Hidden in Plain Sight (Medieval Interventions) [New ed.] 9781433134289, 9781453918791, 9781433137945, 9781433137952, 1433134284

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: Reading Machiavelli Rhetorically: The Prince as Covert Criticism of the Renaissance Prince
Chapter Two: Florentia capta: Michelangelo’s Sagrestia Nuova as Covert Critique of Medici Rule
Chapter Three: The Compagnia della Cazzuola as Locus of Opposition to Medici Rule
Chapter Four: An Academy of Misers: The Compagnie della Lesina and Antilesina as Loci of Opposition to Medici and Imperial Rule in mid-Cinquecento Italy
Index

Citation preview

Hidden in Plain Sight COVERT CRITICISM OF THE MEDICI IN RENAISSANCE FLORENCE MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS

“This book will be of great interest to students in political theory and the history of political thought. The so-called lettura obliqua of Machiavelli’s masterpiece has a long history; however, this is the first time that this reading has been proposed in a radically new way, taking into account how Machiavelli’s friends would have read the Prince soon after its completion. The way Ward deals with the tradition of innuendo is something entirely new and will spark a lively debate among scholars of Machiavelli.” —Paolo Carta, Professor of the History of Political Thought, The University of Trento

6

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT | Ward

Hidden in Plain Sight: Covert Criticism of the Medici in Renaissance Florence offers the first systematic study of an important and heretofore insufficiently-studied phenomenon in Renaissance Europe. Through a close examination of a wide variety of visual and textual materials, James O. Ward illuminates the means by which Florentine citizens—among them several of the most famous artists and writers of the time, such as Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Vasari—managed, in an increasingly authoritarian political and cultural climate, to express their disaffection with the prevailing political and cultural status quo in relatively safe ways, while at the same time maintaining contact with those rulers whom they criticized, upon whom they often depended for their livelihoods. Ward’s volume thus offers new and provocative interpretations of some of the most famous works of Italian Renaissance visual and textual culture—for example, Michelangelo’s New Sacristy in Florence, Machiavelli’s Prince, and Vasari’s portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici—which have traditionally been viewed by scholars of the period as encomiastic celebrations of their patrons’ power and prestige. The volume thus provides—besides its intimate view of power relations between some of Florence’s most creative artists and writers and those they served—fresh perspectives on the important question of patron-artist relations during the period. Written in a style which is not too technical, the book is an ideal resource for specialists in Italian history, art history, literature, rhetoric, theatre studies, and the history of Italian academies, as well as a stimulating narrative for the educated general reader interested in the history of Florence, and its often fraught relations with its leading family, the Medici.

James O. Ward received his Ph.D. in Italian studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently an independent scholar, living and working in New York City.

Cover image: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Night, detail (Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence)

PETER LANG

www.peterlang.com

JAMES O. WARD

Hidden in Plain Sight COVERT CRITICISM OF THE MEDICI IN RENAISSANCE FLORENCE MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS

“This book will be of great interest to students in political theory and the history of political thought. The so-called lettura obliqua of Machiavelli’s masterpiece has a long history; however, this is the first time that this reading has been proposed in a radically new way, taking into account how Machiavelli’s friends would have read the Prince soon after its completion. The way Ward deals with the tradition of innuendo is something entirely new and will spark a lively debate among scholars of Machiavelli.” —Paolo Carta, Professor of the History of Political Thought, The University of Trento

6

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT | Ward

Hidden in Plain Sight: Covert Criticism of the Medici in Renaissance Florence offers the first systematic study of an important and heretofore insufficiently-studied phenomenon in Renaissance Europe. Through a close examination of a wide variety of visual and textual materials, James O. Ward illuminates the means by which Florentine citizens—among them several of the most famous artists and writers of the time, such as Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Vasari—managed, in an increasingly authoritarian political and cultural climate, to express their disaffection with the prevailing political and cultural status quo in relatively safe ways, while at the same time maintaining contact with those rulers whom they criticized, upon whom they often depended for their livelihoods. Ward’s volume thus offers new and provocative interpretations of some of the most famous works of Italian Renaissance visual and textual culture—for example, Michelangelo’s New Sacristy in Florence, Machiavelli’s Prince, and Vasari’s portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici—which have traditionally been viewed by scholars of the period as encomiastic celebrations of their patrons’ power and prestige. The volume thus provides—besides its intimate view of power relations between some of Florence’s most creative artists and writers and those they served—fresh perspectives on the important question of patron-artist relations during the period. Written in a style which is not too technical, the book is an ideal resource for specialists in Italian history, art history, literature, rhetoric, theatre studies, and the history of Italian academies, as well as a stimulating narrative for the educated general reader interested in the history of Florence, and its often fraught relations with its leading family, the Medici.

James O. Ward received his Ph.D. in Italian studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently an independent scholar, living and working in New York City.

Cover image: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Night, detail (Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence)

PETER LANG

www.peterlang.com

JAMES O. WARD

Hidden in Plain Sight

MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS New Light on Traditional Thinking Stephen G. Nichols General Editor Vol. 6

The Medieval Interventions series is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

James O. Ward

Hidden in Plain Sight Covert Criticism of the Medici in Renaissance Florence

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ward, James O., author. Title: Hidden plain in sight: covert criticism of the Medici in Renaissance Florence / James O. Ward. Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2019. Series: Medieval interventions; volume 6 ISSN 2376-2683 (print) | ISSN 2376-2691 (online) Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017038367 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3428-9 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4539-1879-1 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-3794-5 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4331-3795-2 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Medici, House of. Artists—Political activity—Italy—Florence—History. Authors—Political activity—Italy—Florence—History. Florence (Italy)—Politics and government—1421–1737. Renaissance—Italy—Florence. Classification: LCC DG737.55 .W37 2019 | DDC 945/.51105—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038367 DOI 10.3726/978-1-4539-1879-1

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2019 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

Libertà va cercando, ch’è sì cara, come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta. P URGATORIO 1.71

La storia dei minuti popolani, come la storia dei vinti, è stata dimenticata o sovente alterata dalla penna e dalla spada dei vincitori. Del resto è una dolorosa serie di tentativi, di sommosse, più o meno incoscienti, non mai coronate da un buono e duraturo successo … e lo sguardo di ammirazione e il plauso della vittoria nel circo rivolgevano le nobili romane certamente al gladiatore vincente, e non all’ infelice caduto. Così la Storia ha accontentato le nobili dame e i cortesi cavalieri. N ICCOLÒ R ODOLICO

Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Preface Introduction Chapter One: Reading Machiavelli Rhetorically: The Prince as Covert Criticism of the Renaissance Prince Chapter Two: Florentia capta: Michelangelo’s Sagrestia Nuova as Covert Critique of Medici Rule Chapter Three: The Compagnia della Cazzuola as Locus of Opposition to Medici Rule Chapter Four: An Academy of Misers: The Compagnie della Lesina and Antilesina as Loci of Opposition to Medici and Imperial Rule in mid-Cinquecento Italy Index

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245 345

Figures

Fig. Int.1: Bertoldo di Giovanni, medal commemorating the Pazzi Conspiracy (Credit: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London) xxviii Fig. Int.2: Renaissance medal commemorating Lorenzino de’ Medici’s assassination of his cousin Alessandro (Photographer: Andrew McCabe) xxxi Fig. 1.1: Santi di Tito, portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence). 32 Fig. 1.2: “Bruto lettore,” frontispiece, Rime of Rinaldo Corso (collection of the author). 32 Fig. 1.3: Raphael, Portrait of Leo X (Photo: Uffizi). 32 Fig. 1.4: Bronzino, portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici as Orpheus (Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. John Wintersteen). 33 Fig. 1.5: Torso Belvedere, Museo Pio-Clementino (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) 33 Fig. 1.6: Piero di Cosimo, The Forest Fire, c. 1505, detail (Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford). 33 Fig. 2.1: Roman Sestertius of Vespasian showing Judaea capta (Credit: Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society) 75 Fig. 2.2: Roman Aureus of Domitian showing captured female (Credit: Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society) 75

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Fig. 2.3: Fig. 2.4: Fig. 2.5:

Fig. 2.6: Fig. 2.7: Fig. 2.8:

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Fig. 2.10: Fig. 2.11:

Fig. 2.12: Fig. 2.13: Fig. 2.14: Fig. 2.15: Fig. 2.16: Fig. 2.17: Fig. 2.18: Fig. 2.19: Fig. 2.20: Fig. 2.21:

Roman Aes of Constantine showing bound male captive (Credit: Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society) Roman stele showing Germania capta (Credit: © GDKE, Landesmuseum Mainz—U. Rudischer) Raphael, tapestry showing grieving Florence from the Consigning of the Keys to St. Peter (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Dacia capta, Rome, Capitoline Museum (Credit: B. Malter 2736/03) Lafrerey, Roma triumphans with Dacia capta and prisoners, Cesi garden (Credit: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London) Domenico de’ Rossi, Roma triumphans and prisoners (Credit: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program) Charles Louis Clerisseau, Medici vase, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (Credit: Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Leonard Kheifets) Two chained prisoners, Mainz, Landesmuseum (Credit: © DeA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY ) Peter Paul Rubens, The Triumphal Car of Kallo, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (Credit: Photo by Frans Vandewalle) Rubens, detail of Fig. 2.11 (Credit: Photo by Frans Vandewalle) Gemma Augustea, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY ) Sleeping Ariadne, Rome, Vatican Museums (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Francisco de Holanda, sketchbook, Sleeping Cleopatra (Credit: Biblioteca Escorial) Mattei sarcophagus, showing flowing waters (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-984) Sleeping Ariadne, Rome, Vatican Museum (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Night (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence) Roman sarcophagus with general and Sarmatians, Museo Pio Clementino (Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ) Roman sarcophagus (detail of Fig. 2.19) Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of back (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence)

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FIGURES

Fig. 2.22: Michelangelo, plan for the tomb of Pope Julius II (Credit: Uffizi) Fig. 2.23: Roman sarcophagus showing Dionysus approaching sleeping Ariadne (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-29.402) Fig. 2.24: Detail of Fig. 2.23. Roman sarcophagus showing Dionysus approaching sleeping Ariadne, detail of twisting male figure holding shell (Photo: D-DAI-ROM-29.402) Fig. 2.25: Raphael, tapestry showing Leo in exile approaching the river Micio (Credit: Image courtesy of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome) Fig. 2.26: Michelangelo, drawing of Cleopatra (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Source: Web Gallery of Art, Public Domain) Fig. 2.27: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Night, detail (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.28: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of back (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.29: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of face (Credit: White Images/Scala, Florence) Fig. 2.30: Michelangelo, bust of Brutus (Credit: © Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.31: Male profile from Palazzo Vecchio (Credit: Photo Scala, Florence) Fig. 2.32: Michelangelo, carving of male profile from back of the Atlante slave (Credit: Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze) Fig. 2.33: Bust of Brutus (Credit: © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.34: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Night and Day (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.35: Rubens, oil sketch, The Sorrows of War (Photo: Art Resource) Fig. 2.36: Rubens, Two Captive Prisoners (Photo: Image courtesy of New York Social Diary) Fig. 2.37: Detail of Fig. 2.35 Fig. 2.38: Detail of Fig. 2.36 Fig. 2.39: Torso Belvedere (Credit: Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge, by permission) Fig. 2.40: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of back (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.41: Michelangelo, Victory, Florence, Bargello (Credit: Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.42: Michelangelo, Victory, Florence, detail of face of captive (Photo: Uffizi Gallery)

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Fig. 2.43: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of face (Credit: White Images/Scala, Florence) Fig. 2.44: Michelangelo, Bearded Slave (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.45: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Evening (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.46: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Dawn (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.47: Roman sarcophagus, showing reclining river god and two angels holding Medallion (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-29.398) Fig. 2.48: Arch of Septimus Severus, detail, Rome (Credit: © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY) Fig. 2.49: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Evening (Photo: Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.50: Tigris, Rome, Vatican sculpture court (Credit: D-DAIROM-34.14) Fig. 2.51: Maarten van Heemskerck, sketchbook, reclining river god on sarcophagus with tortoises and a shell (Credit: bpk Bildagentur/Kupferstichkabinett, SMB/Volker-H. Schneider/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.52: Francisco de Holanda, sketchbook, Sleeping Cleopatra (Credit: Biblioteca Escorial) Fig. 2.53: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Evening, detail of face (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.54: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Dawn, detail of face (Photo: Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.55: Michelangelo, sketch for a tomb, showing reclining male figures talking to each other (Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.56: Michelangelo, sketch for a tomb, showing reclining male figures talking to each other (detail of Fig. 2.55) (Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.57: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Giuliano de’ Medici, detail of head showing dragon helmet and hand holding cloth (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.58 Juno Cesi, Capitoline Museum, Rome (Credit: B. Malter)

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Fig. 2.59 Michelangelo, drawing of female profile with headdress and braid (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.60 Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Dawn, profile (Credit: Fototeca Zeri) Fig. 2.61: Michelangelo, sketch showing female profile, shell and male profile wearing a wolf ’s head (Photo: Casa Buonarroti) Fig. 2.62: Sarcophagus lid, showing two reclining female river gods (Photo: © Scala/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.63: Niccolò Fiorentino, figure of seated Florence under a tree holding the palla (Photo: Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.64: Vasari, portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici (Photo: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Firenze) Fig. 2.65: Michelangelo, sketch for a tomb, showing bound male captives as herms (Photo: Uffizi Gallery) Fig. 2.66: Vasari, portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, profile (Photo: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Firenze) Fig. 2.67: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, profile (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.68: Michelangelo, Victory, detail of Victor, profile (reversed) (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.69: Vasari, portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, detail of hand holding the bastone (Photo: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Firenze) Fig. 2.70: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail showing hand holding coin (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.71: Bronzino, portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, detail (Credit: Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.72: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, profile (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.73: Bronzino, Portrait of a young man (Credit: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program) Fig. 2.74: Victory and bound male captive from Triumphal Arch (Credit: G. Fittschen-Badura 68–78/01) Fig. 2.75: Bartolommeo Ammannati, Virtue Conquering Deceit (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.76: Giambologna, Florence Triumphing Over Pisa (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence)

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Fig. 2.77: Tomb of Cornutus, showing Etruscan Dis (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-97.751) Fig. 2.78: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Giuliano de’ Medici (Credit: © Scala/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.79: Medici Chapel, detail of frieze (Credit: Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali) Fig. 2.80: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail of cuirass (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.81: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Giuliano de’ Medici, profile (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 2.82: Etruscan tomb drawing showing bearded male figure in wolf ’s helmet (Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 2.83: Michelangelo, sketch of bearded male figure in wolf ’s helmet (Credit: Casa Buonarroti) Fig. 2.84: Michelangelo, sketch of bearded male figure wearing dragon helmet (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 3.1: Alciati, Emblemata, Tantalus reaching for the apples (Credit: By permission of the University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections) Fig. 3.2: La Festa di San Giovanni, showing Baptistry and banners (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 3.3: Sandro Botticelli, The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, detail (Credit: Copyright of the Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 3.4: Winchester Psalter, Hellmouth (Credit: © British Library Board) Fig. 3.5: Illustration of demons devouring themselves from Le Livre de la Vigne Nostre Seigneur (MS Douce 134) (Credit: Bodleian Library, Oxford) Fig. 3.6: Carnival Jesters, Willem Cornelisz Duyster (Credit: bpk Bildagentur/Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/ Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 3.7: Capricci di varie figure, Jacques Callot (Credit: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London) Fig. 3.8: Maurice Sand, Watercolor of a man in Harlequin costume (Credit: Public Domain: Wikimedia Commons) Fig. 3.9: Portrait of Odet de Coligny, cardinal de Châtillon in 1534 (Giovanni Gaddi?) (Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Franck Raux)

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Fig. 3.10: Etching from La canzona de’ Morti (Florence, n.d.), showing chariot with skeletons and the Three Fates (Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale Firenze, available on archive.org) Fig. 3.11: Concord succouring small children from the Ara Pacis, Rome (Credit: Album/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 3.12: Achille Bocchi, etching of Mercury, Minerva and putto holding diamond ring (Credit: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program) Fig. 3.13: Sandro Botticelli, portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici (Credit: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 3.14: Vasari, Duke Cosimo ordering the execution of the Florentine exiles (Credit: Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence) Fig. 4.1: Etching of Lorenzo de’ Medici from a pamphlet containing the Canzone per andare in maschera fatte da più persone showing a procession of the Compagnia dei Magi (Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale, Firenze) Fig. 4.2: Frontispieces of editions of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina (Credit: Biblioteca della Università di Bologna) Fig. 4.3: Title page from an edition of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, showing grasshopper (Credit: Biblioteca della Università di Bologna) Fig. 4.4: Guglielmo della Porta, portrait bust of Paul III (Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 4.5: Pine cone, Cortile della Pigna, Vatican (Credit: Alinari/ Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 4.6: Guglielmo dalla Porta, portrait bust of Paul III, detail showing Plenty holding cornucopia (Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 4.7: Portrait bust of Paul III, detail showing Peace succouring defeated Enemy (Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 4.8: Cellini, portrait bust of Cosimo de’ Medici (Credit: Scala/ Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 4.9: Detail of Fig. 4.8, showing head of Capricorn devouring coins and ingots (Credit: Scala/Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY ). Fig. 4.10: Cellini, bust of Cosimo de’ Medici, detail of cuirass showing breasts exuding a fluid (Credit: Scala/Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY ) Fig. 4.11: Bronzino, portrait of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici in armor holding helmet (Photo: Uffizi Gallery)

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Fig. 4.12: Cassone painting, showing impresa of the Strozzi family with three crescent moons and a garland of roses (Credit: Photo by Giusti Claudio Paul, Florence). Fig. 4.13: Roman portrait bust of the Emperor Caracalla (Credit: Scala/Art Resource). Fig. 4.14: Cellini, portrait bust of Cosimo de’ Medici (Credit: Scala/ Art Resource, NY ). Fig. 4.15: Vasari, portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici (Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ). Fig. 4.16: Etching, showing two beggars (Credit: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons). Fig. 4.17: Vasari, portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail showing borsa and hand gesturing toward genitals (Credit: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Firenze). Fig. 4.18: Francesco Salviati, portrait of Bindo Altoviti (Credit: Courtauld Institute of Art. Collection of the Duke of Northumberland). Fig. 4.19: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail showing hand (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence). Fig. 4.20: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail showing hand holding coin (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence). Fig. 4.21: Tazza Farnese, interior showing Jupiter (or Neptune), Cleopatra, Sphinx, Horus, the Hours and the Winds (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence). Fig. 4.22: Tazza Farnese, exterior showing Medusa’s head (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence). Fig. 4.23: Raphael and assistants, Farnesina, ceiling fresco showing wedding of Roxane and Alessandro Chigi (Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence). Fig. 4.24: Emblem of the Save-All Club (Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions, HA.com). Fig. 4.25: Emblem of the Club dei Brutti (Credit: Image courtesy of the Club dei Brutti).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many librarians whose kind help over the years has made my researching this book a much more pleasant experience than it would have otherwise been. I would like to thank especially the librarians at the University of California, Berkeley and its outstanding Rare Book Room. The rare book rooms of the University of California, Los Angeles, the British Library and Columbia University have also provided courteous and efficient service over the years. A special debt is owed the Professors Silvia Boero and Maura Bergonzoni, formerly of Purdue University, who provided essential support and encouragement at an early stage of this project. Thanks also to the anonymous readers of Renaissance Quarterly, Fifteenth-Century Studies and California Italian Studies for their very helpful comments and suggestions, many of which I have incorporated into this book. I would also like to thank Professors Andrew Starn, John Najemy, Jo Ann Cavallo, Mary Dietz, Deanna Shemek and Paolo Carta for their extremely positive and encouraging words as the project was taking shape. Special thanks to Charles de Tolnay, who, in the parlance of connoisseurs, had the “eye” more than perhaps any art historian of the twentieth century, and whose images of Michelangelo’s sculptures in San Lorenzo suggested many of the identifications and interpretations proposed in this volume. Sincere thanks also to the many curators of image collections, in Europe and the United States, who gave me such generous and timely assistance in procuring the images in the text.

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And to a modern-day practitioner of “close looking,” endowed also with a deep knowledge of Italian Renaissance art, music and literature, I would like to give my sincere thanks: Louis Alexander Waldman, who most graciously consented to give his opinions on the chapter on Michelangelo just as the book was going to press. Any errors of fact or interpretation lie entirely with the author. I would never have embarked on a career in Italian Studies had it not been for the wonderful teaching and warm mentorship of several outstanding professors at Columbia University and Barnard College: John Nelson, Pellegrino d’Acierno, Maristella Lorch, Daniela Mantovan and (as Visiting Professor at Columbia and Barnard) Riccardo Bruscagli. Nullum par elogium … I would like to thank my indefatigable research assistant, Molly Allen, for her tireless pursuit of the many images with which the book is adorned. Without her help, the herculean task of assembling all the visual evidence would, I’m sure, have claimed yet another victim on the slope of projects imagined but never completed. And finally, a special thanks to my long-suffering editors, Michelle Salyga, Meagan Simpson and Michael Doub, who endured many delays and revisions with extraordinary grace and patience. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my late aunt, Aileen Ward, scholar and friend, who, when I was not even aware of it myself, saw and encouraged the scholar I was to become. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever …”

Preface

Though the city was not free under him, it would have been impossible to find a better or more pleasing tyrant. From his natural goodness and inclination came infinite advantages, but through the necessity of tyranny some evils although they were restrained and limited as much as necessity permitted. …

It is surprising how durable the “golden myth” of the Medici has proven, a myth in which the family is seen as just and benevolent rulers, enlightened patrons of learning and the arts, and the principal enablers of the great flowering of artistic and literary creativity known as the Italian Renaissance. As recent scholarship has shown, this myth is largely a creation of the Medici family itself, part of the family’s astute and far-sighted strategy of self-promotion in the face of competition for political and cultural influence in sixteenth century Italy.1 That this myth survives, unchallenged, even today among scholars of the period, is attested to by the introduction to a recent collection of essays on the cultural politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, in which the editor comments: “Although much maligned, especially in Italian and English liberal/republican scholarship, Duke Cosimo I was, in fact, an incredibly astute, successful, and even benevolent ruler who, on being raised unexpectedly to power at the young age of seventeen … managed to revive a dying state, double its territory, and establish a dynasty that ruled unchallenged and beloved by its subjects for two hundred years.”2 The irony of this statement lies in the fact

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that a close reading of the essays collected in the volume reveals a ruler whose close supervision and control over dissenting voices in his realm brings to mind more the modern police state than a well-ordered and beneficent commonwealth. In this volume, we will present evidence which points to another view of the Medici in Florence, in which their often ruthless pursuit of power and their determination to use any means necessary to maintain this power led to a climate fundamentally inimical to the free expression of critical sentiments. Against the background of this political and cultural climate, we will explore how three famous figures of the Italian Renaissance—Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Vasari— employed a technique, well-known to classical rhetoricians, in which critical sentiments are expressed in a veiled and indirect manner. These writers and artists used this technique—called emphasis in classical rhetorical theory—to express sentiments critical of Medici rule while maintaining a margin of safety (not to say economic viability) for themselves and their families, and also to assert their inherent self-worth in relation to patrons upon whom they depended for their livelihood. We will suggest that this mode of discourse was actually more common in Renaissance Europe than scholars perhaps have realized, and that it became especially important as the century progressed, and the powers of Church and state became increasingly intent upon controlling and limiting all forms of critical discourse. The Index of the Counter-Reformation is only the most well-known of these attempts. This mode of deliberately obscure discourse has been well studied in the religious writings of the era (where it is called “nicodemismo”), but it has received relatively little attention in secular works of art and literature from the period. It is hoped that this study will foster further investigation of this important phenomenon in Renaissance Europe. We will first briefly sketch the political and cultural climate in Florence during the first decades of the sixteenth century which made the adoption of this mode of discourse an important prerequisite for dealing with powerful political figures, and will then proceed to an examination of its use by Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Vasari and others to encode criticism of the Medici rulers in works of art directed to these same rulers. In Chapter 1, we use classical rhetorical theory to show that Machiavelli’s Prince was not intended either as political science, or as advice for a prince, but rather as a very subtle, but nevertheless forceful, condemnation of the Italian princes of his day, the Medici in particular. After a close reading of Machiavelli’s text against this rhetorical background, we will consider several possible answers to the question of why Machiavelli should choose to write such a text. Our analysis will demonstrate that Machiavelli’s Prince, far from being a puzzling exception to the republican sentiments expressed in his other writings, an anomaly which has

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long troubled scholars, is instead thoroughly consistent with them, differing from them only in the covert means by which the author achieves his hidden critical message. From this examination of the text against the background of rhetorical theory, one of the perennially vexing questions in the interpretation of Machiavelli’s political thought—how to reconcile the apparently “princely” counsels of the Prince with the republican sentiments expressed in Machiavelli’s other writings— can finally be resolved. In Chapter 2, we continue the discussion of the practice of covert criticism in the Italian Renaissance through an examination of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel in Florence, and show that, far from being an encomiastic celebration of his Medici patrons, as often assumed, Michelangelo intended the Chapel as a covert criticism of Medici rule. We achieve this through a close examination of the visual details of the monument itself, seen against the background of Michelangelo’s own writings and the contemporary Florentine practice of appending critical texts to works of public sculpture as a way of elucidating their political meaning. Chapter 3 broadens the study of covert critique from specific artists and writers to include an entire compagnia in Renaissance Florence, the Compagnia della Cazzuola. We will show how the bizarre entertainments enacted by the members of this association, described at length by Vasari, while on the surface presenting the appearance of harmless, if strange, dinner celebrations, in accord with the essentially carnivalesque nature of the company, actually conveyed, in a highly allusive and recondite way, criticism of the Medici regime, newly reestablished in the city after eighteen years of republican rule. To do this, we examine the political meanings of the classical myths reenacted by its members, thus demonstrating that drama, as well as didactic prose and works of public sculpture, as in the cases of Machiavelli and Michelangelo, was also a means well-suited for the indirect communication of sentiments critical of the domination by the Medici family of these individuals’ native city, traditionally a free commune or city-state, whose myth of origins reached proudly back to ancient republican Rome. Chapter 4 continues our discussion of festive associations in Renaissance Italy, this time focusing on a pair of fictitious organizations, the Compagnie della Lesina and Antilesina, the latter of which, just as the Compagnia della Cazzuola, made use of the theme of festive banqueting to express their discontent with the rule of Cosimo de’ Medici and his Imperial patrons in Florence and Tuscany in the fifth and sixth decades of the sixteenth century. We will show that the extreme and fanatical miserliness of the Compagnia della Lesina, symbolized by their impresa, the lesina, or awl, served for these individuals as a symbol of the nature of Medici rule in Florence, characterized as it was by an obsessive concentration on the accumulation of personal power and prestige at the expense of concern for the welfare

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of the commune as a whole. The impresa of the counterpart and rival of the Compagnia della Lesina, the Compagnia della Antilesina, a golden cornucopia, served in its turn as symbol of this group’s essential nature, characterized by a festive and generous munificentia, presented in pointed contrast to the fanatical and debilitating miserliness of the Compagnia della Lesina. We trace the origins of this latter group of buontemponi to the Rome of the Farnese family and its Pope, Paul III, and show how their policy of festive generosity and public-spiritedness, expressed in their frequent use of the iconography of fertility and abundance, was intended as an allusive, but pointed rebuke of the deleterious effects of Medici and Imperial rule over Florence and her dominions just described, which found its symbolic expression in the miserly possessiveness of the spilorci of the Compagnia della Lesina. To such a civic ethos, the enlightened rule of the Farnese in Rome, for whom food (unlike the fanatical self-deprivation of the misers of the Compagnia della Lesina) was a good to be consumed and shared in a spirit of mutual enjoyment and celebration, presents a striking contrast, and finds its own symbolic expression in the image of the golden cornucopia, pouring out its riches on the city of Rome. Where the sharpened awls of the Compagnia della Lesina bore deeper and deeper into the midollo of the state, consuming everything, the horns of plenty of their rivals and counterparts in the Compagnia della Antilesina provide a healing and nurturing balm to the city whose welfare is entrusted to their care. In the final chapter, we show how the spirit and practices of these mockacademies continued well beyond the sixteenth century in several other festive organizations which took as their raison d’etre the same festive consumption of food which characterized their Florentine antecedents, thus demonstrating the longue durée of the use of the theme of the giving and withholding of food as a symbol by which individuals marginalized or excluded from the centers of power could express, in a relatively safe way, their dissatisfaction with the prevailing social and political norms of Italy in the centuries following the consolidation of relatively centralized rule in the hands of Church and State which characterized sixteenth century Italy. Our investigation of these festive companies will thus serve to demonstrate, once again, as in the cases of Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Vasari, the power of highly symbolic and allusive means as a vehicle for the expression of popular discontent with the social and political status quo of Renaissance Italy.

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Notes 1. Melissa Meriam Bullard, “The Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici; Between Myth and History,” in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Phyllis Mack and Margaret Jacob (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25–58. Regarding the myth of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Bullard comments: “We make certain historical figures into cultural heroes and grant them an afterlife ofttimes richer and filled with more rewards and recognition than their actual chronological lives. Lorenzo de’ Medici is one of them. Mention his name, and vivid and striking images of the golden age of Florence and the Renaissance spring to mind. Lorenzo the Magnificent plays a double role for us. He is that historical person who lived in fifteenth-century Florence, and at the same time, he is a symbol of his age” (Bullard, “The Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici,” 25). 2. Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), xi.

Bibliography Bullard, Melissa Meriam. “The Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici; Between Myth and History.” In Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Phyllis Mack and Margaret Jacob, 25–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed. The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.

Introduction

Writing to his brother Buonarroto in a letter of September 18, 1512, Michelangelo makes the following observation: “I believe that the danger has passed, that is, of the Spanish, and I don’t believe that it is any longer necessary to leave; nevertheless, be quiet and don’t make friends of the associates of anyone, except for those of God; and don’t speak of anyone, neither for good nor for ill, because one never knows how things will turn out; attend only to your own affairs.”1 Written immediately after the return to power of the Medici, the letter describes the climate of intimidation and fear, especially for the republican enemies of the Medici, which prevailed at that time in Florence. Michelangelo was a staunch and life-long adherent of the republican cause, a fact sometimes overlooked by scholars in describing his dealings with his powerful patrons.2 The historian Giorgio Spini, in his study of Michelangelo’s political views, remarks that Michelangelo maintained this attitude of proud independence from his courtly patrons to the end of his life, noting Michelangelo’s “lasting refusal to accommodate himself to the absolute principate.”3 It was a commonplace among Florentine republican writers of the late 15th and early 16th centuries to refer to the Medici as tyrants who had usurped the ancient liberty of the Florentine people. Writing at the end of the 1400s, Girolamo Savonarola eloquently describes the atmosphere of fear and paranoia surrounding Lorenzo il Magnifico in chapter two of the second treatise of his Constitution and

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Government of Florence: “He [the tyrant] lives beset with fantasies of grandeur and with melancholy and with fears that always gnaw at his heart; therefore, he is always looking for pleasures as medicine for his condition.”4 One might cite also Alamanno Rinuccini’s De libertate, written a year after the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, in which the author refers obliquely to Lorenzo in the following terms: Dear friends, I cannot think about this subject without tears. It makes me ashamed, for I too was born in this city, and I too belong to our time. And I see the people who once commanded most of Tuscany and even some of the neighboring peoples, bullied today by the whims of one young man. Many noble minds and men of eminent seniority and wisdom wear today the yoke of servitude and hardly recognize their own condition. Nor, when they do see it, do they dare avenge themselves.5

The brutal reprisals following the plot to assassinate Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano in 1478, commemorated in a medal of Bertoldo di Giovanni, are further testimony of the determination of this powerful family to maintain a hold on power by any means necessary:6

Fig. Int.1: Bertoldo di Giovanni, medal commemorating the Pazzi Conspiracy (Credit: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

This traditional republican view of the Medici as arrogant and violent tyrants, destroyers of Florence’s republican liberty, was shared by other citizens and writers in the first decades of the 16th century. After the restoration of the Medici to power in Florence following the Sack of Prato in 1512 (an event Machiavelli called “an appalling spectacle of horrors”), the arrogant and authoritarian Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino and Pope Leo’s nephew, ruled the city as if it were his private fief,

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surrounded by bodyguards and young dandies “as subservient as courtiers.”7 He rejected the advice of more experienced citizens, and held councils, not in the Palazzo Vecchio, but rather in the Medici palace. The more affable and less ambitious Giuliano (the Pope’s brother) was recalled to Rome and made Captain General of the Church.8 Pope Leo’s primary ambition, besides driving foreign forces from Italian soil and the recovery of Parma and Piacenza for the Church, was the restoration of Florence to Medici rule. After the fall of the last Florentine republic, and Alessandro de’ Medici’s accession to power in the fall of 1530, Medici rule over the city was seen as particularly hateful, due to the relentless persecution of the Florentine exiles, the disarming of the Florentine citizens, the melting down of the great bell of the campanile of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Vacca, symbol of Florence’s freedom, to make medals for Pope Leo, and the general harshness of Alessandro’s rule, as the historian Benedetto Varchi makes clear: In Florence at that time people lived in universal discontent, both because of the newness of that government, never before seen in that city, and also because of its violence, seeing that often, for the slightest offense, harm came to now this, now that, citizen; and also because of the evil behavior of the family of the Duke, and of those soldiers who stood guard, who were truly criminal; to which one might add that Duke Alessandro behaved most dishonorably toward women, and did not forebear, so that he might vent his lust, from sacred virgins, nor from any other woman, whatever her circumstances or social status. (2.14.4)9

The reference here to the newness of Medici rule in the city is intended to recall to the reader the classical tradition of the figure of the tyrant, whose rule is characterized by violence against ordinary citizens, the dishonoring of defenceless women, and by constant fear on the part of the tyrant himself, who must live surrounded by bodyguards to defend himself against his own citizens. In the classical tradition, this constant fearfulness of the tyrant prevents him from enjoying the love and esteem of the citizens which is granted to just and beneficent rulers. It is precisely this classical image of the tyrant which Machiavelli intends to evoke in his vivid description of Cesare Borgia, traditionally assumed to represent his ideal of princely behavior; the fearsome and violent figure of Borgia is in turn intended to recall the tyrant of Machiavelli’s own day, Lorenzo de’ Piero, an allusion not lost on Machiavelli’s contemporaries, as we demonstrate below. Varchi describes the jubilation which greeted news of the assassination of Alessandro on the night of January 6, 1537 by Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’ Medici (“Lorenzino”): And so I say that one could scarcely believe neither how fast the news spread throughout all of Italy (Duke Alessandro having been wounded and killed the night

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of Epiphany in his room by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici), nor how many different things were said about it; indeed, most men, and especially the Florentines, and among these the exiles, exalted him [Lorenzino] to the skies with the highest praise, not merely considering him equal to, but placing him before Brutus; and on this account many, and among these Benedetto Varchi [the author], more than anyone else, composed, both in Italian and in Latin, many poems both in celebration of the tyrannicide and of the new Tuscan Brutus (by which names Lorenzo was immediately called), and also in condemnation and vituperation of Duke Alessandro, and even of signor Cosimo.” (2.15.23)10

Varchi also reports that Francesco Maria Molza, although he had originally composed an oration condemning him, eventually wrote an epigram praising Lorenzino: Invisum ferro Laurens dum percutit hostem, Quod premeret patriae libera colla suae; Te ne hinc nunc, inquit, patiar, qui ferre tyrannos Vix olim Romae marmoreos potui? While Lorenzo was striking the hated enemy with his sword, Because he was oppressing the free neck of his country, He said: “Do you think I can suffer you now any longer, I who was once scarcely able to endure the marble tyrants of Rome?” (2.15.23)11

Here Molza is referring to Lorenzino’s decapitation of the statues on the bas-reliefs of the Arch of Constantine and on the portico of the Basilica of San Paolo in 1530 in Rome, an event for which he became notorious in his time, provoking the oration of Molza mentioned above.12 The reference here to the necks of the Florentines is also a pointed reference to contemporary Medici propaganda in which they depicted themselves as just rulers of city, who managed to bridle the traditionally restless and faction-ridden spirit of the Florentines in the name of peace and public order. The personal device of Cardinal Giuliano de’ Medici (later Leo X) was an ox-yoke under which appeared the motto Jugum enim meum soave est (“My yoke is light”), a deliberate evocation of the Biblical verse “take my yoke upon you, for my burden is easy, and my yoke is light.” When he became Pope, Giuliano continued to use this device as his personal emblem, as the careful studies of Cox-Rearick have pointed out.13 Republican opponents of the Medici, and the popolo minuto, that large class of small workers and artisans who had supported the reforms of Savonarola and who were virtually excluded from political participation under the Medici and the oligarchic rule of the upper classes, would have certainly had reason to question the lightness of this yoke.14

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In reference to the image of the Medici yoke, Varchi comments: At that time Pope Clement was tormented by those passions of the soul [the fear of losing what he had gained] because, having ardently desired, not only to return the house of Medici to Florence, but to make Alessandro her absolute prince, and having to his eternal discredit obtained both of these desires, he never ceased to search for a way to guarantee the State to duke Alessandro; the which seemed to him, as indeed it was, very difficult to do, not only because that government, which he had set up in Florence, was completely new and violent towards the city, but also because of the nature of the citizens, who are naturally seditious and desirous of new governments; knowing this very well, he had no doubt that at the first opportunity which presented itself, they would use every means and every force to remove that yoke from themselves, which he with so much trouble and expense and blame to himself had placed on their necks. (2.14.1)

Here we see reference to the historical commonplace of the seditiousness and restlessness of the Florentines (most famously expressed by Dante in Book VI of the Inferno by the image of a feverish woman, tossing and turning on her bed) which must be bridled and brought under control by strong government.15 As CoxRearick points out, the fact that Medici rule, despite the often severe means used to achieve and maintain it, could nevertheless offer a measure of public quiet and order to the traditionally faction-ridden city of Florence constituted an important part of the family’s political propaganda. It was up to writers such as Varchi and Machiavelli, and artists such as Michelangelo, to raise the question at what cost such public order had been achieved. To celebrate the assassination of Alesssandro, a coin was minted in Florence depicting on one side the image of Lorenzino (copied from Roman coins depicting Brutus) and on the other, the Phrygian hat of freedom flanked by the two daggers of the liberator:

Fig. Int.2: Renaissance medal commemorating Lorenzino de’ Medici’s assassination of his cousin Alessandro (Photographer: Andrew McCabe)

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One could cite numerous other references to the Medici as tyrants from the first decades of the 16th century, but perhaps the most eloquent is that of the Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini’s dramatic and fateful speech before the Florentine citizens who had gathered in the Piazza della Signoria in 1512, immediately before the Sack of Prato, to discuss whether to come to terms with the Viceroy of the Holy League, whose army stood at Barberino, fifteen miles from Florence, and was offering apparently reasonable terms by which the Medici would be allowed to return to the city as private citizens, the only condition being the removal of Soderini from office. In his speech (as reported by Guicciardini), Soderini urges that the Medici not be allowed to return to Florence, since they would surely set themselves up as tyrants: Nor should anyone delude himself that government by the Medici would be the same as it was before they were exiled, because the form and basis of things have changed… But now, having dwelt so many years outside of Florence, brought up in foreign ways, and for this reason out of touch with civic matters, remembering their exile and the harsh manner in which they had been treated, very reduced in means and distrusted by so many families; aware that most, indeed, almost the entire city abhors tyranny, they would not share their counsels with any citizen; and forced by poverty and suspicion, they would arrogate everything to themselves, depending not on good will and love but force and arms, with the result that in a very short time this city would become like Bologna at the time of the Bentivoglio, or like Siena or Perugia. I wanted to say this to those who preach about the time and rule of Lorenzo the Magnificent. For, although conditions were hard then and there was a tyranny (although milder than many others), by comparison with this, Lorenzo’s rule would be an age of gold.16

One wonders what would have happened had the Florentines accepted the terms of the League; certainly, the horrors of Prato would have been avoided; as Guicciardini notes, all the leading citizens of Florence wanted an agreement, “accustomed by the example of their forefathers to often defend their liberty against iron with gold.” The principal question is whether the Medici would have been content with their reduced status, especially given the support of Pope Julius in Rome. In any event, Soderini’s delay in sending the Florentine ambassadors to the Spanish troops outside Prato led to the taking of that city and then to the Medici return to power in Florence. In the 1530s, under the rule of Cosimo, references to the Medici as tyrants continued unabated. Guicciardini and his fellow ottimati had hoped to be able to control the young Medici prince and direct his power to their own ends, the return to an oligarchical form of government in Florence; in this, they were severely disappointed: the young Duke ended up controlling not only them, but Florence and the Tuscan state as well, as the famous lines from Cellini’s Vita attest: “They have mounted a young man on a splendid horse—then told him you must not ride

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beyond certain boundaries. Now tell me who is going to restrain him when he wants to ride beyond them? You can’t impose laws on a man who is your master.”17 Cellini’s sentiment is echoed in a letter of Jan. 30, 1537 from the historian Francesco Vettori to Cardinal Niccolo’ Ridolfi, after Ridolfi had objected to Cosimo’s election as Duke of Florence: “Indeed, it is necessary to do this shameful deed [the confirmation of Cosimo in power in Florence] and set up a tyrant, since in these times it is not possible to find a less evil path.”18 Such a climate prevailing in Medicean Florence, in which the Medici were seen, often with good reason, as tyrants, affected not only artists and writers of republican sympathies, but the general public as well. The military historian John Hale, discussing the construction of the Fortezza da Basso (the cornerstone of which was laid on July 15, 1534), notes that for Florentines imbued with the traditions of republicanism (a tradition which survived, according to Hale, well into the 16th century) the building of fortresses was a clear sign of the repression of a free people by a tyrant: [the Fortezza da Basso] became a symbol of despotism as powerful in the eyes of sixteenth-century Florentines as was the Bastille to eighteenth-century Frenchmen… Florence…was not the place for a political leader to try to fortify himself…The outcry that went up when this bridle was slipped in place owes something to the tradition: citadels for tyrants, walls for a free people; but it owes something, too, to the peculiar nature of Florentine republicanism.19

Hale cites several contemporary reactions to this event, including the following comment from Jacopo Nardi, the historian, one of the Florentine exiles who sent emissaries to Naples in April of 1535 to plead the cause of the exiles before the Emperor Charles V: “a great fortress was being built with the blood of that unhappy people, as a prison and slaughter-house for the distressed citizens.”20 At the same meeting, Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, a supporter of the exiles, told Charles that Alessandro “was at the moment building a fortress at great expense as the sole guarantee of his safety.” And Lorenzino de’ Medici, the assassin of Duke Alessandro, whom we mentioned above, noted in his Apologia (in which he discusses the reasons for his deed and attempts to justify himself for the eventual failure of his act to provoke a popular uprising against the Medici in the city) that the building of fortresses is associated with the evils of tyranny.21 Not only was a fortress constructed to secure the Medici hold on power, but the citizens were also deprived of the means of overturning Medici rule through a popular uprising. Vettori’s eloquent description of the disarming of the Florentine citizens at the behest of Pope Clement VII is worth quoting at length for the light it sheds on the determination of the Medici to secure themselves against any form of armed opposition on the part of the ordinary citizens of Florence:

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Among the first things which Pope Clement, having reacquired Florence, judged necessary was to strip the city of all arms, both defensive and offensive; and so the Otto published a severe ban to the effect that every person, not excepting anyone for any reason, should bring to the Palace within a certain period of time all arms of any kind, both defensive and offensive, both with the handle and without, taking swords, daggers, bucklers, arquebuses, small and large shields, under penalty of one hundred large gold fiorini, and the confiscation of the house of anyone who acted otherwise. The number of arms which were brought in one way or the other was incredible; but partly because it was thought, and partly because it was reported by the spies (who were without number, some secret and some open) that many had hidden in the most secret places their best suits of armor and their best coats of mail, severe bans were imposed, with severe punishments, even execution, with the declaration that every house be searched, without any respect to persons, and that those who were found to have violated the ban and to be guilty, would be punished with the appropriate punishment. For fear of this ban, for the space of several days, every night arms were thrown into the Arno, and every morning they were found scattered here and there on the piazzas and the walls; and so great was the terror, which had come upon the groups of citizens, that no one dared, not only to look at them, but even to touch them and carry them away; on the contrary, upon leaving their houses early in the morning, when they saw them, they turned aside, and watched their footsteps, so as not to be seen by the officials of the Eight, who went around collecting them very early in the morning. (2.12.49)

Varchi goes on to describe the ransacking of houses, especially those of the Piagnoni (followers of Savonarola, suspected of being enemies of the Medicean party and of the State), by groups of workers of the Eight, whom he describes as “the scum of all riffraff.” (We shall say more about the Eight below). Here we observe something which comes close to state-sanctioned terror against the civilian populace, perpetrated by the officials of the Otto di Guardia in support of Medici power in Florence, at the behest of the Pope. This terror is further evoked by the description which follows of Ser Maurizio of Milan, whom Varchi notes was in name the Chancellor of the Eight, but was in actuality their overseer and master, a cruel man whom Varchi says engineered false accusations against citizens by having men throw arms into their houses at night, and then arresting them for this in the morning. The fear among the civilians was so great that, according to Varchi, “men did not dare to keep in their houses, not only chisels, or double pikes, or daggers, or other similar iron objects, but even sticks, or sharpened clubs, for fear that they would be taken for pikes; and they took care even as far as buckets for the well, that they be not of an unusual shape, lest they be taken for helmets” (2.12.50). While it might seem that Varchi is exaggerating here for dramatic (and darkly comic) effect, he avers that this is not the case: “And lest anyone think that I am exaggerating things in the manner of an orator…I am not writing of things so

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long ago, that there are not thousands of people in Florence, not only men but also women, who do not remember these things very clearly as having happened to them.” In addition to the fortress and the disarming of the civilian populace, the use of spies to monitor the sentiments of the people towards the Medici regime was commonplace in Renaissance Florence, as the historian John Brackett makes clear: “The forces of order also relied on information provided by informers, on whose eyes and ears the system of surveillance greatly depended. Some of these were professional spies whose identities were never revealed, even in the budget entries that testify to the regular payment of the stipends they collected by sneaking into the courtyard of the Bargello.”22 Not only were agents of the Otto di Guardia busy monitoring the sentiments of the people, but in some cases, neighbors even spied on each other, as Brackett points out. An anecdote regarding Cosimo’s desire to know the people’s reactions to Cellini’s Perseus when it was first set up in the Piazza della Signoria supports this view of a close scrutiny of critical sentiments in Medicean Florence: “When the Perseus was displayed for the first time in the Piazza della Signoria, Cosimo stood, according to Cellini, ‘at one of the lower windows of the Palazzo, which was above the door, and, in this manner, inside the window, half-hidden, heard everything that was said about the statue.’ Cosimo then ventured his judgment only after he had heard the praise of the people.”23 The desire of Florence’s Medici rulers to know and exert control over all aspects of the life of the civilian populace reaches a kind of nightmarish extreme in an anecdote from Alessandro Ceccheregli’s Delle attioni et sentenze del Signore Alessandro de’ Medici, in which the ruler is depicted as everywhere and all-knowing, traveling incognito deep into the countryside, staying at a peasant’s house, and, seeing that the peasant was unaware of the identity of his noble guest, Alessandro’s asking him what he honestly felt about the rule of the Duke of Florence. Fortunately for the peasant, he had the good sense to treat his unknown guest with courtesy. Ceccheregli’s work is full of stories of Alessandro’s personal intervention in the lives of his subjects, though, owing to the encomiastic nature of the work, all these interventions result in justice being done and Alessandro emerging as a fair and compassionate ruler. While the extent of this surveillance of the civilian population by the Medici regime is perhaps here exaggerated, the historical evidence makes clear the extent to which the monitoring of critical sentiments was essential to the Medici hold on power. Once again, Varchi provides us with an eloquent summing up of Cosimo’s use of spies to monitor the citizens of his state, in this case the Florentine exiles:

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But before I proceed any further, it is necessary to note that Duke Cosimo had been advised a few days earlier by various persons in various places, both by embassy and by letter, of everything that the exiles were planning…And this happened to Duke Cosimo because he (imitating the practice of his valorous father in investigating not only the doings, but even the thoughts, of his adversaries, on the basis of reports from both important men, diligent out of friendship, and also from spies, either open or secret, diligent for the sake of money), continually used incredible diligence, and spent an incalculable amount of money, to the extent that I would dare say that, except for his ambassadors, legates and officials, there was not, I won’t say, one city, or fortified place in all of Italy, but not even hamlet, or country house, or even tavern, about which Duke Cosimo was not advised daily. (2.15.47)

Not only were spies a common form of political and social control in Medicean Florence, but the criminal justice system was also used as a means of suppressing dissent. Varchi notes the use of the Otto di Guardia, mentioned above, as a means of persecution of the Florentine exiles: In the year 1530 … there were confined in various parts of Italy, and even outside of Italy, a great number of citizens for three consecutive years, with this condition, that they could not return from these places of exile to Florence without permission from the Otto di Guardia e Balia by a decision of all the black beans. Therefore, at the end of the three years, authority was given to the magistrate of the above-mentioned to review all those confined, and, for those living, to confirm or change or even to free them; and so the Eight (knowing the hatred which Pope Clement and Duke Alessandro bore toward those citizens, and that their intention was to persecute them to the extent that little by little they would all die, if that were possible) freed none of them from their confinement, to only a few confirmed the same confinement they had had before, and for many changed [the place of exile], and confined them a second time, for the most part in places much more harsh and miserable than those in which they had been confined the first time. . .they were confined a second time by the Otto in such places where not only did they have no chance of starting a new life, but where they could not in any way achieve this, and where in consequence they were almost compelled to die of hunger and privation. (2.14.9)

The requirement noted here by Varchi that the return of the exiles could only be assured by a vote of all the black beans is clearly an expedient to assure that this would not happen, the Florentine equivalent of the modern stuffing of the ballot box. Brackett describes at length the use of the judicial system by the Medici to maintain their power and secure themselves against their enemies. According to Brackett, the condemnation of the reformer Savonarola to death by the Otto di Guardia in 1498

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represented an action engineered by the conservative faction of the oligarchy that brought an end to a particularly tumultuous period in the city’s history. The Eight continued to successfully fulfill the role of political police in the sixteenth century, identifying and punishing the enemies of the recently ennobled Medici family. The report of the Venetian ambassador to Florence in 1561, Vincenzo Fideli, underlined the importance to Cosimo I of the Eight’s routine surveillance over the activities of Florentine aristocrats: First thing in the morning, the Secretary delivered his daily reports in person to Cosimo. The Medici grand duke was no doubt reacting with this sense of urgency to the Pucci conspiracy of the previous year. Condemnations and executions of the conspirators and their supporters by the Eight concluded this last attempt by aristocrats to topple the Medici regime. But it was not only the comportment of the powerful that the prince was anxious to control; he wished to put under surveillance the entire urban and rural populace of the grand duchy.24

Here we see again the determination of the Medici to monitor all potential sources of opposition within the Florentine state. As Brackett astutely points out: “Coercion can be accomplished not only through the exercise of force, but by regulation through enforced observance of bureaucratic procedures and by the power to punish with incarceration those caught in the complex web of criminal laws.”25 Summing up his discussion of the Medici exercise of power in Renaissance Florence, Brackett observes: “It should come as no surprise that the Medici sometimes punished their enemies directly, without the mediation of the criminal justice system, when great discretion was needed. Such had been the case when, for example, the rebel, Filippo Strozzi, banker and erstwhile supporter of the Medici, was captured in 1537 … it was widely believed that he had been ordered strangled by Cosimo, who did not want to risk the disturbances a public execution might have caused.” The assassin of Alessandro de’ Medici, Lorenzino, was finally hunted down and killed in Venice in 1548 on the orders of Duke Cosimo, as was the son of the leader of the last conspiracy against the Duke, Pandolfo Pucci. Lorenzino’s assassin has left us a vivid account of his killing of the tyrant-slayer in Venice in his Apologia, where he notes Cosimo’s great satisfaction upon hearing of the deed. The use of paid assassins was thus another means by which the Medici maintained their hold on power. Because they were so close to those in power, and often by nature of an independent spirit, artists and writers came in for particular scrutiny. We cited the case of Michelangelo above; the artist Benvenuto Cellini, as we note below, was another example of an artist who fell afoul of Cosimo’s insistence on obedience on the part of those at his court. For Cellini, the general intransigence and belligerence of his personality, and for Michelangelo, his proud and independent spirit and strong republican sympathies made these artists particularly vulnerable

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to Medici reprisals. We discuss Michelangelo’s aversion to Medici rule, and his response, in Chapter 2. Not only did Michelangelo, unlike Cellini, leave Florence, never to return, upon Alessandro’s accession to power in 1534, but such an exodus of literary and artistic talent was not uncommon at the time. Cosimo tried to lure many of these artists and writers back to Florence after his accession to power, often with success, one notable exception being Michelangelo himself, as an anecdote cited by Spini regarding Michelangelo’s reply to a request made to him by Cosimo in 1552, relayed to him through Cellini, that he return to Florence, makes clear: After his [Cellini’s] exposition of flattering offers on the part of the Duke, Michelangelo “suddenly looked at me closely and, sighing, said: ‘And you, how content are you with him?’“ Of course, if one takes Cellini’s word for it, Michelangelo wasn’t alluding to anything else than certain temporary fallings out between Cellini and Cosimo, soon to dissipate with a return of ducal favor. But this sneer of Michelangelo’s reminds one too irresistibly of the irony with which the artist replied so often in his correspondence to the compliments of Vasari. And it should alone be enough to dissipate the courtly veil in which scholars have attempted to wrap the last period of Michelangelo’s life.

To cite another prominent example of the exodus of talented writers and artists from Medicean Florence after 1530, the political theorist Donato Giannotti, friend of both Michelangelo and Machiavelli, joined Varchi in exile, living in Venice, Bologna and Rome.26 Rome thus for Michelangelo, as for other republican exiles from Florence, represented (together with Venice or a foreign country such as France) a kind of relatively safe haven from the very real danger of Medici reprisals. As an essay from a recent volume of essays on Cosimo’s Florence makes clear, the arrest, conviction and subsequent pardon of the artist Benvenuto Cellini by Cosimo was occasioned by the particularly independent and anti-authoritarian spirit of this artist. As Margaret Gallucci notes, Cellini’s “scathing attack on Medicean politics” led to his trial for sodomy in February of 1557, his conviction, imprisonment and finally liberation at the behest of Cosimo.27 Gallucci cites a letter of March 3, 1557 in the Florentine State Archives in which Cellini supplicates Cosimo for his liberation. Cosimo, demonstrating both his clemency and his control over the judicial apparatus of the Florentine state, commuted Cellini’s sentence on March 26. As Gallucci makes clear, this incident marked the effective end of Cellini’s artistic career. A letter of Annibal Caro of 1539 to Luca Martini notes the true cause for the persecution of Cellini: “[Cellini’s] peculiar manner of speaking brazenly to authorities made the pope fear him more for ‘what he can do or say in the future than what he has done or said in the past.’“ Vasari expresses

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these same sentiments: according to him, Cellini was “a person who has been only too well able to speak for himself with princes.”28 Gallucci also remarks that Cellini’s trial for sodomy may have been merely a pretext to frighten him into an obedient silence. Given the use by the Medici of the judicial system to harass and intimidate its opponents, such an hypothesis seems to us entirely plausible. We give several other examples of this technique below. As historians have noted, this partisan use of the judicial system on the part of the Medici dates back to at least the middle of the 15th century.29 The trial of Cellini was thus a way for Cosimo to control critical discourse in his realm while simultaneously presenting an image of himself as a just and magnanimous ruler. Here again we see the legal system used as an instrument of social control. As Eisenbichler notes: “Cosimo used not only his subjects, but also the Florentine legal system to his advantage. In particular, he enacted strict legislation, but then mitigated it with his clemency, thus presenting himself as the champion of law and order, while at the same time creating an image of himself as the compassionate ruler to whom his subjects could appeal for clemency.” We noted above the use of the magistracy of the Otto di Guardia as a means of enforcing the Duke’s will. We see a similar use of the legal system to control independent voices in the case of the poet Tullia d’Aragona. After moving to Florence to escape political turmoil in Siena, d’Aragona fell afoul of Florentine sumptuary laws regarding the required dress for prostitutes. After consulting, among other people, Benedetto Varchi, she wrote a letter to Duchess Eleonora imploring her to intercede with her husband on her behalf. Cosimo made a special exemption in her case, ordering that she be granted leniency as a poet. As Basile makes clear, because she owed her freedom and reputation to Cosimo’s intervention in this affair, d’Aragona was obliged to him to return the favor by writing works in the Florentine vernacular, one of Cosimo’s pet projects. Another interesting example, if it is true, of Cosimo’s willingness to exert pressure to secure the compliance of writers and artists, concerns the historian Varchi himself. Varchi, for unknown reasons, left Florence in 1544, “rejecting Cosimo’s patronage and his role in the Academy,” and entered the service of the Archbishop of Bari. While paying a visit to his hometown near Florence the following summer, Varchi was arrested and imprisoned on a charge of having raped a nine-year-old girl. Freed after Cosimo paid his fine (to be applied to the dowry of the girl), Varchi soon entered into the service of the Duke and began writing his Florentine History. One scholar suggests that these two events may have not been accidentally linked, and that either his enemies in Florence, or Cosimo himself may have engineered the entire affair to gain Varchi’s obedience.30 From the

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evidence given above of Cosimo’s ruthlessness and cleverness in using the judicial system to ensure compliance with his wishes on the part of both artists and ordinary citizens, such a hypothesis seems to us far from unlikely.31 Finally, one might cite the recent study of Domenico Zanré, in which this scholar discusses the case of the Accademia del Piano, a private gathering of academicians closely surveilled for its potentially anti-Medicean activities. The dramatist Antonfrancesco Grazzini (“il Lasca”), whom Zanré describes as “hovering on the margins of non-conformity,” was a member of this group, and, more importantly, all the main actors in a conspiracy against Cosimo in 1559 were drawn from this Academy. In addition, the group contained several members of the Pazzi family, long-time opponents of the Medici. Alfredo Pazzi, one of the more distinguished Piangiani, composed a sonnet “Isprezzon l’accademia i piangiani,” in which he alludes to the hostility of the Accademia del Piano toward the Accademia Fiorentina, the official organ of Cosimo’s cultural politics. Zanré notes that Cosimo was convinced that this academy was not a threat to his rule, but was nevertheless grateful to have a description of its meetings and a list of its members. At this point in his regime, Cosimo was sufficiently secure in his power to be able to tolerate the occasional outburst of independent spirit, especially since, in any case, such an outburst was being carefully monitored by a trusted advisor. From the above evidence, we see how the Medici’s determination to maintain absolute control over Florentine political life created a climate of profound intimidation and fear for all who dared oppose them, in which the overt expression of critical sentiments was especially unwise. One of the most eloquent expressions of the dangers of independent expression in Medicean Florence comes from Machiavelli himself. Writing to a friend, Machiavelli remarks that in order to express his true feelings about the Medici, he must resort to extraordinary measures: “As for the lies of these citizens of Carpi, I can beat them all. I have long been a doctor of the art. For some time now I have never said what I believe or never believed what I said. If sometimes I have told the truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find.”32

Given this climate, for men of independent mind and spirit, for whom the options of either cowed silence or worse, sycophancy (the cardinal vice of courts) were not to be tolerated, means would have to be found to express critical sentiments, but in such a way as to guarantee at least a reasonable margin of safety for their expression. It is to such a mode of expression, called by the classical rhetoricians by many names, innuendo being the most familiar to modern readers, that we now turn. We will see how Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Vasari, and others, each in their different way, were able to encode sentiments critical of their princely patrons in

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works addressed to these same patrons. Such means allowed these artists and writers to maintain some measure of freedom of expression while at the same time avoiding reprisals from those in power, reprisals which, as we have seen, could be severe.

Notes 1. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), I, 136. Cited in Giorgio Spini, “Politicità di Michelangelo,” Rivista Storica Italiana 76, 1964, reprinted in Michelangelo politico e altri studi sul Rinascimento fiorentino (Milan: Unicopli, 1999), 33. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Italian are mine. 2. One scholar even goes so far as to describe Michelangelo as a kind of court artist, eager to serve his princely patrons, seeing him in this as typical of his times. For this citation, and a discussion of Michelangelo as an adherent of the republican cause, see Chapter 2. Such a view of Michelangelo, to one who studies his biography carefully, and the historical context in which his works were created, is, in our opinion, impossible to maintain. 3. Spini 52. 4. Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence, trans. and ed. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 242. 5. Ibid. 204. 6. These reprisals included, in Angelo Poliziano’s vivid account of the assassination, the mutilation of the corpses by the pro-Medicean crowd and the hanging of the bodies of the conspirators from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria. (Angelo Poliziano, “The Pazzi Conspiracy,” Watkins 171–183). Francesco Guicciardini notes that the sack of Prato procured lasting enmity for the Medici family among the citizens of Florence: “[Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici], considering that now especially not even this [the return of the Medici to Florence as private citizens] would prove to be long-lasting, because together with his name, they would be deeply hated by everyone, the other citizens being always goaded by the suspicion that the house of Medici would lay ambush against their freedom, and much more because of the hatred felt against the Medici who had led the Spanish army against their country and been the cause of the most cruel sack of Prato, and because the city out of terror of arms had been forced to accept such base and iniquitous terms” (Guicciardini, The History of Italy, trans. Sidney Alexander [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], 265). 7. Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (New York: Morrow, 1980), 220. 8. A. Giorgetti, “Lorenzo de’ Medici Capitano Generale della Repubblica fiorentina,” ASI, ser. IV, 11–12 (1883), 194–215 (211), cited in Najemy, 430. This article is especially fascinating in that the subtle conflict between Lorenzo di Piero and Giuliano, and Leo’s clever and gradual marginalization of Giuliano in favor of the more aggressive (but also more rash) Lorenzo is never stated explicitly, but must be inferred by the reader through a close reading of the letters exchanged by the parties in question. 9. I have used the Salani edition of the Storia Fiorentina (Salani: Florence, 1963). In the citations, the first number indicates the first or second volume of the Salani edition, the second,

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

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the number of the book, and the third, the number of the chapter. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Italian are my own. It is passages such as this, where the words “tyrannicide” and “Tuscan Brutus” are printed in large type (to catch the eye of a reader skimming through the book?) and reference is made to the poems condemning Cosimo (which are even quoted verbatim), which may account for the fact that Varchi’s Storia fiorentina was not published until 1721, and then in Germany under a fictitious imprint (“Colonia: P. Martello”: the work was actually printed at Augsburg by Paolo Kuhzio and edited by Francesco Settimanni, the same individual who edited Giannotti’s Della repubblica fiorentina mentioned above). Here we observe at work a form of veiled critique, or covert allusion, by which the author is hinting at more than he can state explicitly. In this context, the fact that Varchi’s Storia—ostensibly written to glorify Florence under the benevolent rule of its Duke—ends with a saying of the Lutherans (“this [the sexual assault by Pier Luigi Farnese on the bishop of Fano] is a new way to martyr the saints”), a reference to Boccaccio, and a mention that the Farnese Pope, Paul III, was a bastard, all may be seen as further examples of this type of covert critique, since these salacious or heretical details tend to undermine (being the last thing a reader encounters in the book), in a very clever and subtle way, the entire raison d’etre of the text. This hypothesis is confirmed by the final words of the book, in which the Roman historian Tacitus (a master of the technique of covert allusion, whom we discuss at length in Chapter 1) is cited: “And although I know that these, and other similar things said openly by me, could one day be the reason, because of the greatness of those they refer to, that the reading of these Histories will be prohibited under the harshest censure, I also know, besides that which Cornelius Tacitus writes in two places, that the duty of an historian is, without any regard to any person whatsoever, to place the truth before everything else, even should it bring him either harm or shame” (2.16.16). Varchi’s citation of Tacitus, as with similar citations of Boccaccio and Petrarch (of the patriotic poem Italia mia) by numerous other writers of the cinquecento, is, then, we would suggest, in many cases a kind of code word or signal to the reader that a hidden antiauthoritarian meaning or intention is present. We discuss in Chapter 1 the similar use of code words by Machiavelli in the Prince. For a vivid account of the assassination, in addition to Lorenzino’s own Apologia, see Varchi 2.15. The Apologia is now in an English translation, with poems of Molza and a translation of the Apologia of Francesco Bibboni, the assassin who, under the direction of Cosimo, murdered Lorenzino in Venice on February 26, 1548 (Apology for a Murder, trans. Andrew Brown and J. G. Nichols (London: Hesperus, 2004). Lorenzino de’ Medici, Apology for a Murder, xiv. Cited in Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (New York, 1980), 216. For a thorough discussion of the device of the yoke in Medici political imagery, see Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 36ff. The most serious popular uprising in Florence’s history, the Tumulto de’ Ciompi of June 1378, left a profound fear and distrust of the working classes among members of Florence’s mercantile middle and upper classes, leading to fundamental changes in the structure and functioning of her political institutions. For the uprising, see Giuseppe Di Leva, Il tumulto dei Ciompi (Firenze 1378) (Verona: Bertani, 1972). “How many times, as far as you remember / Laws, money, offices and customs/Have you changed, and changed again your members? / And if thou remembrest true and seest the

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16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

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light / You’ll see how like you are to that sick woman / Who cannot find rest upon her pillow / But by turning seeks to shield herself from pain” (Inferno VI.145–151). Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, trans. and ed. Sidney Alexander (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 260. Cellini Vita (1996), 323, trans. Hibbert. Cited in Hibbert 258. Bernardo Segni, Storie fiorentine (Milan, 1805) vol. 2, 155–166. Cited in the essay in the Eisenbichler volume by Marcello Simonetta: “Francesco Vettori, Francesco Guicciardini and Cosimo I,” 4. J. R. Hale, “The End of Florentine Liberty: The Fortezza da Basso,” in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. Nicolai Rubinstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 501–502. Varchi, cited in Hale 503. Hale also cites Donato Giannotti on Cosimo’s installation of a garrison in Florence as evidence that Florence was being changed into a tyranny (Opere politiche e letterarie, ed. Filippo Polidori (Florence: Le Monnier, 1850), vol. 1, 66). Machiavelli himself makes the connection between fortified garrisons and tyrants in his Discorsi II.24: “It must be borne in mind then, that fortresses are constructed as a defence either against enemies or against subjects. In the first case they are unnecessary, and in the second case harmful. . .I maintain that when a prince or a republic is afraid of its subjects and fears they may rebel, the root cause of this fear must lie in the hatred which such subjects have for their rulers: a hatred which is due to their misbehavior…For when mismanagement gives rise to hatred it is mainly due to a prince or a republic having fortresses; and, when this is the case, fortresses are far more harmful than useful” (trans. Leslie J. Walker, revised by Brian Richardson in The Discourses (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 353, cited in Hale 502.) For more on Machiavelli’s insistence on the love of the citizens as being the best defence of the ruler of a state, see Chapter 1. Cited in Hale 504. Hale also cites the republican historian Bernardo Segni to the effect that the fortress was built “to place on the necks of the Florentines a yoke of a kind never experienced before: a citadel, whereby the citizens lost all hope of ever living in freedom again” (Storie fiorentine (Leghorn: G. Masi, 1830), vol. II, 400, cited in Hale 504). The significance of the image of the yoke, symbolizing either Medici tyranny or the firm but benevolent rule of the family over Florence, depending upon one’s political orientation, had very powerful resonances for contemporary Florentines, as noted above. John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 31. Brackett 36-37. Brackett, 30. Brackett also cites the Italian historian Giovanni Antonelli to the effect that “[The Otto di Guardia] is the first stable organ created in Florence with functions that, to use a modern word, we would call those of a political police. One must recall the juridical-political situation of the era to understand how much the modern concept of the police as an organ of public safety should be used with great caution. Here we find ourselves confronted with an organ of the State whose official task is to defend public order, which in effect may be identified with the interests of the governing class whose hold on power this organ was supposed to guarantee against direct attacks in the piazza and against the covert actions of the exiles” (Giovanni Antonelli, “La magistratura degli Otto di Guardia a Firenze,” ASI 1 (1954): 3–39, cited in Brackett 30)

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25. Brackett 31. 26. On the Florentine exiles, see Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), Paolo Simoncelli, Fuoriuscitismo repubblicano fiorentino, 1530-54 (Milan: F. Angeli, 2006), Christine Shaw, The Politics of Exile in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Valerio Vianello, Fuoruscitismo politico fiorentino e produzione letteraria nel Cinquecento, in Contributi rinascimentali Venezia e Firenze, eds. Tiziana Agostini Nordio, and Valerio Vianello (Padova: Abano Terme: Francisci, 1982). 27. Margaret Gallucci, “Cellini’s Trial for Sodomy: Power and Patronage at the Court of Cosimo I,” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 37–46. 28. Gallucci 43. The quotation is from Cellini’s Vita, ed. Lorenzo Bellotto (Parma: Bembo/ Guanda, 1996), 710. 29. The classic work which describes in detail Medici manipulation of the political, judicial and financial apparatus of quattrocento Florence to their own ends is Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434–1494) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). 30. Simonetta, cited above. Simonetta goes on to describe Vettori’s political marginalization at the hands of Cosimo, and the disillusion and resignation in which he died: “[Vettori] buried himself alive in his house, consumed by bitterness, while all the wise citizens of Florence died in the next few years out of pain and discontent,” 7. Simonetta notes that “Cosimo gradually removed the old guard, replaced it with a new administration of homines novi, and rejected the pretensions of the Florentine aristocracy. Vettori, who was not an aristocrat, but had always acted like one of the ottimati, was thus sidelined.” 31. As a further example of Cosimo’s close surveillance of possible troublemakers, one might cite the following letter of March 27, 1553 from Cosimo to his agent Averardo Serristori regarding Cellini’s nephew Libradoro Libradori: “We know that that Libradoro, nephew of Benvenuto the sculptor, is a troublesome person, as you wrote us in your letter of the 24th, but nevertheless, it is prudent to be aware of every little cause for concern, especially in these times. However, try to see if there is anything to be done there, and if not, it would be well that you arrange to make him come to Florence under some pretext.” The letter does not state exactly the nature of Libradoro’s troubling behavior, nor what Cosimo intended to do with him when he came to Florence. From this letter, it seems clear that the compulsion to cause trouble for those in authority was a trait which ran in Cellini’s family. An abstract and excerpt from this letter is to be found on the website of the Medici Archive Project, www.medici.org. 32. For the Medici’s masterful manipulation of the institutions of the Florentine state to assure themselves power while simultaneously maintaining the outward show of republication institutions, besides Rubinstein, cited above, see J. R. Hale, Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), John Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006) and Nicolai Rubinstein, “Politics and Constitution in Florence at the End of the Fifteenth Century,” in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacobs (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960).

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Bibliography Antonelli, Giovanni, “La magistratura degli Otto di Guardia a Firenze,” ASI 1 (1954): 3–39. Basile, Deana, “‘Fasseli gratia per poetessa’: Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Role in the Florentine Literary Circle of Tullia d’Aragona,” in Eisenbichler, 135–39. Brackett, John K., Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Buonarroti, Michelangelo, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori (Florence: Sansoni, 1965). Cellini, Benvenuto, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1998). Cox-Rearick, Janet, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed., The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001). Gallucci, Margaret, “Cellini’s Trial for Sodomy: Power and Patronage at the Court of Cosimo I,” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 37–46. Giorgetti, A., “Lorenzo de’ Medici Capitano Generale della Repubblica fiorentina,” ASI, ser. IV, 11–12 (1883): 194–215. Guicciardini, Francesco, The History of Italy, trans. Sidney Alexander (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Hale, J. R., “The End of Florentine Liberty: The Fortezza da Basso,” in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. Nicolai Rubinstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 501–502. Hibbert, Christopher, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (New York: Morrow, 1980). Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker, revised by Brian Richardson (New York: Penguin Books, 1983). Medici, Lorenzino de’, Apology for a Murder, trans. Andrew Brown and J. G. Nichols (London: Hesperus, 2004). Najemy, John, A History of Florence, 1200-1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). Poliziano, Angelo, “The Pazzi Conspiracy,” in Watkins, 171–183. Rodolico, Niccolò, I Ciompi: una pagina di storia del proletariato operaio (Florence: Sansoni, 1980). Rubinstein, Nicolai, “Politics and Constitution in Florence at the End of the Fifteenth Century,” in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacobs (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960). Shaw, Christine, The Politics of Exile in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Simoncelli, Paolo, Fuoriuscitismo repubblicano fiorentino, 1530–54 (Milan: F. Angeli, 2006). Simonetta, Marcello, “Francesco Vettori, Francesco Guicciardini and Cosimo I,” in Eisenbichler, Spini, Giorgio, Michelangelo politico e altri studi sul Rinascimento fiorentino (Milan: Unicopli, 1999).

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Starn, Randolph, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Varchi, Benedetto, Storia Fiorentina (Salani: Florence, 1963). Vianello, Valerio, “Fuoruscitismo politico fiorentino e produzione letteraria nel Cinquecento,” in Contributi rinascimentali Venezia e Firenze, eds. Tiziana Agostini Nordio, and Valerio Vianello (Padova, Abano Terme: Francisci, 1982). Watkins, Renée Neu, trans. and ed., Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1978).

CHAPTER ONE

Reading Machiavelli Rhetorically: The Prince as Covert Criticism of the Renaissance Prince

Flattery is ugly, but censure is dangerous; that manner is best which lies between the two, namely innuendo. D EMETRIUS OF P HALERON Criticare i principi è pericoloso, lodarli è bugia. I TALIAN

PROVERB

Since its first appearance, there have been readers who have read Machiavelli’s Prince not as advice for the Renaissance prince, nor as an objective presentation of political affairs in the Italy of Machiavelli’s day, but rather as precisely the opposite, namely a veiled but nevertheless trenchant critique of the Renaissance prince, presented in a form which seems to offer him advice.1 Perhaps the best-known of these interpretations of Machiavelli’s treatise as a crypto-republican work, in which, under the guise of seeming to instruct the prince, advice is given to the people on the ways of tyrants and the means of resisting them, is that of Rousseau. In his Du contrat social, he comments: “[Machiavelli], pretending to give lessons to kings, gave great lessons to the people. The Prince of Machiavelli is the book of republicans.” In the 1782 edition Rousseau himself inserted the following note: The choice alone of his execrable hero [Cesare Borgia] makes clear his secret intention; and the contrasting of the maxims of The Prince with those of his Discourses

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on Titus Livy and his History of Florence, makes clear that this deep political thinker has up until now had only superficial or corrupt readers. The court of Rome severely prohibited his book; I well believe it; it is that court which it depicts most clearly.2

While enlightenment readings that see the Prince as containing a concealed republican message are most familiar to modern scholars, there is evidence that even well before its first publication in 1532, there were readers who discerned a hidden anti-princely agenda present in the text. An anecdote recounted by the English Cardinal Reginald Pole (one of the first writers to promote the myth of Machiavelli as a messenger of Satan), provides clear evidence of just such an early reading of the text in chiave antimedicea. Upon asking certain Florentines he encountered in the street during the winter of 1538–1539 how they could justify Machiavelli’s writing such an “infamous” work, Pole claimed to have heard in response of Machiavelli’s secret intention in writing the Prince, that since he [Machiavelli] knew him [Lorenzo] to be of a tyrannical nature, he inserted things that could not but most greatly please such a nature. Nevertheless, [Machiavelli] judged, as have all of the other writers who have written concerning how to make a man into a king or a prince, and as experience teaches, that if the prince did put these things into effect, his rule would be brief. This he greatly hoped for, since inwardly he burned with hatred toward that prince for whom he wrote. Nor did he expect from that book anything other than, by writing for the tyrant the things that please a tyrant, to give him, if he could, a ruinous downfall by his own action.3

Gennaro Sasso notes that the text aroused early hostility as it circulated in manuscript well before its first publication in 1532.4 The text’s first Florentine editor Bernardo di Giunta’s dedicatory letter also notes strong aversion to the text, and asserts that the work contains strong medicine that will allow its readers to defend themselves against tyranny.5 Giunta adds that the text will need strong defenders to protect it from those who have taken offense at its message. Taken together with his reference to the text as medicine against tyranny, this suggests the possibility that certain of its early readers may have been offended not only by the provocative material regarding the necessity for the successful prince to imitate the fox as well as the lion, to cultivate fear as well as the love of his subjects, and so on, but also by what they may have discerned as a veiled anti-Medicean message present in the text, analogous to that described by Cardinal Pole in the anecdote cited above. The dedicatee of Giunta’s prefatory letter was none other than Giovanni Gaddi, the brother of the powerful anti-Medicean Cardinal Niccolò Gaddi.6 The Neapolitan humanist Agostino Nifo produced a Latin version of the Prince entitled De Regnandi Peritia, issued in Naples in 1523, which describes

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Machiavelli’s work in terms similar to those later used by Giunta: “For you will find in these pages both the deeds of kings and of tyrants briefly described, as in the books of doctors both poisons and antidotes: that you might avoid the former, and seek out the latter.”7 While usually dismissed as mere plagiarism or an inept rewriting of Machiavelli’s text, Nifo’s additions to and reordering of Machiavelli’s text are intended to censure the rule of tyrants and describe the nature of just kingly rule. In this respect, his work anticipates Innocent Gentillet’s better-known and more systematic “refutation” of the Prince, the Commentariorum, published more than fifty years later.8 Specifically, Nifo seems to read Machiavelli’s chapter “De Principatu Civili” as a description of Florence’s political situation under Medici rule. After a close translation of Machiavelli’s discussion of the way a civil prince comes to power he adds “In this way the Florentines made Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici civil rulers. … the Sienese Pandolfo Petrucci, the Bolognese first Annibale, then Giovanni Bentivoglio. … In truth, it should not be overlooked that this type of princely rule is tyrannical, or tends toward tyranny, since it comes about neither through legitimate election, nor hereditary right.”9 In Chapter 10 of Book I he had already described the Medici as exercising a kind of “iucundam tyrannidem” over Florence, words which echo Guicciardini’s famous evaluation in Book 11 of his Storia d’Italia of Lorenzo’s rule over Florence years later, just as Nifo’s words classing the Medici as tyrants together with the Bentivogli of Bologna or Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena anticipate Soderini’s speech warning of Medici tyranny to the Grand Council. While it is impossible to know to what extent Nifo’s reading of Machiavelli’s text as a condemnation of the rule of tyrants is based simply upon his own ideas, it seems at least plausible that Nifo should be included in the group of early readers of the Prince who saw an antityrannical message present in the text.10 A few modern scholars have argued that Machiavelli’s text needs to be read as political satire at the expense of Italy’s Renaissance princes. Garrett Mattingly famously questioned the common characterization of the Prince as “political science” with a satirical touch of his own: I suppose it is possible to imagine that a man who has seen his country enslaved, his life’s work wrecked and his own career with it, and has, for good measure, been tortured within an inch of his life should thereupon go home and write a book intended to teach his enemies the proper way to maintain themselves, writing all the time, remember, with the passionless objectivity of a scientist in a laboratory. It must be possible to imagine such behavior, because Machiavelli scholars do imagine it and accept it without a visible tremor. But it is a little difficult for the ordinary mind to compass. (1958, 482–91)11

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This view has its more recent adherents but it has not prevailed.12 While the reasons the Enlightenment readers cited above give for interpreting the text in this light are suggestive—why would Machiavelli choose as his example of ideal princely behavior one of the most hated men of his time? Why would a man descended from a family with a long tradition of service to the republic betray this family history? Why, when in all his other writings Machiavelli is clearly an advocate for the republican cause, would he compromise his principles in this one case for the sake of personal gain?—they rely for the most part on evidence external to the text. In this chapter, we will suggest a way of reading the Prince that draws on classical rhetorical theory and evidence internal to the text, and shows the work to be neither political science nor advice for a prince, but rather a very clever and forceful condemnation of the Renaissance prince, and by extension the miserable state of affairs in Italy in the early 1500s. We shall argue that Machiavelli’s use of the rhetorical technique of innuendo allowed him to write a treatise that criticizes the prince while ostensibly offering him advice.13 Such a strategy was well suited to the political climate in Florence in the second decade of the sixteenth century, when the Medici return to power and the regime’s suspicion of intellectuals, especially those associated with the Orti Oricellari, made it dangerous to speak too freely of one’s republican beliefs.14 Using such a strategy, Machiavelli could avoid Medici reprisals while at the same time reaching those of his fellow republicans who were sufficiently sophisticated to apprehend the real meaning hidden beneath the surface of his text.15 The use of this sophisticated rhetorical technique kept him from being totally silenced, while maintaining a margin of safety; it also gave him the “last laugh” on the family that had exiled and tortured him and had dashed any hopes of a leading role for him in a republican Florence. If the power of the Medici lion could not be broken or confronted directly, at least the fox-like intelligence of its opponents could maintain some measure of covert resistance, and thus personal dignity.

Classical Theory of Innuendo Quintilian, in his Institutiones Oratoriae, describes a form of covert critique, which he calls sermo figuratus: But in the figurative form of irony the speaker disguises his entire meaning, the disguise being apparent rather than confessed. … This class of figure may be employed under three conditions: first, if it is unsafe to speak openly; secondly, if it is unseemly to speak openly; and thirdly, when it is employed solely with a view to the elegance of

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what we say, and gives greater pleasure by reason of the novelty and variety thus introduced than if our meaning had been expressed in straightforward language. … For we may speak against the tyrants in question as openly as we please without loss of effect, provided always that what we say is susceptible of a different interpretation, since it is only danger to ourselves, and not offence to them, that we have to avoid. And if the danger can be avoided by any ambiguity of expression, the speaker’s cunning will meet with universal approbation.16

Here Quintilian is describing the so-called “figured problems” of classical rhetoric, and notes that, besides providing a margin of safety for the speaker, this mode of discourse also provides pleasure to the audience. He also makes the rather surprising statement that it is indeed possible to criticize a tyrant, provided one is cautious regarding the means by which this is done. In his discussion of equivocal discourse or innuendo, Demetrius of Phaleron also mentions the usefulness of this kind of discourse when addressing a tyrant: Frequently, however, when we are speaking to a dictator or some other violent individual and we want to censure him, we are of necessity driven to do so by innuendo. … Men often speak equivocally. If one wishes to speak like that, and also one’s censure not to sound like censure, then what Aeschines said about Telauges is a model to follow. Almost his whole account of the man leaves one puzzled as to whether he is expressing admiration for him or satirizing him. … I mention these things to draw attention to the proper way to speak to princes, and that it very much requires the circumspect manner of speech which is called innuendo. … Flattery is ugly, but censure is dangerous; that manner is best which lies between the two, namely innuendo. [emphasis added]17

Martianus Capella cites Cicero’s First Philippic as a model of veiled speech: “The First Philippic shows the subtle argument to be used, where the leadership of Anthony is covertly [latenter] censured with wondrous subtlety, and while saying all, he seems to say nothing harshly.” And Quintilian notes Cicero’s “magnificent use of irony” in the Pro Ligario. There were many names for this type of discourse in classical rhetorical theory—irony and innuendo being the most familiar to modern readers.18 In his study of covert criticism in classical rhetorical theory and practice, Frederick Ahl notes that an understanding of innuendo (the term we shall use in this chapter) is fundamental to a proper understanding and interpretation of much of the Latin poetry written in imperial Rome, and that this rhetorical device was also part of the stock-in-trade of writers in Eastern Europe living under Communism.19 While the Roman rhetorical theorists do not go into great detail about how the technique of covert critique worked in actual practice (one stratagem, the use of meaningful pauses and a careful manipulation of tone of voice, is obviously

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unavailable to writers employing the technique), Quintilian does makes it clear that rhetorical ambiguity does not depend on “words of doubtful or double meaning,” i.e. it is not lexical ambiguity, but is more subtle. He then makes the rather surprising statement that to achieve this difficult effect “the facts themselves must be allowed to excite the suspicions of the judge, and we must clear away all other points, leaving nothing save what will suggest the truth” so that “the judge will be led to seek out the secret which he would not perhaps believe if he heard it openly stated, and to believe in that which he thinks he has found out for himself [emphasis added].”20 This is actually quite a surprising statement, since it asserts unequivocally that it is indeed possible to criticize tyrants in public, provided one is careful about how one goes about this. Offense may be given, but this is not necessarily the same as incurring the danger of the tyrant’s personal retaliation. And once again, in the passage just cited, we see the pleasure of the audience as well as the safety of the speaker as one of the primary motivations for the use of this type of discourse. As Ahl points out, the practitioners of covert criticism found an especially appreciative audience in imperial Rome, where there were constraints on free speaking. When extended to the discourse as a whole, the classical rhetoricians had a very elaborate and well-detailed theory of covert argument, in which the apparent surface meaning of the speech conceals a hidden meaning running counter to what the orator appears to be advocating. They called this form of argumentation— which, because of the difficulty of achieving the effect, was considered the supreme test of the orator’s skill—color or ductus.21 As we shall see, Machiavelli achieves a covert critique of the princes of his day, the Medici in particular, through precisely the techniques described by the classical rhetoricians, bringing pleasure to those of his readers aware of his subtle game. This was a game worthy of the creator of the most clever and malicious beffe in his comic masterpiece, La Mandragola, and whose letters to his friends after 1512 reveal that for him, a kind of bitter and self-deprecating humor was a way to blunt the humiliations and forced inactivity of his own exile at the hands of the Medici princes. For Machiavelli, as for his classical predecessors, we see that an indirect manner of speech is called for when criticizing princes, and—this is significant for our interpretation of the Prince as a form of covert critique—that this type of argument may be very difficult to detect. The reader or listener may experience a nagging sense that there is something “not quite right” with the argument being presented, that something else may be at work in the text than what the author appears to be saying. By its very subtlety, this form of argumentation creates from the outset two audiences—those “in the know,” aware of the hidden message, or at

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least suspicious of its presence, and another audience which blithely continues its reading or listening, unaware of the latent argument at work beneath the surface.22 As we shall see, it is precisely this method of judicious arrangement of pertinent facts that Machiavelli employs in the Prince to allow a hidden critical meaning to “shimmer through” (to use the phrase of the Greek rhetoricians) the seemingly straightforward surface of his text. Quintilian also notes that the technique is psychologically powerful, since by discerning the hidden meaning themselves the listeners will tend to feel that this message is more “theirs,” since they have invested the effort in finding it out. Referring specifically to speech critical of tyrants, Quintilian writes: For we may speak against the tyrants in question as openly as we please without loss of effect, provided always that what we say is susceptible of a different interpretation, since it is only danger to ourselves, and not offence to them, that we have to avoid. And if the danger can be avoided by any ambiguity of expression, the speaker’s cunning will meet with universal approbation.23

Machiavelli’s Knowledge of Innuendo If one compares the instances where Machiavelli or his friends discuss the use of literary technique in his political writings with the passages in the classical rhetorical texts quoted above, it seems clear that Machiavelli had explicit knowledge of the classical rhetorical techniques of textual obfuscation. To cite only one example, Donato Giannotti notes Machiavelli’s comment that, in his Florentine Histories Io non posso scrivere questa historia da che Cosimo prese lo Stato per insino alla morte di Lorenzo come io la scriverei se io fossi libero da tutti i rispetti; le azioni saranno vere, et non pretermetterò cosa alchuna, solamente lascierò indrieto il discorrere le cause universali delle cose; verbi gratia, io dirò gli eventi et gli casi che successero quando Cosimo prese lo stato; lascierò stare indrieto il discorrere in che modo, et con che mezzi et astutie uno pervenga a tanta altezza, et chi vorrà ancor intendere questo, noti molto bene quello ch’io farò dire ai suoi adversarii, perché quello che non vorrò dire io come da me, lo farò dire ai suo adversarii. (Giannotti 1974, II, 35) I cannot write this history from the time when Cosimo took over the government up to the death of Lorenzo just as I would write it if I were free from all reasons for caution. The actions will be true, and I shall not omit anything; merely I shall leave out discussing the universal causes of the events. For instance, I shall relate the events and the circumstances that came about when Cosimo took over the government; I shall leave untouched any discussion of the way and of the means and tricks with which one attains such power; and if anyone nevertheless wants to understand Cosimo, let him

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observe well what I shall have his opponents say, because what I am not willing to say as coming from myself, I shall have his opponents say. (Machiavelli 1965, III, 1028)

Gilbert remarks on Machiavelli’s “frequent orations in the Thucydidean manner,” in which criticism of a powerful individual is achieved by placing the critique in the mouth of a character other than the author, adding that such a technique “allowed Machiavelli to deal with the problem of the Medici.”24 Consider the passages in which Demetrius describes one technique of covert criticism and Machiavelli’s remarks on Caesar in the Discorsi. Demetrius writes: Frequently, however, when we are speaking to a dictator or some other violent individual and we want to censure him, we are of necessity driven to do so by innuendo. … men and women in positions of power dislike any reference to their faults. … therefore, we shall not speak frankly. We should either blame others who have acted in a similar way, we may, for example, condemn the despotic severity of Phalaris when talking to Dionysius; or again we shall praise others, be it Gelon or Hiero, who have acted in the opposite way and say they were like fathers or teachers to their Sicilian subjects. As he hears these things, Dionysius is being admonished, but he is not being censured; moreover he will envy the praise bestowed on Gelon, and he will want to deserve such praise himself.25

In a similar way Machiavelli pointedly observes of writers who praise Caesar: Né sia alcuno che s’inganni per la gloria di Cesare, sentendolo massime celebrare dagli scrittori; perché quegli che lo laudano sono corrotti dalla fortuna sua e spauriti dalla lunghezza dello imperio, il quale, reggendosi sotto quel nome, non permetteva che gli scrittori parlassono liberamente di lui. Ma chi vuole conoscere quello che gli scrittori liberi ne direbbono, vegga quello che dicono di Catilina. E tanto è piú biasimevole Cesare, quanto è piú da biasimare quello che ha fatto, che quello che ha voluto fare un male. Vegga ancora con quanta laude ei celebrano Bruto, talché, non potendo biasimare quello per la sua potenza, ei celebravano il nimico suo. (Discorsi, I.10)26 Let no one be fooled by the glory of Caesar, hearing him highly praised by the writers; because those who praise him were corrupted by his success and intimidated by the duration of the empire, which, legitimizing itself under his name, did not allow writers to speak freely of him. But whoever wants to know what those writers would have said about him, observe what they say about Catiline. And Caesar is just as more to be blamed as he is blameworthy who actually does, rather than wants to do, evil. And again, observe with how much praise they celebrate Brutus, seeing that, not being able to blame him because of his power, they celebrate his enemy.

The similarities between these two passages suggest an explicit familiarity on the part of Machiavelli with the classical techniques of covert critique.27 Both passages describe a rhetorical strategy in which covert criticism is achieved by censuring the

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actions of one similar to the one we wish to covertly criticize, a method employed in Machiavelli’s vivid evocation of the crimes of Agathocles and Oliverotto da Fermo as an oblique means of condemning the character and actions of Cesare Borgia.28 Both passages also note that one can achieve the same effect by bestowing praise on someone other than the person one wishes to covertly censure. We shall see that Machiavelli uses precisely this technique in Chapter VI of the Prince to blacken by implication the character of Cesare Borgia by bestowing lavish praise on those state founder heroes Theseus, Moses, and Romulus, who differ from him in every respect. Machiavelli’s remark about the corruption and intimidation of those who praised Caesar could just as well be a description of the risks he later faced in writing the Florentine Histories for Pope Clement, and may also be a veiled gibe at those contemporaries of his who outdid themselves in their flattery of the Medici princes. At the end of the dedication of his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli writes: “perché io giudico che sia impossibile, sanza offendere molti, descrivere le cose de’ tempi suoi” (I judge that it is impossible, without offending many, to describe the events of one’s own times). These would be the times from the death of Lorenzo up to and including the present times under Pope Clement—a strategic omission on Machiavelli’s part. The implication is that to speak openly of Florence and her loss of liberty under the Medici would risk incurring the Pope’s displeasure. When speaking to princes, some things are better left unsaid, or, if they are to be expressed, then they should be expressed through that indirect mode of discourse called innuendo.29

Innuendo in the Prince: The Borgia Here we may recall several points which are relevant to this interpretation of the Prince as covert critique of Medici rule. First, covert critique is used when addressing a tyrant, who may, because of his inherently violent nature, react negatively to any form of criticism.30 Second, this may be accomplished in three ways: either by blaming the faults of someone similar to the tyrant whom we wish to criticize, by praising the qualities of someone who is different from the tyrant in question, and lastly, by praising the tyrant himself for qualities he does not possess. This censure of a prince not directly, but through attributing his faults to someone else, or by praising those unlike him, is central to an understanding of Machiavelli’s description of Cesare Borgia. As we shall see, Machiavelli censures Cesare Borgia by describing the crimes of individuals similar to him, and by praising individuals unlike him, and thus uses the first two techniques described by Demetrius. Machiavelli, in his discussion of religious states, also uses the third of these devices,

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covert censure of a powerful individual by means of bestowing praise on that individual for precisely the virtues they lack. Building on but going beyond classical precedents, Machiavelli, in that famous seventh chapter in which he paints a vivid portrait of his “new prince,” also uses a technique which might be called “exemplum inaptum,” a technique which one scholar discerns at work in Erasmus’ Panegyricus to Philip of Burgundy, the father of Charles V, celebrating his return from Spain to the Low Countries in 1504.31 This technique, while not specifically mentioned by the ancient rhetoricians, allows the writer to hint at another meaning through a choice of examples which, instead of supporting his thesis, tend to subtly undermine it.32 In his discussion of Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli also uses another means well suited to a latent critical meaning, namely the juxtaposition of morally questionable behavior (attributed to his “hero”) with the examples of true heroes, whose moral integrity is beyond reproach. Machiavelli’s points of comparison with the present are the heroic paragons of the distant past. The contrast between Chapters VI and VII is central to Machiavelli’s characterization of Borgia. The chapter titles alone suggest that Machiavelli intends his reader to question Borgia’s morality and his fitness to rule. The title of Chapter VI (“De Principatibus Novis Qui Armis Propriis et Virtute Acquiruntur”) is in counterpoint to the title of Chapter VII (“De Principatibus Novis Qui Alienis Armis et Fortuna Acquiruntur”). “Propriis” is an inversion of “alienis;” “Virtute” contrasts with “Fortuna.” In these formulations Cesare Borgia’s status already seems problematic as the new prince who acquires his influence in the Romagna through the arms of another (his father) and morally repugnant means. The title of Chapter VIII (“De His Qui Per Scelera ad Principatum Pervenere”), in turn, continues the negative theme of the title of Chapter VII, and the title of Chapter IX (“De Principatu Civili”) then returns to the positive tone of the title of Chapter VI. As we shall see in some detail below, these chapters form a unit in which the meaning of one chapter is created in part by “strategic juxtaposition” with the chapters which come before and which follow it. Machiavelli’s creation of a kind of “cognitive dissonance” between Chapters VI and VII hinges on “great examples” of “great men” that he adduces in Chapter VI. First, the heroes of Chapter VI, who include Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus are provided with opportunities by fortune, but it is their own abilities that allow them to achieve great things; fortune as a force in human affairs clearly takes second place. Second, these men belong to a very select group of founders of new kingdoms; in the rhetorical tradition such men were second only to men of God as worthy subjects of praise.33 Third, while they may use force to maintain their innovations, the text makes it clear that such force is used for the good of the people as a whole—these leaders come to be venerated by their people. In Machiavelli’s words the heroic founders of states are “truly great examples” (grandissimi

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esempi) who exhibit great ability (“virtù”); they are “eccellentissimi” (most excellent) and serve as models for state-building. They are “mirabili” (truly wondrous), “felici” (blessed by fortune), and have “eccellente virtù” (great ability) that ennobles and supremely blesses the states they found. It seems clear that these founders of states are to be considered “virtuous” in both the moral and the effective senses of the word. They have seized the opportunity (occasione) that fortune provides to men of ability. Machiavelli’s men of great ability and authority are almost godlike heroes who, significantly, are all liberators of their peoples: the “el populo d’Isdraele … stiavo e oppresso. dagli Egizii” (the people of Israel, enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians), the “e’ Persi malcontenti dello imperio de’ Medi” (the Persians discontented with the rule of the Medes), the “Ateniensi disperse” (Athenians dispersed). Clearly for Machiavelli only states founded by great men, who derive their power either from God or the desire for freedom from oppression, can be called truly fortunate. This view squares with what we know of Machiavelli’s political convictions expressed in his other works, and it is in accord with the long tradition of classical and Renaissance republican thought, which makes a clear contrast between tyrannies founded by violence for the satisfaction of the personal ambitions of the ruler over the wishes of their subjects, and free republics founded by law with the consent of the governed. The classic expression of this distinction can be found in Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics: The best of these [forms of government] is monarchy, the worst timocracy. The deviation from monarchy is tyranny; for both are forms of one-man rule, but there is the greatest difference between them; the tyrant looks to his own advantage, the king to that of his subjects. … Now tyranny is the very contrary of this; the tyrant pursues his own good.34 For the same reason, their [foreign kings’] guards are such as a king and not such as a tyrant would employ, that is to say, they are composed of citizens, whereas the guards of tyrants are mercenaries. For kings rule according to law over voluntary subjects, but tyrants over involuntary; and the one are guarded by their fellow-citizens, the others are guarded against them.35

We noted in the Introduction the aggressive actions taken by the Medici, from Lorenzo di Piero to Giulio to Cosimo to deprive the citizens of Florence of their arms, and their simultaneous creation of their own private security apparatus, including armed escorts—much hated by ordinary Florentines—whose function was to guard them against possible assaults from their own citizens. The actions of Cesare Borgia—and, we would argue, his implied Medici analogues—as described by Machiavelli in Chapter 7 of the Prince are clearly, then, intended by the author

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to recall precisely those of a tyrant as described in the classical, medieval and Renaissance tradition of thought on the just ruler.36 Moreover, it was commonplace among Florentine republican writers to refer to the Medici as tyrants who had usurped the ancient freedom of the Florentine citizens.37 The title of Chapter 7 (“De Principatibus Novis Qui Alienis Armis et Fortuna Acquiruntur”) points up the contrast with the founder-heroes of Chapter VI. The men described at the beginning of Chapter VII “solamente per fortuna diventano di private principi” (become princes from private citizens solely through fortune) and “con poca fatica diventano, ma con assai si mantengano” (become [princes] with ease but maintain themselves with difficulty). The reference to the two routes of ascent, one easy and one difficult, recalls classical and Christian conventions regarding the easy road to vice, from which one is eventually cast down, and the hard road to virtue, which leads to lasting happiness. Even on the level of language, Machiavelli makes this contrast clear: the lofty eulogistic tone of Chapter 6 gives way in Chapter 7 to “coloro”—not “great men,” but merely “those” (a deliberate echo of the pejorative Latin isti/tales) who fall into an anonymous group of those to whom “è concesso uno stato … o per danari o per grazia di chi lo concede” (a state is conceded either for money or out of the generosity of the one who concedes it). The specific names of great men are replaced by those anonymous individuals who do not earn their states through individual effort and talent, but rather purchase them or passively rely on the generosity of others: “come intervenne a molti in Grecia, nelle città di Ionio e di Ellesponto, dove furono fatti principi da Dario” (as happened to many in Greece, in the cities of Ionia and the Hellespont, where they were made princes by Darius). Once again, the words “as happened to many” serve to underline the commonplace anonymity of these petty princelings. Here, Machiavelli may be alluding to the warring princes of sixteenth century Italy, whose narrow focus on their own prestige and power (aided and abetted by the involvement of foreign powers in the regional conflicts within Italy), at the expense of any concern for the good of their states as a whole, had profoundly negative consequences for the quality of civic life in Italy during the first decades of the sixteenth century. And to ensure that his readers do not miss the point, he adds one more detail to the detriment of this class of rulers, referring to: “quelli imperatori che, di privati, per corruzione de’ soldati, pervenivano allo imperio” (those emperors who from private station, through the corruption of the soldiers, came to supreme power).38 In the short space of less than a paragraph, Machiavelli has impugned the subjects of this chapter for corruption, and for a reliance on the favor of others rather than on their own merit. All this would seem perfectly appropriate if Machiavelli were making the argument that those who gain their kingdoms through fortune or

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the arms of others are inferior to those who win power through merit and divine favor, but this is the chapter that introduces Cesare Borgia as the supposed paragon of the new prince. It is hard to escape the conclusion, even at this early point in the chapter, that Machiavelli must have something else in mind than praise, or even approval, of Cesare Borgia and his father Alexander VI. Moving on to his discussion of Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli makes it clear that of the two ways of becoming a prince, through ability or fortune, Francesco Sforza represents the former and Cesare Borgia the latter: Francesco, per li debiti mezzi e con una gran virtú, di privato diventò duca di Milano. … Dall’altra parte Cesare Borgia, chiamato dal vulgo duca Valentino, acquistò lo stato con la fortuna del padre, e con quella lo perdé. Francesco, by the appropriate means and with great ability, from private station became Duke of Milan. … On the other hand, Cesare Borgia, called by the common people Valentino, acquired the state through the fortune of his father, and through that he lost it.

Sforza’s great virtue, the difficulty with which he acquires his state and the ease with which he holds it recall the state-founder heroes of the preceding chapter. Borgia acquires his state by fortune, not ability, and it is not even his own fortune, but that of his father, and then he loses it. Second, Machiavelli remarks that this is what “the crowd” calls him. That the common people refer to him without a title seems a subtly diminishing touch. Even when Machiavelli goes on to commend Borgia’s ability in “laying foundations for future power” (aveva il duca gittati assai buoni fondamenti alla potenzia sua) it is clear that the founding of the state itself did not come about through his own ability, but rather through the efforts of his father. Here, Machiavelli may be making a play on a familiar Italian expression; if Valentino is indeed a “figlio di Papa” (a son of the Pope), he is also, in his reliance on family connections instead of personal merit and ability (virtù) a true “figlio di papà” (daddy’s boy). Having thus begun this chapter with an accumulation of small but significantly negative details concerning new princes who acquire their states through the arms of others, Machiavelli expands on this depreciating opening. In the next paragraph he writes: “Alessandro sesto, nel voler fare grande el duca suo figliuolo …” (Alexander VI, wanting to make his son the duke great), words which suggest that we should see Cesare Borgia, not as a talented leader, but as one who does not owe the favor he enjoys to his own abilities, but rather relies on the favor of others. The following paragraphs make clear that unlike the rulers of the previous chapter who found and hold states for the benefit of the citizens, Cesare Borgia uses ruthless means to advance his own interests.

