Patronage, Gender and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honor of Carolyn Valone [1 ed.] 9781599103082, 9781599103068

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts in Early Modern Italy •

“Good friends, like good books, should be shared.” — CarolynValone

Patronage, Gender and the Arts in Early Modern Italy •

Essays in Honor of Carolyn Valone •

Edited by Katherine A. McIver and Cynthia Stollhans

italica press new york

2015

Copyright © 2015 by Italica Press ITALICA PRESS, INC. 595 Main Street New York, New York 10044 [email protected] Italica Press Studies in Art & History All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of Italica Press. For permission to reproduce selected portions for courses, please contact the Press at [email protected]. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patronage, gender & the arts in early modern Italy : essays in honor of Carolyn Valone / Katherine A. McIver and Cynthia Stollhans, Editors. pages cm. -- (Studies in art & history) Summary:“Sixteen essays by an international group of scholars that examine the role of noble women as patrons of architecture and music in early modern Italy and that explore the behavior of woman art patrons and artists involved in the creation of art and architecture”-- Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-59910-306-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-59910307-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-59910-308-2 (e-book) 1. Art patronage--Italy. 2. Women art patrons--Italy. 3. Arts, Italian. 4. Arts and society--Italy. I. Valone, Carolyn, honouree. II. McIver, Katherine A., editor. III. Stollhans, Cynthia, editor. IV. Title: Patronage, gender and the arts in early modern Italy. NX705.5.I8P38 2015 707.9’45--dc23 2015023843 Cover image:The Tomb of Mausoleus, Halicarnassus. Engraving by Philips Galle after Maerten van Heemskerck, Seven Wonders of the World, 1572.

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Contents Acknowledgments XII Introduction Katherine A. McIver & Cynthia Stollhans XIII Part I: noble men and women as patrons of architecture: power and faith

The “Wife’s Room” in Florentine Palaces of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Brenda Preyer 1 Locating Power:Women in the Urban Fabric of SixteenthCentury Rome Katherine A. McIver 21 A Palace Built by a Princess? Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj and the Construction of Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona Kimberly L. Dennis 43 The Rhetoric of Power: Della Rovere Palaces and Processional Routes in Late Fifteenth-Century Rome Lisa Passaglia Bauman 65 Artemisia Conquers Rhodes: Problems in the Representation of Female Heroics in the Age of Catherine de’ Medici Sheila ffolliott 85 Elite Matrons as Founders of Religious Institutions: Ludovica Torelli and Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo Anne  Jacobson Schutte 103 Nuns, Agents and Agency: Art Patronage in the Post–Tridentine Convent Marilyn Dunn 127 Musical Marketing in the Female Monasteries of Early Modern Rome Kimberlyn Montford 153 Part II: notorious men and women and the arts: Sex, greed and scandal

A Monster’s Plea Suzanne B. Butters 177 Preaching in a Poor Space: Savonarolan Influence at Sister Domenica’s Convent of la Crocetta in Renaissance Florence Meghan Callahan 211

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The Pious Act of an Impious Woman: The Courtesan Fiammetta as Art Patron in Renaissance Rome Cynthia Stollhans 231 More Trials for Artemisia Gentileschi: Her Life, Love and Letters in 1620 Elizabeth S. Cohen 249 Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome Michael Sherberg 273 “Un Monsignore troppo abbondo contro le monache”: Alfonso Paleotti Meets His Match Craig A. Monson 293 Suis manibus fecerat: Queen Dido as a Producer of Ceremonial Textiles Gretchen E. Meyers 303 What to Wear in the Decameron and Why It Matters Elissa Weaver 315 Bibliography of Carolyn Valone’s Works 331 Index 333

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Illustrations Frontispiece Carolyn Valone speaking at symposium on Renaissance Women and the Arts, Saint Louis University, October, 1993. (Photo: Cynthia Stollhans.)

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Brenda Preyer. The “Wife’s Room” in Florentine Palaces of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Fig. 1. Plan of the primo piano of the Medici Palace, 1650; selected rooms labeled according to the inventory of 1492. 2 Fig. 2. Plan of the primo piano of the Gianfigliazzi Palace; spaces labeled according to the inventory of 1485 (reconstruction by Matthew Haberling). 3 Fig. 3. Plan of the primo piano of the Tornabuoni Palace in 1498 (reconstruction); spaces labeled according to the inventory of that year (Caterina D’Amelio). 4 Fig. 4. Plan of the primo piano of the Pazzi Palace (reconstruction); spaces labeled according to an inventory of 1626 (Caterina D’Amelio). 9 Fig. 5. Plan of the eastern half of the primo piano of the palace of Alberto di Zanobi, later of Francesco Nori (Giuseppe Medici, 1766). 10 Fig. 6. Plan of the primo piano of the Gondi Palace (Enrico Au Capitaine, 1867); spaces labeled according to the division of 1537. Photo Andrea Lensini. 12 Fig. 7. Plan of the primo piano of the Borgherini Palace in the sixteenth century (reconstruction, Giampaolo Trotta). 14 Fig. 8. Plan of the primo piano of the Corsi-Horne Palace (Fani Revithiadu). 15 Fig. 9. Plan of the primo piano of the Capponi-Barocchi Palace in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (reconstruction) (Caterina D’Amelio). 16

Kimberly L. Dennis. A Palace Built by a Princess? Fig. 1. Piazza Navona, from Mari and Marcucci, Grandezze della citta di Roma, 1625, tav. 57. Fig. 2. Stefano Pignatelli, Palazzetto Pamphilj, piano nobile plan, 1615 (ADP 86.2.2). Fig. 3. Unknown artist. View of Piazza Navona (from south end), c.1630 (Museo di Roma, MR 3651). Fig. 4. Palazzo Pamphilj, piano nobile, from Bosticco, Piazza Navona, isola dei Pamphilj. Development of the palazzo, 1612–1646 (plan modifications by Rebecca Charbonneau). Fig. 5. Palazzo Pamphilj, piano nobile, from Bosticco, Piazza Navona, isola dei Pamphilj. Francesco Pepperelli renovations, 1634–1638 (plan modifications by Rebecca Charbonneau). Fig. 6. Palazzo Pamphilj, piano nobile, from Bosticco, Piazza Navona, isola dei Pamphilj. Renovated apartments of Donna Olimpia, 1646–1649 (plan modifications by Rebecca Charbonneau).

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Lisa Passaglia Bauman. The Rhetoric of Power: Della Rovere Palaces and Processional Routes in Late FifteenthCentury Rome Fig. 1. Map of the Campo Marzio area showing part of the route of the Annunciation procession past the palaces of Girolamo Riario and Giuliano Basso della Rovere (at the second arrow). From L. Bufalini, Pianta di Roma, 1551, reproduced in A. Frutaz, Le Piante di Roma (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1962), vol. 2, tavola 201. 75 Fig. 2. Map of the Borgo showing the location of the palace of Domenico della Rovere in the upper left quadrant of the lower right sheet. From L. Bufalini, Pianta di Roma, 1551, reproduced in A. Frutaz, Le Piante di Roma (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1962), vol. 2, tavola 189. 81

Sheila ffolliott. Artemisia Conquers Rhodes: Problems in the Representation of Female Heroics in the Age of Catherine de’ Medici Fig. 1. Philip Galle, after Maerten van Heemskerck, The Mausolaeum (The Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus), 1572, engraving on laid paper: 22.5 x 27.2 cm (8 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.).  Washington, DC:The National Gallery of Art. Gift of the Estate of Leo Steinberg  2011.139.96. 87 Fig. 2.  Antoine Caron, Les Deux Statues, c.1560s–70s.  Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Rès. Ad 105. 26r.  Pen and Ink with wash and white highlighting. 89 Fig. 3.  Pietro Tacca and Baccio Bandinelli, Monument to Ferdinando I, 1615–23.  Bronze and Marble. Livorno, Piazza della Darsena. 91 Fig. 4. Philip Galle after Maarten van Heemskerk,  Judith Displaying Holofernes’ Head to the People of Bethulia, plate seven from The Story of  Judith and Holofernes, 1564. Chicago:The Art Institute of Chicago. Engraving in black on ivory laid paper; 203 x 248 mm (image); 205 x 251 mm (plate); 227 x 275 mm (sheet). Gift of Ursula and R. Stanley  Johnson in honor of Douglas Druick, 2011.1081. 94 Fig. 5. Annunciation and Visitation, Reims Cathedral, c.1225. 95 Fig. 6.  Master MZ, Phyllis Riding Aristotle, c.1500. Engraving on cream laid paper, 182 x 131 mm (sheet).The Art Institute of Chicago: Clarence Buckingham Collection, 1935.10. 96

Anne Jacobson Schutte. Elite Matrons as Founders of Religious Institutions: Ludovica Torelli and Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo Fig. 1. Portrait of Ludovica Torelli. Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, S.J., Vita, e virtù della contessa di Guastalla Lodovica Torella nominate poi Paola Maria fondatrice dell’insigne monistero di S. Paolo (Milan: Giuseppe Marelli, 1686), a2v. Courtesy of Biblioteca San Francesco della Vigna,Venice (A R IV 14). 116

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Fig. 2. Portrait of Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo. [Maria Ugolini del Chiaro], Vita della serva di Dio donna Leonora Ramirez Montalvo fondatrice dell’umili ancille della Santissima Trinita del nobile conservatorio detto Le quiete e delle ancille della ss. Vergine dell’Incarnazione (Florence: Michele Nestenus & Francesco Mouck, 1731), opposite title page. Biblioteca Civica agli Ermitani di Padova (CF.0745).With the kind permission of the Comune di Padova – Assessorato alla Cultura. 120

Marilyn Dunn. Nuns, Agents and Agency: Art Patronage in the Post–Tridentine Convent Fig. 1. Designs for Gate at San Silvestro in Capite, Rome. From Contract with Girolamo Caffi, 16 October 1680 (Archivio di Stato di Roma, Congregazioni religiose femminili, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 4993, f. 177.With permission of the Ministero dei Beni e le Attività Culturali, ASR 34/2014). 135 Fig. 2. Giacinto Brandi, Assumption of the Virgin with St.  John the Baptist, St. Sylvester, and Other Saints, San Silvestro in Capite, Rome (Rome, ICCD, Fototeca Nazionale, E 50055. Reproduction authorized by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation). 136 Fig. 3. Chapel of the Trinity, Sta. Lucia in Selci, Rome (Photo: Author). 143 Fig. 4. Domenico Maria Canuti and Enrico Haffner, Apotheosis of St. Dominic, Nave Vault, SS. Domenico e Sisto, Rome (Rome, ICCD, Fototeca Nazionale, E 21197. Reproduction authorized by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation). 146 Fig. 5. Patrizi and Bonanni Primi Chapels (center and right) with Altarpieces by Giuseppe Passeri, Sta Caterina a Magnanapoli, Rome (Rome, ICCD, Fototeca Nazionale, N 33988. Reproduction authorized by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation). 148

