bellini, Giovanni. Pietà 7, 9 (see also Plate 1.10) Bergamo, Fra Filippo da. De plurimis claris selectibus mulieribus novissime congestum 62 Berger, Harry Jr 15 Bernardino of Siena, San 62 Bhabha, Homi 149 ‘Big Head’ Eddie Johnson (Lee Friedlander) 148 (see also Plate 6.18) Bishop of Florence, Saint Zenobius 35 Bisticci, Vespasiano da 73, 74

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black bodies 4–5, 145, 147, 148–9 black costume 73–6 black femininity 149 black leg miracle 4–5, 16, 110, 143 black masculinity 4, 5, 147–9 Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron 33–4, 60 bodies white 145, 146 widowed 4–6, 16–17, 123 books as accessories 126, 127–8 Botticelli Saint Augustine in his Cell 44 (see also Plate 2.13) Saint Augustine in his Study 44 (see also Plate 2.14) Bouwsma, William J. 11, 17 Brilliant, Richard 15 Bronzino Cosimo I 123 (see also Plate 5.7) Cosimo I as Orpheus 123 (see also Plate 5.6) Laura Battiferri 128 (see also Plate 5.20) Lodovico Capponi 124–5 (see also Plates 5.14 and 5.15) Maria Salviati (see Plate 3.12) Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi?) (see Plate 5.13) Portrait of a Young Man 124, 126 (see also Plates 5.11 and 5.16) Portrait of Ugolino Martelli 124, 126 (see also Plate 5.12) Bruni, Leonardo 37–8, 41–2, 43 Bueri, Piccarda 42 Bugiardini, Giuliano. (Attributed) Portrait Cover with Mask and Grotesques (see Plate 3.19) Portrait of a Lady, called La Monaca 74, 75–6 (see also Plate 3.15) Burckhardt, Jacob 15–16, 71 Burial of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine Departing for Africa, The (Master of the Osservanza) 46 (see also Plate 2.16) burial societies 149 Burton, Robert The Anatomy of Melancholy 98 Butler, Judith 16, 102–3

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Cabei, Giulio Cesare. Ornamenti della gentil donna vedova 67 Callot, Jacques. Study for a Portrait of Cosimo II (see Plate 5.28) Caravaggio. Medusa 37 (see also Plate 2.11) Casa, Giovanni della. Galateo 124 Castiglione, Baldesare 74, 119 Book of the Courtier 74, 96 ‘Elegy’ 119 castration 69, 70, 126 Caterina Sforza (Giorgio Vasari) (see Plate 3.9) Cellini, Benvenuto. Perseus with the Head of Medusa 68 (see also Plate 3.6) Cennini, Cennino 6–7, 144–5 Cheadle, Don 145–6 childbirth, marble slab of death of woman 35 Christ Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Master of the Straus Madonna) 7–8 (see also Plate 1.11) sculpture 106–7, 108, 109 Cibo, Caterina 73, 74 Cicero. Cicero: De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione 126 Cini, Giovan Battista. La vedova 59–60 Clément, Catherine 36, 37, 130 Clement VII, Pope (Giulio de’ Medici) 95, 109, 110 clothing, male 124–6 codpieces 124, 125 Colonna, Vittoria 108 commemorative portraiture 14, 15, 119–20 condom tin, Merry Widows 60 Confessions (Saint Augustine) 45–6 corpses 6–9 Cosimo I 47–8, 121–4, 129 Cosimo I (Alessandro Allori) 123–4 (see also Plate 5.10) Cosimo I (Bronzino) 123 (see also Plate 5.7) Cosimo I (Giorgio Vasari) (see Plate 5.2) Cosimo I as San Damiano (Giorgio Vasari) (see Plate 5.5) Cosimo I as Orpheus (Bronzino) 123 Cosimo II and Costanza della Gherardesca (Florentine School) 130–1 (see also Plate 5.25) Cosimo-as-Cosmas 4, 5–6