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Keeping in mind Machiavelli’s use of “strategic juxtaposition” and curiously inappropriate examples to signal to the reader the presence of a hidden message in the text, let us now consider how he uses suggestive language to achieve a similar effect.39 In the section of Chapter VII where the deeds of Alexander VI are introduced, this technique does not immediately strike the reader. Instead Machiavelli relies on a gradual accumulation of words whose tone or coloring begins to seem strangely at odds with the surface meaning of the text. According to Machiavelli, the Pope arranges it so that “si turbassino quelli ordini” (the status quo was disrupted) and makes it possible to “disordinare” (throw into chaos) their states so that he may make himself ruler (“insignorire”) of their possessions. Continuing to catalogue the Pope’s actions, Machiavelli notes that he was responsible for facilitating the invasion of Italy by the French (“passò adunque il re in Italia con lo aiuto de’ Viniziani e consenso di Alessandro”). It is in this way that Valentino acquires the Romagna: not only with the arms of another, but with an occupying army of foreigners. Once again, Machiavelli relies on a careful choice of words to make his point: the Duke oversees the “expugnazione di Faenza” (the conquest of Faenza) and “assaltò” (assaulted) Tuscany. The following section describes Cesare Borgia’s “snuffing out” (spense) of the Orsini, before passing from military aggression to Borgia’s use of fraud and a passing reference to the slaughter of his opponents at Sinigallia, an event famous in Machiavelli’s own time for its cruelty and treacherousness. And then we arrive at the famous passage on the slaughter of Borgia’s minister, Ramiro de Lorqua. Machiavelli introduces it with the marvelously bland phrase, “e, perché questa parte è degna di notizia, e da essere imitata da altri, non la voglio lasciare indietro” (and, because this part is worthy of notice, and to be imitated by others, I do not wish to leave it out). The matter-of-factness of this phrase recalls similar passages in Tacitus in which a passage describing a horrific deed is introduced by a seemingly innocuous statement of fact. Readers familiar with Tacitus would have anticipated, with a mixture of dread and anticipation, the conclusion of this passage with the graphic description of some horrible deed. And indeed, after continuing with the same tone of ironic understatement and bland objectivity: Costui [de Lorqua] in poco tempo la ridusse pacifica et unita, con ssima reputazione. Di poi iudicò el duca non essere necessario sí eccessiva autorità, perché dubitava non divenissi odiosa. … E, perché conosceva le rigorosità passate averli generato qualche odio … In a short time he made it peaceful and unified, to great acclaim. And then the duke judged such excessive authority not to be necessary, because he feared it might become hateful. … and, because he knew that the past rigors had generated a certain amount of hatred towards him. …

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suddenly, we are presented with the the bloody conclusion: “E, presa sopra questo occasione, lo fece mettere una mattina, a Cesena, in dua pezzi in sulla piazza, con uno pezzo di legno et uno coltello sanguinoso a canto” (and, seizing his chance, he had him placed one morning in Cesena in two pieces in the piazza, with a piece of wood and a bloody knife alongside him). Machiavelli’s description of the “purgation” of the souls of the people by this crime is a darkly ironic euphemism, reminiscent of similar phrases in Tacitus, in which horrendous deeds are described in an almost off-hand and casual manner. Perhaps the most celebrated of all these tacitismi is the famous phrase—simultaneously extremely comical and also extremely frightening to those readers who know what is to come—with which Tacitus introduces his account of the reign of Tiberius: primum facinus novi principatus (“the first crime of the new principate”). If we admit that Borgia’s deed may indeed be a sterling example of the exercise of a certain kind of power, is it really necessary or even possible to suspend our moral qualms in the wake of Machiavelli’s Tacitean operation? Or is the very brutality of Borgia’s actions precisely the point?40 Machiavelli ostensibly presents the murder of Borgia’s minister as an exemplum of his efficacy in “laying excellent foundations for his power,” knowing as well as his readers that the foundations failed. He describes Borgia’s acquisitions in central Italy as “winnings”: the words “acquisto” or “acquistare” recur very frequently in this chapter, as does the word “spegnere.” Violent words are used to describe the means by which Borgia acquires his power: “spegnere” (to snuff out), “disperse” (scattered), “spogliare” (to despoil), “ammazzare” (slaughter), words better used to describe a mercenary adventurer than the founder of a state. For his part, the Borgia pope “disrupts the status quo” and’ “throws into chaos” the states of Italy; based on cunning and personal ambition, his actions resemble those of Dante’s “seminatori di discordia” who dishonored the Christian faithful (Inferno 27). Besides this careful use of language, in the section which follows Machiavelli’s strategic juxtaposition contrasts the founders of states of the preceding chapter, who seize the opportunities offered them by a benevolent fortune, with Cesare Borgia, who finds himself on the defensive against fortune’s blows: Ma Alessandro morí dopo cinque anni che elli [Cesare] aveva cominciato a trarre fuora la spade. … E lui mi disse, ne’ dí che fu creato Iulio secondo, che aveva pensato a ciò che potessi nascere morendo el padre, et a tutto aveva trovato rimedio, eccetto che non pensò mai, in su la sua morte, di stare ancora lui per morire. But Alexander died five years after he had begun to draw the sword … .and he [Borgia] said to me, on the day Julius II was made Pope, that he had thought of everything which might happen upon the death of his father, and had found a remedy for everything, except that he never thought that at his death, he himself might be on the point of death.

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Not only are the means by which Cesare Borgia achieves power morally repugnant, but for all his efforts, he still fails in the end. In a kind of negative symmetry with the preceding chapter, Borgia receives power from a mortal man, instead of benign fortune, and must worry about it being taken from him, rather than trusting in the favor of his people. But the fact that tyrannies, in contrast to states founded upon just principles, ultimately perish is simply a corollary of the old classical idea that the best defence of a ruler is the love of his subjects, iustitia fundamentum regni. The contrast with the proceeding chapter is also made clear in the means by which Borgia must hold onto his power: instead of through the favor of God, his own ability and the esteem of his people, he must “slaughter the lords he had despoiled” (de’ signori spogliati ne ammazzò quanti ne possa aggiungere), “win over the Roman nobles” (e’ gentili uomini romani si aveva guadagnati) and “secure for himself the College as much as he could” (e nel Collegio aveva ssima parte), presumably through bribery.41 This final note of corruption and nepotism would have registered particularly forcefully with those Italians who had been subject to the brutalities of the occupying Spaniards, the military adventurism of Cesare Borgia, and the political ambitions of Pope Alexander; the fact that Alexander was Spanish would only have increased this effect.42 Instead of the just rule based on the esteem of the citizens of Chapter VI, we have in this chapter a desperate grabbing of power by violent or corrupt means for selfish ends, which in any case ends in failure.43

The Medici Connection We see this use of meaningful juxtaposition in Chapter VIII as well. Here Machiavelli further darkens his portrait of Cesare Borgia through an implied comparison of his behavior with the unequivocally evil actions of not one, but two tyrants, one ancient and one contemporary: Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse and Oliverotto da Fermo, tyrant of Fermo. The association of the crimes of Oliverotto with the actions of Cesare Borgia comes with a reference to the liberty and servitude of a city: “ma, parendoli cosa servile lo stare con altri, pensò, con lo aiuto di alcuni cittadini di Fermo, a’ quali era piú cara la servitú che la libertá della loro patria, e con il favore vitellesco, di occupare Fermo” (but, seeming to him to be a servile thing to live with others, he thought, with the help of some citizens of Fermo, to whom the slavery of their city was more dear than its liberty, and with the help of Vitelli, to occupy Fermo; emphasis added). This latter reference to the betrayal of a city by its citizens, leading to its forceful occupation, closely recalls historical descriptions of the coup d’état which returned the Medici to power in the fall of 1512, in which, according to some

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historians, they received the clandestine support of Medici supporters within the city. These would be the citizens of Florence to whom, like those of Fermo, the “slavery of their city was more dear than its liberty.”44 In addition, the description of a powerful pope promoting the territorial ambitions of a relative with the assistance of foreign troops would be an appropriate analogue to the similar behaviour of the Medici in their strategy of a gradual acquisition of a territorial state in central Italy, with Florence as its base. Specifically, Pope Leo X and Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici’s triumph over the Florentine republic in 1512 came on the heels of the brutal sack of Prato, an event which made a profound impression on the minds of Machiavelli’s contemporaries.45 Machiavelli’s mention of Oliverotto’s besieging of the magistracy in the palace, and the fear it caused (“montò Oliverotto a cavallo, e corse la terra, et assediò nel palazzo el supremo magistrato; tanto che per paura furono constretti obbedirlo e fermare uno governo, del quale si fece principe”), might also be a reference to the besieging of Piero Soderini in the Palazzo della Signoria, his surrender and flight during the Medici seizure of the state following the sack of Prato in 1512. The shortness of Oliverotto’s rule (“in spazio d’uno anno che tenne el principato”) also recalls the shortness of Borgia’s (“la Romagna l’aspettò più d’uno mese” [ch. VII]), a very short period of time, especially considering the tremendous effort which went into constructing his state.46 We may go farther to suppose that Machiavelli’s discussion of Cesare Borgia’s taking of the Romagna with the aid of Pope Alexander may also be an allusion to the Medici, in this case Leo’s determination to acquire territory for his family in northern Italy. As Najemy notes: “Leo’s real objective was the acquisition of a territorial state, and Florence and its finances and institutions were merely a base from which to pursue more grandiose ends.”47 According to Hibbert, Leo intended to “form central Italy into a single strong state by uniting the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino, and by joining to them the cities of Parma, Modena and Piacenza” (1980, 219). In early 1515, Najemy continues, “it was rumored that Leo planned to give these territories [Modena, Reggio, Parma, and Piacenza] to Lorenzo and, if the French expelled Spain from southern Italy, to install Giuliano on the Neapolitan throne.”48 Such ambitions led to Leo’s eventual acquisition of Reggio and Modena from the Emperor and to the short but arduous war against Urbino, culminating with the expulsion of the city’s lord, Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere, and Lorenzo’s triumphal entry into the city in May of 1515. In this regard, it also seems possible that Machiavelli’s reference to the “slight hatred” (qualche odio) felt by the people of the Romagna for the Borgia might be a veiled allusion to the ill-will, among large sectors of the Florentine populace, provoked by Lorenzo’s conquest of Urbino in the spring of 1515.

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The Pope’s plans to attack Urbino were opposed by Giuliano, who was grateful to the Duke for his hospitality to him during his exile in that city. The expulsion of the Duke from Urbino cost the Florentines a great deal of money, aroused lasting resentment, and may have even contributed to the death of Lorenzo himself, who had been wounded in battle during the campaign. Less than a year later, the city was recovered by della Rovere with the assistance of Spanish troops.49 Similarly, just as Cesare Borgia’s acquisition of Valence came about through the marriage dispensation of the Pope, so Leo was rumored to be plotting the acquisition of cities for members of his family. As Najemy, cited above, has pointed out, at precisely this time, it was widely rumored that Leo was contemplating installing Giuliano on the Neapolitan throne and Lorenzo as Governor of the Romagna. Borgia’s aggressive militarism in central Italy may thus allude to similar conduct on the part of his implied analogue, Lorenzo, a man also relying on the power of a close relative, and also thoroughly consumed with dreams of territorial domination and conquest in the service of personal ambition.50 In point of fact, the period during which Machiavelli wrote the Prince— 1513–1514 with some additions perhaps as late as 1515—corresponds exactly to the time of the machinations of Pope Leo and his nephew Lorenzo di Piero. If one accepts that Machiavelli intended the reader to draw these parallels, then much of what he says about Borgia may be applied as well to Lorenzo. While Francesco Sforza acquires Milan through great ability and with great difficulty (“per li debiti mezzi e con una gran virtú … con mille affanni”) and holds his state with ease, Valentino/Lorenzo acquire their states not only with the assistance of their relations (rather than through the exercise of their own virtù), but also through their relations’ fortuna: a doubly weak foundation for power, as noted above. Going further back into Medici family history, it also seems possible that, in his vivid description of the slaughter of Oliverotto da Fermo and Remirro de Lorqua, Machiavelli was alluding to the double homicide in 1488 of the lords of Forlì and Faenza, Girolamo Riario and Galeotto Manfredi.51 These events allowed Lorenzo il Magnifico to reassert Florentine influence over northern Italy. Riario had been one of the instigators of the Pazzi Conspiracy. The cold-blooded and treacherous murder of Manfredi occurred in the private space of his bedroom, and was instigated and carried out by one close to him (his wife). These details are very reminiscent of Machiavelli’s presentation of Oliverotto da Fermo’s murder of his enemies (among them his uncle), as well as his description of Cesare Borgia’s slaughter of de Lorqua. If this is the case, it would be another example of Machiavelli’s use of recent historical events as referents against which events within the text are to be understood, just as his vivid portrait of the classical tyrant Agathocles is intended, within the text, as a referent against which the character and actions of Borgia himself are to be understood.

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The description of the murders of the republican leaders of Fermo is perhaps, in its vividness and brevity, the single most memorable passage in the entire Prince, and, in its unforgettable evocation of a truly appalling treacherousness and cold-bloodedness in very few words, is worthy of any such passage in the works of Tacitus. As a final touch, Machiavelli has Oliverotto, as he is preparing to murder his uncle and the citizens of Fermo, lull them into a false sense of security by discoursing on the “greatness” of Pope Alexander and his son, Cesare Borgia, and their marvelous deeds (“parlando della grandezza di papa Alessandro e di Cesare suo figliuolo, e delle imprese loro”). This last phrase is clearly one of those subtle hints to the reader, discussed above, which imply that once again, in case the reader has missed it up to this point, the real understood object of the critique of Oliverotto is actually Cesare Borgia and his father; the treacherousness and murderous cunning of Oliverotto is thus also that of Cesare, that supposed “paragon” of the princely leader, worthy of imitation by the Renaissance prince. And indeed, in perhaps an even greater stroke of genius, Machiavelli makes this implied comparison between Oliverotto and Borgia even more apparent by noting dryly: “And his elimination would have been as difficult as that of Agathocles, had he not let himself be fooled by Cesare Borgia, when at Sinigallia, as remarked above, he took the Orsini and the Vitelli; where, captured himself, one year after the parricide, he was together with Vitellozzo, his master in ability and evil deeds, strangled.” Oliverotto, a master in crime and treachery, a slayer of his own people, whose classical analogue is the vicious tyrant of Syracuse, also a murderer of his people, is himself mastered by the crimes of one greater than he. Machiavelli, who was at Sinigallia at the time of the murders as Florentine legate, described the event in his Il modo che tenne il duca Valentino per ammazzare Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, il. Signore Paolo, e il duca di Gravina as “in tutto rara e memorabile.”52 This last is a wonderful example, typical of Machiavelli, of the darkly dry presentation of a horrendous deed, another example of which we noted above in reference to Machiavelli’s description of Borgia’s murder of his minister Ramiro de Lorqua, an act blandly described there by Machiavelli as “worthy of notice” (“degna di notizia”). These wonderfully ironic touches are the exact equivalent of the manipulation of tone of voice recommended by the classical rhetoricians as a means of hinting at a hidden critical message, as noted above. Such overweening familial ambitions, described above in reference to Leo’s plans for Lorenzo, put a severe strain on the city’s treasury (as did the equally unpopular policies of Clement in the 1520s) and were widely unpopular in contemporary Florence, since they placed the city’s finances at the service of one individual’s personal ambitions. Nothing could have made Medici rule in the city more odious to the Florentine popolo minuto and popolo grasso, for whom the mercantile

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traditions of thrift, individual initiative taken for the good of the city as a whole, and respect for the laws and institutions of civil government, were still very much a part of their recent historical memory. This plundering of the city’s treasury for the ruler’s personal use is exactly the kind of behavior Machiavelli advised the new prince in Chapter 17 to avoid when he counseled him, in his famous lines, not to touch his subjects’ property: “The prince ought nevertheless make himself feared in such a way that, if he doesn’t obtain love, he avoids hatred … which he will always do, if he abstains from the possessions of his citizens and his subjects and their women … but, above all, abstains from their possessions, because men forget more quickly the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.” It is worth noting here that the mention of “taking the goods and women of one’s subjects” is, in the classical tradition, the locus classicus of the behavior of a tyrant, and that the word “patrimony” may be a deliberate echo of the word “patria,” with all its republican associations. This is the historical background, we suggest, against which Machiavelli’s portrait of Cesare Borgia was intended to be read. The period of the writing of the Prince—from 1513 to perhaps as late as 1515—corresponds exactly with the actions of Pope Leo and Lorenzo di Piero discussed above. Hence, in our view, not only is Cesare Borgia covertly censured in Machiavelli’s work, but the Medici as well, since their continuation of a policy of personal ambition, abetted by the use of bribery and, when necessary, violence, in the service of familial aggrandizement (for which the Borgia had been notorious), had serious consequences for both the political and the financial health of Machiavelli’s Florence.53 This indirect means of commenting on a present-day situation through description of a similar, though different one, if it is indeed present here, is very similar to one of the techniques of innuendo as described by the classical rhetoricians noted above, in which the faults of a ruler are censured indirectly by means of criticism of the similar faults of another figure. It is also one of the classical techniques, used by both ancient and Renaissance historians, by which authors could achieve criticism of current events by describing similar, but safely distant, historical circumstances, a technique employed by Machiavelli himself in his Florentine Histories, as noted above. If a similar rhetorical figure is present here, all the deeds attributed to Alexander and Cesare Borgia—personal self-aggrandizement achieved by means of horrific violence, cunning and bribery—may be taken as implied criticism of the Medici princes. The Prince is, then, doubly allusive, since Machiavelli’s description of Cesare Borgia is intended to refer not just to those classical tyrants depicted by the author, but also, by extension, to the Medici family itself, the Medici Pope, and their Spanish supporters.

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From the foregoing analysis, the inescapable conclusion is that Machiavelli cannot have intended Cesare Borgia to illustrate the viability of princely rule, but rather exactly the opposite; by making his “exhibit A” not only morally bankrupt but also, by the terms of the Prince itself, weak and defenceless against fortune (being dependent upon others and not having the love of the citizens), he seems to be inviting the reader to question the viability of princely rule itself (at least as practiced in Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century). Even if one does not accept our thesis that Machiavelli intended to raise such questions, the accumulation of anomalies, both historical and textual, in this chapter, of small details which don’t quite fit, together with the undeniable contrast of the actions and character of Cesare Borgia with the state founder heroes of Chapter 6 (and the similarities with the villains of Chapter 8), must, in our view, at least raise the possibility of a reading of Cesare Borgia’s, and, by extension, Alexander VI’s actions and policies, as anything but examples worthy of imitation by the Renaissance prince. If one grants that in the subtle ways described above Machiavelli intends to cast doubt on the character of Cesare Borgia, and the validity of his conduct as a model of ideal princely behavior, to be imitated by the Renaissance prince, then one must ask to what end he does this. We would suggest that, by undermining his “case study” of princely behavior, Machiavelli intends the reader to draw the opposite conclusion from that to which the text ostensibly seems to be pointing; that, far from being worthy of imitation, Cesare Borgia’s actions are both morally questionable and doomed in any event to failure. Unlike the laudable actions of the state founder heroes of chapter VI, the use of violent and deceptive means for personal self-aggrandizement in the end accomplishes nothing, except perhaps a legacy of suffering for those subjected to these actions.54 In terms of history, not only are these victories short-lived, but their legacy is one of infamy; here, one is reminded of Machiavelli’s call to virtue on the part of Italy’s leaders in Chapter 10 of Book 1 of the Discorsi: Among all the men who are praised, the most highly praised are those who have been heads and founders of religions. Then next, those who founded either republics or kingdoms. After these, those are famous who, placed at the head of armies, have enlarged either their kingdom or that of their fatherland. … On the other hand, infamous and detestable are the destroyers of religions, wasters of kingdoms and republics, enemies of virtue, letters and every other art which brings utility and honor to the human race, such as are the impious, the violent, the ignorant, the unambitious, the idle, those of no account. … And yet almost all men, deluded by a false good and false glory, let themselves fall into the ranks of those who merit more blame than praise; and, able to their everlasting honor to create a republic or a kingdom, turn themselves to tyranny, nor do they realize, by so doing, how much fame, how much glory, how much honor, security and quiet with satisfaction of the soul they lose, and into what infamy, vituperation, blame, danger and anxiety they run.

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Here we might remark that the phrase “infamous and detestable are the destroyers of religions, wasters of kingdoms and republics, enemies of virtue, letters and every other art which brings utility and honor to the human race, such as are the impious, the violent” is an exact description of the deeds of Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander as portrayed by Machiavelli in Chapter VII of the Prince, in which violence is used against the states of Italy to assure the tyrannical Borgia in their power. The phrase “wasters of kingdoms and republics” (“dissipatori de’ regni e delle republiche”) even echoes the phrase “it was necessary to throw into disorder those forms of rule, and create chaos in their states” (“era necessario si turbassino quelli ordini, e disordinare li stati di coloro”) with which Machiavelli summed up the actions of Alexander in establishing Cesare Borgia in his rule over the Romagna. Seen in this light, far from being an amoral investigation of the workings of power, the Prince is a profoundly moral work which decries the political state of the Italy of Machiavelli’s time, characterized as it is by secular leaders of the stamp of Cesare Borgia, ecclesiastical ones, as the Popes, or regal ones, as the kings of France and Spain, men all motivated, at least as far as Italy is concerned, by a lust for personal gain rather than the good of their subjects. This leads us back to Nifo’s rewriting of the Prince cited at the beginning of this chapter, since, for Nifo, the word “prince” in a Renaissance context is really a code word for “tyrant,” since those princes he cites avail themselves of methods and have ends which form a clear contrast to the legitimate rule of hereditary or elected kings, or of popular republics. If Machiavelli’s political critique by innuendo, juxtaposition, and allusion is indirect and subtle, his representation of Hiero of Syracuse at the end of Chapter VI as a model leader is unambiguous. The acquisition of his state is extremely difficult, but, once acquired, it is easy to maintain. While Hiero receives his opportunity from Fortune, it is his own ability to make use of it that distinguishes him as a just and capable ruler. In this respect, he resembles the state-founder heroes described at the beginning of the chapter (Moses, Theseus, Cyrus and Romulus), all liberators of their peoples who took all appropriate measures to maintain the forms of government they had introduced. Hiero also finds his people oppressed, which justifies any strong measures he may take. His rule, unlike that of Borgia and his Florentine analogue, also comes about from a free and unforced election by his people. This gives it durable authority, since, in Renaissance political thought, the only justification for absolute rule is that it come about either through inheritance, or through the free election of the people. Any other form of absolute rule is tyrannical or borders on tyranny. Equally important, Hiero relies on his own soldiers, rather than on foreign mercenaries, a tenet central to Machiavelli’s concept of a free and viable republican state.55 And finally, Hiero and leaders like him come to

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be held in veneration by their people, and they remain powerful, secure, honored, and blessed (“potenti, securi, onorati, felici”). If the views expressed here can be taken to reflect Machiavelli’s political beliefs, they are an example of the numerous places in the text where he subtly and skillfully manages to incorporate republican sentiments from his other writings, particularly the Discorsi, into the pages of the Prince. Reversing Machiavelli’s observations about Hiero, one arrives a description of the tyranny of Cesare Borgia and of the Medici as well: they obtain their states with ease (Borgia from his father, and Lorenzo from his uncle), but (or so Machiavelli might hope), have great difficulty holding them; they find their people not oppressed, but free, and then proceed to try to oppress them; their rule is established not through an election, but by violence and deceit; they rely not on troops drawn from a broad section of the Florentine populace, and thus highly motivated to defend her freedom courageously, but rather employ foreign mercenaries to intimidate the native population.56 And, in what may be yet another pointed jab against the Medici, Hiero— although powerful—does not actually have or require a kingdom. To make this point, Machiavelli cites the famous paradox with which Justinian had described Hiero’s rule: “ut nihil ei regium deesse, praeter regnum videretur” (so that he seemed to lack nothing of kingship but a kingdom), given even more concise expression in Tacitus’ famous motto at the expense of Galba: “capax imperii, nisi imperasset” (capable of ruling, had he not ruled). Machiavelli’s ironic use of this phrase here to make a veiled allusion to Medici rule once again reflects Tacitus’ similar procedure in the latter’s critique of the absolute rulers of his day, although Machiavelli’s irony is much more deeply buried than that of his Roman predecessor, since it relies on the reader to catch allusions which are not apparent in the text.57 In alluding to a powerful individual who could have had absolute power but chose to give it up for the good of the state, Machiavelli may be referring to an individual from contemporary Florentine history. In his The Natures of Florentine Men, Machiavelli writes of Antonio Giacomini: Era Antonio … severo nel servare la maestà pubblica, e quello che è mirabile e raro, liberalissimo del suo ed astinentissimo da quel d’altri. Ne quando era al governo di un esercito o di una provincia, voleva dai suoi subbietti altro che la ubbidienza, nè de’ disubbidienti aveva alcuna pietà. Privato, era senza parte e senza ambizione alcuna; quando pubblico, era solo desideroso della gloria della città e laude sua. (1843, 231) Antonio was … strict in keeping the dignity of the government and—something that is admirable and unusual—he was very liberal with his own property and altogether refrained from that of others. Not even when he was in control of an army or a province did he ask his subjects other than obedience, yet on the disobedient he had no

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mercy. He was, in private life, without partisan feeling and without any ambition; when in public life, he was eager only for the glory of the city and for his own reputation). (trans. in Gilbert 1965, 3, 1436–438)

Machiavelli’s description resembles a similar austere discipline of moral rectitude and self-sacrifice in service of the state which characterizes Cicero’s portrait of the ideal republican leader and finds its most vivid expression in the person of Cato the Elder. Once again, we may note the allusive nature of Machiavelli’s text and his reliance on his readers’ familiarity with not just the Roman model he is imitating, but also with the views expressed in his other writings, particularly the Discorsi, as well as classical, medieval and Renaissance discussions of the just, as opposed to the tyrannical, ruler.58 The implications of this for the newly reestablished Medici rulers in Florence is left for his readers to discern. Here again, as in his description of the character and deeds of Cesare Borgia, the Medici, like the Borgia before them, are covertly censured for their continuation of a policy of personal ambition, abetted by the use of bribery, and, when necessary, violence in the service of familial aggrandizement.59 In Machiavelli’s use of the techniques of innuendo taken from the classical rhetorical tradition, the Prince is doubly allusive in its cunning association of the Borgia and the Medici with one another and with censuring exempla of the ancients.60

The Virtuous Prince A reading of Machiavelli’s text as a veiled critique of Medici rule, achieved in part by an allusive use of classical sources, can be extended to the rest of the text. In closing, we will briefly consider two examples: one intertextual and one the famously controversial closing chapter of the treatise. One of the ironies of Machiavelli’s discussion of the ethical behavior of the new prince is that it derives in large part from Cicero’s treatment in the De Officiis of allowable deviation from ethical norms on the part of the leader of a free state, as Colish has pointed out: The principal dimension that is present in the De Officiis and which Machiavelli deliberately omits from the Prince is the dimension of civic virtue. … His omission of the topos of civic virtue from the Prince therefore can be seen as an ironic comment on princes in general and the Medici in particular. It is certainly an omission which contemporary readers, steeped as they were in Cicero’s De Officiis, were bound to notice.61

According to Colish, while obsessed with the theme of civic virtue in the Discorsi and the Florentine Histories, “Machiavelli [unlike Cicero] has difficulty envisioning

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such an organic moral relation between the ruler and the ruled in a principality. More precisely, he has difficulty envisioning it in the case of the Medici ruler for whom the Prince was intended.” Cicero’s (already pointed) subordination of the Stoic honestum to the utile, in which the good of the state as a whole is the only justification for a deviation from conventional moral norms, is reduced even further by Machiavelli to an elevation of the utile as an end unto itself, whose only purpose is the preservation of the personal power of the ruler. So Machiavelli’s “counsel” in these chapters involves a wholesale abandonment of the ethical norms traditionally associated with the preservation of a free state. Machiavelli’s discussion here is also derived from those chapters in Aristotle’s Politics where the philosopher describes the means by which a tyrant can secure himself in power. A comparison of parallel passages from the two works makes this abundantly clear.62 In addition, Machiavelli’s discussion in these chapters of the use of force by the new prince is also derived from an important classical discussion of the circumstances under which force may be adopted. The classical sources make a clear distinction between violence rightly used in the defence of a free state, and the inappropriate use of violence on the part of the tyrant. In his description of Romulus in Book II of his De re publica, Cicero provides a description of the “legitimate” use of forceful means by the leader of a free state, since it was Romulus’ physical boldness and strength of spirit which allowed him to undertake the war against King Amulius of Alba Longa which led to the founding of Rome: What State’s origin is so famous or well known to all men as the foundation of this city by Romulus? He was the son of Mars … and after his birth they say that Amulius, the Alban king, fearing the overthrow of his own royal power, ordered him, with his brother Remus, to be exposed on the banks of the Tiber. There he was suckled by a wild beast from the forest, and was rescued by shepherds, who brought him up to the life and labours of the countryside. And when he grew up, we are told, he was so far superior to his companions in bodily strength and boldness of spirit that all who then lived in the rural district where our city now stands were willing and glad to be ruled by him. (II.2.4)

Cicero also makes it clear (although he cautions about its potential for abuse) that the rule of one individual can be of benefit to the state, provided that there are institutional checks on this individual’s power, and he is of upstanding moral character: And since Numa Pompilius had the reputation of being pre-eminent in these qualities, the people themselves, by the advice of the Fathers, passed over their own citizens and chose a foreigner as their king, inviting this man a Sabine of Cures, to come to

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Rome and rule over them. … Thus [by his encouragement of the productive use of the land] he implanted in them a love for peace and tranquillity, which enable justice and good faith to flourish most easily, and under whose protection the cultivation of the land and the enjoyment of its products are most secure … and by the introduction of religious ceremonial, through laws which still remain on our records, he quenched the people’s ardour for the warlike life to which they had been accustomed. (II.xiv.26–27)

Cicero’s discussion here of the “interregnum,” by which outsiders to the city are invited to rule temporarily until a permanent ruler has been elected, is clearly the classical precedent for the later medieval Italian practice of the podestà.63 Once again, as in the case of Moses, Theseus, and Cyrus’ use of force to maintain their civic institutions in Chapter VI, we see the crucial importance of specifying by whom and to what ends such means are employed. In the hands of a founder or a defender of a free state they are legitimate; in the hands of a tyrant, such as Borgia or his Medici analogs, illegitimate. In Machiavelli’s political thought, a leader committed to the health and survival of a free republic must be willing, on occasion, to resort to force if absolutely necessary to defend something as precious and hard-won as civic liberty and the laws and institutions of a free state. To understand Machiavelli’s meaning here, it is, in our view, crucial to recognize this distinction between “legitimate” use of force and the ruthless and self-serving use of force by the tyrant, epitomized by Agathocles, Borgia, Oliverotto da Fermo, the Duke of Athens, Castruccio Castracani, and, finally, Lorenzo himself, the implied analog of Cesare Borgia, as noted above.64 Those who wish to maintain themselves in a state of freedom must then, at times, be willing to avail themselves of means ordinarily used by tyrants to defend their states, something which, in Machiavelli’s view, was tragically lacking in the regime of Soderini, characterized by the kind of naiveté regarding the intentions of others which he also censures in his description of the ingenuousness of the Orsini and Vitelli in his Il modo che tenne.65 This lack of an ability to take full account of the lengths to which others were willing to go in using force and fraud to secure their designs led to the tragic restoration of the Medici to power in 1512 following the brutal sack of Prato. Machiavelli’s unsentimental insistence of the necessity of the use of force to secure the hard-won freedoms of a free state finds its best-known expression in his characterization of Savonarola as an “unarmed prophet,” just as Soderini’s tragic irresoluteness in this regard finds its most humorous expression in Machiavelli’s famous epithet at Soderini’s expense, to the effect that, arriving at Hell’s gate, Soderini is summarily relegated by the infernal judge to Limbo to live with the babies.66 Machiavelli’s famous dictum regarding “force rightly used” is, then, rather than a shocking violation of moral norms, simply an implied allusion to this important classical discussion regarding its legitimate use in defence of a free republic, as

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opposed to its morally unjustifiable use on the part of the tyrant, as described by the classical historians.67 Seen in this light, a reading of the Prince as the “first work of political science,” in the sense of laying out the necessary if unpleasant rules by which Machiavelli’s world actually worked, may actually be reconciled with a reading of the text which interprets it as a covert criticism of Medici power. In a world beset by tyrants, it is sometimes, regrettably, necessary to play by their rules, if one is to defend the civic freedoms one holds dear.68 It was precisely this realism regarding the way the Renaissance world worked which endeared Machiavelli’s text to those of its Renaissance readers able to decipher its hidden republican message. We cited just such an appreciation for Machiavelli’s clear-eyed view of the world, unobscured by the self-glorifying justifications and obfuscations of contemporary rulers, in the case of Chancellor Bacon cited by Diderot above, for whom Machiavelli’s text served the lovers of freedom in understanding the ways of tyrants and the means necessary to defend themselves against them. This was also the purpose of the text according to its first Florentine editor, as we have noted. Agostino Nifo, in his description of just kingly rule, also seems to have read Machiavelli’s text in this light, as discussed above, well before its first publication in 1532. This means that a reading of Machiavelli’s text as describing, or advocating, the use of brutal but necessary means in the world of politics as applicable to the political world in general, and thus as presenting an “amoral” view of power, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the text, based on an inability to perceive the author’s allusions to those texts just discussed which make a crucial distinction between legitimate or illegitimate use of force. Those who are forced to resort to such means to defend their freedom are not to be censured, nor are they immoral; it is the tyrant, who uses such means for his own personal aggrandizement at the expense of the governed, who deserves censure. But this simply leads back to Cicero’s De officiis cited at the beginning of this chapter in his discussion of allowable deviation from ethical norms in the governance of a state. We would also suggest that the final chapter of the treatise is also meant to be taken ironically. Machiavelli hints at this by reintroducing at the beginning of the chapter the examples of truly just leaders from Chapter VI, whose behavior was described there in order to form a contrast with the behaviour of the classical and Renaissance tyrants in the following chapters. The very means which Machiavelli goes on to recommend that Leo adopt— nuovi ordini and arme proprie—are those that appear in his other writings as essential to the maintenance of a free republican Florence. Colish (1998) has argued that Machiavelli’s discussion of an Italian army is an allusion to his project for a civilian militia. Moreover, the very foreigners against whom Machiavelli

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urges Leo to take up arms are the same ones who form Leo’s main source of support in maintaining Medici rule over Florence: the Spanish. While in the chapters on the ethics of the new prince, then, Machiavelli is discreetly urging the Medici to behave as tyrants, here, in a delicious twist, he is urging them to adopt republican means to remove the basis for this tyranny, an action which can only lead to their demise. The tone of the final exhortation to Leo is also a signal to the reader not to take its meaning at face value. In its exaggeratedly elevated tone (standing in pointed contrast to the rapid and concise expository tone of the passage on the Italian army), it is an excellent example of the familiar Renaissance technique of ironic hyperbole.69 As Mattingly pointed out years ago, the final citation of Petrarch’s poem would then indeed be a coded call for the Florentines to resume their ancient liberty. As Mattingly reminded us, “The antique valor Petrarch appealed to was, after all, that of republican Rome.”70

Conclusion From this study it has hopefully become apparent that the art of equivocation was a highly developed skill in Renaissance Europe, useful to writers critical of those in power, yet mindful of the consequences of too-free speech, and that it was especially important at a time in European history when those in power were seeking to control the means of expression as a way of stifling dissent and consolidating their power. The Index of the Counter-Reformation is only the most notorious of these examples. Writers imbued with the traditions of republicanism, or by nature of independent mind and spirit, would not be silenced, yet they were also well-aware of the consequences of a too-frank expression of their beliefs. Outspokenness could, and often did, mean exile or death. For these individuals, a mode of discourse, sanctioned by classical rhetorical theory and practice, and discussed in contemporary manuals of rhetoric, which allowed a writer to communicate critical sentiments without speaking directly, provided a natural solution to the problem of self-expression in an age of absolutism. In his discussion of the position in which Donato Giannotti, the former secretary of the Ten, whose career—as gifted political theorist, man of letters, and exile—closely parallels that of Machiavelli—found himself, constrained to curry favor with powerful prelates and patrons after his exile from Florence following the second Medici restoration of 1530, Randolph Starn has given us an eloquent account of the situation in which many Renaissance intellectuals of independent mind and spirit found themselves in an increasingly absolutist political culture, intolerant of dissent, as the sixteenth century in Italy progressed. Starn cites

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a letter of 1541 of Giannotti to Piero Vettori, in which the former Secretary writes: “Go on then, rejoice and triumph, and turn your thoughts now and then to us other poor wretches, here in Rome amidst these priests, sponging our daily bread and pathetic handouts (‘confetti’), keeping our noggins (‘zucca’) uncovered and making bows and similar other pleasant things.”

Yet what choice, Starn asks, did Giannotti and his other fellow republicans have? “Horsù e’ ci bisogna bere con questo fiasco”: “So be it, then: we must drink our cup of gall.” Starn concludes: There is something of the protest and final resignation of a generation of Florentines in exile in these lines. Wanting nothing more than to return to a republican Florence, the fuorusciti were cast instead into the courts of Italy and beyond the Alps. A few were fortunate to find refuge in Venice, but for the exile whose chief resource was the pen, the only real alternative was whether his patron would be a prince or a prelate. He might hold out for a time; he could dream of Florence, scheme, and lament his lost liberty. But personal necessity and the drift of Italian culture, ever more courtly and clerical, combined to render the acceptance of a patron inescapable. … But when the Florentine citizen and former secretary of the Florentine republic was reduced to living off the liberality of his cardinal, it marked the passing of an age.71

Just as Giannotti, Machiavelli, found himself constrained to curry favor with the Medici rulers of Florence soon after their restoration to power in 1512. Unwilling to choose the safer, but perhaps less honorable, route of silence and self-censorship (a phenomenon known among scholars of religious discourse of the period as “nicodemismo”), his displacement from the centers of power in Florence found its outlet and its most powerful expression in the coded message against the Medici lords who had displaced him in the pages of the work often—ironically—considered his most “objective” or unbiased, or as a celebration of Medici power. But the fact that many readers over the ages have missed this message is perhaps testimony to his skill in practicing this difficult art.72 It is also possible that Machiavelli’s family history might have played a role in his writing such a text. Catharine Atkinson, in her study of the diary of Machiavelli’s father Bernardo, notes that Machiavelli’s family (Guelphs descended from the popolani grassi, as opposed to the noble magnati), had a long history of opposition to the Medici, including a certain Girolamo d’Angelo Machiavelli (1415–1460), a second cousin of Bernardo, Machiavelli’s father, and a teacher of law at the University of Florence. Girolamo, a prominent political figure in the 1450s, and an outspoken critic of Cosimo de’ Medici’s politics, was arrested in 1458, tortured and

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exiled to Avignon, arrested again in 1460, taken prisoner and thrown into prison in Florence, after plans for a conspiracy initiated by him had become known. He died in prison shortly thereafter.73 Atkinson claims that it was in part the memory of Girolamo’s experience which led Bernardo Machiavelli (“no sympathiser of the Medici-based regime”) to choose not to practice his profession of law, fearing that it might put him on a collision course with the Medici regime. On his mother’s side, Machiavelli’s mother (née Bartolomea Nelli) had married into the Benizi (or Benizzi) family, who were involved in the anti-Medici revolts of 1434 and 1458, and two of whose members were declared rebels in 1460 and, along with another Benizi, exiled to Avignon. Other members of the family had already been exiled in 1434, with the return of the Medici to Florence. Seen in this light, Machiavelli’s encoding a message critical of princes in a work dedicated to princes may have been a way to salvage in some measure his family honor, to not leave entirely unsaid what his father had been unable, or unwilling, to say.74 For discerning readers, at least, the unspoken reason behind his own, his father’s and his fellow citizens’ travails would be decipherable, namely the tyrannical nature of Medici rule over his native city.75 And finally, the classical rhetorical theorists emphasize that, in addition to providing for the speaker’s safety and for reasons of decorum, there is a third reason for employing the technique of covert criticism: that of pleasing and delighting the audience. A reading of the Prince which sees it as covert criticism of the Renaissance prince squares completely with our understanding of Machiavelli as a master “beffatore,” familiar to us from the pages of the Mandragola and in his private letters. The inclusion of a message critical of princes in a work addressed to a prince would have brought a smile to the face of himself and his republican friends as the ultimate inganno.76 In the face of the overwhelming power of the Medici family, the last laugh would be that of their republican opponents, the thieves of Florentine liberty being themselves deprived of their legitimacy, “stripped bare” (in the words of the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili) and exposed to the gaze of the suffering nations, “l’ingannatore ingannato.”77 We noted at the beginning of this essay the wide circulation of manuscripts of the Prince well before its first publication in 1532, a fact which tends to suggest that it was eagerly read by those Florentines caught up in the turbulent internal politics of the city immediately following the Medici restoration of 1512.78 It seems to us possible that at least some of these early readers of the text, with direct and recent experience of the return of the Medici to power, and the extinction of the republican regime, may have understood the hidden critique of Medici power which, we have argued, is present in the text. The anecdote recounted by Cardinal Pole cited above would tend to suggest that this audience may have been larger than scholars have up until now been aware.

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Certainly the political circumstances in Europe as a whole during this period were such as to create an environment in which such modes of discourse— which allowed for the expression of critical ideas while maintaining a margin of safety—would have been very appealing.79 There remains to be written a history of ambiguous expression in Renaissance Europe’s secular writings to accompany the already excellent discussions of strategic obfuscation in the religious discourse of the period.80 But before such a history can be written, modern readers will have to adjust their “horizon of expectations” to allow for the presence of such texts, which currently fall outside our inherited reading habits, which, in general, assume that what a writer says is generally what he means.81 Deliberate ambiguity in Renaissance Europe was not only a device to insure the writer’s safety—by guaranteeing what we would call today “plausible deniability”—it was also considered a high art, worthy of praise and imitation for its own sake, because of the intrinsic difficulty of achieving the effect.82 A reading of the Prince which sees it as a covert criticism of Renaissance princes also accords with the widespread use of various forms of encoded or equivocal expression during this period, in many fields of cultural expression.83 Indeed, one can see the enormous popularity of emblems in Renaissance Europe as a specific case of the fondness for covert expression in general. In addition, the widespread popularity in Europe of the literary genre of the paradoxical encomium attests to the predisposition of Renaissance readers to discern covert meanings in works of literary art apparently offering praise.84 Such a predisposition would have formed part of their “cognitive equipment” (to use the apt phrase of the art historian Michael Baxandall). The fact that modern readers do not share this mental predisposition may account for the relative paucity of modern readings of the Prince which allow for the possibility that it may have been intended as covert criticism of the Medici rulers of Florence.85 We conclude with a reminder from a scholar of Tacitus on the difficulty of ever being sure that one has interpreted him correctly: The prudentia of Tacitus lies as much in what he does not reveal as in what he does display in his narrative. The reader is challenged to reach his own conclusions, and when he has done this he still cannot know for certain if he has correctly understood the mind of Tacitus. Thus the interpreter of Tacitus faces a dilemma. He must engage with the wise and subtle intellect of a genius who seldom stands at the center of his stage, yet, in interpreting to his audience the doctrines of the historian, he runs the risk of using the words of Tacitus in ways not intended by the author. (Morford 1993, 150–51)86

One should approach an interpretation of Machiavelli’s Prince with the same caution. But we may at least entertain the possibility that Machiavelli’s use of

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language was so subtle, so “fox-like,” that the work’s true meaning—a veiled, yet nevertheless (for those readers able to discern it) forceful condemnation of Renaissance princes in general and the Medici in particular—has eluded many of even its best readers down to the present day.87

Fig. 1.1: Santi di Tito, portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 1.2: “Bruto lettore,” frontispiece, Rime of Rinaldo Corso (collection of the author).

Fig. 1.3: Raphael, Portrait of Leo X (Photo: Uffizi).

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Fig. 1.4: Bronzino, portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici as Orpheus (Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. John Wintersteen).

Fig. 1.5: Torso Belvedere, Museo PioClementino (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 1.6: Piero di Cosimo, The Forest Fire, c. 1505, detail (Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford).

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Notes 1. In his discussion of Machiavelli’s debt to classical rhetoric, Viroli comments: “The interpretation of Machiavelli as a founder of the science of politics is wrong, no matter what meaning we attribute to the word ‘scientific’. … He [Machiavelli] wrote to persuade, to delight, to move, to impel to act—hardly the goals of the scientist, but surely the goals that an orator intends to achieve. He pursues truth, but this truth is always a partisan truth; always a truth colored, amplified, ornate, and interested; and at times not truth at all—a liberty which a scientist can never allow himself, but which an orator is surely permitted to take” (Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 1, 3). Viroli is usually associated with the so-called “Cambridge School” of political historians. The work of Quentin Skinner, the leading exponent of this school, is especially important in its insistence—in opposition to the banishment of the concept of intentionality in several schools of twentieth century critical thought—on the importance of a consideration of the author’s intent, as far as this can be determined, in establishing the meaning of a given text. But this is simply to insist upon a rhetorical reading of early-modern texts, since rhetorical theory presupposes a speaker, a speech, and an intended audience, the expectations and mental predispositions of which play a large role in determining the content, style, structure and tone of a work of oral or written discourse. 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, ed. Ronald Grimsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 3, 6, 169. Diderot is of the same opinion: “Machiavelli was a man of profound genius and wide erudition. … Some claim that he taught Cesare Borgia how to rule. What is certain, is that the despotic power of the house of Medici was hateful to him, and that this hatred, which was well within his power to hide, exposed him to long and cruel persecution. … How can one explain that one of the most ardent defenders of monarchy suddenly became an infamous apologist for tyranny? In the following manner. … When Machiavelli wrote his treatise on the Prince, it is as if he said to his fellow citizens: ‘Read this work well. If you ever accept a master, he will be such as I paint him for you: here is the fierce animal to whom you will abandon yourselves.’ And so it was the fault of his contemporaries if they misunderstood his purpose: they took a satire as a eulogy. Chancellor Bacon made no mistake, when he said: ‘This man teaches nothing to tyrants; they know only too well what they must do; but he instructs the people on what they should fear. That is the reason why we should give thanks to Machiavelli and this type of writer, who openly and frankly show what men are accustomed to doing, not what they ought to do’” (Diderot, Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert [Paris: Briasson, 1754–1772]). 3. Reginald Pole, The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, ed. Thomas F. Mayer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 35.1.136. In this regard, it is worth noting that Machiavelli’s discussion of civil principalities parallels Cicero’s discussion in the De Re Publica of the way class conflict between nobles and people eventually leads to the creation of a dictator, and that the dedicatory letter is based on Tacitus’ observations on the usefulness of writing the history of the events of one’s own times, since mixed constitutions are rare and short-lived, and states alternate between rule by the nobles and the rule of the people, and it is thus useful for nobles to know the ways of the people in order to control them, and for the people to understand the nobles that they might be wise. Hence Machiavelli, with typical wit

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and cleverness, while appearing to engage in the traditional self-abasement of the captatio benevolentiae before a powerful patron, in his reference to his low station, by implicitly comparing himself to Tacitus, is actually hinting here that his treatise will be useful for an understanding of, and perhaps even an elimination of, Medici tyranny (Tacitus, Histories and Annals, trans. John Jackson [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975], 4.33). For early readers of the Prince, besides Sasso (1988), see Raab (1965), Richardson (1995), Donaldson (1988) and Anglo (2005). For a concise discussion of early interpretations of the Prince, with a generous sampling of primary texts, see Burd’s edition of the text. Burd is one of those critics who reject out of hand any interpretation of Machiavelli’s work as containing a secret, anti-tyrannical or anti-Medicean message, although he gives no cogent reasons for this rejection. 4. For example, Sasso cites Biagio Buonaccorsi’s dedicatory letter of his transcription of the Prince, addressed to his friend and protector Pandolfo Bellacci: “Ricevilo [the Prince] adunque con quella prompteza che si ricerca, e preparati acerrimo defensore contro a tutti quelli che per malignità o invidia lo volessino, secondo l’uso di questi tempi, mordere e lacerare” (Accept it [the Prince], then, with that readiness it requires, and prepare yourself to be its fierce defender against all those who, through ill will or envy, wish, in the spirit of these times, to tear and lacerate it). Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Italian and the Latin in this chapter are mine. Sasso notes that manuscripts of the Prince were in circulation as early as 1515 or 1516, and cites as evidence of this early manuscript tradition, among other examples, Guicciardini’s borrowing of Machiavelli’s passage on the difficulty of holding a new state in his Del modo di assicurare lo stato ai Medici of 1515 or 1516 (Gennaro Sasso, Machiavelli e gli antichi e attri saggi [Milan: Ricciardi, 1988], 202). 5. Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. L. Arthur Burd (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1891), 35–36. Giunta requests of Gaddi that “V.S.R. la quale … lo piglierà non dimeno volentieri; et con quello animo, ch’io glielo porgo; et lo difenderà da quegli, che per il soggetto suo lo vanno tutto il giorno lacerando sì aspramente: non sapendo, che quegli, che l’herbe et le medicine insegnano; insegnano p arimente anchora i veleni; solo accioché da quegli ci possiamo conoscendogli guardare: ne s’accorgono anco, che egli non è arte, ne scientia alcuna; la quale non si possa da quegli, che cattivi sono, usare malamente; et chi dirà mai, che il ferro fusse trovato più tosto per ammazzare gli huomini, che per difendersi da gli animali? Certo, che io creda, niuno” (take it, nevertheless, willingly, and in the spirit with which I give it to you; and defend it from those who, because of its subject, go about every day lacerating it so harshly, not knowing that those who teach us about herbs and medicines, also teach us about poisons, for the sole reason that, knowing them, we may defend ourselves from them; nor do they realize, that there is no art, nor science which cannot be ill used by those who are evil; and who would ever say that iron was discovered for the purpose of killing men, rather than to defend ourselves against animals? Surely, as far as I know, no one). The mention of the use of iron to defend oneself against animals may also be a reference to tyrants, since it was a commonplace in classical and Renaissance political thought to refer to tyrants as beasts, and not men. For example, Cicero remarks in Book II of the De Re Publica: “who, although he [the tyrant] has the shape of a man, nevertheless in the savagery of his conduct surpasses the fiercest animals.” Donato Giannotti uses the same metaphor in his Dialogi where the discussion of tyrants is a veiled critique of Cosimo de’ Medici (Donato Giannotti, Dialogi, ed. Dioclecio Redig De Campos [Florence: Sansoni, 1939]). Compare

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

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Machiavelli on the only remedy for tyrants: “nè vi è altro rimedio che il ferro” (Discorsi I, 58). In reference to Giunta’s comment above, Kristol calls it “an intriguingly cryptic remark which seems to indicate that The Prince was widely regarded as both a shameless defence of tyranny and as a kind of homeopathic medicine against the disease of tyranny” (“Niccolò Machiavelli,” Encounter, December 1954, 48). For a discussion of the literary/political ambiente which saw the first publication of the Prince, see note 27 below. Agostino Nifo, De regnandi peritia, together with a French translation of The Prince in Machiavel Il Principe/Le Prince, ed. Paul Larivaille (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Dedication to Charles V. In light of the hidden anti-tyrannical message present in Machiavelli’s text, it is ironic that Gentillet’s Commentariorum (1576), the first systematic refutation of Machiavelli’s supposed “perfidies,” was intended by the author to inspire Francis, Duke of Alençon, to liberate France from the “barbarous tyranny” of the “peregrinos homines,” that is, Catherine de’ Medici and her Italian advisors (“ad eam [Francia] vindicandam à perigrinorum cruenta et barbara tyrannide”), the latter phrase clearly an echo of Machiavelli’s “Exhortatio ad Capessandam Italiam in Libertatemque a Barbaris Vindicandam.” Nifo, De regnandi, III.10. For Nifo’s connections with Neapolitan humanist circles, see Elena Valeri, Italia Dilacerata: Girolamo Borgia nella cultura storica del Rinascimento (Milan: F. Angeli, 2007). For Nifo and Machiavelli, see Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli: The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility and Indifference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Giuliano Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1965). Garrett Mattingly, “Machiavelli’s Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?” The American Scholar 27 (1958): 482–91. Hans Baron is of a similar opinion: “Garrett Mattingly has recently said, not without good reasons, that instead of closing our eyes to the profound differences between such [republican] convictions [in the Discorsi] and the counsels for a despotic ruler in the Prince, it would be better to return to the eighteenth-century suspicion that some of the prescriptions in the Prince were not meant seriously, but were intended to satirize the life of princes” (Hans Baron, “Machiavelli: The Republican Citizen and the Author of the Prince,” English Historical Review 76 [1961]: 223–24). Mary Dietz, “Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception,” American Political Science Review 80 (1986): 777–99. Dietz contends that Machiavelli’s Prince was intended as a kind of elaborate trap for the Medici, to lure them into action (such as taking up residence in the city) which would be disastrous to them, thus ensuring their demise. This interpretation recalls the anecdote of Cardinal Pole cited above. Dietz’ 1987 article is especially recommended for its very incisive and convincing refutation of John Langton’s critique of her 1986 article, its clear presentation of the current status of the debate over the interpretation of the Prince, and its insistence on the importance of historical context in determining the meaning of the text (“Machiavelli’s Paradox: Trapping or Teaching the Prince,” American Political Science Review 81 [1987]: 1283–288). See also Stephen Fallon, “Hunting the Fox: Equivocation and Authorial Duplicity in the Prince,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 107 (1992): 1181–195, as well as John T. Scott and Vickie B.

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13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

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Sullivan, “Patricide and the Plot of the Prince,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 887–900. In note 18 below we list the many synonyms for these so-called “figured problems,” in which a meaning different from the apparent one is hinted at. Francesco Guicciardini eloquently describes this political climate and the means necessary to deal with it: “Fa el tiranno ogni possible diligenza per scoprire el segreto del cuore tuo, con farti carezze, con ragionare teco lungamente, col farti osservare da altri che per ordine suo si intrinsicano teco, dalle quali rete tutte è difficile guardarsi: e però, se tu vuoi che non ti intenda pènsavi diligentemente e guardati con somma industria da tutte le cose che ti possono scoprire, usando tanta diligenza a non ti lasciare intendere quanta usa lui a intenderti” (A tyrant will do everything possible to discover your secret thoughts. He will be affectionate, and talk to you at great length, will have you observed by men he has ordered to become intimate with you. It is difficult to guard yourself against all these snares. If you do not want him to know, think carefully, and guard yourself with consummate industry against anything that might give you away, using as much diligence to hide your secret thoughts as he uses to discover them). (Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman [Ricordi], trans. Mario Domandi [New York: Harper and Row, 1965], 78). Compare Aristotle: “It is part [of the nature of tyranny] to strive to see that all the affairs of the tyrant are secret, but that nothing is kept hidden of what any subject says or does, rather everywhere he will be spied upon” (Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], Politics, Bk. 5, Ch. 11, 2085). For the important and insufficiently studied topic of opposition to the Medici, see Alison Brown, “Lorenzo and Public Opinion in Florence: The Problem of Opposition,” in Lorenzo il magnifico e il suo mondo, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1994). Important also for an understanding of the unpopularity of Medici rule in Florence during the pontificates of Leo and Clement, due in large part to the arrogance of Lorenzo di Piero and the appointing of outsiders such as Goro Gheri and Silvio Passerini to run the city in their absence, is J. N. Stephens, The Fall of the Florentine Republic 1512–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), especially 81–123. See also the sources cited in Dietz 1987, 1284 and the recent conference Against the Medici: Art and Dissent in Early Modern Italy, organized by Alessio Assonitis and Stefano Dall’Aglio of the Medici Archive Project, held at the Archivio di Stato, Florence, May 26–27, 2016 (http://www.medici.org/antimedici-conference/). Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–1986), 9.2.66–8. A Greek Critic: Demetrius on Style, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1961), 125–27, par. 289–94. Unfortunately, the speech of Aeschines on Telauges is no longer extant. Wright cites Julian’s Second Oration to Constantius as an example of the technique of covert critique, and close analysis of the text bears out this observation. In the Loeb edition of Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, Wilmer C. Wright defines hypothesis eschematismena or veiled argument (whose synonyms include schema, emphasis, sermo coloratus, innuendo, suspicio, ductus contrarius, ductus obliquus, ambiguitas and silentium) in the following terms: “In such a speech the true intent should show or ‘shimmer’ through. The device may be used throughout a speech or only in certain passages: for safety, when one aims at tyrants; for piquancy, or as a test, e.g. Agamemnon’s exhortation to flight in the

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20. 21.

22. 23.

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Iliad. … It is skating on thin ice … and is distinct from eironeia and offers more of a riddle to the audience. A great orator like Demosthenes employed it as a matter of course” (Philostratus and Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952], 570). For more on this type of argument, with citations of classical examples, see “Emphasis,” in Lausberg (Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric [Boston, MA: Brill, 1988], paragraph 906), as well as “figura causae” in Joseph T. Shipley, ed., Dictionary of World Literature (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1966), 239 and Lucia Calboli Montefusco, “Ductus and Color: The Right Way to Compose a Suitable Speech,” Rhetorica XXI (2003): 113–31. For a listing of these and other rhetorical devices, with examples, see Gideon Burton, Silva Rhetoricae (Web resource: http://rhetoric.byu. edu). Ahl also cites Leo Strauss on the use of covert means of expression by writers living under totalitarian regimes: “Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. … It has all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage: that it reaches only the writer’s acquaintances. It has all the advantages of public communication without having its greatest disadvantage: capital punishment for the author. … Therefore an author who wishes to address only thoughtful men has but to write in such a way that only a very careful reader can detect the meaning of his book” (Frederick Ahl, “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome,” American Journal of Philology 105 [1984], 174–208; Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973], 25–26). Quintilian, Institutio, 9.2.71. For an admirably clear discussion of this type of argument, see Montefusco. As an example of a modern use of the classical technique of using just the facts of a case to send an allusive message, we might cite the many short observations made by Russian intellectuals belonging to Russian research organizations over the last decade or so which have appeared in the pages of the New York Times. While the tone of these short observations is studiously neutral, it seems to us possible that, in at least some cases, their authors may have intended them to be taken by Western powers as clues to the real tactics and intentions of Vladimir Putin, and thus to be of assistance to the West in formulating meaningful challenges to Putin’s autocratic regime. Just as Machiavelli’s descriptions of conspiracies in the Discorsi, cited below, if anyone were to challenge the underlying intent of these comments, their writers can always claim that they are just fulfilling their role as political scientists. For more on “covert reading,” see Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 291–311. Quintilian, 9.2.67–8. The translation is Ahl’s (“The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome,” 193). Discussing the prevalence of this technique in classical times, Ahl remarks “Ancient rhetoricians … devoted much time and energy to what they called ‘figured problems’: how to express oneself safely, tactfully, and effectively in almost every imaginable situation. … It is my contention that there is a long tradition of ‘figuring’ language in the interests of both tact and safety, and that this tradition reaches back beyond the documented beginnings of Greek and Roman rhetoric and forward into the Roman Empire and beyond” (Ahl, “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome,” 174).

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24. One observes Machiavelli’s use of this technique in Niccolò da Uzzano’s speech in bk. 4, ch. 27 of the Istorie fiorentine (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965], III, 1027). Sasso points out that this form of disguised expression of personal sentiments was also common in the diplomatic correspondence of Machiavelli’s time (Gennaro Sasso, Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi [Milan: Ricciardi, 1988], 196). Discussing Cicero’s De re publica, one scholar comments: “It is written in the format of a Socratic dialogue in which Scipio Africanus Minor … takes the role of a wise old man—a typical feature of the genre. Cicero’s treatise was politically controversial: by choosing the format of a philosophical dialogue he avoided naming his political adversaries directly. By employing various speakers to raise differing opinions, Cicero not only remained true to his favored skeptical method of setting opposing arguments against one another (see, e.g., Carneades), but also made it more difficult for his adversaries to take him to task on what he had written” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/De_re_publica). In many cases, the format of the Renaissance dialogue served, by its apparently neutral inclusion of arguments from several points of view, the same purpose of concealing potentially controversial ideas under an apparently benign surface. 25. Demetrius, 125–27, par. 289–95. 26. Here and throughout citations from the Discorsi are to Machiavelli (2001); translations are my own. 27. Machiavelli might have known Demetrius’ text in the Greek edition published by Aldus in Venice in 1508 as part of his series of Greek Rhetores, where the section describing the figured problems is called De Interpretatione. While the question of Machiavelli’s knowledge of ancient Greek is still undecided, he might have had the help of one his friends or acquaintances in deciphering the Greek text. That Demetrius’ text was known in the circle of republican exiles in Rome is demonstrated by the fact that Piero Vettori prepared a Latin translation of the work under the title De Elocutione, on the basis of a manuscript (Parisinus graecus 1741) borrowed from the personal library of Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, a staunch opponent of the Medici, and saw to its publication in 1542. A recent paper elucidates the close connections among exiled republican Florentine scholars in Rome, among them Vettori himself (who returned to Florence in 1537), the Gaddi brothers, Donato Giannotti, the Cardinals Niccolò Ridolfi and Giovanni Salviati, Benedetto Varchi, Bartolomeo (Baccio) Cavalcanti and Niccolò Ardinghelli. The group also included the writers Pietro Aretino and Francesco Maria Molza, both known for their anti-authoritarian attitudes (Molza composed an epigram on the assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici in 1537, as did Varchi), as well as Annibal Caro (the personal secretary of Giovanni Gaddi). (This information is from Raphaël Mouren, “The Role of Florentine Families in the Editions of Piero Vettori,” paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, 2008, available online at raphaele-mouren.enssib.fr/Chicago2008#15.) Machiavelli could not have known Vettori’s translation at the time of the composition of the Prince, since Vettori was born in 1499. 28. Tacitus also mentions this technique in describing the offense taken at his work by the descendants of Tiberius: “You will still find those who, from a likeness of character, read the ill deeds of others as an innuendo against themselves. Even glory and virtue create their enemies: they arraign their opposites by too close a contrast” (Tacitus, Histories and Annals, trans. John Jackson [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975], 4.33).

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29. Hörnqvist notes Machiavelli’s use of Ciceronian insinuatio in his exordium, remarking that the classical rhetoricians recommended two modes of discourse for insinuating oneself and one’s speech into the minds of the listeners: principium, which was open and direct, and insinuatio, to be employed only under special circumstances, when the speaker suspects that he is dealing with an audience hostile to his case. Hörnqvist notes that, while most evident in the dedicatory letter, use of this figure continues throughout the work. He adds that Machiavelli’s use of the figure “suggests that the feelings Machiavelli addresses towards the intended readers of the treatise, the Medici, should not be taken at face value, but instead be seen as belonging to a rhetorical strategy firmly rooted in classical rhetorical theory” (Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 30). For Machiavelli’s debt to the classical rhetorical tradition, besides Viroli (1988) see Colish (1978), Cox (1997), Garver 1980, Kahn (1994), McCanles (1983), Siegel (1968), Tinkler (1988) and Hörnqvist (2004). The latter (4–13) discusses many of these recent rhetorical interpretations of the Prince. 30. On the homicidal touchiness of tyrants when confronted with criticism, Demetrius notes: “Philip, for example, had only one good eye, and any reference to a Cyclops angered him, indeed any reference to eyes. Hermias, ruler of Atarneus, though in other ways gentle, found it difficult to endure any reference to knives or surgical operations, because he was a eunuch” (Demetrius 1961, par. 293). 31. In this essay, Rundle argues that Erasmus’ Panegyricus is not so much praise as “subtle criticism” (David Rundle, “‘Not So Much Praise as Precept’: Erasmus, Panegyric, and the Renaissance Art of Teaching Princes,” in Pedagogy and Power, ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 148–69). Coluccio Salutati provides a Renaissance formulation of this rhetorical device: “If praise has been devised untruthfully [de falsis], as is the case whenever it is dressed up in panegyrics, it warns its subject that he has not been praised as much as told what he should do; it spurs on those who are praised into trying to become like the people they see themselves being praised as, even in error” (Coluccio Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman [Zurich: Thesaurus Mundi, 1951], 68, cited in Rundle, “‘Not So Much Praise as Precept’,” 155). Important to note here is the Renaissance assumption that panegyric could easily imply its opposite. Compare Susenbrotus: “Hyperbole is used when the words or ideas exceed what is believable, for the sake of amplifying or diminishing … in particular, Hyperbole lies, not however because it wishes to deceive through falsehood, but that in this way we may arrive at the truth. … In short, Hyperbole asserts more than is true, and yet what is true is understood from what it false” (Susenbrotus, Epitome troporum ac schematum et Grammaticorum & Rhetorum de arte rhetorica libri tres [London: Societas Stationariorum, 1621], 17). Two examples of ironic hyperbole in the Prince which might be cited here are Machiavelli’s addresses to Leo which conclude Chapters XI and XXVI, in which the exaggeratedly elevated tone (which is in pointed contrast to the usual concise, pointed and rapid style of the author) serves as a signal to the reader not to take the praise at face value, but to understand it ironically. A delightful example of Machiavelli’s use of ironic hyperbole to mock Lorenzo il Magnifico is his Capitolo pastorale (2005, v. 3, 4–7), in which the ironically-inflated tone is even more obvious than in the Prince. Although, as inevitably with Machiavelli, this work has been interpreted in an entirely opposite manner, that is, as flattery of Lorenzo di Piero (not il Magnifico) in an attempt on the part of Machiavelli to ingratiate himself with the

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33.

34. 35. 36.

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newly-restored Medici regime following the restoration of 1512 (Francesco Bausi, “Jacopo Nardi, Lorenzo Duca d’Urbino e Machiavelli: l’Occasione’ del 1518,” Interpres 7 [1987]: 191–204). Besides Erasmus, Rundle also argues that Sir Thomas More, in his Carmen gratulatorium on Henry the VIII’s accession in 1509, engaged in this same clever rhetorical ploy, and that his work, “by its phrasing and its use of classical anecdotes, subverts its praise” (Rundle, “‘Not So Much Praise as Precept’,” 167, citing his article of 1995). See also the recent studies of Robin 1995 and D’Elia 2006, which describe the deliberate misuse of classical examples to convey censure of a contemporary leader, Filippo Maria Visconti and Sigismondo Malatesta, respectively (Diana Robin, Filelfo in Milan [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991]; Anthony D’Elia, “Heroic Insubordination in the Army of Sigismondo Malatesta: Petrus Parleo’s Pro Milite, Machiavelli, and the Uses of Cicero and Livy,” in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance, ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens [Leiden: Brill, 2006]). For an earlier period of Italian history, we might cite the essay of Jo Ann Cavallo, “Contracts, Surveillance, and Censure of Political Power in Sabadino degli Arienti’s ‘Triunfo da Camarino’ Novella (Le porretane 1.1),” in Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy, ed. Jo Ann Cavallo and Carlo Lottieri, Annali d’italianistica 34 (2016), 141–62, where the text in question offers, according to this scholar, a thinly veiled critique of the military adventurism and rhetorical manipulation of those wielding political power, specifically the pope and the emperor, implicitly pitting the free movement inherent in a market economy against the coercive violence of the political state. For a study of the rhetorical tradition of praise in the Italian Renaissance, see O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), James J. Murphy, Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Thought and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983) and John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979). Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. 8, Ch. 10, p. 1834. Aristotle, Politics, ed. Barnes, Bk. 3, Ch. 13, p. 2039. As Mattingly eloquently puts it: “Machiavelli deliberately addressed himself primarily to princes who have newly acquired their principalities and do not owe them either to inheritance or to the free choice of their countrymen. The short and ugly word for this kind of prince is ‘tyrant.’ Machiavelli never quite uses the word except in illustrations from classical antiquity, but he seems to delight in dancing all around it until even the dullest of his readers could not mistake his meaning” (Mattingly, “Machiavelli’s Prince,” 486). There is evidence that Renaissance readers were aware of Machiavelli’s implied comparison of the Medici rulers to both Cesare Borgia and to the classical tyrants. Bausi notes that Machiavelli’s Capitolo pastorale (mentioned above) explicitly compares Lorenzo di Piero “not only to the Roman tyrant [Caesar] … but also to a ‘Cesar duca’ closer to his times— Cesare Borgia, to whom his contemporaries where already accustomed to compare the Duke of Urbino” (Bausi, “Jacopo Nardi, Lorenzo Duca d’Urbino e Machiavelli,” 201–02). Ludovico Alamanni, in his Discorso … sopra il fermare lo stato di Firenze nella devozione de’ Medici of 1516 feels it necessary to remark “potendo … [Lorenzo] … rendersi pare ad qualunche delli antichi et de’ moderni, vorrà più presto giostrare con Cesare et Camillo

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che con lo impio Agathocle, col crudelissimi Sylla et con lo scelerato Liverocto da Fermo,” words which suggest that he may have been aware of Machiavelli’s allusive denigration of Lorenzo in his implied comparison of the Duke to the classical and contemporary tyrants, and that this view of the Medici ruler was well-enough known to need refutation (cited in Anthony Cummings, The Politicized Muse: Music for Medici Festivals, 1512–1537 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992], 90, 212 n. 14). For a concise discussion of classical, medieval and Renaissance thought on the tyrant, see Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, 198–204. For example, Donato Giannotti, cited above; Alamanno Rinuccini, De libertate; and Girolamo Savonarola, Trattato sul governo di Firenze (the former translated in its entirety in Renée Neu Watkins, trans. and ed., Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), the latter in part). Benedetto Varchi’s account in his Storia fiorentina of Alessandro de’ Medici’s 1535 “trial” before Charles V in Naples, in which Varchi has Jacopo Nardi compare Alessandro to the worst of the classical tyrants, could also be read as an oblique critique of the Medici ruler of his day, Cosimo, which might explain in part why his history was not published until 1740, and then in Germany under a fictitious imprint (Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina [Florence: Salani, 1963], 2.444–455). This latter is surely an oblique reference to Cesare Borgia. While we have not been able to find these two techniques, “exemplum inaptum” and “strategic juxtaposition” explicitly mentioned in the classical rhetorical treatises, their use is evident in Julian’s Second Oration to Constantius, a masterful demonstration of the incredible subtlety and complexity of this technique when extended to the discourse as a whole and raised to the level of an art form in itself. See for example Paolo Giovio: “[Cesare Borgia] mise le mani sanguinose a Baroni della fattione, et famiglia Orsina. Et prima fece crudelmente morire Vitellozzo, da lui odiato per il suo grande animo et valore” ([Cesare Borgia] laid bloody hands on the barons of the Orsini faction and family. And first he had Vitellozzo cruelly put to death, whom he hated for his great spirit and valor” (cited in Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. Luigi Firpo [Turin: Einaudi, 1981], 35). For a full description of the crime, see Machiavelli’s Descrizione del modo tenuto dal Duca Valentino nello ammazzare Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, il Signore Pagolo, e il Duca di Gravina Orsini. This was also similar to Pope Leo’s method of packing the College of Cardinals with men favorable to Medici interests, and demanding cash contributions from some of those he favored in this way (Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall [New York: Morrow, 1980], 235). Compare Mattingly on contemporary reactions to the character and actions of Cesare Borgia: “A Medici [Giuliano] was being advised to emulate a foreigner, a Spaniard, a bastard, convicted, in the court of public opinion anyway, of fratricide, incest and a long role of abominable crimes, a man specially hated in Tuscany for treachery and extortion and for the gross misconduct of his troops on neutral Florentine soil, and a man, to boot, who as a prince had been a notorious and spectacular failure” (Mattingly, “Machiavelli’s Prince,” 487). One of the great virtues of Mattingly’s article is his taking into account contemporary reactions to the actions of the personages described by Machiavelli. Regarding the Borgias’ notoriety in late 1400 and early 1500s Italy, one might add that Julius II issued a bull in

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January of 1506, which, according to one scholar, “although it was not retrospective, Julius II’s bull concerning simony in papal elections was motivated in large part by the unabashed use of bribes by Julius’ arch rival and predecessor, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, in the conclave of 1492. On the last leaf it is ordered that this bull be posted on the doors of Old St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican chancery, and Campo de Fiori.” Here we might emphasize once again that, in our view, modern interpreters of Machiavelli have tended to overlook contemporary historical evidence (that is, how the events and personages described by Machiavelli were actually experienced by individuals of the time) in constructing their interpretations of the text. 43. An important and often-overlooked source for contemporary accounts of the reactions of contemporaries to the deeds of Borgia and his father are the so-called fogli volanti or chapbooks, sold by traveling vendors, who often doubled as entertainers, in the cities and small towns of Italy. These vendors were important in conveying to the less-wealthy classes important news of the day and contemporary events, such as the goings on at the Papal court, the war against the Turks, Martin Luther’s attacks on the Catholic church, and the miraculous prodigies of nature found in the New World, and also included among their wares popular stories, farmer’s almanacs, religious poetry, and adaptations of the “high literature” of the day, such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso or Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato. Cecil Clough was perhaps the first to draw attention to these ephemeral productions as an important source to a fuller understanding of the history of the period, across all social classes. Garnett has also drawn attention to the importance of these opuscoli, and cites an example with direct relevance to Cesare Borgia, Pastor’s discussion of the hatred ordinary people felt for the Duke, expressed in anonymous poems and pasquinate (Robert Garnett, “Contemporary Poems on Caesar Borgia,” English Historical Review 1 [1886]: 138–41). Pastor cites an anonymous pamphlet in the form of a letter to Silvio Savelli, a baron exiled from Rome living at the court of Maximilian I, dated November 15, 1501, ostensibly from the Spanish camp at Tarento, which excoriates the Duke and his father in no uncertain terms, calling the former “this beast … a new Mahomet … [who] far surpasses the old one in the havoc he causes in what remains of faith and religion by his filthy crimes.” The letter also characterizes Borgia’s father, the Pope, as “an abyss of vice, a subverter of all justice, human or divine” (Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. VI, 113–14, citing Johann Burchard, Diarium III, 182–87, which prints the letter in its entirety). The citation of Clough is “Pamphlets and Propaganda in the Italian Wars, 1494–1512,” Renaissance and Reformation 3 (1987): 12–16, available online at http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/ index.php/renref/issue/view/1065jps. For the Italian fogli volanti, see Giovanni Cinelli Calvoli, Biblioteca volante di Gio: Cinelli Calvoli, continuata dal dottor Dionigi Andrea Sancassani (Venice: G. Albrizzi, 1734–1747), available online at http://catalog.hathitrust. org/Record/001169774 and Raymund Wilhelm, Italienische Flugschriften des Cinquecento (1500–1550): Gattungsgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1996). For recent studies of Italian street-singers, see the collection of essays edited by Luca Degl’Innocenti and Massimo Rospocher, Street Singers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Italian Studies 71 (2016): 149–53. 44. For a similar betrayal of the city to a tyrant for motives of purely personal gain from a later period of Florentine history, see Luigi Alamanni’s stern indictment of Francesco Guicciardini and the Florentine Senate in his A i ma’ cittadini di Firenze of June 8, 1537: “Un

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certo giovinetto in terra nato [Cosimo de’ Medici]/Di quel padre ch’alhor fu pregio et ‘l vanto / Delle vie più famose italiche armi [Giovanni delle Bande Nere]/A questo a forza dié [Guicciardini] titolo et nome / Sol per farlo strumento alle sue voglie, / Bramoso farsi grande appo qualchuno / Ch’el premiasse con tal gloria et oro, / Ch’empier potesse suo appetito ingordo; / Et per far questo non si cura vendere, / E tu ‘l consenti impio civil collegio [the Florentine Senate] / La ciptà per schiava et seco appresso / E suo più forti et ben muniti lochi, / Che non son pur a noi fortezza et scudo / Ma chiave et porta al bel sito toscano” (cited in Dario Brancato, “Una ‘costituzione’ dei fuorusciti: la silloge di Benedetto Varchi per Piero Strozzi e Lorenzino de’ Medici,” in Varchi e altro Rinascimento: Studi offerti a Vanni Bramanti (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2013), 41, citing in turn Salvatore Lo Re, “Il mito di Bruto a Firenze nel Cinquecento tra storia e letteratura,” in Usages de l’histoire et pratiques politiques en Italie, du Moyen Age aux temps modernes: autour de la notion de réemploi, closing session of the Colloquium “Histoire et civilisations de l’Italie,” (Université de Paris IV Sorbonne, October 16–17, 2009), organized by Caroline Callard, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Alain Tallon). For the sack of Prato, see Guicciardini (Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, trans. Sidney Alexander [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969], Book 11, 262–63). Michelangelo, in a letter to his father of October or November 1512 comments: “Del chaso de’ Medici, io non ó mai parlato contra di loro chosa nessuna, se non in quel modo che s’è parlato generalmente per ogn’uomo, come fu del caso di Prato; che se le pietre avessin saputo parlare, n’arebbono parlato” (Regarding the Medici, I have never spoken anything against them, except generally as everyone has spoken, as in the case of Prato; which, if the stones had heard about it, they would have spoken), cited in Michelangelo Buonarroti, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori [Florence: Sansoni, 1965], vol. 1, 139. The sack of Prato would have immediately called to mind of Machiavelli’s contemporaries the equally brutal sack of the Tuscan city of Volterra in February of 1472, occasioned by the recent discovery of alum mines in the vicinity of the city and the resistance of the residents to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s demands that they deed them over to him. In the assault, which occurred after the residents of the city had agreed to terms of surrender, dozens of unarmed citizens were killed. For contemporary reactions to the sack, expressed in poems, letters, elegies and laments by supporters of the Medici and their opponents, see the study, with original documents, of Lodovico Frati, Il sacco di Volterra nel 1472: Poesie storiche contemporanee e commento inedito di Biagio Lisci volterrano tratto dal codice vaticano-urbinate 1202 (Bologna: Frati, 1886). Those opposed to the sack (Lorenzo ignored the advice of Soderini that he exercise restraint in dealing with the situation) considered it an egregious example of the violent intrusion of the Medici into the internal affairs of the city, motivated solely by the desire for personal gain. Given that the sack of Volterra occurred not long before the composition of the Prince and the Medici reoccupation of Florence, it seems likely that, just as with his allusion to Lorenzo’s intervention in the affairs of Forlì and Faenza, discussed below, here also, in his vivid description of the murder of Oliverotto da Fermo and his opponents, Machiavelli may be making a similar use of recent Florentine history as a referent external to the text against which the text is intended to be understood. John Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 429. Najemy, A History of Florence, 430.

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49. For the unpopularity in Florence of Lorenzo di Piero’s conquest of Urbino, we might cite the anecdote reported by Butters to the effect that, unable to bear the sight of the triumphal celebration of the event in the streets and public squares of Florence, a spectacle which also signalled, in a very public way, their own exclusion from any meaningful participation in Florentine political life, many of the ottimati withdrew in mute protest to their villas in the hills (Humphrey Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985]). 50. Savonarola, in his Constitution and Government of Florence, provides us, without ever mentioning his name directly, with a comprehensive indictment of the rule of Lorenzo in Florence. All of Savonarola’s criticisms refer to actual features of Lorenzo’s rule, well-known to historians: his building of churches and temples as a means of enhancing his image as benevolent pater patriae, having the best interests of the city at heart; his creation of a circle of learned men around himself, also to enhance his public image as the equal of any sovereign in Europe; his vindictiveness toward his enemies, and his use of fiscal means, such as the imposition of ad hoc taxes as a means of bankrupting them; his manipulation of the political institutions of Florentine government and his use of its judicial institutions to favor friends and harass his enemies; his involvement of foreigners in the domestic affairs of Florence, including the fomenting of foreign wars (such as that of Volterra) to enhance his own status at home; his imposition of burdensome taxes (gabelle) on those least able to pay them; and his adoption of an appearance of simplicity, embodied in his donning of the simple lucco, to create the impression of his status as merely that of an ordinary citizen. We discuss this treatise further below. 51. For an account of the assassinations, see Marco Pellegrini, Congiure di Romagna: Lorenzo de’ Medici e il duplice tirannicidio a Forlì e a Faenza nel 1488 (Florence: Olschki, 1999) and Konrad Eisenblichler, review of Pellegrini, Congiure di Romagna, Sixteenth Century Journal 32 (2001): 537–39. Machiavelli’s account of the incident is to be found in Bk. 8, Ch. 35 of the Istorie fiorentine. 52. Remarking on Tacitus’s use of innuendo to convey a message at variance with what his text appears to be saying, Irving Kristol remarks: “It is rare that he made a statement of fact about Tiberius without also making a more or less gross insinuation. Thus, we read: ‘About the same time a serious illness of Julia Augustus made it necessary for the Emperor [Tiberius] to hasten his return to the capital, the harmony between mother and son being still genuine, or their hatred concealed.’ Usually he was more subtle than this and there are many occasions when we have to read him very closely indeed to perceive that he has in fact denied what one thought he had said. But it is not at all difficult for a diligent scholar, by snipping off the ‘facts’ from the ‘value judgments,’ to compose a new mosaic which is very different from the Tacitean original. To be sure, there remain the corpses, the murdered and mutilated and self-destroyed. These the scholar may dispose of, first, by counting them to demonstrate that their sum was less than astronomical, then by allowing for exaggeration, and finally by turning his attention to the Pax Romana, the efficient imperial administration, and all those other glorious things that make up History.” This comment recalls our discussion above of the necessity of careful “reading between the lines” in attempting to discern Machiavelli’s message in the Prince, and also, in our view, applies equally well to what we consider the tendency of modern interpreters of Machiavelli to remove his text from its historical context—in particular, the reactions of his contemporaries to the personages and

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events he describes—in constructing their interpretations of the text, a tendency also noted by Mattingly, cited above. This decontextualization has led in turn to various preconceptions about the nature of the work, e.g., the work seen as a work of “political science” in the modern, “objective” sense of the term, a reading which tends to preclude any possibility of an insertion of Machiavelli’s personal political preoccupations into the text, whether in a direct or a veiled way, or the equally influential misconception of the work as presenting an essentially “value-neutral,” view of political action, effectively excluding moral issues from serious consideration in any discussion of political affairs, a view of the text which has been cited by many autocrats over the years as justification for their actions. As we note below, this is perhaps the most damaging misconception of the text, and one to which Mattingly, cited above, strenuously objected. John Najemy has also pointed out the inappropriateness of Machiavelli’s choice of Cesare Borgia as a supposed model for the new prince, relying, unlike this essay, on historical details of the Duke’s career which are at variance with the ostensible argument Machiavelli seems to be making (“Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia: A Reconsideration of Chapter 7 of the Prince,” The Review of Politics 75 [2013], 539–56). For a recent “ironic” reading of the Prince which makes an argument congruent to the one presented here, see Erica Benner, Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Many of the rhetorical techniques Benner claims Machiavelli used to create a covert, ironic message in his treatise are ones which we have noted in the course of this essay. One might also argue that Machiavelli makes use of the same rhetorical device in his famous passage on conspiracies; while enumerating the various ways conspiracies can fail and thus apparently advising against them, the net result of Machiavelli’s discussion is to provide a road map to any potential conspirator of exactly what to avoid in bringing his conspiracy to a successful conclusion. It also provides “cover” from any reader who might suspect his support for such endeavours, since he can always claim that he clearly advised against them, giving good reasons, a claim which, at least on the surface, is completely true. Once again, we observe Machiavelli’s fox-like intelligence at work, as well as his extremely oblique sense of humor, since by using this strategy, he simultaneously guarantees his safety while allowing himself and his knowing readers to have the last laugh on those readers who insist upon reading his text “straight,” thus missing its hidden anti-Medicean message. We noted above that the Medici reoccupation of Florence could never have been achieved without the assistance of Spanish troops, and the brutal sack of Prato, intended to send a message to the terrified Florentines within the city that any resistance to the will of the Pope and his Spanish allies was useless. For an eloquent (and darkly comic) discussion of the odiousness of Medici rule in Florence under Clement, and the disarming of the Florentine citizens, see Varchi, Storia fiorentina, Vol. 2, Bk. 12, Ch. 49–50 and Bk. 14, ch. 1. On the tyrant’s need to defend himself against his own citizens, Aristotle remarks: “Both [the oligarch and the tyrant] mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms” (Politics, Bk. 5, Barnes ed., 2081). See also Najemy, A History of Florence, 429–30, 435 for Lorenzo’s unprecedented creation of his own private army in Florence in January 1515, and ibid. 426–34 for a concise account of the consolidation of Medici power in Florence in the hands of Lorenzo. Machiavelli makes a similar comment regarding Hiero in comparing his rule to that of Persius of Macedon in the dedication of the Discorsi to his friend Zanobi Buondelmonti,

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adding the following pointed allusion to Medici rule in Florence: “Perché gl’uomini, volendo giudicare dirittamente, hanno a stimare quelli che sono, non quelli che possono essere liberali; e così quelli che sanno, non quelli che sanza sapere possono governare uno regno” (Since men, if they want to make judgments based on reality, should consider men who are, and not those who could be, liberal; and in the same way, those who know how to govern, and not those who without knowing, could govern a kingdom). I thank Professor Albert Ascoli for this reference. In yet another irony, Hiero was himself a tyrant, notorious in classical antiquity for the efficacious, but brutal, means employed by him to secure himself in power, perhaps the best-known example of which was his destruction of troops he feared might become disloyal to him by directing them into an ambush, where they were summarily slaughtered by the enemy. In view of the extremely subtle manipulations of irony on the part of Machiavelli we have been discussing, it seems possible that his choice of Hiero as exemplum might represent yet another example of his use of an historical referent external to the text against which the full meaning of this particular passage is created, in a way similar to his allusive use of Agathocles, Cesare Borgia, and Oliverotto da Fermo as historical referents which allude to the character and actions of their Florentine equivalents. If this is the case, here we observe Machiavelli the ironist at his most playful: while using the exemplum of Hiero as a means to allusively indict, because of the close similarities between them, the character and behaviour of Cesare Borgia and, by extension, his contemporary analogue, Lorenzo di Piero, by according Hiero any praise at all, he seems to be implying at the same time that the behavior of Hiero’s Italian analogues is even worse than that of their classical predecessor. If this is the case, a similar irony is to be found in Machiavelli’s citation of Francesco Sforza, similarly notorious as a tyrant in Renaissance Italy, as a supposed model of virtù is his discussion of Cesare Borgia in Chapter 7. If this northern Italian tyrant is “virtuous” in comparison with his Spanish equivalent, what does this say about the latter? As an additional example of Leo’s use of bribery to achieve personal ends, we might cite the suggestion of his secretary, Bernardo Dovizi, to Cardinal Francesco Soderini of the possibility of a marriage between Lorenzo and one of Soderini’s relatives. This helped secure Soderini’s support in the conclave of March 1513 which elected Leo Pope (Hibbert, The House of Medici, 217). See also Leo’s packing of the College of Cardinals with men sympathetic to the Medici cause, discussed above. A classical work which would have been well-known to Machiavelli and his contemporaries which indicts the rule of one Emperor, Trajan, by referring to the harshness of another’s (Domitian’s) is Pliny’s Paneygyric to the Emperor Trajan, composed upon the latter’s assumption of the office of consul in the year 100. Many editions of this work, printed either separately or, more often, together with Pliny’s other works, appeared in the first half of the cinquecento. Colish, Marcia, “Cicero’s De Officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978): 92. For Machiavelli’s use of Aristotle’s advice to the tyrant in the Prince, see Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, 205–08 and 204, n. 31 (where he cites Walker’s list of citations from Aristotle in the Discorsi and, especially, Procacci 1965, pt. 1, ch. 3, who cites numerous readers of the 1500s who discerned the close affinities between Aristotle’s discussion of

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the tyrant and the Prince [The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker, with revisions by Brian Richardson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970]). It is worth noting that Savonarola’s veiled critique of Lorenzo il Magnifico in his Trattato sul governo di Firenze is derived almost entirely from the same chapters in Aristotle, in particular, the philosopher’s discussion of the “wise tyrant,” who eschews the more brutal tactics of his more familiar cousin to secure the people’s favor. An example of Savonarola’s borrowings from the Politics is his presentation of Lorenzo as keeping the citizens of Florence busy with the building of elaborate churches, an echo of Aristotle’s discussion of the building of the pyramids of Egypt in the Politics, Bk. 5, Ch. 11 (Barnes ed., 2085). For an English translation of a selection from the treatise, see Watkins, Humanism and Liberty, 231–60. 63. While many scholars have investigated the classical origins of Machiavelli’s political thought, insufficient attention, in our view, has been given to the potential role played by Cicero’s De re publica in the formation and articulation of Machiavelli’s political theory. There is virtually no aspect of Machiavelli’s political thought which cannot be found, clearly and concisely expressed, in the pages of Cicero. While Cicero’s work, in its entirety, was unknown in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy (the “complete,” though still fragmentary, text was discovered in manuscript in the Vatican Library by Cardinal Angelo Mai in 1819, the only substantial portion known before that date being the famous Somnum Scipionis, an excerpt from the final Book 6 of the text, well known in the Middle Ages through Macrobius’ commentary), excerpts from other portions of the work were to be found from the late classical period onward in authors such as Augustine and Nonius Marcellus. While controversial, we would hazard to speculate that Machiavelli may have been familiar with Cicero’s text in some form (perhaps an epitome, supplemented by the fragments mentioned above) in formulating his own discussion of the benefits and weaknesses of absolute rulers and republican forms of government. If this is so, then Cicero’s discussion would have provided Machiavelli with the idea of writing a pair of treatises, one on republics (the Discorsi), and the other on forms of absolute rule (the Prince). 64. One might object that Machiavelli’s Dispatches present a neutral, or even positive, view of Cesare Borgia, but a close examination of the text reveals that they also present a negative portrait of the Duke’s abilities and steadily declining fortunes, in which an inexplicable failure of those very qualities which make him such a fearsome and formidable figure in the pages of the Prince—his diabolical cunning and propensity to violence—becomes a serious liability after his loss of Imola, leading to his eventual ruin. The great irony of the Dispatches is that it is Valentino, renowned for his duplicity and cunning, who is deceived by the false promises of both Pope Julius and the Florentine Signoria itself, making him, just as in the Prince, doubly dependent on the good will and dispensations of another, and thus extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of Fortune. He fails to appreciate the one essential fact which might have led him to be wary of the false promises of his enemies: they both hate him, and thus cannot be trusted to deal with him in good faith. He forgets perhaps the most important maxim from the Prince, which forms the conclusion to the very chapter which purports to hold him up as an example for imitation: one should never trust men of great spirit whom one has injured: “E chi crede che ne’ personaggi i benefici nuovi facciano dimenticare le iugiurie vecchie, s’inganna” (And whoever thinks that new favors make men of great spirit forget old injuries is only fooling himself ). Hence the fox-like cunning which

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characterizes the Duke in the pages of the Prince thus fails him in the Dispatches at the most crucial moment. 65. Traiano Boccalini expresses the same idea in his Ragguagli di Parnaso, where, on trial before the court of Heaven, Machiavelli is judged guilty of trying to “put the teeth of dogs into the mouths of sheep” [i.e. the Florentines, more accustomed to buying their freedom with money than defending it by force of arms]. 66. Dante also notes that the Florentines’ abandonment of the war-like virtues of Mars—symbolized by the mutilation of his statue, which had been restored by Charlemagne to its position near the Arno, where it had been thrown upon Attila’s destruction of the city—in favor of the adoption of St. John the Baptist as their patron saint led the statue of the god thus scorned to exert a kind of malign influence over their later endeavors: “I’ fui de la città che nel Battista / mutò il primo padrone; / ond’è per questo / sempre con l’arte sua la farà trista; / e se non fosse che ‘nsul passo d’Arno / rimane ancor di lui alcuna vista, / que’ cittadin, che poi la rifondarno / sovra ‘l cener d’Attla rimase, / avrebber fatto lavorare indarno” (“I was of the city which exchanged its first patron for the Baptist; / For which he with his power will always make her unlucky; / And were it not that some trace of him still re mains on the bridge of the Arno, / Those citizens who built her again on the ashes of Attila would have laboured in vain” (Inferno XIII, 143–50). This warning about the potentially enervating effects of an over-emphasis on morality or religion at the expense of military prowess is an old classical topos, going back at least to Homer, where the virtù of Achilles is placed in pointed contrast to the effeminacy of Paris, or Aeneas’ dalliance with Dido is portrayed as an abandonment of his duty to history; in Renaissance literature, perhaps its best-known expression is the abandonment of his military duties by Ruggiero in favor of the pleasures of the island of Alcina. Another often-cited expression of the idea in classical literature is the pointed contrast which was often made between the rugged simplicity of the Spartans and the more refined cosmopolitanism of the Athenians. In effect, in all his writings, whether more theoretical or more historically-focused, Machiavelli is advocating a kind of hybrid polis consisting of a mercantile society with its strong tradition of laws and institutions supported by a strong military force made up of citizens; his “merchant warriors” would, in his view, be better equipped to defend Florence from the incursions of tyrants foreign and domestic than armies of priests; for a republic not to be militarily strong is only to invite its overthrow by its enemies. While Lorenzo de’ Medici famously said, “States are not kept with pater nosters,” republics, according to Machiavelli, can be lost with too many of them. 67. On the profoundly subversive nature of Machiavelli’s political thought, see Hulliung: “Many other scholars have written—and with distinction—on the topic of Machiavelli the republican author and devotee of the studia humanitatis. It is not their scholarship that I wish to question, but rather what seems to me their misplaced determination to prevent Machiavelli’s thought from being the scandal he intended it to be. Our age, it seems, is too much one of embattled humanism for humanists to be able to recognize Machiavelli for what he was, the first and one of the greatest subversives of the humanist tradition. We understandably but mistakenly prefer to believe that Machiavelli was a humanist misunderstood, or that his immersion in the humanist tradition proves we have nothing to fear from him, or better yet, that he was, in anticipation of ourselves, a

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humanist grappling with the problem of ‘dirty hands,’ the dilemma of the necessity of doing evil for the sake of the good. … But in truth … a Machiavelli so much to our liking is not Machiavelli at all. … Not until Nietzsche, perhaps, do we again encounter so deliberate and formidable an attempt to use the studia humanitatis for the purpose of inverting its humanitarianism” (Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983], ix–xi). We agree with Hulliung that a republican reading of Machiavelli’s Prince runs the risk of making the more subversive aspects of his political thought seem tame; we can only respond that what would have been genuinely shocking to his contemporaries would have been his deliberate contravention of the political commonplaces of the humanist tradition (for example, that leaders should exercise mercy and generosity), but that this does not mean that his modern readers should have to assume that, in making such a forceful challenge to the political pieties of the humanistic tradition, he meant to serve as advocate for their opposite, especially as regards the imperialistic tendencies of republican states, a supposed aspect of his political thought which, according to Hulliung, forms one of the most subversive aspects of his writings on republics. We would argue that Machiavelli’s subversion of traditional humanist thought would indeed have been genuinely shocking to his contemporaries, but that, at the same time, rather than implying its opposite, he may have been instead intending to provoke a sense of horror in the reader at his seeming advocacy of the use of violent or overly forceful means on the part of the leader of a state, and to stimulate this reader into seeking a third way between republican passivity and republican imperialism; that is, a form of republican government which allows for the possibility of democratic institutions internally and fairness and restraint in its dealings with foreign powers. Such a strategy of “provoking the opposite” (a strategy which modern psychologists call “contrary intention”) was not unknown to the rhetorical tradition. And we argue below that the ancient Etruscans, with their league of strong and independent free cities, provided Machiavelli with a model of just this combination of internal freedom and external justice. 68. It is remarkable how closely Machiavelli’s account of the final failure of Borgia and Alexander’s schemes parallels the career of another notorious tyrant of fourteenth century Italy, Castruccio Castracani. This adventurer was, just as Borgia, thwarted in his territorial ambitions by sudden death (in the case, his own, and not that of his father), and, just as Cesare Borgia, for all the effort invested in constructing a personal fiefdom in central Italy, his state collapsed immediately upon his death. Also important to note is that one of the territories conquered by Castracani was the ancestral seat of the Machiavelli family. In this regard, we have always felt that the publication of the first edition of the Prince together with the Vita di Castruccio Castracani and the Modo che tenne was no arbitrary editorial decision, dictated by the comparable brevity of the three works, by was instead governed primarily by a recognition of the thematic kinship of the three works, each of which, in its own way, gives a vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of tyrannical forms of one-man rule before the inexorable blows of Fortune. For Castracani as a typical fourteenth century tyrant, see Louis Green, Castruccio Castracani: A Study on the Origins and Character of a Fourteenth-Century Italian Despotism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 69. Many critics have noted the elevated tone of the final “Exhortatio,” although many might not agree that this tone is meant ironically. For a very perceptive discussion of the “Exhortatio” and Machiavelli as rhetorician, see Hugo Jaeckel, “What is Machiavelli Exhorting in His

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Exhortatio? The Extraordinaries,” in Niccolò Machiavelli: politico, storico, letterato, ed. JeanJacques Marchand (Rome: Salerno, 1996), 59–84. Chiappelli calls it a “raptus rhetoricus.” Mattingly, “Machiavelli’s Prince,” 491. Donato Giannotti and his Epistolae: Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, Rome, Ms. 107, ed. Randolph Starn (Geneva: Droz, 1968). On the fundamental incompatibility of humor with totalitarian regimes, see the recent review of Jon Stewart’s film Rosewater, which tells the story of a dissident Iranian filmmaker living under the constraints of a theocratic regime: “Confession and penance are central to totalitarian regimes. … By definition, irony is impossible; speech can have only one state-defined meaning. In all, theocrats make bad comics and a lousy audience for comedy” (The New Yorker, November 24, 2014, 120). Catherine Atkinson, Debts, Dowries, Donkeys: The Diary of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Father, Messer Bernardo, in Quattrocento Florence (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). There are also many passages in Machiavelli’s letters where one gets the strong impression that Machiavelli is sending an encoded message to the recipient. One example which might be cited here is a letter of April 2, 1527 to his son Guido, imploring him to capture and then bring to his farm in San Casciano a certain “wild bull,” so that the bull might exercise himself there and cause no further damage in Florence. If this letter does contain a hidden message it is brilliant, since this is exactly the kind of request a farmer absent from the city might make to an agent in the city. Here, we would suggest that this “bull,” who threatens to cause so much damage in Florence, might be a member of the circle of his friends opposed to the Medici, who, perhaps, out of impatience or hatred of their rule over the city, is becoming over-zealous in his pursuit of a remedy, and so risks exposing the entire anti-Medicean operation entirely. If this is so, Machiavelli’s letter is, then, in effect, an encoded message to “kidnap,” that is, to detain by some means, and then bring to San Casciano this hot-headed individual so that he might “cool his heels” in the country for a few days, thus averting this danger to the republican cause. Najemy also cites the famous letter of December 12, 1513 to Vettori, which Najamy argues is a deliberate, but very subtle, response to a previous letter of Vettori to Machiavelli at San Casciano, in which Vettori laments his useless leisure and sense of not accomplishing anything in Rome, Machiavelli’s letter thus serving, in Najemy’s interpretation, in its detailed elaboration of his daily activities on his farm, as a gentle, but pointed, reminder, that, wherever one is, one can always find something useful to do. (Najemy in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 60–61, citing an essay of Guilio Ferroni). What is especially fascinating in reference to the notion of Machiavelli as the secret enemy of princes is that the famous portrait of the author by Santi di Tito also contains a message of precisely this sort: his left hand clutches a glove which appears to be two daggers, a reference to the two daggers used by the conspirators against Caesar; he is garbed in red and black, the traditional symbol of resistance to absolute rule, later adopted for this purpose by anarchist groups (see, for example, Stendahl’s Le rouge et le noir); his right hand rests upon a book, presumably the Prince, as if to say “Here is my weapon.” Here we might recall the famous anecdote that Machiavelli, attempting to present his work to the Medici princes, and being turned away from the Medici palace as if he were a servant, muttered to himself, “And yet, my work will avenge me,” an anecdote considered by some scholars

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(cited by Connell) to represent historical reality. The latter interpretation of the hidden meaning of Machiavelli’s placing his right hand on his book is confirmed by a similar pose, perhaps modelled on Tito’s portrait, which served as the frontispiece of books printed by the Venetian printer Comin da Trino (see Figure 1.2). Comin da Trino was a native of the small town of Montferrat (Monsferratus) in the region of Piedmont, and was also responsible in the mid-cinquecento for the publication of several other controversial works, including Luigi Alamanni’s Girone Il Cortese, dedicated by the author (one of the conspirators in the plot to assassinate Giulio de’ Medici in 1522) to Louis II of France. In the frontispiece mentioned above, a figure similar to classical representations of Brutus places his right hand on a book in precisely the same manner as in Tito’s portrait, and looks off to his right in a determined manner, as if to swear upon this book an oath of vengeance. In Da Trino’s frontispiece, the figure of Brutus is surrounded by the motto “Invidiam placare paras, virtute relicta,” a reference to Horace’s ode to those engaged in useless leisure, as if to say “Enough of this useless inactivity, now prepare yourselves to act, having left virtue [i.e. your moral scruples regarding tyrannicide] behind.” And indeed, only three years after the publication of this book, Siena rose in revolt against Medici rule. In the frontispiece just mentioned, Brutus’ gazing toward the right might perhaps a reference to the location of the impending conflict between France and the Empire, west of Venice. According to the webpage of one bookseller, Comin da Trino “fu tipografo originario di Trino del quale non si conosce il cognome. Fu uno dei tipografi più attivi di Venezia alla metà del XVI s. e stampò per un gran numero di editori; nel primo periodo della sua attività ebbe problemi con la giutizia per la stampa di testi eterodossi; morì in Venezia senza lasciare eredi” (For the Boscoli plot, see Najemy, A History of Florence, 440–41). 76. An appreciation of Machiavelli’s sense of humor, seen not merely as a literary device or as simply an expression of his fundamentally joking and ironic personality, but as an essential element of his political thought, is, in our view, essential to a full understanding of his works. Machiavelli’s “smile” (so wonderfully expressed in Santi di Tito’s famous portrait) has recently come to the attention of scholars, but Machiavelli the ironist less so--in our view, any reading of Machiavelli which does not take his playful, joking, ironic cast of mind into account seriously risks missing his meaning entirely. 77. Gentili writes: “He [Machiavelli] was a eulogist of democracy, and its most spirited champion. Born, educated and attaining to honors under a democratic form of government, he was the supreme foe of tyranny. … It was not his purpose to instruct the tyrant, but by revealing his secret counsels [arcanis eius palam factis], to strip him bare, and expose him to the suffering nations. … This is the reason why princes of that type object to the survival and publication of his works. The purpose of this shrewdest of men was to instruct the nations under pretext of instructing the prince, and he adopted this pretext that there might be some hope that he would be tolerated as an educator and teacher by those who held the tiller of government” (De legationibus libri tres, London, 1585, Book 3, Ch. 9). The translation is that of Gordon L. Laing, vol. 2 of the Oxford University Press edition cited below, 156, cited in Peter Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 89. Donaldson, in Chapter 3 of the same book gives other examples of early readers of the Prince who saw a hidden anti-tyrannical message in the text. Gentili (1552–1608) was professor of law at Oxford, born on January 14, 1552 in the small town of Castello di San Ginesio in the Marches near Ancona, whose father

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Matteo had studied with a student of Pietro Pompanazzi, Simone Porta, at Pisa, and whose family had been forced to flee Italy after Alberico and his father were condemned by the Inquisition in 1579. (Introduction by Ernest Nys to the reprint of the 1594 edition [New York: Oxford University Press, 1924], vol. 1, 13a–15a). Connell notes that the title page of a first edition of the Prince, bound together with the Discourses, and said to have belonged to Queen Elizabeth I of England, now in the Princeton University Library, bears, in Latin, the note “This author was the enemy of tyrants” (Connell, The Prince, 25–26). 78. For a study of early manuscripts of the Prince, see Brian Richardson, “The Prince and its Early Italian Readers,” in Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince”: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Martin Coyles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) and idem, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 164–67. Richardson notes the wide circulation of the work in manuscript among the elites in Florence, including the Guicciardini family, immediately after its completion, who were eager to read the work in the political context of the recent restoration of the Medici to power, a fact which suggests that these readers, in a way similar to those Florentines on the street mentioned by Cardinal Pole, may have read the work as containing a veiled political commentary on contemporary events. Richardson also notes the wide circulation of the text in manuscript outside of Florence soon after its completion, including a manuscript now in Germany prepared by a team of Venetian scribes as a working copy for an early edition of the text which was never published, an edition, which, had it been published, would have predated the first edition of 1532 by almost fifteen years. 79. Schellhase, in his book on Tacitus in Renaissance political thought, mentions the need participants in the discussions of the Orti Oricellari felt for careful discretion in discussing political matters in Medicean Florence: “A similar strict attention to the event itself and to the avoidance of politically relevant personal comment is characteristic of the whole History of Florence. … Perhaps, too, he [Machiavelli] did not proceed beyond this date [1492] because he would not have had free rein to speak his mind on contemporary and immediate politics. Even his views on historical political situations had to be hidden. … Machiavelli was considered [by the Medici regime] meddlesome if not actually dangerous. … it was believed by the government that his republican writings had incited the plotters, many of them former members of the Rucellai circle [emphasis added].” (Kenneth Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976], 81–82). Here we might also cite Felix Gilbert on Machiavelli in the Orti: “The political conclusions which the group around Machiavelli drew from Roman history and especially from Livy were exactly opposite to the views cherished by Bernardo Rucellai and his circle. … Machiavelli and his friends used classical history as a justification of broad democratic government and their enthusiasm for the republican virtues of Rome was sharply pointed against the Medici” (Felix Gilbert, “Bernardo Rucellai and the Orti Oricellari,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 12 [1949]: 125). 80. See for example Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento e altri scritti (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), Massimo Firpo, Riforma protestante ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento: un profilo storico (Rome: Laterza, 1993), Carlo Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo: simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’Europa del Cinquecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1970) and Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For a recent study of strategies of equivocation in the religious

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discourse of the period, see Giorgio Caravale, “Le ambiguità della parola: eresia e ortodossia tra oralità e scrittura nella predicazione italiana del cinquecento,” The Italianist 34 (2014): 478–92, cited in Stefano Dall’Aglio, “Voices Under Trial: Inquisition, Abjuration, and Preachers’ Orality in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Studies 31 (2017): 25–42, 29. 81. The historian Arthur Melzer, cited above, in his study of philosophic esotericism, insists upon the ubiquity of texts of this nature, often written out of concern for the author’s safety, until the end of the eighteenth century, noting that Diderot discusses the practice in over twenty articles in his Encyclopédie, and admits to using it himself. Melzer argues that by ignoring the long tradition of esotericism in Western philosophical thought, modern readers risk cutting themselves off from a full understanding of these texts. We would only add that modern readers unfamiliar with this tradition also risk misunderstanding the many works of literature, from classical times onward, which rely on the same techniques to express ideas which might be dangerous to express more openly, as Ahl and Strauss, among others, cited above, have argued. 82. On “plausible deniability” see Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 38. Aristotle says that we fear “not those among our victims, enemies, or adversaries who say everything forthrightly, but those who are gentle, ironic, up to everything. Since you cannot see when they are close, you can never see when they are far away” (Rhetoric 1382b, cited in Ahl 1984, 175). 83. In regard to covert criticism in the visual arts, there are Renaissance portraits by highly skilled artists in which one is genuinely uncertain whether the artist intended to flatter or to mock the sitter. To cite only one example, we might note the recent article in the New York Times, in which Goya’s portrayal of an important Spanish banker and supporter of the Crown is striking because of the dwarf-like proportions of the sitter, whose shoulder barely reaches the edge of the table next to which he is seated. The fact that this banker was in actual fact short of stature does not negate the intended allusive mockery of the portrait, but, on the contrary, merely provides the artist cover, since he can always claim that he was just attempting to get an accurate likeness. A similar portrait, more familiar to students of the Italian Renaissance, is Raphael’s famous likeness of Pope Leo X, in which, holding onto the Papal throne as if for dear life, is a man of almost dwarf-like proportions, who has been identified as Luigi de’ Rossi, a cousin favoured by Leo. As Hale has pointed out, these Medici clients were much-hated among the ottimati of Florence as representative of a distant and detached Medici rule of the city, in which the daily administration of the city was turned over to men the ottimati considered, as outsiders to the city and provincials, as their social inferiors. As we note in Chapter 2, one contemporary commentator refers to these Medici clients dismissively as “those dwarves.” This portrait is also interesting for the fact that it also expresses a subtle mockery of the Pope himself: Leo (and once again, the artist can simply claim that he was producing an accurate likeness) is depicted as grossly fat, as he indeed was, and holds in his left hand a magnifying glass, an allusive reference to his severe myopia, an example of which much-cited by contemporaries was his use of a telescope to see the decorations displayed on his triumphal procession through Florence in the spring of 1513. As Hibbert notes, he was also forced to use a telescope on his hunting expeditions, a fact also reported by contemporaries, and which presents us with the extremely humorous image of an immensely fat Pope swaying back and forth on his galloping horse, barely able to stay in the saddle, his telescope firmly fixed to his eye. Hibbert also reports that the

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Pope’s extreme obesity made it necessary for him to have a groom standing near to help him down from his horse. All these facts would have been familiar to contemporaries of Raphael, and would have played an important role in how they perceived and responded to Raphael’s portrait, what art historian Michael Baxandall would call their “cognitive equipment,” art historians their “period eye” and anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz their “local knowledge.” Another very subtle but, once perceived, quite humorous detail in this portrait is that, if one looks very closely, one can perceive a brown spot beginning to form in the center of the lens which Leo (presumably to be able to read the Holy Scriptures open in front of him) holds in his left hand. In our view, this is a humorous reference to the fact that, with the sun shining through it from the right, it is about to set, unbeknownst to the sitter and his two attendants, the Holy Book on fire. Here we may observe an ironic reference to the Pope’s personal motto: “Candor illaesus,” that is, “unblemished clarity.” In regard to what has just been said, we have always wondered if such a delightfully derisive portrait of the Medici Pope might have influenced Rabelais in his creation of the giant Gargantua of his mock-epic, also a gigantically-huge and comical figure who uses a church steeple as his bedpost. For the paradoxical encomium in classical times and in the Renaissance, see Henry Knight Miller, “The Paradoxical Encomium with Specific Reference to Its Vogue in England, 1600–1800,” Modern Philology 53 (1056): 145–78. Although one scholar has recently commented “[I’ve always considered] the Prince as a deeply ambiguous text, an example of rhetorical mastery that has been appropriated historically for radically different political purposes precisely because its surface registers one meaning while its writer’s career and commitments lean its content toward deep irony.” Compare Irving Kristol: “The secret of Machiavelli must be concealed somewhere in this style, which is at once incomparably forthright and impossibly ambiguous. This doubleness immediately suggests irony, but to say that the style is ironical is already a simplification, for it leads us to think that, having perceived the irony, we have consequently got the point. In fact, we can do little more than wonder whether it is his irony or our double vision. And if we conclude that the irony is there, we must go on to try to locate it exactly and estimate its direction, which soon leaves us with the sensation of merely having moved from one riddle to another” (Encounter, December 1984, 48). On Machiavelli’s greatness as a writer, Kristol remarks: “What marks the true greatness of a writer is, first, the peremptory and sovereign way he imposes himself on successive generations of readers; and second, the mystery that attends his ultimate ‘meaning,’ his inexhaustibility before the commentator. One is almost tempted to say that his mystery is his meaning: his words impress us as fragments torn from a greater silence, where the whole truth is to be found, though not by us. There are not many such writers altogether. Most of them are poets and dramatists. Some are novelists and philosophers. Very few are historians. Thucydides perhaps belongs among them; Tacitus certainly.” I thank Francesca de Bardin for the first reference. To give another example of covert criticism in the visual arts, we might cite Bronzino’s famous portrait of a naked Cosimo de’ Medici, where, if one looks closely, one can see that the neck of the viol the Medici ruler appears to be playing is actually attached to the body of what at first sight appears to be a cow (closer inspection reveals it to belong to a gigantic

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mastiff ), and that his right hand seems to be directed toward his genital area in exactly the pose one would assume were one giving oneself an injection. We would suggest that here we are confronted with another example, just as in the portrait by Raphael just cited, of a clever and highly allusive joke directed against a Medici ruler, namely, that having enjoyed sexual relations with the cow, Cosimo has paid the price, and must now take the appropriate measures to deal with the consequences of his action (the primary treatment for syphilis in Renaissance Europe was the injection of a solution of mercury and oil of cantharidis [“Spanish fly”], a medicine derived from the blister beetle). In sixteenth century Florence, it was also a common insult to call someone a cow (bue), one of the best examples of this in an art-historical context being the insults hurled against the Hercules and Cacus of Baccio Bandinelli upon the public unveiling of the statue, which led the artist to complain to his patron about this outrage to his honor, and eventually to leave the city altogether. It was also a Renaissance commonplace, for those opposed to the Medici regime, to refer to the debauchery and immorality of their private life, an allusion to the classical commonplace of the degeneracy and immorality of the Roman emperors. We might also remark that several scholars have noted that the figure of Cosimo is modeled after the famous “Torso Belvedere” of the Vatican gardens. Since this fragment of a Greek statue was used in the Renaissance, in its guise of Pasquino (the famous “talking statue” of the Piazza Navona) as a place where members of Florence’s working classes could leave anonymous messages directed against the rulers of their day, including the Pope, Bronzino’s choice of this figure as the model for his portrait, then, also tends to support our interpretation of the painting as a veiled insult against the Medici Duke. His face, strangely detached from his body, turns awkwardly toward the viewer as if set on a very long neck, and, in its expressionless whiteness, resembles a mask, a feature of the portrait which recalls one of the beasts in Piero di Cosimo’s painting The Forest Fire. In this painting, we are presented with what appears at first glance to be an allegorical representation of a world formerly (before the fire) at peace, but, upon looking closely, one discerns that one of the animals has a human face, perhaps a reference to the myth of Circe, who changed the men of her court into animals. To give a political interpretation to this image, one might conjecture that Circe represents an allusion to the status of the Medici courtiers, similarly reduced to a state of subservience and forced to wear the mask of falsehood if they wish to prosper at court, masks being, in Renaissance Europe, commonly understood as symbols of fraud, the cardinal sin of courts. Leatrice Mendelsohn cites a letter of Giambattista Busini to Benedetto Varchi of c. 1550, in which Busini asserts that various characters in Giovan Battista Gelli’s drama Circe are thinly-disguised versions of Medici courtiers, although, presumably out of caution, Busini refuses to be more specific than this (Leatrice Mendelsohn, “L’Allegoria di Londra del Bronzino e la retorica di Carnevale,” in Kunst des Cinquecento in den Toskana [Munich: Bruckmann, 1992], 158). In the following chapters, we cite several more examples of Renaissance Italian portraits which denigrate their subjects in subtle ways, and suggest that, not only was this a common practice in Renaissance Italy, but that at least some viewers were capable of discerning and appreciating these hidden messages. The question of why an artist would risk insulting his patron in this way is a hard one to answer, but in the following chapters, we will suggest some possible answers to this question.