Suzanne B. Butters: A Monster’s Plea Fig. 1. Giovanni Stradano, Prince Francesco de’ Medici at work with his alchemists, 1570. Francesco’s Studiolo, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. (Photograph Antonio Quattrone.) 178 Fig. 2.  Johannes Schenk. Conjoined twins: adult host in contemporary dress with parasitic twin (46), stillborn infants (47) and live-born infants (48). From his Monstrorum historia memorabilis (Frankfurt: 1609) 65. (Author’s copy.) 186 Fig. 3.  Johann Amos Comenius,“Deformes & Monstrosi” / “Deformed and Monstrous People.” From his Orbis sensualium pictus (London: 1728), XLIV, 55–56. Manchester, Chetham’s Library. 193 Fig. 4. Michael Maier, Albertus Magnus points to the alchemical symbol hermaphrodite, from his Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum (Frankfurt: 1617), 238. Manchester, Chetham’s Library. 198 Fig. 5. Adult one-headed monster with two bodies (host and parasitic twin). From Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historiae (Bologna: 1642), 614. Manchester, Chetham’s Library. 200 Fig. 6. Valerio Cioli, Marble fountain with copy of the dwarf Morgante riding a tortoise, 1561–64. Boboli gardens, Florence. (Photograph Antonio Quattrone.) 202

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Fig. 7. Andrea del Sarto and Alessandro Allori, Caesar receives tributes from Egypt. Fresco in Great Hall, Medici Villa at Poggio a Caiano. Detail: dwarf holding a box with a chameleon (Andrea del Sarto, 1521) adjacent toYoung Boy holding a turkey (Allori, 1582). (Photograph Antonio Quattrone). 204 Fig. 8.Tiberio di Tito, Medici dwarf with lapdogs in the Boboli Gardens, early seventeenth century. Private Collection. Fine Art Photographic Library, London/Art Resource, NY. 205 Fig. 9. Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri, Portrait of the Re Picino in Rome, 1585. Engraving from his Opera nela quale vie molti Mostri de tute le parti del mondo antichi et moderni. London, British Museum. ©Trustees of the British Museum. 206 Fig. 10. Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri, Portrait of a Monstruosa Fanciulla in Rome, 1585. Engraving from his Opera nela quale vie molti Mostri de tute le parti del mondo antichi et moderni. London, British Museum. ©Trustees of the British Museum. 207

Meghan Callahan. Preaching in a Poor Space: Savonarolan Influence at Sister Domenica’s Convent of la Crocetta in Renaissance Florence Fig. 1. AMC, Leopoldo Veneziani, groundplan of la Crocetta, 1811. (Photo author, with the kind permission of Sister Antonina). 212 Fig. 2. AMC, Anonymous Florentine, Nativity, c.1475 (?). (Photo author, with the kind permission of Sister Antonina). 220 Fig. 3. AMC, Box of Bulls and loose documents. Loan from Caterina Cibo, written by Giovanni degli Albizzi. (Photo author, with the kind permission of Sister Antonina). 223

Cynthia Stollhans. The Pious Act of an Impious Woman: The Courtesan Fiammetta as Art Patron in Renaissance Rome Fig. 1. Circle of Andrea Bregno and Mino da Fiesole,Tomb of Cardinal  Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini, after 1479. Photo: Lisa Passaglia Bauman. 238

Gretchen E. Meyers. Suis manibus fecerat: Queen Dido as a Producer of Ceremonial Textiles Fig. 1. Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, Dido Showing Aeneas Her Plan for Carthage, c.1630-35. Photo: The Norton Simon Foundation.

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Elissa Weaver.What to Wear in the Decameron and Why It Matters Fig. 1. Giovanni Boccaccio, catchword portrait, in ink and watercolor, of Landolfo Rufolo (Dec. II 4). Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SBB-PK), Ms. Ham 90, fol. 16v. 318 Fig. 2. Giovanni Boccaccio, catchword portrait, in ink and watercolor, of the abbot (Dec. I 4), Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SBB-PK), Ms. Ham 90, fol. 8v. 319

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Fig. 3. Giovanni Boccaccio, catchword portrait, in ink and watercolor, of Gianni Lotteringhi (Dec. VII 1). Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SBB-PK), Ms. Ham 90, fol. 79v. 320 Fig. 4. Giovanni Boccaccio, catchword portrait, in ink and watercolor, of Neifile, story-teller and Queen of Day Two. Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SBB-PK), Ms. Ham 90, fol. 31v. 320 Fig. 5. Giovanni Boccaccio, illustration, in ink, of the Martellino story (Dec. II 1). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. It. 482, fol. 23v. Below, detail of Martellino hung. 321 Fig. 6. Giovanni Boccaccio, illustration, in ink, of the Filippo Balducci exemplum (Dec. Introduction Day IV). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. It. 482, fol. 79v. 323 Fig. 7. Giovanni Boccaccio, self-portrait, in ink and watercolor, on parchment. Frontispiece of Buccolicum Carmen. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. 34,49, fol. IVv. Published here with the permission of MiBACT. 328

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Acknowledgments First and foremost, the editors would like to thank CarolynValone — for her scholarship, her influence, her friendship and her numerous friends. Carolyn was once called a “sociological phenomenon” by one of her colleagues who was, no doubt, referring to her large, global circle of friends. This volume attests to that very issue. Although all contributors are serious experts in their respective fields, we mostly know of each other because we met through Carolyn. Working on this volume was a pleasant and rewarding experience — scholarfriends sharing a common goal of wanting to pay tribute to Carolyn. When the editors first invited scholars to contribute, responses were quick, and they happily sent abstracts and later sent the completed essays. A special thanks to each and every contributor who helped at every step in completing this volume. In memory of Olan Rand and Barbara Sparti

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Introduction Katherine A. McIver & Cynthia Stollhans The essays in this volume celebrate the work and legacy of Carolyn Valone, professor of Art History, also teacher, mentor and friend to many. Valone’s publications on “matrons as patrons” and “pie donne” became influential, ground-breaking work in the 1990s. Her work on women as patrons of art and architecture pioneered a methodological approach that many scholars followed. As a professor, Carolyn leaves a trail on two continents of former students from Saint Louis University (St. Louis, Missouri), Trinity College (San Antonio, Texas), and St. Mary’s College (Rome, Italy) — some of who are now employed at universities and museums in the United States and Great Britain. Taking a Carolyn Valone course was like taking a walk through sixteenth-century Florence and Rome — not a virtual reality but one totally built with her words, gestures and slides for the scholarly pleasure of her students in the classroom. So complete was the experience that students hated for the allotted class time to be up.Terms such as decorum, rhetoric and sprezzatura all became part of the working classroom vocabulary that spilled into discussions, outside of class, among students. Likewise, through friendly, persuasive discussions with numerous friends, colleagues and scholars in Rome, Carolyn has impacted both formal and informal students of art history. Her willingness to discuss ideas and to share references is equaled by her enthusiasm to encourage and support scholars — both young and old.Through one or both of these channels, all contributors in this volume, representing the diverse disciplines of music, history, art history, Italian literature and archeology, are united in having been shaped by Carolyn’s scholarship and wisdom. For Carolyn Valone interest in the art historical method of patronage began with her graduate studies. Carolyn received her Ph.D. (1972) in Art History from Northwestern University where she studied with Olan Rand (Ph.D., Princeton University) and James Breckinridge (Ph.D., Princeton University). For certain she spent more time in Italy than in Evanston where she researched and wrote her dissertation on “Giovanni Antonio Dosio and His Patrons.” . An up-to-date bibliography appears in this volume. . Carolyn Valone,“Giovanni Antonio Dosio and His Patrons” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1972).

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Valone continues to be recognized for her expert scholarship on Dosio. Two of her Dosio articles, from 1976 and 1977, have been translated and included in the 2011 Italian publication entitled Giovan Antonio Dosio da San Gimignano: Architetto e scultor fiorentino tra Roma, Firenze, e Napoli, edited by Emanuele Barletti. While pursuing research interests on the understanding of Renaissance patronage as a means to elucidate the context and function of art, by the late 1980s Carolyn discovered in the archives of Rome many unpublished wills and various documents for sixteenthcentury matrons — especially widows of prominent, noble families who used their own money to commission architectural projects. Carolyn, through her intensive archival research, recovered the voice of many women whose commissioned projects had been lost, or worse, assigned to a male patron. As she wrote:“If we wish to reconstruct the role played by women patrons in early modern Italy, we must go beyond female tokenism which relegates women patrons to the category of ‘exceptions.’” Valone’s publications directly impacted the reinstating of the voice and power for generations of women from some of Rome’s most important families such as the Cesi and the Colonna. Her pious ladies — Portia dell’Anguillara Cesi, Lucrezia della Rovere Colonna, Caterina de’Nobili Sforza, Vittoria della Tolfa Orsini (Frontispiece) and others — have now become well-known figures in the world of Renaissance art-history circles, almost to the point of being household names in more informed homes. In fact, two of Valone’s matron patrons who were sisters-inlaw, Fulvia Conti Sforza and Caterina de’Nobili Sforza, are discussed in the popular textbook titled Art in Renaissance Italy by  John T. Paoletti and Gary M. Radke, proving that her work has changed how we teach courses in Italian Renaissance art and architecture. . Carolyn Valone, “Giovanni Antonio Dosio: Gli anni Romani,” in Giovan Antonio Dosio da San Gimignano: Architetto e scultor fiorentino tra Roma, Firenze, e Napoli, ed. Emanuele Barletti, (Florence: Edifir, 2011), 155–68; and idem,“Paolo IV, Gugliemo della Porta, Dosio e la riconstruzione di San Silvestro al Quirinale, in Giovan Antonio Dosio, 169–81. . Carolyn Valone, “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl Reiss and David Wilkins (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), 317–35, at 317. . John T. Paoletti and Gary M. Radke, Art in Renaissance Italy, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), 523–24. For Valone’s work on the two