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Index Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ 4, 5–6, 122 Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ (Pontormo) 122 (see also Plate 5.3) Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ as San Damiano (Giorgio Vasari) 122–3 Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ as St Cosmas (Giorgio Vasari) 122–3 (see also Plate 5.4) Cosmas, Saint 4, 5–6, 110 courtesans 63, 76 Cropper, Elizabeth 127 cross-dressing 63–5 crutches 130 D’Arimini, Horatio Fusco Monfloreo. La vedova del Fusco 61 Damian, Saint 4, 5, 110 da Bergamo, Fra Filippo. De plurimis claris selectibus mulieribus novissime congestum 62 da Bisticci, Vespasiano 73, 74 da Signa, Boncompagni 35 da Sangallo, Giuliano. Frieze on Francesca Sassetti’s tomb 35 (see also Plate 2.8) da Vinci, Leonardo. Vitruvian Man 144 (see also Plate 6.2) de’ Medici see Medici Deacon Justinian 4, 5, 16, 110 Dead Christ (Andrea Mantegna) 7 (see also Plate 1.9) Dead Christ (Hans Holbein the Younger) (see Plate 1.6) Dead Toreador (Edouard Manet) (see Plate 1.8) dead man, how to and why paint 6–9, 122–4 death of fathers 95–110 historiographies 10, 11 Death of Meleager, The (see Plate 2.10) Death of a Woman in Childbirth (follower of Andrea del Verrocchio) 35 (see also Plate 2.9) Death of Saint Monica and Return to Carthage, The (Benozzo Gozzoli) 46 (see also Plate 2.15) death rituals 13–14, 38–41, 44 Decameron, The (Giovanni Boccaccio) 33–4 decapitation 68, 69, 70

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del Sarto, Andrea. Lady with a Book of Petrarch’s Verses 127–8 (see also Plate 5.19) dell’ Arca, Niccolò. Lamentation over the Dead Christ 35 (see also Plates 2.1–2.6) della Casa, Giovanni. Galateo 124 della Gherardesca, Costanza 130, 131 delle Bande Nere, Giovanni (Cosimo I’s father) 123–4 depression 97–106 Dialoghi del matrimonio e vita vedovile (Bernardo Trotto) 61 Dialogo della institutione delle donne (Dolce, Lodovico) 61 di Giusto, Andrea. Miracle of the Black Leg 5 (see also Plate 1.5) disability 17 Discourses on Livy (Niccolò Machiavelli) 62 Dolce, Lodovico. Dialogo della institutione delle donne 61 Dollimore, Jonathan 64 Donatello. Judith and Holofernes 68, 69–70 (see also Plate 3.5) double-portraits 95–6, 102, 103–4, 128–30, 148–9 dramatic bodies 35–7 dreams 100–1, 104 dress code, female 74 Dureau, George. John Slate 147 (see also Plate 6.10) Wilbert Hines 14 (see also Plate 6.11) Dürer, Albrecht. Melencolia I 105–6 (see also Plate 4.4) Self-portrait (see Plate 4.5) écriture féminine 127 Edmund Washington (Lee Friedlander) 148 Erwin Panofsky (see Plate 4.6) Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) 146 (see also Plate 6.8) fashion for men 124–6 fathers, mourning of 95, 100–1, 108, 109–10 see also father/son relationship father/son relationship 119–22 see also fathers, mourning of

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female dress code, legislation 74 female melancholia 101–2 female mourning 13, 45–6, 96, 98, 129 fetishes 5, 77–8, 125 Ficino, Marsilio 97, 99–100, 105–6 Fiorentino, Niccolò. (Attributed) Portrait Medal of Caterina Sforza 76–7 (see also Plates 3.24 and 3.25) Florence, Duke of (Alessandro de’ Medici) 95–6, 98, 109–10 Florence, Saint Zenobius, Bishop of 35 Florence, society 37–8 Fonte, Moderata. II merito delle donne 61 Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro (Domenico Ghirlandaio) 120 (see also Plate 5.1) Franco, Niccolò. La Priapea 60 Freud, Sigmund 12–13, 99–100, 102, 104 (see also Plates 1.18 and 4.3) Ego and the Id, The 102 Interpretation of Dreams, The 100–101 ‘Medusa’s Head’ 69 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ 99 ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ 69–70 Friedlander, Lee ‘Big Head’ Eddie Johnson 148 (see also Plate 6.18) Edmund Washington 148 (see also Plate 6.19) John Handy and Melvin Lastie at Mama Lou Washington’s Church 148–9 (see also Plate 6.21) Kid Thomas Valentine 148 (see also Plate 6.17) Look Smart 148, 149 (see also Plate 6.16) Self-Portrait 149 (see also Plate 6.22) friendship 126–7 funeral, jazz 147–9 (see also Plates 6.12–6.14) Funeral of Saint Augustine, The (Benozzo Gozzoli) 47 (see also Plate 2.17) funeral orations 41–4 Garber, Marjorie 125 gender 44, 47, 62, 66, 77 genitals 7–8, 69, 70 see also phallus