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———. Niccolò Machiavelli, storico e politico. Edited by Giuliano Procacci. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1995. ———. The Prince. Edited by L. Arthur Burd. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1891. ———. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli with Related Documents. Edited by William Connell. Boston, MA: Bedford and St. Martin’s, 2005. ———. Il Principe. Edited by Luigi Firpo. Turin: Einaudi, 1981. ———. Principe. Edited and Translated by William J. Connell. Boston, MA: Bedford, 2005. Mattingly, Garrett. “Machiavelli’s Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?” The American Scholar 27 (1958): 482–91. McCanles, Michael. The Discourse of Il Principe. Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1983. Miller, Henry Knight. “The Paradoxical Encomium with Specific Reference to Its Vogue in England, 1600–1800.” Modern Philology 53 (1956): 145–78. Montefusco, Lucia Calboli. “Ductus and Color: The Right Way to Compose a Suitable Speech.” Rhetorica 21 (2003): 113–31. Morford, Mark. “Tacitean Prudentia and the Doctrines of Justus Lipsius.” In Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, edited by T. J. Luce and J. A. Woodman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Mouren, Raphaël. “The Role of Florentine Families in the Editions of Piero Vettori.” Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, 2008. Available online at raphaele-mouren.enssib.fr/Chicago2008#15. Murphy, James J. Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Thought and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983. Najemy, John. A History of Florence 1200–1575. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Nifo, Agostino. De regnandi peritia, together with a French translation of The Prince in Machiavel Il Principe/Le Prince. Edited by Paul Larivaille. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008. ———. Une réecriture du Prince de Machiavel: le De regnandi peritia de Agostino Nifo. Nanterre, 2009. O’Malley, John W. Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979. Pellegrini, Marco. Congiure di Romagna: Lorenzo de’ Medici e il duplice tirannicidio a Forlì e a Faenza nel 1488. Florence: Olschki, 1999. Philostratus and Eunapius. Lives of the Sophists. Translated by Wilmer Cave Wright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952. Pole, Reginald. Apologia Reginaldi Poli ad Carolem V. Caesarem … De Unitate Ecclesiae. Brescia: Rizzardi, 1744. Procacci, Giuliano. Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli. Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1965. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Edited by H. E. Butler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–1986. Raab, Felix. The English Face of Machiavelli. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. Richardson, Brian. “The Prince and Its Early Italian Readers.” In Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince”: New Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Martin Coyles. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

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———. Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Robin, Diana. Filelfo in Milan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du Contrat Social. Edited by Ronald Grimsley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Rundle, David. “A New Golden Age?: More, Skelton and the Accession Verses of 1509.” Renaisance Studies 9 (1995): 58–76. ———. “‘Not So Much Praise as Precept’: Erasmus, Panegyric, and the Renaissance Art of Teaching Princes.” In Pedagogy and Power, edited by Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone, 148–69. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Salutati, Coluccio. De Laboribus Herculis. Edited by B. L. Ullman. Zurich: Thesaurus Mundi, 1951. Sasso, Gennaro. Machiavelli e Cesare Borgia: Storia di un giudizio. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1966. ———. Machiavelli e gli antichi e attri saggi. Milan: Ricciardi, 1988. Savonarola, Girolamo. “On the Constitution and Government of Florence.” In Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence, translated and edited by Renée Neu Watkins. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1978. Schellhase, Kenneth. Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Scott, John T., and Vickie B. Sullivan. “Patricide and the Plot of the Prince.” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 887–900. Shipley, Joseph T., ed. Dictionary of World Literature. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1966. Siegel, Jerrold. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. Skinner, Quentin. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Stephens, J. N. The Fall of the Florentine Republic 1512– 1530. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Strauss, Leo. “Persecution and the Art of Writing.” In Persecution and the Art of Writing. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973. Susenbrotus. Epitome troporum ac schematum et Grammaticorum & Rhetorum de arte rhetorica libri tres. London: Societas Stationariorum, 1621. Tacitus. Histories and Annals. Translated by John Jackson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Tinkler, John. “Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More’s Utopia and Machiavelli’s the Prince.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 187–207. Valeri, Elena. Italia Dilacerata: Girolamo Borgia nella cultura storica del Rinascimento. Milan: F. Angeli, 2007. Varchi, Benedetto. Storia fiorentina. Florence: Salani, 1963. Viroli, Maurizio. Machiavelli. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Walker, Leslie. The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli. London: Penguin, 1950. Watkins, Renée Neu, trans. and ed. Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1978. Zagorin, Perez. Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

CHAPTER TWO

Florentia capta: Michelangelo’s Sagrestia Nuova as Covert Critique of Medici Rule

In this chapter, we continue our discussion of covert criticism of the Medici in Renaissance Florence by turning to another major figure of the period who, in ways not dissimilar to the Florentine Secretary discussed in the previous chapter, has also been subject, over the centuries, to a good deal of critical misinterpretation. As in the case of Machiavelli, this misinterpretation may be traced to two major causes: an underappreciation of the importance of the artist’s personal biography and the specific historical context within which he was working to a proper understanding of his works, and, second, a lack of attention to small, but significant, details present in these works which were intended by the artist to alert the attentive viewer to the presence of a message curiously at odds with the message the work appears, at first glance, to be communicating. In the previous chapter, we saw how a thorough knowledge of classical rhetoric, specifically, the important techniques for communicating messages critical of those in power in a highly allusive and indirect, yet nevertheless powerful, manner was essential to being able, first to discern, and then to interpret correctly, the amazingly varied and subtle clues left by Machiavelli to the presence of a message which, as a kind of subterranean river, runs counter to the message his text appears to be advocating, providing a kind of mute counterpoint to the text’s apparently either encomiastic or disinterested surface, seen either as a work of counsel for princes, or as a dispassionate analysis of the often brutal ways power came to be acquired and exercised in the Italy of his day.

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In the case of Michelangelo, as also in the case of Machiavelli, this misinterpretation has been compounded further by another factor: the overwhelming power of these artists’ posthumous reputations to induce, in the case of Michelangelo, a kind of hagiographic reluctance to assign to the artist any role other than the traditional, and politically safe, one as a more-or-less compliant encomiast of his Medici patrons, as if making a tacit assumption that to admit the artist’s passionate commitment to the republican cause, and its direct influence on his work, should be somehow at odds with his towering genius as an artist, in a kind of unspoken conviction that to contextualize works of such greatness is somehow to diminish them. In the case of Machiavelli, precisely the opposite has occurred: his afterlife as a man whose scurrilous support of a kind of scandalous amorality in the realm of politics has blinded even his best readers to the improbability that a man of his family history and political convictions could have written a book which either dispassionately analyzes the myriad ways the liberty of his beloved city had come gradually to be extinguished, or, even more improbably, could have been so driven by calculations of personal advantage as to have offered, in all apparent sincerity, useful advice to those very agents of its destruction. In both their cases, the glow (or in the case of Machiavelli, shadow) of their posthumous reputations has shed such a strong light as to completely obscure the more subtle, but vitally important, currents at work beneath the surface of the works for which they are best known. Benjamin’s “aura” has turned to a glaring spotlight, obscuring by its very intensity the sfumature which give their best-known works their unique form of greatness. In this chapter, we suggest a new iconographic source for the figures of Day and the Night on the Medici tomb in Michelangelo’s Sagrestia Nuova at San Lorenzo in Florence. The possibility that Michelangelo’s sculptures in the Medici Chapel may have been intended by the artist to express a subtle, but nevertheless (for those able to discern it) powerful critique of Medici power, dates from the cinquecento itself, and has recently been reproposed by Trexler and Lewis.1 While many viewers and critics of former eras, and a few modern scholars, agree in attributing a political meaning to the monument, for the most part, modern critics have tended, when they focus on political aspects of the monument at all, to view the work as an encomiastic celebration of Medici power.2 Perhaps the clearest expression of this view of the Chapel is that of Creighton Gilbert, who, remarking on what he calls the “courtliness” of the Chapel, describes Michelangelo as quite willing to engage in extravagant flattery of his Medici masters, and notes that in this, he was merely acting as a man of his times.3 While modern scholars are well aware that Michelangelo held deeply-felt and lifelong republican sentiments, in general, the “republican” Michelangelo is for the most part relegated to the David, the Brutus, his Victory, and perhaps his Slaves.

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With the exception of the article of Trexler and Lewis cited above, there has been as yet no attempt to apply this knowledge of Michelangelo’s political views to a consideration of his work in the Sagrestia Nuova, and to ask whether these political views might have found expression there also.4 As we will show, Michelangelo’s intention in creating the chapel was exactly the opposite: to provide a very subtle, and yet, for those viewers able to discern it, devastating, critique of Medici power and its effects on his native city. To achieve this, he relies, as we shall see, on viewers’ familiarity with the classical iconographical tradition of captive figures, well known to Renaissance artists, and also on their familiarity with a parallel literary tradition, in which suffering female figures are used to symbolize the domination of a city or state by a superior political force. These traditions formed the cultural knowledge, or “cognitive equipment” (to use Baxandall’s apt phrase) which would have allowed certain viewers to discern a political message at work in the sculptures of the Medici chapel. Hence, the intuitions of those viewers of previous eras who claimed to discern an anti-Medicean message in the chapel, far from being simply reflections of their own political preoccupations, were actually well-founded. We will base our argument on Michelangelo’s own words and the facts of his life, as well as on a close examination of iconographic details of the monument in the context of artistic and political life in the first half of the 1500s in Florence and Rome. In particular, we will consider the Florentine tradition of political sculpture, in which public works of art took on overt or covert political meanings, meanings which could be critical of those in power. Fundamental to our argument is an understanding of Michelangelo’s sentiments towards the princes of his day, and the Medici princes in particular. His feelings, and the necessity of expressing them in a covert way, were both determined by the political climate in which the work was planned and executed. Because of its relevance to an interpretation of the Medici chapel as covert critique of Medici rule, we will first examine briefly Michelangelo’s views on court life in general, and his sentiments toward the Medici in particular, before turning to an examination of the iconography of the monument itself.

Michelangelo’s Views of Life at Court In a letter of December 1515 from Florence to Michelangelo in Rome, Michelangelo’s brother Buonarroto writes: “Dearest, etc. To give you news of things here, and especially of the arrival of Our Lord, that is, the Pope. And although I am certain that to you knowing these things differs little from not knowing them nevertheless, occasionally, since I have the time, I will write a few lines.”5 The letter

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then goes on to describe the ceremonial entry of Pope Leo into Florence, which was, according to the account given by Buonarroto, a grand spectacle, including a procession through triumphal arches, stops at churches and music of all kinds. But to Michelangelo, such ceremonies were, according to his brother, a matter of total indifference.6 Michelangelo’s contempt for displays of aristocratic magnificence, and for princely power in general, is further demonstrated by a wonderfully ironic letter of early December 1525 to his agent Francesco Fattucci in Rome describing his plan for a proposed colossus at the corner of the loggia of the Medici garden of the Medici palace. The passage is worth quoting at length: Regarding the 40 foot colossus which you write me is to go in the corner of the loggia of the Medici garden. … I have given it no little thought. It doesn’t seem to me that it is well suited for that place, because it would take up too much of the street, but would in my opinion be much better situated on the other corner, where there is the barbershop, because the piazza is in front and it wouldn’t block the street. And because no one would perhaps tolerate taking away the entrance to the barbershop, I thought that the figure could be made to sit, and that the seat could be so high, that making the work hollow inside (as is appropriate and could be accomplished by making him in pieces), the barbershop could stay underneath, and would not lose any income. And so that said shop would have someplace to eject the smoke, I plan to place an empty horn of plenty in its hand, which will serve as a chimney. And further, since the head of the figure will be empty, as everything else, I think good use could be made of this also, because there is in the piazza a close friend of mine, a vegetable-seller, who has told me in secret that he would put a nice dovecote there. And there occurs to me something else, which would be much better, but one would need to make the figure much larger (and one could, because this is to be a tower in pieces); and this is, that its head could serve as the belltower of San Lorenzo, which really has need of one, and placing the bells there, and the sound issuing from its mouth, it would seem that the said colossus were crying out for mercy, and especially on holidays, when the bells sound more often and with larger bells.7

These “plans” are so comically outlandish as to give us a glimpse of Michelangelo’s true feelings about his Medici patrons, the overstated hugeness of the proposed colossus brought down to earth by the plebian touch of humor of the barbershop and the grocer’s dovecote in the head of the statue, which recalls the English phrase “bats in the belfry.” We may note also the frequency with which Michelangelo uses the word “empty” to describe the statue (including the horn of plenty, traditionally full of the fruits of peace), as if, in an indirect and allusive way, he were drawing attention to the true vanity of Medici power, despite its apparent greatness. One may also note the reference to the bells, which were, as Waldman points out, a potent contemporary symbol of Florentine liberty. In this letter, then,

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Michelangelo presents us with a vivid clash of symbols, and he also lets us know where his sympathies lie: the grocer is a close personal friend, while the empty colossus cries out in agony at the ringing of the bells.8 As several scholars have pointed out, Michelangelo was extremely proud of his family’s supposed noble origins.9 We suggest that this fact may also have played a significant part in his attitudes towards his Medici patrons. From the point of view of the old landed feudal aristocracy, the Medici would have been seen as upstarts in the city, parvenus, unworthy to command a man of such distinguished ancestry. Michelangelo’s favorite author, Dante, expressed this attitude eloquently when he decried the “subiti guadagni” of the vulgar upwardly-striving merchant class who began to supplant the old feudal aristocracy of Florence in the fourteenth century. An acquaintance of Michelangelo’s remarked that the artist “voleva fare da se, non essere commandato.”10 We see this attitude of Michelangelo’s also in his well-known tardiness in complying with his patrons’ requests, a phenomenon which modern psychologists would term “passive-aggressive.” When the artist was treated with respect, and considered the patron worthy, he had no trouble producing work in a timely manner, as, for example, the creation of his Leda for Duke Alfonso of Ferrara just before the siege of Florence, or his offer to the king of France to create an equestrian statue at the artist’s own expense, to be erected in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, should the king succeed in reestablishing the city as a free republican state. (Although, as Wallace, discussed below, has pointed out, once there was no chance that his work for the former ruler would deliver Ferrarese assistance to Florence during the siege of 1529–1530, the artist quickly abandoned the work, leading to the famous anecdote of his dismissal of Alfonso’s agent for his ignorance). When he was treated with disrespect, no matter who the patron, the artist showed no compunction in aggressively defending his personal honor, as the anecdote just cited makes clear.11 Michelangelo’ close association with the anti-Medicean in Rome after 1534, discussed below, also tends to support this hypothesis.

Michelangelo and the Medici As regards the Medici in particular, we note that Michelangelo was a close friend of a number of the republican exiles from Florence, Donato Giannotti (the republican political theorist and close friend of Machiavelli) being perhaps the most well-known.12 As another example of Michelangelo’s antipathy towards Medici rule in Florence, his Brutus of 1537 (now in the bargello) was reportedly commissioned

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by Giannotti and Cardinal Ridolfi to celebrate the assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici in 1537. Some scholars consider the bust to be a portrait of Giannotti himself.13 Michelangelo had ample reason to hate and fear the Medici tyrant of his day, the violent and arrogant Alessandro, for reasons both of his personal safety and the well-being of his family. The historian Giorgio Spini notes: “[there was] a dangerous tension with Alessandro de’ Medici, Clement the VII’s illegitimate nephew, who was trying to create an absolute principate in Florence, on the ruins of the last republic. According to Condivi, there was already an ‘old feud’ between the artist and the ‘fierce and vindictive’ duke when Michelangelo’s refusal to collaborate on the building of a fortress, planned by Alessandro to keep seditious Florence in check, brought things to a head.”14 Spini notes further that Alessandro had not forgotten Michelangelo’s plans for the fortifications of 1529, and that these plans represented for Michelangelo a political choice, not a mere technical exercise carried out for anyone who might commission them. According to Condivi, Michelangelo actually stood in danger of being assassinated on orders of the duke: “there is no doubt that, had it not been for respect for the Pope, he [Alessandro] would have had him eliminated.” Therefore Michelangelo, by now “in great fear,” stayed from then on more in Rome than in Florence, and “was certainly aided by the good Lord that at the death of Clement he was not in Florence.”15 Well before the time of Alessandro, we see further evidence of Michelangelo’s cautiousness in regard to speaking openly about his feelings toward the Medici in a letter of October-November 1512 from the artist in Rome to his father in Florence: Dearest father, I gather from your latest letter … that it has been said that I have spoken against the Medici. … Regarding the Medici, I have never spoken anything against them, except generally as everyone has spoken, as in the case of Prato; which, if the stones had heard about it, they would have spoken. And further, many other things are said here, which, having heard, I have said “If it is true that they do thus, they do wrong”: not that I believed them, and God will it that it be not so.16

Michelangelo is referring here to the infamous sack of Prato by the Spanish forces at the behest of Giovanni de’ Medici which restored the Medici as rulers of the city, the brutality of which left a profound mark on the contemporary imagination.17 Michelangelo had good reason to be circumspect regarding how he spoke about the Medici, given their lack of tolerance for any direct opposition to their rule. Following the restoration in 1512, for example, a list was produced purporting to identify known opponents of Medici rule; many of those on the list were imprisoned and tortured, the most prominent of whom was Machiavelli.

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Butters recounts a story which reveals the extreme vindictiveness of the Medici when they felt the authority or reputation of the family was in danger. In the first months of 1519, a dinner party was given by Jacopo Cavalcanti, in a room hung with pictures and other decorations in praise of the Medici. After dinner, the lights were extinguished. When they came back on, the room was hung in black with representations of Pope Leo, and there were female figures with plaques turned upside down, bearing the motto “Liberty ground under foot.” The arms of the city were represented upside down. Cavalcanti was arrested, tortured, and consigned to the galleys.18 Not only did Michelangelo fear the Medici rulers in Florence for his own personal safety, but he was concerned for the safety of his family as well, as we read in a letter of September 18, 1512, written to Buonarroto after the Medici return to power in Florence: I believe that the danger has passed, that is, of the Spanish, and I don’t believe that it is any longer necessary to leave; nevertheless, be quiet and don’t make friends of the associates of anyone, except for those of God; and don’t speak of anyone, neither for good nor for ill, because one never knows how things will turn out; attend only to your own affairs.19

Once again, we note a climate of fear of Medici reprisals which dictated extreme caution in discussing topics inimical to the family’s interests, not to mention criticism of the family itself.20 The extensive use of spies, both paid and unpaid, in and out of Florence, by the family to secure their power is by now well-known to scholars.21 To cite an example with direct reference to Michelangelo, we may cite a letter to his father Lodovico, in which Michelangelo says: “About a month ago, someone who makes a show of friendship for me spoke very evilly about their [the Medici’s] deeds. I rebuked him, told him that it was not well to talk so, and begged him not to do so again to me. However, I should like Buonarroto quietly to find out how the rumor arose of my having calumniated the Medici; for if it is some one who pretends to be my friend, I ought to be upon my guard.”22 Here Michelangelo is clearly implying the presence of Medici spies who would feign aversion to their rule to try to draw similar sentiments from others as a means of detecting who the family’s real enemies were.23 Michelangelo even had to fear assassination at the hands of the Pope for refusing to carry out his directives. Symonds, discussing Michelangelo’s angry refusal of a pension and a house from Cardinal Giulio, intended to facilitate the artist’s setting to work on the Medici tombs, cites a letter of March 24, 1524 from his nephew Leonardo in Rome to Michelangelo in Florence, urging the

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artist to accept his pension, saying that it was “madness” to abandon it, adding that he had many enemies, and that he would dishonor both himself and the Pope by refusing. Leonardo then remarks “Take care you do not come short in the Pope’s work. Die first. [emphasis added] And take the pension, given with a willing heart.” In our view, it seems clear that the phrase “die first” is intended as a hint from Leonardo to Michelangelo that he may indeed die if he refuses the Pope’s largess. Evidence that the artist took the hint comes from a letter of August 29 to Giovanni Spina, in which a clearly frightened Michelangelo remarks: “I have changed my mind, and whereas I hitherto refused, I now demand it [the salary], considering it far wiser, and for more reasons than I care to write …” [emphasis added].24 Michelangelo’s suddenly-discovered willingness to comply would be almost comical if it did not involve a very real threat of death against the artist. Michelangelo’s cautiousness toward the Medici should not lead us to question his aversion to their rule, however. As the above evidence makes clear, the artist felt strongly about their usurpation of Florentine liberty, but was cautious about how these sentiments were expressed. References to the Medici as tyrannical usurpers of Florence’s ancient liberty were common among republican writers of the time. Such aversion to Medici rule would have been especially strong among Michelangelo and his republican friends, not to mention those members of the manual workers and merchant classes for whom the mercantile traditions of thrift, individual initiative taken for the good of the city as a whole, and respect for the laws and institutions of civil government, were still very much a part of their recent historical memory.25 As regards Lorenzo specifically, the Venetian ambassador reports that in 1515, after Lorenzo had obtained in May of that year the reluctant consent of the Council of the Seven to his appointment as Captain General of the Florentine forces: “This Lorenzo has been made captain of the Florentines against their own laws. He has become the ruler of Florence: he orders and is obeyed. They used to cast lots; no longer; what Lorenzo commands is done. … So that the majority of Florentines have no taste for the power of the house of Medici.”26 Writing in a letter of January 28, 1515 to Galeotto, Lorenzo makes the following observation: “perchè ha [Florence], come vedete, ad essere il fondamento et stato mio, et a dire meglio, la poppa mia.”27 Nothing could summarize better the ambition of the Medici to subject the traditions and institutions of the city to their personal use. Later, in the fourth decade of the century, Alessandro was considered, if this were possible, an even worse tyrant than Lorenzo had been. The historian Benedetto Varchi provides us with a vivid description of the oppressive quality of Alessandro’s rule in Florence, and his hatred of the Florentine republicans in particular,

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where Alessandro is compared, to his disadvantage, to the worst tyrants of classical antiquity.28 Another factor, besides the personal character and actions of the Medici princes themselves, which rendered Medici rule odious to many Florentines during the pontificates of Leo and Clement was the practice of entrusting governance of the city to outsiders such as Goro Gheri and Silvio Passerini, for whom the Florentine elites felt intense hatred and contempt, due to their ignorance of Florentine customs, their lack of deference to their status, and the simple fact that they were outsiders. One Florentine of the time refers to them dismissively as “those dwarves.”29 In our view, the facts just cited are relevant to Michelangelo’s work in the Medici Chapel, and provide the historical context in which his work there should be viewed. While some artists may have been able to sublimate their personal feelings in their work for their patrons, everything we know about Michelangelo’s character and personality indicates that for him, this was not a possibility. If he could not express his antipathy for Medici rule in Florence directly, he was nonetheless able to express these sentiments in a highly coded and allusive way in his work in the Medici Chapel.30 As we shall see, this image of Lorenzo di Piero and Alessandro de’ Medici as classic tyrants is directly relevant to our interpretation of the Medici tomb as expressing a covert critique of Medici rule.

Michelangelo’s Art and the Struggle for Florentine Freedom Regarding specifically the political and psychological climate in which Michelangelo planned and completed his work in the Chapel, it is precisely this climate of fear of open expression of sentiments hostile to Medici rule in Florence which dictated Michelangelo’s recourse to allusive means to encode a message critical of the family in his work in the Medici Chapel. Symonds makes clear that at the time of the initial planning of the monument, around 1521, Michelangelo was extremely angry at the Medici, specifically the Pope, for a variety of reasons. Leo, in diverting the artist’s energies from the Julius tomb to the façade of San Lorenzo (a plan, as Michelangelo makes clear late in life in a letter to Condivi, he thought the Pope was never serious about completing, but was only a ruse to keep him from finishing the Julius tomb), had cost the artist three years of intense labor, an immense amount of money, and his personal honor: “I do not reckon the enormous insult put on me by being brought here to do the work, and then seeing it taken away from me, and for reasons I have not yet learned ….”31

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As far as making a connection between the republican Michelangelo and his art created at the time of the struggle for Florentine liberty, William Wallace has pointed out that the Leda was very possibly intended as a diplomatic gift to try to curry favor with Duke Alfonso of Ferrara at a particularly crucial time in Florence’s struggle to survive as a republican state against the combined forces of the Papacy and the Empire.32 Specifically, according to Wallace, the painting was intended to encourage Alfonso to lend military assistance to Florence, and in particular his artillery, at the time, the most advanced in Italy, and crucial to Florentine ability to withstand an assault on her defences. While Wallace connects the subject of the painting to Michelangelo’s desire to rival the nude images in Titian’s painting The Bacchanal of the Andrians already displayed in the Duke’s camerino in the ducal palace, and to a desire to flatter the Duke through allusion to the Este claim of descent from the ancient Trojans, it seems to us entirely possible, given the political circumstances under which it was created, that the Leda—the locus classicus of the domination of a female figure by a superior male force—may have also been intended to symbolize and dramatize to the Duke—in a coded and allusive manner—the desperate situation of Florence under threat of assault by the combined forces of Charles V and the Pope.33 As Wallace points out, Ferrara was Florence’s only ally at this crucial time in her struggle to maintain herself as a free republic. As we note below in reference to Michelangelo’s Night, Renaissance viewers were accustomed to interpreting images of female subjugation to a superior male force as symbols of the domination of one state by another. Giorgio Spini also makes a connection between Michelangelo’s art and the political circumstances at the time it was created. While often interpreted in a spiritual sense, Michelangelo’s Slaves may also be seen to have a political meaning, if, as with the Leda, we look to the recipient and to the political circumstances prevailing at the time of its creation. Spini, while noting that “it has already been said that it is probable that, in the Prisoners and the Victories for the tomb of Julius II, Michelangelo wanted to symbolize the torment of humanity prisoner of the flesh and the victory of the spirit over the prison-house of matter,” also notes that Michelangelo made a gift of the statues to the Strozzi family, long-time opponents of Medici hegemony over Florence, as thanks for their hospitality to the artist during his time of sickness in their palace in Rome in 1544–1546, and speculates that these works may have also contained a political meaning: “One may also speculate that he [Michelangelo] wanted to send a sort of final message, from the edge of the tomb, to men capable of receiving and interpreting it, such as were the Strozzi, tenacious supporters of the liberation of Florence from her own imprisonment, and connected closely to France, to which Michelangelo still looked with his ancient hope, aroused in him from the now-distant times of Savonarola and Soderini.”

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Images of struggle in Michelangelo’s art may thus have, in addition to a spiritual meaning, a political one as well. This will be seen to be relevant to our discussion of the Day of the Medici tomb below. Spini notes that in Rome, from 1532 onwards, “as far as his [Michelangelo’s] fidelity to his political past, it is worth noting especially that Michelangelo, after the siege of Florence, returned essentially to the positions of the Savonarolan period. … But in Rome, from 1532 onwards, his closest friendships were not so much with the exiles of the popular party, as with the exiled grandi such as the Strozzi, Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi and his brother Lorenzo, or with people associated with them, such as Donato Giannotti and Luigi del Riccio. The conflict between Michelangelo and Duke Alessandro itself and the final move of the artist from Florence to Rome form indeed a parallel to the fate of these.”34 We noted above Michelangelo’s creation of the bust of Brutus for Cardinal Ridolfi. Spini goes on to point out that it was with these anti-Medicean grandi, based for the most part in Rome, that Michelangelo associated himself during the final period of his life, and that his obsession with his family’s noble heritage may be due in part to his connection with this circle. Spini also notes that this group represented “the most consistent force of opposition to Medici rule.” And these grandi had every reason to hate Duke Alessandro: Alessandro’s absolutism had quickly disgusted many of the leading families of Florence, that is, individuals connected by blood or common interests with the Medici, precisely those who had opposed the republic of 1527–1530, such as cardinals Salviati, Ridolfi and Gaddi, the rich banker Filippo Strozzi and his sons, Piero and Roberto Strozzi, Baccio Valori, formerly Clement’s agent at the siege of Florence, and even branches of the Medici family, for example, Cardinal Ippolito and, later, Lorenzino de’ Medici. … Out of hatred for Alessandro, these individuals had ended up in exile and had formed common cause with the authentic republican exiles. However, their political ideal could be summed up in a motto coined by a humanist of their circle, Ciriaco Strozzi: “Libertas aut potius aristocratia.”35

Spini gives another example of the connection between Michelangelo’s sculpture and his political convictions: when war between Charles V and Francis I in 1542– 1545 offered new hope to the Florentine fuorusciti, once again, as he did with Duke Alfonso, Michelangelo used the prestige of his art to encourage Francis to intervene on Florence’s behalf. While noting that Michelangelo was concerned for the safety of his family in Florence, and wanted to avoid reprisals against them on the part of Duke Cosimo, and thus, in his letters, diminishes the extent of his contact with the republican exiles, Spini argues that Michelangelo’s true feelings emerge from a letter of July 21, 1544 from Luigi del Riccio to Roberto Strozzi in France. Michelangelo, gravely ill, greets Strozzi affectionately and “begs you [Strozzi] to

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send him some news, reminding the king how he had told him through Scipione and then through the courier Deo, that if he restored Florence to its liberty, he would make him a bronze equestrian statue in the Piazza della Signoria at his expense.”36 As in the case of the Leda and the Prisoners, we see once again Michelangelo using his art, not just as a form of political expression, but as a means of direct political action.37 As a very literal example of this transmutation of political sentiments into art, and then into weapons of war, we might note that Michelangelo’s colossal bronze statue of Pope Julius which graced the square in front of the basilica of San Petronio was thrown to the ground upon the return of the Bentivogli to Bologna, and then sent to Duke Alfonso in Ferrara to be melted down and made into a cannon. We noted above Michelangelo’s “artistic diplomacy” in his sending of a secret message in the form of his Leda to this same ruler. Wallace makes the interesting suggestion that Michelangelo’s praise of Titian’s portrait of the Duke, shown with his right hand resting on the cannon, may have also been a subtle hint to this ruler of the importance of this weapon to Florentine hopes of surviving the siege of 1529–1530 as a free state.38 As a final demonstration that Michelangelo’s republican views lasted essentially unchanged to the end of his life, we may again cite Spini, describing Michelangelo’s response to Duke Cosimo’s “skillful politics of reconciliation” with the exiled Florentine artists and intellectuals, the goal of which was to add prestige to his rule, and the most prominent example of which was the return of the historian Benedetto Varchi to Florence: Among the others who came to Michelangelo to urge his return on behalf of the Duke, with the usual promise of a position on the Council of the Forty Eight, arrived Cellini one day in 1552. We have only Cellini’s version of the conversation in his Life, larded with fawning compliments of Cosimo, who knows how sincere. But not even the exaggerations of Cellini are able to conceal that after his exposition of the Duke’s flattering offers, Michelangelo “suddenly looked at me closely and sneered: ‘And you, how content are you with him?’” This sneer of Michelangelo recalls all too well the irony which the artist opposes so often to the compliments of Vasari in his correspondence with the latter. And it alone should be sufficient to dissipate the courtly veil which some scholars have tried to spread over the last period of Michelangelo’s life.39

This “Michelangelesque sneer” described by Spini recalls the artist’s refusal to accept the trite and conventional compliments of the young academician Giovanni di Carlo Strozzi on the Night expressed in the artist’s famous epigram on the statue, discussed below. While unwilling to challenge the Medici directly, Michelangelo clearly maintained a proud and unyielding form of personal resistance to the family’s domination of his native city to the end of his life.

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Spini notes again that Michelangelo’s caution in not overtly refusing the Duke’s offers should not be taken as approval of his regime; Michelangelo was very concerned for the well-being of his family in Florence, especially his nephew Leonardo, at this point the only hope for the survival of the family. Spini also notes Cosimo’s “relentless efforts against his enemies,” and cites Leonardo’s report in a letter of 1549 to Michelangelo of the promulgation of the terrible “Legge Polverina” of March 11, 1549, which mandated harsh reprisals against anyone who associated with the Florentine exiles. Hence, according to Spini, Michelangelo’s “lettere tranquillizanti,” asserting his distance from the exiles in Rome, examples of which (his letters to his father and to Buonarotto) we cited above. Even his supposed severing of ties to the Strozzi was, as Spini points out, merely a fiction. Against this background, it would be almost be surprising if the sculptures of the Medici Chapel didn’t have a political significance for Michelangelo and for his contemporaries. As we have seen, in every other case of his art produced during republican Florence’s political crisis, the works in question have an undeniable political meaning. Even on the project for the Julius tomb, the Prisoners, never installed there, made allusion to the classical iconographic tradition of captive figures described below, and these figures were then detached from this context and given an even more unambiguous political meaning, presented to the Strozzi (according to Spini) as symbols of Florence’s lost liberty. Once again, we see the importance of taking into consideration the political context when considering the possible meaning of Michelangelo’s sculpture in the Medici Chapel. Generic spiritualizing interpretations, in which the “spirit struggles against the flesh,” do not do justice to the full meaning of these works; images of struggle or submission in Michelangelo’s works may have had a political significance in addition to their neo-platonizing spiritual one, if, indeed, such philosophical meanings exist at all.40 We shall observe these same images of struggle with the same implied political meanings in Michelangelo’s use of the classical iconography of captive figures on the Medici tomb. The above evidence of Michelangelo’s attitude toward Medici rule in Florence makes clear both his republican sympathies and the great fear and aversion he had to their rule in his native city, for both personal and familial reasons, and forms, we suggest, the background against which the possibility of his incorporation of a hidden, anti-Medicean message into his Sagrestia Nuova should be viewed. No friend of the Medici, and a passionate supporter of the republican cause, Michelangelo was nevertheless cautious by nature, and had no great desire to offer himself up as a martyr for the republican cause, as did many of his contemporaries. He was also, as the evidence cited above demonstrates, a realist about the often brutal means used by the Medici family to maintain themselves

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in power and suppress criticism of their regime. And yet, despite this innate cautiousness, he was a proud man, and had no desire to engage in the obsequious flattery of the Medici princes which marked so many of his contemporaries. A way would have to be found to express resistance to Medici rule while reducing the possibility of retaliation on their part. Just such a means was found by Michelangelo in his allusive use of classical iconography on the Medici tomb.41 Such considerations as these—Michelangelo’s own political views, and his expression of them in his art at the time of Florence’s republican crisis—make it less implausible, in our view, that Michelangelo might have undertaken to encode sentiments critical of the Medici princes in the Sagrestia Nuova. The period of the creation of the work—from the early 1520s to about 1534—corresponds exactly with the time of Florence’s troubles described above, the final denouement of which was her final subjugation to Medici power. The larger context for the creation of such a work, in which sentiments critical of princely power are encoded in works addressed to these same princes, is the widespread use in Renaissance Europe of covert means, in both the visual and the literary arts, to criticize those in power, a subject which, because of its importance to the proper understanding and interpretation of many works of Renaissance art and literature, was our primary motivation in undertaking this study.42 Such expectations on the part of Renaissance audiences regarding works which to modern viewers or readers appear to represent unambiguous celebrations of the patron’s power and prestige, form one aspect (together with a more general fondness during the period for hidden or covert messages, exemplified in the widespread popularity of emblems) of their interpretive predispositions—very different from our own—which makes our hypothesis of a hidden critical message in the Sagrestia Nuova, when considered together with Michelangelo’s political views and the political circumstances around the time of its creation, in our view, less implausible. To confirm our hypothesis that Michelangelo encoded a message critical of Medici power in the Sagrestia Nuova, we will now turn to an examination of the visual evidence of the Tomb itself.

Classical Images of Captives and the Night An examination of the pose of Michelangelo’s Night and Day, placed on either side of the central figure of Lorenzo, reveals striking similarities with Roman sesterces coined under Titus and Domitian to celebrate the capture and subjugation of the city of Jerusalem, the famous Judaea capta series43:

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Fig. 2.1: Roman Sestertius of Vespasian showing Judaea capta (Credit: Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society).

Fig. 2.2: Roman Aureus of Domitian showing captured female (Credit: Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society).

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Fig. 2.3: Roman Aes of Constantine showing bound male captive (Credit: Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society).

On both the Medici tomb and the Roman coins, we observe the figure of a seated or reclining female figure, eyes downcast, together with a bound male figure on either side of a central axis, on the coins, a palm tree, in the Medici Chapel, the figure of Lorenzo. The only difference between the coins commemorating the capture of Jerusalem and the tomb sculptures is that on the coins the male figure is standing, not seated, and the central axis is different in the two cases.44 In addition, on the Medici tomb, we do not observe actual chains binding the figure, but, in our view, this does not detract from an overall impression of a figure struggling against its bonds. We discuss this aspect of the Day at greater length below. Despite these differences, the similarity of the two representations is compelling. A marvelously eloquent, if crude, Roman relief from the Landesmuseum in Mainz (the so-called Mainz pedestals), called “Germania capta” or “barbara prigioniera,” displays the same posture:

Fig. 2.4: Roman stele showing Germania capta (Credit: © GDKE, Landesmuseum Mainz—U. Rudischer).

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As Antonio Giuliano has shown, the figure of a woman with downcast eyes, in the attitude of mourning, symbolizing a captured province, was widespread in classical antiquity.45 Giuliano has shown that this image was well known in Renaissance Italy as well. He notes the presence of the figure of a grieving woman in the border of a tapestry by Raphael (the handing over of the keys to Peter) in the Vatican. The tapestry was executed in 1514–1515, and represents the sack of Florence of November 9, 1494 and the flight of cardinal Giovanni (later Leo X) and his brothers Giuliano and Piero. This figure is identified by Giuliano as “Florentia capta,” this identification made certain by the placement of the Marzocco by her left knee46:

Fig. 2.5: Raphael, tapestry showing grieving Florence from the Consigning of the Keys to St. Peter (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Giuliano notes that Raphael found his inspiration for the figure in the statue of a “Dacia capta” (perhaps originally the capitol of a triumphal arch in the forum of Trajan) on display in the Cesi gardens in Rome:

Fig. 2.6: Dacia capta, Rome, Capitoline Museum (Credit: B. Malter 2736/03).

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Giuliano then identifies Michelangelo’s Mother of Asa and his Jesse from the Sistine Chapel (executed in 1511–1512) as belonging to this iconographic tradition, and suggests that Michelangelo also found his inspiration in the Cesi figure. The fact that Michelangelo had access to the Cesi garden is demonstrated by the fact that he called a figure of a Juno present there “the most beautiful object in Rome.”47 In the Cesi garden, the Dacia was placed under a statue of conquering Rome, flanked by two captives, an arrangement which might have suggested to the artist the overall structure of the Medici monument, the figure of Lorenzo above replacing the Rome, with the Cesi Dacia now placed on the left as the Night, and the bound Roman captives being replaced by Day:

Fig. 2.7: Lafrerey, Roma triumphans with Dacia capta and prisoners, Cesi garden (Credit: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

Fig. 2.8: Domenico de’ Rossi, Roma triumphans and prisoners (Credit: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program).

As we shall see, the Night actually represents the combination of two statues, the Dacia from the Cesi garden, and another figure, that of a sleeping nymph, present both in the Cesi garden and the Belvedere sculpture court. So, according to Giuliano, this image of a woman with downcast gaze, hand supporting her head, has a very long history, dating back to classical antiquity, and was very well known to Italian Renaissance artists. He also makes it clear that this image invariably had a political significance.48 A Greek vase from the Medici collection (the famous “Medici vase”) represents Helen in this same pose of abject grief and despair49:

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Fig. 2.9: Charles Louis Clerisseau, Medici vase, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (Credit: Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Leonard Kheifets).

Not only was the figure of a seated woman without downcast eyes well-known in classical and Renaissance iconography, but the pairing of this image with one representing a bound male figure is also found in the art of both periods. We cited above the Roman serterces; we also see two male captives chained together on the Mainz pedestals mentioned above:

Fig. 2.10: Two chained prisoners, Mainz, Landesmuseum (Credit: © DeA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY ).

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In post-classical times the motif appears in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, in his oil sketch of the Triumphal Chariot of the Victory of Calloo:

Fig. 2.11: Peter Paul Rubens, The Triumphal Car of Kallo, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (Credit: Photo by Frans Vandewalle).

Fig. 2.12: Rubens, detail of Fig. 2.11 (Credit: Photo by Frans Vandewalle).

As Held points out, Rubens’ source for these figures was either Roman coins, gems or the Dacia herself, the same sources we indicated above as possible sources for Michelangelo’s Day and Night in the Medici Chapel.50 Held also notes that Rubens had access to the Cesi garden, and had made drawings of the Rome, the Dacia, and the prisoners there; he also made a drawing of Michelangelo’s Night.51 We also see this pairing of a male prisoner with a female figure with her head in her hands on the Gemma Augustea:

Fig. 2.13: Gemma Augustea, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY ).

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The pairing also occurs frequently on Roman sarcophagi, as we shall see. Hence to us it seems very likely that the Day and the Night of the Medici tomb, placed in a reclining position on either side of a central axis, under the image of a conqueror, were intended by Michelangelo as a reference to the classical iconographic tradition just described, and that the artist intended to bring to the mind of the viewer familiar with this tradition, looking at his figures in the Chapel, not only the visual similarities between his figures and their classical antecedents, but also the political significance of the figures which formed part of their meaning from the beginning. The exact nature of this political meaning will be described below. To support our hypothesis, we will now examine another source for Michelangelo’s figure of Night in the Sagrestia Nuova.

The Belvedere Cleopatra and the Literary Tradition The scholar of Renaissance gardens Elizabeth MacDougall has observed the similarity of the pose of the Night to that of a classical statue of a sleeping nymph, acquired early in 1512 from the Mattei family of Parione by Pope Julius II and placed in the Belvedere as the centerpiece of a fountain, where the sculpture was identified as a dying Cleopatra.52 Relevant to our argument that the Night was intended to evoke classical captive figures, Bober and Rubinstein discern in the pose of the Belvedere Cleopatra or “Ariadne” (as she was also identified in the Renaissance, the identification generally accepted by scholars today) a possible “allusion to conventional ancient gestures of mourning.”53 These scholars refer to her “second life” as a sleeping nymph in the Renaissance, and note the wide influence she had on Renaissance artists. The sculpture is indeed quite beautiful54:

Fig. 2.14: Sleeping Ariadne, Rome, Vatican Museums (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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Michelangelo could have seen this statue during his visits to the Belvedere gardens during the pontificates of Julius, Leo or Clement. That Michelangelo was at this time occupied with works of Roman sculpture in the Belvedere is shown by that fact that he was present soon after the discovery of the Laocoon on January 14, 1506 in the vineyard of Felice de’ Freddi, a Roman citizen, as noted in a letter of Giuliano da San Gallo’s son Francesco.55 Brummer notes that Michelangelo may have been in charge of the restoration of the right arm of the statue.56 Brummer, citing Vasari, also notes that Michelangelo was in charge of the restoration of a statue of Tigris, also in the Belvedere court, possibly before 1532.57 According to Brummer, the installation of the Belvedere Cleopatra fountain was not subject to any major changes from 1512, when the figure was transferred from the Palazzo Mattei to the Belvedere court, and 1538/9, when Francesco de Hollanda depicted it in his sketchbook:

Fig. 2.15: Francisco de Holanda, sketchbook, Sleeping Cleopatra (Credit: Biblioteca Escorial).

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Brummer notes that a similar figure was present in the Cesi garden, where, as we have already noted, Michelangelo might also have seen the “Dacia capta” discussed above. He also notes that the sleeping Cleopatra figure was also present in the gardens of the Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi, a friend of Michelangelo, on the Quirinal hill. It was also present in the gardens of Angelo Colocci, an important patron of the arts and friend of Italian humanists.58 We will now discuss the Cleopatra in detail. In August 1512, Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola reports that the figure of a reclining Cleopatra formed part of a fountain installation in the Belvedere cortile of the Vatican.59 Placed under the recumbent figure was a sarcophagus which served as a basin to catch the waters from the fountain above60:

Fig. 2.16: Mattei sarcophagus, showing flowing waters (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-984).

The Belvedere Cleopatra bears a striking resemblance to the pose of Michelangelo’s Night, as may be seen from a comparison of the two figures:

Fig. 2.17: Sleeping Ariadne, Rome, Vatican Museum (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 2.18: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Night (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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Both lean backwards for support and support their downturned head on their hands. Both appear to be sleeping. Both have small, round breasts. A salient difference between the two figures is that Michelangelo’s figure is naked, while the Belvedere Cleopatra is draped in the classical chiton which serves to accentuate the curves of the figure beneath. Also, on Michelangelo’s figure, the legs are drawn up, while on the Cleopatra, they are gracefully crossed at the ankles. On the sarcophagus which was originally placed beneath the figure in the Belvedere court, there are a pair of twisting male figures which bear a very close resemblance to the pose of the Day:

Fig. 2.19: Roman sarcophagus with general and Sarmatians, Museo Pio Clementino (Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ).

Fig. 2.20: Roman sarcophagus (detail of Fig. 2.19).

Fig. 2.21: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of back (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence).

We may also note the presence on the sarcophagus of a conquering figure above, together with images of captive prisoners beseeching the conqueror for clemency. We saw the same ensemble of captive figures together with a conqueror on the Roman coins described above. In the installation in the Belvedere courtyard,

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there were also a pair of dolphins and a large shell, which might have suggested to Michelangelo the shell between the tombs in sketches for the Medici monument, as well as the water element at the base of the tombs, which, in Michelangelo’s version of the ensemble, was to have been represented by two river gods:

Fig. 2.22: Michelangelo, plan for the tomb of Pope Julius II (Credit: Uffizi).

Another sarcophagus, also from the Palazzo Mattei, displays the same combination of elements: reclining female figure, muscular twisting male figure below, conquering figure above:

Fig. 2.23: Roman sarcophagus showing Dionysus approaching sleeping Ariadne (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-29.402).

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Fig. 2.24: Detail of Fig. 2.23. Roman sarcophagus showing Dionysus approaching sleeping Ariadne, detail of twisting male figure holding shell (Photo: D-DAI-ROM-29.402).

Perhaps even more striking is the similarity of an inscription placed near the sleeping nymph figure in the Colocci gardens to Michelangelo’s well-known epigram on the Night, in which the sleeping figure addresses the viewer, and requests their silence, as a comparison of the two poems will make clear: Dear to me is Sleep, and more to be of stone, While shame and suffering endure; Not to see, not to hear, is to me great good fortune; And so, do not wake me, pray, speak softly.61 Nymph of this place, Guardian of the sacred fountain, I sleep, while I listen to the murmur of the sweet water; Pray do not disturb my sleep, whoever touches the hollow basin; Whether you drink or bathe, be silent.62

The latter inscription, believed in the Renaissance to be ancient, was very popular in the Rome of the early cinquecento, and versions of it were present in places known to have been frequented by Michelangelo, for example, the Cesi garden and the garden of the Cardinal of San Clemente.63 Noteworthy is that both “inscriptions” describe the figure as sleeping, and beg the viewer not to wake her. This suggests that Michelangelo’s poem on the Night was intended as a kind of interpretive key to its significance, just as the inscription placed near the figure in the Cesi and Colocci gardens was intended to explain to the viewer the meaning of the figure, the only difference being that, in the case of Michelangelo, this interpretive clue is disassociated from the physical monument, hence making the interpretation of the figure more enigmatic. Michelangelo’s epigram should be read in conjunction with another poem of his of 1545–1546, in which he draws a clear connection between a suffering Florence, represented as a lovely young woman, and the tyrannical quality of Medici power:

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—For many, lady, or rather for a thousand lovers You were created, and of angelic shape; But now it seems that Heaven is sleeping, Since one appropriates to himself what is given to many. Give back to our tears the light of your eyes, Since it seems that you deprive Those who are born in misery without your gift. —I pray you, don’t disturb your holy desires, Since he who seems to despoil and deprive you of me With great fear does not enjoy his great sin; Since that state of lovers is less happy In which great plenty satisfies great desire Than a misery full of hope.64

Here Michelangelo refers to Florence as a beautiful woman, intended for the enjoyment of many (“ch’è dato a tanti”) but usurped by the power of “one,” whom Saslow identifies as Cosimo de’ Medici. Michelangelo uses here the classical commonplace of the tyrant so beset by fears that he cannot enjoy what he possesses. Saslow notes that this “appropriation to himself what is given to many” is the locus classicus of the behavior of a tyrant as described by the classical historians and philosophers.65 Masi notes that a contemporary of Michelangelo remarks on this poem that “By the young woman, Michelangelo is signifying Florence.” In our view, both of these poems of Michelangelo’s may serve as glosses on the political meaning of the Night. The reference in the second poem to sleep, tears, sadness and suffering recalls not only Michelangelo’s epigram on the statue, but also to poems written on the reclining nymph figure in the Belvedere, which we discuss below.66 An important difference is that in Michelangelo’s epigram, unlike the inscription on the Cesi/Colocci nymph, the figure desires sleep not for its own sake, but for the respite from suffering it will bring. In both of Michelangelo’s poems, then, we are presented with the image of a beautiful young woman, whose subjugation to a superior male force causes suffering, either for the figure itself, or for those who hold her dear. A set of contemporary poems on the Belvedere Cleopatra reveals further affinities between Michelangelo’s poem on the Night and contemporary literary treatments of the sleeping nymph/Cleopatra figure. These poems were written by the Roman nobleman Evangelista Maddaleni Fausto di Capodiferro, a member of the Colocci circle, and describe the Belvedere Cleopatra as a suffering captive of Pope Julius.67 In the first poem, Cleopatra abjures the viewer to be silent and not to wake her: Tired by the sleep-bearing murmur of the fountain, I enjoy it, clear, sweet and frigid as it is. Approach silently, silently bathe and drink.

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And silently, lest sleep desert me, leave. As much as Caesar, arbiter of the world, thirsted after me alive, Another Caesar loves me made of marble.68

In the second poem, the cause of her suffering is made clear: she is carried captive in triumph by a victorious Caesar, whom Capodiferro identifies as Julius: I who ruled the Nile, am made the guardian of a little fountain And teach how little faith is in great things. Who, conquered, refused in death to follow the triumphs of Augustus, Now, made of stone, I guard, Julius, your waters.69

In the third and fourth poems, Capodiferro repeats the theme of conquering Julius, and the statue’s request to the visitor to be silent. The fifth poem makes both the political reference and Cleopatra’s sufferings clear: Cleopatra, you languish because of sleep or sleep-bearing poison; The murmur of the water mixes dreams with cares. O would these were the waters of fateful Lethe, That I not witness my kingdom perish with me. It would be better today to have died quickly and blessedly, Than to be seized after three thousand years by miserable death.70

Taken together, we observe in these poems every theme expressed in a much more compressed form in Michelangelo’s epigram on the Night: the figure is sleeping; she requests the visitor’s silence; sleep is a way to avoid a memory of her suffering; this suffering causes shame. Both Michelangelo’s epigram and the poems of Capodiferro play on the conceit of living victim/stone image; all the poems abjure the viewer to pity the sufferings of the helpless victim. While Capodiferro’s poems make explicit the cause of this suffering, Pope Julius, Michelangelo only alludes to it by calling it a “danno” (hurt, crime, injury) which endures. As Brummer points out, these poems of Capodiferro had an explicitly political meaning for Michelangelo’s contemporaries, as celebrations of Julius’ power as the founder of a “new Rome” across the Tiber from the old city. In our view, however, the reference here may be even more specific: the conquest by Julius of the city of Bologna in 1505, with the concomitant expulsion of her Bentivogli lords. In the third of the poems by Capodiferro cited by Brummer, the poet explicitly refers to the fountain figure as borne away in triumph: “A second Julius, having led me away, set me up next to the water,” and Brummer also notes in this context that the Apollo Belvedere, placed in an angle of the courtyard opposite the Cleopatra, was also given a political interpretation by contemporaries, as was the Laocoon, which was intended by Julius as an exemplum doloris, warning Italy’s princes of the dangers of trying to defy the Pope’s

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authority, as is made clear from a contemporary poem on the statue, also by Capodiferro: May similar kings be feared for their divine power, and loved! Lest you offend the divine authority, my sufferings warn you. If the example of our suffering is not enough for you, The headlong ruin of the house of Bentivoglio teaches.71

Further support for the hypothesis that the Belvedere Cleopatra carried the specific meaning for contemporary viewers of a captured Bologna is given by the fact that at around the time of the placing of the Cleopatra in the Belvedere statue court in 1512, there were celebrated at Rome two triumphal processions all’antica, one to commemorate Julius’ triumphal return to Rome in March 1507 following the capture of the city by Julius’ forces and the expulsion of Giovanni Bentivoglio in November 1506, the other in February 1513.72 As the above evidence suggests, the use of a reclining female figure to symbolize cities was apparently a visual commonplace for Renaissance viewers. The image also appeared on the series of tapestries by Raphael described above in reference to the Dacia which commemorated the events following the expulsion of the Medici from Florence in 1494. In this case, the figure of Giovanni de’ Medici is seen approaching the reclining nymph figure, symbolic of the city of Mantua, where he was held hostage following the defeat of the Holy League at the siege of Ravenna in 1512 and his capture by French forces.73 In the case of Raphael’s tapestry, the figure represents, not a captured city, but the city seen as place of refuge, alma quies74:

Fig. 2.25: Raphael, tapestry showing Leo in exile approaching the river Micio (Credit: Image courtesy of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome).

Seen in this context, it seems clear that the Belvedere Cleopatra was intended to carry for contemporary viewers an allusion to the classical iconographic tradition of mourning female figures symbolic of captured cities or provinces, the

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meaning given to this particular figure on the Roman coins and monuments, as noted above. Just as the Apollo of the Belvedere cortile represented Julius as a conquering hero, and the Laocoon the terrible fate which awaited his enemies, so also, then, we would speculate, did the Belvedere Cleopatra represent the city of Bologna herself, carried off in triumph and subject to Julius’ superior might, placed in the Belvedere courtyard as an example of his power over the Italian states for all to see. Several poems contemporary with the statue tend to support this hypothesis. Baldessare Castiglione refers to this same image of a suffering Cleopatra borne in triumph by a conquering Caesar, whom Castiglione identifies as Julius, in a vain spectacle (“spectacio inani”) to sate the cruel eyes (“crudelia lumina”) of the spectators.75 From this evidence, we can see that there was a tradition in Renaissance Rome of writing poems on the reclining nymph/Cleopatra figure, in which she was presented as lamenting her capture by a conquering hero, and that these poems referred to actual historical circumstances, specifically the capture of the city of Bologna by Pope Julius. It is against this background, we suggest, that Michelangelo’s Night, along with the poems which explicate its meaning, should be seen. Not only, then, does Michelangelo’s Night derive, in part, her pose and expression from the Belvedere Cleopatra, but Michelangelo’s epigram on the figure, which makes her suffering clear, also derives from the contemporary tradition of poems which attributed an explicitly political meaning to the figure, the captured Cleopatra/Bologna of the Belvedere fountain replaced on Michelangelo’s monument by a captured Florence, both seen as symbols of captive cities, the implied allusion on the Belvedere installation to a conquering Julius made visible on the Medici tomb in the figure of Lorenzo placed over the two reclining figures of the Day and Night, which, as we have seen, already allude to the classical iconographic tradition of captured cities or provinces. In both cases, the poems on the figures serve to illuminate their political meaning, although Michelangelo’s quatrain is much more allusive than the poems of Capodiferro. Seen in this light, both Michelangelo’s poem on the Night, contemporary poems on the figure (such as Strozzi’s cited above), and his figures in the Chapel themselves, find their proper historical context. Once this is understood, a political interpretation of the Medici Chapel as making an anti-Medicean statement becomes more plausible. To sum up what has been said so far: Michelangelo’s Night should be associated with a contemporary visual tradition, widely diffused around the city of Rome, and in places frequented by the artist, in which what at first sight appear to be merely sleeping female figures, on closer inspection, turn out to be representations of the domination of cities by powerful conquerors. And as we have just seen, there was a parallel literary tradition, to which Michelangelo’s epigram on his Night belongs, which assigned an explicitly political interpretation to the sleeping figure, in the

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case of the poems by Capodiferro and Castiglione, as a Cleopatra/Bologna lamenting her conquest by the conquering Pope, where the statue, together with the poems which explicated its meaning, was meant to be seen by contemporaries as an exemplum to other Italian cities who might try to resist his determination to unite northern Italy under Papal control and expel the foreigners from Italy’s shores. As final confirmation that Michelangelo’s Night was intended to recall the Belvedere Cleopatra, we may note that the braid of hair over Night’s right shoulder is analogous to the braid of hair in the artist’s drawing of Cleopatra:

Fig. 2.26: Michelangelo, drawing of Cleopatra (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Source: Web Gallery of Art, Public Domain).

Fig. 2.27: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Night, detail (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

Hence, we would suggest, just as Michelangelo’s epigram on the Night derives its basic theme (“I’m sleeping; don’t disturb my sleep”) from the inscription placed near the reclining nymph/Cleopatra figure, so also does it derive its more complex elaboration of this idea—that the need for sleep is due to some suffering which causes shame—from the poems of Capodiferro. What Capodiferro chooses to make explicit, namely, that this suffering is due to the figure of a conquering Julius, Michelangelo only alludes to in his poem by noting that the “crime” still endures. However, given what we have said about Michelangelo’s political views

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and the circumstances under which the monument was created, this “danno” can only be Medicean domination of Florence. We would also suggest that, just as the inscription under the Belvedere Cleopatra, together with the poems by Capodiferro, provide the context for an understanding of the political allusions in Michelangelo’s epigram on the Night, so also do the poems of Capodiferro just cited provide the context in which the numerous poems mentioned by contemporaries written in celebration of Michelangelo’s work in the Sagrestia Nuova should be viewed. All belong to a Renaissance tradition of “talking statues,” in which literary works were written to explicate the meaning of works of visual art, the work often addressing the viewer and explaining her situation. But while Michelangelo, for the reasons mentioned above, chooses to be highly allusive regarding the political situation to which his poem refers, other poems, such as those of Capodiferro just cited, are more explicit in giving an overtly political interpretation to the work of art. We shall say more about the Renaissance tradition of talking statues in our discussion of the Evening and Dawn below. This raises the interesting possibility that there may exist poems on Michelangelo’s Night which, in addition to the trite and customary formulae of praise which characterized many of the contemporary responses to his work in the Sagrestia Nuova (and which Michelangelo so wittily rejects in his epigram on the Night cited above), may also express a political response to the monument, parallel to that expressed by Capodiferro and Castiglione in their poems on the Belvedere Cleopatra. After all, Cellini, in his Vita, states explicitly that “when our Michelangelo unveiled his Sagrestia, where one can see so many beautiful figures, that wondrous and virtuous school, lovers of the true and the good, wrote him more than one hundred sonnets, competing amongst themselves for who could say the best things.”76 It seems to us not impossible that some of these poems might contain references, albeit allusive and indirect, to a political interpretation of the work. In a later section of this essay, we see that there were indeed contemporary responses to the Chapel which saw it in an explicitly political light. To sum up what has been said regarding Michelangelo’s Night and the Belvedere Cleopatra: the pose of the Night derives in part from that of the Vatican Cleopatra, as does Michelangelo’s epigram on the statue, and both epigram and statue should be placed in the context of Renaissance poems lamenting the fate of a captive female figure, in which the figure was given an explicitly political interpretation. The pose of the Night is in fact a combination of two classical sources, both well-known to Renaissance artists and intellectuals, for whom they carried an explicitly political meaning, and also prominently displayed in places frequented by Michelangelo: the Dacia capta (in the downturned head, supported by a hand and the drawn-up legs) of the Cesi/Colocci gardens, and the Belvedere Cleopatra (in the reclining pose, the downturned head, and the head supported by her hand).

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Michelangelo’s own poetry—both his epigram on the Night and his sonnet in which the political fate of Florence is embodied in the image of a young and beautiful woman subject to the depredations of a tyrannical captor—provides us with an interpretative clue to his figure in the Sagrestia Nuova. While some of the Renaissance poetry cited makes the political reference explicit, Michelangelo prefers to leave his allusions unexpressed, because of his inherently cautious nature, and because the character and actions of the Medici rulers during the time of the creation of the monument made caution advisable.

The Day as Symbol of Resistance to Medici Rule We noted above that the figures of Day and Night are derived from the classical iconographic tradition of reclining captive figures. Just as the Night may be seen in dynamic relation to the figure of Lorenzo above as representing a beautiful Florence suffering the baneful effects of Medici domination, so also may the figure of Day, with which it is paired, be said to suffer the effects of Lorenzo’s overweening rule. And yet while the pose of Night, through its evocation of the classical tradition of captive figures just described, represents abjection and despair, the pose of Day, with its vivid twisting and bulging muscles, is intended to recall the figure of a captive prisoner struggling against its bonds, present also in the classical iconography to which the figure refers, as we have noted. The figures should, then, be viewed in dynamic relation to the figure of Lorenzo above them, and not in isolation, as has been the tendency in most analyses of the Chapel up until now. Many critics have noted this sense of violent torsion present in the figure; the fierce scowl on his face only increases this effect77:

Fig. 2.28: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of back (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 2.29: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of face (Credit: White Images/Scala, Florence).

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Just as the Night represents a mourning Florence, passively suffering the effects of her domination by her Medici lords, so the Day represents, we would suggest, the rageful helplessness of the opponents of the Medici (whether the fuorusciti, who chose the path of military resistance from without, or opponents of the Medici who chose opposition from within) to do anything about the family’s continuing dominance of the city. Some support for this interpretation of the figure of the Day as intended to represent a rageful but impotent resistance to Medici rule is given by Michelangelo’s bust of Brutus, which some critics have proposed is a portrait of Giannotti himself, as noted above. In the Brutus, we are confronted with a work of art which demonstrates a stern resolve and firmness of character in the visual features of the face, its powerful jaw and furrowed brow resembling the fierce scowl present on the face of the Day, as well as the furrowed brow of the David, a recognized symbol of resistance to Medici rule:

Fig. 2.30: Michelangelo, bust of Brutus (Credit: © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY ).

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Hence we suggest that this particular combination of facial features had for Michelangelo a political significance78:

Fig. 2.31: Male profile from Palazzo Vecchio (Credit: Photo Scala, Florence).

Fig. 2.32: Michelangelo, carving of male profile from back of the Atlante slave (Credit: Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze).

Fig. 2.33: Bust of Brutus (Credit: © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY ).

Further support for our hypothesis that the Day represents fierce and angry resistance to Medici rule comes from an external source: Rubens’ oil sketches The Victims of War and Two Captive Soldiers. If we pair these two works, the resemblance to Michelangelo’s Night and Day is striking: in the first sketch, we observe a mourning female figure, turned to the left, head in hand, and, in the second, an older, muscular male captive, struggling against his bonds, turned to the right:

Fig. 2.34: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Night and Day (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 2.35: Rubens, oil sketch, The Sorrows of War (Photo: Art Resource).

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Fig. 2.36: Rubens, Two Captive Prisoners (Photo: Image courtesy of New York Social Diary).

Fig. 2.37: Detail of Fig. 2.35.

Fig. 2.38: Detail of Fig. 2.36.

The face of this figure is contorted in a fierce scowl which bears a very close resemblance to Michelangelo’s Day, as does his muscular and twisting pose. Held notes that Rubens may have derived his captives from ancient coins, gems, or the Dacia, the same sources discussed above as possible sources for Michelangelo’s figures in the Sagrestia Nuova, but it also seems possible that the artist may have derived his figures directly from the Medici Chapel itself, since, as noted above, the artist also made a sketch of Michelangelo’s Night.79 This evidence

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clearly suggests that, for Rubens at least, the figures of Night and Day on the Medici monument were interpreted as captive figures. Another source for the figure points again to Michelangelo’s presence in the Belvedere gardens and also to a political meaning for the figure. Bober and Rubinstein note that the back of the Day is derived from a torso displayed in the Belvedere gardens (the famous “Torso Belvedere”), and that this statue was considered in the Renaissance to represent Hercules:

Fig. 2.39: Torso Belvedere (Credit: Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge, by permission).

Fig. 2.40: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of back (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence).

What connects Day as a reference to Hercules with Michelangelo’s political views of Medici rule is that both the Day and the conquered figure under the victor of the Victory in the Bargello are self-portraits of the artist, as a comparison of the poses and the faces of the figures makes clear: both display bulging, twisting muscles; both have a fierce expression and stare directly at the viewer; both are bearded, older figures80:

Fig. 2.41: Michelangelo, Victory, Florence, Bargello (Credit: Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

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Fig. 2.42: Michelangelo, Victory, Florence, detail of face of captive (Photo: Uffizi Gallery).

Fig. 2.43: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail of face (Credit: White Images/Scala, Florence).

A comparison of these two figures with the Bearded Slave reveals that this latter figure is also a self-portrait of the artist:

Fig. 2.44: Michelangelo, Bearded Slave (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

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This latter representation actually shows the bonds holding the figure, which, as we have seen, are only implied on the Day. All three figures, then, represent Michelangelo as the unwilling victim of a conqueror. The fierceness of his resistance to this domination is reflected in the contorted muscles and rageful expression of the victims, a feature present in the classical iconographic tradition from the beginning, as we have seen. The figure of Hercules was long associated with the city of Florence herself, as her protector, as may be observed in the 1508 commission to Michelangelo for a colossal Hercules as a pendant to his David, and also his youthful creation of a figure of the Greek hero. Tolnay notes that the Hercules was meant to symbolize Florence’s domination of her internal enemies, just as the David symbolized her victory over external ones.81 Balas remarks on the artist’s long obsession with the figure. Hence the Day’s reference to Michelangelo as a captive Hercules, suggested by its quotation of the Belvedere torso, is further confirmation that the artist intended in the figure to send, in a very allusive way, a message regarding Medici domination, not only of his city, but of the artist himself. The Day, then, seen as a self-portrait of the artist as a captive Hercules, struggling in vain against Medici oppression, represents a kind of tragic inversion of the heroism of the David, the slingshot of the victorious conqueror of the Victory now replacing that of the conquering David in the Piazza della Signoria, the gigante of the Day now subject to Medici control, not triumphing over it.82 The intensity of this struggle, and Michelangelo’s passionate identification with it, are represented in the twisting pose of the figure, and in its fierce expression, which seems to stare out at the viewer as a warning, and also, perhaps, a challenge. Hence, for Michelangelo, the representation of himself as an older, bearded figure, struggling in vain against his captivity, far from being a representation of the “spirit struggling against the flesh,” as neo-Platonic interpretations of the Chapel would have it, is, rather, simply an expression of the artist’s impotent rage against Medici domination of his native city, a rage he shared with the other republican exiles.83

Evening and Dawn as Captive Figures Not only do the Night and Day derive from the classical iconographic tradition of captive figures, as we have seen, but the Evening and Dawn also derive from this same tradition; in this case, reclining river gods, as a comparison of their poses to figures of river gods on the Arch of Septimius Severus and a Roman sarcophagus makes clear:

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Fig. 2.45: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Evening (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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Fig. 2.46: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Dawn (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 2.47: Roman sarcophagus, showing reclining river god and two angels holding Medallion (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-29.398).

Fig. 2.48: Arch of Septimus Severus, detail, Rome (Credit: © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY).

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More specifically, a comparison of the Tigris of the Belvedere statue court and the Evening of the Medici Chapel makes clear that the former was the direct source for Michelangelo’s figure in the Chapel: both show reclining, bearded, older male figures; both display a slightly melancholy, pensive expression; the position of both the left and the right arms and hands is the same on both figures, as is the musculature of the chest and abdomen; both are nude or semi-nude; both have the right leg crossed over the left:

Fig. 2.50: Tigris, Rome, Vatican sculpture court (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-34.14). Fig. 2.49: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Evening (Photo: Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

As noted above, Michelangelo was possibly in charge of the restoration of the Tigris in the statue court. As Brummer has pointed out, the Tigris was intended as a companion-piece to the Cleopatra, and was placed in the corner opposite the latter figure, to the left of the Antinoos in the Belvedere cortile, the Cleopatra being to the right. The fact that the two were intended as companion-pieces is made clear from the fact that both show reclining figures, one male, one female; both were displayed resting on sarcophagi; under the sarcophagi were elements associated with water: on the Cleopatra, dolphins and a shell; on the Tigris, tortoises and, again, a shell:

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Fig. 2.51: Maarten van Heemskerck, sketchbook, reclining river god on sarcophagus with tortoises and a shell (Credit: bpk Bildagentur/Kupferstichkabinett, SMB/Volker-H. Schneider/ Art Resource, NY ).

Given what has been said about the importance of the Cleopatra as a source for the Night, it seems to us possible that this pairing of reclining male and female figures, placed above sarcophagi, with bases consisting of water elements, may have suggested to the artist the pairing of the Evening and Dawn on the Medici tomb, where, once again, we observe paired reclining figures, one male and one female, resting on sarcophagi, and, as the sketch cited above makes clear, originally intended to be supported on a base displaying a water element in the form of two reclining river gods.

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Fig. 2.52: Francisco de Holanda, sketchbook, Sleeping Cleopatra (Credit: Biblioteca Escorial).

Brummer also points out that, in the Renaissance, the Tigris was identified as the Arno, the restored urn upon which the right hand of the god rests being embellished with the Medici diamond ring and the Florentine lion, and that, after 1513, the statues in the Belvedere cortile were given explicitly Medicean

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interpretations.84 These factors might also have contributed to Michelangelo’s appropriation of the figure of the Tigris as a source for his Evening in the Medici Chapel. If the latter suggestion of the pairing of the Tigris and the Cleopatra as a source for the similar pairing of the Evening and Dawn of the Medici monument is accepted, we see once again the importance of the Belvedere statue court as a source of inspiration to the artist in his creation of the Medici tomb. The Evening, in particular, is another self-portrait of the artist, as comparison of the melancholy, bearded visage to known portraits of the artist makes clear, hence continuing the theme of a conquered Michelangelo/Hercules of the Day opposite:

Fig. 2.53: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Evening, detail of face (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

As noted above, river gods, along with images of captive cities or provinces, were presented together on Roman coins, funerary monuments, and triumphal arches as symbols of their domination by a conquering hero. That their state of subjugation is a painful one for Michelangelo’s Evening and Dawn is reflected in the expressions on the faces of the two figures: Evening displays an expression of lassitude and extreme fatigue and defeat, and Dawn shock mixed with preoccupation, in her slightly furrowed brow:

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Fig. 2.54: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Dawn, detail of face (Photo: Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

What seem less certain, however, are the specific political circumstances to which Michelangelo’s Evening/Dawn/river gods allude. It seems possible that the artist may have intended here a reference to the Capitoline Investiture ceremony of 1512, in which Lorenzo (in absentia) and Giuliano were given Roman citizenship, and in which the two capitani were celebrated as furthering the wedding of the two cities, Rome and Florence, symbolized by floats of the two rivers, the Tiber and the Arno. During the ceremony a carro, pulled by the Pope’s four white horses, carried a gilded figure of Clarice Orsini, Giuliano’s mother, as Rome, seated on a gilded chair under a laurel tree, symbolizing the union of the two cities under Medici rule. What is significant for our interpretation of the Evening and Dawn as captive figures is that, on the float, there were two river gods reclining on each side of the chair, symbolizing the Tiber and the Arno (“Da man dritta li giaceva apresso il patre Tiberino. Da man manca Arno, ambo con barba bianca et capelli canuti”). At one point in the festivities, the float stopped in front of Giuliano, the figures of the river gods addressed Clarice, and the nymphs of the Tiber and the Arno sang a hymn celebrating the rule of Leo and Giuliano. Varchi cites a poem by Gandolfo Porrini in which humorous reference is made to the delay in Michelangelo’s completion of the Medici Chapel because of his long conversations with Vittoria Colonna: “And the great-spirited kings of the Tiber and Arno will await the great sepulchers in vain.”85 Here again we observe the association of Giuliano and Lorenzo with the two rivers.

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Evening and Dawn in the Renaissance Tradition of Trionfi The individual responsible for the triumphal procession featuring Clarice Orsini as Roma and the two river gods just described was none other than Evangelista Capodiferro, the same person who wrote the poems celebrating the capture of Bologna (symbolized by the Belvedere Cleopatra) discussed above, as well as the poem on the Laocoon which celebrated Pope Julius’ capture of the same city. This suggests yet again a connection between the Cleopatra, Michelangelo’s Evening and Dawn, seen as captive river gods, and contemporary celebrations which depicted a conquering figure above or alongside representations of captive figures. Michelangelo’s Evening and Dawn recline under the figure of Giuliano, just as in the Capitoline Investiture ceremony, the Tiber and the Arno were shown reclining on each side of Giuliano’s mother. During the ceremony on the Capitoline, the figures of the river gods addressed each other (“O padre Tibre, manifesta a questi popoli le suoe speranze. … Arno, perchè noi nascemo inseme di fraterne acque”). In his poetic sketch for a poem on the Day and Night, Michelangelo explicitly presents the two figures as talking to each other: “Day and Night speak and say: ‘With our swift course we have brought Duke Giuliano to death ….” In a preliminary sketch for the Chapel, Michelangelo also presents two reclining male figures under the sarcophagus as talking to each other:

Fig. 2.55: Michelangelo, sketch for a tomb, showing reclining male figures talking to each other (Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY ).

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Fig. 2.56: Michelangelo, sketch for a tomb, showing reclining male figures talking to each other (detail of Fig. 2.55) (Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY ).

Just as Michelangelo’s figures in the Sagrestia Nuova, the river gods of the Investiture ceremony were nude (“nudi tutti, senonchè un certo manto copriva a ciascuno di essi alcune parti del corpo”). On the carro, the seated figure of Clarice wore a dragon’s helmet (“la diva Clarice … vestita d’oro, con la spoglia della testa di uno dracone in capo”). On the Medici monument, we observe that Giuliano wears a helmet which bears a close resemblance to the head of a dragon:

Fig. 2.57: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Giuliano de’ Medici, detail of head showing dragon helmet and hand holding cloth (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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We would suggest, then, that, just as Michelangelo’s Night reclines under the figure of Lorenzo, and is intended to recall, not only generic captive figures familiar from the classical iconographic tradition, but specifically the Cleopatra of the Belvedere fountain, as subject to the might of a conquering figure, so also were the Evening and Dawn intended to recall, not only the classical tradition of captive river gods in general, but also specifically the Tiber and the Arno of the Capitoline Investiture ceremony, in which the two gods were presented discussing the rule of Pope Leo and Giuliano over Rome and Florence. If we accept for a moment that the Evening might be a self-portrait of the artist in the guise of the river Arno, this raises the interesting possibility that the Dawn might also be a portrait of a specific individual. A close examination of plates 108 (“Cleopatra”), 111 (“la Marchesa di Pescara”), 112 (“Sibylline woman”) and 113 (“Zenobia”) in Tolnay v. 5 reveal that the facial features of the Night and the Dawn display strong similarities to known images by Michelangelo of Colonna: all share a long, straight, “Greek” nose, a small mouth in an expression of a slight pout (in French, a moue), large, heavy-lidded, rather deep-set eyes. In each case, the figure wears some form of a headdress, which (in the case of the drawings of Colonna) conceals very long, braided hair. (We noted above the braid which falls over Night’s right shoulder; the veil worn by Dawn could also conceal long hair.) In each case, the figure wears a rather solemn, almost melancholy, expression:

Fig. 2.58 Juno Cesi, Capitoline Museum, Rome (Credit: B. Malter)

Fig. 2.60 Michelangelo, Fig. 2.59 Michelangelo, drawing of female profile with Medici Chapel, Dawn, profile headdress and braid (Credit: (Credit: Fototeca Zeri). Alinari Archives, Florence).

Further support for this identification of the Dawn with Vittoria Colonna comes from a sketch by Michelangelo from the Casa Buonarotti. In this sketch, we observe three elements from the Medici tomb: a sea-shell (present on Michelangelo’s sketch for the tomb cited above and on the ends of the sarcophagi in

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the actual Chapel), a helmeted figure (which finds its expression in the figure of Giuliano), and a female figure in an elaborate headdress who bears a very close resemblance to those female figures just cited who, as we have suggested, are all representations of Vittoria Colonna:

Fig. 2.61: Michelangelo, sketch showing female profile, shell and male profile wearing a wolf ’s head (Photo: Casa Buonarroti).

As just noted, the Dawn of the Medici Chapel also wears a headdress and, in her facial features, bears a close resemblance to Michelangelo’s known portraits of Vittoria Colonna.86 According to Panofsky, the sketch dates from the early 1520s. This sketch might, then, tend to provide support for our hypothesis that the Dawn of the Medici tomb is a portrait of Vittoria Colonna, perhaps a symbol of the river Tiber, intended to be seen as a pair with Michelangelo’s portrait of himself opposite in

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the guise of the river Arno. We noted above that it was a Renaissance commonplace to represent cities in the form of reclining female figures representing the rivers associated with them in a kind of visual metonymy, as in Rubens’ Vatican tapestry, in which the city of Mantua is represented as the nymph of the river Mincio which flows by that city, as noted above. If this interpretation is correct, the pairing of the Dawn and the Evening would parallel both the classical statues in the Belvedere statue court from which they derive, the Tigris and the Cleopatra, and also the pairing of the two river gods, the Tiber and the Arno, symbolic of Rome and Florence, in the Capitoline Investiture ceremony, to which Michelangelo’s figures may also refer, as noted above. In the classical tradition, as we have noted, reclining figures, one male and one female, often represented river gods subject to a conquering figure symbolic of Rome’s domination of her subject provinces. Further support for this hypothesis of Dawn as representing the Tiber in the person of Vittoria Colonna comes (as in the case of Michelangelo’s quotation of the Belvedere Cleopatra in his Night, the Belvedere torso in his Day, and the Belvedere Tigris in his Evening) from a visual source: the lid of the sarcophagus upon which the Belvedere Cleopatra reposed:

Fig. 2.62: Sarcophagus lid, showing two reclining female river gods (Photo: © Scala/Art Resource, NY ).

On this lid, we observe a pair of reclining female figures, one naked, in the familiar pose of river nymphs just discussed, and the other an older, veiled figure. If we combine these two figures, we arrive at a figure very similar to that of Dawn: a younger, reclining, naked female figure, who also wears a veil. On Roman sarcophagi, veiled figures represented mourning.87 This would be entirely appropriate to a funerary chapel, just as Michelangelo’s representation of a grieving Night would also be perfectly suited to this context. But, as in the case of the Night, we suggest that Michelangelo may have had another meaning in mind here as well: a visual expression of the effects of Medici power on those subject to their rule, in which Dawn’s downturned head and troubled expression are meant to evoke her distress at her captive state. Unfortunately, unlike the case of the Night, we have no literary evidence to support this hypothesis, so such an interpretation of Dawn’s expression must

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remain purely speculative. Nevertheless, if her pose is derived in part from the Belvedere Cleopatra (which we consider quite likely, given her pairing on Michelangelo’s monument with the Evening, whose derivation from the Belvedere Tigris, which served as a companion-figure to the Cleopatra in the statue court, seems to us, from the visual evidence, beyond question), then her expression of distress (visible in both her facial expression and also, as in the Night, in the downturned position of her head) might also be the result of her subjugation to her Medici lord. In the classical antecedents of Michelangelo’s figures presented above, whether coins or sculptural reliefs, we often encounter the captives in a similar pose, in which both their facial expressions and the overall position of their bodies are expressive of the suffering engendered by their captive state.88

Images of Rape in Renaissance Art The fact that Michelangelo’s Night has been associated, by both viewers to the Chapel and by scholars, with his Leda only serves to strengthen our argument that the figure represents a young female figure suffering the effects of male violence, specifically, Florence suffering the effects of Medici rule, since Leda, as we noted above, was the classical exemplar par excellence of the subjugation of a woman by the violence of a superior male force. Yael Even has pointed out that in Renaissance Italy, the figure of a woman subject to a superior male force had the political significance of the capture of an enemy city or state.89 Some Renaissance viewers would, then, have immediately associated the image of a young female figure, eyes downcast, hand supporting her head, with the subject of rape and political domination. In addition, if, as Balas suggests, the Night is associated with Proserpina, we are confronted with yet another image of a female subject to the violence of a superior male figure. If she is associated with Ceres, as Balas also suggests, and as seems probable (given Vasari’s identification of a reclining female figure on the Julius tomb with this goddess, and the presence of a crown on her head), our hypothesis that the Night was intended to evoke the image of a defeated Florence is strengthened even further, since the name “Florentia” was associated by contemporary Florentines with the image of a fertile female figure. In classical mythology, Proserpina was also associated with images of fertility and abundance, her return to the upper world in spring symbolizing rebirth and rejuvenation. The sufferings of Proserpina, and her lament for her life in the upper world, from which she had been forcibly taken by an angry Pluto, would have been wellknown to educated Renaissance visitors to the Chapel through the popular De

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raptu Proserpinae of Claudian, or Renaissance laments of famous female figures, which formed a prominent part of the rhetorical curriculum in the schools. Seen in this light, Michelangelo’s possible presentation of the Night as a reference to the classical Proserpina/Ceres might be viewed, perhaps, as a pointed commentary on contemporary Medici propaganda of Florence flourishing under the beneficent rule of the Medici princes, seen, for example, in the series of medals from the late 1400s depicting Florence as “Florentia,” sitting under a laurel tree, holding an olive branch and a palla:

Fig. 2.63: Niccolò Fiorentino, figure of seated Florence under a tree holding the palla (Photo: Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY ).

Michelangelo’s Proserpina/Night suffers and mourns, head downturned, and does not rejoice, under Medici rule, as she does so often in the contemporary images of the period just cited. Seen as Ariadne (as noted above, one of the Renaissance identifications of the sleeping nymph figure of the Belvedere courtyard), the figure also mourns her seduction and abandonment at the hands

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of a powerful male figure, Ariadne, perhaps even more than Cleopatra, being the locus classicus of the desolation experienced by a female figure at the hands of an untrustworthy hero.90 Whatever the mythological associations evoked in viewers’ minds, for those Renaissance visitors of the Chapel with a knowledge of the classical iconographic tradition of captive figures described above, it would have been almost impossible to stand in front of one of these images of a mourning female figure—whether in the Belvedere court, the Cesi garden, the Medici Chapel, or elsewhere—and see them as merely a lovely female form in a lovely pose. Such ahistorical, apolitical, aestheticizing responses belong to a later period, that of the professional connoisseur of art, the aesthete, or the foreign tourist on the grand tour, for whom the political significance of the figure would have been distant from their own experience. For Michelangelo and his contemporaries, deeply caught up in the travails of the inexorable and painful conversion of Florence from a republican to a seigneurial form of government, the situation would have been entirely different. Not only their literary and artistic preparation (that is, their familiarity with the classical iconographic tradition just described and the parallel tradition of literary laments of conquered female figures) but also the historical circumstances in which they found themselves would have prepared them to see a political meaning in the sculptures of the Medici Chapel. In the case of the Night in the Medici Chapel, her pose—derived, as we have seen, from classical images of female subjugation, and familiar to Renaissance artists and writers as representing an act of political domination—would have immediately brought to mind the spectacle of the (often violent) subjugation of a female to a superior male force, with all its tragic consequences known from the classical tradition. And, as we have seen, Michelangelo’s own poetry makes a moderately allusive (in the case of the poem of 1545–1546 cited above), or (in the case of the quatrain on the Night), a rather more veiled reference to the negative effects of Medici power on a suffering female figure. That this suffering female figure is to be identified with Florence is suggested by Michelangelo’s poetry cited above.

External Evidence for a Political Interpretation of the Medici Tomb: Vasari’s Portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici We shall now briefly discuss an external source which provides indirect confirmation of our contention that the Medici Chapel contains an encoded critique of Medici rule, before we turn to an examination of the Florentine tradition of public political sculpture. This is Vasari’s portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici:

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Fig. 2.64: Vasari, portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici (Photo: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Firenze).

In Vasari’s portrait, we observe a conquering figure, the Duke, clad in armor, holding a bastone, sitting on a stool on which are displayed the bound figures of captives. It is recognized by scholars that this portrait is modeled after Michelangelo’s figure of “Giuliano” (actually Lorenzo, if one accepts the identification of the figure proposed by Trexler and Lewis, Languid and others) in the Medici Chapel. This fact alone tends to indicate that Vasari was aware that the Chapel contained a political message: the domination of his Alessandro parallels the domination of the figure of Lorenzo on the Medici monument. What may not have been pointed out, however, is that Vasari’s bound captives resemble Michelangelo’s herms originally intended for the tomb of Julius II (or, according to Balas, the façade of San Lorenzo), figures intimately associated by Michelangelo with his captive Slaves, since the Slaves were meant to stand in front of the herm figures, as an examination of Michelangelo’s sketches for the Julius tomb makes clear:

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Fig. 2.65: Michelangelo, sketch for a tomb, showing bound male captives as herms (Photo: Uffizi Gallery).

This suggests that Vasari was aware, not only that the figure of Lorenzo on the Medici monument represents Medicean domination of Florence, but also that the figure under him, that is, the Day, also had a political signification. Vasari himself says as much in his allegorical interpretation of his portrait, in which he refers to the armless figures on the stool as “his [Alessandro’s] people who, behaving themselves according to the will of the one who rules over them, have neither arms nor legs.”91 Vasari is here referring to the traditional contentiousness of the Florentine populace, which the firm (tyrannical?) rule of Alessandro has suppressed. These figures of Vasari’s display the same state of impotent rage we observed in Michelangelo’s Day, as well as in the classical bound male captive prisoners from which they derive. So, then, one might say that, just as Vasari’s Alessandro portrays the domination of the rebellious Florentines, so also does Michelangelo’s Lorenzo/Day represent the same theme, except that in Michelangelo’s case, the subjugation of the Florentine spirit is represented in a much more allusive manner. As we have seen, a viewer must be familiar with the classical iconographic tradition of captive prisoners to detect Michelangelo’s political reference; no actual bonds are visible on Michelangelo’s Day, nor does Michelangelo give us an explicit explanation of the meaning of his figures, as does Vasari.92

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Fig. 2.66: Vasari, portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, profile (Photo: Fine Art Images/ Alinari Archives, Firenze).

Fig. 2.67: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, profile (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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Fig. 2.68: Michelangelo, Victory, detail of Victor, profile (reversed) (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence).

The possibility that the “Lorenzo” of the Medici tomb may actually be a disguised portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici comes, once again, from Vasari himself. If one looks closely again at Vasari’s portrait, one observes that the left hand of the seated figure is curled over the left thigh, and that the right hand clutches the bastone di dominio in exactly the same manner as Michelangelo’s figure in the Medici Chapel:

Fig. 2.69: Vasari, portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, detail of hand holding the bastone (Photo: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Firenze).

Fig. 2.70: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail showing hand holding coin (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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If one accepts that the “Lorenzo” of the Medici tomb is actually a portrait of the Medici ruler at the time the Chapel was completed (one scholar has noted that the face of the figure was the last detail to be added by the artist before his final departure from Florence in the autumn of 1534), we might interpret this as a kind of “parting shot” at the person responsible for his forced departure from his native city and the persecution of his republican friends, ensuring that some sign, however veiled and obscure, would endure of the true nature of Medici rule in the city. As we have argued, the effects of this rule are discernible in the pained expressions and abject poses of the figures beneath the Medici capitani and in the veiled allusions to the classical tradition of captive figures we have described. And, as we have noted, the artist’s extraordinary skill in masking the true identity of his models confused not only his contemporaries, but later visitors to the Chapel as well, who could sense, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, that the entire ensemble contained an allusion to Medici tyranny, but could not specify precisely how they had reached this conclusion, leading to the vague and impressionistic “interpretazioni ideologiche” described by Barocchi. In support of this hypothesis, we might remark that the actual appearance of the Medici duke varies tremendously according to the artist depicting him: from the almost brutish appearance of Bronzino’s Alessandro, with its large nose, thick lips and sallow complexion, to Vasari’s slightly more attractive version, to the highly-attractive and idealized almost Apollonian version of Michelangelo, to the extremely handsome portrait of the ruler by Bronzino:

Fig. 2.71: Bronzino, portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, detail (Credit: Raffaello Bencini/ Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 2.72: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, profile (Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 2.73: Bronzino, Portrait of a young man (Credit: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program).

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Such variation suggests that, in our identification of Michelangelo’s “Lorenzo” as in fact Alessandro, first Duke of Florence, based upon the analysis of the visual images we have presented, it may not invalidate our argument if the faces of the two figures, Vasari’s (or Bronzino’s) and Michelangelo’s are not very similar; we would argue that such difference may be attributed to the fact that Vasari’s portrait and Michelangelo’s figure lie at different points on the continuum of versions of the Medici ruler just described, from the brutish figure of Bronzino’s portrait, though Vasari’s slightly more flattering depiction to the highly idealized and attractive images provided to us by Michelangelo and Bronzino in his sketch. We might also remark that the defeated figure of Michelangelo’s Victory upon which the victor presses his knee is another self-portrait of the artist, as has already been noted, as is also the grotesque mask which rests under Night’s left elbow in the Medici Chapel, its spoglia-like appearance recalling the St. Bartholomew of the Last Judgment, a recognized portrait of the artist. Balas has argued that the Victory represents a highly personal expression of Michelangelo’s feelings, and dates the sculpture to the early 1530s.93 This signifies that Michelangelo, along with his beloved city, in a kind of tragic inversion of the heroism of the David, is the victim of Medici oppression, the implied slingshot of the victorious Alessandro of the Victory now replacing that of the David in the Piazza della Signoria, the Day struggling against the figure of “Lorenzo” (actually Alessandro) above. As we noted above in reference to Spini’s discussion of the political aspects of Michelangelo’s work, this is entirely in accord with the historical record.94 So once again, we would suggest that, far from presenting an idealizing, spiritualizing or merely aestheticizing response to the historical conditions of his time, the figures of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel make very specific reference to events and personages much closer to home, and which touched the artist very personally, given his passionate adherence to the republican cause and his personal experience of the darker side of Medici power; as such, the monument, far from being an encomiastic celebration of the glories of Medici rule, might rather be termed a very personal, and private, form of damnatio memoriae. If our reading of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel is correct, then Michelangelo would presumably have hoped and expected that some of the many visitors to the Chapel would be able to understand his meaning, veiled as it was, and perhaps draw further conclusions as to the true nature of Medici rule in Florence.