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Within a ten-year period, Valone wrote and published articles that would change the known history of women’s roles as patrons in early modern Rome. First and foremost is the importance in recovering and re-stating women’s voices in their motives and influence in architectural patronage. Valone’s earliest publication resurrecting a female voice is her 1990 article on “Elena Orsini, Daniele da Volterra, and the Orsini Chapel.” Elena Orsini was the natural but recognized daughter of Aldobrandino Orsini, archbishop of Nicosia, a man who sired five sons and one daughter.Through Elena’s own good fortune and some helpful thinking on the part of her father, she inherited the title of Baroness Orsini of Filacciano — and took over his chapel in Trinità dei Monti in Rome. Valone then argues that it was Elena who changed the dedication and the decorative program — giving herself a prominent voice in the chapel and publicly staking her claim to the Orsini name, as both her father and herself would be entombed in this very chapel. Valone then explains how Elena’s selection of scenes from the life of St. Helen, finder of the True Cross, was especially significant in light of the female patron. Through the lens of hindsight, one can see how Valone began to uncover and define the voice of female patronage as differing from male patronage, a theme that she continues to build upon in many articles. She proved that women had their own motives, their own resources and their own unique voice. How do women’s motives for patronage differ from male patronage? Valone discussed this question in “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome.” One motive singled out and explained by Valone is that Sforza women see Carolyn Valone, “Roman Matrons as Patrons: Varied View of the Cloister Wall,” in The Crannied Wall:Women Religious and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig Monson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 49–72. A reference to Valone’s article on Caterina Sforza can also be found in another popular textbook: Stephen  J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole, Italian Renaissance Art (NewYork:Thames and Hudson, 2012), 663. . Carolyn Valone, “Elena Orsini, Daniele da Volterra, and the Orsini Chapel,” Artibus et historiae 22 (1990): 79–87; all information in this recap of Elena Orsini is from this article. . Carolyn Valone,“Women and the Oratorians in Early Modern Rome, ” Scritture, carismi e istituzioni: Percorsi di vita religiosa in età moderna. Studi per Gabriella Zarri, ed. Concetta Bianca, Adelisa Malena, Maria Pia Paoli and Anna Scattigno (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, forthcoming); and Carolyn Valone,“Architecture as Public Voice for Colonna Women in Rome, 1550–1620” (under review). . Valone,“Matrons and Motives,” 317–35.

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Renaissance women, like women such as Dido of ancient Carthage and Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus, chose to pay for architecture, often religious in nature but with a twist. For Valone’s matrons, “well aware of their duty to commemorate their husbands…they often did not hesitate to put their own wishes above their husbands’ instructions.” Valone presents eleven examples where women commissioned architectural projects to support radical reform in Rome, especially in the years following the Council of Trent — including buildings for the  Jesuits, the Capuchins and the Foglianti — in comparison to men’s patronage usually focused on well-established and traditional religious orders. Valone’s female patrons have been recovered through documents, decorative programs and, in many cases, the display of a scudo accollato, an impaled coat of arms in which a woman may honor the family crests of both her husband and her father. The father’s line is displayed on the left (sinister) and the husband’s line is on the right (dexter). In her 2000 Renaissance Quarterly article,Valone recognized and clarified how women often used a scudo accollato as evidence of their own patronage, just like men who usually only used their father’s stemma. By processing the significance of the impaled coat of arms,Valone furthered her course of how female patronage is often different than their male counterparts. In her essay, Valone uses the scudo accollato as evidence of patronage for the chapel and painting to Portia dell’Anguillara, duchess of Cere. Valone’s publications have influenced new generations of scholars, and not just those seeking to restore the voice of female patrons. Not every contributor in this volume works on women or even patronage. Yet in these essays all authors have cited Valone as an influential source for their own work. In that light, Valone’s influence on both scholars and methodology in the field of the arts weaves a strong thread that unites the essays. With the volume, the editors hoped to exhibit the vast influence that Valone has made across many disciplines.To that end, another concept besides gender or geography needed to be devised for organization and for clarity. One common thread of Valone’s influence can be found in the types of Renaissance personalities being discussed. Valone’s women, . Valone,“Matrons and Motives,” 321. . Carolyn Valone,“Mothers and Sons:Two Paintings for San Bonaventura in Early Modern Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 108–32, at 112.

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such as Fulvia Conti Sforza and Caterina de’Nobili Sforza, were almost all born into noble families. However, some ladies, although still noble by birth, have been portrayed by Valone with such large personalities and actions that they can best be described as notorious, such as Vittoria della Tolfa who had the “last laugh,” as Valone would say, “from the grave” since her Roman property reverted to the Theatines even though the first  Jesuit College was built on that exact parcel of land. Therefore, the essays have been divided into those dealing with the noble-born and those discussing the acts of notorious persons as a means to explore people and their motives.

Noble vs Notorious “And if I thought I was saying something new to us, I would cite many people who, though of the most noble blood, have been wicked in the extreme, and, on the other hand, many of humble birth who, through their virtues, have won glory for their descendants.” — Baldassare Castiglione, from the Book of the Courtier

It is true that the women and men of early modern Italy can be described in both flattering and unflattering terms such as noble and notorious — often with a fine line between them. Castiglione pointed out that those of noble birth sometimes displayed ignoble ways, while those of a lower status achieved a heightened standing because of their virtuous acts. It is fair to say that, human nature being what it is, all possibilities in between these two surely also exist. What happens when these terms are applied to the arts? Sometimes the men and women commissioning, supporting or creating the arts could be categorized as noble, usually meaning well-born and acting in an admirable manner, while others fall under the heading of notorious, sometimes meaning well-born but acting in an unfavorable manner. Those in the roles of patrons and artists include married men, women and widows of the so-called noble class of titled families, cardinals, princes, artists, queens and common women. This volume will examine the individuals involved in commissioning and in creating painting, sculpture, architecture, textiles and music in order to understand the reasons and motives for their actions.The dividing line between them may not be based on gender or status. Rather, the . Carolyn Valone,“Piety and Patronage:Women and the Early  Jesuits,” in Creative Women in Early Modern Italy, ed. E. Ann Mater and John Coakley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 157–84, at 163.

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essays that explore actions and arts relating to power, family and faith will be deemed noble, while those actions and arts relating to circumstances of sex, greed and scandal will be deemed notorious.The essays provide an intriguing, new look at how acts of patronage and artistic production reveal the underlying noble virtues and/or notorious behaviors of the women and men who were responsible for the projects. Thus the choices made by patrons and by artists during the creative process help to define or to reveal something about the identities of those involved. That women and men both commission and create artworks to fashion their own identities has long been understood, especially since Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal work in Renaissance SelfFashioning: From More to Shakespeare, first published in 1980. This approach provides a clarified view of human nature at work in the lives of ordinary people in Italy who felt compelled or obligated to take a role in artistic production during the early modern period. Within each essay, the responsible agents of production will be investigated in order to examine their acts as noble or notorious.

Part One. Noble Women and Men as Patrons of Architecture: Family and Faith

This volume’s first section, entitled “Noble Women and Men as Patrons of Architecture: Family and Faith,” presents eight essays that explore, define and re-define early modern patronage of architecture and music. Their strength lies in the strong pronouncement of how the nobility used their financial resources to construct palaces, chapels and music in order to express their identities about family and faith. Reviewing and refining the motives for acts of patronage has had a major role in early modern studies, especially since the publication of Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. More specifically, the role of women as architectural . Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1–9. . Michael Baxandall,Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1972), 2. For patronage studies, see also The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics and Culture, ed. Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Katherine A. McIver, Women, Art and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580: Negotiating Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Patronage and Dynasty: The Rise of the Della Rovere in Renaissance Italy, ed. Ian F. Verstegen (Kirksville, MO:Truman State University Press, 2007); and Pamela M.  Jones, Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

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patron, as women selecting the choices for layout and design of the family palace, has long been recognized as a position of power. In Carolyn Valone’s article,“Architecture as a Public Voice for Women in Sixteenth-Century Rome,” she argued that women in Renaissance Rome used architectural patronage to achieve this public voice; they spoke about radical religious reform and the family, and often their discourse differed from that of Renaissance men. This section conveys the importance of both well-bred women and men as noble participants in the commissioning and creating the arts.The first three chapters by Brenda Preyer, Katherine McIver and Kimberly Dennis convey specific female gender choices in the building and use of palace spaces. Brenda Preyer examines one room adjacent to the sala on the piano nobile in the Gianfigliazzi Palace in Florence in Chapter 1. She argues that a Gianfigliazzi inventory lists solely the wife’s furniture in this room, thus concluding that the room is a gendered space for the wife. Preyer’s theory is well-supported with her comparisons to Boni-Antinori and the Pazzi palaces. Her discovery rewrites the norm for Renaissance family life and the assignment of rooms that suggested that the wife shared the man’s camera or bedchamber. Preyer then interprets the events — such as receiving guests upon the birth of children — as related to the identity of the wife as an agent of female power within her own spaces of a Florentine palazzo. In Chapter 2, Katherine McIver presents a number of case studies outlining the variety of architectural enterprises undertaken by women in Rome. Women in the Eternal City, at almost all levels, had the power and ability to act as art patrons – all they really needed was money. McIver situates woman patrons of architecture into the larger context of artistic patronage in Rome and considers how women could and did operate successfully within its urban fabric. In addition to primary source materials, her overview of the scholarship helps to suggest that, while women all over Italy were active as patrons of art and architecture, Rome provided unique opportunities for women to express themselves and to be recognized as powerful forces in their own right.Through the patronage of architecture, prominent women could assert their place in Roman social hierarchy, while at the same time glorifying their family name. In Chapter 3, Kimberly Dennis focuses on Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphili (1594–1657) the sister-in-law and longtime . Carolyn Valone,“Architecture as Public Voice for Women in Sixteenth Century Rome,” Renaissance Studies 15.3 (September 2001): 301–27.