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‘GET IT RIGHT’ (see Plate 6.7) Gherardesca, Costanza della 130, 131 Ghiberti. Commentaries 145 Ghirlandaio, Domenico Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro 120 (see also Plate 5.1) Head of an Old Man (see Plate 1.14) Lucrezia Tornabuoni 72 (see also Plate 3.11) Old Man with a Child 8 (see also Plate 1.13) Giorgione. La Vecchia 8 (see also Plate 1.12) Giotto. Raising of Lazarus 143 (see also Plate 6.1) Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Carlo Portelli) 123–4 (see also Plate 5.9) Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Francesco Salviati, Attributed) (see Plate 5.8) Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Maria Salviati (Giovanni Battista Naldini) 129 (see also Plate 5.23) Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici and Caterina Sforza (Lorenzo Vaiani) (see Plate 5.24) Girl Asleep (Vermeer) 103–4 (see Plate 4.2) Giusto, Andrea di. Miracle of the Black Leg 5 (see also Plate 1.5) Golden Legend 4, 16, 110, 143 Gozzoli, Benozzo Death of Saint Monica and Return to Carthage, The 46 (see also Plate 2.15) Funeral of Saint Augustine, The 47 (see also Plate 2.17) Guicciardini, Lodovico 63 Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo (Cesare Vecellio) (see Plates 3.20–3.23) Haecht, Willem van. The Picture Gallery of Cornelius van der Geest 11–12 (see also Plates 1.17 and 1.19) Haec-Vir: Or, the Womanish-Man’ 64 Head of an Old Man (Domenico Ghirlandaio (see Plate 1.14) Hennessy, Pope (John) 14, 15 Henry VIII (see Plate 1.18) Hic Mulier: Or, the Man-Woman 64 historiographies of death 10, 11

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Index history and psychoanalysis 12–13 Holbein the Younger, Hans. Dead Christ (see Plate 1.6) Hollanda, Francisco de. Four Dialogues on Painting 120 Holly, Michael Ann 104 Holy Trinity (Masaccio) 9 (see also Plate 1.16) Hotchkiss, Valerie R. 62 humanist orations 41–4 identity 10, 99, 102–4, 105, 106, 108, 130–1 female-female 36 loss 4, 5, 16 istitutione de la femina christiana, De l’ (Juan Luis Vives) 67 Jacobus, Mary 69–70 jazz funeral 147–9 (see also Plates 6.12–6.14) John Handy and Melvin Lastie at Mama Lou Washington’s Church (Lee Friedlander) 148–9 (see also Plate 6.21) John the Evangelist, Saint 35 John Slate (George Dureau) 147 (see also Plate 6.10) Jones, Ann Rosalind 75, 123 Judith and Holofernes (Donatello) 68, 69–70 (see also Plate 3.5) Justinian, Deacon 4, 5, 16, 110 Kid Thomas Valentine (Lee Friedlander) 148 (see also Plate 6.17) Koerner, Joseph Leo 105 Kristeva, Julia 102 Kruger, Barbara. Untitled (Memory is your image of perfection) 145 (see also Plate 6.3) kunstkammer 11–12 Lacan, Jacques, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ 65, 77, 123 Lady with a Book of Petrarch’s Verses. Andrea del Sarto 127–8 (see also Plate 5.19) Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Niccolò dell’ Arca) 35 (see also Plates 2.1–2.6) Lanci, Baldessare. View of Florence 59–60, 67–8, 106 (see also Plate 3.1)