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Fig. 2.74: Victory and bound male captive from Triumphal Arch (Credit: G. Fittschen-Badura 68–78/01).

Fig. 2.75: Bartolommeo Ammannati, Virtue Conquering Deceit (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 2.76: Giambologna, Florence Triumphing Over Pisa (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

Renaissance Viewing Habits In regard to the political meaning we claim to be present in the sculptures of the Medici Chapel, created by means of allusions to the iconographic and literary tradition of captive figures, it seems important to remark that it is not necessary, in our view, to choose one referent to which the figures in the Chapel were intended to allude; rather, we would suggest that the figures were intended to evoke a flood of images or associations in the viewer’s mind, depending on the particular cultural preparation of the individual viewer. The art historian Maria Ruvoldt has remarked in reference to Michelangelo’s drawing of the dreamer: “[Michelangelo’s] mastery of another kind of variety, the ability to engage a viewer’s imagination with a single image that calls forth multiple interpretative possibilities.”95 As a later example of this tendency of Renaissance art to evoke a wide variety of responses on the part of the viewer, we may cite Francesco Baldinucci’s description in his Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua of the reactions of the public gathered around the statue of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine in the

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Piazza della Signoria in Florence after its unveiling on 14 January, 1583. Regarding Baldinucci’s treatise, Del Bravo remarks: As Baldinucci tells us, the Florentines will gather around the Ratto with the desire “to satisfy their eyes with the sight of something so beautiful and new.” Each of them— the naturalist and sophist was well aware—would have had in their eyes and mind a different response: the Platonist would have lifted his gaze beyond earthly beauty; one person would have concentrated on personal interpretations; others would have sated themselves with an overall contemplation, while still others would have considered it merely the precursor to the pleasures of the touch. In the midst of this mass of divergences, while comprehensible according to nature, a connection with a few [connoisseurs] would have been even more precious: Bernardo Vecchietti, for example, “very highly regarded” by Francesco [de’ Medici] or Rodolfo Sirigatti, protagonists of the Riposo of Raffaello Borghini.96

To those responses cited by Del Bravo, one might also add the political ones discussed below in the section on Florentine political sculpture. This principle of varietas or “generative fecundity,” in which Michelangelo’s images have the power to evoke multiple associations in a variety of viewers, might also be extended to modern interpretations of the Medici Chapel; there is, in our view, no need to privilege a political over a religious or a neo-platonic meaning; the monument has the capacity to evoke a variety of responses in a variety of viewers, depending on the individual cultural, spiritual, aesthetic, or political preoccupations of the individual viewer. Its capacity to generate such a variety of responses is typical of great art in general; to insist on any one “stable meaning” is to impoverish our understanding of the work itself. In our view, it is important to keep these interpretive habits of Renaissance viewers in mind when attempting to give an interpretation of the figures on the Medici tomb. Not all viewers, certainly, can be expected to have understood Michelangelo’s references to captive figures, or to have been familiar with the associated literary tradition described above; indeed, as for modern viewers, perhaps the primary response of the majority of Renaissance visitors to the Chapel would have been a religious or an aesthetic one. Nevertheless, it seems to us more than likely that at least some viewers would have perceived and appreciated these veiled allusions to images of captive figures. While there is no contemporary written record of which we are aware which conclusively demonstrates a political response to the figures in the Medici Chapel, similar to the poems on the Belvedere Cleopatra just discussed, it seems to us entirely possible that evidence of such a response could be found, either in poems contemporary with the unveiling of the Chapel, private diaries, personal correspondence, or some other source. And in the next section we present several literary accounts

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roughly contemporary with the opening of the Chapel to the public which tend to confirm our interpretation of the Medici Chapel as a veiled but potent critique of Medici power.

The Florentine Tradition of Political Sculpture and the Medici Chapel We shall now briefly discuss the cultural context for the hidden anti-Medicean message we claim to be present in the Medici Chapel, namely the Florentine tradition of political sculpture. Today, scholars are well-aware of the important role public sculpture played in the political life of Renaissance Florence. In some cases, as in the David, the message was allowed to speak for itself, relying on the viewer to supply the political context, based on their knowledge of the Biblical story of David and Goliath as symbolizing Florence’s struggle against the politically superior power of the Medici family allied with the Papacy based in Rome. However, in some cases, poems or epigrams were written on the statues to make the political meaning clear. The discussion of the reception of Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus is worth citing at some length for the light it sheds on this contemporary practice of appending (and in some cases—as in the case of the Pasquino in Rome—physically attaching) poetry to public works of sculpture to elucidate their political meaning. Waldman, in his study of two unpublished contemporary satires of Bandinelli’s Hercules, notes that criticism of the sculpture, unveiled in May 1534, was a covert way of criticizing Medici rule, recently restored to Florence after the republican interlude of 1527–1530: The widespread public criticism of the statue’s supposed demerits was a safely oblique means of condemning the regime which now ruled the city from Via Larga. But if mocking the Medici’s monuments could be a veil for attacks on their government, in the end the device proved rather too transparent; Alessandro was finally forced to send some of the poets who lampooned the statue to prison—as though openly admitting that artistic criticism was not really the issue. “The wound of a dagger,” as Francesco Sforza used to say, “is less to be feared than that of a satiric poem.”97

Waldman notes that Bandinelli “fled the vituperative storm” to Rome, and later lamented in Cellini’s Vita: “Signore [Duke Cosimo], when I unveiled my Hercules and Cacus, more than one hundred vicious sonnets were written about me, in which the worst things one can imagine were said by this ungrateful rabble.” Cellini continues: “I replied and said: ‘Signore, when our Michelangelo unveiled his Sagrestia, where one can see so many beautiful figures, that wondrous and

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virtuous school, lovers of the true and the good, wrote him more than one hundred sonnets, competing amongst themselves for who could say the best things.’”98 Here we see clear evidence that Michelangelo’s Sagrestia Nuova had a political resonance for contemporary viewers, Bandinelli implicitly being the artist of the hated Medici tyrant, scorned by the “ungrateful rabble” (that is, opponents of the Medici), who are, according to Cellini “lovers of the true and the good,” while Michelangelo, on the contrary, represents the artist of a free republican Florence. The “school” mentioned by Cellini must refer to young artists and academicians, most likely some of them of strong republican sympathies, who studied Michelangelo’s sculptures in the chapel. Although he worked for Duke Cosimo, Cellini’s anti-authoritarian tendencies are well-known, and, as a scholar of Cellini has recently pointed out, his trial for sodomy was undertaken as retaliation for his outspokenness.99 One other example of a political reading of the monument which may be cited here is an anti-Medicean and anti-Bandinellian anecdote recounted by Anton Francesco Doni in his Marmi of 1552. This anecdote shows again that, at least by the mid-1500s, there were viewers who saw Michelangelo’s work in the Sagrestia Nuova in a clearly political context. And once again, the opposition Michelangelo-Bandinelli is made to stand implicitly for a republican Florence free of Medici tyranny as opposed to the signoria of this powerful family. The anecdote, for its relevance to our argument, and for its intrinsic interest, is worth quoting here in full: I was in Carrara for a few days to attend to that matter. The cavaliere [Bandinelli] was seeing to the excavation of marble; and, after many things had been said, I asked him what had been the most beautiful marble ever excavated at Carrara. He, who had a subtle intellect, did not mention the whiteness or the beauty of the marble, but said instead something else: “I believe the most beautiful marble ever excavated at Carrara is that which Michelangelo sculpted miraculously in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo, and especially the two captains above the Tombs.” Cavaliere Bandinelli, having said this, did not go on to any other words except the praise of Michelangelo; and he said that, since he was a man of such divine genius, he had made two statues without equal and without blemish. I, who know how to seize the opportunity, walked on with my head held higher and said “It’s fine for you to speak this way, since the house of Medici has rewarded you and paid you; but Democritus of Milesia would take it ill.” When he heard me make this response, he was silent for a moment and, not understanding, said: “Say more clearly what you mean.” I said to him that, when in the presence of Dionysius someone asked what was the most precious metal used by the Athenians, Democritus made this reply: “That which is melted for the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton [the tyrant slayers].” “To what end were those statues made?” the Cavaliere then asked me. I explained to him how they had killed the tyrants.100

Here we see further evidence of a contemporary reading of the chapel in a political light, Bandinelli’s praise of Michelangelo becoming immediately politicized and

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leading Doni to recount the anecdote about Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the famous tyrant-slayers of antiquity. This obsequious praise on the part of Bandinelli and Doni’s tart rejoinder recalls Michelangelo’s pointed rejection of Strozzi’s conventional niceties of flattery in his lapidary epigram on the Night cited above. Here Doni rejects “il Cavaliere’s” trite and conventional exaltation of Michelangelo’s genius with his short account of the story of the tyrant-slayers.101 It seems clear that, for Renaissance viewers of republican sympathies, Bandinelli represented the sculptor of the hated Medici tyrant, while Michelangelo represented the sculptor of a free republican Florence, the most potent symbol of which was the statue of the David in the `Piazza della Signoria.102 What this anecdote shows us is that the Medici Chapel was caught up in the political discussion of the day. What is not clear from the anecdote, however, is whether Michelangelo’s sculptures there were assigned any specific political meaning by these discussants. Given what has been said about the Florentine tradition of political sculpture, it seems to us possible that they were, and that someday, documents demonstrating such a response may come to light. Bandindelli’s vagueness here as to what exactly he is praising, his reliance on contemporary commonplaces (Michelangelo’s “divine genius”) recalls Barocchi’s comment that, for many Renaissance viewers, discussion of purely aesthetic aspects of the chapel served as a means of avoiding discussion of politically sensitive matters.103 Hence it is possible that the very clichéd triteness of much of the Renaissance discussion of Michelangelo’s art actually represents, not a lack of imagination on the part of the critics, but rather a studied attempt to avoid discussion of politically sensitive matters. Doni, however, refuses to let Bandinelli off the hook, immediately bringing the political subtext to the fore in his mention of Bandinelli’s service to the Medici, although he himself then goes on to use allusive means to make his point. From the above, we can see that there existed in Florence in the mid-sixteenth century a tradition of writings which attributed political meaning to works of public sculpture, and that Michelangelo’s sculptures in the Sagrestia Nuova were very much part of this tradition. As Waldman has noted, this discussion of public works of sculpture was an oblique means for the expression of opinions on contemporary political affairs. While it might be argued that the Sagrestia Nuova was not a public work of sculpture in the usual sense, since it was the private chapel of the Medici family, we have already noted that the Chapel was opened to outside visitors on particular occasions, and that it was popular as a school for young artists (Vasari refers to it as “la scuola delle nostre arti”). Such uses of the Chapel, which continued throughout the 1500s, allow us, in our view, to insert it into the tradition of public discussion—often politically motivated and highly polemical in nature—of works of public sculpture we have just described.104

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This also seems valid when we consider that, for all the temporal limitations on its availability to the public, those who did have access to the Chapel would undoubtedly have been eager to discuss it with those outsiders who did not, whose curiosity about the work would have been intense. Thus, when we view Michelangelo’s figures in the Medici Chapel against this contemporary tradition of political sculpture, we are able to place Michelangelo’s sculptures, along with the poems which elucidate their meaning, into the proper historical context.

The Capitani: Melancholy and Oblivion Our political reading of the Chapel may be extended along similar lines to include the figure of Giuliano opposite. Just as the figure of Lorenzo expresses the active, martial spirit of this leader, the effects of whose dominance over a suffering Florence and the Florentine exiles we have already seen, so also is the figure of the other capitano intended to recall classical and medieval representations of Saturn and the melancholic temperament. As Panofsky notes, a seated figure of a god, head slightly bowed and supported in his hand, represents the second of two types of Saturn in classical art, the first being an erect, hieratic, terrifying figure:

Fig. 2.77: Tomb of Cornutus, showing Etruscan Dis (Credit: D-DAI-ROM-97.751).

Fig. 2.78: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Giuliano de’ Medici (Credit: © Scala/Art Resource, NY).

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The other features of the figure of Giuliano—the coinbox with the bat’s head under his left elbow, and the object in his left hand—also correspond to traditional attributes of Saturn and the melancholic type. The coinbox is a reference to Saturn’s avariciousness and greed, the bat’s head to the noctural, secret aspect of the god, and the object in Giuliano’s left hand to the cloth-covered rock traditionally given to the god as a substitute for the children he is about to eat.105 Panofsky notes that one of the most important classical representations of Saturn in the traditional pose of the melancholic, head cradled on his hand, was a tomb relief of Cornutus (Fig. 2.77), now in the Vatican. A comparison of this relief to Michelangelo’s Giuliano from the Medici tomb reveals that the left elbow of the arm supporting the head rests in both cases on a box-like object, in the Roman relief, the edge of the throne upon which Saturn sits, on the Medici tomb, the coin-box just mentioned. It will be noted that all the attributes just mentioned are thoroughly consistent with the political interpretation of the Chapel we have been proposing. We noted above the possible reference of the coinbox to the draining of Florence’s treasury by the Medici princes to support their expansionistic and dynastic ambitions centered in Rome, which would have been facilitated by Giuliano’s presence there. In the same way, the panno, seen as an object to be eaten, substituting for Saturn’s children, might also be seen as a reference to the consumption of Florence’s vital substance in the name of Medicean family ambitions. In both medieval and Renaissance literary and visual imagery it was a commonplace to represent the tyrant as a devourer of his own children, an association of visual topos and political reference given vivid expression by Dante in his Inferno in the person of the tyrant Ugolino of Pisa, who, driven by hunger, is forced to eat his own children, “brancolando tre giorni sopra le loro corpi,” and also in the figure of Satan himself in the last canto of the poem, where he appears as a terrifying, seated figure (recalling the classical image of Saturn just discussed), frozen in ice, where he is eternally condemned to devour the sinners, at the furthest possible remove from the life-giving and sustaining warmth of the love of God. In a specifically Florentine context, Savonarola makes a connection between the trait of melancholy and Lorenzo de’ Medici: “He [the tyrant] lives beset with fantasies of grandeur and with melancholy and with fears that always gnaw at his heart; therefore, he is always looking for pleasures as medicine for his condition.”106 Panofsky notes that Plato also makes an explicit connection between the trait of melancholy and the tyrant: “‘Then a man becomes tyrannical in the full sense of the word, my friend,’ I said, ‘when either by nature or by habits or by both he has become even as the drunken, the erotic, the maniacal [melancholicos]’” (Phaedrus 573c Loeb ed., 1946, 343, 345).107

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Panofsky also points out that Medieval thinkers such as Berchorius were accustomed to making an association between the trait of melancholy and the tyrant.108 We also speculate that Michelangelo’s original intention of placing the capitani and the figures which lie beneath them on a base formed by four river gods may have been intended to suggest that the entire apparatus of Medici power is floating on the four classical rivers of forgetfulness, and thus destined to oblivion. This interpretation is supported by Michelangelo’s famous comment, in response to criticism that the faces of the capitani bore no resemblance to their actual appearance that “a thousand years from now no one would know that they were any different” (“di qui a mille anni nessuno non ne potea dar cognizione che fossero altrimenti”).109 This comment of Michelangelo’s reiterates the theme of tempus vorans which is one the principal unifying concepts of the Chapel, present as open-mouthed figures on the cuirass of Lorenzo, the box under the left elbow of Giuliano, the decorative frieze which borders the Chapel, the candelabra, their bases and the column capitals of the altar:

Fig. 2.79: Medici Chapel, detail of frieze (Credit: Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali).

Fig. 2.80: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail of cuirass (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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Seen in this light, the devouring mouths carved directly on the cuirass of Lorenzo might have been intended by the artist to symbolize the fact that, for all their self-glorification, the Medici rulers are destined, as all mortal flesh, to be swallowed up forever by the forgetfulness of time. It is here that a political and a religious interpretation of the Chapel come together seamlessly. Support for this interpretation is given by the helmet worn by Giuliano, which, in the right light, and viewed from the side, seems to swallow up his head entirely:

Fig. 2.81: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Giuliano de’ Medici, profile (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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This monstrous image is to be compared with the helmeted figure being devoured by a wolf ’s head in a sketch by the artist identified by Panofsky as a representation of Etruscan Hades:

Fig. 2.82: Etruscan tomb drawing showing bearded male figure in wolf ’s helmet (Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ).

Fig. 2.83: Michelangelo, sketch of bearded male figure in wolf ’s helmet (Credit: Casa Buonarroti).

Fig. 2.84: Michelangelo, sketch of bearded male figure wearing dragon helmet (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

A drawing by Michelangelo now in the British Museum (Tolnay v. 5, plate 110, “the Count of Canossa”) also depicts a figure wearing a helmet in the form of a dragon. Hence, in this interpretation, the Medici ruler is being literally devoured by Hell-mouth. Certainly the interpretation of the four river gods as evoking the idea of oblivion would accord with this theme also, in this case intended by Michelangelo as a pointed response to contemporary propaganda of eternal Medici florescence.110 In general, the themes of Time and Eternity, as opposed to—and ultimately triumphing over—earthly power, form a subtext and recurring leitmotif to all aspects of the Chapel.111 The pose of Giuliano is, then, intended to evoke the classical trait of melancholia, almost without exception a negative characteristic in classical, medieval and Renaissance thought. Starting in the Middle Ages, it was often called acedia, or tristitia, and was one of the seven cardinal sins, a spiritual state characterized by a kind of paralyzing lassitude and lack of interest in things spiritual or (in its secular form), the things of this world.112 This state of brooding inwardness often, in classical and medieval thought, verged on madness or depression. Although recent

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scholarship has noted that in the Renaissance the trait could, at times, take on more positive connotations of genius or the power of inward concentration of the scholar or artist, one scholar argues that the extent of this rehabilitation has been exaggerated, and that during the period it for the most part retained its negative valence. This lack of attentiveness to the things of this world characteristic of melancholia would be especially deleterious in a ruler, whose duty was to remain vigilant to possible danger for the sake of his subjects. The melancholic, in his intense concentration on his present experience, is by nature unable to engage in the far-sightedness essential to the leader of a state, a quality eloquently expressed by Cicero in his description of Romulus in his De republica, whom we mentioned in Chapter 1. The melancholic’s vision is by definition narrowly-focused and partial, as those souls in Dante’s Inferno who have no knowledge of the future or the past, but live trapped in a kind of eternal present. Hence, the melancholic, absorbed in his present experience, suffers from a kind of spiritual blindness. We noted above the bat’s head on the coinbox under Giuliano’s left elbow, bats being, of course, blind during the daylight hours. One scholar has noted the lack of pupils on the eyes of the figures in the chapel, and Michelangelo himself refers to the theme of blindness in his well-known sketch for a poem on the Medici capitano traditionally referred to as the penseroso, discussed above. Another attribute traditionally associated with Saturn was sterility, since having castrated his own children, he was himself castrated by Kronos. Panofsky has noted the common Medieval identification of Saturn with Father Time holding his scythe, who harvests all human life, kings as well as peasants. Hence we would suggest that, just as the image of a suffering Night/Florence may have been intended by Michelangelo as a subtle but pointed rebuke of Medici propaganda of the city flourishing happily under their beneficent rule, so also might the figure of Giuliano, seen as one born under the sign of Saturn, have been intended by the artist as an implicit rebuke of the same Medici iconography of a return to a joyous Golden Age under their rule. As with the theme of melancholy itself, the image of Saturn in the Renaissance had a double valence, making it eminently suitable for either praise or blame of the Medici princes.113 In Michelangelo’s use of the figure in his Chapel, silence, death, suffering, and sterility become an almost palpable presence in a space some scholars have seen as an encomiastic celebration of Medici power. If one pairs the figures of Giuliano and Lorenzo opposite, Giuliano, then, represents melancholia and Lorenzo—head held high on an absurdly long neck— would represent superbia, the cardinal sin of princes.114 The only two figures which

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escape the general atmosphere of lassitude or melancholy pervading the chapel, which show any sign of animation, are the Day and the figure of Lorenzo. And yet these forms of animation are negative forms, as we have suggested: the Day represents impotent rage, struggling against its bonds, and the figure of Lorenzo—in its tense alertness and proud military bearing—represents the sin of pride.115 Just as we suggested that the figures of Day and Night be viewed in dynamic relation to the figure above them as suffering from the effects of Lorenzo’s overweening pride, so may the figures of Evening and Dawn which lie beneath Giuliano be seen as representing, perhaps, lassitudo and acedia, the effects of Giuliano’s temperament upon them. Princely superbia, then, represented by Lorenzo, creates active suffering and anger among those subject to its deleterious effects, just as princely melancholia, represented by the figure of Giuliano, creates a state of lassitude and torpor among those subject to its sway. The monument then takes on a spiritual meaning in addition to its political one, this meaning being also a negative commentary on Medici power.

Notes 1. Richard Trexler and Mary Lewis, “Two Captains and Three Kings: New Light on the Medici Chapel,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (1981): 91–177, reprinted in William Wallace, ed., Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English (New York: Garland, 1995), III. 2. Barocchi cites many examples of responses to the chapel by earlier viewers who saw it as an expression of Michelangelo’s republican and anti-Medicean sentiments, although she generally dismisses these responses as “interpretazioni ideologiche” (Vasari, La Vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi [Milan: Ricciardi, 1962], “Commento”). Hartt rejects out of hand a political interpretation of the monument in an anti-Medicean light: “By means of this passage [Michelangelo’s sketch for a poem on the vendetta of the figure of Giuliano against the figures of Evening and Dawn] Anton Springer was enabled to lay to rest the wild but surprisingly recurrent notion that the images of the Medici tombs were in reality attacks on the Medici tyranny” (Frederick Hartt, “The Meaning of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel,” in Essays in Honor of Georg Swarzenski [Chicago: Regnery, 1951], 145–55, fn. 6, reprinted in Wallace, Michelangelo, 57–67). In general, it seems that many scholars of the Chapel have assumed that spiritual or aesthetic analyses cannot coexist with a political reading of the work. There is no evidence that for Renaissance viewers a variety of responses could not coexist or be equally valid depending on the orientation of the individual viewer. For a concise summary of modern interpretations of the chapel, see Edith Balas, Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel: a New Interpretation (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1995), 14–24. 3. Creighton Gilbert, “Texts and Contexts of the Medici Chapel,” Art Quarterly 34 (1971): 391–409, 405–06, reprinted in Wallace, Michelangelo, 103–21.

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4. There have, however, been several recent studies which have discussed the topic of the “art of dissimulation” in Michelangelo’s other works: Joost Keizer, Michelangelo and the Politics of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, forthcoming) and the study of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling by Blech and Doliner, cited below. See also Massimo Firpo, Gli affreschi di Pontormo a San Lorenzo: Eresia, politica e cultura nella Firenze di Cosimo I (Milan: Einaudi, 1997) and Julia Siemon’s 2015 Columbia University dissertation, “Bronzino, Politics and Portraiture in 1530s Florence” (http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8RV0MNF), which tackles the topic of dissimulation and artistic production in pre-Cosiminian Florence, with special emphasis on Bronzino and Pontormo. 5. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), I, 184–85. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Italian in this chapter are mine. 6. For a full description of the entrata, with eyewitness accounts, see Anthony Cummings, The Politicized Muse: Music for Medici Festivals, 1512–1537 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), Ch. 5. 7. Michelangelo, Carteggio III, 190–91. 8. Louis Waldman, “‘Miracol’ Novo et Raro’: Two Unpublished Contemporary Satires on Bandinelli’s Hercules,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Museum in Florenz 38 (1994): 423. For an excellent discussion of the humorous aspects of the proposed statue, see Paul Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1978), Chapter 3 “Michelangelo’s Sense of Humor.” Barolsky notes: “Michelangelo’s delightful travesty of the proposed gigantic colossus, which is worthy of Rabelais, did not, however, amuse the papal functionary, who replied to his letter: ‘About the statue to be made, his Holiness would have you to understand it is the truth and not a joke, and he wishes it to be made’” (68–69). A Florentine account of the time even attributed to Michelangelo a plan to raze the Medici palace, although Varchi makes clear that he has been unable to definitively establish the truth of this story. Nevertheless, Varchi states that Michelangelo said that it would be appropriate to him. According to Varchi, Michelangelo proposed calling the piazza which would result the “Piazza dei Muli” (Piazza of the Mules). (Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina 6.XXV [Salani ed. i, 365–66]). Once again, we see at work Michelangelo’s sardonic humor at the expense of the Medici family. 9. William Wallace, “Michel Angelus Bonarotus patritius Florentinus,” in Innovation and Tradition: Essays on Renaissance Art and Culture, ed. Dag T. Andersson and Roy Ericksen (Rome: Kappa, 2000), 60–74, 162–63. 10. Symonds cites several letters of Michelangelo in which the artist’s pride in his family’s supposedly noble origins from the Counts of Canossa is vividly expressed. For example, in a letter of 1548 to his nephew Lionardo, the artist writes: “Tell the priest not to write me again as Michelangelo the sculptor. For I am not known here except as M. Buonaroti. Say, too, that if a citizen of Florence wants to have an altar-piece painted, he must find some painter; for I was never either sculptor or painter in the way of one who keeps a shop. I have always avoided that, for the honour of my father and my brothers. True, I have served three Popes; but that was a matter of necessity” (trans. John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti [Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002], 1.306–7).

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11. Condivi also remarks on Michelangelo’s intense assertiveness when it came to defending his personal honor: “As is the case of most people who devote themselves to a leisurely and contemplative life, he has been rather timid, except in righteous anger when some injury or breach of duty is done to him or others, in which case he plucks up more courage than those who are considered courageous” (Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Helmutt Wohl [Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1976], 107. 12. James Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 419. 13. On the Brutus, see D. J. Gordon, “Giannotti, Michelangelo and the Cult of Brutus,” in Fritz Saxl, 1890–1948; A Volume of Memorial Essays from His Friends in England, ed. D. J. Gordon (New York: T. Nelson, 1957), 281–96. 14. Giorgio Spini, Michelangelo politico e altri studi sul Rinascimento fiorentino (Milan: Unicopli, 1999), 49. On the widespread aversion of the Florentine citizens to this symbol of their subjugation, see J. R. Hale, “The End of Florentine Liberty: The Fortezza da Basso,” in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. Nicolai Rubinstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 501–32. For a discussion of Hale’s essay, see the Introduction. 15. Condivi, Vita, Ch. XXXIX, cited in Spini, Michelangelo politico, 50. Michelangelo’s friend Giovan Francesco Fattucci writes in a letter of November 22, 1524 to Michelangelo in Florence: “I say again to you that if there is someone in Florence who takes it ill that you are alive, be patient, because I have hope in God that someday, in whatever way, he will be destroyed” (Carteggio, III, 116). 16. Spini, Michelangelo politico, 33–34. 17. For accounts of the sack of Prato, see Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy, Book 11, 262–63. Machiavelli called it “an appalling spectacle of horrors.” 18. Humphrey Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 305–06. 19. Michelangelo, Carteggio, I, 136. Cited in Spini, Michelangelo politico, 33. 20. Humphrey Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 305–06. 21. John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 31 and Giovanni Antonelli, “La magistratura degli Otto di Guardia a Firenze,” ASI 1 (1954): 3–39, cited in Brackett, Criminal Justice, 30. We discuss these essays in the Introduction. 22. The translation of this and the following two letters are by Symonds. 23. Trexler and Lewis (“Two Captains and Three Kings,” 149–50; Wallace 255–56) note that a similar strategy was used at the opening of the Sagrestia Nuova to the public in 1537 during the “celebration” on March 15 of funeral exequies for the recently murdered Alessandro. According to Trexler and Lewis, the Medici rulers, attended by a large retinue of imperial troops, watched the ceremonies carefully to see who was and who was not in attendance, thus being able to discern who their enemies were. 24. Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1.378–9.

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25. For the political situation in Florence in the first three decades of the sixteenth century, see H. N. Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), J. R. Hale, Florence and the Medici: the Pattern of Control (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), John Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), Cecil Roth, The Last Florentine Republic (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968) and J. N. Stephens, The Fall of the Florentine Republic 1512–1530 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 26. Hale, Florence and the Medici, 99. 27. Compare, from a later period in Florentine history, Varchi’s similar formulation of the same idea, describing the plans of the Florentine grandi to assure themselves in the continuance of their hegemony by using the young Cosimo, after installing the young boy as ruler of Florence, to their own ends. In this way, they hoped to be able to “governare e popparsi, come s’usava di dire, e succiarsi lo stato” (to govern and, so to speak, to suck on the tit of the State) (Storia fiorentina, Salani ed., iii, 255). 28. Storia di Firenze, XV. For a concise discussion of the consolidation of Medici power in Florence in the hands of Lorenzo, see John Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (West Sussex: Blackwell, 2008), 426–34. 29. For Gheri and Passerini, see Stephens, The Fall of the Florentine, 103ff., 167ff. 30. Several recent studies have argued that Michelangelo managed to incorporate subtle jokes at the Church’s and Pope’s expense into the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, a hypothesis which, given the artist’s personality and his sentiments regarding the Church of his day, we find entirely plausible. 31. Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1.378. Symonds gives a lively translation of this letter, in which the full outrage of an irate Michelangelo finds eloquent expression. 32. William Wallace, “Michelangelo’s Leda: The Diplomatic Context,” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 473–99. 33. For a fascinating study, based on archival documents, of the “artistic diplomacy” carried out by Michelangelo’s friend Battista della Palla in an attempt to persuade Francis I to support the Florentine republicans in their desperate struggles to save the republic prior to the siege of 1530 by procuring works of art for the French king, see Caroline Elam, “Art in the Service of Liberty: Battista della Palla, Art Agent for Francis I,” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 5 (1993): 33–109. 34. Wohl divides the list of Michelangelo’s friends given by Condivi into three groups, all of them staunch enemies of the Medici: the Florentine exiles (which included Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, his brother Lorenzo, and Donato Giannotti), the circle of Vittoria Colonna (including Cardinal Pole and Claudio Tolomei) and the Farnese circle, which included Cardinal Farnese himself, Bernardino Mattei, Tolomei, Annibale Caro, and the Cardinal of San Cirillo. 35. Spini, Michelangelo politico, 50. 36. Spini, Michelangelo politico, 52. 37. Against the political background just described, it may not be a coincidence that many of Michelangelo’s republican works (the Slaves, his youthful Hercules and the Leda itself, in the interpretation just proposed) ended up in the possession of the King of France, the traditional defender of Florentine freedom from imperial and Medicean domination.

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38. Wallace, “Michelangelo’s Leda,” 491. 39. Spini, Michelangelo politico, 54. 40. Hartt (citing Popp) expresses extreme skepticism regarding neo-Platonizing interpretations of the Chapel, not considering them founded on historical evidence. Gilbert shares the same view. 41. For more on Michelangelo’s republicanism, see Trexler and Lewis, “Two Captains and Three Kings,” 156ff. (Wallace 262ff.), where the authors connect the issue of the identification of the figures of the Medici capitani with their claim that “the Medici Chapel makes a political statement about tyranny and assassination” and the fact that, in the 1540s, the Florentines “were associating the statues in the Medici Chapel with tyrannicide.” As we note below, while we accept their general contention that the Medici Chapel makes a political statement, some aspects of their argument are not supported by the evidence they adduce. 42. To cite only one example of the encoding of sentiments critical of those in power in a work of Renaissance art, we might mention Pontormo’s Martyrdom of the Eleven Thousand, which, according to Strehlke, “contains a veiled political reference about the brutal reprisals and executions that followed the siege [of Florence in 1529],” the Roman emperor ordering the execution of the Christian martyrs resembling the newly created Duke Alessandro (Strehlke, citing Berti (L’opera completa del Pontormo, 104, n. 111), 12. The phenomenon also appears in Renaissance literature, in which ingenious means were used by writers to encode messages critical of powerful patrons in works of literary art addressed to these same patrons, as discussed in Chapter 1. On this subject, see especially the recent studies of Robin, D’Elia and Rundle, cited there. 43. We agree with Trexler and Lewis’ view that the figure above the Day and the Night is Lorenzo, and that the figure above Evening and Dawn is Giuliano. For a discussion of the history of confusion surrounding the identity of the two figures, see Trexler and Lewis, Appendix. Langedijk also accepts this identification (The Portraits of the Medici: 15th-18th Centuries [Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1981–1987]). 44. Michelangelo’s favorite preacher, Savonarola, frequently referred to Florence as a new Jerusalem, her subjugation to Medici rule representing a second Babylonian captivity. 45. Antonio Giuliano, “Germania capta,” Xenia 16 (1988): 101. Dorothy Shorr notes that medieval representations of the mater dolorosa, head bowed in grief at the foot of the Cross, together with another figure opposite, hands often crossed at the wrists, derives from this same classical iconographic tradition (“The Mourning Virgin and Saint John,” Art Bulletin 22 [1940]: 61–69). 46. For a thorough discussion of the tapestry, see John White and John Shearman, “Raphael’s Tapestries and Their Cartoons,” Art Bulletin 40 (1958): 218–19. 47. Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 12. 48. Giuliano, “Germania capta,” 104. For a full listing of the use of the figure of a grieving woman in the Renaissance, often with a political meaning, see Giuliano, “Germania capta,” 112–14. We have not been able to determine exactly where and when the weeping Dacia was first placed on view, whether in the Cesi family’s sculpture garden or in some other place. Haskell and Penny (Taste and the Antique, 193) imply that the figure could not have

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53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

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been displayed before 1536, but the quotation of the figure by Michelangelo and Raphael in the second decade of the century clearly indicates that it was known to Renaissance artists before this time. For the placement of the sculpture in the Capitoline Museum, with bibliography, see H. Stuart Jones, ed., A Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures Preserved in the Municipal Collections of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 17–18. For a discussion of the use of the sculpture in later art, see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 193–94. For a history of the vase, present in the Medici garden from the 1570s, see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 316. These are all reproduced in Held v. 2, cited below. Held 1.364. Elisabeth MacDougall, “The Sleeping Nymph: Origins of a Humanist Fountain Type,” Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 357–65. See also Phyllis Pray Bober, “Sleeping Nymph and Angelo Colocci,” JWCI 40 (1977): 723–39. For a thorough discussion of the statue, its history and viewers’ responses to it, see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 184–87. Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance artists & antique sculpture, 114. Haskell and Penny note that the Richardsons found the figure deeply moving, citing the passage from the Book of Lamentations on the sufferings of Jerusalem in her Babylonian captivity: “She who was once great among nations has become as a widow … she ceases not to weep night and day, and tears stain her cheeks” (Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 194). Brummer 75. Brummer 107. Brummer 186–87. On Colocci, see Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), with bibliography. For the distribution of the statues in the courtyard, see Brummer 22, Plate 1. If we look closely at another sarcophagus in the Vatican, also from the Palazzo Mattei, we observe that the figure leans for support on an urn, whose flowing waters suggest the flowing beard of the grotesque mask upon which Michelangelo’s Night leans for support. It seems to us not impossible that, in addition to the Belvedere Cleopatra, the artist might have seen this sarcophagus also and, perhaps subconsciously, been inspired by its flowing waters in his creation of the grotesque mask of the Medici Chapel. The open mouth and flowing beard of his mask might then be related to the theme of tempus vorans, all-devouring time, discussed below, as well as to the waters of Lethe, symbol of eternal forgetfulness. The Belvedere Tigris, on which Michelangelo may have worked, also presents the image of a bearded male figure and an urn (Brummer 186; Fig. 2.51). Michelangelo, The Poetry of Michelangelo, ed. James M. Saslow (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 419. For a history of the inscription, see Otto Kurz, “Huius Nympha Loci: A Pseudo-Classical Inscription and a Drawing by Durer,” JWCI (1953): 171–77. Brummer notes that in the Colocci garden in Rome, there was also an image of a fountain nymph, with an inscription requesting the visitor’s silence: “Huius nympha doci bacri custodia fontis / Dormio dum blandae sentio murmur aquae / Parce meum quisquis tangis cava marmora somnum/Rumpere sive bibas sive lavere tace” (Elisabeth Macdougal, Fountains,

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66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

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Statues, and Flowers: Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1994), 39. MacDougall reproduces the image and also discusses the history of the inscription. The image also appears in David Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo, 423. Aristotle, for example, describes the tyrant in these words: “The best of these [forms of government] is monarchy, the worst timocracy. The deviation from monarchy is tyranny; for both are forms of one-man rule, but there is the greatest difference between them; the tyrant looks to his own advantage, the king to that of his subjects [emphasis added] … Now tyranny is the very contrary of this; the tyrant pursues his own good” (Nichomachean Ethics Bk. 8, 1160a32–1160b22), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1834. As Rowland points out, there were also poems written on the Colocci nymph which give an explicitly political interpretation to the figure. Among them was an eclogue (“ecloga felix”) by the Neopolitan poet Girolamo Borgia, in which the fountain in the Colocci garden, as Julius’ daughter Felice, is imagined as singing the praises of Julius, and lamenting his death in the midst of his great enterprises. Capodiferro also wrote a poem on Michelangelo. For a listing of poems written on Michelangelo by his contemporaries, see Arduino Colasanti, “Gli artisti nella poesia del Rinascimento: Fonti poetiche per la storia dell’arte italiana,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (1904): 210–11. For Capodiferro in the cultural life of Renaissance Rome, see H. Janitschek, “Ein Hofpoet Leo’s X. über Künstler und Kunstwerke,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 7 (1880): 52–60 and Rowland. Brummer 221. Brummer 221. Brummer 222. Brummer 226. Brummer 222–23. The entire tapestry is reproduced in Pietro Santi Bartoli, Leonis X admirandae virtutis imagines (Rome: I. I. de Rubeis, n.d.). Two poems by Baldessare Castiglione also make reference to this same image of a suffering Cleopatra borne in triumph by a conquering Caesar, whom Castiglione identifies as Julius, in a vain spectacle (“spectacio inani”) to sate the cruel eyes (“crudelia lumina”) of the spectators. One of the poems was placed on a pilaster to the right of the Cleopatra after she was moved from the courtyard to the Stanza di Cleopatra at Vasari’s suggestion in the early 1550s. For the history of the various locations of the statue, and critical reactions to it, see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 184–87. Brummer 220–21. Vasari, ed. Barocchi, III, 954, cited in Louis Waldman, “‘Miracol’ Novo et Raro’: Two Unpublished Contemporary Satires on Bandinelli’s Hercules,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Museum in Florenz 38 (1994): 423. On the rage of Day see, for example, De Tolnay: “The torsion [of the figure of Day] is so violent that it seems to jerk the left leg forcibly upward. Above the mighty shoulder the head turns toward the spectator, full of rage and contempt” (Cited in Barocchi 990).

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78. Another image of Brutus by Michelangelo is one he carved on the back of one of the Boboli Slaves (“Atlas,” Tolnay v. 4, pl. 55; Fig. 2.32). If we compare this image to the profile of the Brutus on the medallion on the right shoulder of Michelangelo’s bust of Brutus and to an image he is supposed to have carved on the facade of the Palazzo della Signoria, we see that all three images are strikingly similar: all three show a rather stern-faced figure with a large nose, curly hair and a firm set of jaw, the same features we observed on the bust of Brutus and the figure of the Day. Given our interpretation of the Day as an encoded expression of the rage of the Florentine exiles at Medici domination of the city, it may not be going too far to view all three of the images reproduced here as a kind of personal signature or mark expressing Michelangelo’s true feelings about the nature of Medici rule in Florence, feelings which he could not express more openly. It was a common practice of medieval stonemasons to sign their works with just such a simple mark. 79. Held remarks that “‘sitting on the ground’ had long become a pictorial and literary topos for the expression of melancholy and grief.” 80. Balas also sees the crouching figure of the Victory as a self-portrait of the artist, noting that a sculptural grouping for the tomb of Mario Neri depicts the artist as the unwilling captive of a superior figure, and that Vincenzo de’ Rossi’s Hercules and Cacus, a companion-piece to the Victory, also presents the vanquished figure as a portrait of Michelangelo (Edith Balas, “Michelangelo’s Victory: Its Role and Significance,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 113 [1989]: 67–80). 81. For the almost comical tug-of-war over the consigning of the block of marble for the figure, see Tolnay III, 98–100. 82. The Medici presentation of themselves as conquering Hercules is well-known to scholars. See in this regard Leopold Ettlinger, “Hercules Florentinus,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 16 (1972): 119–42 and Kurt Foster, “Metaphors of Rule: Politics, Ideology and History in the Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 15 (1971): 65–104. 83. On a somewhat more jocular note, Sebastiano del Piombo’s suggestion to Michelangelo that he have a figure of a Ganymede depicted on the cupola of the Chapel might be interpreted in the same light, namely, that Michelangelo is captive to Medici demands that he finish the Chapel, despite his desires to the contrary. If this interpretation of Del Piombo’s suggestion is correct, then this self-representation by Michelangelo as a captive Ganymede would form a parallel with his representation of himself in the Sistine Chapel, where his Saint Bartholomew makes a similarly humorous comment on the artist’s unwilling subjugation to his patron’s demands. 84. Brummer 234ff. He cites Ulisse Aldrovandi (Delle statue antiche, che per tutta Roma … si veggono, Venice: 1556, 115ff.) as one of the sources which makes this identification: “si vede il simulacro del fiume Arno giacente …” (268). 85. Cited in Hartt, “The Meaning of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel,” 153; 65, n. 44. 86. While the traditional date of Michelangelo’s first meeting with Vittoria Colonna is around 1535–36, Shrimplin-Evangelidis notes that D. J. McAuliffe puts the meeting around 1517–21 at the court of Leo (Valerie Shrimplin-Evangelidis, “Michelangelo and Nicodemism: The Florentine Pietà,” The Art Bulletin 71 [March 1989]: 58–66, n. 1).

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87. For the motif of the covering of the head to represent grief in classical art, see Elisabeth McGrath, “The Painted Decoration of Rubens’ House,” JWCI XLI (1978): 245–77, cited in Bober and Rubinstein 136. 88. To cite another example of the simultaneous concealment and expression of his republican sympathies, we might mention Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà, where, appropriately enough, the artist portrays himself as Nicodemus, a secret follower of Christ who came to him by night, lacking the courage to openly express his devotion. While scholars have rightly pointed out that this self-portrayal is a reference to the artist’s close ties with reformist religious circles in Rome, what has escaped notice is that this sculpture is also modeled on one Michelangelo would have encountered in the gardens of Cardinal Pio da Carpi, that is, the figure of a seated captive, who wears the distinctive Phrygian cap, universally understood in the Renaissance as a symbol of freedom. A close comparison of the two figures bears out this observation. In Cardinal Carpi’s garden, the original identity of the figure as a captive is obscured by the inscription which accompanies it. 89. Yael Even, “The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,” Woman’s Art Journal 12 (1991): 10–14. See also Margaret Carroll, “The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence,” Representations 25 (1989): 3–30. 90. Even one of the crude sketches on the wall underneath the Chapel has been viewed as an expression of anti-Medicean sentiment. Dal Poggetto describes a “caricatura di re coronato” found on the wall in a hidden space beneath the Chapel: “While remaining puzzled and undecided in the face of this strange image, I ask myself if there couldn’t be behind it the fluid political situation following the defeat of the republican forces and the reentry into Florence of the Medici, and in particular the hated Duke Alessandro and his supporters who made an attempt on the life of the artist” (P. Dal Poggetto, “I disegni murali di Michelangelo scoperti sotto la Sagrestia Nuova,” Prospettiva, 5 [April 1976]: 11–46, also in his I disegni murali di Michelangelo e della sua scuola nella Sagrestia Nuova di San Lorenzo [Florence: Centro DI, 1979]). 91. Letter of August 18–December 9, 1534 to Ottaviano de’ Medici (Frey, Il carteggio di Giorgio Vasari [Munich: Georg Müller, 1923]). 92. In this regard, we are unaware if it has been noted that Michelangelo’s Lorenzo may be a (rather idealized) portrait of Alessandro de Medici, Florence’s notorious tyrant at precisely the time of the execution of the figures in the Medici Chapel, and a man whom Michelangelo (along with the other republicans) both hated and feared. This identification is suggested if one compares Vasari’s portrait of the prince with Michelangelo’s figure of Lorenzo (Figs. 2.66–2.68). While at first glance, the two portraits seem very different, if one looks closely, one may observe the same facial features: a rather small, oval-shaped head, set on a long neck, a small mouth with pursed lips, a cleft chin, brow tensed in a slight frown, curly hair. In Michelangelo’s version of Alessandro, the nose has been regularized, and is smaller and straighter than in Vasari’s portrait. The fact that Michelangelo has regularized and idealized Alessandro’s features (which led his contemporaries to complain that they couldn’t identify the figures with the actual Medici princes) accords perfectly with the necessity that any political references in the Chapel be carefully hidden. It might also be remarked that the figure looming over the defeated figure in the Victory in the Palazzo Vecchio may also a

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portrait of Alessandro, as comparison of the face with the aforementioned portraits makes clear (Figs. 2.66–2.68). 93. The fact that the victim of the Victory is a self-portrait of the artist is also given indirect confirmation by the fact that several other sculptural groups of the mid-1500s show the same image of Michelangelo dominated by a superior figure, whose knee rests on his back (Figs. 2.75–2.76), Ammannati’s Victory for the tomb of Mario Neri (Tolnay v. 3, pl. 268), Giamblogna’s Victory of Virtue over Vice (Tolnay v. 3, pl. 269) and Vincenzo Danti’s Victory of Honor over Deceit (Tolnay v. 3, pl. 270). It thus seems very likely that, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the image of a Michelangelo domato had became a kind of visual commonplace for the final defeat of a once-republican Florence by the Medici, the figure of the artist having by then become a recognized symbol of republican Florence. 94. Close examination of the figure reveals that Alessandro is actually clutching the end of a bag of stones. From the front, however, he appears to be holding a slingshot. 95. Maria Ruvoldt, “Michelangelo’s Dream,” Art Bulletin 85 (March 2003): 86–113. 96. Carlo del Bravo, “Francesco a Pratolino,” Artibus et Historiae 15 (1987): 37–46. Moffitt also describes this interpretive habit as typical of Renaissance responses to works of art: “Viewed as a once-standard mode of thought (a ‘period mentalité’), the emblem books indicate to us in detail what educated people once knew about history and mythology, the physical world and, especially, the slipperiness and fallibility of human nature. Emblematic interpretation required controlled associative thinking. … Since, however, a single emblematic motif usually allows of a variety of interpretations, the potential meanings would expand according to the individual reader’s store of accumulated cultural knowledge” (Andrea Alciati. A Book of Emblems: The Emblematum Liber in Latin and English, trans. and ed. by John F. Moffitt [ Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004], 2, 3, 8, 10). 97. Waldman, “‘Miracol’ Novo et Raro’,” 419. 98. Vasari, ed. Barocchi, III, 954. 99. See Margaret Gallucci, “Cellini’s Trial for Sodomy: Power and Patronage at the Court of Cosimo I,” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 37–46. 100. Barocchi III, 994. 101. Trexler and Lewis go so far as to assert that the sculpture of Giuliano was intended to been seen as a portrait of the Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (“Lorenzino”) who assassinated Duke Alessandro in 1537. Although we agree with their general contention that the Chapel be interpreted in a political light, in our view, they are going too far in making such a claim, and the evidence they adduce in favor of their argument does not support it. 102. That Machiavelli vs. Bandinelli was fraught for Florentines with political significance is further attested to by the fact that the commission for a colossal Hercules, meant to stand outside the Palazzo della Signoria as a companion-piece to the David, was given to Bandinelli instead of to Michelangelo. As Hibbert notes: “The original commission for a Hercules had been given to Michelangelo; but evidently supposing that Michelangelo might use this opportunity to hint at the virtues of the crushed Republic, Pope Leo X ordered that the marble block should be given instead to Bandinelli” (Hibbert 327). 103. Barocchi notes that “Vasari devotes himself to the analysis of the visual details, almost as if to compensate for the lack of any reference to the historic figures of the two Medici

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princes” (993–94). In the same light, Franceschini remarks: “It is unfortunate that Vasari, confronted with a statue of such interest to art, breaks off his discussion in this way. … Servant, just as much to Alessandro as he was to Cosimo (a duke conceivably much worse than the former), Vasari did not want to touch on the philosophical aspect of the image of the Duke of Urbino, because every word he would have been able to write about Lorenzo would have sounded like a condemnation of Alessandro and Cosimo, a condemnation even more shameful for himself ” (Pietro Franceschini, Il Nuovo Osservatore [Florence, 1885– 1886], 294, cited in Barocchi 994). 104. In a recent article, Christine Zappella has argued that, while the iconography of the elaborate apparati set up in San Lorenzo to commemorate the death of Michelangelo in 1564 have traditionally been interpreted as a glorification of the Medici family and its greatest artistic master, these funeral celebrations actually contained covert political messages attesting to the artist’s sympathies for the republican cause, and that the artist’s elevation to the status of a singular genius, divinely inspired, implicit in the programme of these celebrations, is, far from being a disinterested celebration of artistic genius, rather, simply an instance of Cosimo’s plan to diminish the importance of the old guild system (a survival of republican Florence) and to replace it with cultural institutions, such as the Academia del disegno, beholden to himself alone (“The Program of Michelangelo’s Funeral Apparato: Subversion, Competition, Revealing, Concealing,” paper presented at the South Central Renaissance Conference, Tucson, AZ, April 3–5, 2014). For a recent discussion of Bronzino’s use of the Hercules image to express veiled pro-Reformation messages, see Leatrice Mendelsohn, “The Devil in the Details: Ornament as Emblem and Adage in Two Male Portraits of Bronzino,” in Agnolo Bronzino: Muse of Florence, ed. Liana Cheney (New Academia Publishing, 2014), 372–95. On the use of the Hercules image to express covert anti-Medicean messages, with reference to the court of France, see Mendelsohn, “Saturnian Allusions in Bronzino’s London Allegory,” in Saturn from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Massimo Ciavolella and Amilcare Iannucci (Ottawa, ON: Dovehouse Editions, 1992). An expanded Italian edition of the same article appeared in 1992: “L’Allegoria di Londra del Bronzino e la retorica del carnevale,” in Kunst des Cinquecento in der Toskana, Italienische Forschungen, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Band XVII, ed. M. Cämmerer (Munich, 1992), 152–67. For another example of a funerary monument which Vasari, perhaps deliberately, damns with faint praise, see R. W. Gaston and A. M. Gáldy, “The Stranded Tomb: Cultural Allusions in the Funeral Monument of Don Pedro de Toledo, San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, Naples,” in The Spanish Presence in Sixteenth Century Italy, ed. P. Barker-Bates and M. Pattenden (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 153–74. On this tomb, Vasari remarks that it was “una infinità di storie delle vittorie ottenute da quel signore contra i Turchi, con molte statue che sono in quell’opera isolate, e condotta con molta diligenza.” Here, the word “diligenza” expresses a veiled denigration, since, in its emphasis on the hard work and effort which went into making the tomb, it stands in pointed contrast to such words such as facilità or sprezzatura, traditionally used in the Renaissance to describe truly great works of art, which seem to sprung complete from the mind and hand of the artist. The “infinity” of “isolated statues” mentioned by Vasari is also an implied denigration of both the monument and, possibly, by extension, its subject: overdecorated and overornate, the monument, in its lack of overall coherence occasioned by this excessive ornamentation stands in sharp

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contrast to the simplicity. power, and coherence of effect characteristic of truly great works of art. 105. For the rock as a substitute for Saturn’s children, see Panofsky, Saturn and melancholy, 174. This object might also be an allusive reference to Giuliano’s tuberculosis, a malady which finally caused his death on March 17, 1519, and which would have been well-known to his contemporaries. 106. Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence, trans. and ed. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 242. Even Michelangelo’s seemingly encomiastic interpretation of the figure of Giuliano contains a hint of menace. In his sketch for a poem on the figure of Giuliano, Michelangelo says: “Day and Night speak and say: ‘With our swift course we have brought Duke Giuliano to death; it is only just that he take his revenge for this as he does. And his revenge is this: that, we having killed him, he, thus dead, has taken the light from us and with his closed eyes has closed ours, which no longer shine on the earth. What then would he have done to us while he lived!’” (Barocchi 971). 107. Panofsky 17. 108. Panofsky 177. 109. Although once again, Michelangelo’s fondness for a cryptic mode of expression leads Niccolò Martelli, in a letter of July 28, 1544 to Rugasso, to give an opposite interpretation of these words of Michelangelo: “Michelangelo … did not model Duke Lorenzo and Signor Giuliano as nature had depicted and composed them, but gave them a grandeur, a proportion, an appropriateness, a grace, a splendor, such as seemed to him would bring them more praise, saying that in a thousand years no one would know they had been any different, so that people, gazing at them, would be amazed” (Barocchi 993). 110. For the iconography of Medici political propaganda, see especially Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), with bibliography. It may not be going too far to see the very bareness and lack of ornamentation of the Chapel as an implicit rebuke on Michelangelo’s part of the lavish displays of princely power characteristic of Medici political propaganda. Symonds notes that Cosimo, through Vasari, never ceased to importune the artist to return to Florence, or at least to send some drawings, so that the Chapel might be completed in all its richness, a request Michelangelo never failed to evade, pleading old age. 111. This theme would have been familiar to visitors to the Chapel from Petrarch’s Trionfi. Vasari comments: “In the ‘Fedone’ the four rivers of Hades symbolize eternal fluctuation, eternal becoming; Michelangelo wanted to do the same in his original project” (Barocchi 951). Michelangelo’s original intention of carving a mouse, perhaps on the figure of Day, would have represented, had it been executed as planned, a further elaboration of this theme. Why Michelangelo decided not to include this element is unknown. On the mouse, Condivi comments: “And to signify Time he wanted to make a mouse, having left on the work a bit of marble—which, being impeded, he did not do—because that animal gnaws and consumes continuously, not unlike time which devours everything” (Barocchi 971). 112. The most famous visual depiction of this abandonment of productive activity is, of course, Durer’s etching Melancholia, where, however, as frequently in the Renaissance, one could

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argue that the intense inward contemplation of the figure is the sign of great genius bordering on madness. For an excellent survey of Medieval conceptions of acedia, see Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). 113. A good example of this double valence of melancholy in the Italian Renaissance is Vicenzo Cartari’s description of Saturn in his Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi: “I could say, since the Platonists by Saturn symbolized the pure mind, which almost unceasingly contemplates divine things, from which arises occasion to say that the Age of Gold was in her times, and quiet and simple living; this being exactly the life of anyone who seeks to put down the weight of earthly cares, and to raise themselves as much as possible to the contemplation of the things of Heaven” (Cartari, 1615 ed., 31) and, also Cartari: “And because from this planet come for the most part ill effects, they depicted him as old, sad, filthy, with head covered, lazy and slow, because his nature is cold, dry and completely melancholy, as can be seen in the books of those who write about these things” (Venice: Ziletti, 1571), 43, reprinted as Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1976). 114. To make a connection between the monument and medieval discussions of the vices and their effects, one might note that Lorenzo’s high position on the monument, his facial expression and his tense pose recall the French Dominican William Peraldus’ description of the prideful man in his Summa de vitiis (before 1250): “‘Every prideful man is insufferable, over-dressed, pompous in his manner of walking; he has an erect neck, a fierce face, ferocious eyes. He vies for a higher place, and strives to place himself before those better than him; he does not show reverence in his obedience.’ The prideful man does not only cause temporal evil for his neighbor, but also spiritual, for he corrupts him by his bad example. And thus it is said that he sits too high ‘on the throne of pestilence;’ and pride is called a pestilence in reference to the first Psalm, where the gloss says ‘Pestilence is a widespread disease, infesting all or almost all men,’ and adds ‘It is a love of domination, which almost no one escapes.’” 115. Parenthetically, this identification of Lorenzo with superbia and Giuliano with acedia provides indirect evidence that Trexler and Lewis’ identification of the two capitani is indeed the correct one, since the biographies of the two men indicate clearly that Lorenzo was known in the Renaissance for his arrogance, while Giuliano was of a more melancholic, taciturn disposition, a writer of love sonnets and victim of tuberculosis. Balas, following Panofsky, agrees in identifying the figure of Giuliano with Saturn, but sees the figure of Lorenzo as a representation of Jupiter. Given the fact that the biographies of the two men indicate clearly that, of the two, Lorenzo was the more aggressive, martial one, we find it more plausible to view the figure of Lorenzo as representing, not Jupiter, but rather Mars. Trexler and Lewis note that Michelangelo’s Lorenzo was inspired by the Ludovisi Mars, whose breastplate closely resembles that of the Medici capitano. A medal issued in Florence to commemorate Alessandro’s rule also displays, in the space under the bust of Alessandro, an arrow. This could either be a reference to the bent arrows one sometimes encounters on Roman coins as an allusion to the military defeat of enemies, or the astrological sign of Mars, or perhaps both. In the former interpretation, the bent arrow would symbolize the Medici ruler’s complete domination of the city.

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McGrath, Elisabeth. “The Painted Decoration of Rubens’ House.” JWCI XLI (1978): 245–77. Mendelsohn, Leatrice. “The Devil in the Details: Ornament as Emblem and Adage in Two Male Portraits of Bronzino.” In Agnolo Bronzino: Muse of Florence, edited by Liana Cheney, 372–95. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2014. ———. “Saturnian Allusions in Bronzino’s London Allegory.” In Saturn from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by Massimo Ciavolella and Amilcare Iannucci. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1992. ———. “L’Allegoria di Londra del Bronzino e la retorica del carnevale.” In Kunst des Cinquecento in der Toskana, Italienische Forschungen, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Band XVII, edited by M. Cämmerer, 152–67. Munich, 1992. Najemy, John. A History of Florence 1200–1575. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Erwin Panofsky, Raymond Klibansky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. London: Nelson, 1964. Roth, Cecil. The Last Florentine Republic. New York: Russell & Russell, 1968. Rowland, Ingrid. The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Ruvoldt, Maria. “Michelangelo’s Dream.” Art Bulletin 85 (March 2003): 86–113. Saslow, James. The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Shorr, Dorothy. “The Mourning Virgin and Saint John.” Art Bulletin 22 (1940): 61–69. Shrimplin-Evangelidis, Valerie. “Michelangelo and Nicodemism: The Florentine Pietà.” The Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 58–66. Spini, Giorgio. Michelangelo politico e altri studi sul Rinascimento fiorentino. Milan: Unicopli, 1999. Stephens, J. N. The Fall of the Florentine Republic 1512–1530. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Symonds, John Addington. The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Trexler, Richard, and Mary Lewis. “Two Captains and Three Kings: New Light on the Medici Chapel.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (1981): 91–177. Vasari, Giorgio. La Vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568. Edited by Paola Barocchi. Milan: Ricciardi, 1962. ———. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Translated by Gaston de Vere. London: Macmillan, 1912–1915. Waldman, Louis. “‘Miracol’ Novo et Raro’: Two Unpublished Contemporary Satires on Bandinelli’s Hercules.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Museum in Florenz 38 (1994): 419–27. Wallace, William, ed. Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English. New York: Garland, 1995. ———. “Michel Angelus Bonarotus patritius Florentinus.” In Innovation and Tradition: Essays on Renaissance Art and Culture, edited by Dag T. Andersson and Roy Ericksen, 60–74, 162–63. Rome: Kappa, 2000. ———. “Michelangelo’s Leda: The Diplomatic Context.” Renaissance Studies 15 (December 2001): 473–99.

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Watkins, Renée Neu, trans. and ed. Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1978. Wenzel, Siegfried. The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. White, John, and John Shearman. “Raphael’s Tapestries and Their Cartoons.” Art Bulletin 40 (1958): 218–19. Zappella, Christine. “The Program of Michelangelo’s Funeral Apparato: Subversion, Competition, Revealing, Concealing.” Paper presented at the South Central Renaissance Conference, Tucson, AZ, April 3–5, 2014.

CHAPTER THREE

The Compagnia della Cazzuola as Locus of Opposition to Medici Rule

In his life of Jacopo Rustici, Vasari gives us a poignant, though veiled, description of his position vis-à-vis the Medici rulers of Florence by whom he was employed, constrained, for reasons of family obligations, to play the role of courtier/painter at the court of Cosimo deí Medici, to the detriment of his own artistic ambitions: Giovan Francesco, besides being of a noble family, had the means to live honourably, and therefore practiced art more for his own delight and from desire of glory than for gain. And, to tell the truth of the matter, those craftsmen who have as their ultimate and principal end gain and profit, and not honour and glory, rarely become very excellent, even although they may have good and beautiful genius; besides which, labouring for a livelihood, as very many do who are weighed down by poverty and their families, and working not by inclination, when the mind and the will are drawn to it, but by necessity from morning till night, is a life not for men who have honour and glory as their aim, but for hacks, as they are called, and manual labourers, for the reason that good works do not get done without first having been well considered for a long time.1

He has become, in service to his Medici masters, a mere coverer of walls, a decorator. Later on in his life of Rustici, Vasari gives us another poignant description, this time that of the return of Lorenzo Naldini (“Guazzetto”), Rustici’s disciple,

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absent in France at the court of King Francis for many years, to his native city, from which he had been exiled by the Medici regime: That Lorenzo possessed some houses beyond the Porta a San Gallo, in the suburbs that were destroyed on account of the siege of Florence, which houses were thrown to the ground together with the rest by the people. That circumstance so grieved him, that, returning in the year 1540 to revisit his country, when he was within a quarter of a mile of Florence he put the hood of his cloak over his head, covering his eyes, in order that, in entering by that gate, he might not see the suburb and his own houses all pulled down. Wherefore the guards at the gate, seeing him thus muffled up, asked him what that meant, and, having heard from him why he had so covered his face, they laughed at him. Lorenzo, after being a few months in Florence, returned to France, taking his mother with him; and there he still lives and labours.

Why does Vasari end his life of Rustici, in a work intended to celebrate the glorious return of the past grandeur of the Italian arts under the far-sighted and benevolent patronage of the Medici with a story of the return from exile of one of their opponents, his grief over his lost home, and his mocking and humiliation at the hands of the Medici guards? The answer, we suggest, lies in another story told by Vasari. Near the end of the Life of Rustici, he recounts a strange, and, at first sight, inconsequential, anecdote describing the lost lucco of the artist: For Jacopo Salviati the elder, of whom he was much the friend, he made a most beautiful medallion of marble, containing a Madonna, for the chapel in his palace above the Ponte alla Badia, and, round the courtyard, many medallions filled with figures of terra-cotta, together with many other very beautiful ornaments, which were for the most part, nay, almost all, destroyed by the soldiers in the year of the siege, when the palace was set on fire by the party hostile to the Medici. And since Giovan Francesco had a great affection for that place, he would set out at times from Florence to go there just as he was, in his lucco; and once out of the city he would throw it over his shoulder and slowly wander all by himself, lost in contemplation, until he was there. One day among others, being on that road, and the day being hot, he hid the lucco in a thicket of thorn-bushes, and, having reached the palace, had been there two days before he remembered it. In the end, sending his man to look for it, when he saw that he had found it he said: “The world is too good to last long.”

Vasari seems to be hinting here that another meaning lies hidden beneath this apparently trivial anecdote, and discretely urging the reader to seek it out. What is this truth? The answer lies, we suggest, in the symbolic meaning of the lost lucco. The lucco was, for Florentines of the late fifteenth century, a symbol of the voluntary simplicity and self-abnegation in service of the state characteristic of the Florentine republic, which, as historians have noted, was adopted by the Medici as

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a sign of their allegiance to this traditional set of values as they consolidated their hold over Florentine political life. Rustici’s loss and recovery of it on his way out of the city to his villa in the hills can only, in our view, be a symbol of the loss and recovery of Florence’s past as a republic free of Medici rule. Vasari had already described Rustici at the beginning of the Life, where he recounts his artistic training under Leonardo, as being, while no lover of the republican regime which replaced Medici rule after 1494, also “no friend of the Medici regime,” choosing to live quietly in his house on a modest income sufficient for his needs, producing the occasional work of art as it suited him. Taken together with Vasari’s own veiled portrait of himself as a mere painter of walls for the Medici and the hints he leaves for the reader in the stories of Naldini’s return home and the lost lucco, the conclusion seems inescapable that the entire Life of Rustici is an encoded expression of Vasari’s own discontent with the Medici regime, and his wish for the return of an earlier, and freer, form of life to the city. Vasari had already pointedly remarked that the festivities he is about to describe no longer exist in the Florence of his day, but, for this very reason, are worthy of remembrance. Describing the foundation-moment of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, Vasari remarks: The Company of the Cazzuola, which was similar to the other [the Compagnia del Paiuolo], and to which Giovan Francesco belonged, had its origin in the following manner. One evening in the year 1512 there were at supper in the garden that Feo d’Agnelo the hunchback, a fife-player and a very merry fellow, had in the Campaccio, with Feo himself, Ser Bastiano Sagginati, Ser Raffaello del Beccaio, Ser Cecchino dei Profumi, Girolamo del Giocondo, and Il Baia, and, while they were eating their ricotta, the eyes of Baia fell on a heap of lime with the trowel sticking in it, just as the mason had left it the day before, by the side of the table in a corner of the garden. Whereupon, taking some of the lime with that trowel, or rather, mason’s trowel, he dropped it all into the mouth of Feo, who was waiting with gaping jaws for a great mouthful of ricotta from another of the company. Which seeing, they all began to shout: “A Trowel, a Trowel!”

Once again, Vasari seems to be hinting at another meaning hidden beneath the surface of his text. In this chapter, we will take Vasari’s hint and attempt to decipher the strange festivities of this association.

Tyrants Punished, the Just Rewarded As Fred Tromly has noted, the plays of Seneca were extremely popular in the Renaissance, and exerted a powerful influence on Renaissance drama.2 Tromly

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focuses his discussion on the myth of Tantalus, tracing its influence particularly in the dramas of Marlowe, where the myth is used to symbolize the fraught relations between the Elizabethan court and its courtier/intellectuals, even expressing the frustrations of Marlowe himself and his friends, highly educated and ambitious, but eternally frustrated by their inability to find employment at court. Tromly cites Levin’s important work, in which this entire phenomenon is called “overreaching.” He notes the profound influence this latter work has had on Marlowe studies, making readers aware of the great importance of classical myths, and the Tantalus myth in particular, to Renaissance dramatists desiring to convey moral truths in a symbolic manner. The myth was also very popular in the visual arts of the Renaissance, where Tantalus’ expulsion from Heaven was taken as a symbol of the arrogance and pride of the rich and powerful, from which they will be eventually cast down. For Renaissance mythographers, he was the symbol of greed:

Fig. 3.1: Alciati, Emblemata, Tantalus reaching for the apples (Credit: By permission of the University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections).

We will examine another meaning of the Tantalus myth, one hinted at in the works of the mythographers, but not directly expressed. This is Tantalus seen, not as a symbol of greed in a general sense, but more particularly, the greed and unbridled appetites of the tyrant. This myth will be seen to be of fundamental importance to understanding the political meaning inherent in the feste of the Cazzuola, where the tyrant punished, symbolized by Tantalus, stands at the center of their feastings, and is made to reenact, over and over again, in a ritualistic manner, the sufferings vented on the tyrant for his tyrannical behaviour, opposed

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in stark contrast to the food given to the participants as reward for their politically righteous behavior. To understand this latter, political, meaning of the myth of Tantalus, we must turn to Seneca’s masterpiece, the Thyestes. We will focus on two specific aspects of the play which underlie the festivities of the Cazzuola: the infernal, satanic quality of their performances, and the contrast between the punishment of the tyrant, symbolized by the withholding of food, and the food given to the righteous as reward for their politically ethical behaviour. This is the fundamental dyad which underlies the festivities of the Cazzuola, where the food of the gods is given to the just in Heaven, and food is withheld from the tyrant in Hell. Both the infernal, hellish quality of their performances, centered around the giving and withholding of food, and its political meaning, all derive, then, from the Thyestes of Seneca. The Hellish quality appears near the beginning of the play, where Seneca gives a masterful description of the haunted glade which lies behind the royal palace.3 Important to note here is the location of this place: directly behind the royal palace. So, from the beginning of the play, we are made aware of its political meaning: the royal palace is an infernal place, where horrible deeds are committed and ancient hatreds avenged. This political meaning is reinforced by the philosophical intermezzi which punctuate the action of the play, and which express commonplaces from Stoic philosophy regarding the proper ethical behaviour of kings, where he is abjured to forswear the pride which comes from his position, and adopt the humility and just behaviour of the simple man. Finally, the figure of Atreus himself is perhaps the most vivid image in all of classical literature of the horrific and terrifying figure of the tyrant, consumed by hatred, and bent on revenge: When to this place maddened Atreus came, dragging his brother’s sons, the altars were decked—but who could worthily describe the deed? Behind their backs he fetters the youths’ princely hands and their sad brows he binds with purple fillets. Nothing is lacking, neither incense, nor sacrificial wine, the knife, the salted meal to sprinkle on the victims. … Himself is priest; himself with baleful prayer chants the death-song with boisterous utterance; himself stands by the altar; himself handles those doomed to death, sets them in order and lays hand on the knife; himself attends to all—no part of the sacred rite is left undone. … As in the jungle by the Ganges river a hungry tigress wavers between two bulls, eager for each prey, but doubtful where first to set her fangs … so does cruel Atreus eye the victims doomed by his impious wrath.4

The reason for this is that he is haunted by the original sin of his distant forebear, Tantalus, guilty of the sin of carving up his son Pelops and serving his dismembered body to the gods at their feast as a stew. Tantalus’ cannibalism is the reason

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he is thrown out of Heaven and denied the food of the gods, and, driven by the Furies, is compelled to repeat this sin over and over again, Tantalus having eaten his son Pelops, Pelops’ progeny compelled to devour their own, their offspring compelled in turn to consume their children, in an unending cycle of violence and sacrilege destined to continue down the ages. What is important to note is that, although the mythographers hardly mention it, this original sin of cannibalism is actually, in the classical tradition, a symbol for the tyrant’s devouring his own, that is, the citizens of the state. Perhaps the mythographers make scarce mention of this fact because this was the unmentionable sin of their civilization, beset as it was by tyrants of many kinds.5 This image of cannibalism as symbol of tyrannical behaviour is also encountered in classical art and literature in the figure of Saturn, devourer of his own children, as Panofsky has pointed out.6 It also appears in Dante’s Inferno, where the tyrant Ugolino, driven by hunger, is forced to eat his own children, “brancolando tre giorni sopra le loro corpi,” and reaches its final, most horrifying visualization in the figure of Satan, placed under the traitors, frozen in Hell, bereft of the life-giving warmth of the most important of the Christian virtues, love, and eternally compelled to devour his own progeny, the tyrants, in a perverted inversion of the life-giving and generative power of Christian love. Once understood as the symbol of the tyrant, the hidden meaning of the festivities of the Cazzuola may be understood: they reenact, over and over, this deriving of food, the punishment of the tyrant for his cannibalistic devouring of his own children, as opposed to the rewarding of Heavenly food to the just for their faithful adherence to the political virtue of the republican cause. All the other festivities described by Vasari center also around the theme of the tyrant punished for his sins: Jupiter, who reveals the sinful embrace of Mars and Venus for all to see; the lustful and angry Pluto who carries off the chaste Prosperina (whose abduction was also tied to the Tantalus myth, since, distracted by grief over her missing daughter, Ceres ate the shoulder of Pelops, which was then replaced by an ivory prosthesis). Even the Harpies, God’s avengers (whose name derives from the Greek word “to snatch” and who torment King Phineas for his sin of blinding his children) appear in the Renaissance dramas associated with the Cazzuola, where they have an explicitly political meaning. Given this fact, it seems very likely that we may imagine a scene of Phineas tormented by the Harpies, who snatch his food, followed by an enactment of the Tantalus story by the members of the Cazzuola, and after this scene, a heavenly feast given to the members as a reward for their politically virtuous behaviour. Vasari hints at this when he remarks that Francesco and Domenico Rucellai, in their turn as masters of the company, performed a play called “le Arpie di Fineo,” and that Giovanni Gaddi, with the help of Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea del Sarto and Rustici himself, presented a performance of a

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“Tantalus in Hell,” at which all the members of the company, attired in the dress of the gods, were given a lavish feast. He pointedly concludes his account of this festa by remarking “with all the rest of the fable, to recount which would make our story too long,” hinting, just as he did earlier in the life of Rustici, that the reader should consider very carefully what has been left out. What has been left out, as we know from classical mythology, is the punishment of Tantalus for his sins.7 And in the classical tradition, the Harpies were explicitly associated with the theme of tyranny: not only do they appear in classical Greek tragedy as the tormentors of unjust kings (the example of Oedipus being perhaps the best-known), but, more specifically, they appear in several versions of the myth of the Golden Fleece as tormentors of Jason, a legend, as noted above, which, in classical antiquity, alluded symbolically to the stealing by a tyrant of a freely-constituted democracy. Hence both the plays presented by members of the Cazzuola to which Vasari makes explicit reference—the Arpie and Tantalus in Hell—present, in highly dramatic fashion, the spectacle of the punishment of the tyrant for his political sins. And, in the dramatic performances presented by members of the Cazzuola, these themes are dramatically contrasted by performances which present the themes of rebirth and renewal, taken either from the classical, or the Christian tradition, as we shall see. We see just this scenario of punishment followed by reward in another of the feste described by Vasari, where, after being forced to eat the horrific food of Pluto (the classical symbol of the tyrant, as noted above) and listen to the screams of the damned, the tables are removed, beautiful music is heard, there is a short pause (one may imagine here Orpheus strumming his lyre, which had the power to soothe the sufferings of the damned), a play is performed, and the members are led to an upstairs room to enjoy a delicious feast. Once again, as in the enactment of the Tantalus myth, we observe the contrast of infernal feasting with heavenly banqueting.

Popular Religious Traditions in the Feasts of the Cazzuola: The Potenze In the feste of the Cazzuola, this heavenly feasting of the just is accompanied, significantly, with pageants associated with the religious traditions of republican Florence, which Vasari calls “nuvole” and describes in detail in his life of Aristotile da San Gallo. Many of the members of the Cazzuola were from the working or middle classes, a group whose exclusion from any participation in the political life of the new regime was an explicit feature of Medici policy, whose roots date back to the Revolt of the Ciompi in 1378, which left a profound fear and distrust

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of these classes in the minds of the ottimati, leading to profound changes in the structure and functioning of the Florentine republic, and beginning its gradual conversion into an oligarchy run by a few powerful families, and, later, the Medici with their system of clientage and patronage, “friends” and favors.8 Under the new regime these members would have enjoyed this return of Savonarolan and republican pageantry, now forbidden in the Medici-controlled world above, where, as Shearman has pointed out, they replaced the ceremonial carri of the guilds with chariots designed to celebrate Medicean hegemony over Tuscany; Leo burned the carri dei mercatanti upon his election to the Papacy on April 24, 1513, replacing them with new ones; significantly, these Medicean chariots were themselves burned upon the brief restoration of the republic in 1527.9 This conversion of the carts of the guilds into chariots celebrating Medici power parallels the gradual infiltration, neutralization, and conversion of the academies described above into organs of the Medicean state.10 Vasari alludes to these popular Florentine religious traditions in several veiled allusions to earlier celebrations of Florentine religious life, particularly those festivals associated with the followers of Savonarola. He notes that, following the one of the feasts of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, the celebration was brought to a sudden conclusion by a shower of rain. We noted above the presence of spectacles called nuvole in Vasari’s Life of Aristotle di San Gallo. The shower of rain which brings to a sudden conclusion the feast described by Vasari might also be, we would suggest, a reference to this same tradition, here also intended to symbolize divine intervention. Brucker reproduces an image of this spectacle in his book on Florentine public life, which shows an azure cloth, symbolizing Heaven, which was erected along the street leading to the Baptistry:

Fig. 3.2: La Festa di San Giovanni, showing Baptistry and banners (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

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Cummings, in his book on Medici festivals, also mentions this feature of Florentine popular religious festivities.11 What makes these specifically Savonarolan references is that the trial by fire of Savonarola and his followers in April 1498, intended to settle the question of the Friar’s authority over Florentine religious life, was interrupted, as noted by a contemporary chronicler, by a sudden shower of rain. This was interpreted by contemporary Florentines as a sign of divine intervention: as Gareffi has pointed out, for the followers of Savonarola, a propitious one; for his opponents, an example of a canny use of religion to evade a public spectacle which would have been damaging to the reputation of the Friar. Hence we would suggest Vasari might have included this detail as a clue, analogous to his passing reference to the Gates of Paradise and the Threshing Floor mentioned below, to the essentially Savonarolan nature of this festa, in which, as we suggested above, the punishment of Pluto for his rape of Proserpina is meant to allude to its Christian equivalent, the punishment of the tyrant in Hell. In a remarkable passage describing one of the feste of the Compagnia del Paiuolo (a more restricted version of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, with which it shared several members, founded, as noted above, along with the Cazzuola in the fall of 1512), Vasari describes the ceremonial presentation of a replica of San Giovanni, made entirely of materials to be eaten: Andrea del Sarto presented an octagonal temple similar to that of S. Giovanni, but raised upon columns. The pavement was a vast plate of jelly, with a pattern of mosaic in various colours; the columns, which had the appearance of porphyry, were sausages, long and thick; the socles and capitals were of Parmesan cheese; the cornices of sugar, and the tribune was made of sections of marchpane. In the center was a choir-desk made of cold veal, with a book of lasagne that had the letters and notes of the music made of pepper-corns; and the singers at the desk were cooked thrushes standing with their beaks open and with certain little shirts after the manner of surplices, made of fine cauls of pigs, and behind them, for the basses, were two fat young pigeons, with six ortolans that sang the soprano.12

This raising of the old San Giovanni—cherished symbol of communal Florence, dating to the eleventh century—on columns of porphyry would seem to be a symbol of its refoundation, or re-elevation by the members of the company, who recall and cherish its sacred character as a symbol of a free Florentine republic. In this interpretation, the consumption of this holy edifice by the members of the company would take on the quality of an almost sacred rite. Later in the Life of Rustici, Vasari notes that the first meeting of the Cazzuola took place at Santa Maria Nuova at a place called the Aia, “where the gates of S. Giovanni were cast in bronze,” Aia meaning threshing-floor, the place

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of God’s final judgment, where the good are separated from the damned forever, the ones destined for Heaven, the others for Hell. In our view, these details, just as the columns which support del Sarto’s San Giovanni, are not merely gratuitous, but represent another of those hints to the reader to look beneath the surface of the text for its hidden religious and political meaning. Another of the spectacles enacted by members of the Compagnia del Paiuolo also dealt with this same theme of renewal, this time, taken not from the Christian, but rather the classical tradition. For his contribution to one of their feste, Rustici presented a cauldron in the form of a pie, in which Ulysses was dipping his father to make him young again, the figures being fashioned of boiled capons, with various other good things to eat. In this creation, we note again the presence of a cauldron, this time a place of rebirth and renewal, in stark contrast to the infernal cauldron in which Tantalus boiled his son Pelops and served his body to the gods as a test of their omniscience, a sin for which he was thrown out of Heaven. We would also suggest that the canzone della Cazzuola, sung, perhaps, at the Carnival festivities of 1513 to celebrate the restoration of the Medici to rule in the city, also contains an encrypted message directed against the Medici: Donne, come vedete, siam Mastri di murare, e siam venuti qui per lavorare. Noi siam di stran Paese, dove noi abbiam fatt’opere assai: perché da noi s’intese, che ‘l murar vi diletta sempre mai, siam buoni e solleciti operai, e farenvi piacere, e l’Arte nostra per prova vedere. Non sa ciascun che mura, acconciar ben le pietre come noi; bisogna la misura ritta tener, per soddisfare a voi; chi mura fuor di squadra, non val poi al farne il paragone, perché dispiace al più delle persone. Il sapere operare ben la cazzuola colla martellina, fa l’opera lodare, e ben l’un sasso all’altro s’avvicina;

Ladies, as you can see We are master Masons And we’ve come here to work. We come from a far-off Country Where we have built many things; Since it is our understanding That you like building more than ever, We are good and careful workers, And will give you pleasure And show you what our Art is all about. Not everyone who builds Knows how to place the stones together as well as we; You have to hold the ruler straight To give you satisfaction; Whoever builds out of square Is not worthy of comparison, Because most people don’t like it. He who knows how to use his trowel well Together with his hammer Wins praise for his work And places one stone next to another well;

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fermandoli poi ben colla calcina, e turando ogni fesso, sta bene insieme ogni cosa commesso. E si può intonacare la Casa vecchia, arricciare, e pulire, e per tutto imbiancare, ma non può bella e netta riuscire: dica pur a suo modo chi vuol dire, che queste Case vecchie ricetto son da Calabroni, e Pecchie. Chi tien la Casa vecchia, e la volesse in parte racconciare, indarno s’apparecchia, chè ‘l nuovo, e ‘l vecchio insieme però bisogna il vecchio via levare, e fondarsi al sicuro con nuova Casa, e nuovo, e sodo muro. Il murar co’ mattoni è cosa grossa, debole e fallace, che tutti non son buoni, ed a chi ‘intend l’arte molto spiace: ognun non è di tal murar capace, Ché se ne rompe assai, e con fatica a ristuccar poi gli hai. Non è poco importante buona e netta calcina, e buon grassello, che di dietro e davante s’arriccia, e spiana il muro e fassi bello: però abbiate giudizio, e cervello nel pigliar Muratori, che bene, presto, e netto ognun lavori. E per levar li sporti abbiam questi valenti Manovali, tanto gagliardi, e forti, che fra Talian non è tant’altri tali; questi con subbie, manovelle, e pali aranno si buon’opra

Joining them well with cement, And stopping up any hole; So everything fits together well. It’s true, you could put new plaster on an old House, fill the cracks and clean it, And give it a nice new coat of paint But it wouldn’t turn out well: Say what you will, These old Houses Are nests of hornets and stinging wasps. Whoever has an old House And wants to fix it up halfway Just exerts himself in vain Since old and new cannot go together, non può stare; And so you have to take the old one away completely And start all over with a solid foundation a new House, and a solid wall. Building with bricks is a sloppy affair, Weak and wobbling Since not every brick is sound, And to one who knows the art displeasing; Not everyone can build such a thing, Because it will all fall down, And you’ll have great difficulty fixing up again. Of no little importance is good and clean mortar and fine lime To spread on front and rear And levels off the wall and makes it nice; And so, take care and use good judgment In choosing Masons, That each one works well and fast and clean. And to raise the parapets, We have these valiant Workers, So sturdy and strong That there are no others like them in Italy; With pulleys and bars and beams They will make such a good work

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ch’ogni gran Torre manderan sozzopra. E quando noi Maestri fussimo stracchi per tanto murare, saranno ancor sì destri, che in cambio nostro lo sapran ben fare; e però, Donne, non vi può mancare chi molto ben lavori, e meglio i manovali, che i muratori.

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That they will overturn every great Tower. And when we Masters Are tired from all our building, These will be so able That they will take over for us and will know how to do it well; And so, Ladies, you will never lack for One who knows how to work, And the Workers even better than the masons.13

The reference to a certain “Casa,” full of “pecchie e calabroni,” in urgent need of restoration by certain “valenti muratori” (a task which is impossible, according to the text of the song, owing to the impossibility of putting new bricks next to old mortar), is, we would suggest, a reference to the House of Medici (note the capitalization of the initial letter of the word), full of “hornets and stinging wasps,” the latter an echo of the phrase “my House has become the habitation of scorpions and spiders” from the Book of Revelations, a theme used often by Savonarola in his sermons to denounce the rule of the Medici as incapable of salvation and in imminent danger of Divine Judgment. The phrase “valenti muratori,” in this interpretation, would be the members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola themselves, who will construct, upon the ruins of the House of Medici, a new and splendid edifice, constructed, unlike the ugly “bricks and mortar” of the palace on the via Larga, rather of shining marble, akin to that of the new Temple of Jerusalem which will replace it. To those who might argue that the rule of the Medici in Florence is still capable of modification (a view perhaps best embodied in the numerous proposals elicited from various individuals by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici upon his imminent election as pope as a means of mollifying potential opponents of the Medici; a request which also served, according to Varchi, as a clever ruse to discern their true feelings regarding his rule), this cryptic phrase would provide an answer, in its allusion to the impossibility of “putting new stone against old bricks,” that is, of making any compromise with the old Medici regime. The only alternative is to destroy the old edifice completely before embarking upon the task of constructing a new and better one upon its foundations. Such a task the new generation of patriots (the “forti e valenti muratori”) are more than willing and capable of accomplishing. As Mozzati has noted, every element of this song finds an exact parallel in an elaborate ceremony enacted at one of the feasts of the Compagnia della Cazzuola: first, the constructing and then the pulling down of an old edifice, followed by the carrying in and eating of a column, built, not of brick, but rather of shining

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new marble, symbol, we would suggest, of the old Baptistry, cherished symbol of communal Florence, in front of which stood precisely such a column. In this interpretation, the eating of such a column by members of the company would take on the quality of an almost sacred act. Just as in the feste of the Cazzuola, in those of the Paiuolo, we observe the same combination of religious themes and celebratory feasting; the only element missing from Vasari’s description of the feste of the Paiuolo present at the feasts of the Cazzuola being the infernal, nocturnal aspect of suffering and punishment. However, in the last section of this chapter, we will see that there is a hint of this subject also in the feasts of this company. The prehistory of the strange celebrations of the Cazzuola would be those popular associations associated with specific neighborhoods and trades described by Villani, in which religious and purely festive activities were combined, particularly active at the Feast of San Giovanni, and which Gori, in his study of Florentine popular feste, says were called potenze. Another feature of these early associations which finds a later expression in the ceremonies of the Cazzuola was the free mixing of popular and upper classes in their celebrations.14 It is also interesting to note that many of Machiavelli’s canti carnascialeschi may have served as the texts to the music which accompanied the feste of the Cazzuola, and that the founding “charter” of the Compagnia may have been Machiavelli’s Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere, in which all the rigid rules and elaborate hierarchies of the Medicean academies are completely overturned, and a kind of happy chaos rules, where women dominate men, members hurl scabrous insults at each other, and a kind of bacchic and Rabelesian chaos rules.15 Machiavelli’s Canto dei amanti disperati may have been the text for the music of the infernal feast of Pluto just described, where the screams of the damned, suffering the torments of illicit love, are heard, together with his Canto di Pluto e Proserpina; his Canto di Marte e Venere possibly the text accompanying the unveiling and punishment of Mars described by Vasari; and his Canto de’ romiti recited or sung at the last meeting of the Cazzuola before the reduction of their activities into an annual event, where, according to Vasari’s account, Saint Andrew himself appears and rebukes the members for their profligacy, warning them that they were going to end up in the hospital if they continued in this manner, which, taken together with its warning that the citizens of Florence flee the coming conflagration by fleeing into the hills, would seem to be an encoded warning to the members that their activities had been found out, and that they had better get out of town if they didn’t want to wind up in the hospital, that is, subject to Medici reprisals.16 Hence, in all the various of their festivities, the members would have been treated to an image of the tyrant punished and the just (themselves) rewarded

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for their virtuous behaviour, which, because it is in contrast to that of the tyrant, can only be political in nature. This is the meaning encoded in what at first sight appear to be the merely bizarre and eccentric festivities of the Compagnia, whose description by Vasari is, we suggest, deliberately obscure, intended to conceal but also simultaneously to hint at the artist’s own sympathies with the activities of this group as a locus of secret opposition to Medici rule, constrained as he was by family obligations to play the part of faithful servant to his Medici masters, all the while harbouring a secret, but profound, sympathy and nostalgia for the values and institutions of the vanished Florentine republic.17

Florentine Feasts as Political Resistance: The Black, or Hell, Banquet The bizarre, highly symbolic, anti-medicean feste of the Cazzuola should be placed in the context of other similar entertainments in Renaissance Florence. Mozzati cites a feast given by the Soderini family at the end of the quattrocento, in which banners with the word “Libertas” were prominently displayed, and birds (perhaps also symbolic of Florentine freedom) flew out of a cake.18 Domenico Zanré, in his study of the non-conformist Accademia del Piano describes a bizarre nighttime ritual in the house of the Panciatichi family in which the pro-medicean archbishop of Pisa received a kind of posthumous exorcism and a bat flew out of his head.19 Butters describes a nighttime feast given by one of the families of anti-medicean ottimati in early 1519 in which the room was draped in black, the arms of the city were displayed upside-down, and weeping women were painted above the motto “Liberty ground under foot.” The organizer of this festa was arrested, tortured, and consigned to the galleys.20 Phyllis Pray Bober has traced these strange festivities, in which the guests are treated to an infernal meal, and which she terms “black banquets,” to a banquet given by the Emperor Domitian in 89 AD as part of the public celebrations at the conclusion of the Dacian war, at which the senators in attendance were greeted, in a darkened room, draped in black, with skulls and skeletons prominently displayed on the walls, by the sight, at each place setting, of silver tombstones with their names inscribed on them.21 Here we might note a very close resemblance to the infernal banquet of Pluto as described by Vasari, in which, we may recall, the room was also draped in black, and the guests “enjoyed” a meal of scorpions and spiders, served by Devils with pitchforks in their hands, and drank wine out of beakers in the shape of cauldrons, before being led upstairs to a splendid room to enjoy a splendid feast, and to witness a light-hearted comedy derived from the classical tradition.

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Another close resemblance between Domitian’s banquet and the Cazzuola’s Feast of Pluto is the marked sadistic element. One can only imagine the thoughts which went through the minds of the senators as they were served a feast which was, in effect, their own funeral supper. Their terror would have only been increased by their awareness of Domitian’s intent to first terrorize, and then gradually eliminate, their entire political class. In the case of Rustici’s feast, the purpose of this sadistic element is less clear. If we take Vasari at his word, some of the guests present at this feast were genuinely terrified at the sudden appearance of Il Baia, the bombardiere, in the middle of a darkened room, his face lit by the light of a single candle. It does seem possible, however, that these individuals might have represented outsiders invited to the feast, whereas the original members of the company, familiar with its rituals and customs, might have found the discomfit of the invited guests genuinely amusing.22

Fig. 3.3: Sandro Botticelli, The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, detail (Credit: Copyright of the Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY ).

Support for this hypothesis comes from yet another “black banquet” given by Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi in Rome in March of 1519 and described in detail by

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Gareffi in his book on the influence of popular feste on Italian Renaissance theatre.23 At this feast, the guests enter the banqueting hall through a black door, only to see the hall itself draped in black, lit by a single candle, by the light of which they can see, suspended on the walls, an array of skulls and bones. They are seated at a table draped also in black, where they see a wooden bowl also containing skulls and bones; inside the skulls are cooked beans, and inside the bones are sausages. Their host bids them to eat this “colazione,” and then to follow him into another room to enjoy their “cena.” Just as they are about to enjoy their meal, they are deafened by a huge clap of thunder, and the stars which decorate the walls of this room begin to spin around. Then the plates upon which their salad is served begin to fly off the table, and the goblets of wine, upset by a rumbling from beneath the floor, jump off the table. Understandably enough, having already partaken of wine and food, the cardinals and the other guests at the banquet begin to vomit, and, according to the chronicler’s account, rush from the room in terror, invituperati, with the exception of the three prostitutes and two buffoni seated with them at the table, who take advantage of their sudden departure to gorge themselves on the remaining food. In this humorous and vivid account, which Gareffi derives from the diaries of the Venetian observer of Florentine life, Marin Sanudo, in his turn citing a letter of a contemporary, we are immediately struck by the close resemblance of Strozzi’s feast to the Feast of Pluto as described by Vasari: the darkened room, the skulls and bones, the fiero pasto concealed within the bones on the table, the mixing of social classes, the change of rooms, the sudden termination of the feast by a clap of thunder. Perhaps most important, we also observe a dramatic contrast between an infernal feast and a celestial one, although the latter is interrupted by celestial events beyond the guests’ control. And here yet again we encounter the same sadistic element we observed in the banquets of Domitian and Rustici: after having consumed abundant servings of wine and food, and seen the celestial spheres rotating around the table, the cardinals present, according to the account of the Venetian envoy present at the feast, became very ill and rushed from the table, in the words of the chronicler, invituperati. The latter word presumably refers not only to their physical state of discomfort, but also to the feelings of humiliation and stizza engendered in them by the spectacle to which they had just been treated. Given the abundance of homosexuals at the papal court, a familiar topos in Renaissance Italy, their close proximity to members of Rome’s demimonde seated next to them at the table would presumably have increased the discomfit of these men of God considerably. We suggested above that the infernal feasts described by Vasari in his Life of Giovanfrancesco Rustici were intended to encode a covert critique of Medici rule

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in Florence after the restoration of the family to power in the fall of 1512, in which the nature of this rule, and its deserved reward, are conveyed by a highly sophisticated and symbolic use of classical myths in which the punishment of the tyrant, taking the form of a withholding of food, is vividly portrayed. And as with the feasts of Domitian, Soderini and Rustici just described, it seems very possible that there was a political subtext to Strozzi’s feast as well: Strozzi was a member of a family known as staunch opponents of the Medici regime, and those cardinals present (Cybo, Rossi, Salviati and Ridolfi) were all closely associated with Pope Leo. As Gareffi also notes, all four of these cardinals were also cousins of the Medici Pope. Hence it seems entirely possible that, just as in the feste of the Cazzuola, a message was being sent to those in power: there still remained places in the cultural, if not the political, space of Renaissance Italy where these individuals did not dictate to others, but were themselves subject to the whims of others, and were forced to witness a spectacle which, to the most perceptive of them, would have represented, in a highly symbolic and recondite way, the just punishment meted out to those who would tyrannize others. We also noted above the possibility that the shower of rain which terminated the Feast of Pluto described by Vasari might be an allusive reference to the shower of rain which brought to a sudden halt the trial by fire of Savonarola, as well as to those Florentine popular religious feste described by Brucker and Cummings, in which a sudden shower of rain (together with the nuvole and the cielo consisting of blue cloth, symbols of Heaven) also played a prominent role, presumably as a symbol of Divine Judgment.24 Brucker also notes that this cielo was erected to protect the workers from the sun during preparations for the Feast of San Giovanni on June 24. Here once again, we see a reference to the working classes of Florence, who, as noted above, comprised the majority of the members of the Cazzuola. What is significant, then, about all these banquets, in which (with the exception of Domitian’s) themes of heaven and Hell are mixed together with classical and (in the case of the Compagnia della Cazzuola) medieval religious elements, is that they all contain a political subtext, more or less clearly expressed. In the case of Domitian’s banquet, this message, directed at the terrified senators in attendance, is that the Emperor is in total control of their fates, and can have them killed at any moment, part, according to Bober, of his systematic campaign of intimidation, and then final elimination, of the senatorial class. In the case of Soderini’s banquet, as well, we suggest, as those of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, this message is that the Medici rulers of Florence are, in effect, tyrants, who share the same rapaciousness as their classical forerunners, and will share the same fate.25

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When we consider the strange feste of the Cazzuola described by Vasari against the background of these other anti-medicean celebrations, with which they share many common elements, our interpretation of the feste of the Cazzuola as expressing, albeit in a highly coded and oblique way, opposition to Medici rule in Florence, becomes more plausible.26

The Tour of Heaven and Hell We have been discussing how the elaborate celebrations of the Compagnia della Cazzuola described—albeit in a fragmentary and allusive way—by Vasari would seem to allude to contemporary Florentine religious festivities in which the themes of the punishment of the powerful, including the kings of this world, and the rewards given to the righteous play a prominent role. But there is one spectacle well-known to the Medieval tradition which allows us to consolidate and incorporate all the scattered details provided by Vasari into one coherent picture. This is the “guided tour through Heaven and Hell” provided by a trusted guide to a soul caught up in the things of this world, and intended to remind him of the risks he runs by his insufficient attention to his spiritual state. We encounter this theme, which clearly forms the inspiration for Dante’s Divine Comedy, and which one scholar has proposed finds its ultimate derivation from the Arabic tradition, in many works of Medieval art and literature.27 One example which might be cited here which forms an especially close parallel with the strange festivities described by Vasari in his life of Rustici is the popular mid-twelfth-century The Vision of Tundale, where a knight, having suffered a seizure at supper, is led through the three realms, where he encounters, at an infernal banquet, “furnaces crammed with the bodies of sinners and demons, cooking, breaking down and reconstituting.”28 Here we observe the same combination of punishment and the theme of cannibalistic devouring we observed in the feste of the Compagnia della Cazzuola and its classical and Medieval antecedents we have been discussing. Significant for our interpretation of the elaborate festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as a covert critique of Medici rule is the fact that it is a knight, an individual high on the Medieval hierarchy, who is led on this journey intended to rebuke him for his sins and encourage him to lead a better life. Perhaps one of the forestieri, that is, guests not members of the Company present at the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola—where, as we have been suggesting, their elaborate stagings of classical myths conveyed, in a highly allusive manner, a criticism of the tyrannical nature of Medici rule in Florence, presented in stark contrast to themes of Christian, and specifically Savonarolan,

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renewal—would have recalled the tradition just discussed and emerged from the lower rooms of the Compagnia into the squares of Florence bearing in mind not only the specific features of the spectacles to which he had just been treated, but also their medieval precursors, the vivid images of punishment followed by heavenly reward embodied, as we have seen, in these Medieval images and later incorporated into the elaborate public spectacles of the Florentine popular religious tradition. Another piece of evidence which tends to support our claim that the Compagnia della Cazzuola represented a clandestine locus of opposition to Medici rule in Florence, where, in a festive, carnivalesque atmosphere, the members enacted, in a highly encoded and symbolic way, their opposition to Medici rule, and where long-suppressed Savonarolan and popular elements were allowed, in the safety of the hidden rooms of its members, to re-emerge, comes from the historical record itself. Trexler cites what would seem to represent the original inspiration for the bizarre banquet of Pluto described above, where, as we may recall, the members of the Cazzuola “enjoyed” an infernal feast, amid the screams of the damned and the lamentations of Proserpina, captive to the angry and lustful Pluto, symbol of the tyrant, before being led upstairs to enjoy their true feast and enjoy a performance of Pisani’s Philogenia, a humanist comedy from the early 1400s and, as noted below, possibly the original inspiration for Machiavelli’s Mandragola. Trexler cites a description by Antonio Pucci of an elaborate spectacle which took place on the Arno on May Day, 1304: Ed in sull’Arno aveva piatte, e navi, Con palchi d’assi; or udirai bel giuoco,

E come que’, che ‘l facieno eran savii. Dall’una parte avea caldaie a fuoco, Dall’altra avea graticole, e schedoni, Ed un gran Diavol quivi era per cuoco. Nella sentina avea molti Dimonii, I qua’ recavan l’anime a’ tormenti,

Ch’ordinati eran, di molte ragioni. Qual si ponia sopra carbon cocenti,

On the Arno were rafts and ships And many bleachers made of beams; now you will hear a great bit of fun, and How wise were those who did it. On one side there were huge caul drons with fire, On the other grills and placards, And a great Devil was there as a cook. In the bilge were many Demons, Who were bringing the souls to the punishments, which had been ordained, And were of many kinds. Some were placing burning coals on them,

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E qual nella caldaia, che bolliva, E di sentina uscivano i lamenti. La gente, che d’intorno il pianto udiva, E poi vedea a sì fatto governo Co’ rassi, e con gli uncin gente cattiva, Che parean tutti Diavoli d’inferno a chi li vedea, Immaginando que’ del luogo eterno. Sette tormenti v’eran per ragione, Punendo i sette peccati mortali, E sovra ognuno scritto in un pennone: In questo luogo son puniti i tali. Alcuna volta v’avresti veduti Serpenti, e draghi feroci con ali, E contraffatti Diavoli cornuti, Che forcon da letame avieno in mano, Di più ragione, tutti neri, e sannuti.

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And some were placing them in the boiling cauldron, And from the bilge you could hear their cries. The people, who heard the cries all around Saw then an evil crew at work with rasps and claws, So that they all seemed Devils from Hell, Terrifying to those who saw them, Imagining those in that eternal place. Seven torments there were for each region, Punishing the seven mortal sins, And over each was written on a banner “In this place are such ones punished.” At other times you would have seen Serpents, and fierce dragons with wings, And costumes of horned Devils Who held pitchforks for manure in their hands, Of every type, all black, and with fangs.29

Here we encounter, in an earlier version, all the elements of the infernal feast of Pluto described by Vasari: a Devil as cook (in Vasari’s account, Pluto as host), boiling cauldrons, the screams of the damned, demons, serpents (in Vasari’s account, the scorpions and spiders which serve as “dessert”), devils with pitchforks in hand (in Vasari’s account, a shovel with which he loads the food onto the guests’ plates). Trexler notes that this festival was the first popular festival on record, an expression of the public exuberance of the various artisan festive groups who, in the 1330s and 1340s, elected a “signore,” and, on May Day, “marched through the streets in festive gaiety.”30 Hence, we would suggest, in their adaptation of this festa, or others similar to it, in their own celebrations, the members of the Cazzuola were making a deliberate, if allusive, reference to these earlier displays, manifestations of the popular power and festive spirit of the neighborhoods and trades of a Florence of an earlier time, now, in the Florence of their time, subject, as we have noted, to Medici censorship and repression.31 Illustrations in the margins of Medieval manuscripts also make clear how, in the Medieval tradition, the punishment of sinners and the theme of cannibalistic eating were inextricably linked. Sinners were routinely devoured by the

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demons in Hell, and were routinely roasted on spits, flayed alive, and even boiled in cauldrons.32 Among these sinners were kings and the prideful of the earth, while the just were admitted into Heaven, in this manuscript represented, appropriately enough, by a cloister. We also noted the presence of a cauldron in both the Thyestes of Seneca discussed above, and, as we shall see, a cauldron plays a prominent part in the one of the feste of the Compagnia of the Paiuolo. And the entrance to Hell is commonly represented by a huge devouring mouth, as in the following illustration:

Fig. 3.4: Winchester Psalter, Hellmouth (Credit: © British Library Board).