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companion of Pope Innocent X (1574–1655, pope 1644–55) and her part in the construction of the Palazzo Pamphili (begun summer 1645) in Piazza Navona. Dennis has unearthed archival documents confirming that, in fact, Olimpia directed the building of the Palazzo Pamphili during the years of the greatest construction activity, 1647– 1650. Olimpia oversaw the work on the palazzo from beginning to end and created a grandiose monument that celebrated the power of the Pamphili in one of the city’s most magnificent squares. Her patronage demonstrates Olimpia’s commitment to the invaluable role noble women played as members of preeminent families and also assigns to Olimpia a greater role in the production of the Palazzo Pamphili. Of course, the voice of the noble, male patron should also be heard; and Lisa Bauman’s study, Chapter 4, furthers the dialogue of patronage by addressing issues of architectural projects by the famous della Rovere. Bauman’s essay offers an examination of della Rovere palaces through the family members’ motives of how best to situate their princely constructions within the framework of select streets — important papal processional routes — and other princely palaces in Rome. She addresses issues of patronal motives and messages, especially those of power and authority. Power and authority are also examined in Sheila ffolliott’s essay (Chapter 5), focusing on Queen Catherine de’Medici and her efforts, working together with her artist, Antoine Caron, in creating a suitable monument to promote Catherine’s image as a ruler after the death of King Henri II of France. Both queen and artist relied on the historical prototype of Artemisia II of Halicarnassus who built the Mausoleum after her husband’s death. The strength of this essay lies in the noble Catherine working with a male artist to devise an iconographic program in a new monument. In doing so, Catherine and Antoine draw on Artemisia’s own visual statements as an influence for the project. ffolliott explores, in particular, the positioning and message of ancient descriptions of female military triumphal images in which the female protagonists relate to one another horizontally. The final three chapters of this section reveal the noble acts of widowed matrons, one chaste but married woman and many virgin nuns. The common factors are their privileged birth to the noble class and their involvement in the creation of the arts from a variety of

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perspectives: patron, subject and performer. Anne  Jacobson Schutte’s essay, Chapter 6 on widowed matrons as founders of religious orders, is a unique study of the biographical documents of two women, Ludovica Torelli and Eleonora Ramierez Montalvo. Schutte fervently studied the biographical accounts within the framework of Pope Urban VIII’s new rules for regularizing vite for beatification and canonization purposes. Of significance, she compares and contrasts the written lives in light of the writers’ strategies to stay within the newly mandated papal rules. In Chapters 7 and 8, various female religious are presented as patrons of art and of music. Marilyn Dunn, in Chapter 7, argues that even with the severe limitations of newly established reform practices for female religious after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), nuns in Rome discovered a way to connect — through male agents engaged as messengers and businessmen — to handle affairs outside the convent walls in the name of the sisters. Dunn examines the relationships of the nuns with the male agents as a way to discover the invisible power of the nuns in asserting their own choices for artists and projects carried out behind the cloistered walls. Kimberlyn Montford in Chapter 8 supports the independent working methods of female religious as in the previous essay, but her focus is on the musical performances on patronal feasts and other holy days that took place within the cloistered walls.These celebrations included performances by male musicians who were invited to contribute to the festivities. Although the nuns themselves never left the confines of the cloister, the invited male musicians and audiences of hundreds of people would fill the monastery church. Such musical displays became demonstrations of the nuns’ spiritual lives and devotions to their faith.

Part Two. Notorious Men and Women and the Arts: Sex, Greed and Scandal

This volume’s second part explores actions and behaviors of art patrons and artists involved in the creation of art and architecture as well as actions and behaviors in subject matter. In his Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 Richard A. Goldthwaite stated that “historians have taken it as virtually a law of social behavior throughout the history of medieval and early modern Europe that wealthy non-nobles imitate the ways of the nobility and seek to

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enter into its ranks.” This, Goldthwaite deemed, is social emulation. Sometimes the non-nobles achieve success, such as in the example of Sister Domenica who built and founded a convent in Florence. In the case of the courtesan Fiammetta, perhaps born of a prostitute but who achieved great wealth through her own talents, she would always remain notorious by reputation. In other examples, the person may be well-born but conduct himself in an ignoble manner, as in the case of Archbishop Alfonso Paleotti, who instituted anti-music initiatives against all musical performances in Bologna. “Notorious,” therefore, is a term usually applied to the actions or behaviors under investigation. If those actions involve sex, greed or scandal, then the person will never truly escape the label of notorious! Chapter 9 is entitled “A Monster’s Plea.” In this essay Suzanne Butters presents a rare look into the unkind standards and practices towards Christofaro Tagliare, who labelled himself a monster and was most likely born with a physical disability. On 14 August 1583 Christofaro wrote a letter to the region’s princely ruler, Francesco I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany (r.1574–87) pleading for help. His letter reveals his mistreatment at the hands of his keeper, who used beatings and cruel behavior against him. Butters builds a context within which to examine the letter, the “monster” and images of persons with genetic variances in early modern Europe. In Chapter 10, Meghan Callahan discusses Sister Domenica Da Paradiso, humble in birth and upbringing, who founded and built the convent of la Crocetta in Florence using her own connections, piety and determination. As a women and Dominican, Sr. Domenica would not have been allowed to preach publicly. Yet through her following of wealthy male Florentines, she was able to build a convent, complete with church, so that she would have a suitable place to preach. Her actions and reputation far exceeded even her own expectations for success — notorious because of her unprecedented rise from her humble background to individual, gendered triumph. Whereas Sr. Domenica facilitated her rise to success by utilizing her strengths as a nun who lived as a virgin, the case of the courtesan Fiammetta is best seen on the opposite side of the spectrum as one who used her physical charms to achieve what she wanted. In . Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 3.

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Chapter 11, Cynthia Stollhans examines the last will of Fiammetta in conjunction with her funerary chapel in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino. Fiammetta accumulated substantial wealth in the legal sex-trade conducted in Rome but spent her money on projects in ways that echoed those of pious, noble women of sixteenth-century Rome. Despite her desire for a funerary chapel — complete with painted references to saints and the promise of salvation — her fame will always be defined in history by her occupation. A violent act of rape has done much to color the identity of the artist Artemisia Gentileschi. However, utilizing letters written by this nonelite artist to her well-bred lover Francesco Maria Maringhi, in Chapter 12 Elizabeth Cohen focuses on what Artemisia reveals about herself and her thoughts. This essay will help to shape our understanding of Artemisia’s own views about her sexuality as a wife and as a mistress. The writings of the artist Benvenuto Cellini are interpreted by Michael Sherberg in Chapter 13. Cellini wrote his own autobiography sometime after the famous biographies of Michelangelo Buonarotti by Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi in which Michelangelo was duly praised, if not deified. Cellini took exception to the lavish and sometimes absurd approaches of Vasari and Condivi. Sherberg argues that Cellini took the approach of presenting his conflicts and struggles to gain recognition, thus turning to scandalous events of his own life to retaliate against the previous types of art-historical writings. Through the scandalous but acceptable practice of nepotism, Alfonso Paleotti attached his career to that of his famous uncle, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, and landed the office of archbishop of Bologna. As Craig Monson reveals in Chapter 14, Archbishop Paleotti set about organizing anti-music initiatives aimed at enforcing grave limitations on all sacred music, which was unfortunate for convent musicians. Paleotti’ actions were regarded as unnecessary; nuns, nobles, and members of the papal legate fought back by writing petitions to the Roman Congregation of Bishops and Regulars. Bishop Paleotti would never have won a popularity contest, nor would he ever wear the red hat of a cardinal, like his esteemed uncle. Perhaps notorious for being foreign-born in Carthage, Queen Dido will forever be remembered as the doomed love of Aeneas. In Chapter 15, Gretchen Meyers offers an innovative approach to

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the understanding of Virgil’s literary depictions of Dido as a weaver of garments. Although Greek heroines such as Penelope and Helen are well-known for their weaving skills, this is not the case for Dido. Meyers shows that for Dido,Virgil did, indeed, highlight this skill in a way that developed a traditional Roman female identity for her, one that would resonate with the audience of Roman women. The final chapter in this volume is written by Elissa Weaver and examines Giovanni Boccaccio’s special attention to fashion and clothing in the Decameron. Boccaccio not only writes about clothing in detail, he also dressed his characters fashionably and appropriately –— and if they were not, then he criticized, sometimes humiliated, them for their failure to do so. Clothes had an exchange value, representing the financial means of those who wore them and the bad fortunes of those who lose them.Weaver discusses Boccaccio’s verbal and visual representations of fourteenth-century fashions and their meaning for the Decameron’s stories. A complete listing of articles and book chapters written by Carolyn Valone follow these essays.

One Sad Note

On a sad note, Barbara Sparti passed away in  June 2013, before she could complete her promised essay, “Antiochus and Stratonice from Textual to Visual Image,” which began as a conference paper and evolved into a scholarly essay. Sparti was examining this fatal love story from ancient Greece as represented on two mid-fifteenth century Tuscan wedding chests or cassone. For Barbara Sparti, the cassone allowed her to look at the wedding celebrations and dancing activities in comparison to contemporary dance treatises and other images. She was a noted dance historian, after all, and it is with regret that we cannot include at least the conference paper here. Carolyn and Barbara had a special and enduring friendship that came about at the 1999 death of a mutual friend, Franca Camiz. Barbara’s contribution would have been a celebration of friendship. •

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Part I: noble men and women as patrons of architecture: power and faith •

The “Wife’s Room” in Florentine Palaces of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Brenda Preyer In this initial survey of the “wife’s room” in Florence I hope to open up the question, rarely explored, of special spaces in Florentine palaces where the wife of the palace’s owner resided. No certain statements can be made, and hypotheses must be developed from inventories of palaces, from the wills of the owners and from plans of the primo piano, where the principal living quarters invariably were located. While the documents of course will be important for me, the true basis of my study are the plans of the palaces themselves, where sometimes I find “extra rooms,” that is, rooms that are in prominent positions near the sala but that do not appear to belong to a true suite. If indeed these spaces were intended for the wife, the size, location and relationship with other spaces can be seen to indicate something about her position within the family group.The data that I have assembled, which can be only a random sample of what might be available, are suggestive: it is possible to conclude that in the 1460s a new space that we can see on the plans of several palaces may have been used by the wife, while in a number of further cases we have inventories that tell us of the existence of a “camera di monna X.” At the end of the article, the question of the use of the room will lead to a consideration of the participation by wives and widows in the running not only of the household but of other family affairs. Susanne Kress’s article about the wife’s room uses an approach different from mine, first laying out references in inventories and libri di ricordi to the spaces occupied by women, and then referring to images and documents to try to conjure up some of the ways a separate space for the wife might have functioned, especially in connection with childbirth. While Kress discussed . As usual, I am indebted and grateful to Gabriella Battista for help with the transcriptions of documents and for counsel on other matters. All archival references are to material in the Archivio di Stato, Florence, with the abbreviation Not. antecos. for the books in the Notarile antecosimiano. . Susanne Kress, “Frauenzimmer der Florentiner Renaissance und ihre Ausstattung: Eine erste ‘Spurensuche,’” in Das Frauenzimmer: Die Frau bei Hofe in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit 6. Symposium der Residenzen-Kommission der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, ed. Jan Hirschbiegel and Werner Paravicini (Stuttgart:  Jan Thorbecke, 2000), 91–113. I thank Gert  Jan van der Sman for telling me of this article and making a photocopy available.