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Laura Battiferri (Bronzino) 128 La Vecchia (Giorgione) (see Plate 1.12) Lavezzo, Kathy 36 Lazarus 143 legislation, female dress code 74 legs 110, 123, 125–6, 129, 130 black 4–5, 16, 110, 143, 147 lesbians 65–6 letter-writing 127 Libro della vita viduale. (Girolamo Savonarola) 66–7, 76 Ligon, Glenn. Untitled (I AM A MAN) 147 (see also Plate 6.9) limbs, dismembered see legs Licinio, Bernardino. Woman Holding the Portrait of a Man (see Plate 6.15) Lodovico Capponi. (Bronzino) 124–5 Look Smart (Lee Friedlander) 148, 149 (see also Plate 6.16 loss 4–5, 13 of self 16, 105, 125, 126–7 Lucrezia Tornabuoni (Domenico Ghirlandaio) (see Plate 3.11) Lunetti, Tomasso di Stefano (?) or Andrea del Sarto (?) Portrait of a Man and His Wife 128 (see also Plate 5.21) Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy 62 Madonna and Child 3 Malaspina, Taddea 95–6, 98, 102, 109 male body 11, 144–7 male mourning 46, 48, 95–101, 105–6, 109, 148 male portraiture 95–6, 119–20, 122–4 Manet, Edouard. Dead Toreador (see Plate 1.8) Man in a Polyester Suit (Robert Mapplethorpe) (see also Plate 6.4) Mantegna, Andrea. Dead Christ 7 (see also Plate 1.9) Mapplethorpe, Robert Man in a Polyester Suit 145 (see also Plate 6.4) Thomas 145 (see also Plate 6.5) Maria Salviati (Pontormo) (see Plate 3.13) Maria Salviati (Giorgio Vasari) (see Plate 3.10)

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Maria Salviati with little girl, probably Giulia de’ Medici (Pontormo) 128–9 (see also Plate 5.22) Marinella, Lucrezia 124 The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men Marsuppini, Carlo 42, 43 Martelli, Niccolò 110 Marucelli, Antonio 73, 74 Mary Magdalen 35 Masaccio. Holy Trinity 9 (see Plate 1.16) masculine memory 10, 14, 19, 77, 106, 128 via Taddea Malaspina 102 via Vermeer’s Girl Asleep 104 masculinity, white 149 Masten, Jeffrey 127 Master of the Osservanza. The Burial of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine Departing for Africa (see Plate 2.16) Master of the Rinuccini Chapel. Saints Cosmas and Damian Transplant the Leg of a Moor 5 (see also Plate 1.4) Master of the Straus Madonna. Christ as the Man of Sorrows 7–8 (see also Plate 1.11) Medici Chapel 109–10 Medici family 14, 19, 122 see also Cosimo I; Malaspina, Taddea; Salviati, Maria; Sforza, Caterina; Tornabuoni, Lucrezia Medici, Alessandro de’ (first Duke of Florence) 63, 64, 95–6, 98, 102, 103, 109–110, 129 Alessandro de’ Medici (Pontormo) 95 Medici, Catherine de’ 75 Medici, Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ 4, 5–6, 122 Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ (Pontormo) 122 Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ as San Damiano (Giorgio Vasari) 122–3 Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ as St Cosmas (Giorgio Vasari) 122–3 Medici, Damiano de’ 5 Medici, Francesco de’ 120–2 Medici, Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ 129 Medici, Nicola di Vieri de’ 42 Medusa (Caravaggio) 37 (see also Plate 2.11)