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In the Feast of Pluto described by Vasari, we encountered the classical equivalent of this powerful image in the jaws of Cerberus through which the guests descended to the Underworld. Hence, we would suggest, the elaborate productions of the Compagnia della Cazzuola draw upon both classical and Medieval traditions in which the themes of eating, especially the cannibalistic devouring of one individual by another, and the punishment of the wicked, prominent among whom are the kings and powerful of the world, are inextricably linked. In one striking illustration, the demons are even seen devouring themselves:

Fig. 3.5: Illustration of demons devouring themselves from Le Livre de la Vigne Nostre Seigneur (MS Douce 134) (Credit: Bodleian Library, Oxford).

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We noted at the beginning of this chapter the self-consuming nature of tyranny, in which the tyrant’s rule is characterized by the consumption of the most vital asset of the state, its citizens, thus leading to his final demise, an image we also encountered in the Inferno of Dante, where both the tyrant Ugolino and Satan himself, the ultimate tyrant (since he rules the souls of the sinful, having usurped God’s place there as its intended ruler) are seen in the act of cannibalistic consumption. Just as Ugolino consumes his own sons (as did also the Thyestes of Seneca’s play), so also is he to be consumed in turn by the Mouth of Hell, where he will be consumed by the demons, until, in an infernal version of the Last Judgment, both the demons and the sinners inside them will themselves be devoured by Satan, who then will presumably devour himself, finally bringing to an end the cycles of violence and tyranny which have characterized human history. Once again, we may note the mixing of classical and Medieval imagery around the theme of the consumption of food in the elaborate performances of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, which reflect and recreate not only the highly theatrical and rhetorical aspects of Senecan drama, but also its Medieval successors in the elaborate festivities and celebrations of the Medieval Christian tradition, the sacre rappresentazioni and the processions in which the same themes played a prominent role. In addition, the cry which in Vasari’s account greeted the “spontaneous” birth of the Cazzuola (“Cazzuola, Cazzuola”) may itself be a deliberate evocation of the popular cry of the early woolworkers or Ciompi. Citing Stefani, Trexler describes a drinking bout among artisans and workers and Walter of Brienne’s men at arms: The latter [the artisans] had italianized the French word “compar” (“co-father” or “ally”) as ciompo, Stefani tells us, so that when the French said to them, “Compar, let’s go drinking,” the Florentine artisans responded, “ciompo, let’s go drink. And thus they said: ‘Ciompo, Ciompo’ as if everyone was a ciompo, that is, a compar.”33

In our view, these two pieces of evidence provide further support for our hypothesis that the Compagnia della Cazzuola represented a locus of covert opposition to Medici rule, and that Vasari, in giving such a full, but, in our view, deliberately evasive description of their activities, intended to allude to these earlier groups which, just as the Cazzuola, expressed their resistance to the hegemony of the popolo grasso, that is, the prosperous merchant class who stood above them on the social scale, through elaborate, symbolic celebrations in which (as was the norm in such late medieval feste), the rulers of the earth and the rich and powerful were among the primary recipients of divine wrath. Trexler also notes that these earlier festivities, which took place during May Day, Carnival,

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and the Feast of San Giovanni, were associated with particular religious confraternities, often tied to a neighborhood church.34 He cites the 1451/2 capitoli of the Compagnia of San Andrea de’ Purgatori, which met in Borgo La Croce. Could the Compagnia della Cazzuola, where, as we have seen, the members were immersed in a Hellish environment before being transported to an upper region, where they enjoyed their celestial banquet, have taken inspiration for the name of their patron Saint, and perhaps even its place of meeting, from this earlier company? In this regard, Trexler also mentions a hospital by the name of “societas hospitalis S. Johannis Baptiste de via S. Gallo de Florentia.”35 Vasari describes an elaborate feast set in an imitation hospital “outside the Porta di San Gallo,” where the members are warned to curb their expenses, lest they wind up in the hospital. Might this “feast” also have been inspired by this earlier organization? As noted above, the theme of the latter banquet was poverty, since the guests were dressed as paupers, which (besides the obvious humorous reference to the impending state of impoverishment of the members if they continue in their profligate ways) would also accord with one of the functions of such small confraternal organizations, namely, to assist their needier members with basic expenses. As we note in the following chapter, the theme of a voluntary and also comically-exaggerated form of poverty, placed in stark opposition to a heedless wasting of resources, formed the fundamental dyad which underlay the feasts of another festive company of later in the century, where this theme was also used as a symbol of the miserliness and mean-spiritedness, or the conspicuous wasting of civic resources, which characterized the Medici regime in Florence under Duke Cosimo. Michel Plaisance has noted the presence of several informal companies in the mid-1550s which bear a very close resemblance—in the festive informality of their meetings, in the semi-secret nature of their gatherings, in their locations far from the centers of power in Florence and in their staging of elaborate spectacles which included music and elaborate sets—to the Compagnia della Cazzuola.36 The fact that these companies arose at precisely the time that Cosimo was trying to assert his control over the Florentine Academy, itself the result of the infiltration and conversion of the more informal and anti-authoritarian Academia degli Umidi into the former academy, tends to suggest that the activities of these informal compagnie di piacere described by Plaisance may also have represented loci of opposition to Medici rule in the city, where, as we noted above, Cosimo’s assertion of control over all productions of culture resulted in the highly hierarchical, programmatic and formal organization of the Florentine Academy, with strict

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rules and regulations as to its mode of operation and members tasked with the duty of reporting all its activities to the Duke.37 This hypothesis would also tend to support the possibility that these latter festive organizations represented a continuation of sorts of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, both in the nature of their meetings, their membership, and the activities in which they engaged. While up to this point, we have been able to find only one individual who belonged to both companies, it seems possible that others might emerge, their identities in one or the other of the groups concealed under a pseudonym. One of the names given by Vasari in his account of the Compagnia della Cazzuola is clearly a pseudonym: “Barbagrigia.” The editors of Annibal Caro’s Gli straccioni, discussed below, identify this latter individual as the Roman printer Antonio Blado, printer to the popes and also the printer of the first edition of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. We noted above the presence of Machiavelli himself as one of the primary participants in the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola; such a connection between the author and the printer of his most controversial work as members of the same company suggest that others, perhaps hinted at or disguised by Vasari by various means, might have belonged not only to the Cazzuola, but to one or more of these later festive organizations which shared both its ethos and format. As we note below, one of the members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola—Barlacchia, himself, along with Giovan Battista Ottonaio, discussed below, herald of the Florentine Signoria, close friend of Machiavelli and the author, apparently, of a work sometimes attributed to the latter—was an active participant in the performance of Cardinal Bibbiena’s Calandria at the court of Francis I of France in Lyon in 1548.38 These details suggest the possibility of an important connection between the Compagnia della Cazzuola and later organizations which managed to express opposition to Medici rule in Florence by indirect means, in particular, by a highly astute and clever use of the stock plots and characters of Renaissance drama (particularly Plautine comedy) as a means of expressing their reservations and discontent with the nature of Medici rule in Florence. This seems to be a highly promising area of future investigation. We discuss the connections between the Compagnia della Cazzuola and Renaissance drama below.

Party Games: Entertainment as Political Critique In our view, however, the most convincing support for our interpretation of the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as encoding a message critical of

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Medici rule in Florence comes from the feasts given by another festive company, the Academia della Virtù (Virtuosi), active in Rome for only a few years in the middle of the fourth decade of the century. One scholar has described the nighttime activities of this company in the following words: On 10 March 1538 Caro wrote to Benedetto Varchi (1503–65) in Padua, explaining that every week during their “Game of Virtue” they enthroned a king, held a banquet, and presented “an extravaganza and a composition” relevant to their theme, “kings and vassals” competing to outdo each other. This academy was chiefly a drinking and dining club that gave mock orations at banquets, celebrating indulgence before the austerity of Lent. While the evening’s king hosted a feast, his beneficence was rewarded by the presentation of a tribute from one of his vassals. The small, usually satirically inconsequential gift was accompanied by an after-dinner speech, written in either prose or poetry and explicating the presented item. The “Sacred Majesty,” or “Glorious Prince,” received such tokens as a pastry, a raven, a ring, a frying pan, two sprigs, a little box, or a vase. At least some of the authors played with double meanings and paradoxes, usually parodic and sometimes obscene. It was common for these literati to praise Petrarch, for instance, but at least three surviving speeches offer an exaggerated, even parodic, encomium to the canonical author. Several surviving texts satirize overweening ambition and vanity on the part of mock-royals, for one king was crowned with a circlet of dog-grass, another given a mere drinking glass that had many sexually suggestive connotations.39

Not only do the activities of this association recall those festive companies described by Gori, which included the election of a “King” who oversaw the organization of their festivities, and, in an imitation of Medieval courts, relied upon a coterie of servants and vassals to help him in the preparation of their public celebrations, but it is striking how closely the activities of this organization also recall those of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as described by Vasari: a master of the feast, whose responsibilities lasted for only a short time; the delight the members took in games with obscure meanings (the enigmas, parables, emblems and ciphers described by Maffei), the carnivalesque, irreverent aspect of their festivities, which recalls the kind of Rabelesian excess so vividly described by Machiavelli in his Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere; and the recitations of dramatic speeches and orations, which recall the dramatic performances of the Compagnia della Cazzuola examined above, as well as those possible successors to the latter company described by Plaisance.40 But what is perhaps most striking are the ceremonial gifts presented by members of the company to the King at the end of the banquet: they correspond precisely to those items described by Vasari as present at the feasts of the Companies

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of the Cazzuola and Paiuolo: a raven (one of the animals, along with the porcupine and the snakes, present at the feast of Giovanfrancesco Rustici), a frying pan (which corresponds to the cauldron, discussed below, in which members of the Compagnia del Paiuolo enjoyed their supper), the little box, which corresponds precisely to the little box in which the special token of another festive company, the Compagnia della Lesina, which we describe in the next chapter, was kept, adorned with images of all the heroes of classical spilorceria, or miserliness. As we shall see, the company just mentioned, the Compagnia della Lesina, also managed to convey, in a highly symbolic way, criticism of the Medici ruler of its time, Duke Cosimo, and thus, once again, to combine festive banqueting with political commentary.41 In Vasari’s description of the Feast of Pluto, we also encountered the drinking glasses mentioned by Caro in the goblets out of which the members drank, made in the form of a devil’s beaker. We might also note that even Caro’s mention of a pastry might correspond to an item in the repertoire of the Compagnia della Cazzuola: besides its meaning of trowel and tadpole, which we have already mentioned, it also referred to a triangular-shaped biscuit, particular to Tuscany, often served during Lenten season.

Fig. 3.6: Carnival Jesters, Willem Cornelisz Duyster (Credit: bpk Bildagentur/ Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY ).

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Fig. 3.7: Capricci di varie figure, Jacques Callot (Credit: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

Fig. 3.8: Maurice Sand, Watercolor of a man in Harlequin costume (Credit: Public Domain: Wikimedia Commons).

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The Academia della Virtù, in Caro’s account, also took delight in mocking the pretentiousness of the official academies of its day, as Simons and Kornell note. This was also a feature of the festive companies we shall examine in the next chapter. We mentioned above in reference to Machiavelli’s Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere that one of the games enjoyed by the after-dinner guests at the nighttime meetings of the Compagnia della Cazzuola may have resembled our modern game of musical chairs, in which guests higher up on the social hierarchy of Renaissance Florence vied with their social inferiors for the best seats at the table. Another game which was very popular at the gatherings of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, according to Maffei, was a game called enigma, in which the guests competed to see who could figure out the meaning of a particular visual image (perhaps analogous to our modern game of charades?). We would suggest that Vasari, in his detailed yet allusive description of the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, is playing a version of precisely this game with his readers when he describes the strange menagerie of animals which were accustomed to gather at the feasts of the Compagnia della Cazzuola. In a very amusing aside, Vasari notes that, for his own amusement, Rustici allowed a porcupine to brush up against the legs of his guests from under the table, causing, as one might imagine, great consternation among them. Here we would suggest that the porcupine might be a reference to the King of France, since the porcupine was his personal emblem, accompanied by the motto “Cominus et eminus,” that is, “I shoot my quills near and far”; the crow mentioned by Vasari as also in attendance at the feasts sponsored by Rustici perhaps a reference to the King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus (“corvo” means “crow” in Italian), renowned in Renaissance Italy as a great supporter of humanists; the eagle possibly a reference to the Empire, whose symbol was the double-headed eagle. The water snakes, whom Vasari describes as performing elaborate tricks for the after-dinner guests, and whose meaning, in a very subtle manner, he seems to be encouraging his reader to figure out (“and they performed such amusing tricks as you may imagine …”) might perhaps, we suggest, be a reference to the pair of crested water-snakes which appear on the frontispieces of many of the printers of Reformation texts in Italy and beyond the Alps. Among these were the frontispieces of many books printed by the Basle printer Froben, close friend of Erasmus, where the snakes are accompanied (in one instance) by the motto “Vincent” (they shall conquer), a motto which suggests a political interpretation of this image also, perhaps a hoped-for alliance between the German princes and either France or England, an alliance which Protestants hoped would occur after Frederick V was chosen Elector of Bohemia in 1619, only to be disappointed when James I of

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England decided not to pursue military action against the Catholics.42 (We discuss the motif of the water snakes further below.) In the interpretation just proposed, the animals at Rustici’s feast—to play along with Vasari—would have served, then, as symbols of a particular ruler or country. What connection, if any, these images would then have had to the anti-medicean nature of the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola we have been proposing is something about which one can only speculate. Perhaps the competition, besides guessing the meaning of the image itself, might have been to guess which animal would finally win out over the others, a game somewhat analogous to our modern “paper, scissors, stone.”43 And just as those companies we have been discussing, the raison d’etre of the Academia della Virtù, besides providing a convivial space in which members could relax and enjoy themselves, was the mocking of the strict formalities and rules of procedure which characterized the academies founded by Cosimo through the creation of a kind of “alternative universe” and a counterpart to the highly regulated, and often violent, world which characterized Renaissance Florence, and Italy as a whole, in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Such a political environment was accompanied, as historians such as Najemy have noted, by a marked increase in the repressiveness of Medici rule in the city following the restoration of the family to power after the siege of Florence in 1529–1530, culminating in the installation of Alessandro de’ Medici as ruler of the city, a man considered, as noted in the Introduction, by many of his contemporaries to surpass even the tyrants of classical antiquity in his depravity and propensity to violence.44 Alessandro was followed in turn by Duke Cosimo, whose primary aim was to secure absolute, uncontested rule over the city and Tuscany as a whole, and whose relentless efforts in this direction, as noted in the Introduction, culminated ultimately, in the fifth decade of the century, in something resembling very closely what we would today call a police state, in which the forces of public order—from the judicial system to an elaborate system of informers, both within and without the city, to the much-feared and much-hated Otto di Guardia, Cosimo’s political police, to the absolute control by the Medici and their partisans of the legislative apparatus of the city—conspired to reduce the citizenry of Florence to a state of total obedience, in which the economic and personal welfare of the citizens and, indeed, the state itself, was a secondary, if not entirely irrelevant, consideration, as the evidence presented in the next chapter makes clear.45 Perhaps most important for our interpretation of the activities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as expressing covert resistance to Medici rule in the city, however, is that Simons and Kornell end their discussion of the company by noting that several of the games played by members of the company satirize the “overweening

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ambition and vanity on the part of mock-royals.” We suggested above that a game similar to our game of “musical chairs” may have also been played at the nighttime meetings of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, in which the poorer members of the company usurped the seats reserved for the upper-class hosts of the feast.46 This tends to further support our claim that all the companies we have been discussing had as their primary purpose a satirical critique of the rulers of their age.47 The above considerations also tend to suggest that our hypothesis that the Compagnia della Cazzuola, which bore a close resemblance to these later compagnie di piacere—in their informality, frequent changes of meeting place, mixing of social classes and presentation of elaborate spectacles which may have served as veiled commentary on the political circumstances of their times—may have also represented a locus of opposition to Medici rule in the city is actually well-founded.48

The Functions of the Cazzuola: Memorialization, Incitement, Warning Anthony Cummings has noted the importance of the memorialization of the memories of Florence’s republican past among supporters of the republic in the first days of the Medici restoration in the fall of 1512. In his volume, he also discusses the Canzone della Cazzuola, which is notoriously difficult to interpret and deliberately ambiguous. Cummings sees this song as an expression of a nostalgic fondness for a pre-republican Florence, and an exhortation to the youth of the new Medici regime to remember this age and its values fondly and to seek to restore them: La gran memoria dell’età passata dove sempre virtù & amor crebbe, ci duole aver lassata, perchè perpetuarsi ognun vorrebbe. Ma, poich’el è dal cielo sì exaltata, chiascuno amarla vuole, per restar vivo in sì splendida prole. Però voi, parvoletti, in cui non iace anchor, sicome in noi, esperienza, correte a tanta pace per fare anchora più trihonfare Fiorenza;

The great memory of the past age Where Love and Virtue always flourished It grieves us to have left, Because everyone would like to perpetuate themselves. But since she is so exalted by Heaven, Everyone wants to love her, So as to remain alive in such a splendid progeny. And so, little ones, In whom lies not yet experience, As in us, Run towards such peace, So as to make Florence triumph more and more:

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& voi & noi accui lasciarla spiace, sopperisca il favore: chè quella a tutti noi ancora porrà amore. Honora adunque, alma Ciptà, costei ch’è stata & è & sia la tua salute: pensa hora quel che fusti sanza sua & se mai festa & fè regnio in lei con virtù, gratia e pace, saprallo el buon chè ‘l ben sempre al buon piace.

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And you and we whom it pains to have left her May that Grace sustain us, Since she will still love us. And so honor, beloved City, she who Has been and is and will ever be your salvation: Think what you were without her strength; And if ever joy and faith reigned in her With virtue, grace and peace, Let those who are good know that To the good the good is always pleasing.49

While, according to Cummings, the song looks back nostalgically to the former days of il Magnifico and exhorts Florence’s youth to remember and restore them, in our view, the song can be interpreted in an entirely opposite manner: as a call to Florence’s republican youth to remember the pre-restoration days of Savonarolan Florence, and to exert themselves strenuously to recover them, the “gran memoria dell’età passata … che perpetuarsi ognun vorrebbe” referring, not to the Florence of il Magnifico, but rather to the recently-supplanted republican regime; the “parvoletti, in cui non iace anchor, sicome in noi, esperienza” representing, not the youth of the recently-restored Medici regime, but rather those born too late to remember clearly the days of the pre-1512 republican regime; the “costeiî” whom the “alma Cipta” is abjured to honor, being her “salute,” once again, a reference, not to the present-day regime of the Medici, but rather to the golden age of a republican Florence. The canzone ends with the final plea: “pensa hora quel che tu sei e quel che fusti sanza sua virtute,” in other words, which we would interpret as a plea to the young men and women in attendance at the singing of the canzone in the streets of Florence during Carnival to recall her former greatness under the Savonarolan regime, and to work strenuously to ensure that such an age may return once again. The highly cryptic nature of the song, then, would be due to its function as the public expression of the Cazzuola’s self-presentation, its “public face,” sung during the celebrations during Carnival when the carri of the guilds processed before their patron saint in the piazza of San Giovanni, seeking his blessing on their endeavours in the year to come. As such, it would need to carefully conceal in highly encoded language its status as an exhortation to Florence’s republican youth, now out of power, and under strong suspicion and persecution by the new Medici regime, to restore the republican regime.

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Its “private face” would be the song sung at the banquets of the Cazzuola, discussed above, which is itself, as we suggested there, in spite of presenting a surface appearance as a typical carnival song performed by one of Florence’s many companies of workers, actually an allusive reference to the need for the replacement of the old and decrepit Medici regime by a newer and more just social and political order. The reason for the highly cryptic nature of these two songs would have been, presumably, the possible presence of Medici spies at the feasts of the Cazzuola; the use of spies, both within the city and without, to monitor the activities of citizens who might pose a threat to the regime being a common feature of the Medici regime, as we have noted. Domenico Zanré, in his study of the Accademia del Piano, cited above, notes the gradual infiltration, neutralization and conversion of the latter academy into an organ of the Medicean state. Another scholar has recently described the same practice in reference to the gradual conversion of the Accademia degli Umidi (originally characterized by a marked non-conformist ethos) into the Florentine Academy, as part of Cosimo’s strategy to bring all forms of cultural expression, especially those that might present a threat to his regime, under his direct control.50 If, then, the Compagnia della Cazzuola functioned as a kind of locus of hidden opposition to Medici rule, then even its private activities would have to be highly encoded and difficult to interpret. We observed just such a process in our examination of Vasari’s account of the Cazzuola above, where meetings were held in semi-secrecy, secret signs (such as painting of an image on the outside of the meeting-place) were used to guide the participants to the right place, members employed pseudonyms, and the places of their meetings changed constantly. We also noted the fondness of the members, in the performance of their “party games,” for highly encoded and cryptic forms of communication. All these features point to a fundamentally clandestine ethos of the meetings and activities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola. And, of course, as we have just suggested, this same clandestine ethos may have also been present in both their public and their private carnival songs, as well as those strange performances described by Vasari which form the main subject of this chapter.51 This might also explain the timing of its foundation: founded in the fall of 1512, immediately after the Medici restoration, it might have functioned as a way to quickly mobilize Florentine youth in support of the former republican regime before the Medici could consolidate their hold over Florence. As Cummings notes, the Medici, following their restoration, immediately created the companies of the Broncone and the Diamante, the former of which, as a supporter of the Medici himself admits, represented a deliberate attempt on the part of Lorenzo di Piero to harness the energies of the youth of Florence in service of the new regime.52 It thus seems possible that the founding by the Medici of these companies so soon after their restoration to power might have been a response on their part to a fear that their anti-medicean opponents might organize the young supporters of the

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former republic, or those as yet undecided as to their allegiances in a highly charged and unstable situation, into a potent counter-force to their newly-created rule if they did not act quickly to forestall this possibility. As history has shown us, times of regime change are particularly fluid and subject to sudden changes and shifting alliances. In this interpretation, the foundation of the two Medici companies (there is much doubt among historians as to the exact sequence of the founding of the three companies) might have represented just such a response to the threat posed by the foundation of such an anti-medicean organization as the Compagnia della Cazzuola within the walls of the city. If this hypothesis is true, it would explain the need for an extremely oblique and encoded form of expression, in all their varied activities, on the part of the members of the Cazzuola as we have been describing. At any rate, it seems fair to assert the possibility that the public canzone sung by members of the Cazzuola during Carnival celebrations, reproduced by Cummings, represents, rather than a nostalgic celebration of the Florence of il Magnifico, as Cummings maintains, an exhortation to Florence’s republican youth to recall the past days of a Savonarolan, pre-restoration Florence, and to work strenuously for its restoration. Many historians have noted the obsession, during precisely this period, on the part of partisans of all sides, with the theme of restoration and return.53 If the cycles of history can bring about the restoration of the Medici, they can also bring about the restoration of the former republic; the “myth of eternal return” could be the return of a Savonarolan Florence, rather than the pre-Savonarolan, Lorenzan, one. And after all, the canzone was sung AFTER the restoration of the Medici: what need would there be to exhort Florence’s youth to restore something which had already been restored? This is precisely the sequence of the ceremony as reconstructed by Mozzati: first the bringing in of an old edifice, its removal and destruction (perhaps another veiled reference to the evils of the pre-Savonarolan regime), its consumption by the members of the Cazzuola, and then, as the conclusion of the ceremony, the ceremonial presentation of a new course consisting of the column, made, unlike the ugly bricks of the former Casa, of shining new marble. This column was then also eaten. In the context of the interpretation we have been suggesting, this destruction and eating of a bad old thing, and the consumption of a new and splendid one, would seem to take on the quality of an almost sacramental act. The column is presumably the one which stood, according to contemporary accounts, outside the Basilica of San Giovanni. The song concludes with an exhortation to the spectators to make use of the “valenti muratori,” who are perfectly capable of replacing their elders in this task of reconstruction: once again, we would propose, that, in addition to its sexual reference to the virile potency of Florence’s youth (as opposed to the failing energies

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of older members of the company) this might be a reference to the new generation of Florentine patriots, perfectly capable of exerting themselves strenuously in the construction of a new republican order.54 There is, of course, no way to know for certain whether this interpretation is correct; however, given what has been said above about the possibility of the presence of highly encoded anti-Medicean messages in the feste of the Cazzuola, the singing of this song in the same place, and the possibility of a similar anti-Medicean message in the Carnival song of the company discussed above, such an interpretation, in our view, does not seem entirely implausible. In support of our hypothesis that the elaborate festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola may have encoded a hidden message against the Medici, it is also interesting to note that the motto of the group (“finiunt pariter renovantque labores”) also served as the personal motto of Vittoria Colonna, whose connections with dissenting religious groups in early cinquecento Rome have been well-documented by scholars. This tends to suggest that the Compagnia della Cazzuola was far from being the only such company in cinquecento Italy where, in secret or semi-secret meeting places, marked out by special signs known only to the members and their carefully-chosen guests, wide license was given to travesty and to mock the social and political status quo of the times, although it may have been one of the first.

Fig. 3.9: Portrait of Odet de Coligny, cardinal de Châtillon in 1534 (Giovanni Gaddi?) (Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Franck Raux).

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Carnival 1513: A Political Interpretation of Two Florentine Carnival Parades We noted above the use of popular festivities, particularly during times of Carnival, by the Medici after their reassertion of control over Florence in the fall of 1512 as a means of consolidating their rule over the city by providing vivid public displays which testified to their wealth and power, and also proclaimed the benefits which would accrue to her citizens as a result of this rule. Maria-Luisa Minio-Paluello has given us a fascinating account of carnival festivities of June 1514, a little over a year after the restoration of the Medici to power in the city, a record of which we have from no less than three contemporary chroniclers: [In] the year 1514, on the evening of the 22nd day [of June] went the Magistrates, with the Six [della Mercatura] in procession with the offerings (in the procession of the Offering). And also, while the said procession was going on that street, a fusta full of fools, that is jesters or buffoons, also went, with many devils at the foot of the said fusta, and they played many pranks and buffooneries, and having put in her a certain character, who was a little silly but smart of tongue and pleasant, and was called with the nickname of Maestro Antonio di Pierrozzo da Vespignano, who was a maker of hoods, and whom they had caught the day before on demand of the “Masters of the revels,” and they had put him in in the palace of the Podestà, and then the said day they put him on the Fusta, clothed in his black cloak and hood, as we was normally dressed, which was rather worn, because he was poor, and those devils with their hooks tore it off his back. I believe they clothed him anew afterwards. … While they were going on the said procession they came across Gio. Tancredi citizen and craftsman, of the Quart. of S. Croce, who wore/carried the wool and was much more foolish than Maestro Antonio mentioned above, because he was not able to do anything else than carry (wear) wool, and he never even thought he could become maestro, and in 50 years never changed his trade; all at once those devils, who were at the foot of the fusta, caught him, the fusta sent down a basket, and swiftly pulled him up into the fusta, and put hjm to the oars; and with their clubs made of leather filled with wind hit him several times so as to make him row well, he and the others.55

Perhaps even more fascinating than this invenzione are the events which followed it. According to Minio-Paluello, on the same day as the parade mentioned above, a strange procession made its way through the streets of Florence: While from another direction a really ghostly cavalcade, earnest and altogether real, arrives in Florence these days, black clad and darkly menacing, clattering with their

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cavalry on the cobbled streets for the days of the festival. Certainly more threatening than the ephemeral ship of fools drawn on a cart by placid oxen for a short, if lively, evening.

Citing Cambi, Masi and Sanudo, Minio-Paluello gives an account of this second procession: Giuliano de’ Medici came here from Rome to see the festival with six cardinals, and there was the Pope’s nephew Giulio, the Siennese cardinal, a Venetian one, our Da Bibbiena, and they all walked about not in their cardinals’ habits, but all dressed in black in the Spanish fashion, with swords at their sides, and their faces covered [turati], the same as Giuliano, so that they were giving us a good example and in this way one reforms the Church. May God forgive them, and may he make them repent of their errors, like all of us Christians.

While Minio-Paluello speculates that this procession might represent a kind of response to the first, and astutely remarks that such a procession, in which the participants carried swords and masked their faces, was expressly forbidden by the statutes of the city as far back as the Middle Ages as a means of preventing either internal discord or external interference in the affairs of the city at a time when many citizens, many of them no doubt inebriated, would have thronged the streets. We would, however, interpret it in relation to the procession which went before. Minio-Paluello speculates that the former procession might have represented a typical “Ship of Fools,” a type of spectacle well-known since the Middle Ages, in which mankind’s follies are humorously exposed. While in our view, this is essentially correct, we would propose that it carried a second, more allusive meaning, namely as a symbolic representation on the part of the new rulers of the city of their disdain for, and also their total control over, potentially subversive remnants of an active mercantile culture, once, despite the dominance of the upper classes, powerful in the city, and with values and aspirations radically different from those of the Medici family. As noted above, Trexler, Najemy and Plaisance have all remarked upon the progressive marginalization of this middle-class mercantile culture as an explicit feature of Medici rule in the city, a process beginning with their restoration in 1512, and continuing into the coming decades. We would hence suggest that the first procession described by Minio-Paluello expresses in symbolic, yet highly dramatic, form precisely this disempowerment of the working classes of the city: the primary fool on this ship, as noted by the chronicler, is Maestro Antonio di Pierrozzo da Vespignano, a member of the working class; he was a maker of

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hoods, surely a Savonarolan reference; this individual had been “abducted” the day before and placed in the Palazzo della Podestà, as symbolic “King” of Florence; then made a spectacle on the cart, where he is dressed in rags and tormented by devils.56 We would thus suggest that Minio-Paluello’s Ship of Fools presents, in addition to its traditional meaning as a reference to the inevitable follies of human life, a more specific subtext expressed in a symbolic use of the details we have just mentioned; that is, the ritual and public humiliation of the working and mercantile middle classes in face of the newly ascendent power of the Medici family. And following on the “kidnapping” of Maestro Antonio, the chronicler records a second abduction, that of Giovanni Tancredi, “citizen and craftsman.” This individual, significantly, “wore the wool,” a reference to the principle trade of late medieval Florence, the working of wool, and, as the chronicler notes, never even thought to change his trade. For this loyalty to Florence’s mercantile traditions, this individual is also tormented by devils. Such public and quasi-ritualistic humiliation of their enemies was not at all unknown in Medicean Florence. Several examples which might be cited here are the conversion of the Sala del Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, seat and symbol of republican Florence, into a barracks immediately following the destruction of Prato and the return of the Medici to Florence in August 1512; the melting down of the vacca, the great bell of the Campanile, also a potent symbol of republican Florence, to make medals which glorified the Medici family; we remarked above, in reference to the Triumph of Camillus presented on the occasion of Lorenzo di Piero’s “victory” over the city of Urbino, a sight so distasteful to the ottimati, who would have been thus forced to witness a very public display of their political marginalization and impotence at the hands of the new regime, that many of them withdrew in mute protest to their villas in the hills.57 Such public humiliation of their enemies was, then, a common practice of the Medici in their use of public spectacles to make a political point. If this interpretation of the first Carnival procession, that of the Ship of Fools, as a symbolic humiliation of Florence’s working and middle classes is accepted, we would also suggest that the second procession described by Minio-Paluello, which, in the description of the contemporary chroniclers, seems highly strange and also slightly sinister, is also, in a symbolic way, connected to the first: that, should the Florentines choose to ignore the message of the first procession, that is, the absolute control of the Medici family over the city and its mercantile traditions, then the family and its Roman allies were ready, willing and more than able to use force (in the form of armed and veiled figures of authority) to ensure their dominance over Florentine political life.58

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As such, the second procession would have served as a kind of “commentary” or gloss on the first, as a kind of veiled warning as to Medici designs on the city under the new dispensation. The fact that Florentine audiences for these kinds of spectacles possessed highly sophisticated skills in the decipherment of their political subtexts is made clear from a third anecdote, this one also connected to Carnival, to which we now turn.

“Sorry to Spoil the Party”: Piero di Cosimo’s Trionfo della Morte in the Carnival of 1513 An extremely rare pamphlet printed on the occasion of the 1513 Carnival reproduces the carnival songs of the three companies discussed in this chapter, the compagnie del Broncone, Diamante, and Cazzuola, as well as a carnival song, perhaps by Antonio Alamanni, a member of an old and distinguished Florentine family, the Canzona della Morte, sung, according to one scholar, the year before the other three songs reproduced in the pamphlet.59 While Cummings and Mozzati, cited above, would argue that the songs reproduced in this pamphlet all represent a common theme, namely, the Medici use of public spectacles to publicize the advantages of their rule, we would argue that only the second and the third of the Carnival songs reproduced, those of the Diamante and Broncone, may be said to serve this function. And, as one scholar has noted, while the second song, that of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s compagnia del Broncone, presents an unequivocally positive image of the glorious return of a Golden Age under Medici rulership (“Torna il secol felice,/E come la fenice,/Rinasce dal Broncone del vecchio Alloro/Così nasce dal ferro/ Un secol d’oro”), the third song, that of Giuliano’s Compagnia del Diamante, is conspicuously lacking in this triumphalist element, rather displaying a more melancholic take on the passing of the ages: Volan gli anni, i mesi, e le ore … The years and months and hours are fleeting E però chi ‘l tempo perde, And yet he who loses time in his green youth Nell’età giovane, e verde, Poco dura, e presto muore. Lasts but for a moment, and soon dies.

The trionfo which accompanied Lorenzo’s song displayed, in vivid visual form, with carri trionfali surrounded by performers and animals garbed in various forms (including one in the costume of an elephant as a reference to Hannibal) the heroic deeds of the Medici, which paralleled, if not surpassed, those great heroes of the Roman past:

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Fig. 3.10: Etching from La canzona de’ Morti (Florence, n.d.), showing chariot with skeletons and the Three Fates (Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale Firenze, available on archive.org).

That of Giuliano’s, as Prizer notes, was much more modest, displaying only the three ages of man. This display was called by contemporary chroniclers the Trionfo delle tre Parche. It will be noted that the latter theme, in which we see the three fates, Lachesis, Atropos and Clotho, spinning, spooling out, and cutting off the thread of human life, is not at all incompatible with a penitential, Savonarolan message, man’s ages ending in decline and old age, then followed by death, only the ages of God leading to a final rebirth and renewal.60 We discussed above a possible anti-medicean message concealed in the imagery of the Carnival song of the Cazzuola, carefully hidden beneath the extremely obscure and allusive language of the song. We would suggest that the first song of the pamphlet, the Canzona della Morte of Francesco Alamanni, might also have encoded just such a message. This song (recently attributed by another scholar to Castellano Castellani) may have been performed at the same Carnival celebrations as the other three, in the spring of 1513, although there is some debate among scholars about this. This song presents a strong contrast with the other three in its Savonarolanesque warnings to the Florentines of the evanescence of earthly pleasures and the need for repentance. What is especially interesting about this song (and such inclusions of sober reminders of man’s mortality were not uncommon in medieval and Renaissance carnival celebrations) is that, according to one contemporary, it caused great consternation upon the occasion of its performance, and was explicitly interpreted in

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political terms by the spectators. Vasari, in his life of Piero di Cosimo, remarks that the song caused a sensation and frightened many spectators, and that some of them interpreted it as a prediction of the return of the Medici to Florence, and, even, perhaps, as a veiled threat of possible retaliation directed at the republican opponents of their restoration. The chronicler seems also to imply that the reception of this Carnival song was mixed, many of the spectators in attendance viewing it as a celebration of the return of the Medici, but not all. In his life of Piero, Vasari describes in detail the artist’s invenzioni for the young nobles of Florence, among them the current lord of Florence, Lorenzo di Piero, and makes a vivid contrast between these ose constructions and the macabre procession of his Carro della Morte: And I will not omit the fact that in his youth, having a lively and capricious imagination, Piero was much sought-after for the design and construction of Carnival displays, and was very much favoured by the young gentlemen of Florence, having improved upon, both in conception and execution and grandeur and pomp these types of festivities; and they say that he was one of the first to make them in the form of triumphs, or, at the very least, that he greatly improved upon them by not only accompanying the stories with the appropriate music and words, but also by adding to this an incredible display of men on horseback and on foot, all with costumes suited to the occasion. … And indeed, it was something wonderful to see, by night, twenty-five or thirty pairs of horses richly caparisoned, with their riders all decked out in garb suited to the story.

Here is Vasari’s description of the Carro della Morte: Among these many ingenious creations of Piero, it seems appropriate to mention briefly one in particular, which was the greatest of his efforts of his later years, and, unlike many of his inventions, pleasing not on account of its beauty, but, on the contrary, one which, because of its strange, horrible and unexpected appearance gave great satisfaction to the people, in exactly the same manner as sometimes with food bitter things, provided they are added judiciously and with art, are incredibly pleasing to the human palate; we observe the same effect in the recitation of tragedies. This was the Chariot of Death, secretly constructed by him in the Sala dei Papi so that no one would be able to find out anything about it, but that it would be both seen and known in the same moment. The triumph consisted in the following: a gigantic cart pulled by buffaloes, all black and painted with white crosses and the bones of the dead; and on top of the cart there was a huge figure of Death with scythe in hand; and around the cart were arranged many coffins, and, at every place where the procession stopped to sing, the lids were opened, and a figure appeared dressed in black cloth, upon which was painted the skeleton of a dead man on the arms, chest, flanks and legs, which,

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being white on black, and, appearing from a distance several of those torches in the shape of skulls, besides seeming truly miraculous, was both horrible and terrifying to behold.61

Not only does Vasari make a vivid contrast between those glamorous and showy spectacles favoured by the aristocracy of the city, including his Medici patrons, and the frightening and unexpected appearance of Piero’s Carro della Morte, with its clearly Savonarolan reminiscences (both in its visual aspects which evoked the familiar image of Death as the great leveler and the final judge before whom all mortals, princes as well as paupers, must appear, together with the dirge-like song which was sung on the occasion, the Miserere psalm of David which begins Dolor, pianto e penitenzia) but he also offers, as we observed on several occasions in his life of Rustici, to the careful reader of his life, hints as to another message hidden amongst the admittedly entertaining details of his narrative, and discreetly urges him to seek this message out. He does this in precisely the same way as he did in his life of Rustici: at the beginning of his life of Piero di Cosimo, he remarks upon the strong admiration the young artist had for the works of the Florentine master, Leonardo da Vinci; Leonardo here, just as in the life of Rustici, serving as a symbol of the ideals and practices of republican Florence, the artist’s most famous Florentine work being the lost Battle of Anghiari, which celebrated one of the pivotal moments in the history of the republic, the defeat on June 29, 1440 by the republican forces of the rival troops of her arch-enemy, Milan, under the command of the mercenary commander Niccolo Piccinino.62 In this account of the Carnival celebrations of 1513, we also observe Vasari using another of those techniques upon which we remarked above to hint at an important message concealed within his text, to which he can only gesture in the most allusive of terms. Here he achieves this effect by employing the phrase “it seems appropriate to mention briefly one in particular …,” a phrase very similar to several we noted in the life of Rustici in which the artist, as if underlining the importance of what he is about to say, reserves his right as author to pause, if only briefly, on a particular circumstance, and to go into some detail in his exposition of it; in the life of Rustici, for example, he asks the reader’s indulgence for taking some time to describe the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, for precisely the reason that the academies he is about to describe are no longer a part of Florentine civic life. In another place, describing one of the feasts given by the company, Le arpie di Fineo, he describes only part of the ceremony, concluding “with all the rest of the fable …” the recounting of which would take too long. These phrases are, in our view, meant to signal to the reader the importance of either what he is about

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to say, or, on the other hand, what has been left out; they serve as “verbal gestures” hinting that what he is either saying or leaving out is of primary importance, and that the reader should pay close attention. Thus, in an almost humorous example of the classical rhetorical device of praeteritio, just as in his life of Rustici, the very thing Vasari promises to pause upon only briefly is precisely that thing in the description of which he goes into the greatest detail, that is, Piero’s Carro della Morte, a spectacle presenting, as just noted, an unmistakeable allusion to the life and works of that great prophet of the decline of the Medici and the restoration of a civil society resembling that of the former republic under Florence’s true Lord, Jesus Christ, namely Girolamo Savonarola. This recalls Vasari’s equally pointed pausing over the practices of the companies of the Paiuolo and the Cazzuola described at the beginning of this chapter, where he had remarked upon the usefulness of going into some detail as to their inner workings and festive practices. Vasari concludes his elaborate and vivid digression into the Carnival inventions of Piero di Cosimo with the following words: This harsh spectacle [the Carro della Morte], both for its novelty and its terrible grandeur, as I said, sent both terror and wonder together into the soul of the city; and if at first sight it does not appear to be a thing appropriate for Carnival, nevertheless, on account of a certain novelty and its being so well brought off, it satisfied the souls of everyone; and Piero, as the inventor of such a thing, was praised and lauded to the skies, and was the cause that such spirited and ingenious inventions continued to be made; and indeed, both for the choice of such subjects and the making of such spectacles, this city has never had an equal, and they still remain vivid in the memories of those elders who witnessed them, who never cease to praise such clever inventions.

And so Vasari concludes his, we would suggest, deliberately detailed and pointedly allusive account of the carnival celebrations of 1513 in exactly the same manner as he did his detailed and vivid description of the feste of the companies of the Paiuolo and the Cazzuola: with praise both for its inventor (which parallels his strongly favourable portrait of Rustici, particularly as regards his generosity, in which he was unlike most of the men of his class), together with an assertion of the great value of these celebrations to the life of the city, and thus the necessity of preserving their memory for future generations. From what has just been said, it would seem to be an inescapable conclusion that, just as in his account of the activities of the two companies which form the subject of this chapter, so also in his life of Piero di Cosimo, Vasari intends his readers to read between the lines and to be able to discern both the artist’s own sympathies for Florence’s former status as a Christian republic, free of the pretensions and ambitions of her Medici lords, as well as the importance of keeping

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these memories of a former time alive in the form of spectacles which have as their subtext an implied rebuke of the tyrants of the city, and an (albeit muted) call to remember her past traditions, and to work strenuously to restore them.

Carnival and Counter-Carnival: The 1513 Carnival as Covert Criticism of Medici Rule To return to our discussion of the carnival songs of 1513, if all four songs were performed during the same Carnival (which seems likely, given that such ephemeral pamphlets were customarily printed either immediately before or soon after the events they commemorated) we may observe the following progression: a spectacular and terrifying image of Death, holding a scythe; Lorenzo’s triumph of the return of the Golden Age, personified by six elaborate chariots depicting the glorious deeds of the Medici’s Roman ancestors; Giuliano’s much reduced presentation of the Three Ages of Man, represented by the Three Fates; and finally, proceeding through the streets and squares, accompanied by the canzone of the Cazzuola (which, as mentioned above, may have contained a highly cryptic and allusive reference to the rebirth of the city under the aegis of a return to the values of the time of Savonarola), a seated female figure, representing Peace, surrounded by small children, a common representation of the benefits of just rule from classical times onward:

Fig. 3.11: Concord succouring small children from the Ara Pacis, Rome (Credit: Album/Art Resource, NY ).

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In this interpretation (although, as noted above, the Canzone della Cazzuola is highly cryptic and hard to interpret, much less visualize) the “parvoletti” and the “gran memoria dell’età passata,” in whose grace you [the “alma ciptà”] flourished, would be references to the small children protected by this seated figure, which the assembled spectators would be entreated to remember, a reference, perhaps, not to the present regime, in which, while the Medici had succeeded in establishing military domination over the city, there could be no real peace as long as large numbers of the civilian populace, including the working and middle classes, were excluded from any real participation in civic life, but rather to the city’s former late medieval status, evoked by Savonarola as a model, as a free commune, and whose reliance on ancient Roman republican sources as a point of reference has recently been described by the historian Maurizio Viroli.63 Hence the Canzone della Cazzuola which concluded the Carnival festivities of 1513 (which, as we have seen, began with a frightening recollection of Savonarolan themes of Death and the need for repentance, followed, in a kind of strange parenthesis, by the elaborate chariots depicting the glories of the new Medicean order succeeded by Giuliano’s melancholy recollection of the evanescence of human life) would, in this interpretation, as the last image the spectators saw, have promised, perhaps, the possibility of a return to the republican ideals of just government and social justice which had formed the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings (for all the excesses to which the republic had been subjected by over-zealous arrabbiati determined to punish, not just the former partisans of the Medici, but their entire social class) of the republican regime which had just ended. This interpretation of the Carnival festivities of 1513 becomes more plausible when we consider that, for Florentines of all social classes, a large seated female figure, succouring small children would have immediately recalled images of Florence herself, seen as a kind of alma mater protecting those under her care, an image dating, not to the Medici regime (although they attempted to co-opt it in a series of medals issued in the late 1400s in which Florence is depicted in this manner), but rather to the city’s communal past. Perhaps this might be the true explanation for the shock and horror the Carnival festivities of this year aroused in the onlookers mentioned by Vasari: perhaps the shock was due not so much to the appearance of an image of Death per se (this image was a common part of almost all Carnival celebrations), but rather by the audaciousness of presenting such imagery in a city now at least nominally under Medici control. Mozzati also notes that two out of the four songs we have been discussing, the third and fourth (those of the Diamente and Cazzuola) were sponsored either by the Cazzuola or by Giuliano in his role as a member of this organization. If we allow for the possibility that the first song also, the Canzone della Morte, may

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have also been sponsored by an individual, who, as the evidence presented by one scholar suggests, if not himself a member of the company, may at least have been not unsympathetic to the Savonarolan message, and thus one of those ottimati opponents of Medici control of the city (of which there were many), this consideration might also tend to support our hypothesis of a Savonarolan, implicitly anti-medicean subtext for the Carnival celebrations of 1513. Lorenzo’s highly triumphalistic presentation of the supposed benefits of a return to Medici rule would, then, in this scenario, find itself sandwiched between three other triumphs which presented a highly pessimistic view of human life, recalling Savonarolan themes of death and old age, and strongly contrasting with the optimistic vision of life in Florence under the newly-created Medicean dispensation. And certainly the content of the first and third songs, the first explicitly, in its terrifying image of Death, the third implicitly (with its classical reference to the Three Fates) leaves no doubt as to their Savonarolan provenance, a fact which makes an interpretation of these Carnival celebrations in a pro-medicean key, as has been the case for some scholars, even harder to sustain. As noted above, the Carnival celebrations of following year may have represented, perhaps, a response on the part of the Medici to the Savonarolan tone of the festivities just described, intended to send a strong message that it was the Medici, and not their former ottimati friends and clients, who were now in full control of the city. Two objections to our interpretation of the Carnival celebrations of 1513 immediately arise: how can one prove that such an interpretation is correct, and how can one reply to the obvious objection that such a presentation of Savonarolan themes, albeit in a highly symbolic and encoded manner—what Minio-Paluello calls “visual riddles”—in Carnival festivities only seven months after the return of the Medici to power, seems highly improbable, given the seemingly impenetrable hold the family had on the city at this time. To the first objection, we can only reply that both the dating, the meaning, and even the authors of the Carnival songs discussed above are still highly unclear and hotly contested by scholars, which might allow for the possibility that, however improbable on its face, the interpretation we have just proposed not be dismissed out-of-hand. We might further note that, as Hale and Najemy have pointed out, the rule of the Medici over the city at this time was far from assured, and open to challenges of all kinds, from both the popular and the upper-class side, until well into the fourth decade of the century; such a consideration might also allow for some flexibility in allowing that at this time, control, not only of the city, but also its public

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spaces had not been entirely secured by the Medici; at this relatively early stage in the progression of the city from a post-oligarchic to an absolutistic state, there may still have been spaces, both metaphorically, in the languages and symbolism of Carnival, and physically, in the control over the public space, for some expression of popular, and also oligarchic, discontent with this situation. This might tend to suggest, following our interpretation of the festivities of the Cazzuola as representing a veiled allusion to the tyrannical nature of Medici rule and a celebration of the virtues of the former Savonarolan order, that such forms of dissent could, even so recently after the restoration of the Medici, still be performed in public, and did not have to be limited to the shadowy, nocturnal world of the festivities of the company so vividly described by Vasari. Seen in this light, the festivities of the following year described by MinoPaluello would represent a response to this still semi-fluid character of the public sphere, in which dissenting voices still had some space, until the replacement of this still-indeterminate character by an unequivocal assertion of Medici control through the spectacles described by Minio-Paluello, which also represented, we suggest, an encoded, but this time unambiguous, message: that the artisan groups which had formerly had some influence in the city were now (in their public mocking, their enthronement as “king” of the city through the public investiture of Maestro Antonio with this power in the Palazzo della Podestà (as noted above, a travesty of the practices of the popular artisan groups discussed by Gori), their public humiliation in the “abduction” of Tancredi and his public flogging by the devils, and the final “pursuit” of this sorry spectacle by the sinister masked figures described by Minio-Paluello) definitively excluded from any meaningful role in Florentine political life, and that the city under its new rulers, cleansed of the messy and disorderly burden of its communal past, and restored to its former greatness as a happy realm under their benevolent and paternal care, was ready to begin a new chapter in its history. Such a vision would have appealed especially to their former friends and clients who had benefitted from the family’s de facto rule over the city, but it might also have appealed to ordinary citizens tired of the fighting and factionalism which had characterized the time of Savonarola. Butters (cited in Chapter 2) also notes the reluctant consent on the part of the Florentine Signoria to Lorenzo di Piero’s assumption of the bastone di dominio in September 1515 and that this represented an unprecedented departure from the constitutional procedures of the city. Najemy also notes the unprecedented creation by Lorenzo of his own private army, once again, a patent violation of the city’s political traditions, again intended to make clear once and for all who the real rulers of Florence actually

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were.64 Against this background, the elaborate festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola described by Vasari might be viewed as a popular response to this situation on the part of groups newly-marginalized from political power in the city through the creation of a kind of “counter-carnival” to compete with those elaborate celebrations sponsored by the Medici. We noted above the essentially carnivalesque nature of the company as described by Vasari, perhaps best embodied in Machiavelli’s Rabelesian Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere, as well as the elaborate games alluded to by Vasari, in which members of the company managed to express, in highly cryptic ways, their opposition to Medici rule. Such considerations also might tend to suggest that members of the social classes now excluded from power by the Medici return to the city might well have availed themselves of Carnival (where traditionally, some license was permitted for the criticism of those in power) at this time to register, albeit in an oblique and encoded way, their discontent with this state of affairs.65 To sum up what has been said, all the examples just cited suggest that many, if not all, the public festivities which celebrated Carnival and the Feast of St. John in Renaissance Florence (of which we have a rather full record, both in eyewitness accounts and in the later studies of scholars) had a political subtext involving political power and the control of the public sphere, and, as we would argue, that far from evoking images of a glorious return of a happy age for the city under the beneficent and benevolent rule of the Medici, the Carnival festivities of 1513 evoke, in their veiled allusions to the Savonarolan themes just discussed, precisely the opposite: an appeal to the citizens to remember, and perhaps work to restore, a former age marked, not by factionalism and political strife, nor by the domination of one powerful family, but rather by the rule of the laws and institutions of the early Republic, characterized (at least ideally) by justice and a sharing of power among the various classes, and whose fruits were the peace evoked by the procession of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, with its dramatic image of a fostering female figure holding small children, traditional symbol, from classical times onward, of the final effects of just government. Ottimati watching this latter spectacle might also have reflected that, if the working classes of the city, represented by the madmen of the Ship of Fools, could be publicly humiliated in this manner, surely the new lords of the city could not be assumed to be willing to accord them any greater share of power; as noted by Najemy, any of them who still clung to this delusion were finally disabused of such a notion in the brutal reprisals which followed the final defeat of the exiles at Montemurlo which made it abundantly clear, to those who might still cling to such notions, that any opposition to Medici hegemony on the part of their class would be just as brutally repressed as the revolts of the

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populo minuto; indeed, as noted above, this entire period was characterized by a prolonged power struggle between a steadily-diminishing share of ottimati still hoping for a share of power in the new medicean dispensation, and, on the other side, Medici determination to establish absolute, uncontested rule over the city, in which every decision, whether cultural or political or economic came under Cosimo’s absolute control. Seen, then, in this longue durée, in which the process of consolidation of Medici power as absolute rulers of the city took place over many years, endured many vicissitudes (in the briefly reestablished republic of 1527–1530, for example), was hotly contested (in the numerous conspiracies against the Medici, for example, the Boscoli plot of 1513, or the plot in 1522 to assassinate Giulio, presumably to prevent his imminent election as Pope), and was not finally completed until over 20 years after the restoration of the family to rule in the city in the fall of 1512, the public spectacles we have been discussing may be seen, perhaps, not as monolithically pro-medicean, but as allowing for some “wiggle-room” for the expression of the discontent, on the part of both the ottimati and the popular classes, which would have been an inevitable part of this process. It is easy for modern historians, looking back at events which occurred more than 500 years ago, to compress events into a much smaller space than would have been the case for the actual participants, who lived these events intensely and day-to-day, and thus to construct a “master-narrative” to account for the often bewildering amount of information with which they are confronted. This process of compression and schematization leads inevitably to over-simplifications of various kinds, perhaps the most important of which, for the purposes of this study, is the creation of that “golden myth” of Medici benevolence, objections to which, both public and private, have formed the object of this study. In our view, the only antidote for such a process is to disrupt this master-narrative through the gradual accumulation and bringing to light of facts at variance with it, in the bringing to light of “counter-voices,” albeit often hard to hear and barely audible, which can disrupt it and lead us to a fuller and more nuanced view of the period. To sum up what has been said, it may not be going too far to assert that most, if not all, Florentine popular celebrations, at least after the return of the Medici to power in 1512, had, more or less clearly expressed, a political subtext, whether as vehicles for the promotion of pro-medicean positions, or, as we have been suggesting, for the expression, in some cases, of sentiments opposed to the family’s domination of the city and their imposition of values incompatible with its mercantile and republican traditions.66 The same might be said for Florentine Renaissance drama, to which (after a brief digression) we will turn.

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Dissident Networks Our study of non-conforming companies such as the Compagnia della Cazzuola and those others mentioned by Plaisance, Simons and Kornell suggests that many of the academies generally considered by scholars to be primarily purely intellectual or cultural in nature may have in fact also had a hidden political agenda, if not explicitly, then at least in their firm commitment to maintaining the traditions of free discourse and open debate which had characterized, at least ideally, the academies of the fifteenth-century, not to mention their classical antecedents, and that they viewed this mission as perhaps even more important than the discovery of new knowledge for its own sake as their fundamental reason for being.67 This would, of course, been highly displeasing to those authorities of church and state determined to control, if not eliminate entirely, the free exchange of ideas which, in their view, presented a threat to their hegemony and their consolidation of power over the Italian peninsula, that is, the Spanish and their Imperial allies.68 In a study we are currently preparing, we argue that many of these non-conforming academies were in fact part of a loose network of religious and political dissenters, spread throughout Europe, many of which were actually Masonic organizations in the full modern sense of the term, years before most scholars consider such organizations to have arisen.69 As we will argue, many of the features of the clandestine or semi-clandestine organizations which have formed the subject of this chapter—their propensity for secrecy, evidenced in the extensive use of pseudonyms on the part of their members, and the use of ambiguous images and signs both to communicate their places of meeting, as well as to disguise the anti-imperial and anti-medicean nature of their activities, their fondness for elaborate and often highly cryptic rituals, understood and appreciated only by those members initiated into the company, and their (in the case of the Compagnia della Cazzuola) championing a kind of political and religious reform which recalled both the teachings of Savonarola and also the ideals of the early Christian church—are also those which historians have identified as lying at the heart of modern Freemasonry.70 We will also argue that these early cinquecento Florentine Masonic organizations were closely affiliated with the Servites of the Santissima Annunziata, an association which would have given them “cover” as places of opposition to the prevailing intellectual and religious norms of cinquecento Europe.71 In more general terms, these dissenting academies had their origins at precisely the moment in European history which saw the formation and consolidation of the large nation-states of Spain, Germany, France and England, with the associated need for at least some degree of central control over all forms of

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cultural as well as political life, and, perhaps even more appropriately, in precisely the country which bore the full brunt of these attempts at consolidation of power on the part of these players, the Italy of the cinquecento, whose long history of fiercely independent communes and small city-states made it especially resistant to attempts to regulate and standardize Italian cultural or political life, or to reduce it to the status of a client-state.72 These academies served, then, a much more important function than the mere discussion of particular philosophical, literary, or even scientific matters. They served to maintain and keep alive the long tradition of political and intellectual freedom which, at least ideally, the Italians of the period traced back to their republican forefathers.73

Machiavelli’s Mandragola in the Senecan Tradition As in many Renaissance comedies, the names of the characters provide a clue to the allegorical interpretation of the play: Callimacho, whose name refers to one crafty or clever in battle (i.e. for the honour of the chaste Lucrezia) a reference, as one scholar has pointed out, to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, who, just as Callimacho, has been absent from Florence for some years, seeking his fortune abroad, and has finally returned to take control of his affairs (Lorenzo di Piero returned to Florence from France in 1507, precisely the date assigned by scholars as the fictive date of the play); Lucrezia an allusion to the Roman maiden, whose rape by the son of the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus led to the founding of the Roman republic; Messer Nicia a self-mocking allusion to Machiavelli himself, too befuddled and preoccupied with household affairs to take any notice of the plots unfolding around him; fra Timoteo, who uses sophistical perversions of the teachings of the Church to aid and abet the seduction of Lucrezia, a reference perhaps to Pope Leo, whose use of the resources of the Church to further Medicean dynastic ambitions was one of the primary features of his papacy; Ligurio a reference to Leo’s predecessor, Julius, who was from the town of Savona in Liguria and supported the Medici in their retaking of Florence in the fall of 1512; and finally, Sostrata a reference to a character in Terence’s play Adelphoe, a widow who, interestingly, marries a man who lives next door to her by the name of Micio. In Terence’s play, a character named Demea decides to separate his children and raises Ctesipho while allowing his brother Micio to raise his son Aeschinus. Since in Machiavelli’s play, Sostrata aids Callimacho and fra Timoteo in the seduction of Lucrezia (a symbol of Florence, as we note below), the topical reference here might be to Alfonsina de’ Medici, the mother of Lorenzo di Piero, an individual much hated by many Florentines for precisely the kind of scheming

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behind the scenes in support of Medici rule which characterizes the plotting on behalf of the schemes to subvert the virtue of Lucrezia which distinguishes the character in Machiavelli’s play. Alfonsina de’ Medici was also hated by many Florentines of the middle and lower classes for her arrogant assumption of superior Roman ways, her aristocratic airs a presumed slight to Florence’s mercantile and republican traditions. The name “Sostrata” is derived from Latin, and means “taken away.”74 While Demea is strict and authoritarian, Micio is more permissive and tolerant, a theme which forms the basis of the plot of a comedy written by another Florentine, Lorenzino de’ Medici, the assassin of his cousin Alessandro. As we note below, one of the play’s modern editors considers Lorenzino’s play to be an allusive reference to the severity of Alessandro’s rule. Turning now to the intermezzi, we may note the pointed contrast between the lyrical celebrations of true love, with echoes of the tender love between lover and mistress celebrated in the poems of Catullus, to the diabolical scheming in the service of lust which characterizes the main action of the play. In this regard, Machiavelli’s play closely resembles the Thyestes of Seneca, where, as we have seen, lyrical intermezzi (in the case of Seneca, philosophical in nature, extolling the virtues of the simple man, presented in sharp contrast to the arrogant over-reaching of the king) are interspersed with the horrific and violent action of the play. Just as in Seneca’s Thyestes, in Machiavelli’s play, the plot also revolves around the machinations of a clever and determined character pitted against the unwary trustfulness of an unsuspecting and sympathetic victim. In Machiavelli’s play, the violence is not the bloodthirsty violence of the tyrant of Seneca’s play, Atreus, who is motivated solely by a lust for revenge, but is rather more subtle; as several scholars have noted, in an ironic inversion of the lieto fine of many Renaissance comedies, the conclusion of Machiavelli’s play, where the chaste and virtuous Lucrezia finally succumbs to the schemes of her young suitor and submits herself (not entirely of her free volition) to his will, would, at least for some of those spectators in attendance, have been left a somewhat bitter taste in their mouths as they left the theatre.75 As we noted in Chapter 2, the figure of a young and beautiful woman, subject to the predatory machinations, if not the outright violence, of a superior male figure, was, in many cases, understood by Renaissance audiences as symbol of the tyrannical usurpation of a free state by a tyrant. Perhaps the best-known Florentine example of this topos is Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines, symbol of Florence’s domination, in emulation of her Roman forebears, of the territory surrounding the city, one of the supposed glories of the new Florentine order under Duke Cosimo.

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Returning to the figure of Lucrezia, we noted in Chapter 2 that Michelangelo employs the topos of a young woman unwilling subject of the might of a superior male force in his madrigal of 1545–1546 Per molti, donna, anzi per mille amanti, where Florence is symbolized by a beautiful young woman, subject to the lusts of her tyrannical captor, symbol, as Saslow has pointed out, of Cosimo de’ Medici. The topos was also common in the visual arts of the period, as just mentioned.76 We also remarked that a propensity to be consumed entirely by one’s desires and to be concerned primarily with one’s own private interests at the expense of others (a fitting description, if one moderates it a bit, of Machiavelli’s Callimacho) is one of the primary characteristics of the classical figure of the tyrant. And so the image of a chaste young woman as victim of a powerful male figure determined to have her virtue would have been immediately understood by at least some of those in attendance at Machiavelli’s Mandragola as a symbol of republican Florence’s ravishment and subjugation to Medici rule. As we shall see, this image recurs frequently in Italian Renaissance dramas and comedies, where, just as in the Mandragola, it is intended to symbolize Medici and Imperial domination, not only of Florence, but of Italian political life in general. Machiavelli himself hints that the play is a political allegory directed against the Medici in his prologue, where he asserts that he will pay no attention to a certain “monster” who is threatening him, and that he has no intention of backing down from expressing this image of the family, come what may: Pur se credessi alcun, dicendo male, tenerlo pe’ capegli e sbigottirlo o ritirarlo in parte, io lo ammunisco e dico a questo tale che sa dir male anch’egli, e come questa fu la sua prim’arte: e come, in ogni parte del mondo ove el sì suona, non istima persona, ancor che facci el sergieri a colui che può portar miglior mantel di lui. […] Far conto non si de’ delle parole, né stimar qualche mostro che non sa forse s’ e’ si è vivo ancora.

But if anyone thinks that they can By speaking ill of him, hold him by the hair Or frighten him or take him aside I advise such a person and say to them That he also knows how to speak ill, And that this was his first art: And how, in every part of the world Where the sì is heard, He respects no one, Even if he serves them, Who might wear a better cloak than he. […] One should never be afraid of words, Nor be unduly concerned with a certain monster Whom he perhaps doesn’t even know if it is still alive.77

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While it may upset the Medici family, Machiavelli, because of his unquenchable contrarian nature, cannot refrain from expressing it, since he sees himself as a kind of Florentine Socrates on the body politic of the city, goading those passive supporters of her freedom to take action, or at least to question the image of the family as just and benevolent guardians of her best interests which characterized the Medici propaganda of the day.78 Interestingly, this image of the Medici as “monsters” may also be found in Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicarum quaestionum, a work published in Bologna in 1574, where we observe on the corner of a building just such a monster, together with an inscription which makes the topical allusion clear:

Fig. 3.12: Achille Bocchi, etching of Mercury, Minerva and putto holding diamond ring (Credit: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program).

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This image shows Minerva, goddess of War, arm-in-arm with Mercury, god of knowledge, accompanied by a putto holding the head of the Marzocco in a bridle. But what is interesting about this image, in regard to the hidden antiMedicean message we suggest may be present as the political subtext of Machiavelli’s Mandragola, is that the same word Machiavelli uses to characterize the individual or individuals who are threatening him for speaking so boldly in his play—mostro—appears also in the motto which accompanies this strange image. On the plinth and the cornerstone of the building is written the inscription: “Sic monstra domantur. Me duce perficies tummodo progredeas,” that is: “Thus are monsters brought under control. With me as leader, you will finish your task, and then go forward.” Since the putto is pointing with his left hand to Minerva, while Mercury points toward Heaven (the traditional gesture, found in countless works of art from the late Middle Ages onward, indicating that one should seek the wisdom of God) it seems clear that she is the principle protagonist of this little tableau, the leader under whom those addressed in the inscription will, having bridled the monsters, proceed. And, to confirm that these “monsters” are the Medici, the Marzocco whose head Cupid holds in his bridle grasps in his mouth the Medici diamond ring, traditional symbol of the permanence of their rule. While at present, we can not identify to whom the inscription is directed; given that it appears to be on the corner of a palace, and that Bocchi’s work was published in Bologna, it seems possible that the audience who is being urged to use warlike means (symbolized by Minerva) to bring to bear the Medici lion may be the citizens of Bologna themselves, and that this palace may be the one which forms one of the boundaries of the Piazza Communale, perhaps the Palazzo della Podestà itself. If this is the case, it would be entirely appropriate, since, traditionally, Bologna was one of those powerful central Italian cities which had (just as Florence and Siena) a very strong tradition of communal government, dating back to the early Middle Ages, and was fiercely protective of its prerogatives against the frequent attempts of Popes and Emperors on its independence. The city was especially proud of its status as the seat of the first University in Europe, the Alma Mater Studiorum, whose founding dated back to 1088, and which was particularly famous for the study and teaching of the law. At any rate, from this evidence, the inevitable conclusion is that the “monster” to whom Machiavelli refers, and who attempts to block the writing or performance of his play, can only be the Medici family itself. If this is so, it would provide indirect evidence that our hypothesis of a veiled anti-Medicean message in the play is indeed correct.

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Historical evidence also supports our claim that Machiavelli’s Mandragola represents a veiled critique of Medici rule in Florence. One scholar has noted that the Medici in attendance at the first performance of the play were extremely upset by it, which strongly suggests that they might have been aware of a hidden political allegory directed against them contained in the characters and action of the play. Whether any of the other audience members grasped this hidden meaning is unknown, but given what has been said above, it seems to us entirely possible that at least some members of the audience—perhaps those closest to Florentine politics or personal friends of the author—might have. If this is true, the enormous popularity of the play, described in a letter of Guicciardini to Machiavelli of 1525, might have been based on something other than an appreciation for the play’s brilliant deployment of the plot and characters of Plautine comedy to make a highly amusing allusion to life in contemporary Florence. Perhaps evidence of this sort will come to light in private letters or diaries attesting, in the relatively safe confines of a private communication, to the real reason for the play’s succès du scandal. And certainly, Machiavelli’s letter to Guicciardini of October 1525 strongly supports our claim that the play is an allusive political allegory directed against the Medici, since, in this letter, Machiavelli makes clear that he is responding to certain objections to the content of the prologue which had caused Guicciardini “great distress of mind.”79 In our view, this can only be a reference to the veiled threat against the Medici “monster” we cited above in reference to Machiavelli’s determination to speak out in his play, come what may. Guicciardini may have thus been worried that someone—possibly one of the supporters of the Medici—in the audience might have discerned the political subtext directed against the Medici just discussed, and might then report it, causing danger not only to his friend, but even, perhaps (Guicciardini being the governor of Modena at the time) to himself. And as we discuss below, in the second half of the century, the play became one of the most sought-after offerings of a traveling theatre company performing Italian plays throughout Europe which counted at least one of its members as a member of the Compagnia della Cazzuola. As such, it might have served to convey, in a highly allusive and encoded way, what Florence’s republicans, at least, would have considered the dire straits to which their once-free city been reduced under Medici and Imperial rule. And Machiavelli himself hints that the play is a political allegory directed against the Medici in his prologue, where he asserts that he will pay no attention to a certain “monster” who is threatening him, and that he has no intention of backing down from expressing this image of the family, come what may. The circumstances of the first performance of Machiavelli’s La Clizia also, in our view, tend to support our interpretation of the Mandragola as veiled political

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allegory. This performance by members of the Cazzuola was upon the occasion of the liberation of Jacopo Falconetti (“il Fornaciaio”) from prison for some unknown offense against the Medici regime.80 This would suggest that this play also might have contained a veiled allusion to Medici rule, since, given what we know about the tendency of members of the Cazzuola to resort to dramatic spectacles, not only to criticize the Medici regime, but also, as noted above, to make fun of the “princes of the age,” it seems possible that this play might have represented just such an occasion, in which, in a kind of revenge against the regime for jailing one of their members, they indulged in a light-hearted comedy which, because of its political subtext, also, just as the Mandragola, combined the humorous aspects of Plautine drama with a more serious message. What would have been the function of Machiavelli’s veiled political allegory concealed in the action and characters of his play? We suggest that its primary purpose was to celebrate and keep alive for a younger generation of patriots the beautiful and virtuous image of the vanished Florentine republic, lest they forget it and retire into the type of befuddled privatism, preoccupied with his own concerns and family obligations which makes messer Nicia so endearing but also of no use in the restoration of the republic. In other words, to challenge and incite them not to withdraw into an apolitical preoccupation with their own affairs when, as the sons of those who had fought for and defended the republic, their duty was to stand up against the Medici tyrants and recapture their city’s lost freedom. In this way, the play would serve as a kind of “memento libertatis” equivalent to the Judith or the David of the Piazza della Signoria. In regard to the plays in which the members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola either performed or enjoyed as spectators, it is interesting to note that the play which accompanied their dinner feast in the upper room following Rustici’s Feast of Pluto, the Philogenia, a humanist comedy from the early 1400s, is considered by one scholar to represent a satire of Jacopo Nardi’s Due fratelli rivali, performed for the Medici in their palace soon after their restoration as rulers of Florence in the fall of 1512.81 What is especially interesting about Pisani’s play is that, in a satirical inversion of the quasi-Salomonic resolution of the rivalry between the two “brothers,” that is, Lorenzo di Piero di Medici and his uncle Giuliano, which forms the climax of Nardi’s play, the Philogenia, while also concluding with a banqueting scene, this time presents no equal resolution of the intreccio, but instead Pamphilo, one of the rivals for the hand of Philogenia, suddenly discovers that his sought-after bride is actually his sister, and so, rather than sharing her with his rival, as in Nardi’s play, he instead graciously yields her to her other paramour, Lycurgo. If Nardi’s play had a political subtext, it seems almost certain that Pisani’s did also; otherwise, the two plays would not be true mirror-images of each other.

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What might this subtext have been? We would suggest, that, just as in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, the names of the characters are a clue as to the political subtext of the play: Lycurgo a reference to the famous lawgiver of ancient Athens, known, especially in the popular imagination, for the harshness with which he applied the laws, would, in this interpretation, be a stand-in for Lorenzo di Piero, also regarded, as noted in Chapter 2, at least by opponents of the Medici, as a tyrant, an individual who did not hesitate to enforce his rule with strong measures, examples of which we have given above. Pamphilo, in this interpretation, would be a stand-in for Giuliano de’ Medici, whose uncle, in the late quattrocento, was a lover of ideal beauty and the neo-Platonic ideals espoused by Ficino, an aspect of his personality which comes through clearly in Botticelli’s wonderful portrait, where, with his slightly upturned head and haughty air, he conveys an image of both effeteness and superiority:

Fig. 3.13: Sandro Botticelli, portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici (Credit: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Florence).

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And Giuliano di Piero had, as we noted in Chapter 2, in the eyes of his contemporaries, a temperament in marked contrast to that of his more aggressive nephew: he is always referred to as somewhat melancholy, a lover of lyric poetry and an early victim of tuberculosis, which killed him in March 1516. Such an image of the two Giulianos accords perfectly with the Pamphilo of Pisani’s play: a somewhat feckless lover of all things (Pamphilo in Greek means precisely this), and, just as his historical counterpart, completely unsuited to the rough-and-tumble world of Italian politics in the first half of the cinquecento. As noted in the Introduction, Giuliano di Piero was very happy in his exile at the court of in Urbino (the “ideal city” of many Renaissance paintings), where he could indulge his love of finer things, far from the competitive and sometimes violent world of Florentine politics to which his younger cousin was ideally suited. As we also noted there, letters between the two Medici rivals for political power in Florence and Pope Leo, brilliantly analyzed by an Italian scholar, make for fascinating reading, as it becomes clear that Leo has growing reservations about Giuliano’s ability to exert himself aggressively in defence of Medici interests in Florence, first floating the idea of making him King of Naples, and finally deciding to recall him to Rome, where he was given the honorific title of “Captain of the Church” and was presumably able to continue to pursue the cultural activities to which he was so well-suited. If the preceding suggestion as to the actual identities of the principle characters of Pisani’s play is accepted, the members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, seated around the table, would have enjoyed a very diverting comedy, in a sense slightly different from that usually applied to the plays of Plautus: for them, the agnitione would have been, not so much that of the characters of the play, but rather a recognition on the part of the spectators that the two characters contending for the hand of the young woman were in fact an allusion to a similar rivalry actually taking place in the city outside the walls of their meeting-place, a rivalry (just as in Pisani’s play) also comically stacked against the efforts of one protagonist, in the form of circumstances (the machinations of Leo and Lorenzo di Piero described above) of which he, in his good-natured way, was completely unaware. In this case, just as in the Mandragola, the young woman would be a symbol of the city of Florence herself. This unequal battle between Giuliano, lover of the good and the beautiful, and his aggressive and arrogant cousin Lorenzo di Piero which we suggest formed the political subtext of Pisani’s play would presumably have been quite amusing for those dinner guests witnesses, and perhaps even participants, in this little comedy-drama taking place behind the scenes in the Florence of the second decade of

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the sixteenth century. If this is so, it would represent another example of how the nighttime goings on so vividly described by Vasari served, beyond their value as pure entertainment, as oblique commentary on the world in which its members lived.82

The Compagnia della Cazzuola and Renaissance Drama The same themes we have been discussing—the violence and unbridled lusts of the tyrant, and the sufferings of those subject to them—also appear in Renaissance dramas staged or written by members of the Cazzuola or by individuals associated with them. In the heroine of the Rosmunda of Giovanni Rucellai (one of whose relatives, Francesco, was, according to Vasari, one of the founding members of the Cazzuola) we encounter a sympathetic female figure, once the queen of a great kingdom, now subject to the violence of a powerful male figure, who seeks to humiliate her and subject her to his will, forcing her to drink wine from the skull of her father, whom the tyrant, Albuino, has slain in battle. The tyrant receives his final comuppance at the end of the play, when allies of Rosmunda slay and decapitate him in his tent. In Rucellai’s play, just as in the feste of the Cazzuola analyzed above, we see the theme of cannibalism closely associated with the figure of the tyrant. We also see the tyrant receiving his final just recompense for his arrogant and violent behaviour. And just as in Seneca’s Thyestes, the main action of Rucellai’s play is interspersed with lyrical intermezzi expressing commonplaces from Stoic philosophy regarding the power of Fortune over all mortals, kings not excluded, and abjuring these kings to rule justly, since they are subject to the whims of Fortune just as much as the common man, and can suffer sudden reversals of fortune which can at any time make them subject to those they once ruled. Important to note in this regard is that the image of a suffering female figure, subject to the depredations of a powerful male figure, was, for Renaissance audiences, commonly understood as a symbol of the political domination of one city or state by another, as the art historians Yael Even and Margaret Carroll have pointed out.83 As noted by the art historians, the figure was employed as such in many works of literature and visual art of the period. In our discussion of the feste of the Cazzuola above, we noted the appearance of the figure of Proserpina, the unwilling captive of Pluto, carried off by him to the underworld to satisfy his lusts and be his captive queen, another example of this common Renaissance topos. Given this interpretive predisposition, many, if not most, of

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those in attendance at Rucellai’s play would have immediately recognized his Rosmunda as a symbol of Florence, or Tuscany, subject to the forceful domination of the Medici. As the editor notes in the 1728 edition of the play (Padova: G. Comino), Rucellai modeled his play on the Hecuba of Euripides, whose subject is the loss of a kingdom by a captive queen who suffers outrage at the hands of her Greek captors, among them Agamemnon, son of Atreus, who, as noted above, provided one the most potent symbols in all of classical literature of the fierce and vindictive figure of the tyrant. The first performance of the Rosmunda took place in Rucellai’s gardens for Leo and his retinue of cardinals on the occasion of the Pope’s triumphal visit to the city in November 1515, immediately before his humiliating colloquy with King Francis in Bologna, where the King insisted on the surrender of the cities of Parma and Piacenza and that the Pope hand back Reggio and Modena, which he had recently acquired from the Emperor, to France’s ally Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. It thus seems possible that the final exhortation of the play—a warning to rulers that the only way to secure their states in safety is to rule with humanity and humility—is directed not at kings in general, but to the new prince of Rome and de facto ruler of Florence not to abuse his power, but to rule his native city with moderation and justice. As such, this admonition would be analogous to the orations directed to new officials upon their taking office, for example the podestà, urging them to rule justly, one of the important genres of Renaissance rhetoric.84 Rucellai’s close friend and artistic competitor Gian-Giorgio Trissino’s Sofonisba presents us with yet another image of a highly sympathetic female character, subject to unjust domination by a superior male force, in this case, surprisingly, the Romans, who have just conquered her native city, Carthage, which, as the former queen pointedly remarks at the beginning of the play, was once used to living in liberty, before the onset of her civic misfortunes upon the betrayal and death of Dido at the hands of Aeneas, and her forging of diplomatic alliances which proved ruinous to her and resulted in her final subjugation.85 Just as Rucellai’s Rosmunda, Trissino’s Sofonisba is a heroic figure who prefers death to the dishonor of servitude to the conquering Romans, and emerges from the play as a stronger and more determined figure than her male counterparts. And just as the Rosmunda, the play draws inspiration from the plays of Seneca, which take as their primary theme the highly melodramatic theme of the injustice of tyrants, resisted, if not always conquered, by the heroic efforts of the truly just individual, interspersed with choral interludes which celebrate the power of Fortune and the gods (and, in some cases, as in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, Love)

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as final arbiter in all human affairs, to whom kings, no less than the ordinary individual, are ultimately subject. The topical reference of Trissino’s play is a bit more difficult than that of Rucellai’s to determine, but it does seem possible, that, given the Spanish King’s determination, well-known to contemporaries, to bring all of Europe, including France, Italy, the Low Countries as well as north Africa, under the sway of the Spanish crown (a feature of his reign which included the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492, an event which Machiavelli referred to as a kind of “pious cruelty”), that the Carthaginians of Trissino’s play, subject to Roman conquest and enslavement, may have been intended by the author as an implied allusion, or “stand-in” for just such a policy of imperial conquest, with all its tyrannical, unjust and painful features to which the conquered are inevitably subject. If this interpretation of the play as implied critique on contemporary rulers is accepted, it would represent another example of a Renaissance inversion of the traditional heroic role assigned to the Romans, another example of which is to be found in Rembrandt’s painting The Oath of the Sarmathians, painted for the town hall of Amsterdam, where the leader of the latter tribe makes a heroic gesture of resistance to Roman rule, raising his sword and swearing an oath of vengeance together with his companions. The painting was intended by the artist as an implied rebuke of Spanish power and a celebration of those who steadfastly oppose it. Interestingly enough, the Borgia Pope’s ascension to the Papacy on August 11, 1492, just weeks before the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors, was the occasion of the presentation of Marcellino Verardi’s Fernandus Servatus (Ferdinand Preserved), a play (written probably in early 1493) which also, in a way somewhat analogous to Milton’s Lucifer, manages to present its “villain,” Ruffus, the would-be assassin of the King, as a far more sympathetic and courageous figure than his intended victim.86 On the same occasion of the Pope’s election, the Romans were treated to a mock battle between the Spanish troops and the Moors in the Piazza Navona, and the spectacle of a tauromachia in the streets of Rome, a barbarous and blood-thirsty spectacle completely alien to Roman humanist and curial culture, a Florentine version of which, sponsored by the Medici for the festa of San Giovanni on June 25, 1514, occasioned one outraged Florentine to remark on the diabolic barbarity of the spectacle.87 Trissino’s Sofonisba, just as the other plays we have been discussing, also derives, in its highly rhetorical and melodramatic presentation of the violence associated with imperial courts, from the dramas of Seneca.88 Another play we will cite here is Lodovico Domenichi’s Progne (a translation of Gregorio Correr’s humanist tragedy Procne, composed around 1427) a myth,

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as we observed above, closely associated with that of Tantalus in the classical tradition (Atreus even refers to it obliquely in the Thyestes as a crime he aspires to outdo), where, just as the myth of Tantalus, it symbolized the cannibalistic consumption by the tyrant of his own offspring. The cutting out of Philomela’s tongue by the tyrant of Domenichi’s play is intended to keep her silent regarding her rape at his hands, a deed eventually avenged by the slaying of his sons and the feeding of them to him in a stew. The heroic figure of Procne, who avenges her sister’s rape, thus forms an exact parallel to the slaying and beheading of the tyrant by the allies of Rucellai’s Rosmunda, an act of vengeance on the part of a suffering female figure which, in Rucellai’s play, represents one of the those “implied gestures” described by Tromly, intended to recall to mind the heroic Judith of the Piazza della Signoria who slays the Medici tyrant and holds his head aloft for all to see, restoring freedom to her city.89 And just as the Rosmunda and the Sofonisba, the play shows the strong influence of Seneca in its highly melodramatic and rhetorical dramatization of the iniquities and final punishment of the tyrant. While not associated with members of the Cazzuola (Domenichi worked later in the century as an editor and translator for the Venetian publisher Giolito and the Florentine printer Torrentino), Domenichi includes in his 1559 edition of poems by renowned Italian women (the first collection of exclusively female poets ever published) as the very first poem in the volume Aurelia Petrucci’s poem lamenting the internal divisions within the city of Siena, the cause of her eventual conquest by Florence. Fully a quarter of the poems in the volume are by Sienese women (a number of whom took an active role in the defence of the city during the siege of 1554), and many of the poems in the volume lament the sorry state of war-torn Italy and make urgent calls for peace.90 Coming only five years after the defeat of Siena by Florentine forces, and Cosimo’s subsequent triumphal declaration of a Tuscany now under Florentine control, it seems hard to escape the conclusion that the entire volume represents an implied critique of Medicean territorial policy of conquest and domination. In a sonnet of Tullia d’Aragona, the courtesan describes, in highly cryptic and allusive terms, her escape from the tyrant Tereus’s prison, as a modern-day Philomela, recovering her voice and briefly flying free, only to become subject to another captivity in the prison of the addressee’s power.91 As one scholar has pointed out, Cosimo’s freeing of the poet from prison, where she had been imprisoned for breaking Florence’s sumptuary laws, as a special favor granted to her as a poetess (“fasseli gratia per poetessa”) ensured her loyalty to him and her subservience to the Medici regime.92 So it seems entirely possible that Domenichi’s choice of the classical Procne, the liberator and avenger of her abused sister, as subject of his play

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might represent yet another veiled reference (as we saw in the case of Rucellai’s Rosmunda) to a contemporary female figure subject yet again to a contemporary tyrant.93 In the 1561 Giuntine edition of the play, the Progne is bound together with Rucellai’s Rosmunda, which might also indicate that contemporaries associated the themes, and perhaps even the contemporary references, of the two plays with each other. In his dedication to Giannotto Castiglione, Domenichi asserts the value of tragedy in teaching proper ethical behaviour to rulers, making an explicit connection between the fictions of the dramatic genre and contemporary events.94 Finally, in the Tullia of Lodovico Martelli, we encounter once again the theme of the usurpation of a kingdom by a tyrant and the attempts of a heroic female figure, in this case the Tullia of the title, to recover it for herself and her family, although in this case, as one scholar has pointed out, the divine intervention at the end of the play, in which the crowd gathered together in the public square is incited to frenzy by the Furies, is a reflection, not of any republican sympathy for the common people, but rather of Martelli’s personal commitment to a more aristocratic form of republican rule.95 Given the contemporary political subtext of plays—in both the classical era and in the Renaissance—which take as their subject the deeds of the tyrant, it seems possible that the Furies of Martelli’s play might have been intended to suggest an even more specific reference, that is, the storming of the Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria by Medici partisans during the coup d’etat which restored the Medici to power in September 1512, in which cries of “palle” echoed through the streets, intended by partisans of the Medici as a tactic of intimidation, one which, in this case, succeeded, leading as it did to Soderini’s abdication and flight to Ragusa.96 So it appears that Seneca’s Thyestes served as the foundational text for a whole series of Renaissance dramas which censured the evils of tyranny in an indirect way.97 Given what has been said about the circumstances of their performances, and the composition of the groups which performed them, it seems fair to say that there is only one set of individuals to whom these plays can reasonably be said to allude, that is, the newly-restored Medici and their Spanish supporters.98 The plays for which the Cazzuola was particularly famous in its role as a kind of traveling theatre-company—the Cassaria and Suppositi of Ariosto, and the Calandria of Bibbiena—also had a political subtext, according to several scholars.99 Solerti describes a performance of the Calandria in Lyon in September of 1548 before King Henry of France and his court in which the intermezzi consisted of a procession of scenes which dramatized the return of the Age of Gold, to replace

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“quella, ch’hora / (Benché dispiaccia a voi) qua giù dimora,” that is, the Age of Iron, as Apollo sings at the beginning of the play.100 With Apollo appear onstage the four ages of man, and as the Age of Iron, the one now ascendant, comes forward, Apollo sings that it is characterized “D’ogni bruttura, e ‘l vizio cole a ama / Quel sol pregiando che ‘l suo troppo schiva, / Sí ch’altrui morte e altrui danno brama” and, being so hated by the King, is to be sent back underground by his valor. At the end of the play, the Age of Gold descends from the stage to present a golden lily to the Queen as a gift from the nazione fiorentina of Lyon.101 Here it seems an almost inevitable conclusion that, in this performance for republican Florence’s traditional ally, at a time of Cosimo’s ascendance, by a company of players including members of the Cazzuola, in a city which was home to a large number of Florentine exiles, we are confronted once again with a play which manages, under the guise of being merely a diverting comedy in the Plautine tradition, to cleverly conceal its political meaning. In this performance, it is the intermezzi, not the main body of the play, which manage to convey, in an oblique and highly symbolic way, its true meaning.102 Assuming for the moment that the plays performed by the Compagnia della Cazzuola and the other companies described above did have as one of their aims the conveying of encoded anti-Medicean and anti-imperial messages, this raises the interesting possibility that such performances may have been intended by their founders as a means of communicating such messages throughout Europe to a wider public than would have participated in—or even known about—the existence of such clandestine organizations as the Compagnia della Cazzuola, the Virtuosi of Rome or those compagnie di piacere described by Plaisance which flourished in Florence in the fourth and fifth decades of the sixteenth century, all of which organizations had as their primary purpose, beyond providing their members opportunities for pleasurable relaxation and recreation, the staging of spectacles which simultaneously celebrated and commemorated the values and ideals of republican Florence while at the same time providing their members a safe place for the expression of their disdain for the regime of the Medici in Florence. This might be a fruitful area of future investigation for scholars of Italian Renaissance theatre; at present, the idea of Italian Renaissance plays as a form of covert “political propaganda” directed against the rulers of the age would be dismissed out-of-hand by many scholars of Italian Renaissance theatre, or, if they did admit the possibility of a political function for many of the plays written and performed in Renaissance Italy, they would most likely have a natural inclination to view them as supporting their patrons in the political or religious establishment,

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rather than as providing a space for the expression of dissent on the part of those opposed to the rule and policies of these social and political elites.103 Four years after the performance of the Calandria discussed above came, in July 1552, the revolt of Siena, and an invasion led by Piero Strozzi, the Florentine exiles, and French forces appeared imminent, a final attempt to dislodge Cosimo from his hold on Tuscany. But the Golden Age so earnestly solicited from the King of France by the players of the Compagnia della Cazzuola never dawned; the defeat of the exiles at Marciano in August 1554, and the subsequent public humiliation and execution of exiles from the leading republican families assured that Cosimo’s Reign of Iron would endure for the rest of the century, and that any possibility of a return on the part of Florence to its traditional role (in the eyes of her republican supporters) as a thriving city-state guided by ideals of social and political justice would remain unattainable for over 200 years.104

Fig. 3.14: Vasari, Duke Cosimo ordering the execution of the Florentine exiles (Credit: Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

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The Compagnia del Paiuolo as Locus of Opposition to Medici Rule Interestingly enough, the Compagnia del Paiuolo, founded together with the Compagnia della Cazzuola sometime in the fall of 1512, but limited, unlike the Cazzuola, to only to a select group of artists, may have also functioned as locus of covert opposition to Medici rule. Vasari hints at this by giving us a tantalizingly brief description of its activities, but, if we look closely at the festa Vasari does describe, we see that it is a reenactment of the same myth of Tantalus, symbol of the punishment of the tyrant, followed by the same celebratory feast we encountered in the feste of the Cazzuola. The ceremony takes place in a giant cauldron, with a view of the half moon above. Around a table, the members of the compagnia are eating a splendid feast, served from the branches of a tree above. But what is significant is that Vasari mentions that one of the members is charged with making sure that no water escapes from the cauldron. What this implies is that, prior to their feast, the members may have witnessed the spectacle of a Tantalus tantalized by fruits hanging from the very same tree, with water up to his chin, a common representation of the myth in the Renaissance mythographers. The water would then have been drained out, the Tantalus tree would have descended below, lovely music would have been heard, and then the tree would have reappeared laden with all the fruits of Paradise as a celebratory feast for the lovers of freedom gathered around the table. If this is the case, it would form an exact parallel with the feasts of the Cazzuola we have been describing, in which the tyrant is punished, and the just rewarded. Once again, Vasari seems to be hinting at an important message encoded in his text, and discretely urging the reader to seek it out. Tromly makes mention of a “Tantalus tree” and a cauldron in which an evil-doer is punished in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, so it would seem that both the Tantalus tree and perhaps the entire ceremony formed one of the commonplaces of Renaissance theatre throughout Europe, a detachable element with symbolic meaning, an example of what the scholar of Italian Renaissance theater Louise Clubb has called a “theatregram.” An interesting question would be whether Marlowe also, in addition to serving as an expression of the fraught relations between his fellow courtier/intellectuals and the Elizabethan court, might have also intended his play to be seen as an encoded rebuke of tyrants and a celebration of the just.105

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Notes 1. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston de Vere (London: Macmillan, 1912–1915), vol. 8, 109–29. All citations of Vasari’s Life of Rustici are from this edition. 2. Fred Tromly, Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 3. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, ed. and trans. John Fitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 287–289. 4. Ibid., Seneca’s Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 149. 5. Here it seems important to note that all four of the classical damned were, with the exception of Tityus, in fact, tyrants: Ixion, king of Thessaly; Tantalus, king of Sipylus; Sisyphus, king and founder of Corinth; and Lycaon, king of Arcadia. Taken together, these transgressors display the two defining characteristics of the tyrants of classical antiquity: a propensity to violence (a feature of tyrannical rule which we noted in Machiavelli’s vivid portrait of Cesare Borgia), and a second feature, which we will encounter often in the course of this chapter: the abandonment of themselves to their lusts and baser desires, which leads them to assault young and virtuous women. In a patriarchal and authoritarian culture, what these myths are communicating is that it is dangerous to strive too much (Icarus), to know too much (Prometheus), to want too much (Midas/Thyestes), or to try to see too far into the future (Phineas/Cassandra). The biblical equivalent is, of course, the story of Adam and Eve, who, as Prometheus, try to know too much, and, as Midas/Thyestes, to have too much. For this, the punishing, patriarchal God banishes them from his presence. Perhaps this is the reason why myths which convey the punishment of the tyrant have to be veiled, as we have seen in our investigation of the classical myth of Pelops and Thyestes, or the reason that even many modern scholars seem to be unaware of the anti-tyrannical subtext of the myths we have been discussing; they are, by their nature, subversive in that they challenge the right of absolute rulers to this absolute authority. Hence this challenge must be conveyed in a highly oblique and encoded manner, whether in the authoritarian, patriarchal culture of Renaissance Italy, especially in places like Florence, where one-man rule had usurped a more broad-based form of government, or the similarly authoritarian cultures of the classical Mediterranean world. To cite an example of this extremely oblique encoding of challenges to authority in classical mythology, the hidden meaning of the myth of Jason’s stealing of the golden fleece is that it is a symbolic representation of the overthrow by a tyrant of a democratic form of government, as a reference in Seneca’s Thyestes makes clear which describes the deepest and darkest part of the hidden grove, located immediately behind the royal palace, where the fleece was hung as a trophy of the conquests of the House of Pelops, together with Pelops’ Phrygian hat, the latter being a common symbol of freedom in both classical times and the Renaissance (Thyestes, ed. Fitch, Act 2). The passage is worth quoting in full: “Behind these public rooms, where whole peoples pay court, the wealthy house goes back a great distance. At the farthest and lowest remove there lies a secret area that confines an age-old woodland in a deep vale—the inner

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sanctum of the realm. There are no trees here such as stretch out healthy branches and are tended with the knife, but yews and cypresses and a darkly stirring thicket of black ilex, above which a towering oak looks down from its height and masters the grove. Tantalid kings regularly inaugurate their reigns here, and seek help here in disasters and dilemmas. Here votive gifts are fastened: hanging up are bruiting trumpets and wrecked chariots, spoils from the Myrtoan Sea, wheels defeated because of rigged axles, and all the exploits of the clan” (Thyestes, ed. Fitch, Act 4). In regard to hidden meanings in works of classical literature, we might also cite Apuleius’ address to the reader at the beginning of his Golden Ass: “Lector intende; laetarberis,” which can be roughly translated as: “Reader, pay close attention: you’re going to enjoy this.” Compare Strauss’ brilliant discussion of the recourse to highly cryptic modes of communication on the part of writers in authoritarian societies, cited above in Chapter 1. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964). One classical source which provides a vivid depiction of the punishment of the tyrant for his sins which would have been well-known to educated Florentines of the early 1500s is Lucian’s The Tyrant Punished. The dialogues of Lucian were enormously popular in the Renaissance, and went through many editions, starting with the first Latin edition, published in Rome in 1470 (E. P. Goldschmidt, “The First Edition of Lucian of Samosata,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 [1951]: 7–20). A humorous touch in this work is that the most convincing witness called for the prosecution by Radamanthus of the tyrant in Hell is his beside lamp, which gives vivid testimony to the scenes of depravity to which it has been a witness. As we remarked in Chapter 2, besides his propensity to violence, moral depravity was one of the defining features of the classical figure of the tyrant. We also noted that the rule of Alessandro de’ Medici, first Duke of Florence, was considered by many of his contemporaries to be marked by just such behavior, and that Savonarola, in his The Constitution and Government of Florence, cited in Chapter 1, indicts Lorenzo de’ Medici for the same crime, alluding to the hidden passages in his palace used to abduct and then assault young girls and boys. While perhaps exaggerated, such details about the regime of Alessandro are based on actual historical features of his rule. There is now a modern biography of Alessandro: Catherine Fletcher, The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also J. K. Brackett, “Race and Rulership: Alessandro de’ Medici, First Medici Duke of Florence, 1529–1537,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 303–25 and N. S. Baker, “Power and Passion in Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Sexual and Political Reputation of Alessandro and Cosimo I de’ Medici,” Journal of the History of Sexuality XIX (2010): 432–57. For an excellent survey of this process, John Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). John Shearman, Andrea del Sarto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 2, 316–17. For a fascinating account of the conversion of the non-conforming Accademia degli Umidi into the Accademia Fiorentina, see Inge Werner, “The Heritage of the Umidi: Performative Poetry in the Early Accademia Fiorentina,” in The Reach of the Republic of Letters:

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Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 257–84. Cummings, The Politicized Muse, 88. All citations of Vasari are from de Vere, cited above. The text of the song of the Cazzuola is reproduced in Mozzati, Gianfrancesco Rustici, 302– 03 and in Lasca’s mid-century edition of the canti carnascialeschi. Modern editions of the latter include Trionfi e canti carnascialeschi toscani del rinascimento, ed. Riccardo Bruscagli (Rome: Salerno, 1986) and Canti carnascialeschi del rinascimento, ed. Charles Singleton (Bari: Laterza, 1936). Pietro Gori, Chapter XXII, “Le potenze, o signorie, festeggianti,” in Le feste fiorentine attraverso i secoli: Le Feste per San Giovanni (Florence: Bemporad, 1926), 287–323. In his edition of the Thyestes, Fitch notes several other plays performed on the same theme in imperial Rome, each intended as an oblique critique of imperial power, for which several of their authors met either exile or death. This chaotic inversion of social roles, in which guests costumed as the rich and powerful members of the upper classes vie for the best seats at the table with their social inferiors would seem to recall our modern game of “musical chairs.” An interesting side-note to Machiavelli’s Canto de’ romiti is that it was very likely intended as a response to the use on the part of the Medici of news of impending disasters, whether natural or man-made (in this case, an upcoming flood due to a particular astrological conjunction in the sign of Pisces) to provoke fear in the common people, and thus make them more likely to rely on the security of established institutions, and forgo any potentially destabilizing challenges to authority in uncertain times. Niccoli gives several fascinating examples of this process, and also describes the resistance to this fear-mongering on the part of opponents of the Medici and the Empire in the middle decades of the cinquecento. She also notes that the Medici Popes Leo and Clement in particular employed astrologers in this way, and recounts a hilarious anecdote in which the governor of Modena, Luigi Guicciardini and its podestà, Paulo di Brunori, accosted on the street by two masked “astrologers,” are forced to observe the “astrologization” of the posterior of one of these individuals by the other, an example, as Niccoli notes, of popular and local resistance to perceived Medici meddling in the city’s internal affairs (Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, 165). These prognostici of doom were spread among the common people by means of small, inexpensive pamphlets called fogli volanti, an important documentary source often overlooked by historians, and described in detail below. A recent article, cited below, also discusses Ariosto’s similar use of the character of an astrologer in his Negromante, intended as an oblique reference to Leo and his manipulation of gullible citizens to achieve his ends. Agostino Nifo’s De falsa diluvii prognosticatione: quæ ex conventu o[mn]i[u]m planetar[um], qui in piscibus continget anno 1524 divulgata est, published in Germany in 1520 without date or name of publisher, is also, presumably, a response to this same use of astrology on the part of religious authorities to manipulate public opinion. The fact that the work was published in Germany, and, even then, without date or publisher’s name is undoubtedly an indication of the highly controversial nature of the work, and the dangers inherent in “calling out” a sitting Pope on his use of devious means to manipulate public opinion, or, as Gentili, cited in Chapter 1, would express it, “laying bare his secret counsels,” an undertaking similar to the risk undertaken by Ariosto

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in his Negromante, leading to the non-performance of the play described by Portner. Nifo was a Neapolitan scholar and one of the foremost authorities on the work of Aristotle of the cinquecento. In this treatise he makes it clear that, far from being due to an astrological conjunction, the coming flood is more akin to that of Noah, attributable, not to abstract causes, but rather to the wickedness of men, and, more specifically, that of the Roman court: “Adsunt enim principatus importunae tyrannides, sceleratissimae gubernationes, ducus et imperantius irae. Adsunt indomiti impetus, rixae, contentiones, truculuntissima bella, tumultus, seditiones, tum civiles, tum bellicae. … Principes et qui gubernant iura negant, iura publice vendunt, iura pessundant, divinas leges profanant, adsunt qui divina oracula contemnunt, ac nullifaciunt …” This “iura publice vendunt” would have especially struck a nerve at the Papal court, coming less than 20 years after the posting of Luther’s theses. For an excellent general discussion of the use of prophecies for political ends in cinquecento Italy, see Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 140–67 and idem. “Anticlericalismo italiano e rituali dell’infamia da Alessandro VI a Pio V,” Studi storici: rivista trimestrale dell’Istituto Gramsci 43 (2002): 921–965. For the non-performance of the Negromante, see I. A. Portner, “A Non-Performance of Il Negromante,” Italica 59 (1982): 316–29. Further support for our hypothesis that the Compagnia della Cazzuola represented a locus of covert opposition to Medici rule comes from another source. If we examine the list of members given by Vasari, a striking pattern emerges: almost to a man, at its formation, every member of the company was either an artist or a member of the working class; ottimati were only admitted at a later date. These individuals, as members of a class with a long history of participation in Florentine political life, especially through their guild and neighborhood organizations and subject, as, later, the ottimati themselves, to exclusion from the new Medicean political order, would have been the natural enemies of the Medici, despite the fact that several of them, as individuals, did find employment at the Medici court. However, as we note below, several of these working-class members of the company were subject to reprisals by the Medici regime. For a detailed list, with short biographies, of the members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, see Mozzati 333–94. Tommaso Mozzati, Gianfrancesco Rustici: le compagnie del Paiuolo e della Cazzuola; arte, letteratura, festa nell’età della maniera (Florence: Olschki, 2008). Mozzati offers an entirely different interpretation of the activities of the Cazzuola from the one offered here, and considers the company as playing, together with the Medicean companies of the Diamante and Broncone, an important role in furthering the consolidation of the newly-restored Medici regime in Florence. Domenico Zanré, “Ritual and Parody in Mid-Cinquecento Florence: Cosimo de’ Medici and the Accademia del Piano,” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 193–94. Humphrey Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 305–06. Jane Levi, “Melancholy and Mourning: Black Banquets and Funerary Feasts,” Gastronomia 12 (2012): 96–103, citing Bober, “The Black or Hell Banquet,” in Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery: Feasting and Fasting, ed. Harlan Walker (London: Prospect Books, 1991).