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Fig. 1. Plan of the primo piano of the Medici Palace, 1650. Selected rooms labeled according to the inventory of 1492. North is to the right.

primarily the use, also by the wife, of the camera of the man, and the room’s furnishings, notably those related to marriage, I am more interested in bringing to the fore in specific palaces a separate room for the wife. However, at the end of this article, I too shall turn to the man’s camera principale, though from a significantly different point of view. The classic scheme of the main suite in a Florentine palace was elucidated forty-five years ago by Wolfger Bulst, who showed that on the piano nobile of the Medici Palace, at the top of the stairs, was the entrance to the sala, the great reception room, where banquets and formal celebrations took place (Fig. 1).  The next room of the main suite was the camera of the head of household, another large space filled with imposing furniture. Associated with the camera and always following it, the anticamera was much smaller but contained similar . While Kress interpreted the mention in the inventory (1424) of Agnolo Da Uzzano of the “camera d’in su la sala detta la camera di monna Bonda” as an early instance of a separate room for Agnolo’s wife, to the contrary I think that she had moved already to the rooms assigned to her in her husband’s will; see Kress, “Frauenzimmer,” 96, and the will in Not. antecos., 10518, Guardiano di Andrea, fol. 110v. . Wolfger A. Bulst, “Die ursprüngliche innere Aufteilung des Palazzo Medici,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 14 (1970): 369–92, at 378–79 and fig. 4.

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furniture. Finally, sometimes there was a scrittoio, a private study that also often held valuables. Such suites are found in innumerable palaces, though of course with variations due to the configurations of the sites. Especially close to the Medici example were the main suites of the Gianfigliazzi and the Tornabuoni palaces, where the rooms of the suite were lined up along the facade (Figs. 2 left, 3 below); the same components, sometimes differently arranged, existed at all the other palaces treated in this article. Fig. 2. Plan of the primo piano of the Gianfigliazzi Palace. Spaces labeled according Where was the palace owner’s to the inventory of 1485 (reconstruction by wife in this scheme? There is no Matthew Haberling). doubt that in the first half of the fifteenth century an upper-class Florentine husband and wife shared the same room, despite the existence of an oft-cited passage in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria. Writing of villas, though his words have been held also to be applicable to city dwellings, Alberti stated:“The husband and wife must have separate bedrooms, not only to ensure that the husband be not disturbed by his wife, when she is about to give birth or is ill, but also to allow them, even in summer, an uninterrupted night’s sleep, whenever they wish. Each room should have its own door, and in addition a common side door, to enable them to seek each other’s company unnoticed.” Alberti’s . The prefix “anti” signifies “next to,” giving the word “anticamera” a very different sense from “antecamera.” . ”Viro atque uxori dormitio singulis singula debetur; non id modo ut parturiens aut malfata mulier molesta viro non sit, verum et aestivos etiam somnos illesiores peragat, cum lubuerit. Sua cuique aderit ianua, et praeter id commune aderit posticulum, quo mutuo se possint petere sine interprete”: Leon Battista Alberti, L’architettura, ed. Giovanni Orlandi (Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1966), 1:427; the English translation is taken from Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building inTen Books, trans.  Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 149. Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Italian Interior, 1400–1600 (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), 288, stated that a man and his wife normally had separate bedrooms.

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Fig. 3. Plan of the primo piano of the Tornabuoni Palace in 1498 (reconstruction); spaces labeled according to the inventory of that year (Caterina D’Amelio).

recommendation applied to princely houses elsewhere in Italy, not to those in Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century, though we shall see that a slow movement towards the situation he described seems to have developed. The evidence that a man shared his camera with his wife comes mainly from inventories and wills.The inventory taken in 1417 of the Medici “casa vecchia” lists in the camere of Giovanni di Bicci, and of his sons Cosimo and Lorenzo, items belonging to the men and also to their wives. Men’s wills sometimes allude clearly to the fact that the couple shared the same camera: in 1438 Bernardo di Uguccione Lippi left to his wife “the use of the camera of said testator and said lady, with all the furnishings and clothing existing in said camera.” Similarly, in 1463 Manno Temperani left to his wife “the camera in which at present said testator has been sleeping for a long time and . Inventari Medicei 1417–1465: Giovanni di Bicci, Cosimo e Lorenzo di Giovanni, Piero di Cosimo, ed. Marco Spallanzani (Florence: Associazione ‘Amici del Bargello’ 1996), 4–31. See also the study of the Medici casa vecchia by Howard Saalman and Philip Mattox,“The First Medici Palace,”  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44 (1985): 329–45. . “dominam usufructuariam camere dicti testatoris et dicte domine cum omnibus fulcimentis et pannis in dicta camera existentibus” (Not. antecos., 12074, Lorenzo di Francesco di Michele, under date 1438, 22 July).

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lived together (with her), and he assigned said camera to her for her use for as long as she should live, with all the furnishings….” An alternative was proposed by Bulst, who argued on the basis of a letter of 1472 that Clarice Orsini, the wife of Lorenzo the Magnificent, lived in the main anticamera at the front of the palace; and from the inventory of 1492, he concluded that the anticamera in the suite on the opposite side of the building, above the garden, also was used by a woman, the wife of Lorenzo’s son Piero. It is possible also that at the Tornabuoni Palace, on the evidence of the inventory made in 1498, the two anticamere [3, 6] of the suite of Giovanni Tornabuoni’s son, Lorenzo, housed his first wife, Giovanna degli Albizzi, and then his second wife, Ginevra Gianfigliazzi (Fig. 3). Support perhaps is given to both hypotheses by the facts that at Palazzo Medici the anticamera of Piero di Lorenzo contained a portrait of his wife, Alfonsina, just as in the second anticamera (the “chamera del palcho d’oro” [3]) of Lorenzo Tornabuoni was a portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi. A third example regarding an anticamera may be the room of the widow of Piero da Gagliano. In 1463, just two weeks after Piero’s death, the inventory of his house lists on . “reliquit et legavit cameram in qua ad presens dictus testator per lungum tempus dormivit et cum et insimul stetit, et eidem dictam cameram in dicto casu deputavit pro suo usu donec et quamdiu vixerit, cum omnibus fulcimentis, videlicet lectiera, lectuccio, forzerettis et forzieri existentibus in dicta camera, et cum pannis…” (Not. antecos., 18452, Antonio di Salamone, fol. 176v). . Bulst, “Aufteilung,” 389–90; idem, “Uso e trasformazione del palazzo Mediceo fino ai Riccardi,” in Il palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed. Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli (Florence: Giunti, 1990), 98–129, at 114. . As suggested by Susanne Kress, “Die camera di Lorenzo, bella im Palazzo Tornabuoni: Rekonstruktion und künstlerische Ausstattung eines Florentiner Hochzeitszimmers des späten Quattrocento,” in Domenico Ghirlandaio: Künstlerische Konstruktion von Identität im Florenz der Renaissance, ed. Michael Rohlmann (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2003), 245–85, at 263. See also Brenda Preyer, “Palazzo Tornabuoni in 1498: A Palace ‘In Progress’ and Its Interior Arrangements,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz (forthcoming). . I once thought that Lorenzo’s “camera bella” (2) may have been designed for GiovanniTornabuoni’s wife, Francesca di Luca Pitti, whom he married in 1466, when he was beginning to build the palace, and who died in 1477. But the complex apparatus of other spaces connected with this room, together with the fact that the palace frequently was the guesthouse for foreign visitors to Florence, has led me to conclude that the southern wing was envisioned initially to accommodate such guests. For the Medici and Tornabuoni examples, see also Kress,“Frauenzimmer,” 97–99.

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the primo piano a sala, a “chamera di detta sala a’ lato all’aquaio,” then the “chamera di Monna Ginevra,” complete with a bed and a lettuccio as large (almost 3 meters) as those in the other camera. With no anticamera listed, this could well signify that Ginevra was in fact in that room. Nevertheless, I have not seen other plausible cases of the anticamera being the wife’s room. To return to the sharing of the camera principale by the husband and wife, we should reflect on the room’s character. Certainly, as innumerable studies have shown, most of the furniture and decoration was put in when the man married, and Isabelle Chabot has made the case that the room was the man’s in every sense, especially after even the cassoni, which previously had been contributed by the bride’s family, came to be commissioned by him. Perhaps because most of the documentation regarding this type of room dates from the period of marriage, Kress regularly calls it the “camera nuziale.” But a camera principale was never just a camera nuziale, even in the beginning of a marriage, not to speak of twenty or thirty years later. Just as it should not be thought of simply as a “bedroom,” we limit our understanding of it if we think of the marriage overtones as necessarily carrying over a long period. In simple terms, the room functioned as the center of all the man’s activities in the house. I have made this case elsewhere, and here I shall make it again. Bulst assembled a varied group of references to individuals and groups of men visiting Cosimo de’ Medici and also his son Piero, in their camere. Regarding important meetings, in 1432 the executors of Ilarione de’ Bardi’s will appeared before a judge in the camera principale of Ilarione’s palace, now Palazzo Canigiani. Sixty years later, again in the Medici Palace, the French ambassador was allowed to eavesdrop from the anticamera upon a conversation between the Milanese ambassador and Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici . Not. antecos., 388, Andrea di Agnolo da Terranuova, fols. 113v–114r. . Isabelle Chabot, La dette des familles: Femmes, lignage et patrimoine à Florence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2011), 195–259. . Brenda Preyer, ”Planning for Visitors at Florentine Palaces,” Renaissance Studies 12 (1998): 357–74, at 362–63; idem,“The Florentine Casa,” in At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006), 34–49, at 44–45. . Bulst,“Uso e trasformazione,” 110–11. . Not. antecos., 8778, Niccolò Gentiluzzi, fol. 2r.