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‘Medusa’s Head’ (Sigmund Freud) 69 Meleager 35–6 melancholia 97–106 Melancolia (Monogrammist F.B.) 106 (see also Plate 4.7) Melencolia I. Albrecht Dürer 105–6 (see also Plate 4.4) memory 7, 10–11 12, 96, 103 books as memory 126–7, 128 in female body 145 loss 4, 5, 16 masculine see masculine memory merito delle donne, II (Moderata Fonte) 61 Merry Widows condom tin 60 (see also Plate 3.2) Michelangelo 106–9, 110 Pietà 106–9 (see also Plates 4.8–4.10) Tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici (see Plate 4.11) Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici (see Plates 4.12–4.13) Saints Cosmas and Damian and Virgin and Child (see Plate 4.14) Study of a Mourning Woman 78 (see also Plate 3.27) mimicry 149 miracle of the black leg 4–5, 16, 110 (see also Plates 1.3 and 1.5) Miracle of Saint Zenobius, The (Domenico Veneziano) 35 (see also Plate 2.7) mnemonic bodies 130–1 Monaca, Portrait of a Lady, called La (Giuliano Bugiardini) 74, 75–6 Monica (patron saint of widows) 45–6 Monogrammist F.B. Melancolia 106 (see also Plate 4.7) Montaigne, Michel de 77 Essays of Michel de Montaigne, The 124 ‘On Some Lines from Virgil’ 77 mourning costume 73–6 mourning rituals 33–4, 38–41, 44, 99 female 13, 45–6, 96, 98, 129 gender transgression 47 male 46, 48, 95–101, 105–6, 109, 148 premature 129 Moxey, Keith 105

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Index Naldini, Giovanni Battista. Giovanni della Bande Nere and Maria Salviati 129 (see also Plate 5.23) New Orleans jazz funeral 20, 147–9 Nora, Pierre 12 Nuovo Sfera, La (Giovanni Tolosani) 98 Old Man with a Child (Domenico Ghirlandaio) 8 (see also Plate 1.13) opera 36–7 orations, humanist 41–4 Ornamenti della gentil donna vedova (Giulio Cesare Cabei) 67 painting a dead man 6–9, 122–4 ‘Panegyric to the City of Florence’ (Leonardo Bruni) 37–8 Panofsky, Erwin 71, 105, 106 Parenti, Marco Memorie 74 Pellegrin, Nicole 77 Perseus with the Head of Medusa (Benvenuto Cellini) 68 (see also Plate 3.6) Petrarch, Francesco 38, 77, 127–8 phallic accessories 124–5 phallic overtones 5, 148 phallic transferability 65 phallus 7–8, 65, 69, 70, 77–8, 125 Phelan, Peggy 34 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 127 Picture Gallery of Cornelius van der Geest, The (Willem van Haecht) 11–12 (see also Plate 1.17) Pietà Giovanni Bellini 7 (see also Plate 1.10) Michelangelo 106–9 (see also Plates 4.8–4.10) Pontormo 97–8 Alessandro de’Medici 95 (see also Plate 4.1) Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ 122 (see also Plate 5.3) Maria Salviati 74 (see also Plate 3.13) Maria Salviati with little girl, probably Giulia de’ Medici 128–9 (see also Plate 5.22) Study for a Portrait of Maria Salviati 130–1 (see also Plate 5.27)

ALLISON LEVY.indb 191

191

Study for Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s ‘On Friendship’ 127 (see also Plate 5.18) Study of a Woman, Possibly Maria Salviati 130–1 (see also Plate 5.26) Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s ‘On Friendship’ 126–7 (see also Plate 5.17) Pope-Hennessy, John 14, 15, 71 Portelli, Carlo. Giovanni delle Bande Nere 123–4 (see also Plate 5.9) Portrait of Caterina Sforza (Anonymous) (see Plate 3.26) Portrait in the Renaissance (PopeHennessy, John) 14 Portrait Medal of Caterina Sforza (Niccolò Fiorentino) 76–7 (see also Plates 3.24 and 3.25) Portrait of a Lady (Jacometto Veneziano, Attributed) 74, 78 (see also Plate 3.14) Portrait of a Lady, called La Monaca (Giulano Bugiardini) 74, 75–6 (see also Plate 3.15) Portrait of a Man and His Wife. Tomasso di Stefano Lunetti (?) or Andrea del Sarto (?) 128 (see also Plate 5.21) Portrait of a Young Man (Bronzino) 124, 126 Portrait of Savonarola as Saint Peter Martyr (Fra Bartolomeo) 8 (see also Plate 1.15) Portrait of Ugolino Martelli (Bronzino) 124, 126 portraiture male 95–6, 119–20, 122–4 as remembrance 14, 119–20 widows 16, 71–3, 128–31 premature mourning 129 Priapea, La (Niccolò Franco) 60 prosthetic fittings 4–5, 16, 19, 110, 124–6, 129, 143 prostitutes 63, 76 psychoanalysis and history 12–13 racial politics 145 Raising of Lazarus (Giotto) 143 (see also Plate 6.1) Raphael. Baldesare Castiglione 74, 119, 145 (see also Plate 3.16)