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22. In terms of the theme of a “feast gone wrong,” where chaos, instead of the expected decorum, rules, there is an amusing painting by Botticelli which shows what appears to be the figure of il Magnifico vainly attempting to bring order to a chaotic banqueting scene, where the guests have spilled the food and wine all over the table (see Fig. 3.3). 23. Andrea Gareffi, “La festa macabra di Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi,” in La scrittura e la festa: teatro, festa e letteratura nella Firenze del Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 157–61. 24. Although, in accord with the mixing of classical and Christian medieval elements in the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola we have been describing, the shower of rain may have been simply a recreation of similar events which often ended the lavish banquets of the ancient Romans, an example of which is described by Apuleius in his account of Trimalchio’s feast, where the guests, at the conclusion of the banquet, are doused by showers of perfume issuing from the ceiling above. It could also be a reference to the water tricks or giochi d’acqua which were prominent features of Italian Renaissance gardens, where, especially in the grottos, at the end of private feasts, guests were also frequently bombarded by showers of rain issuing out of secret apertures in the walls and ceiling. Lorenzo de’ Medici gives a vivid and humorous account of this sudden flooding of the banqueting hall in his Capitolo dei beoni, where he remarks “and more than one goblet was floating.” For more on these companies of buontemponi, including some which had an explicitly anti-Savonarolan function, see Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 102–03. Brown notes the use of theatrical performances by one of these companies, at a supper organized by Doffo Spini in 1498, where Doffo, seated on a raised dias, served as leader of the feast, surrounded by a company of young men dressed in white stockings, velvet cloaks and hats edged with black velvet. This recalls the elaborate spectacles of the Compagnia della Cazzuola described above (Brown, The Return of Lucretius, 103). 25. Interesting to note in this regard is that the strange stage effects described by Gareffi as forming a prominent part of Strozzi’s feast (the shaking of the floor, the jumping of the goblets off the table) were also a prominent feature of the feast at which the tyrant Atreus served Thyestes’ sons to him in a stew: [Thyestes]: “I take the gift, as part of my brother’s feast. The wine shall be poured to our fathers’ gods, then drained.—But what is this? My hands will not obey, the weight increases and burdens my hand. When raised, the wine flees from my very lips, cheats my mouth and swirls around my open jaws. The table itself jumps with the ground’s trembling. The fire scarcely gives light. Even the skies are sluggish and dazed, left abandoned between day and night. What is this? More and more heaven’s vault is shaking and lurching.” This topos of the “feast gone wrong,” in which those immersed in the pleasures of the flesh are suddenly surprised by divine judgment, makes perhaps its first appearance in the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, where King Belshazzar, in the midst of feasting, is suddenly confronted by his sins in the form of the mysterious handwriting on the wall, which says: “Thou hast been weighed in the balance, and found wanting.” As we have noted, the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola draw upon both classical and Medieval Christian sources in their representations of the punishment visited on tyrants, and the rewards given to the just. 26. As testimony to the fondness of members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola for highly encoded and oblique forms of expression, the scholar of Italian emblems Sonia Maffei

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gives a partial transcription of a manuscript now in Florence (Antonfrancesco Doni’s Una Nuova Opinione), in which this tendency is clearly expressed: “Bernardino di Giordano fu un bel ingegno a Firenze, il quale oltre al bellissimo casamento che egli fabricò et giardino che ei fece raro, e’ levò una compagnia che Academia hoggi se gli direbbe, et nel farvi recitare le commedie fu unico intelletto […] Costui adunati molti belli ingegni pose nome loro per sopranomi di quei che i Lombardi muratori si ritrovano per la maggiore parte, Zannin, Tognetto, mastro Luchin, e tali sì fatti, et si chiamava la Compagnia della Cazzuola, portando per insegna della loro Accademia un trofeo di martellina, archipenzolo, squadra et cazzuola da murare, strumenti tutti che sempre smurano et murano e tanto son buoni all’una come all’altra manifattura, et un breve che gli legava diceva in quel modo medesimo apunto che quello del Marchese Del Vasto Fiuniunt [sic] pariter renovantuque [sic] labores […] Tutti gli huomini fanno qualche dimostratione dell’animo loro o in fatti o in parole, per parabola, per figura, in enigma, in cifra, con saviezza o con pazzia, ma uno meglio dell’altro la registra, per che bisogna aiutarsi come la va par pari, et veder di vincerla o almanco inpattarla che ‘l perderla è sempre in ordine [italics added],” In this passage we also note the presence of a garden (presumably behind) Bernardino di Giordano’s casamento, which would make the gatherings of the Cazzuola those of a real Academy proper, rather than the occasional and informal festive association we glean from Vasari’s account, similar in this respect to the gatherings in the gardens of Cosimo Rucellai, where serious discussion of political matters was combined with lighthearted and jocund repartee. We may also note the agonistic quality of the gatherings of the Cazzuola as they are described by Doni, the members competing with each other to see who could be most obscure. In this respect, they would then be very similar to the meetings of the other Italian academies, such as that which met in the gardens of Angelo Colocci, located near the spot of today’s Fontana di Trevi, where discussion of serious political matters was leavened by light-hearted and teasing banter, the members reciting (often scurrilous) compositions directed at each other, an example of which Rowland gives in one of the members’ mock invectives directed at Erasmus, in which the Dutch scholar is described as too timid to confront the fearsome and terrifying “genius loci,” Colocci’s pet cat Selurus. (The transcription of Doni is from Sonia Maffei, “Giovio’s Dialogo delle imprese militari e amorose and the Museum,” in The Italian Emblem: A Collection of Essays, ed. Donato Mansueto, in collaboration with Elena Calogero [Glagow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2007], 33–63). Maffei reproduces a drawing of the impresa of the Compagnia della Cazzuola from the same manuscript. The reference to Colocci’s garden is from Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Doni’s text may be found online at the following address: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=hvd.32044010403996;view=1up;seq=7. 27. Professor James Monroe has kindly informed me that the topos of the guided tour through Hell, with a final vision of Heaven, intended to warn the traveler of the importance of living righteously, derives ultimately, via Arabic intermediaries, from the ancient Zoroastrians of Persia. This group also, interestingly enough, conceived of Hell, not as a place of fire, but rather as a place of icy coldness. This would be the ultimate derivation of Dante’s striking image of the bat-like Lucifer, fanning his wings over the damned frozen in the ice, a representation of Satan almost unheard of in the Middle Ages. Professor Monroe also

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notes that Dante’s teacher, Brunetto Latini, had access to Arabic sources via their translation into Provençal, a language he knew well and in which he also wrote poetry. For this entire subject, see Miguel Asin Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, trans. Harold Sunderland (London: Cass, 1968) and Monroe’s own Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Sixteenth Century to the Present) (Leiden: Brill, 1970). Aleks Pluskowski, “Apocalyptic Monsters: Animal Inspirations for the Iconography of Medieval North European Devourers,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 155–76. Antonio Pucci, “Centiloquio,” in Delizie degli eruditi toscani, ed. Idelfonso di San Luigi (Florence: Cambiagi, 1770–1789), IV, 195ff. Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 220. For the rise of popular confraternities, which played a prominent role in the festivities of San Giovanni under the Medici in the quattrocento, see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 252–58. For the cooptation of these groups by the Medici in support of their rule in the late 1400s, see, in addition to Najemy, Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 512–13. That the potenze could represent a threat to Medici control of the city even much later in the century is shown by a bando issued by the Otto di guardia on June 18, 1577 which shows clearly the concerns on the part of the rulers of the city that the often-raucous festivities celebrating the festa of San Giovanni sponsored by these organizations might lead to civil disorder, or even to open revolt against the Medici regime. This same bando also makes clear the concern on the part of the authorities that the potenze might join together in armed revolt against the Medici, or perhaps even be infiltrated by outsiders hoping to stir up opposition to their rule. The text of the bando may be found in Gaetano Cambiagi, Memorie istoriche riguardanti le feste solite farsi in Firenze per la natività di San Gio. Batista (Florence: Stamperia Granducale, 1766), 93–96. In general, the bandi are an excellent way to investigate the continuing fears on the part of the Medici regime of popular resistance to their rule; it allows us to work backwards from what was proscribed to the historical reasons for why exactly such things posed a threat to the regime. For the bandi, see Leggi e bandi del periodo mediceo posseduti dalla Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze (Florence: Titivillus, 1992–) and Andrea Emiliani, Leggi, bandi e provvedimenti per la tutela dei beni artistici e culturali negli antichi stati italiani: 1571–1860 (Bologna: Nuova Alfa; Milan: Elemond, 1996). These reproductions are taken from Alixe Bovey, Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 221. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 404. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 405. Michel Plaisance, L’Accademia e il suo principe: cultura e politica a Firenze al tempo di Cosimo I e di Francesco de’ Medici (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2004), 148–57. On this aspect of the Florentine Academy, see below. On the infiltration and conversion of the Academia degli Umidi into the Florentine Academy, see Werner, cited above. We discuss this performance below.

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39. Patricia Simons and Monique Kornell, “Annibal Caro’s After-Dinner Speech (1536) and the Question of Titian as Vesalius’s Illustrator,” Renaissance Quarterly 61 (Winter 2008): 1069–097. 40. On the Accademia della Virtù, see also Ambra Mononcini, “The Accademia della Virtù and Religious Dissent,” in The Italian Academies 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, ed. Jane Everson, Denis Reidy, and Lisa Sampson (Oxford: Maney Legenda, 2016). 41. The Croatian humanist Marcus Marulus (Marko Marulić), prefaces his Quinquaginta parabolae (Venice, 1510, 1517; Cologne, 1529) with the following admonition: “Sapientiam omnium antiquorum exquiret sapiens, et in prophetis vacabit. Narrationem virorum nominatorum conservabit, & in versutias parabolarum simul introibit. Occulta proverbiroum exquiret, et in absconditis parabolarum conversabitur.” This recalls Maffei’s description of the fondness of members of the Cazzuola for riddles and enigmas cited above. The large profusion of such collections of motti, proverbi, enigme and favole, many of them printed in Venice, might also be a sign of the presence of a network of similar such organizations, which met in secret, at night, with closely guarded memberships, and, even in the relative safety of their lodgings, felt it advisable to veil their true thoughts and feelings in secrecy. This would in turn suggest that the topics so carefully veiled under the guise of the puzzles and games we have been discussing must have been extremely controversial, and apt to draw the attention of the authorities. The use of an elaborate network of spies, spread throughout Europe, was a common feature employed by the rulers of the age to keep an eye on what any potential enemies might be saying or thinking. To cite just one example, Cosimo himself was referred to as the “spider-prince” because of just such a network of informers, embedded, not just in sensitive areas; to reiterate Varchi’s remarks from the Introduction, no place, however humble, was free from the attentions of the Duke’s busy spies (Storia fiorentina 2.15.47). Such a system was enormously expensive to maintain: some historians estimate that Cosimo spent approximately 40,000 ducats a year on his network of spies and informers, an enormous sum. We noted above the assassination in 1548 of the assassin of Alessandro de’ Medici in Venice, an operation which presumably must have required much advance scouting of the terrain and careful preparation. We also noted the persecution of the anonymous author of the Florentinae historiae libri octo by agents of the Medici in Lyon. Given the presence of such a wide and well-organized system of surveillance of dissident individuals, it is no surprise that they should have been forced to resort to an elaborate system of cryptic signs to express themselves safely. For the phrase “spider-prince” to describe Cosimo, see A. Contini, “Dinastie, patriziato e politica estera: ambasciatori e segretari medicei nel Cinquecento,” in Ambasciatori e nunzi: Figure della diplomazia in età moderna, ed. D. Frigo, Cheiron 30 (1998): 77. Interestingly, Marullus wrote two plays, a Susana and a Iudit, both of which take as their subject the same abuse of a heroic woman as we observe in Rucellai’s Rosmunda and Trissino’s Sofonisba, discussed below. The places of publication of many of these works, Venice and Lyon, home to many Florentine exiles, also tends to support our claim that these apparently trivial pastimes, in many cases, may have concealed hidden meanings directed against the rulers of their time. We discuss the Iudit below.

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42. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 100. 43. Vasari may also be alluding to the Medici when he discreetly urges the reader to guess at the strange after-dinner activities of Rustici’s water-snakes, commenting, “and they played such amusing tricks as you can imagine.” In a mock-heroic poem of Andrea del Sarto, recited after a dinner at one of the gatherings of the Roman Academia della Virtù, a mouse, being chased by a cat, and riding the back of the frog, is eaten by a large water snake. The symbol, as noted below, of the anti-medicean Academia degli Umidi was a frog. In his poem, Del Sarto refers pejoratively to the mice as “mangiacruscanti,” that is, “crumbeaters,” the frogs’ natural enemies. This pejorative term might be an allusion to the Medici-sponsored Academy della Macina, also called the Macinati, founded in the early years of the cinquecento and situated near the Medici palace on the via Larga. The emblem of this academy was a Macina, or Millstone, which foreshadows the later emblem of the Academia della Crusca, and whose members would have been called by a term very like this, that is, “Cruscanti.” So Rustici’s water snakes might, in imitation of the pseudo-Homeric poem it imitates, the Batrochomyomachia, have eaten mice, symbols of the Medicean Academia della Macina, those “Medicean mice” who, given the Compagnia della Cazzuola’s status as a locus of covert opposition to the Medici, would have been their natural enemies. In this interpretation, members of the Cazzuola would have taken great delight in seeing their natural enemies fed to Rustici’s fierce snakes as an after-dinner entertainment. If this is the case, it would represent an example of one of the important functions of these nonconforming academies, namely to provide a kind of “sfogo” or outlet for their members’ hatred of the Medici regime which would have been dangerous to express more openly outside the secret confines of their meetings. We discuss these Macinati, who meddle in others’ business and try to lure them into needless expenses, in the next chapter. 44. In a forthcoming study, Prof. Deborah Blocker describes in detail another academy of later in the century, the Accademia degli Alterati, the members of which also managed to keep alive the traditions of an earlier age before the assertion of Medicean hegemony over all aspects of Florentine political and cultural life, although, owing to the upperclass composition of this academy, what its members were preserving were the philological and rhetorical skills of the ottimati, not the memories and values of the vanished republican order, as was the case with the Compagnia della Cazzuola. Just as in the case of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, this later company resorted to elaborate means to assure that its membership and activities would remain secret, primarily by making sure that the writings which documented their activities circulated, with rare exceptions, only in manuscript. Another company of later in the century, the Compagnia de’ Piattelli, this one also limited to members of such high-ranking families at the Capponi, the Cambi, the Pandolfini and the Ricasoli, continued the festive and joking spirit of the Compagnia della Cazzuola we have described in this chapter, since they dedicated themselves, unlike the Cazzuola, whose primary pasttimes were those games and theatrical performances described in this chapter, to the pleasures of the hunt, and engaged in continual battles with their arch-rivals, the Compagnia dei Piacevoli, a competition which recalls the rivalry between such anti-medicean companies as the Accademia dei Piangiani and the Medici-supported company of the Aramei, described by Plaisance.

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As also with the antipathy between two other festive companies described in the next chapter, the Compagnie della Lesina and Antilesina, this rivalry often took on extremely humorous aspects; see for the example an illustration from an early seventeenth-century manuscript of the company, which depicts a grandiose ship recalling those of the contemporary trionfi, but whose sails consist not of linen, but rather of hares. We described above the foundation-moment of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, in which the trowel by which the quick-lime was ladeled into the mouth of an unsuspecting guest was chosen as its official emblem. As one scholar notes, the name of the Compagnia de’ Piattelli derived “dal mettere ciascuno a comune la sua vivanda, o il suo piatto, e si dicea far piattello” (from their habit of placing their plates and food at the disposition of the entire company, from which arose their expression “fare piattello”). For a detailed description of this manuscript, see the webpage of the bookseller: http://www.preliber.com/ search?tx_ttnews%5Bswords%5D=Piattelli&tx_ttnews%5Bauthor_search%5D=&tx_ ttnews%5Btitle_search%5D=&tx_ttnews%5Beditor_search.%5D=&tx_ttnews%5Byear_from_search%5D=&tx_ttnews%5Byear_to_search%5D=&tx_ttnews%5Btag_ search%5D=&search=Cerca&id=1548. 45. For the increasingly repressive nature of Cosimo’s rule in Florence in the fifth decade of the century, noted by the Venetian ambassador, see Najemy, A History of Florence, 468–73. For Alessandro’s reputation in Renaissance Italy, see Nicholas Scott Baker, “Power and Passion in Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Sexual and Political Reputations of Alessandro and Cosimo I de’Medici,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19 (2010): 432–57. In terms of the wider diffusion of the political messages encoded in the festivities of these compagnie di piacere beyond the confines of the relatively protected spaces in which they were performed and enacted, we might note that there are several contemporary accounts which attest to just such a wide diffusion of specific details of these spectacles, if not to a specifically political interpretation of them. Plaisance, citing a letter of Niccolò Martelli, notes that the nocturnal goings-on at one of the feasts sponsored by the founder of the Academia degli Umidi, padre Stradino, occasioned great curiosity on the part of the public gathered in the shop of the mercier Visino the following morning: “[I] don’t believe that Visino favours the tornatelle only for the hearty and dainty food, since that is the least important pleasure; and if there are poets to be found there, who are like the laurel on every feast, he also wants farces, comedies and performances together with words and music, prepared especially for the occasion; a life which would be the envy of the Emperor himself! And they are kept such a secret that one only hears about them the morning after when he tells those who hang around his shop, recounting every detail until tears roll down his cheeks” (Plaisance, L’Accademia, 154). Striking to note here are the resemblances between Martelli’s account of Stradino’s feast and the nighttime goings-on of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as described by Vasari: elaborate comedies and performances accompanied by music; allusive references to the inversion of social roles (the Bacchic chaos of Machiavelli’s Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere; the superiority of Stradino’s feast to the Emperor’s); the necessity that their activities be kept a carefully-guarded secret. Gareffi also notes the wonder aroused among the citizens of Rome when accounts of Strozzi’s feast began to circulate the following day, and also remarks on how sought-after invitations to such events were. What this implies is that, if there were a hidden political message in any of the spectacles we have been

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describing, it would have been readily and immediately available to a very wide audience by means of oral channels of communication. 46. An English broadside of 1674 setting out a list of proposed rules for English coffee-houses reveals a similar mixing of social classes, and the same usurpation on the part of members of the working class of the higher places at the table as we encountered in Machiavelli’s Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere: “First, Gentry, Tradesmen, all are welcome hither, / And may without Affront sit down Together: / Pre-eminence of Place, none here should Mind, / But take the next fit Seat that he can find: / Nor need any, if Finer Persons come, / Rise up to assigne to them his Room” (cited in Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry, 188). Stevenson also notes that the British Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, provided a place where people of various social classes could meet and exchange ideas, and characterizes the first masonic lodges, which he considers to have arisen in Scotland sometime in the middle of the 1600s, in the following terms: “There [in the lodges] [non-members] could find the ideal of fellowship, informal social mixing … and the annual banquet, and in addition indulge in a taste for the ancient, secret, mysterious and ritualistic,” all qualities which could be as well be an exact description of the makeup and activities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, with its mixing of social classes, its vivid dramatizations of classical myths and its love of cryptic games, and, as Vasari describes, its annual banquet in honor of St. Andrew, its patron saint. As we suggest below, there is evidence that the Compagnia della Cazzuola was itself a masonic organization, in the full modern sense of the term, long before the era when most historians consider such organizations as the masonic lodges to have arisen. 47. Brown points out that these companies—comprised almost entirely of “young and hot-tempered men”—also served an important political function: that of defending the city and its neighborhoods against the threatened return of Piero de’ Medici by organizing what we would call today armed “citizen patrols” in the quartieri of Florence. She mentions a supper given by Benedetto di Tanai de’ Nerli in December 1500, to which members of families hostile to the Medici were invited, noting that this was just the first of a planned series of suppers at which these men were asked to take up arms to defend their city from Piero’s threatened assault (Brown, The Return of Lucretius, 99–100). This recalls those antiMedicean feasts of Soderni and others discussed above, which may also, as we suggested, have had an explicitly political function. 48. In a very interesting essay, Sanne Wellen has also remarked on the carnivalesque nature of the festivities of the Compagnia della Virtù, with particular attention to a mock-heroic poem which the artist Andrea del Sarto, one of the most active members of the company, may have recited there in 1519. Wellen argues that it was precisely this aspect of their celebrations, seen as a survival of bourgeois culture into the age of the nascent Medicean court, which so displeased Vasari, seen as one of the prime advocates for a new, courtly culture based on strict social and artistic norms. We would suggest, however, as we did at the beginning of this chapter, that Vasari includes such detailed descriptions of this lost cultural world, not as a means of censuring it, but rather, using this apparent censure as a cover or veil, as a way of keeping a record of its activities alive for future generations. Although this is purely speculative, it is interesting to note that, in criticizing del Sarto for choosing to remain in Florence, while, according to Vasari, his genius would have been

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better served either in France or in Rome, Vasari would seem to be undercutting his own apparent championing of Medicean Florence as a center of artistic excellence. The implication would seem to be that, while Florence has produced great geniuses in the visual arts, they find better soil for the flourishing of their talent elsewhere. We might also remark that the subject of the poem recited by del Sarto, while it takes a familiar subject (the battle of the mice and the frogs, well-known from the fables of Aesop and the pseudo-Homeric Batrochomyomachia) nevertheless had, in the third and fourth decades of the cinquecento, a political subtext, which Plaisance and Zanzè have identified as the struggle between the Medici and their ottimati opponents for political control of post-republican Florence. However, we find it more plausible that such mock-epics may have represented rather an attempt to deflate Medici pretensions to grandeur and control over not only Florence, but Tuscany as well, a policy which entailed the gradual marginalization of the class of ottimati, as well as the working classes of the city, as noted above. In the next chapter, we note the existence of another informal company, the Compagnia della Macina, also affiliated with the Medici, and whose name would also seem to foreshadow the later Academia della Crusca, whose emblem was precisely this apparatus. 49. Anthony Cummings, The Maecenas and the Madrigalist: Patrons, Patronage, and the Origins of the Italian Madrigal (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004), 108. 50. Plaisance, “Une première affirmation de la politique culturelle de Come 1er: La transformation de l’Académie des ‘Humidi’ en académie florentine (1540–1542),” in Plaisance, L’Accadmia, 29–122. 51. It does not seem impossible that one of the meeting places for the gatherings of the Compagnia della Cazzuola might, given the name of the group’s patron saint, have been Machiavelli’s own house in the small town of Sant’Andrea in Percussina, miles southwest of Florence, or perhaps even the badia of San Martino in Mensola, near Fiesole, founded, according to legend, by St. Andrew the Scot, an Irish monk who traveled to Italy with Donatus, sometime in the ninth century. Interestingly enough, there is an Annunciation there by a certain Zanobi Machiavelli, a painter and miniaturist of the fifteenth century. Either locale was sufficiently removed from the city to provide a refuge from Medici spies, and their locations in the hills above Florence might explain Machiavelli’s reference to the need to “flee into the hills” of his Canzone dei romiti, discussed above. On a recent visit to Tuscany, sig. kindly informed me that there is an underground tunnel which connects the “Albergaccio” (the country inn where Machiavelli’s raucous conversations with his friends, “which could be heard as far away as San Casciano” were said to have taken place) and the little church of Sant’Andrea, for which Machiavelli, as the proprietario del luogo, was responsible, and whose lack of zeal in the upkeep of which led to his being fined by the Florentine Signoria. (Brucker cites the report of the Vicar General of the Florentine Archdiocese to the effect that, in Machiavelli’s parish church, “Omnia male se habebant. Lampas non erat accensa ante Corpus Christi. Domus tota ruinosa et ecclesia male se habebat. Relatum est Nicolaum de Malchiavellis tenere ad affictum omnia”). The dilapidated state of his parish church accords with what we know about Machiavelli’s lack of interest in traditional forms of Christian observance (citation is from Gene Brucker, “Niccolò Machiavelli, his Lineage, and the Tuscan Church,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 13 [2010]: 79–90. I thank David Kydd for this reference). If there were clandestine anti-medicean

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53.

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meetings at Sant’Andrea, such a hidden tunnel might have provided a convenient escape route from either the church or the inn, and would have served to conceal the movements of the participants from those Medici agents intent on keeping an eye on their activities. On the other side of the coin, we might recall the “corridoio vasariano” at the Uffizi, which, connecting to the Ponte Vecchio, led over the Arno all the way to the Palazzo Pitti, from which there was (and still exists today) a network of underground tunnels, several of which ran underneath the Palazzo Corsini and its gardens, continuing all the way to the city walls. For an explicit acknowledgement of this as the primary function of Giuliano’s Compagnia del Diamante, see Cerretani’s Sommario e ristretto cavato dalla historia di Bartolomeo Cerretani, cited in Cummings, The Maecenas, 119, 122–23. Cummings also reproduces Cerretani’s list of the members of the compagnia. Perhaps the most eloquent and cogent presentation of this theme is to be found in the works of Machiavelli, where this theme recurs constantly, and forms one of the important “sub-themes” of his Mandragola, in which, as suggested below, the scheming young Callimacho (intended, we argue, as symbol of the young Lorenzo di Piero, newly returned from France) finally gets the better of an older man, symbol, we suggest, of both the older generation of Florentine patriots (now outmoded and essentially useless in the new Medicean order), as well as representing a humorous self-reference on the part of Machiavelli himself to his own now essentially useless status as a representative of the former regime. This political interpretation of the theme of youth versus old age has implications for an interpretation of Machiavelli’s Mandragola, which we discuss below. Maria-Luisa Minio-Paluello, Jesters and Devils: A Midsummer Voyage, Florence 1514 (s.n., 2008). For a very useful survey of public spectacles under the Medici, including those which presented the theme of devils and Hell, see Plaisance (2008, 101–40). Document 2 (Plaisance 127–29) is a translation of the Cronaca fiorentina 114–15 which gives a vivid description of Hellmouth, presented for the Carnival celebrations of February 16, 1550. For this anecdote, see Chapter 2. For a similar use of Carnival festivities to simultaneously impress and intimidate the civilian populace of a city, in this case that of Reggio-Emilia, see Serge Bouchet, “De la fête communale à la fête princière dans les villes d’Emilie-Romagne (XIVe–début XVIe siècle): affirmation de pouvoir et sujétion des citadini,” Le Verger: La fête à la Renaissance, available online at http://cornucopia16.com/blog/2014/11/30/le-verger-bouquet-vi-la-fete-a-larenaissance/. For a study of Carnival festivities in Venice as expression of political dissent, see Linda Carroll, “Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 487–502. William F. Prizer, “Reading Carnival: The Creation of a Florentine Carnival Song,” Early Music History 23 (2004): 185–252. John Shearman, “Pontormo and Andrea Del Sarto, 1513,” The Burlington Magazine 104 (1962): 450, 478–83. All citations from Vasari’s life of Piero di Cosimo are from Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston de Vere (London: Macmillan, 1912–1915).

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62. Recent radiographic analysis of the wall of the Salone del Gran Consiglio suggests that Leonardo’s fresco may actually lie behind Vasari’s fresco of Pisa being attacked by Florentine troops, and that Vasari may have deliberately hinted at its existence by including the inscription Cerca trova (“Seek and ye shall find”) on one of the battle flags in his fresco. Instead of painting directly over Leonardo’s fresco, Vasari took care to leave a space between his fresco and that of Leonardo, presumably to ensure its survival into later generations. If this turns out to be the case, it might provide a further example, this one very literal, of a secret adherence on the part of the artist to the ideals and institutions of the Florentine republic. 63. On this subject, see his From Politics to the Reason of State: the Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Ch. 1. And the word “supperisca” of the Canzone della Cazzuola, of whose meaning Cummings is uncertain, might, then, correspond to the Biblical “suffer the little children to come unto me.” 64. On Lorenzo’s abrogation of Florence’s republican traditions, see Trexler: “At a stroke, Lorenzo violated one of the oldest Florentine tabus and armed the youth. Evidently the Medici, different from the old oligarchy, did not fear youth any more than it feared the lower classes. Within the year, Florentine military captains serving Lorenzo became a common sight in Florentine festive life, bearing the flags and threads of nobility with a public pomp few could have earlier imagined” (Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 517). 65. We noted above that the exclusion of members, not only of the working classes, but also of the ottimati was a prominent feature of the consolidation of Medici rule in Florence in the fourth and fifth decades of the cinquecento. Plaisance gives a nice summation of this process: “À ce type d’intellectuel [supporters of Cosimo de’ Medici] s’opposent évidement Lorenzo Scala, Lasca et ses amis, peu soucieux de servir inconditionnellement le Prince dont ils ne dépendent pas, attachés aux valeurs culturelles et politiques de la société marchand, qui sont désormais en voie de liquidation. Souvent, dans le passé, leurs ancetres avaient soutenu les Médicis: c’est le cas de Simone Grazzini, grand-oncle de Lasca, un des familiers de Pierre de Médicis, ou celui de Bartolomeo Scala. Mais, depuis Alexandre de Médicis, les familles florentines qui avaient un passé politique ont peu à peu étés écartées des affairs publiques par un pouvoir plus soucieux d’avoir des serviteurs que des partenaires” (Plaisance, 164). Compare this with the comments on the marginalization of the ottimati, among them Michelangelo and his friends, in Chapter 2 above. 66. For a recent study of Medici manipulation of the festival of San Giovanni for political purposes, see Heidi Chrétien, The Festival of San Giovanni: Imagery and Political Power in Renaissance Florence (New York: Peter Lang, 1994). 67. For a study of one of the first scientific academies in Italy, see William Eamon and Francoise Paheau, “The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli: A Sixteenth-Century Italian Scientific Society,” Isis 75 (1984): 327–42. Interestingly, Eamon and Paheau note the same mixing of upper class and working class individuals in this academy as we noted above in our discussion of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, as well as the same insistence on secrecy as to both its membership and its activities. The statutes of this academy were only published years after it ceased to function, under the pseudonym “Alexis of Piedmont” (Alessio Piemontese) and, under the title of Liber segretorum, had a wide circulation throughout Europe. See also Marco Faini, “A Ghost Academy between Venice and Brescia:

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Philosophical Scepticism and Religious Heterodoxy in the Accademia dei Dubbiosi,” in The Italian Academies 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, edited by J. E. Everson, D. V. Reidy, and L. M. Sampson (Oxford: Legenda, 2016), 102–115. 68. Cummings cites the Italian historian Giuliano Procacci on the deleterious effect of Medici rule on Florentine cultural life, in his turn echoing a famous passage from Tacitus (the concluding passage of the Dialogus de oratorabis) on the fundamental incompatibility of despotic regimes with intellectual and artistic creativity. According to Procacci, with the decisive establishment of the principato, there was among Florentines “a tendency to close in on themselves with a self-sufficiency and aloofness that was the exact contrary of the mental openness of the great Florentine artists and intellectuals of the past … if one considers late sixteenth-century Florentine intellectual life as a whole, … it is bound to seem less energetic than it had been; it shows a marked tendency to withdraw into contemplation of its own past” (Cummings, The Politicized Muse, 170, citing Procacci, History of the Italian People, trans. Anthony Paul [New York: Harper and Row, 1973], 164–65). For Venice as refuge for Italian exiles from Florence, see William Bouwsma, Venice and the Defence of Republican Liberty (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968). For its function as a center of clandestine publishing, see Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), idem, Culture and Censorship in Late Renaissance Italy and France (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), as well as the recent study of John Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). For the Italian exiles in general, see Paolo Simoncelli, Fuoriuscitismo repubblicano fiorentino, 1530–54 (Milan: F. Angeli, 2006). 69. On this reform movement, Stephen Bowd, citing Thomas Mayer, has commented: “Thomas F. Mayer, the most recent biographer of Reginald Pole, has preferred the term ‘reform tendency’ to describe the grouping of men and women once conveniently described as ‘spirituali’ and ‘intransigenti.’ He has written: ‘Constantly shifting, realigning, metamorphosing, anything but a party, this tendency includes all those who expressed allegiance to reform and who usually cooperated with one another until driven apart by personality or politics, not in the first instance religious differences’” (Stephen Bowd, “Prudential Friendship and Religious Reform: Vittoria Colonna and Gasparo Contarini,” unpublished manuscript, available at: https://www.academia.edu/s/2dd90e7f98, citing Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8). In his recent book on religious reform movements, Biagioli, citing a contemporary letter, makes a tantalizing reference to the presence of such groups, which he terms a “secret alternative church,” an organized group consisting of “a large number of Christians [who] existed secluded from the Church,” and “who believed they could change the world.” According to Biagioni, this group, evidence of whose existence first appears in the middle years of the sixteenth century, was so large that “e’ possono fare una repubblica assai popolata” (“they could constitute an entire nation unto themselves”), and consisted of “a network of people [throughout Europe] who were able to distribute books and support ideas.” Biagioni cites a letter of Francesco Pucci to Fausto Sozzini (both of them prominent religious dissenters and exiles from Italy) sent “ex sessione XXXV concilii peregrinantium Christianorum,” a phrase which, if it is not an exaggeration, implies a highly organized and widespread group

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of religious dissenters (Mario Biagioni, The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe: A Lasting Heritage [Leiden: Brill, 2017], 52, 55). As we note below, the associated images of the pilgrim and the peregrine falcon are the secret keys to this entire underground network. 70. One location which may have served as an important place of refuge for those dissenters we have been discussing, and which we have not discussed in this study, are the many monasteries and rustic hermitages (eremi) widely scattered throughout the countryside of central and northern Italy. As examples we might cite a copy of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina which, according to the owner’s signature on the title page, belonged to certain “sisters of Gromelle” (“le s.r. de Gromelle”), that is, nuns residing in the Benedictine convent of Saint Grata in Bergamo. Another example might be the author of the Dialogo de Fortuna, Antonio Fregoso, whose pseudonym was “Phileremo,” that is, “lover of the hermitage.” The scholar Justine Walden has studied a family of manuscripts written by the Vallombrosan order around the 1480s which were ostensibly about exorcism but were in fact an unusual blend of Medici adulation and covert criticism. One of the translators of one of these manuscripts, Taddeo Adimari, was a Servite prior to becoming a Vallombrosan (“Foaming Mouth and Eyes Aflame: Exorcism and Power in Renaissance Florence,” PhD. dissertation, Yale University, 2016). See also the fascinating article by George McClure, “Heresy at Play: Academies and the Literary Underground in Counter-Reformation Siena,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 1151–207, which gives an account of another manuscript, this one associated with one of the Siennese academies, which presents a competition between pseudo-orthodox and secular images in an allusive satire of counter-Reformation proselytizing efforts in the city. This manuscript even includes an “Index of Prohibited games,” perhaps a satirical reference, not only to the desire on the part of the Medici to control every aspect of Florentine political and social life, no matter how trivial, but also to the fact that some of these games, as we have been suggesting, may have had a political subtext directed against the Medici. The best modern history of Freemasonry is David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), although Stevenson, as a good Scot, tends to overemphasize the precedence of Scotland over England in the development of modern Freemasonry, tracing its origins to the mid-seventeenth century. He does not even consider the possibility that modern Freemasonry may have arisen much earlier, in the Florence of the early 1500s. 71. Interestingly, one of the founders of the Servite Order, Sor Giuliana, has the same last name as the falcons of Doni’s Accademia dei Pellegrini: “Falconieri.” This might also tend to indicate that, besides its appropriateness to the wandering nature of its adherents, this pan-European movement of reform-minded individuals took its original inspiration and symbol directly from the Servite Order, who took as their mission precisely the same commitment to social justice and selfless service which characterized these later organizations. Another interesting fact which may also not be coincidental is that one of Machiavelli’s ancestors on his mother’s side, S. Filippo Benizi, was one of the founders of the Order. We noted above that the occasion for the first performance of Machiavelli’s Clizia was the freeing from jail of a certain “Jacopo Falconetti” (“il Fornaciaio”). We also frequently encounter these “Pellegrini” on many of the frontispieces of Venetian printers of works which challenged the political and religious orthodoxies the day. Many of the printer’s devices

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just mentioned also display, along with the references to pilgrims, what would seem to be Masonic imagery, a topic which is beyond the scope of this study, but one example which might be cited here is the motif of a serpent, either alone or paired with another, which appears, twined around a cross or a staff, on the title pages of many of these printers, thus aptly combining both Hermetic (as symbol of the ancient healer Asclepius) and Christian (as the brazen serpent raised by Moses in the wilderness) allusions. 72. While he oversimplifies and overdramatizes for the sake of narrative effect, Burckhardt’s famous formulation of the vulnerability of sixteenth century Italy to domination by foreign “tyrants” (as the author of the Marucelli chronicle terms the kings of France and Spain) is still, in its essentials, valid: “In face of this centralized authority, all legal opposition within the borders of the State was futile. The elements needed for the restoration of a republic had been for ever destroyed, and the field prepared for violence and despotism. The nobles, destitute of political rights, even where they held feudal possessions, might call themselves Guelphs or Ghibellines at will, might dress up their bravos in padded hose and feathered caps or how else they pleased; thoughtful men like Machiavelli knew well enough that Milan and Naples were too ‘corrupt’ for a republic. Strange judgements fell on these two so-called parties, which now served only to give official sanction to personal and family disputes” ( Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [New York: Modern Library, 2002]). With the marginalization and gradual disempowerment of the old feudal principalities, such as Ferrara or Urbino, there remained no powerful central authority within Italy to withstand the incursions into her territory on the part of these foreign powers. In our view, the only antidote for this situation, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was the creation, not of the quasi-dictator many critics consider to have been his recommendation in the final pages of the Prince, whomsoever they consider this figure to have been (most consider it plausible that Machiavelli was alluding in his final chapter either to Cesare Borgia or to one of the Medici, either Lorenzo di Piero or Giovanni delle Bande Nere, the latter an individual much admired in Renaissance Italy for his decisiveness and military prowess), but rather a network of independent republics, similar to those of the late Middle Ages, and modeled after the league of twelve cities of the ancient Etruscans, the leader among them being, perhaps, Florence, who, united together in a loose federation similar to that of ancient Etruria, would have been able to withstand these external forces, while simultaneously maintaining, within these cities, the rights and privileges of their citizens. 73. On the baneful effects of Cosimo’s rule on Florentine intellectual life, Plaisance remarks: “La réaction de Lasca [a dissident intellectual, one of the original members of the Accademia degli Umidi, until his expulsion upon the dissolution of the academy at the behest of Cosimo in March 1547] le seul homme de lettres florentin à etre aussi indépendant, est évidement la plus violante, ma elle est aussi une prise de conscience. Lasca a payé le prix pour pouvoir dire ce qu’il pense et meme pour pouvoir simplement penser.” Lasca had written a series of poems against the “Aramei,” that is, supporters of Cosimo’s cultural programme. According to Plaisance, the consolidation of power in the hands of Cosimo involved as one of its primary objectives the marginalization and eventual elimination of literary forms and themes which had characterized the great age of Florentine bourgeois literature (189). Seen in this light, whatever the interpretation of individual poems written

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by members of the Accademia degli Umidi or their successors in Cosimo’s Accademia Fiorentina, their entire cultural programme, taken as a whole, might be seen as a form of “cultural resistance” to these attempts on the part of Cosimo to standardize and regularize Florentine literary and artistic culture in support of his regime. While many scholars of Italian Renaissance theatre might disagree with our interpretation of the names of the characters of Machiavelli’s play, it has always amazed us that such an obvious reference to republican Rome as the name of Lucrezia should be seen as controversial. In our view, this is simply to ignore evidence right beneath one’s own eyes. Several prominent scholars agree with our insistence on the importance of the names of the play to a proper understanding of its political subtext, although they may differ on the specific interpretation of individual names. For these references, see the discussion of Lorenzino de’ Medici’s Aridosio below. Jane Tylus, “Theater and Its Social Uses: Machiavelli’s Mandragola and the Spectacle of Infamy,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 656–86. Andrews, cited by Tylus, makes a similar observation: “There is no textual way of deciding whether Lucrezia is indeed joyfully liberated into sensuality. … All we can say is that if we are expected to rejoice with her, Machiavelli has been inefficient about making the fact clear on paper” (Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 54). Linda Carroll, citing Sanesi, has also noted the use of this topos in Renaissance Italy as symbol of political domination, especially during times of Carnival: “The imposition of French and Imperial influence on Italy was represented in drama as a reinterpretation of the Carnival theme of the young man who takes the wife of an older, enfeebled husband” (“Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 16 [1985]: 487–502). The last phrase of this canzone is especially cryptic, but it recalls to mind a similar phrase, cited in Chapter 2, in which Condivi reports that a friend of Michelangelo’s, Giovan Francesco Fattucci, urged him not to worry about possible attempts on his life, since the (unnamed) initiator of this attempt may not live long: “I say again to you that if there is someone in Florence who takes it ill that you are alive, be patient, because I have hope in God that someday, in whatever way, he will be destroyed” (Condivi, Vita, Ch. 38, citing letter of November 24, 1524, cited in Spini 50). Since this letter was written in the same year (November 22, 1524) that the Mandragola was published, it seems plausible to conjecture that both the letter and Machiavelli’s veiled reference to the monster who may not even be still alive are both allusions to the Medici rulers of Florence or one of their agents, whom both writers hope will soon meet their end. There was a plot in 1522 to assassinate Giulio de’ Medici during a procession to celebrate the Feast of San Giovanni, presumably to prevent his imminent election as Pope (Barocchi, Carteggio, III, 116). For the essential “difficulty” of Machiavelli’s personality, see Najemy: “Outwardly he may have tried to conform and to mask his private feelings, like a good secretary and soldier; but it must have been clear, not merely to Luigi Guicciardini, Piero Soderini, Biagio Buonaccorsi, Filippo Casavecchia and Agnolo Tucci, but to everyone who knew anything of the impatient and sometimes excessively independent secretary, that underneath his formal compliance with the conventions of the chancery he harboured a multitude of negative

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and often scathing judgements about the political leaders, institutions, and policies that he served” ( John Najemy, “The Controversy Surrounding Machiavelli’s Service to the Republic,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 101–17). Mera J. Flaumenhaft, The Civic Spectacle: Essays on Drama and Community (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 85. Anthony Cummings, The Politicized Muse: Music for Medici Festivals, 1512–1537 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 211–12. Armando Petrini, La signoria di madonna Finzione: teatro, attori e poetiche nel Rinascimento italiano (Genova: Costa and Nolan, 1996), 48–50, cited in Mozzati 305. Interestingly, the Philogenia displays many resemblances to Machiavelli’s Mandragola: the urban setting, the mixing of social classes, a plot built around the deception of an old man by a young and virile suitor for the affections of a beautiful young woman, the conclusion in a marriage. Where the play differs significantly from Machiavelli’s, however, is in the tone of the ending: instead of the bitter edge noted above, due to Lucrezia’s only partial and external submission to the pressures of her lover’s schemes, owing to her reluctance to abandon her essentially chaste character, the marriage which ends the Philogenia is an unequivocally happy one. Another salient difference is that, unlike Machiavelli’s Lucrezia, the female protagonist of Pisani’s play is more than eager for the attentions, not just of her young lover, but of many others also, and surpasses even the male protagonists in her unabashed enjoyment of her sexuality, a feature unusual in the female protagonist of an Italian Renaissance play. Given the fact that Machiavelli was an active participant in the theatrical performances of the Cazzuola, it does not seem impossible that he might have taken the inspiration for his Mandragola from this play. We have already noted the possible references to contemporary personages in Pisani’s play; perhaps this also might have given Machiavelli the idea for a play in the Plautine mold, telling the story (in his case, bitter-sweet) of a pair of young lovers who are stand-ins for contemporary individuals and events. Further evidence which suggests the Philogenia as inspiration for the Mandragola is the fact that one of the characters in the former play, Pamphila, was substituted by the author of the Commedia in versi, sometimes attributed to Machiavelli, for the original name of this character, Lucrezia, a substitution which Stoppelli considers to have been occasioned by the final choice of the latter name as that of the protagonist of the Mandragola. A female character named Sostrata is also common to both the Commedia in versi and the Mandragola. Stoppelli, basing his analysis on textual and biographical evidence, disagrees with the current critical consensus which attributes the Commedia in versi to Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi, and not to Machiavelli. In addition, the plots of all three comedies center around the schemes of the protagonists to achieve their sexual desires by duping other more naive characters, although, admittedly, this could be said about Plautine comedy in general (Pasquale Stoppelli, “Un’altra commedia per Machiavelli,” Ecdotica 13 [2016]: 9–40, available online at http://ecdotica.org). Yael Even, “The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,” Woman’s Art Journal 12 (1991): 10–14 and Margaret Carroll, “The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence,” Representations 25 (1989): 3–30.

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84. As another example of a well-known Renaissance drama which, according to one scholar, makes a veiled critique of Leo is Ariosto’s Il negromante, composed at the Pope’s request one year after the performance at the papal court of the author’s hugely successful Suppositi during Carnival of 1519. Attempting to answer the question of why this play was never performed in Rome, this scholar demonstrates conclusively that it was because the play represents an allusive and highly negative portrait of the Pope himself, in the person of the Iago-like character Iachelino, who obtains what he wants from the other, weaker, characters by means of deceit and the ability to assume many identities. According to this scholar, the reason why this play was never performed at Leo’s court was not its scabrous and obscene language and its references to sodomy, intended to satirize the papal court, and present in even greater measure in his other plays, but rather the frequent references to Iachelino’s greed and his astrological manipulation of “magiche sciochezze” to extort money and favors from those he needs; in the words of this scholar, Iachelino “pontificates over the world of Il negromante … dispensing artificial services for real cash.” As a veiled allusion to the sale of indulgences and Leo’s manipulation of religion in the service of personal self-agzement, the machination of this character would have struck a particularly sensitive cord, just three years after the posting of Luther’s theses, which taxed the Roman court for just such improprieties. In reference to our claim that the names of the characters of both Machiavelli’s Mandragola and Caro’s Gli straccioni are important clues to the anti-medicean subtext of these plays, Portner observes Ariosto’s similar use of proper names to hint at the actual personage who lies behind his fictive Iachelino. In reference to our claim that Raphael’s portrait of the Medici Pope contains a humorous allusion to his extreme myopia, we might note that Porter also observes a similar use of this detail in Il negromante to direct the audience’s attention to the political subtext of the play (I. A. Portner, “A Non-performance of Il Negromante,” Italica 59 [1982]: 316–29). Raphael’s portrait was commissioned for the celebration on September 1518 in the Medici garden of the wedding, several months earlier, of Lorenzo di Piero and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne. The entertainment for this event consisted of a performance of Machiavelli’s Mandragola. If our suggestion of an implied satirical message directed against the Pope in Raphael’s portrait and in Machiavelli’s Mandragola is accepted, then the ironies of this situation become almost too much to bear: these proud Medici rulers would have feasted and toasted their ascendent power over the city seated under a portrait which mocked the person most responsible for this turn of events, while enjoying a seemingly-innocent comedy in the Plautine tradition which indicted their rule as little more than a tyranny. A further irony, for those in attendance at the feast, or who heard about it second-hand, would have been that both of the Medici clients who hold onto the throne had extremely tenuous claims to power: Giulio’s exact status vis-à-vis his ecclesiastic offices was never really clear, and de’ Rossi, while also a cousin and intimate of Leo, had been elevated only very recently to the Cardinalate by the execution of his predecessor in the office, Cardinal Sauli, owing to the latter’s alleged participation in a plot to assassinate Leo Nelson Minnich, “Raphael’s Portrait ‘Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi’: A Religious Interpretation,” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 1015–018. Najemy points out that the entire affair may have been merely a pretext by which Leo could gain access to the assets of these individuals. If these contemporary circumstances are taken into account, it

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might explain the anxious expression on the face of de’ Rossi, as well as his death-grip on the throne. The topical references we have just proposed also raise the possibility that the Lucrezia of Machiavelli’s play might be a symbol, not of Florence, but rather of Madeleine herself (Nelson Minnich, “Raphael’s Portrait ‘Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi’: A Religious Interpretation,” Renaissance Quarterly 56 [2003]: 1005–052). In his Life of Rustici, Vasari notes that at some of the feasts hosted by the artist, he was accustomed to dressing up as a negromante, a practice which provoked terror in his household servants. Another Italian Renaissance comedy which may have served as veiled commentary on contemporary events is Agostino Ricchi’s, Comedia intitolata I tre tiranni, recitata in Bologna a N. Signore, et a Cesare, il giorno de la Commemoratione de la Corona di sua Maesta (Venice: Bernardino de Vitalibus, 14 September 1533). This play was adapted for its first presentation to suit the occasion of the meeting of Charles V and Pope Clement VII in Bologna, to which place the action was shifted. In Act V, one of the principle characters “returned from Spain, dressed in the habit of a pilgrim and speaking Spanish, enters into praise for the Emperor and the Pope.” The author’s dedication to Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici is followed by a long and interesting introduction by the Dante scholar Alessandro Vellutello explaining the basic ideas of the play and its place in dramatic literature. Humanist Tragedies, trans. Gary Grund (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), xxxv–xxxvii. Gori, Chapter XVI, “Le feste diaboliche del 1513, 1514, ed altre,” 204–07. It is also interesting to note that an English version of Trissino’s play appeared in the first edition of Marston’s collected plays, and that he took great care that the second edition not carry his name, perhaps a further indication of the dangers inherent in the use of the theme of a heroic female figure subject to the violence of a superior male figure to allude to contemporary political events. In this case, then, the tyrant would be James I. Remarking on Marston’s stylistic innovations, T. S. Eliot commented: “We are aware, in short, with this as with Marston’s other plays, that we have to do with a positive, powerful and unique personality. His is an original variation of that deep discontent and rebelliousness so frequent among the Elizabethan dramatists. He is, like the greatest of them, occupied in saying something else than appears in the literal actions and characters whom he manipulates. … It is not by writing quotable ‘poetic’ passages, but by giving us the sense of something behind, more real than any of his personages and their action, that Marston established himself among the writers of Genius.” Here once again, we observe, this time in England, the same use of highly cryptic and allusive means to encode criticism of a contemporary ruler as we have been discussing in the dramas of Rucellai and Trissino. “Like many Renaissance writers, including Chapman in his tribute, Marlowe frequently evokes classical myths without actually naming them, and in many cases his most significant myths are only implicit in patterns of images. In the plays especially, there is no need for Tantalus to be named, for we see versions of him in the stage-pictures Marlowe creates through props and the postures of the actors” (Tromly, Playing with Desire, 11). On the Judith, see Sarah McHam, “Donatello’s Bronze ‘David’ and “Judith’ as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence,” The Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 32–47.

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90. Lodovico Domenichi, Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne (Lucca: Busdrago, 1559). The article which discusses this volume is by Marie-Françoise Piejus, “La première anthologie de poèmes féminins: L’écriture filtrée et orientée,” in Le pouvoir et la plume: incitation, contrôle et répression dans l’Italie du XVIe siècle (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982), 193–213. 91. Ann Rosalind Jones, “New Song for the Swallow: Ovid’s Philomela in Tullia d’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 263–77. 92. Deana Basile, “‘Fasseli gratia per poetessa’: Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Role in the Florentine Literary Circle of Tullia d’Aragona,” in Eisenbichler, 135–39. 93. Here we might also cite Federico Della Valle’s Iudit, an overlooked masterpiece of late Renaissance drama (Della Valle is better-known for his La Reina di Scozia), in which we encounter, once again, the same theme of the tyrant punished for his abuse of a young woman. This play (which also appeared under the title “Betulia liberata,” “Betulia” being Hebrew for “young woman”) presents striking parallels to the plays we have been discussing, especially Seneca’s Thyestes and Rucellai’s Rosmunda: the tyrant of Della Valle’s play is encouraged by Judith to immerse himself in drink, and, once he is too drunk to defend himself, he, along with his drunken companions, are slaughtered and decapitated by the heroic Judith and her Israelite companions. The scene in which he and his fellow-banqueters stagger about the stage, making half-hearted attempts to attack the Jews ensconced behind the walls of Jerusalem, is truly a masterpiece of Renaissance drama, and deserves to be better known. As part of this comic (but also highly dramatic, given what is about to happen to the King and his companions) interlude, we are also treated to a hilarious “encomium” to the virtues of wine, as opposed to the harshness of Mars, in a tour-de-force of comic writing which recalls the philosophical interludes of the Thyestes, where, as noted above, we encounter Stoic commonplaces which warn of the pitfalls which attend the arrogance of kings and celebrate the simple virtues of the common man. Given our suggestion of possible topical references in the Renaissance plays we have been discussing, where the tyrants represented are possibly intended to refer to contemporary historical circumstances, Della Valle’s play might have also been intended to censure a similar abuse of power on the part of a powerful ruler of his day. 94. That Renaissance farces could often have a didactic intent directed at the rulers to whom they were presented is made clear by a farce of Jacopo del Bientina, a member, along with Giovan Battista Ottonaio, of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, recited “agli excelsi Signori di Firenze in 1512,” regarding which Bientina, in the Prologue, claims apologetically: [non è] una ordinata comedia, distinta a punto in cinque acti, togata o palliata, racolto in un sol dì del tutto el sunto,” but rather a “storia inmaginata partita in tempi, più di cinque in punto.” As with the other Renaissance plays we have been discussing, but in a different register, Bientina’s play represents yet another rebuke, similar to the plays of Rucellai and Trissino discussed above, of Florence’s current leaders, immediately after their restoration as lords of the city, and an attempt to teach them the proper way to behave with their subjects. Although Bientina never refers directly to Florence, it is clear that his play was intended to function as an implied critique of the current social and political climate,

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since he rebukes, in a Savonarolan, medievalizing way, the self-centeredness of the lover, the merchant, and the lord, which explains his use of the words “storia inmaginata” to describe his play, i.e. consisting of relatively simple dialogue between a few carefully-delineated characters, accompanied by the appropriate visual supports. Here we might also cite Ottonaio’s L’ingratitudine, a Savonarolan-flavored play in which a rich man is reproved for his ungratefulness toward his friend, possibly an allusive reference to Ottonaio’s treatment at the hands of the Medici, by whom he was dismissed from his position as Herald of the Signoria for reasons which remain unclear. This play is also an allusive censure of the vices of the Medicean court, since, just as in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, the prologue refers to an avaricious man’s having just returned to his homeland from abroad, thirsty for honor and riches and all the prestige the court can bring. The play was then clearly intended to serve, in a manner similar to Savonarola’s sermons, as a reproof of courtly vices and a call to repentance. Among the vices of the court which comes in for special censure is that of avarice, which sets one man against another and destroys the bonds of friendship, thus voiding the social contract and introducing into society all the vices associated with this. In this regard, it may be significant that, while Ottonaio died in 1527, the play did not see its first edition until 1549, by the Giuntine press, although Poggiali suggests that earlier editions may have existed, possibly dating to the time of the first performance of Machiavelli’s Clizia and Mandragola The rarity of these earlier editions, assuming they existed, might perhaps be an indication of an active effort on the part of the Medici to suppress the play. As noted above, the first performance of La Clizia was intended to celebrate the release from prison of one of the members of the Cazzuola, who had been arrested for some unknown transgression against the Medici regime. In our view, it is significant that both Bientina and Ottonaio were members of the Cazzuola and followers of Savonarola; this tends to suggest that our hypothesis of a hidden Savonarolan and anti-Medicean agenda present in the activities of the company is indeed well-founded. The Canzone della Chazuola, discussed above and at length by Cummings, has also been attributed to Ottonaio, for which see also Cummings, The Politicized Muse, 103, 107–12 et passim. For more on Ottonaio, see Cummings, Mozzati and Armando Petrini, La “Signoria della Madonna Finzione”: Teatro attori e poetiche nel Rinascimento italiano (Genova: Costa and Nolan, 1996), 21–87. 95. In one of the carnival songs included in Lasca’s mid-cinquecento anthology, Rucellai makes an explicit connection between the Furies and the present sorry state of Florentine political life, to which another author, in a humorous rejoinder, remarks that, rather than referring to Florentine political life in general, they represent the travails of ordinary Florentines, hounded by the constant harassment of the city’s ever-present fiscal authorities. 96. Martelli was a close friend of Giovanni Gaddi, the brother of the powerful anti-medicean Cardinal Niccolò Gaddi, who dedicates his edition of Martelli’s work as a posthumous tribute to the memory of his departed friend, and who was the center of a clandestine group of opponents of the Medici based in Rome, of which Michelangelo himself was a member. For Martelli’s connections with the Florentine exiles in Rome, see the footnote in Chapter 1, citing Raphaële Mouren, “The Role of Florentine Families in the Editions of Piero Vettori” (paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, April 3, 2008, available online at http://raphaele-mouren.enssib.fr/ Chicago2008#15). While Slim considers Martelli to have been a supporter of the Medici

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regime, in contrast to his father and his brother Niccolò, some of the evidence he presents in his essay on the early Italian madrigal points to the opposite conclusion: Martelli’s killing of a guard in the Piazza San Giovanni in April 1527, which led to his flight from Florence to Campania with the soldier Cesare Fieramosca, his friendships with and service to Giovanni Gaddi, Benedetto Varchi and Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, all of them opponents of the Medici, his close association, along with Paolo Giovio, with the circle of Vittoria Colonna on Ischia, and, especially, his composition of a poem around 1525 extolling Ippolito de’ Medici as the “hope of Florence.” Also telling is the list of tragedies based on classical models associated with Florentine writers which Varchi gives in his Lezzione V of 1553, which is in chronological order: Rucellai’s Rosmunda (1515), Alessandro Pazzi de’ Medici’s Didone (1524), the latter’s Latin translation of the Oedipus tyrannus (1526), and finally, Martelli’s Tullia of after 1526. As we have proposed, these tragedies all refer, in an oblique way, to the tyrannical nature of Medici rule in Florence. Ippolito de’ Medici, along with Giuliano and perhaps Ottaviano de’ Medici, was one of those Medici opponents of Medici rule over Florence, whose covert (in the cases of Giuliano and Ottaviano) opposition is, in our view, an important historical fact which has been largely overlooked by historians of the period. In this chapter, we have described Giuliano’s sympathies for and participation in the anti-medicean festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola (H. Colin Slim, “Un coro della Tullia di Lodovico Martelli messo in musica e attribuito a Philippe Verdelot,” in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ‘500 [Florence: Olschki, 1983], 2, 487–511). 97. For the rediscovery of Seneca’s tragedies, and their influence on tre- and quattrocento Italian drama, see Grund vii–xx. In this regard, it is interesting to note that every play printed in Grund’s edition of humanist tragedies has a contemporary political subtext, more or less overtly expressed, regarding the nature of tyranny and the necessity of combating it (Humanist Tragedies, ed. Gary Grund [Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2011]). 98. The fact that dramatic performances could represent a potent challenge to the authority of the Medici regime in Renaissance Florence is attested to by an edict published on May 21, 1581 by Sebastiano de’ Medici, canon of the Florentine cathedral, at the behest of Alessandro de’ Medici, Archbishop of Florence, noting that since there had come to his [Alessandro’s] attention the presence of “alcuni disordini per i quali si potrebbe destruggere tanta utilità spirituale,” he has determined and ordered that “non si recitino in modo alcuno Commedie, Tragedie, Farse, Tragicommedie o altri spettacoli né di cose sacre né di profane” in the oratories of sacred companies, nor anywhere else without the express consent of the Archbishop of his Vicario Generale (cited by Michel Plaisance, “Littérature et Censure à Florence à la Fin du XVIe siècle: le Retour du Censuré,” in Le Pouvoir et la Plume, 249–50). If “disordini” threatening to Medici authority in the city could be a problem in the theatrical performances of the sacred companies, and had to be tightly regulated, one can only imagine the possibilities for the proliferation of dramatic performances with subversive intent in the multitude of non-religious organizations of the city. This chapter has attempted to document only several of what were very likely many other such uses of drama to express discontent with the Medici regime, and to keep alive, if only underground and only on stage for an evening’s performance, the memories and traditions of the vanished Florentine republic.

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99. Anna Fontes-Baratto, “Les fêtes a Urbin en 1513 et la Calandria de Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena,” in Les écrivains et le pouvoir en Italie a l’époque de la Renaissance, ed. André Rochon (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1974), 45–79 and Dominique Clouet, “Empirisme ou égotisme: la politique dans la Cassaria et les Suppositi de l’Arioste,” in Rochon, 7–44. On the Calandria, see also Ronald Martinez, “Etruria triumphans: Fables of Medici Hegemony in Bibbiena’s Calandra” (paper delivered at the conference “Italy in the Drama of Europe,” University of California, Berkeley, April 25–25, 2009, now available as Renaissance Drama 36/37: Italy in the Drama of Europe, ed. William West and Albert Ascoli [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010]). 100. Angelo Solerti, “La rappresentazione della Calandria a Lione nel 1548,” in Raccolti di studi critici dedicata ad Alessandro D’Ancona (Florence: Barbèra, 1901), 693–99. 101. I would like to thank Professor Richard Andrews for informing me of the later history of the Cazzuola represented by its performances in Lyon. Whether the compagnia remained active in Florence into the 1540s is a question which we cannot answer at this point. Given that one of the meanings of “Cazzuola” is “tadpole”, a creature in a constant state of transformation, placed together with the worker’s trowel by the members of the company on their impresa, it does not seem impossible that the company may have “mutated” into another clandestine organization, perhaps keeping some of the same members, and changing its name, impresa, and places of meeting. Indeed, it does not seem impossible that this later incarnation of the Cazzuola, if it existed, may have been the Academia degli Umidi itself, whose non-conforming nature, discussed above, is well-known to scholars, and whose impresa. according to Doni in his Nuova Opinione, was a frog, a creature with the ability to change its location (being amphibious in nature) to adapt to prevailing circumstances. If this is the case, it seems possible also that the supposed founder of the Academia degli Umidi, a certain “padre Stradino,” may be a pseudonym, a reference to the recondite and out-of-the way location of this organization, “Stradino” meaning “Little Street.” There is a “via delle Caldaie” in Florence, not far from the working-class neighborhoods which were the locus of several other anti-Medicean academies, discussed in the next chapter. Given that the name of the sister-company of the Compagnia della Cazzuola was the Compagnia del Paiuolo (Company of the Cauldron), it does not seem impossible that the via delle Caldaie may have served as the location of either or both companies. Given its importance to the history of Renaissance drama, and, more generally, to the subject of resistance to Medici rule in the first decades of the cinquecento, the entire topic of the actual historical substrate of the fanciful account given by Vasari would seem to be a highly promising subject of future investigation. 102. As another example of political commentary donning the guise of Plautine comedy, see Faccioli’s discussion of Lorenzino de’ Medici’s L’Aridosio, which the editor claims alludes to present-day circumstances in Medicean Florence, specifically, the harshness of Alessandro’s rule. As an interesting side note, we might remark that, according to Vasari in his Life of Aristotile da San Gallo, the play was intended by its author, the future assassin of Alessandro de’ Medici, to physically kill the Medici audience in attendance at its first performance by means of a cleverly-concealed device which was to cause the proscenium to collapse on top of the spectators in the front row, a calamity prevented only by the timely and diplomatic intervention of the artist himself (Lorenzino de’ Medici, L’Aridosia, ed.

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Emilio Faccioli [Turin: Einaudi, 1974]). The title of the play (given in some editions as “L’Aridosia”) would seem to be a veiled reference to Cardinal Francesco Alidosi, a supporter of Leo in his attempts to unseat Francesco Maria della Rovere from his position as ruler of Urbino. Alidosi was a known catamite, that is, the homosexual lover of the previous Pope, Julius II. Hence Lorenzino’s reference in his title to this individual using its feminine form would seem to be a joking reference to this fact, and an indication of the author’s opposition to Leo’s policies of territorial expansion at the expense of one of Florence’s traditional allies against Medici rule, known especially as the last hope of the Florentine republicans besieged by the combined forces of the Papacy and the Empire during the siege of Florence in 1527. This would in turn tend to suggest that the main character of the play, Aridosio, who treats his son harshly and seeks to impose stern discipline on him, is indeed a veiled reference to the harshness of Medici rule in Florence. Aridosio is also a miser, who places his love for his treasure above both his own health and that of his family, resembling in this way also the tyrants discussed above, who, by consuming the most valuable assets of their states, ensure their impoverishment into the future. In the next chapter, we will examine how this second feature of the tyrant, besides his propensity to violence, came to play a major role, in Italy and beyond, as an important topos for the expression of popular discontent with Medici and Imperial rule. For an excellent discussion of the play, with a full accounting of the historical circumstances which attended its composition, see Ferdinando Biglioni’s edition of the play, available online at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.3 1924027521552;view=1up;seq=2. 103. Although we have not dealt with it in this essay, another genre which may have provided opportunity to express covert criticism of Renaissance rulers was the academic oration. Here we might cite as an example a certain “Michelangelo Serafini,” who delivered a discourse Sopra un sonetto della Gelosia di G. B. Strozzi before the Accademia Fiorentina in 1549 or 1550. In a way similar to Varchi’s Storia fiorentina cited in the Introduction, in his preface, Serafini uses capital letters as a means of drawing the reader’s attention to the subtext of his work, since the first thing the reader encounters is a list of those just men, among them his personal friends, to whom Serafini is indebted, followed by a second list, also in capital letters, of the Medici rulers and their clients. This pairing continues in what follows, where, as in those Renaissance plays we have been discussing, the author takes as his subject the two kinds of love, and the two kinds of jealousy associated with them, that is, a virtuous and spiritual love which seeks as its end only the good of the beloved, and a jealous, spiteful love which seeks to possess the object of its desire. As we remarked above, the latter desire to subject another, usually female, individual to one’s desires was often understood by Renaissance audiences as an allusion to behavior typical of the tyrant, who seeks to bring free cities under his control, while the former, as the pure love characteristic of free and virtuous lovers, often served as symbol of the condition of a state under a just and benevolent ruler, whose concern is not for his personal glory and reputation, but rather the good of the city as a whole. And in Serafini’s oration, just as in the plays we have been examining, the final reward for the tyrant’s behavior is for him to be consigned to Hell. Hence, we would suggest, the combination of the hints conveyed through the capitalization of the proper names, taken together with the use of the familiar theme of tyrannical versus spiritual love, was intended by Serafini to convey an oblique message critical of Medici

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rule as being in its essence tyrannical in nature, and meant to stand in sharp contrast to the selfless giving of oneself for the good of the commune as a whole which characterizes those “heroes,” personal friends of the author, who precede the references to the Medici in the dedication. Plaisance, although he admits that Serafini’s activities in Florence remain very obscure, nevertheless considers this name to be the true name of an actual historical individual (L’Accademia e il suo Principe, 181–82). In our view, it seems more likely that it is a pseudonym, the name being a humorous reference to the “Divine Michelangelo,” whose contempt for Cosimo’s academy and its academicians, indeed, for his entire cultural programme, we noted in Chapter 2. Serafini himself makes reference to the hidden political subtext of his oration when he notes, also in the dedication, that the reader will have to pay very close attention to be able to discern the message carefully concealed under a veil of obscure language. 104. Najemy, A History of Florence, 483–84. Against this historical background, it is interesting to read the Canto degli Strozzieri of Jacopo da Bientina, a member of the Compagnia della Cazzuola. In this poem, the speaker (whose name, which means “falconer” in English, might be a reference to Strozzi himself, commander of the French forces against the forces of the Empire in central Italy) presents himself to the assembled ladies as having made a definitive change in his appearance and strategy, advocating, using the image of the tame versus the wild falcon, in the face of the overwhelming power of Fortune, the use of more subtle means as a way to achieve one’s ends: “Perchè Fortuna ha sempre avuto a sdegno / Ogni nostro contento, ogni quiete, / Tutti, come vedete, / Abbiam mutato stile, abito, e segno. / Facemmo già tremar più d’una volta, / Coll’arme indosso le nimiche Schiere; / … L’Arte dello Strozziere, / Men faticosa assai vogliam provare, / E questi Uccei conciare, / Mostrando, Donne, pazienza e ‘ngegno.” In the next chapter, we note that Strozzi also wrote a Lamento, in which, in a manner similar almost to a religious obrenuntio, he rues his former reliance on force of arms and admits his defeat. As we have just noted, the defeat of the Florentine and French forces at Marciano in August 1554 signalled the final decisive end of the hopes of the Florentine rebels to put an end to Imperial and Medici control of central Italy. In Lasca’s mid-century edition of canti carnascialeschi, this poem comes immediately before the Canto de’ Muratori of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, discussed above. 105. Another literary genre which may have seen a very fertile life in Renaissance Italy as a means for the expression of covert criticism of Medici and Imperial rule are the numerous bucolic poems produced during the period, which, under the seemingly innocent guise of a pleasant pastoral, used metaphors of ordinary country life to express opposition to Medici and Imperial domination of the peninsula. Examples which might be cited here are Luigi Alamanni’s Coltivazione, dedicated to the King of France, and Giovanni Rucellai’s Le Api, which concludes with a very curious passage on the death and resurrection of a swarm of bees, a curious detail which seems to point to a hidden meaning concealed by this striking image. In this regard, it is worth noting that Piero Vettori, his hopes of service to the Medici dashed by Cosimo’s policy of the promotion of men drawn from the provinces as administrators of Florence, retired to his villa in the Tuscan countryside and wrote a bucolic treatise, the Trattato delle lodi et della cultivatione de gl’vlivi (Florence: Giunti, 1569). An Italian scholar, currently a rare book dealer in London, has also noted this use of pastoral as mask for political commentary by Italian writers of the settecento; according to this scholar,

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by this time, such a use of bucolic poems to convey political lessons was so well-known as to be immediately obvious to the reader.

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Maffei, Sonia. “Giovio’s Dialogo delle imprese militari e amorose and the Museum.” In The Italian Emblem: A Collection of Essays, edited by Donato Mansueto, in collaboration with Elena Calogero, 33–63. Glagow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2007. Martin, John. Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Martinez, Ronald. “Etruria triumphans: Fables of Medici Hegemony in Bibbiena’s Calandra.” In Italy in the Drama of Europe, edited by William West and Albert Ascoli. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Mayer, Thomas F. Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. McHam, Sarah. “Donatello’s Bronze ‘David’ and ‘Judith’ as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence.” The Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 32–47. Medici, Lorenzino de’. L’Aridosia. Edited by Emilio Faccioli. Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Minio-Paluello, Maria-Luisa. Jesters and Devils: A Midsummer Voyage, Florence 1514. s.n., 2008. Minnich, Nelson. “Raphael’s Portrait ‘Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi’: A Religious Interpretation.” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 1015–018. Mononcini, Ambra. “The Accademia della Virtù and Religious Dissent.” In The Italian Academies 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, edited by Jane Everson, Denis Reidy, and Lisa Sampson. Oxford: Maney Legenda, 2016. Monroe, James. Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Sixteenth Century to the Present). Leiden: Brill, 1970. Mozzati, Tommaso. Gianfrancesco Rustici: le compagnie del Paiuolo e della Cazzuola; arte, letteratura, festa nell’età della maniera. Florence: Olschki, 2008. Najemy, John. “The controversy Surrounding Machiavelli’s Service to the Republic.” In Machiavelli and Republicanism, edited by Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, 101–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Niccoli, Ottavia. Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Lydia Cochrane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Nuovo, Angela. The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Palacios, Miguel Asin. Islam and the Divine Comedy. Translated by Harold Sunderland. London: Cass, 1968. Paradin, Claude. Devises heroïques. Lyons: Jean de Tournes and Guillaume Gazeau, 1551. Petrini, Armando. La signoria di madonna Finzione: teatro, attori e poetiche nel Rinascimento italiano. Genova: Costa and Nolan, 1996. Piejus, Marie-Françoise. “La première anthologie de poèmes féminins: L’écriture filtrée et orientée.” In Le pouvoir et la plume: incitation, contrôle et répression dans l’Italie du XVIe siècle, 193–213. Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982. Plaisance, Michel. L’Accademia e il suo principe: cultura e politica a Firenze al tempo di Cosimo I e di Francesco de’ Medici. Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2004. Pluskowski, Aleks. “Apocalyptic Monsters: Animal Inspirations for the Iconography of Medieval North European Devourers.” In The Monstrous Middle Ages, edited by Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, 155–76. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

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Portner, I. A. “A Non-Performance of Il Negromante.” Italica 59 (1982): 316–29. Pucci, Antonio. “Centiloquio.” In Delizie degli eruditi toscani, edited by Idelfonso di San Luigi, IV, 195ff. Florence: Cambiagi, 1770–1789. Rochon, André. Les Ecrivains et le pouvoir en Italie à l’époque de la Renaissance. Paris: Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1973. Rowland, Ingrid. The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Salamone, Maria Antonietta. La idea del contrato social en Mario Salamone de Alberteschi: sus vincúlos con la escuela de Salamanca y el Constitucionalismo ingles. PhD thesis, Facultad de Filosofía, Departamento de Filosofía del Derecho, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, 2005. Available online at http://eprints.ucm.es/7214/. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Seneca: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes. Edited and translated by John Fitch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. ———. Seneca’s Tragedies. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Shearman, John. Andrea del Sarto. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. ———. “Pontormo and Andrea Del Sarto, 1513.” The Burlington Magazine 104 (1962): 450, 478–83. Simoncelli, Paolo. Fuoriuscitismo repubblicano fiorentino, 1530–54. Milan: F. Angeli, 2006. Simons, Patricia, and Monique Kornell, “Annibal Caro’s After-Dinner Speech (1536) and the Question of Titian as Vesalius’s Illustrator.” Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 1069–1097. Slim, H. Colin. “Un coro della Tullia di Lodovico Martelli messo in musica e attribuito a Philippe Verdelot.” In Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ‘500, 2, edited by Giancarlo Garfagnini, 487–511. Florence: Olschki, 1983. Solerti, Angelo. “La rappresentazione della Calandria a Lione nel 1548.” In Raccolti di studi critici dedicata ad Alessandro D’Ancona, 693–99. Florence: Barbèra, 1901. Trexler, Richard. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Tromly, Fred. Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Tylus, Jane. “Theater and Its Social Uses: Machiavelli’s Mandragola and the Spectacle of Infamy.” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 656–86. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Translated by Gaston de Vere. London: Macmillan, 1912–1915. Viroli, Maurizio. From Politics to the Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Walden, Justine, “Foaming Mouth and Eyes Aflame: Exorcism and Power in Renaissance Florence,” PhD. dissertation, Yale University, 2016. Wellen, Sanne, “La Guerra de’ topi e de’ ranocchi,” attributed to Andrea del Sarto: Considerations on the Poem’s Authorship, the Compagnia del Paiuolo, and Vasari,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 12 (2009): 181–232.

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Werner, Inge. “The Heritage of the Umidi: Performative Poetry in the Early Accademia Fiorentina.” In The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch, 257–84. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Zanré, Domenico. “Ritual and Parody in Mid-Cinquecento Florence: Cosimo de’ Medici and the Accademia del Piano.” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler, 189–204. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

CHAPTER FOUR

An Academy of Misers: The Compagnie della Lesina and Antilesina as Loci of Opposition to Medici and Imperial Rule in mid-Cinquecento Italy

In the previous chapter, we examined Vasari’s vivid and detailed description of a festive organization, the Compagnia della Cazzuola, founded in Florence together with two other festive companies—the companies of the Broncone and Diamante—in the fall of 1512. As we noted in that chapter, unlike the latter two organizations, which were intended to consolidate Medici rule in the city after eighteen years of republican rule, the Compagnia della Cazzuola served a rather different function. We described in detail how the nighttime activities of this festive organization, while presenting on the surface the appearance of merely bizarre and eccentric divertissements, actually managed to convey, in a highly symbolic and recondite way, criticism of the Medici regime, newly re-established in the city. In this chapter, we will examine the equally strange activities of two other festive organizations in Renaissance Florence, the compagnie della Lesina and Antilesina, where, as with the Compagnia della Cazzuola, their members managed to convey, in a highly allusive manner, criticism of another Medici of later in the century, Cosimo, together with his imperial patrons. Just as in the strange festivities of the Cazzuola, this criticism was conveyed through a skillful manipulation of the twin themes of festive banqueting, the raison d’etre of the second of these festive companies, the Compagnia della Antilesina, and the absurd and outlandish privations which characterized the practices of the first, the Compagnia della Lesina. As the case of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, this contrast

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between festive banqueting and deprivation came, as we shall see, to represent, in a symbolic way, the nature of the Medici regime in Florence, in this case presented in pointed contrast to the generous and benevolent rule of the Farnese family in Rome. The counterpart of festive feasting—which, as we saw in the case of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, came to take on a political and spiritual meaning as the reward for faithful adherence to the republican cause, together with a Savonarolan commitment to social justice, in a kind of Feast of the Gods—is this time symbolized not by the myth of Tantalus, as in the feste of the Cazzuola, but rather by the image of the lesina, or awl, which served as the impresa of the Compagnia della Lesina, together with an extensive and outlandish enactment of the supposed virtues of spilorceria, or miserliness. An Italian critic has described the Compagnia della Lesina in the following manner: “La Compagnia si prefiggeva di canzonare lo spirito ‘sparagnino’ e di consigliare grettissime economie, nonché di raccontare burlesche avventure di noti ed ignoti arpagoni.” And indeed, in a comic inversion of the seriousness of the “official” Florentine academies (for example, the Medici-sponsored Accademia Fiorentina), we encounter, in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, requirements such as In choice of shoes and clothing, members should not show off, but dress themselves modestly according to their station: and when, because of excessive wear, or for any other reason, their clothing becomes torn, or some little rent appears, having provided themselves with the little case which we shall describe, along with its accessories, they should mend and repair them as best they can, even up to and including the, and not be in a hurry to throw them away, or place them in the trash, but save them for everyday needs, as is written: Quid ni iterum.1

or When their shoes become worn or torn, having provided themselves with the awl and its accessories, they should sew them up, or repair them, so that the uppers hold together; and whatever he does, he can do for himself, withdrawing into a corner that his face may not be seen, as is written: Non maculat manus, qui sua facta facit.2

The new inductees are admonished to observe the strictest moderation in their eating habits: It is granted to anyone of our Company, and especially those who are bachelors, free choice to eat only once a day; and the first thing in the morning, having finished his chores, to withdraw to some little osteria away from the center of the city and order some little meal for breakfast, for example, a little slice of tripe, which may serve him

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as meat, and some soup, and a half-litre of wine from the mountain of Lecore, or Quaracchi, and a carafe of fresh water to mix with it, a hard roll that is not over-refined, nor round, since excessive whiteness in bread, as Hippocrates affirms in his Aphorisms, is harmful to one’s health, and one’s budget be damned; and if from the aforesaid things something remains, he should take a little bit of paper and wrap it up and place it in his pocket, for a bit of supper in the evening: as is written: Sobrius esto.3

and are expressly forbidden certain foods, such as “starne, fagiani, capponi, galline, piccioni, e pollastre, tortole, beccafichi, vitella di latte, animelle, e altre carnacce” since they induce gout and a thousand other infirmities, while they are encouraged to eat Some good meat from a cow which has given birth two or three times, a nice piece of fat beef, which is stupendous to eat, and makes a wonderful lasagna, a little bit of pork, and, on special occasions, but once a year only, and no more, is conceded a chicken, as it written: Semel in anno risit Apollo.4

In one of the most humorous anecdotes recounted by the Maestro de’ Novizi in his address to his new charges, the extensive use by the members of the company of garlic leads to a triumph for the contrarian spirit of the Lesina, in a legal case where one of the lesinanti appears before a judge, and, after offending him by the odor of his breath, causing the judge to ask him to distance himself from the tribunal, ends up in effect winning his case by indicting the judge for the same offense with which the judge had just indicted him. Group solidarity would certainly have been enhanced by the requirement that the lesinanti cut each other’s hair: When anyone of the Company finds himself in need of a haircut, so as not to be a nuisance to the barber, he may seek out another individual, provided he be of the Company, who finds himself in need of the same, and let each one cut the other’s hair at the waning moon, as is written: Instar mulorum.5

Pets are prohibited, and, to avoid theft, scandals and inconveniences, servants should be ugly and unmarried: There are not to be kept in the house dogs, puppies, monkeys, parrots, nor any other bird, or animal, which do not pay for themselves, and can cause harm; and one is not to keep strainers, not the ones for washing, but those which empty out the house, as is written: Ab uncinatis manibus libera nos Domine.6 It being necessary to hire a servant, male or female, take care to hire, if at all possible, one who does not drink wine and who is unmarried, and, for good measure, let him provide good collateral. The female servant should be ugly, and without husband, so

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that a house well-supplied for a year is not emptied out in a week, and keep one’s eyes open, because otherwise, in addition to trouble there is also scandal, as is written: Dicere non putarem.7

And as a soldier is provided with his sword, the merchant with his account book, and the priest with his missal, each of the members of the Compagnia della Lesina is instructed to furnish himself with the tools of his trade: So that the two preceding statutes may be placed in effect [the repair of one’s shoes and clothing], each of the brothers should provide himself with a little case, thimble, five or six needles, a bit of white rosin and a bit of black, a pair of small scissors, some remnants, a fine Damascine awl, two large needles, a bit of wax, and some thread, so as to be able to provide for his own needs, without having to go purchase this or that.8

Not only are the statutes of this imaginary company absurd, but their “myth of origin,” in a clever parody of Cosimo’s tracing of the foundations of Florence back to the ancient Etruscans as a means of enhancing the legitimacy of his rule, traces the foundation of the company back to these same Etruscans, who, as the writer points out, were true lesinanti par excellence: Our Archconfraternity is by no means a funhouse, or a playpen for silly jokes, but is such that, in respect to its antiquity, it is as venerable as all of Tuscany, for, if one reads the records of history carefully, when Tuscany began to be inhabited (which began before, not only any other part of Europe, but even of the Maremma itself ), it began in this way to grow, as is written, Sic fortis Hetruria crevit, and if it put down its roots everywhere, as a living thing, in no other part of the city did it send down its roots better to the center of the earth, and its leaves to the sphere of fire; and it would (as I believe) have grown even higher had not the excessive heat begun to singe its leaves; with the result that, so great was the parsimony, temperance, and modesty of our Forefathers, that nothing (as you shall see) can be imagined, much less described, more thrifty, more abstemious, and more modest.9

Here the humour, besides the comical juxtaposition of learned Latin with a lower, even vulgar, register of language (“baia,” “fanfaluca”), a feature present throughout the text, derives from the comical exaggeration of the traditional myth of the founding of Florence, symbolized here by a tree (possibly an allusion to the laurel under which Florence, personified as a young woman, sits on Medici medals of the late 1400s), which would have raised its branches even to Heaven, had not the heat there begun to singe its foliage.10 Indeed, we are informed, without the presence of the lesinanti, Rome would never have achieved her greatness, nor would Florence find herself in her present state of pre-eminence:

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And so not only did the most learned and the richest men become such for having read carefully in our Statutes, but I will even add that, owing to such study, several men of that time were most adept in the management of great undertakings, and not of spades, or bales of wool, mind you, but of Republics, and of States; look, look at our own City, how many Priors there were, how many Gonfalonieri, who entered into the Palazzo with the acclaim of the people still bedecked (not to say greasy) with flocks of wool, or colored with various tints, and, to put it briefly, bearing some sign of their trade and profession more or less noble, according to his own station and the temper of the times, not forsaking for a moment the paths trodden by their ancient forefathers, the Romans, of whom one (if I am remembering correctly) bore the name Lucius the Stutterer, whom, when the Senate and the Roman people came to hail him Dictator, they found in the Campo covered with dust from working with the oxen; and so the study of our splendid statutes was the cause of such greatness in those peoples.11

Here again we observe the use of a parody of the familiar humanist topos of the ancient origins of the city of Florence, in which the former greatness of republican Rome and of Florence herself are attributed to men who are trained to subsist on a diet of tripe and garlic, and to repair their own shoes. To call the gonfalonieri, the highest elected officials of Florence, whose authority consisted as much in how they carried themselves in public as on the fulfillment of their official duties, “bioccolosi per non dire unti” is another instance of this parodic deflation, reminiscent of the Italian “scrittori irregolari” (Folengo, Berni, Lasca, Aretino, among many others), of the political norms and institutions of mid-cinquecento Florence by the compiler of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina.12 There is a serious side to this satire of contemporary Florentine academies and institutions, however. We would suggest that these misers, whose behaviour is so extreme, are an allusive reference to the nature and effects of the rule of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence. As Najemy has pointed out, at precisely the time of the publication of the “capitoli” of the Compagnia della Lesina, Florence was suffering the effects of great privation, which could be attributed directly to the political decisions and economic policies of the Duke.13 The Maestro de’ Discepoli, making use of the old classical metaphor of the state as a kind of family writ large, makes an important distinction between a responsible and frugal parsimony, typical of the buon massai of the Compagnia, in their role as faithful stewards of the goods of the state, and a kind of selfish and thoughtless profligacy which wastes and depletes these same goods, and must resort to a greedy accumulation of resources to further its own ends, typical of the sect of “avari e luponi” who have infiltrated the company14: First of all, therefore, so as to proceed in order, we will discuss the origin, reason for being, foundation, and true name [of the Compagnia della Lesina], as the most

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important things, and then the others, according to what we have discovered. And so, as an introduction to the subject, it should be noted that all good companies have been founded to compensate for worldly defects, and to guide people on the right path by correcting vices, and by introducing good customs, and praiseworthy discipline. … And from this our Company took its origin, and was founded upon Holy Husbandry. And for this reason, in ancient times, in all republics and states, there were designated a certain number of parsimonious and thrifty men, to whom was given the authority to correct such errors, and they were called regulators, since they had no other responsibility than to regulate similar disorders, so as to ensure that the things regulated and so appointed would endure and last for a long time. In addition, there was appointed a Magistrate called the magistrate of the Massai, and this was the true name of the Company, that is, the Compagnia de’ Massai.15

However, into this realm of the well-ordered state certain other elements have insinuated themselves: Novitiates: O Master, this seems to us truly a miraculous thing, and worthy of the highest praise, and it gladdens our heart for being so well-grounded: but a question arises among us, which we would wish for you to answer for us before proceeding any further, and that is: that there are in our Company certain ones called misers, greedy, and similar names. We would like to know, therefore, so as to be informed of everything, if these ones are here legitimately, or not, and how you understand this question.16 Maestro: Your question pleases me very much, because by asking it, you demonstrate subtlety of intellect. I say, therefore, that the entire Compagnia is divided into two principal groups, in so far as some are true Massai, and good brothers, and worthy of every praise, seeing that out of their good stewardship good fruit always comes; and such are, to give a brief example, those who have founded, and continue to found, so many hospitals, monasteries, and other pious places, and those sufficiently endowed who have built so many beautiful tribunes, or rather churches, funded so many chapels, with the most beautiful ornaments and rich endowments, and convents, helped to marry so many poor young girls, left so many bequests to pious causes, and so many other pious works, that it would be impossible to enumerate them all. … But there is another sect, and this is the second principle group of the kind you mentioned in your question, that it would be a good thing if their seed were extinguished, even though they profess to belong to our Company, since, the major, or rather miserable, part of their stinginess is of no use either to them, or to anyone else; indeed, it is harmful, and brings great opprobrium onto the entire Company, as you shall see. … And finally, not to belabour the point, there is a kind worse than all the others, that is, those Misers, Wolves and miserable souls who would skin their father and mother alive, and even worse, if they could, only to heap up money by fair means or foul, by every foul contract, and are so savage and inhuman that they do not enjoy the things they have, nor

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do others; rather they labor like the dogs they are. And what is even more, since they cannot bring their money with them to the other world, they bury it, wall it up, or hide it in a place where the Devil himself could not find it. Neither do they worry about losing their souls along with their body, nor ending up in Hell among those toads and other evil creatures, with punishments and sufferings the like of which it would be difficult to describe. What say you now? Are you now clear as to your question?17

This distinction between the buon lesinanti or massai and their natural enemies, the avari and wastrels of the Compagnia della Lesina, corresponds to the distinction in English between “frugality” or “parsimony” on the one hand, and avariciousness on the other, the former associated with the English word “steward” or “overseer,” derived from classical and medieval concepts of estate management, or economia, a practice essential to the conservation of the state, based on the prudent management of resources, avariciousness, on the other hand, being characterized by the obsessive acquisition of goods, not for the use of the commune as a whole, but rather to the end of hoarding them either for their own sake, or in the service of purely personal pursuits. And this distinction between the buon massai of the company, whose wise and frugal parsimony serves to maintain and sustain the commune, and those miseri avari who have infiltrated it, mingling incognito with the other members, is, as we will now demonstrate, an allusive, but pointed, indictment of the regime of the Medici in Florence. Continuing his discussion of the supposed historical antecedents of the Compagnia della Lesina, the Maestro dei Discepoli proceeds to describe the origins of the Compagnia del Mantellaccio, a confraternal organization founded by Lorenzo de’ Medici near the end of the quattrocento whose festive identity was based on their assumption of the appearance of poverty: “I say that there were two companies which were almost the same, ours of the Lesina, formerly situated between the scrap-metal dealers and the rag sellers, infra suos confines, and the venerable Company of the Mantellaccio, situated near the stinche [prison], or if it had other more true and certain boundaries.”18 We would suggest that the Maestro de’ Novizi’s careful locating of the meeting places of these two companies is significant: the Compagnia della Lesina, as one would expect of a company whose membership was characterized by the buon massai described by the compiler of their statutes, known for their frugality, met in a poor part of the city, while the Compagnia del Mantellaccio is located “presso alle stinche,” that is, near the prison, a location appropriate to the sinister, coercive and destructive aspect of the company which the writer then goes on to describe, emphasizing that, while the members of the Compagnia della Lesina are drawn to the company out of a natural affinity between their good character and the

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character of the company, the members of the Compagnia del Mantellaccio joined their company under threat of coercion: But [the Company of the Mantellaccio] has absolutely nothing to do with our most noble, excellent and distinguished LESINA, because, although they may in part observe our statutes, they do it more out of obligation than not, and even if they cannot do otherwise, having fulfilled their obligation to the Compagnia di SANGODENZO, through which they pass on to the MANTELLACCIO, even if they don’t want to, having as its border on one side the Stinche, and on the other the Bargello. … But we LESINANTI, not out of obligation, but out of genuine desire, embrace the virtue taught to us by our statutes.19

Taking together the author’s pointed reference to the location of the meeting place of the Compagnia del Mantellaccio as being near the prison and the Bargello (that is, the seat of government in the Palazzo dei Signori) with his mention of the coercive aspects of the company under the sponsorship of Lorenzo, where members join out of fear rather than genuine desire, it seems likely that those miseri avari of the Compagnia della Lesina just described are a reference to the Medici rulers of Florence, characterized by the same pursuit of resources in the service of personal self-aggrandizement which characterized their miserable counterparts in the Compagnia della Lesina, the Avaroni and Luponi who would sell their own souls for gain. With them the good stewards of the state’s resources, the buon lesinanti, who recall the overseers of ancient republican Rome, the buon massai, form a pointed contrast. And the progression from the Compagnia della Lesina to its opponent and counterpart, the Compagnia della Antilesina, finds an exact parallel (significantly, in reverse) in the progression from another festive company founded by Lorenzo, the Compagnia di San Godenzo, which was distinguished by an extreme and self-conscious display of conviviality, to the Compagnia del Mantellaccio, characterized by an equally ostentatious and comical display of poverty.20 With this progression from festivity to penitence, the companies of the Lesina and Antilesina (whose statues we shall examine next) form a marked contrast in moving from the comically severe strictures of the lesinanti (symbols, as we have been suggesting, of Medici avariciousness) to the open-hearted generosity and joyous celebrations of their sworn enemies, the antilesinanti of the Farnese court.21 The frontispiece of a pamphlet published in Florence in the late quattrocento gives vivid visual expression to the nature of Lorenzo’s sponsorship of fraternal organizations in the city: with a harsh expression of his face, his body expressing disdain and impatience, hand on hip, his money purse prominently displayed, he

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glares at the three timid souls who dutifully enact for their patron the journey of the Magi and gesture to the female supporters of the company in the windows above22:

Fig. 4.1: Etching of Lorenzo de’ Medici from a pamphlet containing the Canzone per andare in maschera fatte da più persone showing a procession of the Compagnia dei Magi (Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale, Firenze).

And indeed, modern historians such as John Najemy and Richard Trexler have described in detail how Medici sponsorship of festive associations, which began in earnest under Lorenzo il Magnifico, had everything to do with control of elements potentially disruptive of their rule, and the promotion of the family’s self-image, and very little to do with actual pleasure.23 The Maestro de’ Discepoli also refers to another company, the Compagnia dei Macinati, especially to be avoided, The Company of the Macinati, or Scapigliati, because this insatiable sect cannot bear to see someone minding his own business, and are always trying to draw you out, but

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if by chance you run into them, you cannot get away from them by any means … while we are with them, let us imagine ourselves to be with the chiefest enemies of our pocketbook.24

Elsewhere in the text, the author makes several references to the intrusiveness of this “sect,” who intrude upon one’s private affairs, incessantly demanding attention, and try to lead the unwary members of the company to waste their money in idle pursuits. Here it may not be going too far to hypothesize a veiled reference to the ubiquitous presence of Medici agents both within the city and without, who mingled with the civilian populace, and used various ruses, by now well-known to historians, to elicit their true feelings regarding the nature of Medici rule in Florence, thus serving as the “eyes and ears” of the ruling regime in their role as a kind of secret police.25 There is another small, but, in our view, significant, piece of evidence which points to an anti-Medicean subtext present in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina. On the title page of the first edition of the text, published around 1546, we find the notation: Per ordine degli otto Operai di detta Compagnia

that is, “printed by order of the eight Workers of said company.” Given what has been said above regarding the references to the menacing and coercive nature of Lorenzo’s Compagnia del Mantellaccio, and his use, wellknown to historians, of the Otto di Guardia as a kind of secret police, it seems plausible to maintain that the “Otto” of the title page is also a reference to this aspect of Medici rule in Florence. If this is the case, it would tie the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina even more closely to the Medici regime. We shall say more about the presence of the Otto di Guardia in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina below. In this regard, we might point out that many of the pseudonyms of the members of the Compagnia della Lesina, as well as the title pages themselves, evoke instruments of torture: Uncinato de gli Uncinati, Pitocco Rastrelli, Coticone de’ Coticoni, Strascina, Tiradenti, or what an individual subject to their effects might plausibly exclaim: Avvertisci alli fatti tuoi (“Mind your own business”), Dio te n’aiuti (“God help you”), Dio te ne scampi (“God deliver you”):

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Fig. 4.2: Frontispieces of editions of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina (Credit: Biblioteca della Università di Bologna).

These names also recall the names of the devils of Dante’s Inferno: Truffaldino da Graffignano, Tiraquello Rasponi, and so on. In the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina cited above, explicit reference is also made to the “uncinati mani” of the servants members of the company are expressly instructed to avoid. Given the family’s frequent use of torture to punish its enemies and intimidate its opponents, such a reading of the names of the members of the Compagnia della Lesina does not seem entirely out of place.26 And indeed, given the political circumstances prevailing at the time of the composition of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, characterized, as we have seen, by a determination on the part of the Medici and their Imperial patrons to dominate all of Florence and her environs, and a willingness to use

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any means to achieve this end, the two final capitoli of the company offer some sound advice: That in all our actions, and in all our affairs, we should be prudent, and cautious, and keep our eyes open, and consider the end; and, above all else, manage always to have sufficient provisions, so as not to have to rely on others, and to manage always to learn at the expense of others, as is written: Foelix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum.27

In the passages we have just examined, we observe a clear distinction between the responsible husbanding of the state’s resources on the part of the buoni lesinanti, who are associated with the virtues of republican Rome, and the wasteful and self-aggrandizing spending of money on the part of the wastrels and spendthrifts of the Compagnia della Lesina, or a false appearance of poverty, meant to conceal an underlying avariciousness, which characterizes the companies of Lorenzo il Magnifico, the Compagnia di San Godenzo and Mantellaccio respectively. We will encounter this same image of greed disguising itself in the rags of poverty, also explicitly associated with the Florence of the Medici, in Annibal Caro’s comedy Gli straccioni, discussed below.28 With the strange economies of the Compagnia della Lesina, based, as we have seen, either upon a ridiculous and extreme form of self-denial, or its equally pathological opposite, a profligate and thoughtless wasting of vital resources, the precepts of those of its rival and counterpart, the Compagnia della Antilesina, make a striking contrast.

Avarice Reproved: The Compagnia della Antilesina While the members of the Compagnia della Lesina are enjoined to eat very frugally, the members of the Compagnia della Antilesina are urged to do just the opposite: As many hours as there are in a day, so many times should one eat, because, since every hour a new planet is in the ascendent, one should make him feel welcome as one would a stranger, and have a table all set for him, as is written: Sempre oportet esse paratum.29

An entire page, in a “speech act” intended to evoke the Monte di Cuccagna and a kind of Rabelesian excess, reminiscent of the feasts of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, is devoted to a list of the foods the members of the company are urged to enjoy.

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Where the members of the Compagnia della Lesina are enjoined to wear the same clothing for months on end, and to repair their own shoes, the members of the Compagnia della Antilesina are enjoined to wear new clothing every day: [The Compagnia della Lesina] condemns conspicuous display in the choice of clothing, and praises the repair of one’s own shoes so as not to have to purchase new ones: this is denied, since it is written: Omnia nuova placent.30

Where the members of the Compagnia della Lesina are enjoined to “turn the other cheek” at insults and improprieties, the members of the Compagnia della Antilesina are enjoined to meet force with force: They [the Compagnia della Lesina] teach that one should let insults and injuries go: in this they lie, as is written: Vim vi repellere licet.31

Where the members of the Compagnia della Lesina are enjoined never to lend money to anyone, and to require security even from their household servants, the members of the Compagnia della Antilesina are urged to lend generously to those in need, with no thought as to repayment: It is ordered that every member of our company be ready to be of use and to serve as guarantor to everyone, even without any expectation of repayment, since melius est dare, quam recipere.32

Where the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina dictate that one limit the number of servants, the statutes of the Compagnia della Antilesina counter by observing that the former company They [the Compagnia della Lesina] praise doing without servants, and going on foot even when one could go on horseback, a thing unheard of in our age, as is written: Utendum est donis fortunae.33

While members of the Compagnia della Lesina are urged, should one of them fall sick, not to call the doctor, but to wait to see if the illness resolves itself, the members of the Compagnia della Antilesina are urged to do just the opposite: The Compagnia della Lesina asserts that an invalid should wait six days before calling a doctor to see if the illness resolves itself, and to save on the cost of medicines; for this, this sect should be punished for the crime of homicide, since it is against the law of medicine, as is written: Principiis obsta, sero medicina paratur.34

Where the keeping of domestic animals is strictly forbidden members of the Compagnia della Lesina, members of the Compagnia della Antilesina are enjoined to

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do the opposite: “They condemn keeping parrots, monkeys, and similar such animals as pets; this is denied, as is written: ‘Everything lovable is also edible.’”35 As one can see from these few examples, every admonition of the Maestro de’ Discepoli of the Compagnia della Lesina is met by its opposite, in a polemical assertion of the values of festive abundance and joyfulness, together with a spirit of generosity and concern for the well-being of others, as opposed to the self-absorbed hoarding of resources in the service of one’s personal interests which characterized the miseri avari of the Compagnia della Lesina.36 Hence, the statutes of the sister-company to the Compagnia della Antilesina, taken as a whole, in their celebration of a spirit of generous abundance, present a stark contrast to the miserly and and miserable rule of the Medici in Florence, symbolized, as we have seen, by the extreme and fanatical miserliness of the miseri of the Compagnia della Lesina, whose end is not the good of the city as a whole, as the buon massai who represented the true lesinanti, but rather, as a malicious sect concealed within the bosom of the company, the furtherance of their own personal wealth and status at the expense of others. The allusive critique of Medici and imperial rule, implicit in the statutes of the companies we have been describing, can be placed in the larger political and historical context of Renaissance Italy. As Najemy has pointed out, the years of the 1540s were particularly difficult ones for the citizens of Florence, the winter of 1548–1549 especially, where there was a terrible shortage of food and fuel. The contadini in the countryside around Florence suffered particularly under this state of affairs.37 The Marucelli chronicle, cited by Najemy, gives us a vivid picture of the great sufferings of the poor in the Florentine countryside, and even in Florence itself, and makes it clear that the responsibility for these sufferings lay directly with Cosimo38: On the first of April, a staio di grano was valued at 7.13.4 lire, such a serious situation that the poor were dying at Santa Maria the entire month of March, so that by April there were 604 bodies there, and, when they were opened up, many were found who had their intestines full of the grass which they had eaten; and, when such a death toll came to the ears of His Excellency, he hardened his heart and did nothing to alleviate the situation; indeed, on the contrary, the authorities of the city levied such a huge tax on the entire city as had never been seen, and not only that, but he suspended the salaries of all the magistrates, and in the same way imposed a tax on the charitable organizations, so that the entire city was turned upside down and desperate and one could hear only people cursing God and saying horrible things. And he, well-aware of his good fortune, took no care at all for any complaints or criticisms, and in the aforesaid month, there were such huge winds and rain that everyone thought it was the end of the world.39

The author of the chronicle never describes any action taken by Cosimo for the good of the city as a whole, but makes it clear that the Duke’s sole priority is

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securing his control over Tuscany, primarily by reducing the city of Siena to the status of a colony: On that day there was a great famine, and many of the poor died of hunger. Nevertheless, Cosimo attended only to the undertaking against Siena; indeed, both he and his consort were accustomed to reply, hearing of such sufferings and deaths from hunger, that whoever could not eat twice a day should eat once, and whoever could not eat a piece of bread should eat half of one, so that, not to say any more about his cruelty, suffice it to note that a staio di grano was valued at 6.10 lire, a staio delle vecce 4 lire a staio, a staio of cecerchie 5 lire, fava beans 4.15 lire, wine 7 lire a barrel, olive oil 14 lire a barrel. Meat could not be found at any price, an egg one soldo each, and everything came about because of that cursed war, and this lasted until January 13, 1554.40

Here again we are confronted with the same theme of miserliness with respect to food encountered in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina described above. Here, unfortunately, this state of semi-starvation on the part of the citizens of Florence is no mere symbol, but refers to actual historical circumstances. In this regard, the title page a later edition of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina presents some very dark humor:

Fig. 4.3: Title page from an edition of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, showing grasshopper (Credit: Biblioteca della Università di Bologna).