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in the latter’s camera. Frequently notaries came to these rooms to draw up legal acts in the presence of the principals and witnesses. For example, in 1469 the camera of Bongianni Gianfigliazzi in his Lungarno palace was the place where the document for partitioning the family’s older Torre Palace was written. In the same year, the camera of Lorenzo de’ Medici was the site of the sale to Francesco Nori of a large palace on via de’ Neri; in addition to the notary, four of the owners, four witnesses and Nori himself all were present.And in 1472  Jacopo Pazzi, arbitrating a dispute among his dead brother Piero’s six sons, pronounced his sentence “in the camera of the house of said arbitrator.” Finally, inventories allude to a wide variety of interests and activities in connection with camere: when he died in 1478, in addition to the standard bed and lettuccio, Francesco Nori’s contained more than forty books in Italian and French, several paintings, a device for loading a crossbow, a nautical map, a few pieces of cutlery, a table for writing, items of clothing and account books for construction and household expenses. Recognizing the wide use to which a man put his camera opens us to envisioning conflicts when the room also housed the wife. Did she have to go in and out depending on who came to talk to her husband? Where would she have gone? What about childbirth? For difficult pregnancies it seems impossible that she could have occupied the room for long periods of time. So far, we have no answers to these questions. Also, we should wonder about the setting for the ceremonial receiving of guests upon the birth of children. As  Jacqueline Musacchio has shown, visits of this type are well documented with regard to gifts, the provision of food and drink, even special lighting for the occasion, though the room itself is difficult to identify. Giovanni Buoninsegni, a week after the birth of his . Bartolomeo Cerretani, Storia fiorentina, ed. Giuliana Berti (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 188. . Brenda Preyer, “Around and in the Gianfigliazzi Palace in Florence: Developments on lungarno Corsini in the 15th and 16th Centuries,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 48 (2004): 55–104, at 61–62 and doc. 13 (Not. antecos., 21064, Nastagio Vespucci, inserto 4, fol. 204). . Not. antecos., 10187, Simone Grazzini, fols. 20r–20v. . “in camera domus dicti arbitri”: Not. antecos., 235, Giovanni Battista Albizzi, fols. 82v-86v. . Magistrato dei pupilli avanti il principato, 174, fols. 229v–230r.

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first child in 1471, referred to the “two lamps with three candles to be kept lit in front of the Virgin Mary on the day that the women came to see Lena (his wife) in childbirth.” Buoninsegni implies that there was just one such visit, and considering that much of his book up to this point was devoted to the outfitting of “la chamera mia,” the women probably went to the camera principale, though frequent intrusions like this would have posed problems for the man in this, his “residence.” And using the anticamera for these visits would not solve the problem, as reaching it would require the visiting women and the servants carrying the refreshments to troop first through the camera principale. Thus there certainly seems good reason for designing living spaces with separate quarters for the wife. My own point of departure for wondering about the wife’s room came when I was working on the Gianfigliazzi Palace, built about 1460, and I realized that it had, in addition to the main camera, another large room next to the sala (Fig. 2).Among the items consigned in 1511 to the wife of the palace’s owner, who had not died but had become demented, were a bed and four cassoni to be removed from the “camera di mezzo,” called in the inventory of 1485 the “camera della stufa,” which could only be this room. (While the term “camera di mezzo” refers to the room’s location, I have no explanation for the other name.) The room had doors opening to the sala, to the camera principale and to the hallway at the north and thence to the saletta or salotto (a room smaller than the sala, which was used for less formal eating and often was located nearer the kitchen). On the basis of the furniture and the location next to the sala and to the camera principale, I concluded that this space was designed as the room for the wife of the palace’s owner. Nevertheless, with regard to this palace and also to several others, we need always to consider an alternative use for such a room: as the camera of a brother of the principal owner, who would have been in the camera principale.Very probably that . “2 torchietti chon 3 chandele per tenere aciesi alla Vergine Maria el dì che lle donne vennono a vedere la Lena in parto” (Corporazioni soppressi dal governo francese, 102, 356, fol. 28 right), a reference from  Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1999), 185 n. 72. . For this material and for reference to the documents, see Preyer, “Gianfigliazzi Palace,” 80–81. For the important point regarding the door between the “camera della stufa/di mezzo” and the sala, see Doc. 23, fol. 4v in the listing for the sala:“una dipintura sopra l’u[s]ccio di chamera di mezzo.”

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Brenda Preyer • The ‘Wife’s Room’

Fig. 4. Plan of the primo piano of the Pazzi Palace (reconstruction); spaces labeled according to an inventory of 1626 (Caterina D’Amelio).

was not the case here — at least initially — as the palace, nominally started for a naturalized Sienese, was sold half-built to a Gianfigliazzi man who had no children, and whose own brother lived separately from him. But already in the inventory for the latter brother in 1485, made two months after his death, his wife — stepmother to the two heirs — had moved upstairs, to the “chamera di Madonna,” and it is possible that the room below now housed the younger son. Another example of a probable room for the wife can be seen on the plan of the Pazzi Palace, also built in the 1460s (Fig. 4).  Jacopo Pazzi and his wife Maddelena Serristori had no children, though  Jacopo had an natural daughter; and his brothers both were installed in their own houses. As at the Gianfigliazzi Palace, the room in question (14) was large and located adjacent to the man’s camera (16) and also to sala (13); thus its size and its relationship to other rooms gave it a weight similar to that of the all-important camera principale. And in both these cases, the room was closer to the salotto (12) and to . Preyer,“Gianfigliazzi Palace,” 63–66. . Brenda Preyer,“Non solo facciate: Dentro i palazzi Pazzi, Lenzi e Ridolfi Guidi,” Opus Incertum 4 (2008): 6–17, at 10–11. Figure 4 is labeled in accordance with the inventory of 1626 in Magistrato dei Pupilli del Principato, 783, fols. 1124r–1125r.

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Fig. 5. Plan of the eastern half of the primo piano of the palace of Alberto di Zanobi, later of Francesco Nori (Giuseppe Medici, 1766).

the kitchen. If the spaces in these two palaces were not designed for the wives when the palace was built, I do not know for whom they might have been intended. A different set of relationships among camera principale, sala, and possible wife’s room existed at the palace where Francesco Nori lived before he was murdered in the cathedral during the Pazzi Conspiracy (Fig. 5).This is a second example in which good plans can be coordinated with an inventory, which starts with an “anticamera nuova” and the “camera di detta anticamera in su la sala,” going then to the “antichamera della chamera vecchia” and the “chamera in sulla sala.” Some background is necessary in order to understand where these rooms were. In 1469 Nori bought a palace comprising the western two-thirds of the block, he acquired more property towards the east and he began remodeling on this side. The expanded palace was divided into two properties in 1489.The plan in Figure 5 shows only the eastern half with part of the sala, which belonged to the western portion and which lay in the middle of the facade with a total of four bays; the . Brenda Preyer, “The ‘chasa overo palagio’ of Alberto di Zanobi: A Florentine Palace of about 1400 and its later Remodeling,” The Art Bulletin 65 (1983): 387–401, at 398–99. For the plan, one of a beautiful set, see Gian Luigi Maffei, La casa fiorentina nella storia della città dalle origini all’Ottocento (Venice: Marsiglio, 1990), 130–34. The inventory is in Magistrato dei Pupilli avanti il principato, 174, fols. 229r–233v.

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first camera mentioned in the inventory is the room next to the sala labeled “anticamera,” while the new anticamera is the “camera” behind; (conventions in the naming of rooms changed in the two hundred years that separated the inventory from the plans.) The “chamera vecchia” lay in the half of the palace not shown on the plan, on the other side of the sala in the southwestern corner of the building. It is clear from their contents — men’s clothing, a great number of books, many in French, arms, building books (“quaderni della spesa della muraglia”) — that the western camera and anticamera were Francesco’s, so perhaps his wife, Costanza di Filippo Tornabuoni, was in the two other rooms. (Francesco had a young son who had recently been legitimized but no other children, although his wife was pregnant when he died; and no other family members lived on this floor.) The contents of the eastern rooms perhaps confirm the hypothesis: in the anticamera were “two beautiful painted chests” with a painted spalliera above them, and a quantity of men’s and women’s fine clothing, much of it Flemish or French in style.The level of luxury points to an important occupant, although nothing makes us sure of the gender. This arrangement has a fundamental difference from that at the Gianfigliazzi and Pazzi palaces, for the two camere were on opposite sides of the sala and thus not in direct communication; we shall see this to have been the case also in some other palaces. It is quite possible that when the early palace was built the camere were destined for the owner’s two sons — almost certainly in the original scheme of about 1400 the second one was not planned for the man’s wife. Two inventories of buildings for which I know of no plans also tell us of the existence of rooms for the wife of the deceased owner. In 1464, upon the death of messer Piero de’ Pazzi, an inventory was taken of items in his palace in town and his villa of Trebbio, near Sieci to the east of Florence.Though the inventory in some ways is puzzling, and sorting out which parts refer to which building presents problems, in two places there are mentions of a “camera di Madonna” (Fiametta di Bernardo Giugni, the widow and the mother of the eleven children who survived their father), followed by the relative anticamera. I have come to the conclusion that the first part of the inventory, which includes a “cassa degli arienti,” a “camera terrena di messer Benedetto” (Accolti, the chancellor of Florence), and furniture with intarsia decoration, refers to the palace at the corner of Borgo degli Albizzi and via Giraldi, just east of Piero’s brother Jacopo’s more

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Fig. 6. Plan of the primo piano of the Gondi Palace (Enrico Au Capitaine, 1867); spaces labeled according to the division of 1537. Photo Andrea Lensini. North is to the right.

famous palace on via del Proconsolo. The repetition of the wife’s rooms would refer to Trebbio, less richly furnished; in this part of the inventory are mentioned a “camera di sopra dove dorme uno fattore” and at the end, “una cappella” (Trebbio has a chapel). Unfortunately, the relationship of the wife’s room in the city palace to the sala and to the “camera di Messere” is not articulated. The first four rooms in the inventory of the house of another famous Florentine,Tommaso Portinari, who died in 1501, are listed in this logical sequence:Tommaso’s own camera, the anticamera that he shared with his wife, his wife’s camera, the sala nearby (“Im prima nella chamera della chasa della abitatione di decto Tommaso dove lui era consueto stare,” “Item nella antichameruza contra alla camera decta e di monna Maria,” “Item nella chamera di monna Maria sua donna in decta casa,” ”Item nella sala in decta casa”). As always, . The inventory (shared with me many years ago by Howard Saalman and Anthony Molho) and other acts regarding the estate are in Not. antecos., 388, Andrea di ser Agnolo da Terranuova, fols. 174r–198r (mod.). I think that fols. 174r– 176r, 192r–194v refer to the city palace, fols. 180r–181r to Trebbio. I am grateful to Amanda Lillie for discussing this inventory with me, although our views about it did not always coincide. . Not. antecos., 6094, Paolo Dieciaiuti, fols. 5r–6r. I learned of this inventory from Louis Alexander Waldman, “New Documents for Memling’s Portinari Portraits in