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192

Re-membering Masculinity

remembrance in portraiture 14, 119–20 Renaissance Man 14, 16, 71, 144–7 ‘Renaissance Man’, Neiman Marcus catalog (see Plate 6.6) resurrection 143 Rijn, Rembrandt van. Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (see Plate 1.7) rituals 44 death 13–14, 38–41, 44 mourning see mourning rituals Rossellino, Bernardo Tomb of Leonardo Bruni (see Plate 2.12) Sacchetti, Franco 120 Saint Augustine Confessions 45–6 Saint Augustine in his Cell (Botticelli) 44 (see also Plate 2.13) Saint Augustine in his Study (Botticelli) 44 (see also Plate 2.14) Saint Cosmas 4, 5–6, 110 Saint Damian 4, 5, 110 Saint John the Evangelist 35 Saint Zenobius 35 Saint of widows, patron (Monica) 45–6 Saints Cosmas and Damian Transplant the Leg of a Moor (Master of the Rinuccini Chapel) (see Plate 1.4) Saints Cosmas and Damian and Virgin and Child (Michelangelo) (see Plate 4.14) Salutati, Coluccio 41 Salviati, Francesco. (Attributed) Giovanni delle Bande Nere (see Plate 5.8) Salviati, Maria 47–8, 62, 72, 73–4 Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Maria Salviati (Giovanni Battista Naldini) 129 Maria Salviati (Pontormo) 74 Study for a Portrait of Maria Salviati 130–1 Study of a Woman, Possibly Maria Salviati 130–1 San Bernardino of Siena 62 San Marco Altarpiece 3–5, 143 (see also Plates 1.1–1.3) Sangallo, Giuliano da. Frieze on Francesca Sassetti’s tomb 35 (see also Plate 2.8) Sant’ Antonino of Florence 62

ALLISON LEVY.indb 192

Sanudo, Marin ‘Praise of the city of Venice, 1493’ 74–5 Sarto, Andrea del. Lady with a Book of Petrarch’s Verses 127–8 (see also Plate 5.19) Sarto, Andrea del (?) or Lunetti, Tomasso di Stefano (?). Portrait of a Man and His Wife 128 Sassetti, Francesco, frieze on tomb (Giuliano da Sangallo) 35 Savonarola, Girolamo 8, 74, 76 Libro della vita viduale 66–7 Schiesari, Juliana 40, 99–100, 101 Sciorina, Lo. Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici and Caterina Sforza (Lorenzo Vaiani) 129 self loss 16, 105, 125, 126–7 searching for 149 Self-Portrait (Albrecht Dürer) (see Plate 4.5) Self-Portrait (Lee Friedlander) 149 (see also Plate 6.22) Sercambi, Giovanni 60 sexual desires of widows 60 sexual union, symbol 109 sexuality 7–8, 106 Sforza, Caterina 62–3, 65, 68, 70, 72, 76–7, 129 Sforza, Galeazzo Maria 119–20 Signa, Boncompagni da 35 ‘Signification of the Phallus, The’ (Jacques Lacan) 65 skeletons 9 Slive, Seymour 103 Snow, Edward 103–4 son/father relationship 119–22 see also fathers, mourning of Southern black masculinity 4, 5, 147–9 Stallybrass, Peter 75, 123 Staten, Henry 105, 106, 126–7 Steinberg, Leo 109 Straus Madonna, Master of the, Christ as the Man of Sorrows 7–8 Strocchia, Sharon 10, 37 Study for a Portrait of Maria Salviati (Pontormo) 130–1 (see also Plate 5.27)