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Here, in the image of the grasshopper (traditional symbol of famine), we observe a reference to the privations mentioned above, which fell especially severely on the peasants in the countryside around Florence, and whose sufferings, as the Marucelli chronicler makes clear, were greatly aggravated by the indifference of Cosimo and his advisors to their plight, preferring to preoccupy themselves with their plans for the siege of Siena, rather than attend to the dire straights in which their own citizens found themselves.41 These suffering peasants and ordinary citizens would have had no choice as to whether to “keep themselves slender” (mantenersi magro), given the extreme “privations of their pocketbooks” (strettezze di borsa) engendered by the Medici regime. In addition, if we read these harrowing accounts of the Marucelli chronicler against the background of the descriptions of avarice on the part of a ruler in the political treatises of Pontano, Savonarola and Poggio, cited in the footnote below, it becomes clear that, in his obsessive preoccupation with securing his own personal power, to the neglect of the welfare of the state as a whole, Cosimo approaches the description of the classic tyrant as provided by both the classical writers on just government and their Renaissance followers.42 In his preoccupation with his own personal power, and the acquisition of the resources necessary to sustain it, the tyrant ends up impoverishing his state and thus ultimately secures his own ruin; as Savonarola eloquently puts it, he is trying to hold together by force something which naturally breaks, and, thus, in the long run, is destined to fail.43 As we noted in Chapter 2, he ends up, in effect, consuming himself by consuming the state’s most precious resource, its human capital. In this regard, we may recall that it was Aristotle, in his important discussion of the “wise tyrant” (who eschews, whenever possible, overtly violent or oppressive means, and who thus forms a more successful counterpart to his more brutal cousin, tyrants of the stamp of Dionysius of Syracuse or the Pisistratids of Athens) who pointed out that the deliberate impoverishment of the citizens of the state, and the keeping them engaged in endless warfare, was one of the chief means by which such a tyrant can maintain himself in power.44 Given this historical connection between the miserable state of Florence and its environs under the rule of Cosimo and the explicit connection the Marucelli chronicler makes between these two so vividly expressed by the numerous instances of suffering he recounts, it seems entirely possible that the compiler of the statutes of the Company of the Lesina may have had these circumstances in mind when he began to write his veiled critique of Cosimo’s rule we have just discussed. And, as noted above, the title page of the statutes themselves makes veiled allusion to this set of circumstances, both in the oppressive nature of Cosimo’s rule as enforced by his personal internal police, the Otto, as well as the use of torture, symbolically

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expressed in the names of the members of the company as well as the succession of intimidating instruments which grace the covers of the various editions of the statutes of the company reproduced above.45 And the miserable self-deprivation of the misers of the company, as noted above, was intended by the author to recall another company created under the aegis of Lorenzo, the Compagnia del Mantellaccio, located next to the prison, and, in a later edition of the text (Vicenza, 1602), the suffering of the poor in the countryside surrounding Florence is invoked in a phrase on the title page which notes that the capitoli have been undated “in the year of the famine,” that is, 1548–1549, a clear reference to the sufferings of those peasants of the Tuscan countryside so vividly evoked by the Marucelli chronicle.46 The chronicler also records numerous instances of an appallingly cold-hearted reaction on the part of the Duke upon being informed of the suffering of ordinary citizens as a result of his hegemonistic policy of expansion of Florentine control over all of Tuscany, as we have seen.

Medicean Florence vs. Pauline Rome: The Buontemponi of the Compagnia della Antilesina The only name in the list of members of the rival and counterpart of the Compagnia della Lesina, the Compagnia della Antilesina, printed at the beginning of their capitoli in the list of members of the Company, which appears not to be a pseudonym is one which, we suggest, is a disguised version of the name of Rodolfo Pio da Carpi, an individual very closely associated with the Farnese court, as diplomat and Papal nuncio to the court of Francis I. This disguised pseudonym is repeated three times, in different variations: Taccagnino da Carpi (the Little Miser of Carpi), Quomodocunque Carpisci (However You May Understand it), Gremingna Carponi (Cornpone Carpi). Carpi played in important role in the cultural activities and diplomatic undertakings of the Farnese court.47 Another element which tends to support our hypothesis of a connection between the statutes of the Compagnia della Antilesina and the Farnese court in Rome is that, on the title page itself, the entire company is described as being under the protection of a certain “pastor monopolitano,” who serves as its guiding spirit and patron. This, in our view, and in consideration of what has just been said, can only be a reference to the Pastor of the city of Rome, that is Paul III, who did indeed, in his commitment to ensuring the rule of law and his concern for the poor, act in ways which might be considered those of a generous and benevolent protector48:

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Fig. 4.4: Guglielmo della Porta, portrait bust of Paul III (Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY ).

This hypothesis is supported by yet another small, but in our view, significant, detail. Also on the title page, just under the title, we learn that the company’s activities take place under the aegis of the “Pignato grasso,” that is, the Giant Pine Cone. This, combined with what has just been said regarding the individual who serves as patron and protector of the group, can, in our view, only be a reference to the famous Cortile della Pigna in the Vatican gardens, which does indeed display just such a giant pine-cone:

Fig. 4.5: Pine cone, Cortile della Pigna, Vatican (Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY ).

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As Bober and Rubinstein have pointed out, the giant pine cone of the Belvedere gardens, in classical times, represented fertility and long life, explicitly associated with imperial power49: This would have been an ideal location for the activities described in the statutes of the Compagnia della Antilesina, characterized, as we have noted, by a lavish display of generosity and festive abundance, particularly as regards the presentation and enjoyment of food, together with a fraternal, other-oriented spirit which, as remarked above, stood in marked contrast to the miserly hoarding of resources which characterized the misers of the Compagnia della Lesina. It is possible, however, that the gathering place which provided the historical inspiration for the comic exaggerations of the statutes of the Compagnia della Antilesina may have been elsewhere. The gardens of the same Cardinal Pio da Carpi mentioned above were famous in the Renaissance as a kind of earthly paradise, according to the description of Aldovrandi (and whose entrance, perhaps coincidentally, presented the visitor, upon entering, with the sight of four powerful symbols of the power and beneficence of the Farnese family—a Medusa’s head, a Sphinx, a statue of Hercules and a gigantic elm tree), and so may have also served as the gathering place for the actual meetings of a festive organization whose lavish banquets—albeit in a comically exaggerated form—provided the inspiration for the capitoli of the Compagnia della Antilesina.50 A final possibility is that such convivial gatherings might have occurred in the Palazzo Farnesina, the construction of which was completed by the Siennese architect Baldassar Peruzzi in 1509, and which served as the unofficial residence of the Farnese family, directly across the Tiber river from their official residence, today the site of the French academy, and where, even today, a visitor entering from the via Lungara is greeted by the sight of an enormous pine tree. Alessandro Farnese purchased this villa from Alessandro Chigi, the enormously wealthy Roman banker, famous for just the kind of lavish entertainments described in the statutes of the Compagnia della Antilesina, and whose ceiling frescoes presented an equally lavish display of just the kind of festive abundance which characterized the statutes of the latter company.51 Another small, but in our view significant, detail also tends to support our hypothesis of a hidden, anti-Medicean and anti-Imperial message concealed under the apparently merely frivolous description of the activities of the Compagnia della Antilesina. At the conclusion of the statutes of the company, we encounter the following inscription, set off by itself in a separate line of type: Gibellinus es, et cum Gibellinis morieris.

Given the status of the Compagnia della Antilesina as a response to its rival, the Compagnia della Lesina, which, as we suggested above, represented a veiled

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indictment of Medici rule in Florence, the mention here, in such negative terms, of the Ghibellines—a party traditionally associated with imperial rule of Italy, as opposed to its Guelf faction, traditionally associated with the Church—at the very end of a text which is itself, as we have suggested, a veiled allusion to the beneficent rule of the Farnese court, can only, in our view, be a reference to Imperial and Medicean domination of present-day Florence, firmly opposed by the just and beneficent rule of the Farnese family in Rome, their traditional rivals, which finds its veiled expression in the statutes of the former company. In any event, the presence of two such powerful images, the golden cornucopia and the pine cone, both well-known classical symbols of fertility and abundance, and associated with the benign qualities of imperial rule, in both the statutes of a company known for just the kind of festive celebrations which characterized the Farnese court itself, as well as in the images of festive abundance which adorned the ceilings of the private palace of the family, would seem to suggest the possibility that these statutes provide us with a vividly-detailed (although perhaps somewhat exaggerated) and allusive picture of the private life of the Farnese court, characterized by the same spirit of conviviality and generosity which characterized the public image of the family.52 And indeed, prominently displayed on the right shoulder of Guglielmo della Porta’s portrait bust of the Pope, we observe the image of a cornucopia, an explicit symbol, together with the image of Peace succouring a wounded warrior on the left shoulder, of the life-giving and restorative spirit of his rule:

Fig. 4.6: Guglielmo dalla Porta, portrait bust of Paul III, detail showing Plenty holding cornucopia (Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY ).

Fig. 4.7: Portrait bust of Paul III, detail showing Peace succouring defeated Enemy (Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY).

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The Milk of Human Kindness Curdled: Avarice in Several Renaissance Portraits In this regard, it is interesting to note that on Cellini’s famous portrait bust of Duke Cosimo, we encounter the exact opposite of this image of outpouring generosity: prominently displayed, again on the right shoulder of the classical cuirass which covers his chest, we observe, not an image of generosity and abundance, as in della Porta’s bust of Paul III, but rather the opposite: a grotesque mask which devours what appears to be an ingot of metal, together with some coins:

Fig. 4.8: Cellini, portrait bust of Cosimo de’ Medici (Credit: Scala/Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY ).

Fig. 4.9: Detail of Fig. 4.8, showing head of Capricorn devouring coins and ingots (Credit: Scala/Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY ).

While this could represent a humorous self-reference on the part of the artist to his hard labors and the cost of materials which went into creating the bust, the project itself becoming a kind of “monster” of consumption, it also seems possible that this could be a clever and extremely allusive reference to the all-devouring nature of Medici rule in Florence, whose consumption of the state’s resources in support of their rule we have already described. Support for this hypothesis is given by the fact that the grotesque head devouring the coins on Cellini’s bust is the head of a goat, Capricorn being the astrological sign associated with Duke Cosimo, being his ascendant.53 Another small but interesting detail which points to the same theme of the miserliness of the Medici ruler is that the nipples on the cuirass appear to be being bitten by the beaks of two birds, and then seem to exude a fluid:

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Fig. 4.10: Cellini, bust of Cosimo de’ Medici, detail of cuirass showing breasts exuding a fluid (Credit: Scala/Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY ).

How can we account for this strange detail? One scholar has drawn attention to the fact that, strange as it is for modern audiences to countenance, in the Renaissance, a male ruler could be depicted with breasts as an indication of his life-giving and nurturing qualities as ruler of his state.54 If such a topos is being alluded to here, the fact that the “milk of human kindness” has to be literally extorted from Cosimo’s body by the two eagles fits precisely the theme we have been discussing: his extreme reluctance, caught up as he is in issues of personal power and prestige, to take any action out of a spontaneous love or concern for his state. Even the few drops which reluctantly flow from his breasts have to be forcibly squeezed out of him by an external force. Could the birds who perform this action be eagles, an allusion to imperial rule? Perhaps this is a detail which is better left uninterpreted. Against this reading of Cellini’s bust as a Cosimo lactans, Bronzino’s portrait of the Duke in armour takes on an entirely different coloring:

Fig. 4.11: Bronzino, portrait of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici in armor holding helmet (Photo: Uffizi Gallery).

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Not only are his breasts stingy in providing the nurturing milk of just rule to his state, but, even worse, they are pointed—weapons where there should be life-giving sustenance, martial values where there should be civic ones. A portrait by Francesco Salviati of Margaretta of Austria, daughter of the Emperor, also shows the Emperor wearing the same kind of armor. In reference to the concealed anti-Medicean messages we have been discussing, it is interesting to note the chair upon which Margaretta sits displays a bound captive figure beneath the head of a lion, possibly a reference to the captive state of the Florentine populace (symbolized by the Marzocco, symbol of Florence) under the rule of Cosimo, or perhaps his predecessor, Giovanni, Leo X. On the cuirass of Cellini’s bust, we also observe the head of a lion just behind that of the capricorn, symbol of the Medici family, perhaps also an allusion to an astrological progression from the rule of Leo to that of his successor, Cosimo, under whose influence, in the eyes of his republican enemies at least, Florence witnessed a drastic depletion of her vital resources due to the productivity and enterprising activities of the formerly free citizens of the state. As we noted in Chapter 2, this is also the interpretation given to this bound figure by Vasari in his discussion of the allegorical meaning of his portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici. If this interpretation of the figure in Salviati’s portrait of Margaretta is accepted, this image of subjugation is repeated in the limp figure of the lamb which dangles around the neck of the Emperor in the medal of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the lamb being, of course, closely associated with Florence as its most prominent consumer good, symbol of the Arte della Lana and a treasured reminder of the city’s communal past. As we noted in Chapter 3, the Golden Fleece, although for Renaissance rulers it represented the most prestigious symbol, on the European stage, of their achievements, ironically, in some more esoteric versions of the story, such as that of Seneca, served as a veiled allusion to the subjugation of a free city by a tyrant. To add insult to injury, Cellini adds another small but, in our view, significant detail to his bust of Cosimo: the strap which secures the cuirass over his right shoulder is embossed with a series of crescents. The impresa of the Strozzi family, perennial opponents of the Medici, was, in fact, a series of three crescent-moons:

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Fig. 4.12: Cassone painting, showing impresa of the Strozzi family with three crescent moons and a garland of roses (Credit: Photo by Giusti Claudio Paul, Florence).

If one accepts the possibility of carefully disguised anti-Medicean symbols on Cellini’s bust, such a detail might represent yet another example of the clever incorporation of an anti-Medicean message in a work of art commissioned by the same Medici, and would provide yet another instance of this type of subtle critique to complement our discussion of Michelangelo and Vasari in Chapter 2. Recently, several scholars have devoted studies to the presence of such powerful, yet subtle visual messages in many works of Italian Renaissance art.55 In Chapter 2, we remarked that several scholars have recently claimed to have discerned messages directed against the religious establishment of the day in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel itself.56 While some scholars might consider the foregoing interpretation of Cellini’s bust fanciful, if not outlandish, for a reader who has come this far, and has seen the strikingly varied and subtle ways by which artists, writers, and intellectuals of the Italian cinquecento managed to express their disaffection with the rule of the Medici in Florence, such an interpretation will, it is hoped, not seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility. A further feature which might have drawn Cosimo’s ire regarding the bust, assuming that the old story of its “banishment” to Portoferrato contains some truth, is that Cellini’s bust bears a striking resemblance to the famous classical bust of Caracalla, one of the most violent tyrants of Imperial Rome:

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Fig. 4.13: Roman portrait bust of the Emperor Caracalla (Credit: Scala/Art Resource).

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Fig. 4.14: Cellini, portrait bust of Cosimo de’ Medici (Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ).

If one looks closely, the similarities between Cellini’s bust and the classical portrait of Caracalla are striking: the tunic swept to the left (on Cellini’s bust much smaller than on the bust of Caracalla: only a small portion of fabric, gathered in a knot on his chest), the stern (on the bust of Caracalla, even fierce) expression, the curly hair and the short beard, the securing of the tunic on the right shoulder (on the bust of Caracalla, by a fibula; on the bust of Cosimo, the grotesque head we have just described). Even the bases of the two portraits are very similar in shape and form. In our view, there are simply too many similarities between the two portraits to be a mere coincidence.57 Cellini’s frequent contempt for his princely patrons has been extensively documented by scholars (one story, oft-repeated in the Renaissance, had it that even the Pope was afraid of what he might say), and a recent essay notes that Cosimo was indeed notorious for withholding payment due to the artists with whom he worked.58 Seen in this light, the famous “banishment” of the bust to Elba, had the Duke been able to discern the hidden allusions we have been suggesting, might be more than an amusing fable, as one scholar has recently suggested. Interestingly enough, the grotesque head on Cellini’s bust of Cosimo finds its analog in the grotesque mask upon which the figure of Night in the Medici Chapel

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leans for support, a self-portrait, as several scholars have suggested, of Michelangelo himself.59 In Michelangelo’s New Sacristy, we also encounter the same motif of coins, this time in the hand of Lorenzo, as we have just observed on Cellini’s bust of Cosimo. In Chapter 2, we argued that Michelangelo, in his use of these symbols, intended to convey the same message as we have just suggested for Cellini: that the Medici rulers of Florence are bent on consuming her vital substance in pursuit of their dynastic ambitions, something which can only leave her as enervated and lifeless as the figures which recline beneath the Medici captains in the Chapel. And in Vasari’s well-known portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, we also observe that the figure of Lorenzo (intended, as we argued in Chapter 2, to evoke the image of the melancholic or saturnine temperament, often associated in classical and medieval thought with tyrants, and one of whose main attributes was possessiveness and greed) appears to be clutching his money-purse, perhaps another allusive reference to the same theme of Medici greed60:

Fig. 4.15: Vasari, portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici (Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ).

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Fig. 4.16: Etching, showing two beggars (Credit: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons).

Given what has just been said regarding the use of extremely subtle and allusive messages by Renaissance artists opposed to the Medici regime to communicate a veiled critique of Medici rule, and the weaving together on the part of the Medici in their dominance of Florentine political life of political and personal power and potency, it may not be going too far to propose another highly allusive message in Vasari’s portrait which touches on the Medici use of power: Lorenzo’s right hand appears to be making a curious gesture toward his genitals, or the coinpurse (borsa) which dangles from his belt:

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Fig. 4.17: Vasari, portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail showing borsa and hand gesturing toward genitals (Credit: Fine Art Images/Alinari Archives, Firenze).

We observed the same prominent display of the money-purse in the frontispiece of the late quattrocento text depicting Lorenzo’s oversight of the Company of the Magi above. We would propose that, following the line of interpretation we have been suggesting, this strange gesture (which we have personally never encountered in any other work of Renaissance art, with the exception of the portrait of Bindo Altoviti discussed below) might have a triple function in Vasari’s portrait of the Medici ruler: while drawing attention to the money-purse itself, sign of Medici financial power, the gesture, so close to his genitals, might be also a reference to the personal palle, in a physical sense, of Lorenzo as powerful ruler and padrone of the city, while at the same time recalling the borse in which votes were stored in elections to Florentine political office, the reference serving here a sign of Medici potency in their control over the political mechanisms of the Florentine state. If one admits the possibility that Vasari might have intended to encode such a message in his portrait of the Medici ruler, here Lorenzo is triply potent: sexually, politically, and financially. This gesture is still used in Italy today, as, for example, at the Palio of Siena, where the supporters of one horse clutch their genital area and gesture toward the fans in the opposing section of the viewing stands, intended simultaneously as an insult and as a challenge to their rivals. One scholar has informed me that the gesture is also used at Italian funerals, presumably as an apotropaic gesture intended to ward off the threat of death.61 Kindness extorted; money consumed; Tantalus thirsting for the waters reserved only to the righteous: these three themes come together if we compare the works just discussed, and add another: Francesco Salviati’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti, the banker who financed the Florentine exiles62:

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Fig. 4.18: Francesco Salviati, portrait of Bindo Altoviti (Credit: Courtauld Institute of Art. Collection of the Duke of Northumberland).

In this portrait, we see the same gesture as we observed in Vasari’s portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Here, however, his hand is empty: symbol perhaps, of both the enormous loss of money incurred by the Florentine exiles in their attempt to unseat Cosimo as ruler of Florence, and also (if one accepts the interpretation proposed above regarding the connection between the electoral borse and the Medici

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palle) perhaps also a symbol of the failure of the anti-Mediceans, supported by rich bankers such as the Strozzi and the Altoviti, and whose public face was, as we have seen, the Farnese family in Rome, to produce a successor to equal the heirs the Medici were able to produce in continuing their dominance over not only Florentine political life, but (through their astute deployment of marriage alliances with the Hapsburgs and the kings of France), over central and northern Italy, and France as well. Altoviti is empty-handed, in several senses of the word: he lacks both the palle/borse of Medici political power, toward which the Lorenzo of Vasari’s portrait so avidly (or anxiously) gestures, and, having bankrupted himself in his support of the republican cause, he lacks the true capital (in both the sexual and the financial senses of the word) to mount a sustained challenge to the combined power of the Medici in Florence and their Imperial patrons over Italy as a whole. And indeed, Cosimo himself boasted of just such a transfer of capital and the power it brings, denouncing the “madness” of Altoviti and his fellow exiles in throwing away so much of their money on a losing cause.63 Such an interpretation of the portrait in a sexual/political sense also finds support in the inscription on the piece of paper which Altoviti holds in his right hand: “Bene vivere et letare.” One scholar has translated this inscription as “Live happy and be well,” an entirely plausible translation and one which would accord with the moral meanings present in many Renaissance portraits. There is only one difficulty with this translation, however. If one looks closely at the inscription, one notes that the verb is not “Laetare” (“Be happy”), but rather “Letare” (“Fertilize”); it lacks the conjunct AE which would be necessary in the former verb, a common abbreviation in Renaissance inscriptions. Had Altoviti and his fellow republicans been able to “fertilize” (that is, to continue their legacy of commitment to republican ideals and to prevail in the political organization of cinquecento Italy), the subsequent history of the country would have been very different. In the example just cited, we see another example of the extremely subtle means by which Renaissance artists opposed to the Medici were able to conceal covert messages against these rulers in their works, and the necessity of a very close attention on our part to even the smallest details which provide a clue to the existence of these messages and to their proper interpretation. If we look closely again at Michelangelo’s Medici tomb, we also observe that the figure of Day (whom, we suggested in Chapter 2, represents the Florentine exiles, rageful yet powerless to do anything about the continuing dominance by the Medici of Florentine political life) seems to make the same gesture with his left hand as does the Medici captain directly above, with one important difference: his hand is empty, while the hand of the Medici captain above him is holding a coin:

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Fig. 4.19: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Day, detail showing hand (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

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Fig. 4.20: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail showing hand holding coin (Credit: Alinari Archives, Florence).

We would interpret this detail to mean that, while the exiles have bankrupted themselves in their efforts to unseat the Medici from Florentine control, the Medici have themselves been enriched; in effect, a drastic transfer of capital has occurred, from the hands of the opponents of Medici rule to the Medici themselves, who then use this capital to further enhance their hold over Florentine political life. As we noted in Chapter 2, this is in fact precisely what happened in Florence: the Medici aggressively used the finances of the Florentine republic in the furtherance of their own personal ends, to the detriment of the political and financial health of the city as a whole. As we noted in that chapter, this included the massive diversion of funds intended for the city to the Strozzi bank in Rome, where it was used to further Medicean dynastic ambitions, leading Lorenzo di Piero, referring to his use of Florence as his base of power, to boast to a friend “Perché ha [Florence] da essere el fondamento del mio stato, e, a così dire, la poppa mia” (Because Florence is to be the foundation of my state, and, so to speak, my tit). And we noted above this same diversion of public funds on the part of Cosimo to further his ambitious plans to bring first Siena and then all of Tuscany under his control. As we noted there, this caused enormous suffering on the part of ordinary Florentine citizens, not to mention the citizens of Siena and those peasants living in the surrounding countryside.64 If this interpretation of these portraits is accepted, it demonstrates once again the power and the long duration of the use of the theme of money (whether its acquisition and hoarding in the service of a personal political agenda, or its acquisition and generous spending in service to the commune as a whole) as symbol

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of the realities of political life in Florence and Rome in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. As such, the use of this theme by Renaissance critics of the status quo serves to call into question the insistence on the part of the rulers of the age, whether local or regional (as the Medici in Tuscany), or European and trans-national (as the Emperor and the French and Spanish kings) on the identity of personal and public interests. By placing such a strong emphasis on an individual trait of personality and its negative effects on the good of the state as a whole, the theme of avarice simultaneously undermines individual rulers’ claims to universality (since the trait is a sordidly personal one), while at the same time calling into question the presumed connection between their supposed gifts of character and the happiness of the states over which they rule, a nexus which represented one of the primary features of their self-presentation and served as a justification for their rule. Avarice is by its nature both intensely personal and also profoundly destructive of the implied social contract between rulers and ruled—in which the people give up a measure of freedom for security and prosperity—which formed one of the foundations of political thought from classical times onward. This topos, then, forms an important hub around which opponents of the increasingly centralized forms of rule which characterized sixteenth century Europe could construct an alternative narrative or, to use the anthropologist James Scott’s term, a “hidden transcript” to compete with those self-serving narratives of power upon which those authorities relied. An interpretation of Salviati’s portrait in this light might also account for the woebegone and bereft expression on the face of the Roman banker: this expression, which also contains a trace of sadness, finds an exact parallel in the woebegone expression on the face of the Dawn of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel, and the expression of fatigue and resignation on the face of Evening, symbols, as we suggested in Chapter 2, of the enervated state of the city of Florence following the Medici return to power in the fall of 1512 and the long, arduous, and ultimately unsuccessful struggle on the part of her republican supporters to unseat the family from power and restore the city to her former status as a free commune. Vasari’s portrait is also interesting for the fact that, in a kind of diabolic inversion of the life-giving image of the cornucopia, which, we have suggested, served as one of the most important symbols of the generosity and public-spiritedness of the Farnese family, pouring out its riches upon the city of Rome, we observe, in the upper left of Vasari’s painting, a satanic image of a large tazza in the form of a grotesque figure whose open mouth appears to hold a poker, a detail which, along with the overall tone of Hellishness which permeates the portrait as a whole,

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brings to mind an instrument of torture.65 As such, it would represent the diabolic inversion of the Tazza Farnese seen as symbol of Farnese joyousness and festivity, out of which festive librations are poured, a satanic mouth which consumes everything, an infernal image entirely appropriate to a portrait which itself makes a veiled allusion, as we suggested in Chapter 2, to the saturnine or melancholic type, one of whose distinguishing features from classical times onward was an all-consuming greed. Hence—in the “tenzone” we have been describing between the miserly awls of the Medici, symbol of the pathological and debilitating miserliness of their rule in Florence, and the restorative abundance of the golden cornucopias of the Farnese family in Rome—we are confronted with what might be called a “battle of the images,” in which these images take on a contemporary political meaning. In Caro’s play Gli straccioni, to which we now turn, this same rivalry is expressed through a series of veiled references to the Tazza Farnese, formerly a symbol of Medici power and prestige, now given a place of honor by the Farnese in Rome, who convert it from its former function as symbol of Medici greed and acquisitiveness into a symbol of their own public munificence, seen as a kind of tutelary symbol of their enlightened rule over the city, where it stands for the spirit of public generosity which characterized, at least among their supporters, the family’s dealings with the city. Whereas the awls of the Compagnia della Lesina bore deeper and deeper into the vital substance of the state, consuming everything, the golden cornucopias of the Farnese family pour forth a stream of vital nourishment and a healing balm on a citizenry long oppressed by the arrogance and use of arbitrary force (prepotenza) by the nobles of the city, and which in contemporary Florence characterized, as we have seen, the rule of the Medici. The movement of the former is sharp, painful and inward, the other restorative and outward. And as we noted above, this contrast between a life-giving and beneficent generosity, and an enervating and debilitating miserliness was characteristic of both classical and Renaissance political thought on the character and actions of the just ruler, on the one hand, and the tyrant on the other.

Annibal Caro’s Straccioni as Symbols of Medici Avarice In Annibal Caro’s Gli straccioni, we encounter two strange characters, Giovanni and Battista, who, as the editors of the play remark, affect a false appearance of poverty as a disguise; their real mission is to recover some jewels which they claim have been stolen from their master.66

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Here, we are confronted with the same theme of avarice masquerading under the rags of poverty as we observed in the Maestro de’ Novizi’s description of Lorenzo’s Compagnia del Mantellaccio in the statues of the Compagnia della Lesina. Given their names, their status as outsiders in Rome, and their mission, the significance of which we will now discuss, these two characters can only, in our view, be a reference to the Florence of the Medici. We might also remark that these two misers—whom Caro describes as straccioni (“the ragged ones”)—bear a very close resemblance to those hired assassins who roamed the cities of Italy in pursuit of the enemies of the Medici, an example of which being the assassination of Lorenzino de’ Medici, the assassin of Alessandro de’ Medici, by a paid killer in the service of Cosimo de’ Medici in Venice in February of 1548, mentioned above. The mission on which these two individuals are engaged—the recovery of their master’s jewels—is also, we would suggest, an allusion to the Florence of the Medici. The testament of Margaretta of Austria refers to her prolonged struggle to maintain possession of her most treasured possession, the famous Tazza Farnese, against the incessant claims of the Medici on the object, the single most treasured prize of the Medici collection, symbol of Medici wealth and power, as well as a visually potent symbol of their status as among the most important rulers of Europe, important in the public declaration of status which was, beyond any aesthetic effect, the primary purpose for the collecting and display of precious objects on the part of Europe’s new rulers67:

Fig. 4.21: Tazza Farnese, interior showing Jupiter (or Neptune), Cleopatra, Sphinx, Horus, the Hours and the Winds (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

Fig. 4.22: Tazza Farnese, exterior showing Medusa’s head (Credit: Reproduced with the permission of Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

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As historians have pointed out, the Medici were especially highly astute maintainers and manipulators of their public image, which formed an essential part of their “artistic diplomacy” in Renaissance Europe, where precious objects of art were used, not only as symbols of the family’s power, but also as gifts to powerful individuals as a means of cultivating their good will.68 Hence, we suggest, the obsession of these two strange characters with the return of this precious object to Medici ownership was intended by the author as a symbol of the Medici family’s equally obsessive preoccupation with this object, and their determination to secure its restoration to what they viewed as its rightful location in Florence. Support for this hypothesis is given by the fact that, according to Mirandola’s description of the objects whose reacquisition is the real reason for these individual’s presence in Rome, this hoard of jewels contains, along with many other precious stones, two emeralds which once belonged to an eastern prince, and represented the eyes in a representation of the head of Medusa. This is a precise description of the provenance and appearance of the Tazza Farnese: its original provenance, still something of a mystery to scholars, was somewhere in the Near East; according to some scholars, the object was at one time possessed by Tamerlane himself.69 The outside of the cup displays precisely the image described by Mirandola: the head of a Medusa, which would presumably have served an apotropaic function in warding off those ill-wishers (invidiosi) who might begrudge the celebrants the pleasure of their feast, or (in its possible function as a sacred libation cup) who might attempt to interfere with the efficacy of its sacred function as an offering to the gods. The Tazza was acquired by Lorenzo il Magnifico, possibly from the collection of Pius VI, at the end of the quattrocento. In their edition of the play, the editors also note that the rags with which the two misers disguise themselves actually represent, not their true status, but rather a hypocritical means to an end (the return of the jewels), the motivation for which is not any display of true poverty, sign of their inner virtue, but rather precisely its opposite, greed. In other words, these “misers,” under their rags, conceal their true identity as agents of Medici greed, determined to restore a precious object, itself a symbol of the family’s lust for acquisition, to its “owners,” and willing to employ any means, fair or foul, to achieve this end. Further support for this hypothesis comes from the fact that the bank which is handling the transaction is identified by one of the characters as belonging to the “Grimani”; the Grimaldi bank of Genova was one of the primary banks employed by the Medici in their ambitions for the territorial expansion of the Tuscan state.70

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Caro’s play ends with the resolution, by the just judge (symbol, according to the editors, of the commitment of the Farnese family to the rule of law, and the end of the kind of arbitrary violence which characterized the rich magnati of Rome) of the schemes of the two mysterious and shady straccioni, symbols, as we have suggested, of Medici Florence and the greed and self-promotion which characterized the family’s acquisition and display of precious objects. As the editors of the play remark, one of the elements which justifies the play’s being regarded as one of the notable works of Renaissance drama is the extreme skill of the author in being able to weave together and resolve, in a manner unprecedented in Italian Renaissance drama, three separate plot strands, derived from three separate literary sources. According to them, the final resolution of the suit of the two straccioni represents the resolution of one of these strands of the plot. In addition to his resolution of the lawsuit brought by the two straccioni to reacquire their master’s jewels, symbol, as we have suggested, of the Medici family’s relentless efforts to reacquire the Tazza Farnese, a second plot complication resolved by the judge at the end of the play are the equally relentless efforts on the part of another character, il Cavaliere Jordano, to prevent the marriage of Tindaro, a young man newly returned from the East, to Giulietta, daughter of one of the straccioni, who has been abducted by pirates in the East and sold into slavery. In our discussion of Machiavelli’s s Mandragola above, we remarked that, in Renaissance drama, the marriage of two young lovers which concludes many Italian comedies of Plautine inspiration actually served, for Renaissance audiences, in many cases, as a symbol, either of the happy possession of a state by its absolute ruler, where the young bride, symbol of the state, now enjoys the protection of her benevolent lord, or (in the darker version of the symbol, as in the case of Machiavelli and the other Renaissance dramas discussed above) of the attempted possession of a state by a tyrannical usurper, the best-known example of this topos being the rape of the Roman virgin Lucretia by the son of Tarquinius Superbus, tyrant of Rome, which led to the founding of the Roman republic. The conclusion of Caro’s play combines both of these versions of the topos in an ingenious way: in a way analogous to the symbolic function of the Tazza Farnese just described, we would suggest that the felicitous resolution at the end of the play of the efforts of the straccioni to thwart a happy marriage also serves as a potent symbol of contemporary affairs: in this case, the happy resolution of Margaretta’s state of internal exile in Florence after the assassination of her husband Alessandro in 1537 through her betrothal to Ottavio Farnese, grandson of the Farnese Pope, in expectation of her intended role in the happy continuation of the Farnese dynasty. Just as the Tazza Farnese finds its proper place in Renaissance Rome, where, removed from its location in a city (Florence) where it served as symbol of the

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ruler’s personal wealth and power, it can take its true place as a powerful symbol of a generous use of personal wealth and status for the good of the community as a whole, so also, we would suggest, Margaretta herself, seen as a kind of trophy, finds her proper place in a city where she can, through her role in the continuation of the ruling dynasty, fulfill her true destiny as a physical embodiment of the generative and nurturing power of the Farnese family, which finds, as we have seen, symbolic expression in the statutes of the Compagnia della Antilesina described above. Whereas her presence in Florence does nothing except lend legitimacy to the oppressive and tyrannical rule of Alessandro, her presence at the Farnese court holds out the possibility that the benevolent rule of the family will continue into the future. Support for this interpretation of the play comes from another small, but in our view, significant detail: the name of the individual who attempts to thwart the marriage is Cavaliere Jordano, aided and abetted by his wife, Madama Argentina and her steward Marabeo. In our view, it is no coincidence that these characters, whose function in the play is to thwart a happy marriage, have Spanish names. In our view, this is a reference to Spanish support for the Medici in their ambitions for control of mid and central Italy through precisely these means, the establishment of a dynastic relationship with the Hapsburg rulers of Germany. It was the frustration of such ambitions after the death of Alessandro which brought about a change in the Emperor’s mind and the arrival of Margaretta in Rome as bride of Ottavio Farnese. In this regard, it is also significant, in our view, that the author describes these latter two characters in terms which recall those used to describe tyrants in the classical and Renaissance tradition, as well as in those dramas discussed above: they resort to violence and devious means (a servant of Madama Argentina, Marabeo, captures the chaste Giulietta and keeps her in a prison, where Jordano, consumed by lust, abuses her) to inflict suffering upon a sympathetic female figure, who is finally rescued from their clutches by the propitious intervention of an external force at the end of the play. In those Renaissance dramas discussed above, it is the intervention of a heroic young male figure (or, in the case of Domenichi’s Procne, Filomena’s sister) which leads to the eventual frustration of these schemes and the rescue of the young woman, symbol of the state. Cavalier Jordano himself admits that his behaviour towards Giulietta resembles that of a tyrant: Pilucca [servant of Madonna Argentina]: Have you tried wooing her [Giulietta]? Jordano: In a thousand ways. I’ve tried flattery and beggary, promises and gifts. I’ve wept, shown my anger and threatened. What haven’t I done? I even went to her— dagger in hand—like Tarquinius. But to no avail. She’d rather die than consent.

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Not only does Jordano display the behaviour of the classic tyrant in his attempts upon the virtue of the chaste Giulietta, but he resembles the classic tyrant in another way: he is prone to anger, and given to using violence to get his way. This is demonstrated in his frequent attempts on the life of Gisippo, the Florentine name of Tindaro, lover of Giulietta. Another feature of the classic tyrant, besides his assaults on innocent women and his propensity toward violence, is that he is consumed by lusts, having given himself over completely to his baser instincts. We encountered this feature of the tyrant in Seneca’s Thyestes, discussed above, where Atreus is completely consumed by the lust for revenge. In Ruccelai’s Rosmunda and Trissino’s Sofonisba, the tyrants are consumed by sexual desires for young women whom they cannot persuade by other means to return their advances. And in Gigli’s Don Pilone, discussed below, we encounter yet another reiteration of this theme, where an older man tries to foist himself off upon a younger woman, despite (in this case, the comic) inappropriateness of such behaviour. We also suggested that both the Callimacho of Machiavelli’s Mandragola and the Cesare Borgia of Machiavelli’s Prince make allusive reference to this same tradition. Hence, in the dramas we have been discussing, we can see that for Renaissance audiences, the theme of young lovers pitted against a grasping older figure had, in many cases, a political subtext, and that in almost all cases this political subtext served as an allusive commentary on actual political circumstances prevailing at the time of the writing and performance of these plays. Not only does Jordano display all the markings of the classic tyrant, in which, in his proneness to violence and a stubborn conviction in the rightness of his cause, he resembles the Atreus of Seneca’s Thyestes described above, but he also, in his loud and threatening behaviour by which he attempts to intimidate others, his sense of aggrievance, and his obsession with the maintenance of his personal honor, resembles the stock figure of Italian Renaissance drama, the braggart soldier, most often portrayed as Spanish.71 As we have noted, he receives his comuppance at the end of the play, when the judge reveals that he (and indeed, almost every character in the play) and Gisippo are related, and severely rebukes him for his churlish behaviour, noting that his authority comes directly from the Pope: Why would you dare such insolence? Can’t you see that I represent the Pope? Cavalier, if you behave so lightly and irresponsibly during the reign of this Pope, whatever head you have left will be chopped off. Your boldness has been excessive; you have created a private prison in the city of Rome, treated women brutally, attempted murder. your behaviour shows nothing but contempt for so lofty a prince. (V.iv–v)

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Just as the young lovers, whose union is celebrated at the end of the play, represent, we suggest, Margaretta of Austria and Ottavio Farnese, so also, we would suggest, do Cavaliere Jordano and his wife Madama Argentina represent the Spanish King and Queen, who are united in support, not only of their dynastic designs on a chaste young woman (symbol, as suggested above, of Margaretta), but also of the claims of the two straccioni, Giovanni and Battista, in their attempts to repossess their jewels, symbols, as suggested above, of Medici determination to reacquire that potent symbol of their influence and power, the Tazza Farnese. Assuming this interpretation of the symbolic function of the characters of the play is accepted, the former scheme (to secure Margaretta for themselves) also corresponds, as in the case of the Tazza Farnese, to actual historical circumstances prevailing at the time of the writing of the play, namely Cosimo’s desperate, relentless, and futile efforts to secure a marriage alliance with the Hapsburgs, ultimately frustrated by the Emperor’s decision to award his daughter’s hand to Ottavio Farnese instead. Hence, we would suggest, not only does the play serve as a symbolic reenactment of the lust to acquire physical objects in the form of the Tazza Farnese, but also personal ones as well: the schemes of Cavaliere Jordano and Madama Argentina serving, we suggest, as symbols of Medicean dynastic ambitions to establish absolute and uncontested rule over Florence by means of a dynastic alliance with the Hapsburg family of Germany and Spain. Just as in the dramas discussed above, these schemes were frustrated by a propitious historical intervention worthy of any drama: the assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici by his distant cousin Lorenzo on the night of January 6, 1537. It is worth noting that in Caro’s play, this figure is represented by Tindaro, newly returned from Chios, in Greece, traditional symbol of democratic rule, and itself a colony of Genova, traditionally a republic, free from Medici domination. This character, we have been suggesting, was intended by the author to symbolize Ottavio Farnese, the young man destined to become Margaretta’s spouse.72 Seen in this light, the entire play may be seen as a kind of “commedia-à-clef ” for actual historical circumstances prevailing at the time of its writing, a feature of the play explicitly mentioned by the author himself.73 The fact that all the characters in the play are related (a fact which emerges only at the end of the play, a tour de force of plot resolution of which the author must have been proud) would also seem to allude to the close connections between the Medici of Florence and the Hapsburgs of Spain, to whose domination of Italian political life the Farnese of Rome were determined to provide an effective counterweight.74 Hence, we would suggest, both the Tazza Farnese and Margaretta herself, seen as prized possessions of the Farnese family, become, in Caro’s play, in the world

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of Farnese iconography, and in the real world of contemporary Rome, symbols of the removal of precious objects, one physical and the other human, from a place where they are used only as symbols of the personal power of the ruler and his concern with his dynastic ambitions, to a place, that is, Farnese Rome, where they can find their best setting and serve the functions for which they are best suited, the Tazza serving as a potent symbol—with its seated ruler holding a cornucopia and its references to fertility, abundance and joy—of the family’s commitment to an ethos of festive generosity, and Margaretta, as the spouse of Ottavio Farnese, the means by which the just and magnanimous rule of the family can be continued into the future. Interestingly enough, the Tazza Farnese even appears, it would seem, in the elaborate frescoes commissioned by Chigi to decorate the ceiling of his villa on the via Lungara, mentioned above as a possible location for the elaborate celebrations which characterized the Papal court of Paul III and which may have been the historical setting which provided the inspiration for the lavish and comic descriptions of festive banqueting recorded in the statutes of the Compagnia della Antilesina. In these frescoes, we also observe a scene of a lavish marriage, celebrated in the form of a feast of the gods, where Jupiter receives the newly-betrothed lovers Cupid and Psyche, and a lavish banquet accompanies the occasion where all the denizens of Heaven are present:

Fig. 4.23: Raphael and assistants, Farnesina, ceiling fresco showing wedding of Roxane and Alessandro Chigi (Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence).

It would be tempting to assign the creation of this fresco to precisely the time of the writing of Caro’s play and to see it as further evidence of the validity of our hypothesis of the play’s hidden meaning as a political allegory of the triumph of Farnese benevolence and generosity over Medici greed, but, unfortunately, the

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general agreement among art historians is that the frescos were actually painted by Raphael and his assistants in the second decade of the cinquecento. However, given the purchase of the palace by the Farnese family from its former occupants, the enormously rich Chigi family, bankers to the Papacy, to serve as the center of their private festivities across the Tiber from their official residence, and hence the appropriateness of its ceiling decorations to the themes we have been discussing, we may perhaps be allowed to cite in this regard the old Italian proverb “se non è vero, è ben trovato.” To return to the theme of avarice, what connects both themes we have been discussing, the contested and finally happy marriage of Tindaro to Giulietta, and the restoral of the Tazza Farnese to its rightful location in a court motivated by the same spirit of generosity and public-mindedness which the cup itself depicts, is, of course, this same theme of avarice, seen, that is, not in the narrow sense of the acquisition of money, but rather as an overweening and obsessive need to possess at the expense of others, whether it be human or artistic capital, a theme which formed (in addition to the derivation of its title from the revolt of the poor workers of Lucca, as discussed below), we would argue, the political subtext of Caro’s play. With this avariciousness the generosity and festive munificence of the Farnese family forms, both in Caro’s play and in the actual world of Farnese iconography, a distinct and pointed contrast. From these citations, then, one can deduce that the play was intended as a kind of veiled allusion to the struggles of the Farnese family, in their self-appointed role as restorers of a culture of decency and the rule of law to the city of Rome, with the repressive forces which stood in the way of such efforts. While the reference to the arrogant rich of Rome as one of the targets of these reforms is clear from the text itself, as the editors remark, historically, the family was equally deeply engaged in beating back the increasingly assertive claims of the Medici family to hegemony over Florence and its surrounding territory. One example of this is the Salt War of 1542, instigated by the Pope himself, in which papal forces defeated the combined forces of Ascanio Colonna and Rudolfo Baglioni, a captain in the service of Cosimo de’ Medici. This allowed the Pope to reassert control of the region for the Papal States.75 Given these considerations, it would be surprising, in our view, if references to this struggle were not also present in a play which the author himself describes as being very much a product of its place and time, and which places such great emphasis on dramatizing the efforts of the family in resisting what it saw as the forces of tyranny and injustice in central and northern Italy. The play’s editors also note that the rags of the two straccioni are also an allusion to the revolt of the poor workers of Lucca in 1531, and are intended, just as the allusion to the Florence of the Medici encoded in the choice of their names,

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as a rebuke of the arrogance and prepotenza of the rich classes of Rome, who hypocritically complain of their newly-reduced status as the result of the policies of the Pope, where the reassertion of the rule of law, and the enforcement of a strict accountability for acts of arbitrary violence against the poor citizens of Rome formed an important part of Farnese domestic policy. If this interpretation of these two strange characters is accepted, we observe, once again, the use of highly symbolic means to express the true nature of Medici rule in Florence. Their overweening avarice and their obsession with the family’s own rights and prerogatives, against those of their dominion as a whole, lead to an attempted repossession of the object most treasured by them as symbol of their absolute rule by individuals intended to recall to the mind of the astute reader the unscrupulous means the family was in actual fact all too willing to employ in the furtherance of their power in Renaissance Italy. With this greed in the service of personal self-aggrandizement, so vividly, yet allusively, portrayed in Caro’s play and in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina are contrasted the beneficence and public-spiritedness of their great rivals, the Farnese family in Rome, the generosity and benevolence of whose rule also finds its expression in a potent pair of symbols, as we have seen. As the editors of Caro’s play have pointed out, in their devotion to creating a society dedicated to the rule of law and the rights of all citizens, even the less fortunate, the family was influenced by the writings of Giovanni Guidiccioni, in particular, his Orazione ai nobili di Lucca, intended as a defence of the poor workers in the city, who, protesting their treatment by the ottimati rulers of the city, had revolted in 1531, provoking severe reprisals on the part of the city’s governing elite.

The Orazione ai nobili di Lucca Making use of both classical and Biblical precedents, Guidiccioni appeals to these leaders’ “better self,” abjuring them to foreswear a vindictive severity against the poor, and reminding them, in an echo of classical political thought, as well as of Machiavelli, that states are most secure which include all classes in their governance (most succinctly expressed in the adage, often repeated in the Renaissance, iustitia fundamentum regni) since, again to paraphrase Machiavelli, all that the people ask is that they not be oppressed; if they are treated well, by a ruler who has their best interests at heart, they are quite willing to entrust themselves to his care, as long as he is guided by the principles of justice and reason. If the people are not treated fairly, they will seek a Dictator to support their cause, which, in the case of Lucca, as Guidiccioni pointedly remarks, could very well be Alessandro de’

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Medici, who had already made overtures to city leaders, and, according to Guidiccioni, if allowed an entrée into the city, would spare no efforts to reduce both the ottimati and the popolo to his tyrannical rule. Guidiccioni also makes clear that, while he uses the old topos of the plebs as a ravening beast, subject to its passions and easily mislead by a crafty leader who makes use of their grievances to further his own personal power, nevertheless, the grievances of the poor of Lucca have real merit, expressed in the “scrittarini e lettere” which they leave on the city’s walls: Have you not diligently considered the significance of those slogans and writings which are sometimes are attached to and read on the walls? They mean nothing else except that the people with a mute voice cry out against those who are governing. And so, if you will be as wise as those who occupy the seats of government ought to be, you will not try to remove them from government nor to provoke them; indeed, even if they wanted to oppose you (as they would inevitably do out of lack of consideration), you should try by any humane means try to keep them on your side.76

Such an appeal to reason in the treatment of the poor, and especially Guidiccioni’s insistence that, for all their purported unsophistication, these masses have legitimate grievances and a legitimate right to representation in the governance of their city, is almost unique in the writings of Italian political thinkers of the first half of the cinquecento. To return to the subject of the Farnese family and its commitment to a policy of generosity, the rule of law, and concern for the poor, and their indebtedness to the writings of Guidiccioni, it is significant, in our view, that Guidiccioni ends his oration with a rebuke of the elders of his city for neglecting those who pursue “scienzie,” that is, wisdom, and dare to forsake the acquisition of money for the sake of service to the commune, although, by so doing, they risk condemnation and ridicule from their fellow-citizens. Guidiccioni traces this abandonment of a commitment to public service on the part of those who should know better, and the present sorry state of the Luccan republic, directly to the sin of Avarice: But what has made this generation of men so little esteemed in our republic? Avarice. What will continue to make them even more so? The same. What will discourage and deter the others from the ways of scholarship? Avarice. What will finally end up sending into exile the practice of the arts? Avarice. No one knows better than you how that noble soul who, in order to follow his studies, does not wish to apply himself to business is almost marked by infamy. Only the rich are held in esteem, and honor is the sustenance of the arts; but just as riches arise out of hard work and good fortune, so also out of riches arise false happiness and pride, the which is so odious to God, that, not only is it punished, as the other vices, by divine punishment, but also by indignation.77

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Guidiccioni ends his oration with an appeal to both classical and Christian sources to persuade his listeners to foreswear their evil ways, and reclaim their true status as benevolent and enlightened leaders: Receive into your heart those two virtuous sisters, Justice and Temperance, which, because of their usefulness in governing, both in commanding and obeying, were called by the ancients Harmony. And finally, use your riches and your counsels to honor God, so that, even should you fall into some human error, you will at least be free from impiety, having sure knowledge of the fact that, as long as men rule with little respect for religion, so long will they lead a miserable and difficult life, and that death and ruin are ordained for that city which is governed and ruled without the help and guidance of God.78

This “disprezzo della avarizia” on the part of Guidiccioni, in its insistence on the corrosive effects of this sin on the body politic, recalls the classical discussions of the vice, as well as those of Pontano and Rinuccini, cited above. Once again, we see that such a vice is not merely private, but has profound effects on the health of the body politic as a whole. As noted above, such a contrast between a life-giving and beneficent generosity and an enervating and debilitating miserliness was also characteristic of Renaissance political thought on the character and actions of the just ruler, as opposed to the oppressive and destructive rule of the tyrant.

The Audience for These Treatises: “Hidden Transcripts” If one accepts our interpretation of the strange festivities of the companies of the Lesina and Antilesina as expressed in their statutes, it leads to an interesting question: who could have formed the audience for these books? For whom was the allusive message critical of Medici rule intended? One piece of evidence is suggestive. Existing copies of the original edition of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina (Capitoli da osservarsi inviolabilmente della venerabile Compagnia della Lesina) are extremely rare. A search of the catalogue of world libraries turns up only a handful of copies, and some bibliographers even seem unaware of the existence of this edition. This suggests that the Medici censors were extremely active in confiscating copies of the book, which in turn suggests that, not only was the family aware of the latent subtext directed against the family expressed in the bizarre descriptions of the festivities of this company, but were also concerned that others, perhaps even outside of Florence, might also detect and find pleasure in the hidden critique of the family we have described.79 We know that another book critical of Medici rule, which also encoded its critique

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of the Medici in a highly allusive way, was also confiscated, even though it was published in Lyon, a center of anti-Medicean activities, and that the author was severely persecuted by the authorities.80 This suggests a very active system of surveillance on the part of Medici censors even in centers very far from Italy. This in turn suggests that the public for such anti-Medicean and anti-Imperial works must have been quite wide-spread, and that the authorities were well aware of this fact and determined to suppress such expressions of dissent, even if they took a highly symbolic form. This further implies that the public for such works must have been not only larger than what one might at first assume, but that they were also quite sophisticated in discerning and interpreting such messages. In Chapters 1 and 2, we noted the highly allusive messages directed against Medici rule in the works of two of the most famous artists and writers of the time; if such men, in full public view, were capable of creating such messages (which assumes that at least some members of their audience were capable of receiving and interpreting them), then it seems reasonable to assume that others, perhaps less famous, such as the compilers of the statutes of the Compagnie della Lesina and Antilesina, might have been capable of creating such messages as well, relying on the abilities of the public to whom they addressed themselves to be capable of discerning and interpreting them correctly (although, as noted above, several of the members of the Compagnia della Antilesina may have been highly placed, and the “academy” may have met in the gardens of the Pope himself ). That the public for these strange works was indeed widespread is attested to by the fact that, while the first edition of the work was very possibly immediately detected and suppressed by the Medici censors, subsequent editions kept appearing, even well into the seventeenth century.81 These even included a Dutch edition of the capitoli della Antilesina, published in Holland in 1697. We also noted above several French editions of the work, attesting to its popularity beyond the borders of Italy. The places of publication of these later Italian editions of the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina are also suggestive: Vicenza, Ferrara, Orvieto, Bologna, Venice: all in northern Italy, in places somewhat removed (with the exception of Venice) from the large urban centers. What this suggests is that, while Medici and imperial censorship of these works critical of Medici and Imperial rule was effective in central Italy, as evidenced by the extreme rarity of the first Florentine edition, there was greater latitude to publish and distribute these anti-Medicean texts in northern Italy and in France, a hypothesis which conforms to what is already known about the survival of opposition to imperial rule in the latter part of the cinquecento and the first half of the seicento.82

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Finally, most of the editions of the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina are very small, and printed on cheap paper, without name of publisher, place of publication, or year. In English, these small pamphlets are called chapbooks, and were sold by itinerant peddlers in all the European countries from the sixteenth century on. It was common practice to print the contents of these popular texts on one large page (called in English broadsheets and in Italian fogli volanti), once again with no indication of either printer or place of publication, intended for public display, either in the bookseller’s shop or in some other location. This would also have facilitated the wide distribution of their contents while guaranteeing anonymity for their author and, as with the chapbooks, also indicates a surprisingly high level of literacy among members of the working and lower classes.83 A Petty Countrey Fair, Is the publication of some few Pedlers packs distinguisht into Boothes, which is yet fild with a great confluence of countrey people, who flocke thither to buy some triviall necessaries. Afarre off it seemes a tumult of white staves, and red petticoates and muflers, but when you come nearer they make a fayre shew. The men buy hobnayles and plough-irons, and the woemen houshould trifles, yet such as are for use more than ornament. Your countrey Gentlewomen come thither to buy bone-lace, and London gloves, & are onely knowne by a Maske hanging on their cheeke and an Anticke plume of feathers in a Faire, and t’would doe you good to heare them bargaine in their owne dialect. The Inns are this day fild, every man meetes his friend and unlesse they crush a pot they thinke it a dry complement. Heere the young Lads give their Lasses Fair-rings, which if shee take with a simpering consent, the next Sunday their banes are bidden. A Balletsinger may be sooner heard heere than seene, for instead of the violl hee sings to the croud. If his Ballet bee of love, the countrey wenches buy it, to get by heart at home, and after sing it over their milkepayles. Gipsies flocke thither, who tell men of losses, and the next time they looke for their purses, they find their words true. At least after much sweate and trampling too and froe, each one carryes home a peece of the Faire, and so it ends.84

In this charming picture of English country life, we see that the chapbooks play, alongside plough irons and London gloves, an important role in the everyday life of those who live and work in the English countryside. To draw attention to his wares, the chapman will sing verses taken from the small books he is selling, which milkmaids will then take home with them to ease the drudgery and monotony of their daily lives on the farm. If there were a clandestine anti-Medicean message present in the capitoli of the companies of the Lesina and Antilesina, as we have been suggesting, the format of these small books would have been ideal for its wide distribution and easy concealment: the book could be hidden in some article of clothing, or even inside another volume, should its possessor receive notice of

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the presence of Medici or Imperial agents seeking to confiscate copies of the book and punish the owner with a fine, and, in such an event, the pamphlet could also be easily and quickly disposed of.85 We have already noted the wide variety of genres available in chapbook form in Renaissance Italy: avvisi, or news of the day, prognostici, or calendars listing important dates, such as saint’s days and movable feasts, and auspicious times to plant or harvest, epics or mock-epics derived from the oral tradition, saint’s lives, reports of mostri, or prodigies of nature and natural disasters, first-hand accounts of wars, the defeat of the Turks, Christians sold into slavery, the sacking or liberation of cities, tender love-ballads. Such small, inexpensive pamphlets, both entertaining in themselves, and also containing (in the case of the opuscoli describing the activities of the companies of the Lesina and Antilesina, and perhaps others) a hidden critique of contemporary affairs and the actions of two of the biggest contemporary players on the Italian stage, Cosimo de’ Medici and Charles V, would have found an enthusiastic and appreciative audience, even well outside the large urban centers, comprising, as they did, one of the most sought-after items among the wares of the Italian equivalents of the English chapmen, the venditori ambulanti.86 James Scott, whose work we cited above, has remarked on the importance of such marginal individuals as the travelling merchant and the bard in the diffusion of ideas falling outside the accepted norms, and thus the furtherance and elaboration of alternative narratives, or “hidden transcripts,” as direct challenges to the stories rulers tell themselves and their subjects as a means of justifying and legitimizing their rule: The elaboration of hidden transcripts depends not only on the creation of relatively unmonitored physical locations and free time but also on active human agents who create and disseminate them. The carriers are likely to be as socially marginal as the places where they gather. Since what counts as socially marginal depends so heavily on cultural definitions, the carriers will vary greatly by culture and over time. In early modern Europe, for example, it seems that the carriers of folk culture played a key role in developing the subversive themes of the carnivalesque. Actors, acrobats, bards, jugglers, diviners, itinerant entertainers of all kinds might be said to have made their living in this fashion. Other itinerants journeymen, craftsmen on tour, tinkers, colporteurs, shoemakers, petty traders, vagrants, healers, “tooth artists”—while perhaps less active in elaborating a dissident subculture, might be important vectors of its propagation. … Finally, a good many of these groups depend directly on the patronage of a lower-class public to make their living. The clergyman who must rely on popular charity or the bard who expects his audience to feed him and give small contributions is likely to convey a cultural message that is not at odds with that of his public … the bard who sings for an audience of subordinates will have a repertoire more in keeping with the hidden transcript than a bard who is retained exclusively to sing praise-songs to the prince.87

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We have already noted the carnivalesque quality of many of the celebrations of the Compagnia della Cazzuola and the possible presence of a veiled anti-Medicean message in their carnival song. The fact that without exception, the many editions of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina which appeared throughout Europe from around the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the following century appeared in chapbook format, and were thus to a large extent to be found not in bookshops (where they could be more easily detected and confiscated by the authorities) but rather among the varied wares of the traveling merchants and book sellers described above is another indication that these works might represent examples of the “hidden transcript” so aptly described by Scott.88 If such is the case, it would imply that the allusive anti-Medicean and anti-imperial message we claim to be present in these works was both understood and appreciated by a wide public consisting not only of members of the upper educated classes (here we may recall the highly erudite references to the Pythagoreans and the Etruscans on the part of the maestro de’ discepoli described above), but also of middle and lower-class readers, the latter two of which groups suffered the negative effects of Cosimo’s rule particularly severely, as we saw in the vivid accounts of the Marucelli chronicle cited above.89 Whether these works provoked any form of direct resistance to the political or religious status quo during these years is a question we cannot answer at this point. But if we allow for the validity of Scott’s hypothesis of a dynamic role for the hidden transcript in effecting, sooner or later, political change, it seems entirely possible that they did.90 And in reference to the importance of the oral tradition—the “voce della piazza,” to use Salzburg’s apt phrase—in keeping alive republican and popular religious traditions in an increasingly autocratic age, we might recall Plaisance and Gareffi’s descriptions of the activities of those non-conforming companies of 1540s Florence and Rome, which took place on the margins (both socio-economically and geographically) of these cities, and, just as the Compania della Cazzuola, included among their members a striking mix of working-class and aristocratic individuals.91 Plaisance cites a letter of Niccolò Martelli in which Martelli describes a celebration at the house of the founder of the Academy of the Umidi, padre Stradino: then, in a week, tornatelle in Stradino’s house: I call him father because he was the first founder of the immortal Academy of the Humidi, which then became the present one, derived from that one; and don’t believe that Visino favours the tornatelle only for the hearty and dainty food, since that is the least important pleasure; and if there are poets to be found there, who are like the laurel on every feast, he also wants farces, comedies and performances together with words and music, prepared especially for the occasion; a life which would be the envy of the Emperor himself! And they are kept such a

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secret that one only hears about them the morning after when he tells those who hang around his shop, recounting every detail until tears roll down his cheeks.92

In this letter, we observe the same combination of learned entertainment and more outlandish behavior as we observed in the nighttime festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, as well as the same presentation of dramatic performances; in fact, this might tend to suggest that Stradino’s “academy” might actually have been a continuation of sorts of the earlier Compagnia della Cazzuola, the tadpole, symbol of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, having mutated into the frog, symbol of the Academia degli Humidi, according to one of its early historians, Gianfrancesco Doni. We also observe the same secrecy regarding the nighttime goings-on of Stradino’s “academy” as we noted above in our discussion of the nocturnal meetings of Strozzi’s Roman brigata. Even the fact that the dramatic performances there were made specifically for the occasion recalls the performances of Machiavelli’s Clizia and Mandragola at the meetings of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, where these plays received their first performances, and, in the case of the Clizia, were staged to celebrate the conclusion of the punishment of one of their members by the Medici regime. What this discussion of these later compagnie di piacere implies is that, following up on Scott’s remarks about the “hidden transcript,” such apparently frivolous and ostensibly non-political festivities may have actually been more successful in sustaining and propagating a rather wider and more durable form of cultural resistance than one might at first assume. It was a Renaissance commonplace, when speaking of the mutual dependence of writers, artists and the patrons they served, to remark that the rich and powerful ought to be very careful how they treated this class of individuals, since they had the power to inflict long-lasting damage to their reputations. We cited above the German Emperor’s comment to the effect that a satirical poem directed against a powerful person is more to be feared than the thrust of a dagger. And, if one allows oneself for a moment to take an optimistic view of social and political change, what men and women think in their hearts and confide only in darkness can, when the times are right, emerge into the light of day and effect radical change.

Avarice as Social Critique: The Canti carnascialeschi of Giovambattista Ottonaio The theme of a fanatical and destructive avariciousness, which, according to the compilers of the statutes of the two companies we have been examining,

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characterized Medici and Imperial rule in the Italy of the mid-cinquecento, and was placed by them in polemical opposition to a benevolent and public-spirited generosity, finds expression in many other cultural productions of Renaissance Italy. We will briefly examine several of them here. The canti carnascialeschi of Giambattista Ottonaio (a member of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, as noted in Chapter 3), taken together, present a vivid picture of the tenor of social life in Florence prevailing in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century. As noted above, a carnivalesque, anti-authoritarian element was a prominent feature of the celebrations of the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, also expressed in the carnival song of the company, where a festive, joking element provided a kind of “cover” for the expression of the anti-Medicean sentiments, since Carnival-time was the time traditionally allowed for the expression of sentiments critical of the ruling regime. Ottonaio’s Canzone dei Giudei gives vivid expression to the corrosive effects of greed on the social and political life of Florence in the second decade of the sixteenth century, soon after the Medici return to power in the fall of 1512. It is also a cry for social justice, since the Jews have been expelled from Florence for the very sin which the Florentines have stolen from the Jews themselves: Già mille volte da noi accattasti danar col pegno in mano; ma poi che l’arte me’ di noi imparasti, pover venuti siàno. Ma parci un caso strano che chi presta col pegno non porti il nostro segno e stia quanto vuol drento a vostre mura.93

By now a thousand times You’ve extorted our money with pledge in hand; But since you’ve learned your art from us, We have become poor. But to us it seems something strange That those who lend on credit Don’t wear our sign And stay as long as he wishes within your walls.

Ironically, it is the Jews of this canzone who teach the Christians the true meaning of a prudent parsimoniousness, as opposed to its close relative, the sin of Greed: Noi sappiàn ben che non sol per guadagno We know that one does not only loan

con sicurtà prestate,

On credit to make money.

ma l’aiutare un povero compagno: il che molto ben fate. E se voi guadagnate il giusto, è cosa onesta: ché non fa mal chi presta; ma chi accetta, fa mal dell’usura.

But to help a poor companion: Doing which, you do well. And if you take an honest profit It is a fair transaction: For it is not he who loans who sins; But he who borrows, who sins by usury.

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The final irony is that the Jews of this canzone end their plea for readmission to the city by teaching the good Christians of Florence a moral lesson: Or sia savioe prudente chi n’ha ricchezza o stato: ch’un ben, mal acquistato, se ne va ‘n fumo presto e poco dura.

And so let he who has riches or position Be wise and prudent: For a good ill-gotten Soon goes up in smoke and lasts only a short time.

The last stanza urges the Florentines to adapt the Jewish trustworthiness, evidenced in their willingness to lend with a simple pledge, and do away with elaborate contracts and stipulations, which only serve to obfuscate financial transactions, to the benefit of those who know this “art” of manipulation: stiensi dunque da parte scrocchi, cambi e contratti; fate ormai chiari i patti ché tutti poi alfin son pretta usura.

And so let’s leave behind usury, pawnshops and contracts; From now on make clear contracts Since all the others are mere usury.

This latter appeal for prudence and transparency in the management of fiscal affairs, and the abandonment of exploitative practices based on the mystification of those subject to them, is, it seems reasonable to speculate, a veiled critique of the financial practices of the Medici rulers of Ottonaio’s day, who, as historians have pointed out, availed themselves of similar manipulations and obfuscations to further the family’s interests to the detriment of the commune as a whole.94 It also recalls the wise and responsible parsimony of the buon massai of the Compagnia della Lesina discussed above, where, as we saw, this virtue served to sustain and extend the life of free republics, and was opposed to the wastefulness and avariciousness of the “sect” of misers and spendthrifts who had invaded the company, masquerading as its supporters. Ottonaio’s Canzona de’ Diavoli reproves the Florentine obsession with making money, which has led its citizens to Hell, and saves special vitriol for the priests of his day, who, blinded by the most serious of the seven capital sins, pride, have led God’s people astray: Se Colui ch’ora in ciel gode immortale, trionfar vuolse già del nostro regno, prender corpo mortale forza gli fu e morire in sul legno. Ma ‘l principe infernale

If He who now reigns immortal in Heaven Wished to triumph over our world It was necessary for Him to take a mortal body And die upon the Cross. But the infernal prince

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senza fatica governa ogni loco; e ‘l regno di Chi é ‘n ciel val nulla o poco.

Rules every place without fatigue: And the rule of He who is in Heaven Is worth little or nothing.

Onde con piú letizia trionfiàno

And so they triumph with even greater joy With our king, lord of the universe, So that He gave his blood in vain And wasted so much time and toil; So that Christian people (Or so they call themselves Compete to rebel from Him by deeds.

col nostro re, signor dell’universo, poich’Egli il sangue invano e tanta suo fatica e tempo ha perso; perché ‘l popol cristiano, se ben col nome suo cosí s’appella, da Lui coll’opra a gara si ribella. Come vedete, il nostro gran signore ha sette capi, il primo incoronato; però ch’ogn’ altro errore dalla superbia si vide esser nato.

As you see, our great lord Has seven heads, the first crowned; Since every other sin is born from pride.

Con questi il suo valore per tutto il mondo il gran Satàn dimostra e massim’ oggi nella città vostra.

With these throughout the whole world The great Satan shows his power And especially today in your city.

Questi vescovi e preti abbiàn legati

These priests and bishops have all agreed To make war on us from ancient times. But he who takes his example from priests Errs even more than the others. There are many monks and brothers Who flee the cares of this evil world For love of God.

ch’anticamente ci facevon guerra. Ma chi or de’ prelati l’esempio prende, vie piú che gli altri erra. Assai monaci e frati Ci son, che fuggon pur del mondo rio tutti i disagi per l’amor di Dio.

Ottonaio’s Canzona della Virtù is an indictment of the sorry state of Florentine civic life, where every citizen is out for his own good, and the virtuous are publicly praised, but privately hated by the “invidiosi,” who subscribe to the philosophy that “chi ha piú danar, piú ha amicizia,” and where parasites and flatterers rule, telling citizens and princes only what they want to hear, in service of their own interests. And finally, his Canzona delle Maschere is a jeremiad against the frivolousness and superficiality of the citizens of Florence, who place great faith in appearances, at the expense of sincerity: Ècci chi si diletta, per seguir qualche uom degno,

Here is one who delights Following after some great man,

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tôrle colla barbetta per mostrar piú disegno; bench’a molti d’ingegno par troppa leggerezza, perché bellezza e bizzarra presenza non mostra arte, virtú né sperienza. Queste qui di civette, cornacchie e bertuccioni, quasi ognun se le mette; queste son da buffoni; molti voglion dimoni e noi gli contentiàno; e vegghiàn ch’ognun compra e si misura

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And pull him by the beard Although to many intelligent people It seems foolish, Because beauty and outlandish garb Shows neither art, nor ability, nor judgment. Of these ones here almost every one Puts on jester’s bells and gear,

quella ch’ è piú secondo suo natura.

These are buffoons; Many want demons, And we satisfy them. And we see how everyone buys and measures themselves Each according to his own nature.

Gli è ver che oggi queste

It’s true that today these young Beauties

giovani e belle han grazia, ma troppo disoneste vengon presto in disgrazia; ch’ogni bellezza sazia è sanza prudenza: usate diligenza a tôr di quelle

Are pleasing to look at, But those who are too flirtatious Soon come into ill repute; Since every loveliness sates ones’ell’ If it is without restraint: Be careful to choose from among them Those who show that virtue which makes them shine.

che dimostron virtú che le fa belle.

All wear the masks of fools, suited each to his own nature; no one shows the true face of Virtue, afraid that, by so doing, we will subject himself to public ridicule. The vices expressed so vividly in Ottonaio’s other canzoni are here only reinforced by an obsessive desire to conform oneself to the gestures of the crowd. In such a Florence, devoid of independent spirits guided by Reason and Virtue, a kind of Carnival of vice and self-interestedness prevails, making any kind of true civic life impossible. Scholars who express uncertainly as to the reason for Ottonaio’s dismissal from his position as herald of the Florentine Signoria need looks no further than these verses: once again, as in the statutes of the two companies we have been discussing, we see a strong critique of contemporary Florentine life; it seems reasonable to speculate that Ottonaio was expelled by the Medici from his position

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as herald for precisely the expression of such anti-Medicean sentiments as we have seen articulated in his poetry.95 At a time of increasing religious orthodoxy, particularly heretical would have been his condemnation of the religious establishment and his praise for those who withdraw from participation in the daily spectacle of religious observance; Ottonaio’s words here are virtually indistinguishable from the sentiments of the Church reformers, both within and without Italy, especially the Anabaptists, who held all forms of religious ritual in particularly scant regard, and were considered particularly dangerous by the guardians of religious orthodoxy. His Canzona delle Maschere, with its satirical presentation of those flatterers who follow great men, would also have struck a particularly sensitive nerve with the Medici rulers intent on transforming Florence into something resembling a princely court, where citizens formerly used to exercising considerable authority in the affairs of the city were transformed, in the manner of Circe’s beasts, into little better than servants, those dandies and flatterers condemned by Donato Giannotti in his letter to Piero Vettori cited at the end of Chapter 1, so making themselves, to those with a memory of former times, as ridiculous as those buffoons who accompany them onstage. And whereas, owing to the license given to the expression of anti-authoritarian sentiments during times of Carnival, Ottonaio was able to express somewhat more openly in his canti carnascialeschi his disaffection with Medici rule in Florence, nevertheless, as noted above, the Medici were very careful to monitor any such expressions of festive spirit, keeping a tight control over them to ensure that they did not lead to any public disorder. Such control, as we have seen, led the Compagnia della Cazzuola, in their carnival song, to veil their anti-Medicean sentiments in extremely oblique and encoded language.

Avarice as Social Critique 2: The Don Pilone of Girolamo Gigli The Don Pilone of the Sienese playwright Girolamo Gigli, which saw its first performance in Siena in 1701, is an adaptation, as acknowledged by the author himself, of the L’avare of Molière, and shares with the Compagnia della Lesina a comical treatment of the theme of extreme stinginess, made even more ridiculous in this case because the character beset by this vice, as a buon borghese, is of relatively high social station, and thus, unlike a truly destitute individual, should be above such pettiness.96

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In this play, we also encounter, as we did in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, a deliberate and pointed contrast between the stinginess of the credulous Monsù Buonafede, Gigli’s miser, and an open-hearted generosity and willingness to put the interests of others above one’s own which distinguish the other characters of the play. As we noted above, this was also a feature which distinguished the buon massai of the Compagnia della Lesina. Another theme present in the play, also derived from Plautine comedy—the pursuit by an avaricious and devious older man of a (in the case of the Don Pilone, relatively) virtuous and innocent young woman (the best-known example of which, in classical tragedy, being the rape of the chaste Lucretia at the hands of Sextus Tarquinius, son of the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus)—was, as we observed in our discussion of the plays in Chapter 3, a topos commonly understood by Renaissance audiences, of both theatre and the visual arts, as a symbol of the ravishment of a free state by a tyrant. In Gigli’s play, this older man is Don Pilone himself, bent on possessing Madama Mariana, daughter of Buonafede, at all costs. What was more allusively expressed in those Renaissance plays (where one has to read between the lines to discern the political subtext) becomes much more openly expressed in Gigli’s work, since, in the Don Pilone, the theme of greed (that is, the lust to possess, whether a young woman or money) is joined by an equally powerful theme: an insidious deviousness in pursuit of evil ends, masquerading under an appearance of virtue. In the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina, this duplicity was a feature of Lorenzo’s Compagnia del Mantellaccio, as we have seen, symbolized by those avari and luponi who insinuate themselves into the company and try to undermine its ethos of temperance and self-restraint. In Gigli’s play, the topical reference is to the insidious maneuverings of the Jesuits, seen as secret subverters of the just state, plotters and schemers, whose end, the substitution of a free society with an authoritarian one, is nefarious, but who cloak themselves in the garments of righteousness as a means of deceiving those not astute enough to see through their false disguises.97 Just as in Caro’s Gli Straccioni, justice is achieved at the end of the play when, in a sudden reversal of fortune, il Caporale Benigno announces that he is taking Don Pilone, and not Monsù Valerio, lover of Madama Mariana, as had been expected, into custody for his crimes, and that he will be taken to Paris and summarily executed. The joy of the other characters at this sudden turn of events is expressed in the lines which conclude the play, in which Monsù Buonafede urges the others to ask the Signore Commissario for permission to witness his execution at the wedding festivities planned for that evening to celebrate the marriage of Madama Mariana and Monsù Valerio.

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Whereas in Caro’s play, the final stroke of justice is meant to represent the commitment to justice and the fair application of the laws characteristic of the Farnese family in Rome, sharply contrasted with the miserly and self-absorbed rule of the Medici in Florence, in Gigli’s play this final stroke of justice is meant to represent the final defeat of the Jesuitical machinations of Don Pilone in his attempt to have the sympathetic and heroic Valerio, a secret advocate for democratic rule, arrested for plotting against the King and Crown, the real aim of his apparent scheme to seduce Buonafede’s wife while thwarting the marriage of Valerio to Mariana. But in those Renaissance plays just mentioned and in Gigli’s Don Pilone, the political subtext is essentially the same: the forces of violence and deceit which challenge the authority of just government are in the end defeated. And, as we have seen, this political message is not at all abstract, but alludes directly to the actual political circumstances of the times in which these works were written.98 In Gigli’s hands, then, the old topos of classical comedy, the comical inappropriateness of an older person seeking the favours of a young lover, takes on, just as it did in his Renaissance precursors, an allegorical meaning which alludes to the actual historical circumstances of his time., that is, the attempted appropriation of a free commune by a tyrant.99 Another element of Gigli’s play which it shares with the plays we have been examining is the use of highly lyrical and visual intermezzi to provide a kind of counterpoint to the action of the play. And in a nice touch which demonstrates the importance of the theme of avarice to Gigli’s indictment of Italian political culture of the early eighteenth century, the last words in the first edition of the text of 1711, printed at the bottom of the final page, are “Si vendono in Roma a Pasquino ed a’ poveri si danno per carità.” His play, unlike its greedy and self-absorbed protagonists, is generously given to those who cannot afford it.100 While in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, these intermezzi celebrate the joys of a pure and innocent love, against the cynical and self-serving machinations of Callimacho and his mother Sofronia (symbols, as suggested in Chapter 3, of Medici machinations to secure the state of Florence for themselves), in his play, Gigli gives dramatic expression to the same themes, but in a manner opposite from Machiavelli’s: in Gigli’s play, it is the final denouement which celebrates the triumph of a pure and unselfish love, in marked contrast to the bittersweet submission of Lucrezia to Callimacho’s desires with which the Mandragola concludes, while it is the intermezzi (in contrast to Machiavelli’s celebrations of the joys of a tender and sensual love) which give us a dramatic picture of the conflict between two kinds of love, Gigli’s amoretti representing a pure and divine love, who are merciless in

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their mockery of the “Pinzochere and Bacchettoni,” that is, the bigots, who are truly grotesque in their attempts to foist themselves upon the unsuspecting youth. And just as in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, discussed in Chapter 3, as well as in the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola discussed in the same chapter (not to mention the Thyestes of Seneca, which, as we noted there, served as the literary model for the infernal, Hellish quality of the performances of the Compagnia della Cazzuola), the malfattori of Gigli’s play also find their final place in Hell, when the proscenium opens to reveal them enjoying a festive banquet, only to have Divine Justice appear above them, and consign them to everlasting torment as the stage opens up beneath them and swallows them whole. The play was enormously popular in Italy, and is considered important for the history of Italian theatre.101 As Pellegrini notes, the play saw its first performance in Siena in 1701, but provoked “i malumori delle persone che si riconobbero nella satira dell’autore,” who succeeded in having further performances of the play blocked on the authority of the Grand Duke. Pellegrini also notes that Gigli’s play was severely censored by the Jesuits, who, as we have just noted, were the real implied targets of Gigli’s satire. Gigli was also a staunch defender of the superiority of the Sienese dialect of Italian against the insistence of the Academy of the Crusca on the preeminence of Tuscan, which, as several scholars have pointed out, represented an attempt on the part of that academy, under the sponsorship of Duke Cosimo, at a kind of “linguistic hegemony,” symbol of the Medici ruler’s domination of the Tuscan state.102 As one critic has remarked, Gigli participated in the polemic against the Florentine purism of the Academy of the Crusca, from which he was as a consequence expelled for having come to the defence of the Siennese Vocabolario Cateriniano (1707), which, for its lesa fiorentinità was burned on the public square by the public executioner. He was forced to retract his opinions on language (he placed the Siennese dialect above the Florentine) and was sent into exile.103 In his dedication of the work to the Contessa Flavia Teodoli Bolognetti, Gigli himself makes clear that his work is intended to “lacerate” the hypocrisy and duplicity of the religious establishment of his time: This [Hypocrisy] is a Monster which for some time now has been routed from its den and hounded by the whistles and cat-calls of the people each time he has come out into the open, that is to say, each time I have presented him on stage. But since now and then he returns to his hideout and tries to save himself in his secret paths, I have decided to hunt him down for the last time, blocking all his hiding places, and throwing to the ground all his places of refuge.104

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If the foregoing discussion of the political meaning of the Renaissance plays, as well as Gigli’s later work, is accepted, then the theme of avarice, understood as a symbol of failed political leadership and an indictment of a corrupt political culture, comes full circle: from the sharp awls of the misers of the Compagnia della Lesina, symbols, as we have suggested, of Medici greed, to the Renaissance dramatists who give vivid embodiment to the same theme, to French theatre, in Molière’s L’avare and then back again to Italy in the plays of Gigli. Seen in this light, the theme of avarice might thus be said to represent one of the most potent symbols by means of which Renaissance writers were able to convey, in an allusive manner, their opposition to features of Renaissance Italian political life which it would have been dangerous to express more openly. Following the great success of his Don Pilone, Gigli’s wrote a second play, the Sorellina di Don Pilone, first performed during Carnival in Siena in the year 1709, in which, in the words of one critic, he makes reference to the actual circumstances of Gigli’s life, among them the stormy relationship with his wife, were the inspiration for the plot: ever since his marriage he has been in constant conflict with his consort, signora Lauretta Perfetti, owing to their differences of temperament and inclination, she being excessively parsimonious, and he being supremely generous, she treating the household servants harshly, he, being more aware of his obligations toward the servants and tradesmen, open-handed and courteous; finally, she being neither especially young nor attractive and openly disaffettamente religious, he being of a breezy and not unpleasant disposition, and, as far as religion goes, neither too self-righteous nor too liberal.105

Once again, as in the Don Pilone, we are confronted with a pointed satire of the hypocrisy of the religious establishment of the day, in which these individuals, who (just as the falsi risparmiatori of the Compagnia della Lesina) while parading a showy form of modesty and virtuous behaviour (this time, in a difference from the Don Pilone, rather than an appearance of religiosity, a hypocritical thriftiness, meant to conceal an underlying avariciousness) are unsparingly (and very comically) reproved. And just as we observed in the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina, this critique takes the form of an extreme, and, in this case also, unseemly and extravagant avariciousness, as opposed to an open-hearted and magnanimous generosity. Whereas this contrast, as we have seen, finds its expression in the different capitoli of the two companies described above, which present a vivid counter-image of each other, here this fundamental dyad is embodied in the characters of the play itself.

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Later Developments And so we can see that what began as an apparently innocuous literary joke, and an innocent satire of the pretentiousness of Italian academic life in the mid-cinquecento, came, later in the century, both in Italy and beyond, to take on great importance in the intellectual life of Renaissance Europe, where citizens of other countries were also struggling with the effects of various forms of authoritarian rule. In Chapter 3, we noted the survival into the late 1540s of several organizations which—in their meeting places, far from the watchful eyes of Medici censorship, their membership, which consisted for the most part of members of the working and middle classes, together with some ottimati, and their activities, which featured elaborate banquets accompanied by theatrical productions satirizing the political and religious status quo of their times—bore a very close resemblance to the Compagnia della Cazzuola. In a similar way, the ethos of the Compagnia della Lesina managed to survive long after any trace of its existence—if indeed, it existed at all—disappears from the historical record.106 In a fascinating and little-known document, Giovanni Cosimo Villifranchi gives us a description of another compagnia, this one with the name Compagnia dell’Arsura, which made its appearance in late seventeenth century Florence. Just as with the Compagnia della Cazzuola, which, as we noted in Chapter 3, was accustomed to changing its meeting places, which were often known only to the members through special signs, so also was the “Academy” of the Arsura difficult to locate, down a narrow alley off the via della Pellicceria and into a small piazza, the Piazzetta dei Pilli, whose entry way, once found, was even more difficult of access: And (as I said) this place where the Arsi hold their meetings is in a corner of the little Piazza de’ Pilli facing the loggia of this same family, into the which piazza one enters down a very narrow little alley. The entryway which serves as the entrance to the flight of stairs which leads to the aforementioned room resembles more that of the nest of an owl than that of a human habitation, since, besides being more than three feet off the ground, and being made half of bricks made pink by time and half of cut stone, it might be termed more accurately a hole in the wall than an entrance proper. … But this is the entrance which without allowing one any repose suddenly thrusts you into a room from which one ascends to the room in question; the which stair seems to me to be like the one which leads to the house of the bogeyman, since it is made of such poorly constructed steps that you really can’t be napping as you try to ascend it, so that one could say along with the Poet: Even an agile bear would have broken its neck.

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And so, this staircase, or, I should say, fragment of a staircase, is worse than the one in the Inferno, because, of that one, according to Virgil, facilis descensus, and only coming back up hoc opus, hic labor est: but on that of the Arsuri the ascent is almost impossible, and the descent even more dangerous; but at least it has this in its favor, namely, that there is no door, since at the end of it there is a little landing on the lefthand side for their much-need repose; since from here on they have, not to climb, but rather to jump, because to climb here is absolutely impossible; three more steps then which lead to the aforesaid room where the Arsuri hold their meetings.107

Once the visitor had survived this grueling ordeal, and had finally made it to the penetralia of this organization, he was greeted by a scene of abject squalor, in which even the furniture mirrored the founding principle of this Academy, a devotion, just as we observed in the Compagnia della Lesina, to an extreme and comical form of poverty, reflective of the status of this academy as a meeting-place for young artists: In this room there is no adornment at all; the walls are cracked and crumbling, the pavement uneven, the beams of the ceiling attached with crude and full of breaks and peeling paint. And it seems as if either Nature or chance took compassion on the condition of this room, since, in a corner, it placed a toilet, which is always spewing out some stinking and putrid material. And it also has a fireplace in a corner which looks as if it had been made with the stones left over from the burning of Troy. … To the naturalness of the place the furnishings add a great deal, consisting in several benches, which once formed part of a bed, and, to remain upright, they have to reverse their normal function, since they are held up by those who sit on them. Several little tables so battered and beat up it is difficult to use them and they are even harder to use than the Round Table of King Arthur, which was without a leg. And to hold them up they make use of an edge of a window so battered it resembles the loom of a weaver or the pedals of an organ, and the legs are attached in such a manner that if they place even the lightest object on it, it falls right off, and it vi forma un bel fondo di calesso con la sua colonnetta. Certain chairs from Pistoia have better luck, since, lacking entirely the seat bottoms they can also serve as a prie-dieu or a stool for one’s bodily needs.108

And, in a delightful parody of the formal seriousness of the academic oration, the members of the Compagnia dell’Arsura delivered their orations while standing in a fireplace, amid the cinders left over from the conviti of its members: On the front wall facing the window was their impresa, which was a fireplace in which there was a pile of spent ashes, and written on the front was the word Arsi and on the lintel the motto which accompanied their impresa, that is, Sotto cenere freddo il fuoco ascondo. This fireplace was constructed of moldings which carried the flue up to the ceiling, and was covered with painted cloth. In the middle of the aforementioned flue was an opening so large that it seemed a window, behind which the one who had to

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recite the Oration had to stand, which served him as a professor’s chair, entering it from beneath.109

And, just as with the Compagnia della Lesina, the names of the members and their impresa, displayed on the rough walls of their artists’ den, reflected the state of “voluntary” poverty “enjoyed” by its members: the Worn Out One, the Impoverished One, the Entangled One, the Derelict, the Burnt Out One, the Dried Up One.110 As with the Compagnia della Cazzuola, the Compagnia dell’Arsura was made up primarily of artists and musicians, and spent its time in festive banqueting, musical and theatrical performances, and games: And since gambling is completely alien to one who calls himself a member of the Arsura, and also because none of them are afflicted by this vice, so as to be able to pass their evenings in a festive mood, and since many of them are well-experienced in music, having brought a keyboard instrument into the room, bass viols, violins and violas, they began to play lovely symphonies and musical compositions, which, being very pleasing to the public, led to their gatherings being quite large. Any time left over from playing music was occupied by games of sibillone, mazzolino, mestieri, and other similar silly and harmless games, and those who lost a turn in these games were condemned to pay a small sum of money, with which they bought provisions for their feasts.111

As also with the Compagnia della Cazzuola, the Compagnia dell’Arsura had its beginning in an apparently random event: November of the year just passed 1682 having arrived, when the eve of All Saints had begun, this same group, finding itself in the place just described, and having spent the time until supper in pleasant and honest conversation, several of them proposed to establish in that place an Academy by the name of Arsura. … The idea met with general approval, and making a game of writing their statutes and regulations, they began to pass the vigils commenting on this matter, and proposing now this, now that ridiculous suggestion to establish and govern such an Academy in the same manner as the Company of the Mantellaccio in Florence, following those things which Lorenzo de’ Medici had written about it, and incorporating into the whole the teachings and practices of the most refined sort of stinginess. … And since, as the saying goes, Loose the dogs and they will appear, they were all for the most part great friends and, to use a country phrase, good old boys, it came about that, often taking pleasure in each other’s company at table, usually, at the end of the month, very few of them had anything left over, and for the most part were more pressed than flush with cash, so that, one of them, joking that he found himself without money, would say “io sono arso,” and so little by little this became their motto.112

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It is interesting that the founding of these compagnie di piacere, as presented in their statutes, seems to happen almost by chance, and out of the daily life and ongoing activities of their members, and usually in a festive setting: even before the founding of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, its precursor, the festive association of the Ciompi, as noted in Chapter 3, arose in a similar manner, when its members, far gone in a state of happy inebriation, began to shout “Ciompo, Ciompo.” And the Compagnia della Cazzuola also began in a similar manner, we may recall, when a mason’s trowel was used to ladle a portion of quicklime into the unsuspecting mouth of the host.113 In the accounts of the founding of these societies, then, it thus seems almost as if their very spontaneity and almost random choice of name were intended, in marked contrast to the formalities, rules and regulations, and hierarchical organization of the more formal Medicean academies, as an assertion of their organic nature vis-à-vis the societies from which they arose, issuing spontaneously out of its working-class soil, in marked contrast to the highly programmatic and often coercive nature of those organizations sponsored by the Medici rulers of the city, perhaps the best expression of which was the formation of the Compagnia del Mantellaccio described above, where, unlike the “spontaneous” embrace of poverty on the part of the members of the Accademia della Lesina, the society was deliberately formed, in the view of the compiler of its statutes, as a means of projecting a carefully-cultivated image of rectitude on the part of its members.114 This organic quality also found a symbol in the tree reaching to the center of the earth from the heart of the gonfalone of the lesinanti, as noted above. As we observed in our discussion of the Accademia della Lesina, for the Arsuri, the exercise of temperance in their eating habits was fundamental to their ethos of prudence and self-restraint: They ordered that every savings possible be taken in purchasing food for their meals; that each member bring and provide his own food; that the food which was wrapped in leaves be well-wrapped in several leaves, not so much so as to procure more of them to resell, as that, since they would have to serve as their plates, they could better stave off hunger; and so did they also they have their salads wrapped up in several leaves.115

Here, as with the Compagnia della Lesina, we encounter once again the theme of food, and its sober and temperate enjoyment, as symbol of the upstanding moral character of its members, in pointed contrast to the sordid acquisitiveness and wanton wasting of resources characteristic of the miseri avari of the Compagnia della Lesina, symbols, as we have seen, of the nature of Medici rule in Florence. A nice classical

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touch is provided by the preference of members of the company for salads, beans and lettuce being well-known symbols of the deliberate austerity of the Pythagorians, which formed an essential part of their spiritual life. And just as with the companies of the Cazzuola and Lesina, we may note in their late seventeenth successor the company’s function as a fellowship of like-minded artists and musicians, bent on passing their time in “trattenimenti onesti” and the pursuit of their craft. Even at their most splendid feast, the Arsuri exercised an admirable restraint: The dinner consisted of very exquisite foods and wonderfully seasoned and with such a beautiful presentation than there seemed to be nothing lacking, nor was there anything in excess; and they observed a particularly clever Arsuran custom, that the sausage and parmesan were placed on the table on the same folded leaves in which they had been wrapped by the grocer, and these were all very carefully collected by their punctilious provisioner Rifinito, who, after dinner was finished and the guests of the company sent home, gathered together the leftovers and placed all the ashes which he found in the various hotplates which had been placed on the table into a brazier, and these were carried in several vessels by various ones to warm their hands, and then left for the benefit of the place.116

Here we may observe the same combination of temperate enjoyment and concern for others which characterized the gatherings of the Compagnia della Lesina described above. The author of this description of the Compagnia dell’Arsura even goes so far as to note that, just as the surroundings of their normal meeting place, in their state of dilapidation and decrepitude, reflected their ethos of poverty, so also, on this their special day, do the furnishings of their banquet hall reflect their commitment to prudence and self-restraint even in the midst of festive abundance: “La tavola era apparecchiata con una bianchissima tovaglia, ma artificiosamente accomodata in maniera, che nè per la testa nè per le bande non avanzava un dito di superfluo” (the table was set with a shining white tablecloth, but carefully arranged in such a way that neither at the head nor at the sides of the table did it overlap even by an inch the edge of the table).117 As the members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola added the image of the tadpole (Cazzuola) to their impresa of the working-man’s trowel, so also did the members of the Academia dell’Arsura embellish their feasts with a prominent display of radishes and turnips, a kind of poor man’s answer to those lilies of the Medici family which adorned every available public space in Florence, and the title-pages of innumerable texts published in their name.118 And finally, the Carnival song of this artist’s den makes clear that it functioned not only as a semi-secret meeting place, out of sight of the eyes of the ruling

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regime of the city (Villifranchi even notes that the evening drawing classes offered to the young artists had to be suspended because all the other young and talented artists of the city, having heard of their existence, promptly abandoned their classes at the Academy of Design, to the obvious embarrassment of the latter’s sponsors), but that it also performed another important social function. Just as the Compagnia della Cazzuola, the Compagnia dell’Asura was especially active during times of Carnival, and, just as the Cazzuola, took an active part in those celebrations in their preparation of a procession, complete with music and visual displays, and a special carnival song which proudly boasted of the excellence and importance of the Company. The Carnival song of the Arsuri proudly declared, more openly than the Carnival song of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, the moral superiority of the company, while simultaneously making a strong critique of the contemporary state of civic life in Florence, to which their company provided a superior alternative. Here again, as with the companies of the Cazzuola, Lesina and Antilesina, beneath this apparently joking and unserious description lies a serious political message: not only does the Arsuran insistence on a prudent and parsimonious temperance in the conduct of their daily life serve as an implied rebuke of the then-current state of civic life in Florence, where an ethos of greed, self-interest and self-display (vividly expressed in the canzoni of Ottonaio discussed above) prevailed, but, perhaps more important, the civic message contained in the feasts of these artists and musicians (characterized, as we have seen, by a combination of frugal banqueting and festive celebration) was one of fellowship and solidarity in the face of social fragmentation and a civic culture marked by an every-man-for-himself mentality and the incessant pursuit of personal gain.119 That this appeal to the values which characterized (at least in the minds of her republican supporters) a Florence of a former day was broadly appealing to citizens outside the company is made clear by the frequent mention in Villifranchi’s text of supporters and sympathizers among the general population of the city, the most prominent of whom was Filippo Corsini, a friend and associate of Cosimo III, who, in his capacity of “Cacciatore maggiore and Gran Cavallerizzo,” supplied the company with a deer for their feast.120 As in the other companies we have been examining, we observe then, once again, in this late seventeenth century version of the Compagnia della Lesina, the themes of poverty and voluntary simplicity, as opposed to avariciousness and the sanctimonious display of wealth, used to make an implicit, but nevertheless forceful, indictment of the cultural and political life of early modern Florence.

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Lesinanti Abroad Not only were the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina and its rival popular throughout Europe, as attested to by the large number of editions, many of them in inexpensive chapbook format, which issued from Italian, French and Dutch presses beginning in the last decades of the 1500s and continuing into the seventeenth century, but there even arose actual academies which (unless they were purely fictitious), took as their raison d’etre the practices of these former companies. We describe several Italian examples below, but, before we do, we may note the existence of a “Save-All Club” in early eighteenth-century England, which emulated the humorous strictures of the Compagnia della Lesina, both in its statutes, and also in the elaboration of these statutes encountered in later editions of the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina: Thomas Sprightly is a constant frequenter of balls and assemblies, and treats the ladies, who laugh at him as a common dangler. He is admonished to refrain from this idle expense. His remonstrance, that it is in the view of a good marriage, has been duly considered, but has made little impression on the old ones of the Club, who are rather apprehensive, from his simple manners and goodness of heart, that he will become the prey of the very artful, cunning, and treacherous females of the present day. If however, he get married, it shall be regarded as a sufficient punishment.121

While displaying a typically dry British sense of humor, and relying on the wellknown English love of eccentricity for its effect, these passages are clearly inspired by the humorous requirements of the Compagnia della Lesina discussed above: any excess in either food, or clothing, or choice of servants, or personal behaviour is grounds for immediate expulsion from the Club: Mr. Thomas Spangle, when his clothes had only lasted three years, and had never been turned, thought proper to purchase a new suit, at the enormous expense of four pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence, sterling money. N. B. The old suit was sold for three half-crowns, and he might have had a cheap suit in Monmouth-street, as is well known to most of our members. … Expelled for a year. He may, however, appear at the Club if he choose to wear a gold-laced waistcoat on these occasions, and to which waistcoat all the members shall make a low bow. Mr. Liquorish, having wasted seven shillings on a dish of half-ripe green peas, and pleaded in excuse that the belly is not blameable because estables are dear, fined in fourteen shillings for his gluttony, and sent to Coventry for a month, on account of his plea, which betrays an hardened sinner.

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This latter censure of Mr. Liquorish, in the snide reference to Coventry, would have represented a particularly severe punishment, Coventry serving as symbol of a kind of quiet country life, which would have been, in its provinciality and predictability, a form of torture for an individual accustomed to the lively society and ever-changing daily pageant of life in the English capital.122 Lesson Two of the statutes of the Save-All Club is taken almost verbatim from a later edition of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, where the box in which the statutes were kept is described in great detail: An opulent goldsmith, M. S. A. has presented to the club a beautiful save-all in a casket, which I shall describe, as replete with lessons of thrift. The save-all is of gold, the casket of silver, except a circle in front of rock-crystal, through which the save-all is seen. In the angles, and around the crystal, are festoons of beet, radishes, and turnips, because the Greeks, according to Pliny, had placed in the grand temple of Delphi these three estables, in gold, silver, and lead, as emblems of their ancient frugality. Medallion 1. Ancient Rome sitting on a globe, with a sceptre in one hand and a saveall in the other, signifying that by parsimony in private life the Romans conquered the world. Medallion 2. Marcus Curius Cincinnatus holding the plough while the staff of dictator is sent to him by the senate. Cold indifference and surly majesty appear in his countenance, while the messengers and lictors display mingled awe and surprise. A masterpiece, to show that thriving is the daughter of thrift. […] Medallion 6. The same [Cato the Elder] selling a heifer from his farm, and some fruits from his garden, to another senator. They are wrangling stoutly about the price. It is a well known maxim of Cato, that a prudent manager should sell, and not buy. […] Medallion 8. Phocion, that eminent Greek general, carrying his sandals under his arm, and wiping his brow, to show that it is hot weather. For he said there was no occasion to use shoes unnecessarily; and when the season required their use, the soldiers would exclaim, “Cold weather, my lads; Phocion wears his sandals.”

Here we encounter once again the same tone of mock-seriousness as we encountered in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, the difference being that here, the satire is not explicitly political, as in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, but rather, it is the social mores of the entitled upper classes of British society which are being parodied here, the world of gentlemen’s clubs, smoking rooms, private schools, discrete affairs and trips abroad. Given the English fondness for self-satire, these statutes would seem to represent an affectionate send-up on the part of these same upper classes of what they themselves recognized as being the more ridiculous among their many foibles.

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And just as with the Compagnia della Cazzuola, the emblem of the Save-All Club was a humble object which nevertheless served to represent an important moral lesson. The Secretary of the club describes this item in the following words: The Save-all is a little instrument well known in economical families, and so constructed that a candle may burn to the last without losing any fragment. On account of its use and name, it has been adopted as the sacred emblem of our Club; also known by the appellation of “Sons of Thrift”. … The Save-all is of various forms. Some have only one prong; but as this is apt to split the candle, other inclose the prong in a little cup of white-iron. Others have two prongs; but the best are those with three, which support your candle-end without any risk of burning your fingers; an accident to be avoided, as the cure may cost more than the candle, in opposition to every rule of sound economy. Nor is there any proof of saving in learning to snuff a candle with the fingers. It is, indeed, a display of courage; but courage is not an every day suit, and it is a dirty business, unfit for our club, of which all the members are men of worth and respectability, and though of the strictest frugality, far above any dirty or mean action. Nor is it necessary to add, that snuffers may be found in every street, not to mention Westminster Hall or the Royal Exchange.

And as in the case of the Compagnia della Lesina, the statutes of its English successor have as their aim, beyond the amusement and pleasure of the reader, a serious moral purpose; in this case not, as in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, an allusive censure of the rulers of its time, but rather a more general celebration of the virtue of simplicity as a means to a happier life: A main secret of thrift is to be contented with a little. Happiness is too proud a word for man, who must be satisfied if he find contentment and tranquillity. … A great secret of content is to compare ourselves with others yet more unhappy. Three quarters, perhaps, of the human race live from day to day, and are not secure of the pittance of to-morrow. … The constant re-production of animal and vegetable food, arranged and maintained by human industry—the prodigality of nature, the excess of her productions, which leads to commerce and interchange between nations, displays the infinite wealth, and power, and beneficence of an infinite Creator, whose powers are in constant activity, and whose creation is repeated every year and every day. To suppose such wonderful arrangements the effect of chance is not to display intellect, but to struggle against both intellect and sensation.

This latter description of the gifts of Nature also recalls the lavish descriptions of natural and man-made abundance encountered in the statutes of the Compagnia della Antilesina. And finally, as just noted, just as the Compagnia della Lesina, the Save-All Club chose as its emblem a humble image expressive of its ethos and character:

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Fig. 4.24: Emblem of the Save-All Club (Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions, HA.com).