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Tommaso’s camera principale would have been next to the sala, and the order in which the rooms are listed in the inventory suggests that so too was Maria’s camera. After the two cases in which we have only inventories to indicate the existence of rooms for the wife, we can return to questions of the location and character of such rooms by examining the plans of the primo piano of two famous palaces that have “extra rooms.” A document laying out the division in 1537 of the Gondi Palace and surrounding properties among Giuliano Gondi’s grandsons has been used recently by Linda Pellecchia to clarify the plan (Fig. 6). Of special interest to us is the very precise language regarding some of the spaces to be included in one of the portions: “salotto posto sul primo piano di detto palazzo con la camera che confina con la sala grande,” referring to the salotto at the southwest corner of the palace and to the camera between that room and the sala at the front. The stipulation that the door between this camera and the sala be closed not only makes us certain of the location of the camera but is suggestive in light of the similarity with the plans of Gianfigliazzi and Pazzi palaces. Even though the room was some distance from the camera principale at the northeast corner, I would conclude that this camera at the Gondi Palace may have been designed for Giuliano’s wife, if she was still alive; alternatively, the room was for one of his many sons. Also at the Borgherini Palace, started by Salvi Borgherini a few years before he died in 1510 and continued by his elder son Pierfrancesco, both the main suite and the room that may have been the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Apollo 153 (2001): 28–33. In my opinion, the Portinari portaits were not in the volta, which signifies a basement in Florentine inventories; rather, the entry for them was added as an afterthought at the end of the inventory, just like the listing for Tommaso’s scrittoio that follows (fol. 7v). . Linda Pellecchia,“The Palace of Giuliano Gondi and Giuliano da Sangallo,” in Gondi: A Florentine Dynasty and its Palazzo, ed. Gabriele Morolli and Paolo Fiumi (Florence: Polistampa, 2013), 88–125, at 120–25.This beautiful book is published with Italian and English texts. I am grateful to Linda Pellecchia for providing me with the high-quality image for Figure 6. . Pellecchia,“Palace of Giuliano Gondi,” 122–23. . I have been unable to discover the date of death of Antonia di Lorenzo di Ranieri Scolari, whom Gondi married in 1460 and who was dead when he wrote his will in 1501.The palace was begun in 1489.

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Fig. 7. Plan of the primo piano of the Borgherini Palace in the sixteenth century (reconstruction, Giampaolo Trotta). North is to the bottom.

that of Margherita Acciaiuoli, Pierfrancesco’s wife, were adjacent to the sala, but they were not next to each other (Fig. 7). The suite, at the right on the plan, comprised a camera, anticamera and scrittoio, and it lay directly across from the other large room; the doorways to both camere line up and still have their impressive stone frames. In contrast to the reconstruction shown in Figure 7, the eastern camera was not planned to go with the long narrow space further east, which belonged to the small house next door that was bought only in 1517 and sometimes was used by the palace owners, sometimes was rented out. Also, the doorway shown in the south wall of the camera was cut through at a later date, and thus the room did not communicate directly with the southern part of the palace either. My question, as always, is: following one of the possible patterns for a wife’s room, is this such a one? Although Allan Braham suggested that the east room was Pierfrancesco’s famous “bedroom,” I disagree. Because it is not part of the palace’s one proper suite, I would conclude that it . Observation by Giampaolo Trotta in Gli antichi chiassi tra Ponte Vecchio e Santa Trinita: Storia del rione dei Santi Apostoli, dai primi insediamenti romani alle ricostruzioni postbelliche (Florence: Messaggerie Toscane, 1992), 167. . In contrast to the palace proper there is no vaulting under the narrow space. See the plans in Trotta, Antichi chiassi, 175. . Allan Braham,“The Bed of Pierfrancesco Borgherini,” The Burlington Magazine 121 (1979): 754–65.

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Brenda Preyer • The ‘Wife’s Room’

Fig. 8. Plan of the primo piano of the Corsi-Horne Palace (Fani Revithiadu).

may have been Margherita’s room. If we choose to believe Vasari’s report of her statement that the bed in Pierfrancesco’s camera was the “letto delle mie nozze,” Salvi may have intended the eastern room for his younger son, Giovanni, who perhaps even lived there until in 1529 he moved with his wife to the former house of Francesco Sassetti. In this case, Margherita would have started to use the room not as a young bride in about 1515, but some fourteen years later. A final example, the Palazzo Corsi-Horne (c.1500), has many anomalies in its plan due to the small site and the desire of the builder nevertheless to have a house with grand proportions (Fig. 8). But in the light of what we have seen so far, the twin camere on the piano nobile are intriguing. Claudio Paolini suggested in 1994 that the north camera was probably for the wife of the owner, a possibility that I did not consider in my book about the palace published the year before. . Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), 6:262– 63. In 2006 I proposed a reconstruction of the paintings in the corner room (Preyer, “Florentine casa,” 42–44), an effort of which Robert La France was somewhat skeptical: Robert G. La France, Bachiacca: Artist of the Medici Court (Florence: Olschki, 2008), 142–43. . Claudio Paolini, Itinerari nella casa fiorentina del rinascimento, ed. Elisabetta Nardinocchi (Florence: Fondazione Herbert P. Horne, 1994), 29–31; Brenda Preyer,

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Fig. 9. Plan of the primo piano of the Capponi-Barocchi Palace in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (reconstruction) (Caterina D’Amelio). (The salotto in the inventory of 1600 was the “camera a mezzo l’andito della Signora,” and its anticamera was the “anticamera della Signora.”)

Although Paolini proposed that Luigi Corsi and his wife went from one room to the other through the narrow space on the east that held toilets, this seems unlikely in the extreme, and as at Nori’s palace, and at the Gondi and the Borgherini palaces, movement could have been through the sala. Alternatively, if perchance Horne was mistaken in dating to different points in the eighteenth century, the doorways of which he found traces in the dividing wall, one of these may have been a refashioned original doorway between the two rooms. While of course in the later sixteenth century the ducal palaces in Florence had separate suites for the duke and duchess, the situation for other houses is not clear due to a lack of detailed research on the interiors of these buildings. However, two inventories known to me indicate that instances of separate suites for husband and wife can be found. In 1568, the inventory of the assets of the rebel Luigi di Messer Pandolfo Della Stufa lists items in the rooms of the Della Stufa Palace that had belonged to his father: the sala, then the camera of Luigi’s mother and a full set of attendant spaces (“camera di Madonna Lena in su detta sala,”“anticamera di detta camera,”“scrittoi[o] della anticamera,”“soffitta sopra la suddetta anticamera”). All this was matched by the husband’s rooms (“camera sulla sala di Messer Pandolfo,” “[anti] camera al lato a detta camera,” “soffitta sopra detta anticamera,” “terrazo di Il palazzo Corsi-Horne: Dal Diario di Restauro di H.P. Horne (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1993). . For Horne’s comments about these doorways, see Preyer, Palazzo Corsi-Horne, 124–25.

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detta soffitta”). That Monna Lena’s camera communicated directly with the sala is testified to by the listing of the last item in the latter room,“Un crocifisso sopra l’uscio di camera di Madonna Lena.” The second case involves the Capponi-Barocchi Palace, formerly known as Palazzo Coverelli (Fig. 9). Here in 1600 the owner, recently deceased, had lived in the camera principale, next to the sala, and in its anticamera, while his wife had her own suite nearby, improvised in a space that seems in the fifteenth century to have served as the salotto. (The plan of this palace is strange due to the long narrow site and the origins of the palace in the trecento, with a major remodeling in the quattrocento.) In most of our examples of possible rooms for the wife, a close relationship to three other rooms seems to have been important, though in only a few buildings was the ideal achieved. A first priority, apparently, was that the room be, like the camera principale, adjacent to the sala. And most of the rooms also seem closer to the salotto and the kitchen than was the man’s room. Finally, if possible, the wife’s room communicated with that of the husband, just as Alberti recommended.There are interesting implications for the possible existence of the wife’s room.While I do not know of changes in social practices to which the change in planning can be attributed, the size together with the location would seem in themselves to be making a statement that the man and his wife had similar importance in the home; indeed, most marriages were between people of families of similar social status (though with all the variables of age, wealth, political status and dowry). I hope that specialists in disciplines other . Magistrato dei Pupilli del principato, 2709, cc. 35v–38. An abbreviated transcription of the inventory has been published in Giuseppina Carla Romby, L’arte dell’abitare nelle città toscane: Magnificenza, decoro, ornamento (secolo XVI) (Florence: Edifir, 2013), 57, 108–13. The house in question was not the trecento Della Stufa Palace, but its extension towards via Ginori. . These were very grand people; Pandolfo Della Stufa was close to Catherine de’ Medici, and during a diplomatic and political career of ups and downs, he served frequently as an ambassador throughout Europe. See the entry by Vanna Arrighi in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 37 (1989): www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pandolfodella-stufa_(Dizionario biografico). . See Brenda Preyer, Palazzo Capponi-Barocchi: From the Agli to the Barocchi through Six Centuries (Florence: S.P.E.S. Studio Per Edizioni Scelte, 2014), 80–82.The inventory calls the wife’s rooms “camera a mezzo l’andito della Signora” and “anticamera della Signora.”

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than mine will work with the new material that I have presented, coordinating it with data permitting a rounding-out of the picture. For instance, I would imagine that the new room would be the place from which the woman would manage the household, though information is difficult to recover. Even though I have no data on the actions that she performed in that room, the wife’s room therefore can be thought in some respects to symbolize the standing of the wife. As a coda to this article three cases demonstrate the competence of women and the respect they commanded and can suggest that a wife may well have had important work to do and therefore that she needed appropriate quarters. Often in his will a man named his wife, if she was no longer marriageable, as a principal guardian of their young children, and he gave her his camera with all its accoutrements.Thus after her husband’s death the woman was much involved with handling the estate, sometimes for decades. I find it suggestive that she was deputized to do this from the same room in which her husband had been based, and like the existence of the wife’s room this situation can be understood to say something about the place of the wife in the family. Isabelle Chabot, referring mainly to the period before 1450, sees the practice as geared primarily towards retaining the wife’s dowry. But in 1488 Niccolò di Giovanni Capponi’s legacy of the use of his camera and everything in it to his wife of fifty years seems to me a loving gesture towards a trusted partner; it was also a way of substituting himself with a second authoritative figure in the family, operating from the same space as had he, although their four sons were all married and living in the palace, and in no need of a guardian. Capponi’s will contained the standard stipulation that his wife not reclaim her dowry, but it provided generously for her. Even without a will that gives the camera principale to the wife, there are cases in which it is clear that a widow was managing family affairs while living in the camera principale. So with Lorenza Ginori (b.1476), who had been married to Paolo di Pandofo di Giovanni . For comments about this topic, see Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, “Housework,” in At Home in Renaissance Italy, 153–63. . Chabot, Dette, 274–82. I am grateful to Isabelle Chabot for discussing this subject with me. . Preyer, Palazzo Capponi-Barocchi, 102–9.