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Index Study for Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s ‘On Friendship’ (Pontormo) 127 (see also Plate 5.18) Study of a Mourning Woman (Michelangelo) 78 (see also Plate 3.27) Study of a Woman, Possibly Maria Salviati (Pontormo) 130–1 (see also Plate 5.26) sumptuary laws 74 Sunny Henry (Lee Friedlander) (see Plate 6.20) ‘Taboo of Virginity, The’ (Sigmund Freud) 69–70 Tenenti, Alberto 10 thanato-erotic anxiety 13, 105 thanatoerotophobic misogyny 13, 106 Thomas (Robert Mapplethorpe) 145 (see also Plate 6.4) Tolosani, Giovanni. La Nuovo Sfera 98 Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici (Michelangelo) (see Plates 4.12 and 4.13) Tomb of Leonardo Bruni (Bernardo Rossellino) (see Plate 2.12) Tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici (Michelangelo) (see Plate 4.11) Tornabuoni, Francesca Pitti, tomb 35 Tornabuoni, Lucrezia 72 Torrello, Ippolita 119 transvestism 63–5 Traub, Valerie 66 Trexler, Richard 37 Trissino, Giovanni Giorgio. Epistola ... de la vita che dee tenere una donna vedova 62 Trotto, Bernardo Dialoghi del matrimonio e vita vedovile 61 Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s ‘On Friendship’ (Pontormo) 126–7 (see also Plate 5.17) Untitled (I AM A MAN) (Glenn Ligon) (see Plate 6.9) Untitled, (Memory is your image of perfection) (Barbara Kruger) 145 (see also Plate 6.3) Vaiani, Lorenzo. Called Lo Sciorina, Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici

ALLISON LEVY.indb 193

193

and Caterina Sforza 129 (see also Plate 5.24) van Haecht, Willem. The Picture Gallery of Cornelius van der Geest 11–12 (see also Plates 1.17 and 1.19) van Rijn, Rembrandt. Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (see Plate 1.7) Varchi, Benedetto 48, 97 Vasari, Giorgio 72, 95, 120–1 Caterina Sforza (see Plate 3.9) Cosimo I (see Plate 5.2) Cosimo I as San Damiano (see Plate 5.5) Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ as San Damiano 122–3 Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ as St Cosmas 122–3 (see also Plate 5.4) Maria Salviati (see Plate 3.10) Vecchia, La (Giorgione) 8 Vecellio, Cesare. Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo 76 Venetian widow (see Plate 3.20) Venetian prostitute (see Plate 3.21) Roman widow (see Plate 3.22) Roman prostitute (see Plate 3.23) vedova del Fusco, La (Horatio Fusco Monfloreo D’Arimini) 61 vedova, La (Giovan Battista Cini) 59–60 veils 76–8 Venetian courtesan engraving 63 (see also Plates 3.3 and 3.4) Veneziano, Domenico. The Miracle of Saint Zenobius 35 (see also Plate 2.7) Veneziano, Jacometto. Alvise Contarini (?) (see Plate 3.17) (Attributed) Portrait of a Lady 74, 78 (see also Plate 3.14) Woman, possibly a Nun of San Secondo, A (see Plate 3.18) Vermeer. Girl Asleep 103–4 (see Plate 4.2) Verrocchio, follower of Andrea del. Death of a Woman in Childbirth 35 (see also Plate 2.9) View of Florence (Baldessare Lanci) 59–60, 67–8 (see also Plate 3.1) Vinci, Leonardo da. Vitruvian Man 144 (see also Plate 6.2)

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Virgin Mary 108 Vitruvian Man (Leonardo da Vinci) 144 (see also Plate 6.2) Vives, Juan Luis. De l’istitutione de la femina christiana 67 white bodies 145, 146 white masculinity 149 Whythorne, Thomas 61 widow portraiture 16, 71–3, 128–31 widowed bodies 4–6, 16–17, 123 widows 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 59–78, 103 Widows, patron saint of (Monica) 45–6 Wilbert Hines (George Dureau) (see Plate 6.11)

ALLISON LEVY.indb 194

Woman Holding the Portrait of a Man (Bernardino Licinio) (see Plate 6.15) Woman, Possibly a Nun of San Secondo, A (Jacometto Veneziano) (see Plate 3.18) women melancholia 101–2 in mourning 13, 45–6, 96, 98, 129 role 10 woodcut of Caterina Sforza 77 Zenobius, Saint, Bishop of Florence 35 Zizek, Slavoj 96 Zufolina, La, letter to 63–4 Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club 149 (see also Plates 6.23 and 6.25–6.27)

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