The parsimony of the members of the Save-All Club is as absurd as was that of the Compagnia della Lesina; the only difference being that here we encounter individuals more familiar to us: the well-to-do members of the entitled upper classes of British society. Not only did the academies we have been discussing, from the Compagnia della Lesina of the mid-cinquecento, to the Compagnia dell’Arsura of the late 1600s, simultaneously parody and critique the pretensions of Florentine academic life and the political structures these institutions supported, but, as we have seen, they also took aim at the social practices of their own and later ages. The canti carnascialeschi of Giovanbattista Ottonaio, a member of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, provide an early example; we have just seen how the statutes of the Save-All Club, an English version of the Compagnia della Lesina, also provided a humorous satire of the pretensions of a certain class of leisured gentlemen; from a slightly later period of the cinquecento, we cite as an example one of the later editions of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, where the author lists all the reasons not to take a coach, or ride a horse: It will happen that your Coachman who eats your bread, will, as he settles you into your coach, given the first opportunity, turn his back on you. The third [reason being] that, sharing the coach with others, to make yourself understood, you will have to shout like a madman. The fourth is that if you want to look out the window, you will have to crane your neck like a goose. The fifth is that if someone has to let out a fart, everyone in the carriage will have to smell it. But let the person to whom it might

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seem that going by coach is the modern way to make oneself respected with bows and hats off, consider that he is attending more to empty appearances than to true merit, that for the most part, people today go about on foot, and let him also know how to live in peace, that the lazy bird doesn’t get caught in the cage, leaving it to his judgment whether it’s a good thing for a young man to walk, and if he is old, that he not have to relieve himself in the ditch, and constantly be required, when he is a hurry, to wait for his horse to urinate, or to ride so fast that the horse falls and he breaks his neck.123

The very vulgarity of this passage represents an implied rebuke of the vanity and pretentiousness of the new “aristocracy” of the age, an aspect of the text which recalls the parodic deflation of the pretentiousness of the Florentine academies discussed above.124 In our study of the Companies of the Cazzuola, Lesina, Antilesina, and their successors, it becomes apparent that the theme of food and festive banqueting, whether withheld (as punishment of the tyrant for his political sins, as with the Compagnia della Cazzuola), consumed with temperance and self-restraint (as with the companies of the Lesina and Arsura), or consumed lavishly in a festive display of public munificentia and generosity (as with the company of the Antilesina), took on, in the second through the fifth decades of the sixteenth century, and even beyond, a very wide range of symbolic meanings, all of these meanings being political in nature. And, as we have seen, this symbolic, political use of the twin themes of generosity and miserliness (or their culinary equivalents, selfdeprivation and festive banqueting) continued in Florence even into the eighteenth century and beyond.125 The theme of an extreme and debilitating stinginess, as opposed to a generous and magnanimous generosity, embodied in the capitoli of these two companies, the plays and the academic orations which derived from them, came to take on a powerful role as symbol of circumstances in the real world to which their festivities alluded, the cities of Florence and Rome, and, more generally, Italy as a whole, suffering under the domination of the Medici family and their Imperial allies. The former, as we have seen, together with the surrounding countryside, suffered enormously, in the eyes of these critics, from the baneful effects of the rule of Cosimo, whose primary concern was not the well-being of his realm as a whole, but rather the preservation and extension of his own personal power at the expense of those less fortunate. With this miserable and miserly rule was contrasted the Rome of the Farnese, this latter being characterized, as we have seen, by an abundance of generosity and public-spiritedness, symbolized by the frequent use of the iconography of festive banqueting and generous abundance. We have seen how this theme, important

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also for its long afterlife in Renaissance Europe, was symbolized in the imprese of these two companies, the lesinas of the misers of the Compagnia della Lesina, and the golden cornucopias of the Compagnia della Antilesina, the latter of which, in its pointed juxtaposition of the twin themes of festive banqueting and miserly withholding, represents a continuation of the tradition of the similar festivities of the earlier Compagnia della Cazzuola, where these same two themes, festive banqueting and the withholding of food (whether self-imposed or imposed from without) also served to encode a critique of the nature and character of Medici rule in Florence.126 And finally, we have seen how these works managed to keep alive, albeit in a highly allusive and encoded way, Savonarolan themes of Christian love and social justice, long opposed and suppressed (at least in the eyes of her republican supporters) by the Medici regime, long after the actual political institutions which sustained these values had disappeared from the European stage.127

Fig. 4.25: Emblem of the Club dei Brutti (Credit: Image courtesy of the Club dei Brutti).

Notes 1. “Che nel calzare, e vestire non si debbano fare sfoggi, ma andar moderatamente secondo ‘l grado delle persone: e quando per lo troppo uso, ò per altro, i panni si stracciano, ò vi si fa qualche finestrino, ritrovato lo scatolin che direm con li suoi ordigni, si debbano risarcire, e racconciar meglio, che si può, etiam usque ad toppas inclusive, ne correr così alla prima

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a gettargli via, o mettergli tra gli stracci, e tra’ ferri vecchi, ma riserbargli a’ bisogni, che posson giornalmente accadere: iuxta illud: Quid ni iterum” (Captolo Quattordicesimo). On the formality and hierarchical nature of the Florentine Accademia Fiorentina, where an emphasis on decorum and the strict observation of rules and procedures came to predominate after the conversion of its forerunner, the Accademia degli Umidi, into an organ of the Medicean state, see Inge Werner, “The Heritage of the Umidi: Performative Poetry in the Early Accademia Fiorentina,” in The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 257–84. While Werner focuses on the accommodations members of the Umidi were willing to make to ingratiate themselves with the Medici regime, Plaisance and Zanré, cited below, while recognizing that this did indeed occur in many cases, also point out the tendency of many members of the Fiorentina to continue to express their discontent with this state of affairs through various means. The statutes of the Compagnia del Broncone have been published by Giuseppe Palagi, I Capitoli del Broncone (Florence: Le Monnier, 1872) and are also available online at: http://catalog,hathitrust.org/ Record/012391839. “Quando anche le scarpe si sdrucissero, ò si rompessero, ritrovata la Lesina con le sue carabattole si debbano o ricucire, e racconciare, usq; ad taccones semel, et pluries; ac toties quoties opus fuerit, dico applicative, purche le tomaia tengano il punto: e chi fa, e può far da se, ritiratosi in un cantone, purche non sia visto la faccia, iuxta illud, Non maculat manus, qui sua facta facit” (Capitolo Quattordicesimo). “Concedesi à ciascuno della nostra Compagnia, e massimamente à quegli che non hanno famiglia, libera facoltà di mangiar solamente una volta il giorno: e però potrà la mattina, fatte prima le sue faccende, ritirarsi in qualche piccola osteria fuor del cerchio, e farsi dar qualche cosetta per desinare, come dire una presa di trippa, la quale può servire, unico contentu, per carne, e ministra, e una mezzetta di vino de la montagna di Lecore, ò di Quaracchi, e un boccal d’acqua fresca per temperarlo, un panetto duro, che non sia ne ducal, ne tondo, perche la troppa bianchezza del pane, come Ippocrate afferma ne gli Aforismi è nociva alla santità: e muoia per l’avarizia: e se della cose predette avanzaste nulla, pigliare un poco di carta, e rinvolgerlo, e metterselo nella tasca, per un po di colezion per la sera: iuxta illud, Sobrius esto.” “una buona manza, che abbia figliato due, o tre volte, un bel pezzo di bue grasso, che è un mangiar più che dilicato, e fa miracolose lasagne, un poco di porco, e per qualche solennità, ma solamente una volta l’anno, si concede una gallina, e non più: iuxta illud: Semel in anno risit Apollo.” “Che quando alcuno della Compagnia avrà bisogno di esser tosato, per non dar fastidio al barbiere, potrà ricercare qualch’un altro, pure della Compagnia, che abbia bisogno anch’egli d’esser tosato, e l’un l’altro si tosino à luna scema, iuxta illud: Instar mulorum.” “Che non si tengano in casa cani, cagnuoli, bertucce, pappagalli, ne altri uccelli, ò animali, che non si guadagnin le spese, e apportin danno; ne si tengano colatoi, non dico di quei da ranno, ma di quei che votan la casa: iuxta illud: Ab uncinatis manibus libera nos Domine.” “Occorendo pigliar servidore, ò serva, abbiasi l’occhio à pigliargli se egli è possible, che non bean vino, e che’l servidore non abbia moglie, e dieno sempre, per non errar, buona sicurtà. La serva brutta, e senza marito, acciò che la casa provveduta per un’anno non si voti in una settimana, e aprasi bene gli occhi, perche poi, oltre al danno è vergogna: iuxta illud, Dicere non putarem.”

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8. “Che per poter mettere ad effetto quello, che comandano i due precedenti Capitoli [that is, the repair of one’s shoes and clothing] debba ciascun de’ fratelli star provisto d’uno scatolino, dentrovi un’anello da cucire, con quattro, ò sei agora, un poco di rese bianco, e un po di nero, un paio di forbicine, e qualche ritaglio, una buona Lesina fine dommaschina, due quadrelli, un po di cera, e un po di spago, per poterne a’ tuoi bisogni, e senza avere andare alle mercé di questo, e di quello, servirtene: iuxta illud: Istud est sapere.” 9. “Nostra Archiconfraternità non è miga una baia, ò una fanfaluca di farsene beffe, ma è tale che rispetto all’antiquità sua è nobil appunto tanto quanto la Toscana tutta, perche, si bene si leggono le Storie, quando la Toscana cominciò à popolarsi (che cominciò prima che parte alcuna non pure della Europa, ma della Maremma ancora) cominciò per questa via à crescere, iuxta illud, Sic fortis Hetruria crevit, e se si abbarbicò bene per tutto, come cosa naturale, meglio assai, che in nessuno altro luogo in questa Città mandò le barbe finentro al cento della terra, e le frondi fino alla sfera del fuoco, et passaria (per quel che io mi creda) più su, se il troppo caldo non le cominciava ad abbrustir le foglie; imperciocche tale e tanta fu la parsimonia, astinenza, e modestia de gli Antichi nostri, che (come intenderete) niente si poteva imaginare non che dire più parco, più astinente, e più modesto.” 10. For Medici appropriation of the myth of the Etruscan origins of Florence as a means of legitimizing their rule, see Ronald Martinez, “Etruria Triumphant in Rome: Fables of Medici Rule and Bibbiena’s Calandra,” in Renaissance Drama, New Series, Vol. 36/37, Italy in the Drama of Europe (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 69–98 and Giovanni Cipriani, Il mito etrusco nel Rinascimento fiorentino (Florence: Olschki, 1980). 11. “Diceva adunque, che non pur gl’huomini dottrinalissimi, e gl’huomini richissimi, erano venuti tali per havere studiato molto nella nostre Constituzioni, ma aggiungo ancora, che per haver fatto simile studio alcuni di quel nuon tempo furono potentissimi nel maneggio di cose, non miga di picche, ò di Balle di lana, ma di Republiche, e Stati; guardiamo guardiamo un poco per la nostra Città quanti de’ Priori, e quanti Gonfalonieri ci hebbero, che in Palagio salivano con il concorso di tutto il popolo, essendo ancora tutti bioccolosi, per non dire unti, ò tutti tinti di qualche colore, e finalmente con qualche segno di arte, e esercizio più o men nobile, secondo la qualità delle persone, e la condizione de’ tempi, non tralignando punto de’ que’ loro antichi progenitori Romani, de’ quali (se ben me ne ricordo) uno fu detto Luccio Scilinguato, che l’andarono il Senato e popolo Romano à salutare Dittatore, trovandolo nel Campo tutto polvoroso à lavorar co’ buoi, lo studio adunque de’ nostri prelibati Capitoli causava queste grandezze in que’ popoli.” In a later edition of the capitoli of the company, the case in which the lesinas of the company are kept is carefully described as having on its cover and sides all the prominent heroes of Republican Rome. 12. A very useful introduction to these writers is Nino Borsellino, ed., Gli anticlassicisti del Cinquecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1982). 13. John Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 473–78. 14. For the metaphor of the state as a kind of family, see Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary, With a New English Translation by Sarah Pomeroy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 15. “Primieramente adunque, per procedere con ordine trateremo dell’ origine, cagione, fondamento, e vero titolo, come di cose principalissime, di poi sussequentemente dell’altre, secondo, che habbiamo trovato. Onde, per Introduzione della material è da notare, che

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tutte le buone Compagnie sono stato ordinate, per ovviare alli difetti mondani, e di quel rittar le persone col correggere i vizii, e introdur buon costumi, e lodevoli discipline. … E di qui ebbe origine, e principio la Compagnia nostra, aquale fu fondata in su la S. masserizia. E però anticamente in tutte le Repub. e Communità, erano ordinati, per un certo numero alcuni huomini masseriziosi, e risparmievoli, a’ quali era data l’autorità di correggere tali errori, e si chiamavan regolatori, perche non attendevano ad altro, che à regolare simili disordini, acciò le cose regolate, e ordinato avessero a permanere, e perseverare. Era ancora ordinato un Magistrato, il quale si domandava un magistrato de’ Massai, e questo era il vero titolo della Compagnia, cioè la Compagnia de’ Massai.” “Novizii: O Maestro, questa ci par veramente cosa miracolosa, e degna di suprema lode, e molto ce ne gode l’animo, per esser sì ben fondata: ma e’ ci nasce un dubbio, il quale vorremo ci dichiaraste, avanti procediate più oltre, e questo è: che nella Compagnia nostra ci sono alcuni chiamati miseri, avari, e simili nomi. Vorremmo adunque sapere, per essere informati del tutto, se questi tali ci son dentro canonicamente, ò nò, e come voi la’ntendete.” “Maestro: Assai certamente mi piace il vostro dubitare, perche in ciò mostrate sottilità d’ingegno. Dico adunque, che tutta la Compagnia si divide in due membri principali, imperochè alcuni son veri Massai, e buon fratelli, e degni d’ogni laude, conciosiache della loro masserizia appai sempre buon frutto, e son quelli, per un breve esempio, e discorso, che hanno fatti, e fanno tanti spedali, monasteri, e altri luoghi pii, e quelli sufficientemente dotati hanno fabricate tante bellissime ragioni, anzi Chiese, fondate tante Cappelle, con bellissimi ornamenti, e ricche dotazioni, monacate, e maritate tante povere figliuole, fatti tanti lasci ad pias causas, e tante altre opere pie, che sarebbe impossibile il raccontarle. … Ma e’ c’è bene un’altra razzina, ed è il secondo membro principale della sorte che voi nel quisito nominaste, che faria bene, che se ne spegnesse il seme, etiam che facciano professione della Compagnia nostra, perche la maggior parte, anzi la masserizia, ò per dire meglio la miserizia loro non è di alcuna utiilità, ne à loro, ne ad altrui, anzi è dannosa, e reca biasimo ssimo alla Compagnia, come intenderete. … Ultimamente, per non essere in ciò troppo prolisso, è quella pessima sorte di tutti gli altri, dico di quegli Avaroni, Luponi, e miseracci, che scannerebbono il Padre, e la Madre, e sto per dir peggio, se potessero solo per accumulare per fas, et nefas, con ogni cattivo contratto: e sono tanto crudeli, e strani, che quello, che hanno non lo godono ne eglino, ne altri: anzi stentan, come cagnacci, che essi sono: Et quod plus est, perche non possono portare nell’altro Mondo i loro danari, e’ gli sotterra no, murano, ò gli nascondono in luogo, che’l Diavol non gli ritroverrebbe. Non si curando perder l’anima, e’l corpo, ne d’andare all’Inferno tra quelle botte, e altri animalacci, con tanti stenti, e con tanti guai, che malagevolmente può dirsi. Che dite adesso? Siete voi ancora chiari di questo dubbio?” “Dico, che furono due Compagnie quasi simili, questa nostra della LESINA, già situta tra ferravecchi e tra Rigattieri, infra suos confines, e la venerabile Compagnia del MANTELLACCIO, situata presso alle stinche, ò se altri haveva più veri, e certi confini.” “Ma [la Compagnia del Mantellaccio] non ha che fare cosa del Mondo con la LESINA nostra di antica mano Nobilissima, Eccellentissima, & Osservandissima, perchè quantunque in parte osservassino li nostri Capitoli, lo facevano sforzatamente anzi che nò, et si et inquantum non potevano far altro, havendo fatto il debito loro nella Compagnia di SANGODENZO, per la quale l’huomo trapassava al MANTELLACCIO, etiam che non

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volesse havendo per parapetto da l’un de lati le Stinche, dall’altro il Palagio del Bargello … ma noi LESINANTI non isforzatamente, ma della buona voglia abbracciamo la virtù insegnataci da Capitoli nostri.” The Maestro de’ Discepoli even goes so far as to parody contemporary methods of discursive reasoning, protesting that he will not (and indeed, cannot) adopt such means to persuade his listeners: “Parmi di vedere, fratelli, che i vostri ceffi à queste gran parole, tutti mirabili si siano in me rivolti, quasi che io habbia detto un gran Passerotto, e parmi udire bisbigliare, chi dal canto dei Platonici, chi dalla banda dei Peripatetici, chi di sopra da gli Stoici, chi di sotto da gl’Epicurei intorno alla felicità: mà haime? che io non sono ne Filosofo, nè Profeta, se bene io hò la parte mia del naturale, e però non hò quel gran pezzo di conoscimento, che basti à toccare il fondo della felicità, che non habbiamo in questa Compagnia, nè anche hò tanta Logica, che scoccandovi adosso una copia d’entimemi, io vi cacci carote, e basti à farvi vedere il bianco per il nero, et anco farvi credere, che l’Asino sia una Bestia, ò per meglio dire, l’Huomo un Asino, e però se io vi dico che l’operare secondo li nostri buonissimi Capitoli è la vera regola della perfetta Felicità” (Ragionamento del Maestro Buona Limosina a Suoi Discepoli nell’Introdurre gli Infrascritti nella Compagnia della Lesina). Plaisance notes that the huge audience in attendance for the first formal lecture of the Accademia Fiorentina was completely unable to penetrate the highly philosophical and abstract language in which the oration was couched (Michel Plaisance, L’Accademia e il suo principe: cultura e politica a Firenze al tempo di Cosimo I e di Francesco de’ Medici [Vecchiarelli, 2004]). It also seems possible that Lorenzo’s Compagnia del Mantellaccio (“Brotherhood of the Ragged Cloak”), in which the drunken members of the company engage in a vigorous competition for a ragged cloak, succeeding only in tearing it further, was intended as a satirical travesty of the religious strictures of the Order of the Mantellate, the third Order of Servites, whose vows of poverty and service to the poor gained them much sympathy among the poor of Florence in the years following the execution of Savonarola. As such, such satirical activities would parallel those of the various other brigate, also sponsored by the Medici, which took as their mission the public derision of the followers of the Friar in the final years of the quattrocento. A glimpse of life inside the Compagnia del San Godenzo is provided by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Capitolo dei beoni. Some scholars have attributed the canzone del Mantellaccio to Lorenzo also. This pamphlet is reproduced in La Compagnia del Mantellaccio: componimento del secolo XV citato dagli accademici della Crusca: riproduzione a facsimile della prima stampa con il catologo dell’edizioni conosciute (Florence: A. Cecchi, 1861). Najemy, cited above and Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). “DELLI SCAPIGLIATI, perche questa insaziabile Setta, non può patire di vedere uno che badi ai fatti suoi, sempre studiando in qualche trovato per fatti uscire, ma se pure in essi per avventura alcuna volta c’intoppiamo, ne sfuggirli per verso alcuno possiamo … mentre che con essi staremo, imaginiamoci pure d’essere con i nemici più capitali della nostra Borsa.” These macinati, who meddle in others’ business, and, in their extravagant devotion to a conspicuous wasting of money in idle pursuits, represent a deliberate affront to Florentine traditions of mercantile thrift and cautiousness, are also a pointed Medicean reference, in this case, to the Compagnia della Macina, a group of buontemponi affiliated with the

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Medici, which had its seat near the Medici palace in the via Larga. There were numerous such companies of compagnacci, composed primarily of young men devoted to a conspicuous pursuit of pleasure, and with varying political loyalties, which appeared in Florence in the late quattrocento. Some of these brigate as just noted, were affiliated with the Medici and used by the family to counteract the influence of Savonarola, using a combination of public ridicule and, when necessary, violence in an effort to rally popular discontent with the strict policies of the Friar. For more on the compagnacci, see Najemy, A History of Florence, 397–99, 444, 449, Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 515–21 and Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 91, 101–03. For the Compagnia della Macina (Millstone), see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 403–16. To recall two examples of this practice from Chapter 2, Trexler and Lewis cite an interesting example of this phenomenon in their description of the funeral exequies for Alessandro de’ Medici, in which Medici agents, surrounded by Imperial troops, stood amidst the populace to observe who expressed feelings of grief, and who did not (Richard Trexler and Emily Lewis, “Two Captains and Three Kings: New Light on the Medici Chapel,” in Michelangelo, Selected Scholarship in English, ed. William E. Wallace [Hamden, CT: Garland, 1995], v. 3, 149–50). Michelangelo, in a letter to his father of October–November 1512, vividly describes the “chilling effect” this had on the free exchange of ideas in the Florence of the restored Medici regime: “Regarding the Medici, I have never spoken anything against them, except generally as everyone has spoken, as in the case of Prato; which, if the stones had heard about it, they would have spoken” (Barocchi, 1965, vol. 1, 139). Michelangelo himself, as a known sympathizer with the republican cause, suffered from the “attentions” of this group of individuals, which he vividly describes in various letters from Rome to his friends and family in Florence. We cite several of these letters in Chapter 2. For Medici use of torture, see Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (New York: Morrow, 1975) and Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). “Che in tutte le nostre azzioni, e in tutti i nostri maneggi dobbiamo esser prudenti, e cauti, e guardar molto bene, e pensare al fine: e sopratutto ingegnarci d’aver da noi, per non avere ad andare alle mercè d’altri, e ingegnarci d’imparar sempre alle spese altrui, iuxta illud: Foelix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum.” The statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina are available online at the Warburg’s digital collection of works on early modern academies: http://catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/search~S12/f?SEARCH=warburg+digital+ collection+academies. It is amusing to note the confusion on the part of modern bibliographers over just how to classify the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina, some viewing them as a typical production of Renaissance Italian humour à la Bernesque, others as a work of social history, useful as a gastronomic compendium of the eating habits of Renaissance Florentines. As one bibliographer notes: “The work is placed in the class of gastronomic books as there are several chapters pertaining to food and drink e. g. how to whet the appetite, sorts of meat, of not holding banquets, not putting water into the wine, about soup and its virtues etc.” Another lists the book under the category of “History: island of Hvar, Lesina, Croatia, Kitchen Cooking Satire,” Lesina being a city on the Croatian island of Hvar.

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29. “Quante hore sono, tante volte si deve mangiare, perche regnando ogn’ hora un nuovo pianeta, come à forestiero bisogna sempre fargli carezze, e farli trovar sempre la mensa apparecchiata: Iuxta illud: Sempre oportet esse paratum.” 30. “Biasima [la Compagnia della Lesina) lo sfogio di vestiti, e loda il rippezzar delle scarpe per non farli nuovi negatur: Iuxta illud: Omnia nuova placent.” 31. “Insegna, che si faccia passaggio dell’ingiurie, e degli urtoni, mentitur: Iuxta illud: Vim vi repellere licet.” 32. “S’ordina, che ciascuno sia pronto à far servigio, e securtà à tutte le persone, etiam sine spe restitutionis, Quia melius est dare, quam recipere.” 33. “Loda lo star senza servitori, e andar a piedi a chi può andare a cavallo, a seculo non auditum: Iuxta illud: Utendum est donis fortunae.” 34. “Dice [the Compagnia della Lesina] che l’ammalato si trattenga sei giorni à chiamar il medico, per veder dove riesce l’infermità, e per sparagnar la spesa de’ medicamenti, questa setta dev’esser punita pena homicidii, perche fa contra la legge medicinale: Iuxta illud: Principiis obsta, sero medicina paratur.” 35. “Biasima il tener pappagallo, simie, ed altri animali di diletto, negatur: Iuxta illud: Omne delectibile est appetibile.” 36. Interestingly, the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina would seem to have their origin in the De avaritia of Poggio Bracciolini, a treatise composed around 1430. In his eloquent condemnation of avarice as a vice destructive of the common good, Bracciolini describes the avaricious man in terms which recall those of the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina: “Also, he [the avaricious man] is tormented by hunger for food and drink that he rarely satisfies, except with cheap and plain fare. For how will such a wretch procure fancier or more expensive dishes? There once was a Florentine, a miserly nobleman, who, it is told, was served two leeks for supper at one time. Although he was rich, he ordered that one be taken away to be served the next day, scolding his steward as a spendthrift. … Another, when he was sick and his doctor asked him what foods he ate, answered veal and beef. Reproved because he did not eat chicken, he answered that it did not agree either with his character or his illness because it would cost more” (Poggio Bracciolini, “On Avarice, trans. Benjamin G. Kohl,” in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt [Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978], 254). Here, as in the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, we observe the same obsessive and comic preoccupation with food as a sign of a miserly character. We discuss this treatise below. 37. Najemy, A History of Florence, 478. 38. Najemy, A History of Florence, 477–78, noting the increasing poverty in mid-sixteenth-century Tuscany as a result of Cosimo’s economic policies, intended to support his regime at the expense of the economic development of the region as a whole. Najemy cites in particular Cosimo’s exploitation of the Foundling Hospital (the Innocenti) through its conversion into a bank accepting interest-bearing deposits, which had to be repaid before it could feed the children ( John Najemy, A History of Renaissance Florence 1200–1575 [West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2008], Anonymous, Cronaca fiorentina 1537–1555 [Florence: Olschki, 2000]). It is hard to reconcile the admiration expressed for Cosimo by some modern historians (where he is sometimes praised for his institution of an efficient proto-modern bureaucracy and the creation of a secure regional state in Tuscany) with the means used to create this

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state as described in the Marucelli chronicle. Besides the strettezze already described, one can cite numerous examples of more severe measures taken by Cosimo to intimidate the opposition both within and without the city. The Marucelli chronicler cites, for example, a particularly gruesome instance of this policy of intimidation where the heads of executed opponents of Cosimo were placed on pikes in the prominent squares of the city. Unless the events recounted by the author of the Chronicle are entirely fictitious, or one sincerely believes that the nature of the means taken to secure a given political end are entirely irrelevant in judging the ultimate value of this end, it is hard, at least for this writer, to see how such admiration can be sustained. For an excellent and concise summary of Cosimo’s consolidation of power in Florence and the establishment of a Tuscan state, see Gene Brucker, Florence: The Golden Age, 1138–1737 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 184–89. 39. “Addì primo d’aprile valse il grano lo staio del grano lire 7.13.4, cosa veramente grande che i poveri ne morivano a Santa Maria Nuova per tutto il mese di marzo, che così a tanti d’aprile 604 corpi et sparatone, trovorno molti che piene le budella seccovi dentro l’erba che havevano mangiato et venendo un tanto esterminio alli orecchi di sua Eccellentia, face quor di sasso et non fece opera per questa nessuna di carità, anzi si scoperse il primo d’aprile 1555 un ssimo accatto a tutta la città de’ che mai fussi stato udito et non solo questo levò tutti e salari de’ magistrati et così agli spedali pose accatto, talché tutta la città era sottosopra et disperata et non si sentiva altro che bestemmiare Dio et maladire. Et quello, già conosciuto la sua buona fortuna, non curava né strepiti né romori alcuno, et fu in detto mese grandissimi venti et pioggia quasi che ogn’uno pensava essere la fine del mondo” (Cronaca fiorentina, ed. Enrico Coppi [Florence: Olschki, 2000], 177–78). 40. “Appresso a questo dì, era una grandissima penuria et fame, et moriva di molti poveri di fame. Niente di meno Cosimo non attendeva salvo che all’impresa di Siena, anzi usava rispondere lui et la donna sua, quando sentiva questi clamori e morti di fame che, chi non poteva mangiar due volte il giorno, mangiassi una et chi non poteva mangiare un pane ne mangiassi un mezzo, talché non si parlava per la sua rigidità, basta che valse lo staio del grano lire 6.10, lo staio delle vecce lo staio lire 4, lo staio delle cecerchie lire 5, le fave lire 4.15, il vino lire 7 il barile, l’olio lire 14 il barile; carne non si trovava per denari, un huovo un soldo l’uno et tutto nasceva per la maleditione di detta guerra et questo fu fino addì 13 gennaio 1554” (Cronaca 172). 41. The use of the image of plague and privation as a symbol of the state of Florence and its surroundings under the harsh rule of Cosimo de’ Medici, more preoccupied, in the eyes of his critics, with his own power and prestige than the welfare of his countrymen, may help to explain the two short works which, from the earliest editions, conclude the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina, and which, at first glance, seem to have little to do with what precedes them. The first is a short mock-epic, the Rabbia di Macone, which takes as its theme an episode from Luigi Pulci’s Morgante. The second urges its readers to take every precaution possible to avoid the plague by being a careful steward of their resources (“Polvere assai di gran, che bianca sia, / Oglio commune, et aceto rosato, / E pelle, e polpa di gallo castrato”). It seems fair to speculate that the first poem might be a satirical allusion to Cosimo’s grand plans for Tuscany under his control, an undertaking which, in the view of the Marucelli chronicler, leads only to the extreme suffering and privations evoked in the second poem with which the volume concludes, the only defence against which, for the average citizen,

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is an extreme parsimoniousness akin to that practiced by the members of the Compagnia della Lesina. The Rabbia also contains a dramatic battle between the forces of Heaven, led by Mercury, who brandishes his staff as a weapon (“E cominciò con loro una gran zuffa, / Con quella verga avvolta di serpente”) against the arrogant people of his day (“voi ben nata, e mal vissuta gente”), an allusion, we would suggest, to the Medici and their supporters, who try to raise themselves to Heaven. This recalls the mock-heroic poem of Andrea del Sarto cited above. Some scholars attribute these poems to Piero Strozzi (“lo Sciarra” = “zuffa,” that is, “skirmish”), Grand Marshal of France and leader of the military forces of the republicans against the Medici and the Empire in the middle years of the cinquecento. 42. The humanist treatises of advice for princes from the quattrocento also make clear that generosity and its counterpart, avarice, were not merely personal virtues or vices, but were public qualities, the former essential to the functioning of a well ordered state, the latter profoundly destructive of it, and so were called by the writers of these treatises virtù sociali. The Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano gives an eloquent description of the importance, for purely pragmatic reasons, of the quality of generosity in the ruler, bringing him renown, and prosperity and happiness over the realm he rules: “And it is especially necessary to take care to be loved by those to whom you have entrusted your body and your household affairs. If you do this, you will live more securely, and this love, once it has been established among your domestic servants, becoming more widely diffused, will be spread out, not only among the peoples subject to you, but also among foreign nations.” Here, as in the case of the prudent management of resources on the part of the buon massai of the Compagnia della Lesina described above, we see that it is actually to the ruler’s advantage to be generous, since this generates an enormous amount of good will in his regard among his subjects, thus making his rule more secure, and leading to its long continuance, an idea perhaps best expressed in the classical adage “Iustitia fundamentum regni.” We observe the same pointed contrast between generosity and avarice in the writings of another humanist of the quattrocento, Poggio Bracciolini: “For I firmly believe that avarice and lust are, as it were, the seat and foundation of all evils, and I hold that the following saying of M. Porcius Cato is very true: ‘The cities are suffering from avarice and luxury, which have been the destruction of every great empire’. … But the other vice [avarice] is the enemy of nature; it cannot be ruled by reason, nor is this kind of evil controllable … avarice is a despicable crime, harming everyone, and aimed at the subjugation of all mortals. … It is a horrible, dreadful monster born to ruin people, to destroy fellowship among men” (Citations from Poggio are from Kohl and Witt, eds. and trans., The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society [Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978]; citations from Pontano are from Giovanni Pontano, I libri delle virtù sociali, ed. Francesco Tateo [Rome: Bulzoni, 1999, trans. mine]). 43. Here one might object that Cosimo did not, in fact, fail, citing the consolidation of oneman rule during his regime, and the long continuance of the Medici as at least titular rulers of the Florentine state. In our view, this is simply confirmation of what Poggio and the classical writers on tyranny have always asserted: that, to preserve such a state, it is necessary to use extraordinary means, several examples of which we have given in this chapter. And Cosimo, as the historical record clearly indicates, was not only capable of, but also more than willing to use such means.

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44. To scholars who might object to our calling the Medici rulers of Florence “tyrants” as either anachronistic or exaggerated, we can only reply that many intellectuals and historians of the period with which we are concerned used precisely this term to characterize their rule, and used it in a way which corresponds very closely to both our modern understanding of its meaning and the classical one as well. We would also reply that they used it, for the most part, not merely as a rhetorical exaggeration designed to express their personal distaste for aspects of Medici rule (although, because of the inherently negative connotations of the term, such a use was inevitable, just as it is today), but to refer to actual historical circumstances prevailing at the time of their writing, which, in our view, when examined objectively, correspond precisely to both the classical and more modern uses of the term to denote an oppressive form of rule, characterized by the use of violence and other forms of coercion to maintain an individual or small group of individuals in power, without consideration of the good of the state as a whole, or the consent of the governed to the form and institutions of the ruling regime. In short, both history and usage fully justify our use of the term to describe the nature and effects of Medici rule in Florence, from the “veiled tyranny” of Cosimo il Vecchio, where his control over state institutions was veiled by an apparent deference to the norms and traditions of Florence’s oligarchic past, to the more overtly repressive form of this type of rule which characterized the regimes of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Lorenzo di Piero, Alessandro and Cosimo. For a very interesting discussion of “veiled tyranny,” from the Middle ages to Italy today, see the article of Viroli cited below. 45. That Aristotelian discussions of tyranny, as opposed to just government, continued into the Middle Ages, is made clear by Julius Kirshner’s review of Denis Fachard’s, “Biagio Buonaccorsi: Sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre,” The Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 129–31, and Maurizio Viroli, “Can Italy Put Berlusconi Behind It?”, The New York Times, November 11, 2011, op-ed page A35, the latter especially interesting for Viroli’s discussion of “veiled tyranny,” an expression dating from the Middle Ages indicating a form of control of the state by a single individual through indirect means, such as manipulation of the political and judicial apparatus of the state. For a concise summary of classical, medieval and Renaissance thought on tyranny, see Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, 198–204. On veiled tyranny, see also Viroli’s, The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi’s Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) and, for a selection of medieval treatises which demonstrate a reliance on Roman republican thought, see Cary Nederman and Kate Langdon-Forhan, eds., Medieval Political Theory—A Reader: The Quest for the Body Politic, 1100–1400 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 46. We discuss below the dating of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina. 47. For Carpi, see Alberto III e Rodolfo Pio da Carpi: collezionisti e mecenati, ed. Manuela Rossi (Comune di Carpi: Museo Civico, 2004). 48. For the social policies of Paul, focused on punishing the arrogance and prepotenza of the noble classes of Rome and defending those subject to these, particularly the poor, see the bibliography in the English translation of Annibal Caro’s comedy Gli straccioni, cited below. 49. Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 50. Ulisse Aldrovandi, Delle Statue antiche che per tutta Roma si veggono (Venice: Ziletti, 1556). For da Carpi as patron of the arts, see Alberto III e Rodolfo Pio da Carpi, cited above.

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51. As the author of the article on the Farnesina on the website of the Accademia dei Lincei notes: “The Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, named ‘magnifico’ by his contemporaries, acquired the villa, which had been completed in 1509 by Baldassarre Peruzzi, a Sienese architect of great renown. The villa, a wonderful example of Renaissance art, was decorated by such famous painters as Raffaello, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (called Sodoma), Giulio Romano and Peruzzi himself, and it was furnished with such magnificence that it aroused general admiration.” One contemporary notes that after one feast, held in a building adjacent to the villa on the banks of the Tiber, one of the guests, on remarking on the magnificence of the location, was amazed to see, the host proudly letting fall the curtains with which the room was festooned, that he was actually sitting in the palace’s stables. Another contemporary account reports that a regular feature of the festive gatherings of the Roman banker was the throwing of the golden cups and saucers into the Tiber, where they were cleverly retrieved from nets spread under the water for this purpose. The author of the Wikipedia article continues “In the rooms of the Villa high prelates, noblemen, poets, men of letters and artists used to meet; comedies were performed there and sumptuous banquets were held. The most famous of these were the banquet of April 30, 1518 and the one in honour of St. Augustine’s day in 1519. The first banquet, with a magnificent decor of tapestries and carpets, was laid out in the stables, which at that time were placed near the Tiber and were later demolished when a high Tiber wall was built. The second banquet, on the occasion of the wedding of Agostino and Francesca Ordeasca, which was blessed by Pope Leo X, was held in a setting of pomp and splendour, in the great hall of the villa, and in the presence of the Pope himself, twelve Cardinals and many guests. After Agostino Chigi’s death, the villa was bought by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (from whom the Villa takes its name). It passed to the Bourbon family in 1714” (http://www.lincei.it). 52. Historians have noted that the rule of the Farnese in Rome was characterized by just this sort of public-spiritedness and generosity, evidenced in their draining and construction of new roads and splendid palaces (for example, the formal palace of the family mentioned above, and the palace near the Campo dei Fiori known today as the Cancelleria, the unofficial residence of the Pope’s grandson, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese) and, especially, a concern for the plight of the poor and disenfranchised of the city, together with a reform of the laws of the city intended to curb the arrogance and prepotenza of the upper classes of Rome. For more on this aspect of their rule, see the editors’ introduction to their translation of Caro’s Gli straccioni, cited below. 53. For an excellent study of the iconography of the Medici family, see Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 54. Raymond Waddington, “The Bisexual Portrait of Francisco I: Fontainebleau, Castiglione, and the Tone of Courtly Mythology,” in Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit, ed. Jean Brink, Maryanne Horowitz, and Allison Coudert (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 99–132. 55. Richard Stemp, The Secret Language of the Renaissance: Decoding the Hidden Symbolism of Italian Art (London: Duncan Baird, 2006). 56. Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican (New York: HarperOne, 2008).

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57. The bust of Caracalla was very popular and widely-known in the Renaissance, appearing in many of the most prestigious private collections. For its history in the Renaissance, see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006) 172–73. 58. Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker: The Patronage of Bindo Altoviti, ed. Alan Chong, Donatella Pegazzano, and Dimitrios Zikos (Boston, MA: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2003). 59. John Paleotti, “Michelangelo’s Masks,” The Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 423–40. 60. Another attribute of the classical figure of Saturn was his sterility, for, having castrated Kronos, he was himself castrated by Zeus. He was also an exile. This latter attribute accounts for the fact that, in medieval and Renaissance prints, he is often depicted as a wandering beggar (Fig. 4.16). 61. Prof. Jo Ann Cavallo, in a private communication. 62. For Altoviti’s crucial financial support of the anti-Medicean republican exiles, see Chong, 237–63 and Najemy, A History of Renaissance Florence, 483. 63. Najemy, A History of Renaissance Florence, 483. 64. An important literary genre in Renaissance Italy were the laments of cities, usually entitled “Lamento di,” followed by the name of the city. These laments were often published in the form of small pamphlets, inexpensively printed, and distributed by traveling peddlars in the larger cities and the surrounding countryside. Called chapbooks in English and fogli volanti in Italian, they attest to the great interest among the working and middle classes of Renaissance Italy in contemporary historical events. As examples from the cinquecento, we might cite the lamenti of Florence, Siena, Volterra, and others. This genre also included laments of famous individuals, such as Alessandro and Giuliano de’ Medici and Piero Strozzi. the latter interesting in its simultaneous quasi-Christian expression of regret for having followed Mars as a career together with a simultaneous lament for having failed to achieve his military goal of freeing Italy from Medicean and Imperial domination. In Chapter 1, we discussed the role these small pamphlets played in disseminating the popular view of Cesare Borgia as a monster and a tyrant, thus calling into question the traditional view of Machiavelli’s use of the Duke as a supposed exemplum worthy of imitation by the Renaissance prince. Such pamphlets have sometimes been overlooked by historians as a valuable source of information on the views of the non-elites of Renaissance Italy, and, especially those which presented the Medici or the Emperor in a negative light, would have played an important role in legitimizing opposition to their policies among the popular classes during the period. In particular, besides the Capitoli of the two companies we have been discussing here, which, as we have suggested, managed to convey the authors’ dissatisfaction with Medici and Imperial rule in the form of an allusive satire, we might cite the numerous mock-epics which also circulated in this format, which also, in some cases, may have been intended as a veiled critique of the dynastic ambitions of the Medici family and their Imperial patrons. Domenico Zanré cites as an example of this genre Girolamo (“il Gobbo”) Amelonghi’s La gigantea (Domenico Zanré, Cultural Nonconformity in Early Modern Florence [Aldershot, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004]). Zanré argues that this work is not only an allusive critique of Amelonghi’s enemies in the Accademia Fiorentina (the “Aramei”), but that it also contains veiled allusions to the political circumstances

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of his time, although he does not specify in great detail what these references might be. Such a consideration might shed further light on the poem which concludes the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina, the “Rabbia di Macone,” usually attributed to Piero Strozzi, Grand Marshal of France and the primary military opponent of Medici and Imperial rule in central and northern Italy. This poem, as we have noted, is extremely obscure, and its connection with the treatise it follows is not at all clear. As an examination of surviving copies of the fogli volanti attests, there were examples of more direct criticism of Medici rule which also found expression in this format, an example of which might be the pamphlets against Cesare Borgia and his father cited above. We discuss these pamphlets further below. For the laments of cities, see Lamenti storici dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI, raccolti e ordinati a cura di Antonio Medin e Ludovico Frati (Bologna: Romagnoli-Dall’Acqua, 1887–1884), available online at http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007969296. It is strange that so few scholars have drawn attention to this aspect of the portrait. In our view, it is the key to the proper interpretation of the work. The Scruffy Scoundrels: (Gli Straccioni), ed. Massimo Ciavolella and Donald Beecher (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006). Renato Lefevre, “Il testamento di Margarita d’Austria, duchessa di Parma e Piacenza,” Palatino 12 (1968) 240–50, 246, ibid., “Madama Margarita d’Austria” (1522–1586): Vita di una grande dama del Cinquecento (Rome: Newton Compton, 1986), 103–06, cited in Marina Belozerskaya, Medusa’s Gaze: The Extraordinary Journey of the Tazza Farnese (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 163. For an excellent study of the use by the Medici of works of art to enhance the prestige and influence of the family in Renaissance Europe, see the article of Bullard, cited in the Preface. For the Tazza, see, besides Belozerskaya, N. Dacos, A. Giuliano, and U. Pannuti, Il Tesoro di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence: Sansoni, 1973–1974), Silvio Strano, La “Tazza Farnese:” nuova analisi egittologico-semiotica (Rome: Edizioni Espera, 2016) and Eugenio La Rocca, L’Età d’oro di Cleopatra: indagine sulla Tazza Farnese (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1984). Najemy notes that Cosimo’s use of foreign banks to finance his territorial ambitions served as a means to avoid potential conflict with those ottimati who still harbored sympathies for Florence’s traditional alliance with France, and that such loans allowed him to bypass Florence’s traditional checks and balances on princely adventurism: “These were private loans contracted by Cosimo, sometimes jointly with his wife Eleonora, and the combination of their private status and foreign origin left Cosimo free to use the funds as he wished (subject if course to the approval of the kings of Spain) without having to consult Florentine councils or creditors. Yet at least a third of this indebtedness was repaid from direct and indirect taxes collected from the Florentine treasury. Most Florentines may have been unaware of the siphoning off of public funds to pay for their duke’s territorial ambitions, his court, and even his private investments.” Najemy goes on to describe what today we would call a massive diversion of public funds amounting to embezzlement on a colossal scale in support of the personal finances of the Medici family: “Indeed, he ran something of a family business from the ducal palace, regularly diverting public funds to personal investments in an artful blurring of the boundary between state finances and private and family interests.” Najemy concludes by noting that most of the increase in Cosimo’s personal wealth

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occurred during the Siennese war, his personal fortune being thus built upon the sufferings inflicted there (Najemy, A History of Renaissance Florence, 474–75). 71. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this is the braggart soldier of Aretino’s Marescalco, who speaks a strange mixture of Spanish and Italian. In a fascinating article, an Italian scholar notes that in Siena also, where the faction opposed to the Medici had come to power over the faction in favor of the Medici and Imperial rule, the techniques of covert criticism were also well-known. This scholar describes what could have been an extremely humorous (or perhaps embarrassing) situation in which the Emperor, arriving in the palazzo della podestà upon the occasion of his triumphal entry into the city in 1536, was greeted by the sight of murals which, albeit in a highly allusive way (since they relied on rather obscure references to classical history), made it very clear that the city, while nominally under the control of the Emperor as his fief, still adhered to the traditions of its republican and communal past. As the author notes, Alessandro Piccolomini, himself a member of a distinguished Siennese family and an important intellectual figure in Renaissance Italy, wrote two plays which, also in an allusive way, manage to express his personal displeasure with this state of affairs: the first, L’amor costante. begins in medias res with an extremely humorous contretemps between a Spanish visitor to the city and his interlocutor, who reminds the Spaniard, subtly but in no uncertain terms, that this is indeed an Italian city, where the language of Italian is spoken, that it would be advisable for him to recognize this fact, and, incidentally, would he please get off the stage so that the play can begin. This extremely humorous scene recalls both the Straccioni of Caro and the Nozze dell’Antilesina discussed above, where we also observe an array of Spanish characters who cling stubbornly to their sense of entitlement, and whose first response to any situation is an immediate resort to violence, but who end up making fools of themselves in their absurdly-inflated sense of self-importance and, in their obstinate persistence in speaking their own language in a foreign country, paradoxically end up isolating themselves completely from what is going on around them, and, being thus completely unable to understand what is happening around them, end up, for all their bragadoccio, looking like fools. The use of Pisa (another conquered city, one might note) as a stand-in for Siena, in its state of de facto subjugation to the forces of the Empire and its Medici vassals also recalls the use of the German tribes in Rucellai’s Rosmunda or Carthage in Trissino’s Sofonisba as stand-ins for Italy in those plays, suggesting that this familiar Plautine device, in which the narrator explains the location of the action to the spectators or to another character, served, in many Renaissance comedies not as a mere stage device, but rather as a clue to the contemporary political references of the play. We might also note in Piccolomini’s play yet another iteration of the theme of the attempted thwarting and final happy resolution of the marriage of two young lovers, here also, we would suggest, as in the Mandragola and the Straccioni, a symbol of the final frustration of the usurper’s schemes and the return of the city, in the form of a young woman, to her rightful possessor, the young and viral suitor, symbol of a reinvigorated and enterprising citizenry, undaunted by the tyrant’s attempts on her freedom. 72. One of the ironies of this interpretation, assuming it is correct, is that Margaretta was actually, by some accounts, quite happy with Alessandro, and found her Farnese consort thoroughly unpleasing.

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73. For the author’s strong opposition to the idea of any staging of the play in the years after it was written, or to lending out, even to his closest friends, manuscript copies of the work, see the editors’ introduction to the play. This is further evidence of the extremely controversial nature of the play. 74. As another example of the use of the motif of Spain as a veiled allusion to its domination of Italian political life in the cinquecento, we might also cite the play which concludes the capitoli of the Compagnia della Antilesina, Le nozze d’Antilesina, cited above. The play takes as its theme the marriage of a young woman, signora Antilesina, to messer Spendingrosso, the former of whom brings with her a dowery which includes entire continents and the island of Cyprus. Messer Spendingrosso’s father has the name, significantly, Confalone, a reference to the highest elected official of republican Florence, the gonfalone. The character who opposes the marriage and tries to secure Madonna Antilesina for himself, Cortamonte, is Spanish, and, just as the other braggart soldiers of Italian Renaissance drama, insists on speaking Spanish to Gustabocconi, a cook who is preparing the lavish banquet planned to celebrate the nuptials. The exchange between these two characters takes the form of a highly comic duel of verbal one-upmanship, in which each boasts of his superior prowess in his chosen profession, and which threatens to erupt at any moment into a true “battle of the swords and saucepans.” 75. Gli Straccioni x, xxvi. 76. “Non avete voi diligentemente essaminato quel che importino quegli scrittarini e quelle lettere, che alcuna volta s’attaccano e si leggono per le mure? Niente altro significano, se non che il popolo con voce muta grida contra quei che governano. Laonde se voi sarete di quella prudenzia che debbono esser quelli, gli quali seggono ne’ publici luoghi, non cercherete di rimoverli dal governo né di inasprirli, anzi, se essi cercassero di alienarsi, come verisimilmente per lo mancamento de’ guadagni far doveranno, dovete con ogni umano officio cercare di ritenerli” (Giovanni Guidiccioni, Orazione ai nobili di Lucca, ed. Carlo Dionisotti [Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1945], 111). 77. “Ma chi ha resa nella nostra republica poco prezzata questa generazione d’uomini literati? L’avarizia. Chi la renderà ogni dí meno? la medesima. Chi sgomenterà e rivocherà gli altri dalla via delli studi? L’avarizia. Chi manderà finalmente in exilio l’uso delle discipline? L’avarizia. Niuno meglio di voi conosce esser quasi notato d’infamia quel nobile, il quale, per seguitar gli studi, non vuole applicarsi alla mercatanzia. I ricchi solamente sono in eccellenza d’onore, e l’onore è nutrimento delle arti; ma, come dalla diligenzia e dalla fortuna nascono le ricchezze, cosí dalle ricchezze nasce la falsa felicità e la superbia, la quale è tanto odiosa a Dio, che non solamente è punita, come gli altri vizii, dalla divina pena, ma dalla indignazione.” 78. “Ricevete nel vostro seno quelle due virtuose sorelle, Giustizia e Temperanzia, le quali per la loro convenienza in governare, in essequire e ubidire, furono dagli antichi nominate Armonia. E usate finalmente le vostre ricchezze e i vostri consigli in onore d’Iddio, acchioché se pur sete invilupatti in qualche umano errore, siate almeno sciolti e liberi dalla impietà, sicuri di questo che, quanto tempo i mortali domineranno con poco rispetto della relligione, tanto meneranno vita faticosa e misera, e che è apparecchiata morte e rovina a quella città, la quale si governa e si regge senza la custodia e la guida d’Iddio.”

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79. For censorship in sixteenth century Italy, see Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy, ed. Gigliola Fragnito (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Paul Grendler, Culture and Censorship in Late Renaissance Italy and France (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), Ugo Rozzi, La letteratura italiana negli “Indici” del Cinquecento (Udine: Forum, 2005) and Nicolò Franco, Dialogo del venditore di libri: 1539–1593, ed. Mario Infelise (Venice: Marsilio, 2005). 80. The text in question is Florentinae historiae libri octo priores, by a certain “Gian Michele Bruto,” published in Lyon in 1562. Of this work, Moreni notes: “L’opera, pubblicata in risposta alle ‘Istorie’ di Paolo Giovio, narra più di un secolo di storia fiorentina (dal 1380 al 1492) e si arresta alla morte di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Permeata di spirito repubblicano, reca una impronta decisamente antimedicea. Cosimo I ne ostacolò la circolazione e perseguitò l’autore” (Moreni, I, 180). 81. For an extensive collection of these later editions of and additions to the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina, see the digital collection of the works of Giulio Cesare Croce at the University of Bologna, available online at: http://www.bub.unibo.it/it-it/biblioteca-digitale/collezioni-digitali/giulio-cesare-croce.aspx?idC=61806&LN=it-IT. 82. There were several French editions of both the capitoli of the Lesina and the Antilesina: La Fameuse Compagnie de la Lésine, ou Alesne; c’est à dire, la manière d’espargner, acquérir et conserver. Ouvrage non moins utile pour le public que delectable pour la variété des rencontres, pleins de doctrine admirable, et de moralité autant qu’il est possible (Paris: Boutonne, 1618) and La Contre-Lésine, ou plustot Discours, constitutions et louanges de la libéralité, remplis de moralité, de doctrine, et beaux traicts admirables. Augmentez d’une comédie intitulées Les Nopces d’Antiséline. Ouvrage du pasteur Monapolitain. Suivi de: Les Nopces d’Antiseline. Comédie nouvelle, extraicte des discours de la Contre-lésine. Par le pasteur Monapolitain. Et traduicte nouvellement de l’italien par le Pasteur Philandre (Paris: Saugrain, 1604). Note the humorous addition of the words “autant qu’il est possible” to the title of the Boutonne edition. 83. For the Italian fogli volanti, see the excellent summary in the Dizionario storico della Svizzera under the entry “Fogli volanti,” available online at http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/i/ I10465.php, Ugo Rozzo, La strage ignorata: i fogli volanti a stampa nell’Italia dei secoli XV e XVI (Udine: Forum, 2008), Raymund Wilhelm, Italienische Flugschriften des Cinquecento (1500– 1550): Gattungsgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996) and Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500–1820, ed. Roeland Harms, Joad Raymond, and Jeroen Salman (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 84. Wye Saltonstall, Picturae loquentes (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1946). 85. For an excellent discussion of the distribution of chapbooks and their role in the dissemination of knowledge in Renaissance and later Europe, see Small Books for the Common Man: a Descriptive Bibliography, ed. John Meriton, with Carlo Dumontet (London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2010) and Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1982). An entire international conference has been dedicated to the subject: “Crossing Borders, Crossing Cultures: Popular Print in Europe” (Trento June 15–16, 2017), sponsored by the international network European Dimensions of Popular Print Culture (EDPOP). See their website at: http://edpop.wp.hum.uu.nl/.

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86. For a fascinating recent account of popular artistic productions used to critique an oppressive regime, and the care which the producers and consumers of these took to avoid detection, see Jacqueline Adams, Art against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013). For a study of the means by which marginalized or powerless groups were able to express dissent in ways difficult to detect in modern-day Indonesia, see James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Several scholars have assured me that other cultures not only engage in such practices, but even have elaborate theoretical discussions of them, akin to those of the Greek rhetoricians discussed in Chapter 1. The cultures in question are Iran and China. 87. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990). For the role of popular entertainers and booksellers in the diffusion of controversial ideas in Renaissance Italy, and excellent discussions of the struggle to control the public sphere (both physically in the piazza and metaphorically, in the struggle for supremacy of competing discourses), see Brian Richardson, Massimo Rospocher and Stefano Dall’Aglio, eds., Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (London: Routledge, 2016), idem., Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe [Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012] and Oral Culture in Early Modern Italy: Performance, Language, Religion, The Italianist 34 [2014]). We noted above Werner’s discussion of Cosimo’s sending a funambulist into the piazza in front of Santa Maria Novella to disrupt public lectures in the newly re-established Florentine Academy as a means of demonstrating his absolute control, as a kind of Wizard of Oz, operating from behind the scenes, of public discourse in Renaissance Florence. 88. For a discussion of covert critique of contemporary rulers in the Italian Renaissance romances, see Albert Ascoli, “Ariosto and the ‘Fier Pastor’: Form and History in Orlando Furioso,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 487–522, Jo Ann Cavallo, The World Beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto (Toronto, ON: Toronto University Press, 2013) and David Quint, “Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme Liberata,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 1–29. For mock-epics which make veiled allusion to contemporary events, see Plaisance and Zanré. The latter two authors note the likely presence of veiled political allusions in several mock-epics produced in the fourth and fifth decades of the sixteenth century by Florentine academicians, but they do not go into great detail about these allusions, and consider them pejorative references allusions to the ottimati who opposed Medicean hegemony over Florence. Given our preceding discussion of veiled critique of Medici rule in Florence during these years, we consider it equally possible that these pejorative allusions, in which giants are reduced to the size of pygmies, might rather represent an implied satirical diminishing of Medicean pretensions to greatness, similar to Michelangelo’s parodic deflation of Medici pretensions discussed in Chapter 2. In a forthcoming article, Robin O’Bryan argues that Bronzino’s portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici’s dwarf Morgante presents a subversive critique of Cosimo and his policies, specifically, the takeover of the Accademia degli Umidi by the Duke, discussed in detail by Plaisance and Werner, cited above (“Portrait of a Dwarf, Reflections of a City: Bronzino, Morgante, and the Accademia Fiorentina”). See also her Games and Game Playing in Early Modern Art and Literature (Medieval Institute Publications), forthcoming.

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89. Poorer residents of the city and the countryside would not have been able to avail themselves of the protective measures against plague and famine recommended by the author of the enigmatic poem which concludes the statutes of the company. 90. That the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina reached as far as England is attested to by the fact that the earliest, and rarest, quarto edition of the work was to be found in the library of one of the foremost English bibliophiles and collectors of the seventeenth century. However, one scholar remarks that the volume may have been more prized as a collectible than read. The statutes were very popular in France, as demonstrated by the author of the privilège of the 1604 French edition of the work, published by Abraham Saugrin in Paris: “Nostre bien amé A. Saugrin … nous a faict dire et remonstrer que depuis plusieurs annés en ça il se seroit estudié å rechercher à grands frais les hommes plus doctes qu’il auroit peu recouvrer en la cognoissance des langues Françoise et Italienne, pour traduire un livre intitulé Famosissima Compagnia della Lesina, ensemble la Contralesina con le nozze d’Antilesina, imprimée par plusieurs et diverses fois en Italie, et auroit employé beaucoup de temps, et grande somme d’argent pour advancer ladite traduction, laquelle il desireroit volontiers faire continuer” (Raymond Lebègue, “Tableau de la Comédie Française de la Renaissance,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 8 [1946]: 278–344). Note the writer’s reference to the many Italian editions of the work, a testament to its enduring popularity in the late Renaissance and the early years of the seicento. 91. Salzburg has written extensively on the role of public performers in Renaissance Italy. See the works cited in the Bibliography. Many of these, and others, are also available on her page on the website academia.edu. 92. “Poi in fra settimana, la sera, tornatelle in casa il padre Stradino: dico padre perché e’ fu pur il primo a dar principio e origine alla Immortale Academia degli Humidi, onde poi è diventata questa, derivata da quella; e non vi crediate che e’ [Visino] degni le tornatelle per le oneste e polite vivande solamente, ché questo è il minore piacere; e se bene e’ vi si trovano ancora i poeti, che son come l’alloro a ogni festa, ma vuole le farse, le commedie et le invenzioni con le parole et musica, fatti apposta per questo: vita proprio d’averne invidia l’Imperatore! et procedon tanto secrete che e’ non se n’ode mai ragionar se non la mattina quando e’ le conta agli sfaccendati nella sua bottega di punto in punto, ridendosi a piene guancie” (Plaisance 154). 93. Citations of Ottonaio are from Trionfi e canti carnascialeschi toscani del rinascimento, ed. Riccardo Bruscagli (Rome: Salerno, 1986). 94. For Medici manipulation of the finances of Florence to further their own interests, see Najemy, Hibbert and Hale. 95. In this regard, it is interesting to note that Ottonaio wrote a play with the title L’ingratitudine, published by Giunti in 1559, but written much earlier. This play, in which a rich man treats the one who helped him become rich ungraciously, may well be a “commedia-à-clef” for Ottonaio’s own treatment at the hands of the Medici, by whom he was dismissed from his position as Herald of the Florentine Signoria sometime in the second decade of the century, for reasons which remain unclear. 96. For Molière’s Tartuffe and its relationship to Gigli’s play, see Manfredo Vanni, Girolamo Gigli nei suoi scritti polemici e satirici (Florence: Tipografia Cooperativa, 1888), 19–21. 97. For this view of the Jesuits as insidious subverters of the just state, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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98. In this regard, it is interesting to note that every play printed in Grund’s edition of humanist tragedies has a contemporary political subtext, more or less overtly expressed, regarding the nature of tyranny and the necessity of combating it (Humanist Tragedies, ed. Gary Grund [Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2011]). 99. The play’s first performance, in Siena in 1701, attests to its relevance to Sienese-Florentine politics of the time. Its second performance, in Rome in 1711, as the author makes clear in his dedication to the Countess Flavia Teodoli Bolognetti, was intended to incite the citizens of that city, especially its matrons, to take a strong stand against the hypocrisy and political machinations of the religious establishment of the day. Regarding the political meanings of Renaissance intermezzi, the author of the article in Wikipedia remarks: “There was invariably a political message, even if this was limited to general glorification of the ruling family; at times more specific messages were intended. Some thematic connection with the main play might be made, though intermedii could be repeated with different plays from the one they were written for” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Intermedio). 100. The cheapness of Gigli’s play, which makes it accessible to the poor, together with the reference to the place of distribution as near the famous statue of Pasquino, traditional locus of public protests against the religious authorities of Rome, is a further indication of its intended purpose as a critique of the religious status quo of the day. 101. For an excellent study of the Don Pilone and Gigli’s relations with the political and religious authorities of his day, see Vanni, Girolamo Gigli nei suoi scritti polemici e satirici. 102. Michael Sherberg, “The Accademia Fiorentina and the Question of the Language: The Politics of Theory in Ducal Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (Spring 2003): 26–55 and Sergio Bertelli, “Egemonia linguistica come egemonia culturale e politica nella Firenze cosimiana,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 38 (1976): 249–83. 103. “partecipò alla polemica sulla lingua contro il fiorentinismo della Crusca dalle quale fu di conseguenza espulso per aver sostenuto il senese Vocabolario cateriniano (1707), che per lesa fiorentinità venne arso dal boia sulla pubblica piazza. Gigli fu costretto a ritrattare le sue opinioni (anteponeva il senese) linguistiche e mandato in esilio.” 104. “Questo [Hypocrisy] è un Mostro da qualche tempo in quà scavato dalla sua tana, ed inseguito dall’imprecazioni e dalle fischiate popolari quante volte egli è uscito alla netta; cioè quante volte io l’ho fatto vedere in sulla scena. Ma perchè di tanto in tanto ritorna alla sua macchia, a salvarsi nelle sue strade coperte, io mi son determinato di dargli finalmente l’ultima caccia, serrandoli tutti i nascondigli e atterrandogli tutti i ripari.” 105. “le circostanze reali della vita del Gigli, tra cui il burrascoso rapporto con la moglie, ispiratrici dell’intreccio: Il sig. Girolamo Gigli è stato fin da’ primi anni del suo accasamento in continue liti con la sig. Lauretta Perfetti, sua consorte, per differenza di natura e di genio, essendo quella di troppo stretta economia, egli di eccedente generosità; ella di trattamento ruvido colla famiglia di suo servizio, esso riconoscente più del dovere verso i servitori ed i mercenarj, largo e manieroso: essa finalmente non troppo giovane, né troppo bella, e disaffettatamente spirituale, egli fresco e non disaggradevole, e quanto alla Pietà ed ai costumi né troppo bacchettone né troppo libero.” 106. While the author or authors of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina are unknown, there are resemblances between the style of the first edition of the statutes and certain

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writings of Antonfrancesco Doni, a Florentine and free-spirit, opponent of the Medici, known especially for his Libraria, Mondi, and Marmi, cited in Chapter 2. Group authorship was a common practice of cinquecento Italian academies, so it seems possible that either the statutes themselves, or the numerous later additions to them may have been a collective effort on the part of Doni and his fellow academicians as part of their ongoing attempts to create a kind of counter-culture in opposition to the political and social norms promoted by Cosimo and his successors. 107. “È (come io vi dissi) questo luogo, dove gl’Arsi fanno i loro ritrovati, in un angolo della piccola piazza de’ Pilli rincontro alla Loggia della medesima famiglia, nella qual piazza s’entra per l’angustezza d’un strettissimo chiassuolo. La porta che serve per entrare a salire in detta stanza mostra d’esser più tosto una tana di gufi, che ingresso d’abitazione umana, perchè oltre all’essere alta dal terreno più di tre braccia, essendo fabbricata parte di mattoni rosi dal tempo e parte di pietre vive, si può chiamare più giustamente straccio di muraglia, che artificiosa apertura. … Ma finalmente ella è quella porta che senz’alcuna cortesia di risposo vi caccia in una sala, per dove si sale alla detta stanza: la qual’ scala mi credo che sia simile a quella per dove uno si conduce all’abitazione dello spavento; perchè è fatta di scalini così malconci, che è necessario non aver sonno per salire; sì che si puol dire col Poeta: Ov’avria rotto il collo ogni destr’orso. Insomma questa scala, o per meglio dire, fragmento di scala, è peggiore di quella dell’Inferno, perchè in questa, secondo Virgilio, facilis descensus, e solamente revocare gradum, hoc opus, hic labor est; ma in quella è quasi impossibile la salita e più pericolosa la scesa; ma pure quella ha qualche amorevolezza, che non ha la porta, perchè in fine ha un piccolo pianetto a mano manca per riposo necessario; perchè quivi si devono saltare non dico salire, perchè salir qui è assolutamente impossibile, tre altri scaglioni che pure si conosce che vi erono per salire alla prefata stanza, nella quale fanno gli Arsi le loro adunanze” (Palagi, L’Origine e le Feste dell, 25). Citations from this text are from Giuseppe Palagi, L’Origine e le Feste dell’Academia dell’Arsura in Firenze (Florence: Le Monnier, 1874), available in the Warburg’s digital collection of works on the early Italian academies, cited above. 108. “In questa stanza non si nota coltura alcuna: le mura arsiccie e mal incrostate, il pavimento ineguale, le travi assicurate da rozzi puntelli, piene di scalcinati e di rotture; e pare che la natura o l’accidente abbi avuto compassione alla tanta infirmità di questa stanza, e però gli abbia fatto in un canto un cauterio, che continuamente getta material salsa e putrida. Ha poi un cammino in una cantonata che par fabbricato con quelle pietre che avanzarono all’incendio di Troia. … Aiutano la naturalezza del luogo le masserizie che vi sono, consistenti in alcune panchette, che già furono da letto, e per star male in piedi, è convenuto mutar mestiero per farsi sostener da coloro che vi seggono. Alcuni tavolini poi così sconquassati guasti che più difficile è il servirsi di quelli, che non sarebbe stato il voler servirsi della tavola rotonda del Re Artù qual’è senza un piede, e si fa gruccia di un cantone d’una finestra, quale per essere sconfitta pare la calcola d’un tessitore, o i pedali d’un organo, e che si ficca i piedi in capo, in maniera che posandovisi sopra qualche peso ancora che leggeri, se ne scende regolatamente in terra, e vi forma un bel fondo di calesso con la sua colonnetta. Maggior fortuna si trova in alcune seggiole di Pistoja, perchè l’esser quasi tutte senza l’intero fondo, o sedere, fa che possano anco servire per predella, o seggetta per l’uso necessario.”

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109. “In faccia [dalla finestra], rincontro alla finestra, era la lor comune impresa, che è un cammino, in cui è un monte di cenere spenta, e nel frontale è scritto Arsi, e nell’architrave quella dell’Impresa, in un verso, che dice: Sotto cenere fredda il fuoco ascondo. Questo cammino era fabbricato di regoli che portavano la gola sino al palco, et erano coperti di tela dipinta. In mezzo a detta gola era uno straccio tanto grande che pareva una finestrella, alla quale doveva star quello che doveva recitare l’Orazione, e di esso servirsi per cattedra, entrandovi per disotto.” 110. Palagi gives a nice summary of the academic names of the members and their personal imprese. 111. “E perchè all’esser Arso ripugna totalmente il giuco, et ancora perchè non hanno alcun di loro questo vizio, per trattenersi nelle veglie con allegria, essendo fra di loro molti versati nella musica; condotto nella stanza uno strumento di tasti, Basso di Viola, Violini e Viole, principiarono a farvi ogni sera trattenimenti geniali di sinfonie e di musica: cose che allettando le genti, fece essere numerosa cotesta Adunanza. L’avanzo poi di quelle ore che non si spendevano nella musica, si consumavano in fare il sibillone, il mazzolino, i mestieri, e simili trattenimenti ridicoli e piacevoli senza vizio alcuno, e quelli che a tali giuochi erravano, erano condannati in piccole somme di denari, con i quali si compravano robe comestibili per sovvallo dei loro mangiari.” 112. “Giunto il passato mese di novembre 1682, quando per Ognissanti si cominciano le veglie, ritrovandosi la medesima conversazione in detto luogo [their meeting place in the Piazza dei Pilli], e passando il tempo fino all’ora di cena in onesti e piacevoli discorsi, fu da alcuni di loro proposto il fare in quel luogo un Accademia col nome d’Arsura. … Piacque il pensiero, e datisi scherzando a fare i lor ordini o capitoli, cominciarono a passare le veglie motteggiando sopra questa cosa, e proponendo or l’una, or l’altra nova e ridicolosa sottigliezza per ben reggere e governare detta Accademia, nella forma che già facevano in Firenze quie della Compagnia del Mantellaccio, come si cava da quello che ne lasciò scritto il Mag.o Lorenzo de’ Medici; e portando sempre qualche dogma della più raffinata lesina. … E perchè, come dice il comune proverbio, scogli i cani e lor s’appaiano, sono per lo più tutti amici dell’allegria, e per dirla con la frase paesana, buon compagnoni: quindi nasce, che dilettandosi spesso di essere a tavola insieme, segue per lo più che al finire del mese non vi è di loro chi facci avanzi, e però il più delle volte son più tosto scarsi che abbondanti di denaro, onde scherzando qualcheduno di loro, che si trova senza soldi, suol dire, io sono arso; così a poco a poco è divenuta questa frase un loro dettame.” 113. It seems entirely possible that the obsession with the repair of their shoes which characterizes the members of the Compagnia della Lesina, and which, according to the compiler of its statutes, played a prominent role in the founding of the company, might also be a reference to the Ciompi, since, while all the Italian dictionaries express ignorance as to the etymology of the word (some speculate that it derives from the French “compare,” a reference to their rather improbable association with the knights of Walter of Brienne), a more likely derivation, in our view, would have been from the German root of the word “clomp,” an allusion to the wooden shoes worn by the Ciompi in the course of their daily work. A source at Wikipedia notes that a flag depicting a regular leather shoe of a type worn by peasants in the sixteenth century was carried by the peasants in the German peasants war of 1524–1525, a proto-anarchist rebellion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Anarchist_symbolism).

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114. Given the possibility, discussed above, that the Compagnia della Cazzuola, in addition to its function as a locus of clandestine opposition to Medici rule, may have also been a Masonic or proto-masonic organization, it does not seem impossible to us that the carbonari of the nineteenth century, whose affiliation with Freemasonry is well-known, in searching for a symbol of their organization, might have taken inspiration from the ashes which served as the emblem of the Compagnia dell’Arsura, whose function as a place where non-conforming artists and those at odds with the prevailing social and political norms of late seventeenth century Florence could gather has just been noted. We discuss below the survival of numerous aspects of the cinquecento companies we have been discussing in later Florentine festive organizations, well into the nineteenth century. 115. “Comandarono che nella spesa di lor mangiari s’avesse ogni risparmio; che s’andasse a provedere e portare la roba da sè; che quelle robe che andavano rinvolte in fogli, si facessero involtar bene con più fogli, non tanto per buscarne maggior quantità e poterli rivendere, quanto perchè dovendo per lo più servir loro per piatto, potessero meglio resistere; come ancora l’insalata per la medesima ragione si facesse infilare in più giunchi.” 116. “La cena fu di vivande assai delicate e benissimo condizionate e con ordine tanto bello, che non pareva che alcuna cosa si potesse desiderare; e niente vi fu di superfluo: e fu osservata una sottigliezza arsuresca, che il salsiciotto e il parmigiano fu messo in tavola sopra quei medesimi fogli raddoppiati, dentro ai quali era stato messo dal pizzicagnolo, e che questi furono tutti diligentemente radunati dal loro puntualissimo provveditore Rifinito; il quale terminata la cena, e licenziati i commensali forestieri, adunò gli avanzi e messe in un caldano tutta la cenere che si trovò in diversi scaldavivande serviti per la tavola, et in alcuni raveggi stati portati pieni da diversi per scaldarsi le mani, e poi lasciati a benefizio del luogo.” 117. Palagi, L’Origine e le Feste dell, 21. 118. Another example of the widespread use of the theme of poverty, presented in comic or tragi-comic guise, as a form of social critique in late Renaissance Italy is the enormous popularity of Giulio Cesare Croce’s, Le Piacevoli e Ridicolose Semplicità Di Bertoldino Figliuolo Dell’Astuto ed Accorto Bertoldo Con Le Sottili, ed Argute Risposte Della Margolfa Sua Madre, Moglie di Esso Bertoldo, first published c. 1608. This work appeared in many editions, including many in chapbook form, almost all of them, as the statutes of the companies of the Lesina and Antilesina, printed in northern Italy. Croce’s work even served as the inspiration for several comic operas of the 1700s and for a play by Goldoni. The work remained extremely popular in Italy well into the twentieth century, and at least ten separate editions appeared during the Fascist era, once again attesting to the power and longue durée of this type of critique, in which the self-mocking and humorous misery of the protagonist serves as a cover for serious social criticism. In the Fascist-era editions of the work, not only does the “hero’s” semi-comic state of impoverishment serve as veiled critique of social and political conditions in Fascist Italy, but the colorful covers of these editions also present the peasant as a kind of clown. This latter representation of Bertoldo, who leaves his farm to serve the king of the Lombards Alboino (interestingly enough, the same king who served as a symbol of the Emperor Charles V in Rucellai’s Rosmunda, discussed above) might have represented, it seems reasonable to speculate, a veiled satire of Il Duce himself, a man of relatively humble origins in the northern Italian province of Emilia, best known for its

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agricultural products. As we note below, the use of the theme of a kind of semi-humorous poverty as veiled political and social critique by the companies of the Lesina and Antilesina continued to be popular from its origins in the mid-cinquecento through the early and late seicento to the early ottocento and even down to the present day. Regarding the use of Bertoldo to indict Mussolini’s regime, an Italian bookseller has remarked regarding an important periodical of the period, the first issue of which appeared on July 14 1936: “Il Bertoldo fu una rivista settimanale (inizialmente bisettimanale) di umorismo e satira pubblicata a Milano dal 14 luglio 1936 al 10 settembre 1943 dalla Rizzoli. Il giornale si affermò subito per il suo stile innovativo, del tutto nuovo per la vignettistica italiana: le vedovone di Guareschi, gli omini un po’ folli di Mosca, la celebre rubrica Bertoldo erano esempi di anticonformismo e di leggerezza che si opponevano allo stile ‘paludato’ dei giornali dell’epoca.” 119. Here we might cite Mattio Venier’s La strazzosa, an extremely humorous mock-petrarchan poem of the latter half of the cinquecento, in which the poet claims that he prefers his lover to be dressed in the rags (stracci) of a peasant than adorned with precious gems and clothing, and to live among the pigs and chickens of their humble country house than to frequent the courts of the rich and mighty. The first several stanzas of the poem are worth quoting for the extremely clever and humorous “ekphrasis” they provide of life among the poor but happy of cinquecento Italy: Amore, viviamo tra la gatta e i tizzi

My love, let us live between the cat and the woodpile Di una casa a pianterreno In a house on the ground floor Dove il lume e il pane Where the lantern and the bread Stanno tutti insieme, la rocca, Are all together, the spinning wheel I vestiti e il vino, The clothes and the wine La vecchia e le fascine, The old woman and the kindling I bambini e le galline, The children and the chickens In mezzo il capezzale sotto il camino In the middle the bolster under the chimney Dove appeso ad un uncino Where hanging from a nail Ci sono a mo’ di trofeo Are our many trophies: La padella per friggere, una cuffia The frying pan, the bonnet e la graticola, And the grill, La zucca dell’aceto, The gourd full of vinegar, Un cesto e la sporta, A basket and the shopping bag E il letto fatto d’alga e di stoppa And the bed made of moss and cotton Così piano che le pulci s’inciampano. So low the chicks trip over it. Al posto di un pappagallo si alleva un’oca, Instead of a parrot we keep a goose; Al posto di un cagnolino Instead of a puppy, there’s a sweet little pig C’è un porchetto gentile, che bacia sulla bocca, Who kisses us on the mouth, Lascivo animaletto. Shameless little creature! Soave compagnia, dolce concerto! Sweet company, soft symphony!

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L’oca, la gatta e tutti, La vecchia, il porco e i bambini, Le galline e il mio amore sotto a un tetto. Ma in cento parti aperto Dove la luna e il sole Fanno tanto più la casa allegra e chiara, Come sotto a uno stuoino Nasconde fortuna avara Una gioia. una perla nell’immondizia: Infinite [sic] bellezza in mille stracci! In casa chi è in camera è in salotto, Chi è in salotto è in magazzino, C’è soltanto un letto in un sottoscala Dove in braccio al mio bene Passo le notti di dolcezza piene, Nonostante la pioggia e il vento Ci [sic] vengano talvolta dentro A rinfrescare l’amore su per la schiena. Notti care e serene, Caro luogo amoroso, Beltà celeste in povera schiavina! Prenda un letto pomposo Chi ha dentro una Gabrina Che in esso fa quell’effetto un viso d’orca Come in belle [sic] gabbia una gazza sporca.

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The goose, the cat and all, The old woman, the pig and the children The chickens and my love all under one roof. But open in a hundred places, Where the moon and the sun Make our house even happier and brighter As under a mat Stingy fortune hides a jewel, A pearl amidst the trash: Infinite beauty in a thousand rags! In our house whoever is in the living room is in the parlor Whoever is in the parlor is in the pantry; There is but one bed under the stairs Where in the arms of my beloved I spend nights full of sweetness, Notwithstanding the rain and the wind Which sometimes come in To refresh our loving upon our backs. Nights sweet and serene, Dear loving abode; Celestial beauty in a poor little slave! Let him choose a bed of kings Who has in there a Gabrina, Which has the same effect as an orca’s face, Like a dirty bird in a lovely cage.

The editor notes that this poem was enormously popular in late cinquecento Italy, circulating widely in many forms, many of them anonymous, and many in dialect, and that it was especially appreciated by the republican exiles from Florence, where the return of the Medici to power in 1530 and the domination of Italian political life by Charles V and the Spanish had rendered many of them not only poor, but completely marginal to Italian

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political life (On the Florentine exiles, see Tiziana Agostini Nordio, La strazzosa, canzone di Maffio Venier, in Contributi rinascimentali Venezia e Firenze, ed. Tiziana Agostini Nordio and Valerio Vianello [Abano Terme, Padova Francisci, 1982]). 120. Palagi, L’Origine e le Feste dell, 20. See also Mara Visonà, Carlo Marcellini, Accademico “Spiantato” nella cultura fiorentina tardo-barocca (Pisa: Pacini, 1990), cited above. 121. Citations of the Save-All Club are from Lessons of Thrift; Published for General Benefit by a Member of the Save-all Club (London: Thomas Boys, 1820). 122. While a certain fondness for eccentricity may be part of English culture, certainly those artists described by Vasari discussed above demonstrate that non-conforming Italians were capable of behaviour at least as strange as their English counterparts. In his life of Aristotle da San Gallo, Vasari provides us with an extremely amusing portrait of one of the strangest of the Italian artists, Jacone: “But what was really funny, and I don’t know whether worthy more of laughter or of pity, was that he belonged to a company of friends, or rather, I should say, a gang who, under the name of living life as philosophers, lived like pigs and animals; they never washed their faces, nor hands, nor heads, nor beards, never swept the house nor made their beds more than twice a month, set the table with the sketches for their paintings, and never drank except straight out of the bottle or the jug, and they considered this boorish behaviour and, so to speak, living hand-to-mouth the happiest life than could be lived.” This “vivere alla filosofica” so comically evoked by Vasari recalls the similarly absurd self-deprivations and strettezze of the companies of the Lesina and Arsura discussed above. As one scholar has noted, Vasari meant for this mode of life to stand in sharp contrast with the quasi-courtly behaviour expected of the members of Cosimo’s newly-formed state. While some scholars argue that Vasari intended his depiction of this “masnada” (“gang”) as a rebuke of a kind of behaviour thoroughly unsuited to Cosimo’s court, we would argue that, just as his extensive and vivid descriptions of the activities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola were intended to keep the memory of this group alive for future generations, so also are his frequent descriptions of his artists’ eccentricities intended to express, in an allusive manner, an admiration for these non-conforming individuals, and their overt disdain for the rules and strictures of Cosimo’s regime, which he, as court artist and servant of the Medici, could not express openly. On veiled critique of Medici rule in the Lives, see Paolo Simoncelli, Antimedicei nelle “Vite” vasariane (Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2016). 123. An extensive collection, including many in manuscript, of later editions of the statutes of the Compagnia della Lesina may be found in the digital collection of the library of the University of Bologna: “Manoscritti, autografi e opuscoli di Giulio Cesare Croce,” available at http://www.bub.unibo.it/it-it/biblioteca-digitale/collezioni-digitali/giulio-cesare-croce. aspx?idC=61806&LN=it-IT. 124. Here me might cite a very interesting use of the technique of covert critique from modern China. Since vast numbers of Chinese citizens are appalled by the exploitative and corrupt nature of the current regime, where local officials masquerade behind the cover being simply executors of the Party’s directives to enrich themselves at the expense of the public’s health and safety, these marginalized and angry individuals have had recourse to an extremely clever form of veiled satire which plays upon the fact that any given Chinese character may have multiple meanings. Chinese blogs have been filled by apparently innocent stories of the famous Chinese “grass-mud horse,” a creature familiar to Chinese readers from the folk tradition. But what it quite amusing is that the character for “grass-mud

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horse” is also, when spoken aloud, an incredibly obscene curse-word in Chinese. Here again, just as in the academies we have been discussing we observe the use of extremely oblique and encrypted means to express popular dissent with the prevailing regime: http:// www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?_r=0 (March 11, 2009). The same phenomenon may be observed in today’s Russia, a regime arguably more brutal and repressive than the one in China, where, as one blogger has recently commented, Russians are accustomed to “saying one thing, thinking another, and doing a third.” 125. Here we might mention the Miserabile Compagnia degli Spiantati (“the Evicted Ones”), purportedly founded in nomine incredibilis Necessitatis by a certain “Stracciamondo Imperatore, Re de’ Rovinati, Duca senza ducati, Principe de’ falliti, Barone de’ Birbanti, Commendatore de’ Debiti” in the year 1754, in which, in an extremely humorous recollection of the strictures of the Compagnie della Lesina and Arsura, members are enjoined never to repay a debt, never to appear in a court of law, and, if faced with eviction, to make sure to take with them when they leave anything of value, even down to the mattress and the bars on the windows. This book, according to the editor of the Lucca edition, saw many reprintings and was very popular all over Europe. As is the case with most of the companies we have been describing, every edition of this amusing work, as far as we can tell, appeared in chapbook form, thus ensuring its wide distribution and consumption. In the course of our research, we have encountered several other mock-academies by the names of the La Compagnia Nobilissima de’ Tagliacantoni (Venice: Andrea Viani, 1602), and the Compagnia Nobilissima della Bastina (Ferrara: Baldini, 1597). The latter company has as its impresa a large saddle, with a motto beneath it which reads “Quanto viè più s’ingrossa/Altrui meglio s’addossa,” that is, “The larger it is, the better it fits on someone else,” a reference both to the nature of the company as presenting a satire of contemporary mores (“bastina” referring to the whip used on horses), and also a reminiscence of the motto of the Compagnia della Lesina, “L’assottigliarla più meglio anche fora.” Here we might note that the functions of both the Spiantati and the Bastina as vehicles for social satire survived well into the eighteenth century, Gli spiantati denoting an intermezzo performed by a troupe of Italian actors, the Dilettanti, at the Teatro San Michele in Murano in 1726, which took as its theme the hollowness at the heart of life at court, in which the elaborate feasts and receptions are a sad reminder of the former status of a noble class now ruined and corrupt, in imitation of the anti-aristocratic ethos of the Compagnia della Bastina, which made an explicit point of rejecting the “cerimonie, sberretate, inchini e parole profumate” of the courtly classes. What is especially striking is that all the organizations we have been discussing in this chapter are linked: the capitoli of the Compagnia della Lesina, as we have seen, refer back to similar companies instituted in Florence by Lorenzo de’ Medici in the late 1400s; the statutes of the Compagnia della Bastina are dedicated to Brancazio Spilorcioni, Guardiano of the Compagnia della Lesina; the capitoli of the Accademia dell’Arsura refer back to the Company of the Lesina, the statutes of the Compagnia degli Spiantati are modeled in their turn on those of the Lesina, and the Compagnia dell’Arsura is linked to a later company which made its appearance in nineteenth century Italy, the “Club dei Brutti,” discussed in the note 128 below, since, as Palagi notes in his account of the Arsura, at the same Carnival at which the Arsuri presented their mascherata of February 24, 1682, another invenzione presented a Trionfo de’ Brutti. Visonà, cited above, also discusses this same Carnival, citing Giovanni Battista Fagiuoli’s In Occasione

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d’Accademia fatta in lode de’ Brutti, which, making the case that ugliness is very useful, since it leads to virtue, includes the following amusing lines: “Un po’ più verginità / Non si rara l’onestà / Più frequente il celibato / Manco popolo ammogliato: / Più remiti alle Tebaidi: / Ci sarian manco Atteoni: / Più Lucrezie e manco Taidi” (Visonà, Carlo Marcellini, 57). We noted above that the editor of the 1813 Florentine lunario cites as his source the activities of the Compagnia della Lesina, and that he also published a second lunario the following year which drew its inspiration from the capitoli of the Compagnia della Antilesina. Such a linking suggests that, beyond the obvious fact that all these groups saw themselves as kindred spirits linked by an ironic and self-deprecating critique of the societies of their day, our hypothesis that the theme of voluntary poverty and self-abnegation, presented in pointed contrast to either a profligate wasting of resources or a joyous sharing of them in a spirit of generosity and public-spirited munificentia, did indeed play a significant role as an important topos culturale around which those opposed to or marginalized from the prevailing social and political status quo of Renaissance and later Italy could organize their discontent. 126. In Chapter 3, we remarked that the trowel of the Compagnia della Cazzuola might, in addition to drawing attention to the partly working-class composition of its membership, with the associated Savonarolan associations, also have been intended to refer to the building of a new, more just, society upon the ruins of the hated Medici regime. 127. The spirit of the companies we have described in this chapter, which combine an ethos of satire and self-parody with serious (or semi-serious) commentary on their own societies, continues in Italy even today in the Il Club dei brutti, which has been described in the following terms: “Il Club dei brutti, è un’organizzazione internazionale fondata nel 1879, ad oggi conta 25 sedi sparse nel mondo e circa 30.000 iscritti. La sua sede si trova a Piobbico. La nascita del club era motivata dall’esigenza di maritare le zitelle del paese, poi con il passare degli anni, e l’evoluzione della società l’associazione ha accolto una visione più ampia del problema. Lo scopo dell’associazione negli anni più recenti è stato quello di sminuire il culto della bellezza e dell’apparenza, ormai dominante sulla società moderna per ristabilire un giusto equilibrio di valori sociali. Negli ultimi 50 anni, il club si è prodigato a diffondere la sua idea mediante campagne mediatiche, e innumerevoli sono le sue apparizioni in giornali, trasmissioni televisive ecc” (source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_dei_brutti). Their impresa recalls those we have been discussing in this chapter, combining an image symbolic of the club’s mission with a motto in which this mission is concisely expressed: “La bruttezza è na’ virtù, La bellezza è schiavitù” (Ugliness is a virtue, Beauty is Slavery). In the United States, we might cite the “voluntary simplicity” movement which came to prominence in the 1980s in reaction to the financial excesses of that decade, and, again for Italy, the “slow food” movement, which presents itself in polemical opposition to the superficial and unsatisfying aspects of modern consumer culture.

Bibliography Adams, Jacqueline. Art against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013.

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Index

A Accademia della Virtù, 171, 174–175, 221 Accademia dell’Arsura, 307, 333 Academy of the Umidi, 169, 178, 214, 129, 221–222, 224, 229–230, 237, 244, 292–293, 315, 330, 336 Accademia del Piano, xl, 159, 178, 216 Adelphoe, 196 Alexander (pope), 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 43 Altoviti, Bindo, 272–274, 325 Antinoos, 100 Apollo Belvedere, 87, 89 Aristotle, 11, 25, 37, 41, 46–48, 54, 135, 153, 216, 260, 338 Atkinson, Catherine, 29, 30, 51 Atreus, 150, 197, 206, 208, 217, 282 Avignon, 30

B Baglioni, Rudolfo, 285

Basile, xxxix, 234 Battle of Anghiari, 187 Belvedere Cleopatra, 80–83, 86, 88–91, 105, 109–110, 119, 134, 159, 162, 216, 263, 323 Benizi, 30, 228 black banquet, 159–161, 216, 217 Bober, Phyllis Pray, 80, 96, 137 Bocchi, Achille, 199–200 Borgia, Cesare, xxix, 1, 9–11, 13–24, 26, 34, 41–43, 46–48, 50, 213, 229, 282, 325, 326 Bronzino, 33, 55–56, 116–117, 130, 139, 266, 330 “Bruto lettore,” 32 Brutus, xxx–xxxi, 8, 52, 62, 65, 71, 93, 94, 131, 136, Buonarroto, xxviii, 63–64, 67

C Calandria, 170, 209, 211, 237 Callot, Jacques, 173

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Canzona della Maschere, 296–298 Canzona della Morte, 184–185 Canzona della Virtù, 296 Canzona de’ Diavoli, 295 Canzone della Cazzuola, 155, 176–177, 179, 189–190 , 224, 226, 235, 294, 338 Capella, Martianus, 5 capitani, 104, 116, 123–129, 133, 141 Capitoline Investiture, 104–105, 107 Capodiferro poems, 86–91, 105, 135 Carnival, 155, 164, 168, 171–172, 177–181, 183–193, 223, 225, 230, 232, 235, 291– 292, 294, 297–298, 302, 307–308, 339 Carnival Jesters, 172 Caro, Annibal, 39, 132, 170, 220, 256, 277, 323 Carro della Morte, 186–188 Cavalcanti, Jacopo, 67 Cellini, xxxv, 72, 91, 120, 121, 138, 265–270 Cerberus, 167 Cesi gardens, 76–79, 82, 85, 91, 112, 133 Charles V, xxxiii, 10, 36, 42, 70, 71, 233, 291, 335, 337 Christianity, 12, 15, 133, 151, 152, 154, 163, 168, 182, 188, 195, 217, 224, 295, 296, 314, 325 Cicero, 5, 24–26, 34–35, 39–41, 47–48, 128 Clement (pope), xxxiii, 9, 19, 33, 37, 46, 66, 69, 71, 81, 83, 215, 233 Cleopatra, 80–92, 100–112, 119, 134–135, 278, 326. See also Belvedere Cleopatra Clizia, 201, 228, 235, 293 Colocci gardens, 82, 85, 91, 134–135, 218 Colonna, Ascanio, 285 Colonna, Vittoria, 104, 107–109, 132, 136, 180, 227 Commentariorum, 3, 36 Communism, 5 Compagnia del Diamante, 178, 184, 216, 225, 245 Compagnia della Antilesina, 222, 245–249, 251–264, 281, 284, 288–290, 311 313–314, 328, 336, 340

Compagnia della Cazzuola, 146–239, 245–246, 256, 292–294, 298, 301, 303, 305–308, 311, 313–314, 335, 338, 340 Compagnia della Lesina, xxiii–xxiv, 172, 222, 245–246, 248–249, 251–259, 261, 263, 277–278, 281, 284, 286, 288, 289–290, 292–293, 295, 298–299, 301–323, 326, 328–329, 331–332, 334–336, 338–340 Compagnia dell’Arsura, 303–305, 307–308, 312, 334–335, 338–339 Compagnia del Mantellaccio, 251–252, 254, 256, 261, 278, 299, 305–306, 317–318, 334 Compagnia del Paiuolo, 148, 154–155, 172, 212, 237 Constitution and Government of Florence, xxviii, 45, 214 Corsini, Filippo, 308 Cortile della Pigna, 262 Corvinus, Matthias, 174 “Count of Canossa”, 127, 130

D Dacia, 76–77, 79, 82, 88, 91, 95, 133, 159 Dacian war, 159 Dante, 15, 49, 65, 124, 128, 151, 163, 168, 218–219, 233, 255 David, 62, 93, 98, 117, 120, 122, 138, 202 da Vinci, Leonardo, 187 Dawn, 82, 91, 129, 133, 211, 276 captive figures, 98–104 trionfi, 105–110 Day, 62, 71, 74–75, 77, 79, 90, 93, 87, 89, 103, 105, 114, 117, 129, 133, 135, 136, 140 Resistance to Medici, 92–98 De Regnandi Peritia, 2 Del Bravo, 118–119, 138, 142, 229 De republica, 128 Discepoli, Maestro de’, 249, 251, 253, 258, 292, 318

INDEX

Discorsi, 8, 21, 23–24, 36, 38–39, 46–48, 334 Divine Comedy, 163, 219 Domenichi, Lodovico, 207, 209, 234 Domitian, 47, 74–75, 159–162 Doni, Anton Francesco, 121–122, 218, 333 Don Pilone, 282, 298–302, 332 Du contrat, 1 Duyster, Willem Cornelisz, 172 d’Aragona, Tullia, 208, 234

E Enlightenment, 2, 4 Etruscan Hades, 127 Evening, 91, 133, 148, 171, 181, 182, 236, 247, 276, 299, 305, 308 captive figures, 98–104 trionfi, 105–110

F Falconetti, Jacopo, 202 Fattucci, Francesco, 64, 131, 230 Feast of Pluto, 158–162, 165, 167, 172, 202 Feast of San Giovanni, 158, 162, 169, 230 Fermo, Oliverotto da, 9, 16–19, 26, 44, 47 First Philippic, 5 Florentine Academy, 169, 178, 219, 330 Florentine Histories, 7, 9, 20, 24, 39, 170 Florentine Secretary, 61 “force rightly used,” 26 Francis I, 71, 132, 170, 261

G Gaddi, Giovanni, 2, 151, 180, 235, 236 Gaddi, Niccolò, 2, 39, 71, 235, 236 Galba, 23 “Germania capta,” 75, 133 Gheri, Goro, 37, 69

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Giacomini, Antonio, 23–24 Giannotti, Donato, 7, 28, 35, 39, 42, 51, 65, 71, 298 Gigli, Girolamo, 298, 331, 332 Giuliano, Antonio, 76, 133, 182, 184 Giunta, Bernardo di, 2 Gli straccioni, 170, 232, 256, 277–286, 299, 323, 324, 328 Golden Age, 128, 177, 184, 189, 211, 321 Golden Fleece, 152, 213, 267 Grimani, 279 Guardia, Otto di, 175, 219, 254 Guidiccioni, Giovanni, 286, 328

H Harpies, 151–152 Hercules, 96, 98, 130, 132, 135, 138–139, 263 Hercules and Cacus, 56, 120, 136 Hiero of Syracuse, 22 Hollanda, Francesco de, 81

I impresa, 218, 237, 246, 267–268, 304–305, 307, 321, 334, 339, 340 Index of the Counter-Reformation, 28, 228 Inferno, xxxi, 15, 49, 124, 128, 151, 165, 168, 255, 304, 317 innuendo, theory of, 4–7 Machiavelli’s knowledge of, 7–9 in the Prince, 9–16 Institutiones Oratoriae, 4

J Jerusalem, 74, 75, 134, 157, 234 Jesse, 77 Jew of Malta, 212, 301

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Jordano, Cavaliere, 281, 283 Julius (pope), 15, 42–43, 48, 69–70, 72–73, 80–81, 84, 86–90, 105, 110, 113, 135, 196, 238, 323

L La Mandragola, 6, 30, 164, 196, 198, 200–206, 225, 230–232, 235, 280, 282, 293, 300, 327 Laocoon, 81, 87, 89, 105 Leda, 65, 70, 72, 110, 132, 133 Leo X (pope), 17, 18, 20, 27–28, 32, 37–38, 40, 42, 47, 54–55, 64, 67, 69, 76, 81, 88, 104, 107, 135, 136, 138, 153, 162, 196, 204, 206, 215, 232, 233, 267, 324 longue durée, 194, 335 Lorqua, Remirro de, 18 Lucca, 234, 285–287, 328, 339 L’avare, 289, 302

M Machiavelli, Bernardo, 29–30 Magnifico, Lorenzo il, xxviii, 18, 37, 40, 48, 57, 217, 253, 256, 279, 323, 326, 329 Mandragola, 6, 30, 164, 196–205, 225, 230–232, 235, 280, 293, 300, 327 Mantua, 88, 109 Marmi, 121, 333 Martelli, Lodovico, 209, 236 Martelli, Niccolo, 222, 235, 236, 292 Masonic organizations, 195, 223, 335 Medici, Alessandro de’, 13–15, 19, 39, 42, 66, 69–69, 71, 112–117, 120, 133, 137–139, 171, 175, 197, 214, 216, 220, 222, 233, 236–237, 263, 267, 280–281, 283–284, 286, 319, 323–325, 327 Medici, Cosimo de’, 3, 7, 11, 29, 33, 35, 42, 44, 55–56, 71–73, 86, 120–121, 130, 132, 136, 138–140, 146, 169, 172, 175, 178, 184, 186–188, 194, 197–198, 208, 210–211, 214, 216, 218–220, 222, 226,

229– 230, 234, 239–240, 245, 248–249, 258–260, 265, 267–270, 273–275, 278, 283, 285, 291–292, 301, 303, 313, 318, 320–324, 326, 329–330, 333, 338 Medici Chapel, 62–63, 69, 73, 75, 82, 83, 89–100, 103–104, 106–108, 112–120, 122–123, 125–126, 129, 133–134, 136–137, 269, 275, 276, 319 Medici, Ippolito de’, xxxiii, 71, 233, 236 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 2–3, 7, 9, 11, 17–20, 23, 37, 40–42, 44–49, 62, 64, 68–69, 71, 74–75, 77, 89, 92, 104, 107, 113–117, 121, 123–126, 128–130, 132–133, 137–141, 146–147, 160, 178, 183–184, 186, 189, 191–192, 196, 202–204, 214, 217, 225–226, 229, 231–232, 251–254, 256, 261, 270–275, 278–279, 283, 299, 305, 318, 323, 326, 329, 334, 339 Medici palace, xxix, 51, 64, 130, 221, 319 Medici tomb, 62, 69, 71, 73, 75, 80, 89, 101, 103, 107, 108, 112, 115, 116, 119, 124, 274 Medici vase, 77–78 Michelangelo, 77, 79–100, 103–141, 226, 230, 235, 238–239, 268, 270, 274–276, 319, 324, 325, 330 and the court, 63–65 and Medici, 65–69 Florence, 69–74 Minio-Paluello, Maria-Luisa, 181–183, 191–192, 225 Mother of Asa, 77

N Naldini, Lorenzo, 146, 148 Nardi, Jacopo, xxxiii, 41, 42, 202 New Sacristy, 270 Nicomachean Ethics, 11, 41 Nifo, Agostino, 2, 27, 36, 215 Night, 62, 70, 72, 82, 85–96, 98, 101, 105, 107, 109–112, 117, 122, 128–129, 133–134, 137, 140, 269 and Medici rule, 74–80 Novizi, Maestro de’, 247, 251, 278, 317

INDEX

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O

R

Oedipus, 152, 213, 236 Orazione ai nobili di Lucca, 286, 368 Oricellari, Orti, 4, 53 Orsini, Clarice, 14, 19, 26, 42, 104 Otto di Guardia, xxxi, xxxiv, 175, 219, 254

raison d’etre, 175, 245, 309 rape images, 110–112 rape in Renaissance Art, 110–112 Rape of the Sabines, 197 Ravenna, 88 Rembrandt, 207 Revolt of the Ciompi, 152 Romagna, 10, 14, 17–18, 22, 45, 58–59 Romulus, 9–10, 22, 25, 128 Rosmunda, 205–206, 208–209, 220, 234, 236, 282, 327, 335 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1, 34 Rucellai, Giovanni, 205–209, 239 Rustici, Jacopo, 146–148, 151–152, 154–155, 160–163, 174–175, 187–188, 202, 213, 221, 233 Ruvoldt, Maria, 118

P Palazzo della Podestà, 183, 192, 200, 327 Palazzo Mattei, 81, 84, 134 Palazzo Vecchio, xxix, 32, 94, 137, 209, 225 Passerini, Silvio, 37, 69, 132 Paul III (pope), 261–262, 264–265, 284 Pazzi Conspiracy, 18 Pelops, 150, 151, 155, 213 Phineas, 151, 213 Piazza della Signoria, 65, 72, 98, 117, 119, 202, 208–209 Piazzetta dei Pilli, 303 Pius VI (pope), 279 Plato, 73, 98, 119, 124, 133, 141, 318 podesta, 26, 181, 183, 192, 200, 206, 215, 327 political sculpture, 63, 112, 119–123 Porrini, Gandolfo, 104 Porta, Guglielmo della, 262, 264 Prato, 17, 26, 44, 46, 66, 131, 138, 183, 319 Prince, 1–55, 282 ethical behavior, 24–28 innuendo, 9–16 Medici Connection, 16–24 Prisoners, 70, 72–73 Progne, 207–209 Pucci, Antonio, 164

Q Quintilian, 4–7, 37–38

S Sack of Prato, xxviii, 17, 26, 44, 46, 66, 131 Sagrestia Nuova, 62–63, 73–74, 80, 91–92, 95, 106, 121–122, 131, 137 Salt War of 1542, 285 Salviati, Franceso, 267, 272, 273 Sand, Maurice, 173 Santissima Annunziata, 195 Sasso, Gennaro, 2, 35, 39 Save-All Club, 309–312, 338 Savonarola, xxviii, 26, 42, 45, 48, 70–71, 124, 133, 153, 154, 157, 162–164, 179, 183, 185, 187–195, 214, 217, 235, 246, 260, 314, 318–319, 340 Seneca, 148, 150, 166, 168, 196, 197, 205–209, 213, 234, 236, 267, 282, 301 Severus, Septimus, 99 Sforza, Francesco, 13, 18, 47, 120, 317–318 sfumature, 62 Ship of Fools, 182–183, 193 Sistine Chapel, 77, 130, 132, 136, 268

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Soderini, Gonfaloniere Piero, xxxii, 3, 17, 26, 44, 47, 70, 159, 162, 209, 230 Sofonisba, 206–208, 220, 282, 327 Sorellina di Don Pilone, 302 Spini, Giorgio, xxviii, 66, 70, 131 Starn, Randolph, 28, 51 Strozzi, Filippo, xxxvii, 71, 160, 217, 231 Strozzi, Lorenzo di Filippo, 71, 160, 217, 231 Symbolicarum quaestionum, 199

T Tacitus, 14–15, 19, 23, 31, 34–35, 39, 45, 53, 55, 227 Tamerlane, 279 Tantalus, 149–152, 155, 208, 212, 213, 233, 246, 272 Tantalus in Hell, 152 Tazza Farnese, 277–280, 283–285, 326 The Bacchanal of the Andrians, 70 The Forest Fire, 33 The Natures of Florentine Men, 23 The Oath of the Sarmathians, 207 The Victims of War, 94 The Vision of Tundale, 163 Thyestes, 150, 166, 168, 197, 205, 208–209, 213–215, 217, 243, 282, 301 Tigris, 81, 100, 102–103, 109–110, 134 Tito, Santi di, 32, 51–52 Tomb of Cornutus, 123–124 Torso Belvedere, 33, 56, 96, 98, 109 Trissino, Gian-Giorgio, 206–207, 220, 233–234, 282, 327 Triumphal Chariot of the Victory of Calloo, 79 Tullia, 208–209 Two Captive Soldiers, 94

U Ugolino of Pisa, 124

Urbino, 17–18, 41, 45, 139, 183, 204, 229, 238

V Valence, 18, 38, 128, 141 Vasari, 72, 81, 110, 112–117, 122, 129, 135, 137–140, 146–148, 151–154, 158–163, 165, 167–172, 174–175, 178, 186–188, 190, 192–193, 205, 212–213, 215–216, 218, 221–226, 233, 237, 245, 267–268, 270–274, 276, 338 Victories, 70 Vitelli, 16, 19, 26, 42

Z Zanrè, Domenico, 159, 178, 216, 325

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