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Rucellai, and who stayed after his death in 1509 in the Rucellai Palace, with the care of numerous children. Pandolfo, the oldest, became head of this branch of the family, and his mother remained with him in the palace.When Pandolfo died in 1542, Lorenza again took over, caring for his two children until her own death in 1548. In that year the inventory of the palace shows that Lorenza was living in the main camera, as evidenced by various items in the room that can be identified with her (for example, a Madonna with the coats of arms of the Rucellai and the Ginori, cassoni with same arms, clothing). Lorenza probably also used a nearby room as a study, for in it were some of her account books. This room at the corner of the palace, where the space now is occupied by a much later staircase, has always puzzled me, and now I wonder whether it was an early example of a wife’s room, as it opened onto the sala. While few data for the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries have emerged about writing and accounting activities on the part of women, an exception is the will of Lorenzo di Anfrione Lenzi, from 1509, which stipulates that his wife, a daughter of Tommaso Soderini, should manage his affairs as she had done heretofore. The will continues with details about the reliability of her accounting procedures: “And because said testator asserted and affirmed said Monna Maria his wife to have administered and handled his many affairs and businesses, and to have taken in the harvests of the farms, and to have done and managed much else for said testator, and always to have given to him the full calculation and correct accounting, and to have returned to him any remaining funds, in general said testator directs Monna Maria also in the future to be obliged to administer his affairs and businesses and manage them on her own. Especially because he wants to leave the said Monna Maria protected and secure, by virtue of the present legacy he exempts her from rendering accounts of the aforesaid. Furthermore, he leaves to her judgment everything that she will administrate in the future and that will pass through her hands of the possessions of said testator, up to the . Magistrato dei Pupilli del principato, 2649, fols. 403r–404r mod. . “Uno libro di ricordi di monna Lorenza senza segnio, comincia l’anno 1514 et finisce l’anno 1529; uno quadernuccio di ricolta di monna Lorenza; uno libro di monna Lorenza cominciato l’anno 1509 e finito 1528 di paghi et melioramenti” (Ibid., fol. 398r mod.).

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day of his death.” Maria Soderini’s actions as described by Lenzi are in accord with the statement about “how much women’s position had changed since the fifteenth century,” made by Tim Carter and Richard Goldthwaite in their recent book about the musician  Jacopo Peri (d.1633); the authors’ further comments about Alessandra Fortini, Peri’s widow, suggest that they believe her to have been a capable administrator of the estate. Following the proposal that a wife’s room may have been introduced into Florentine palaces in the middle years of the fifteenth century, my assumption is that the practice continued in later years, presumably with increased numbers of cases. In reflecting on possible reasons for this change, we have been led to think about what some of the woman’s activities in that room might have been. Even when her husband was still alive, a woman probably took on a large part of the running of the household, and after his death she sometimes had full responsibility. Thus we have been led from the rooms in which women lived to the question of the competence of women in other matters. •

. “Et quia dictus testator asseruit et affirmavit dictam dominam Mariam eius uxoram predictam administrasse et fecisse plura eius facta et negotia et ricollectas prediorum recepisse et alia multa fecisse et gessisse pro dicto testatore et semper eidem testatori integram rationem et bonum computum reddidisse et reliqua restituisse, cumque dictus testator intendet etiam dictam dominam Mariam in futurum administrare debere facta et negotia dicti testatoris et de ea plurimum considere, propterea maxime volens reddere cautam et securam dictam dominam Mariam virtute presentis legati, liberavit ipsam dominam Mariam a redditione rationis administrationis sue predicte facta et fienda. Ac etiam remisit eidem domine Marie omne id totum et quidquid in futurum administrabit et ad eius manus perveniet de bonis et substantia dicti testatoris husque in diem mortis sue” (ASF, Not. antecos., 21073, Antonio di Anastagio Vespucci, fol. 86. I thank Louis Waldman for referring me to this will, and Robert Black and Margaret Haines for helping with the translation.) . Tim Carter and Richard Goldthwaite, Orpheus in the Marketplace:  Jacopo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 340–44.

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Locating Power: Women in the Urban Fabric of Sixteenth-Century Rome Katherine A. McIver Architectural patronage has always been understood to be a powerful tool for shaping both the physical and cultural environment, allowing the patron an opportunity for self-fashioning and the expression of public ideology. As Carolyn Valone has noted,“In Rome both women and men were aware of this tradition, and aristocratic matrons for more than 1500 years used their own money to adorn the city with buildings which spoke about the issues that concerned them.” It was common practice for women with the financial means to commission religious or charitable structures: chapels, churches, convents, hospitals, housing for the poor or prostitutes. As well, women not only constructed or reconstructed palaces or less ostentatious residences, they built country houses and villas, sometimes working in conjunction with their brothers or sons; still others took on the male model and built private residences that spoke of family, power and prestige. Women throughout Italy were involved in a variety of artistic and architectural enterprises (both secular and religious) and invested their money in farms, houses and other property (for example, Laura Pallavicina in Parma, Isabella d’Este in Mantua, Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara, Camilla Peretti in Rome, Agnesina Badeor-Giustinian in Venice). The situation in Rome, however, was quite different due in . When I began working on women patrons in Parma in the mid-1990s and presenting my findings at various conference, it was Carolyn Valone who constantly encouraged me to keep on digging, even when others were skeptical of my work – she was my champion, always cheering me on. Conversation on her terrace in Rome over a glass of wine inspired me, her generosity beyond anything I imagined. My work would never have taken the form it has without her and this particular article (and the one noted in footnote 3) truly show the impact of her work, our conversation and her sharing of knowledge and archival sources. . Carolyn Valone, “Architecture as a Public Voice for Women in Sixteenth Century Rome,” Renaissance Studies 15.3 (September 2001): 301–27, at 301. . Katherine A. McIver, “An Invisible Enterprise: Women and Domestic Architecture in Early Modern Italy,” in Wives,Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage, ed. Katherine A. McIver (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012): 159–77 where she discusses women as patrons of architecture and the ownership of real estate throughout Italy; idem, Women, Art and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580: Negotiating Power (Aldershot: Ashgate,

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part to the influx of the clergy into the city, and it attracted a greater number of women (as well as men) than other cities, with perhaps the exception of Venice. Not only were there more men than women in Rome, but the new arrivals – including families connected to newly appointed cardinals, new brides and other women, as well as artisans and workers – had to establish themselves and their families within the social network of Rome.Women in Rome, at almost all levels, had the power and ability to act as art patrons and to use their “voices” to speak openly about family, identity, religion or whatever concerned them – all they really needed was money. Even successful Roman courtesans, like the famous Fiammetta (mistress of Cesare Borgia), could use their financial resources to commission art and architecture and to make personal statements just as did well-born women, like Portia Anguillara-Cesi. Fiammetta acquired property, wealth and a burial chapel in one of Rome’s most visible and highly venerated churches, Sant’ Agostino, and decorated it just as other pious, Roman women would have done. Women like Camilla Peretti (sister of Pope Sixtus V) and Olimpia Pamphili used their architectural commissions to promote and strengthen family identity. This paper seeks to situate woman patrons of architecture into the larger context of artistic patronage in Rome, and to consider how 2006); Diane Ghirardo,“Lucrezia Borgia as Entrepreneur,” Renaissance Quarterly 61.1 (Spring 2008): 53–87; idem,“Lucrezia Borgia’s Palace in Renaissance Ferrara,”  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64.4 (December 2005): 474–97; Isabella d’Este: La Prima Donna del Rinascimento, ed. Daniele Bini (Modena: Il Bulino, 2001); and Blake de Maria, Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2010). . See Carolyn Valone,“Mothers and Sons:Two Paintings for San Bonaventura in Early Modern Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 53.1 (Spring 2000): 108–31. . See Cynthia Stollhans’s essay in this volume: “The Pious Act of an Impious Woman:The Courtesan Fiammetta as Art Patron in Renaissance Rome,” 231–48. . Kimberly L. Dennis, “Re-Constructing the Counter-Reformation: Women and Architectural Patrons in Rome and the Case of Camilla Peritti,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2005); idem,“Recovering the Villa Montalto and the Patronage of Camilla Peretti,” in Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy, 55–73; idem, “Camilla Peretti, Sixtus V, and the Construction of Peretti Family Identity in Counter-Reformation Rome,” Sixteenth Century Journal 63.1 (Spring 2012): 71–101; and her essay in this volume:“A Palace Built by a Princess? Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphili and the Construction of the Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona,” 43–64.

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women could and did operate successfully within the city’s urban fabric. It may read as more of a list, but this is meant to show just what women in Rome could do in terms of architecture. In addition to primary-source materials, an overview of the scholarship will help to suggest that, while women all over Italy were active as patrons of art and architecture, Rome provided unique opportunities for women to express themselves and to be recognized as powerful forces in their own right. Through the patronage of architecture, prominent women could assert their place in Roman social hierarchy, while at the same time, glorify their family name. In sixteenth-century Rome, as Carolyn Valone has shown, aristocratic women did not lose legal access to her dowry or inheritance upon marriage; moreover, protection, status, and wealth could be inherited from either the maternal or paternal line, which is one reason why the careful construction of marriage alliances was so important. Carolyn Valone asks, “Were matrons as patrons of architecture recognized in early modern Rome?” Yes, as printed sources and visual images indicate, women were widely acknowledged as patrons in the period, and their patronage was often seen as part of a continuum that stretched back to the heroic days of the early Roman church. The writers and publishers of late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury guidebooks thought that the mention of matrons as patrons was both suitable and useful. At this time Rome was a city in which women patrons flourished and were widely recognized, not usually the case elsewhere in Italy. In fact, women in Rome frequently performed as men, whether it was having an extramarital affair or owning/building their own palace. Ricciarda Malaspina, marchesa of Massa and Carrara, is a primary example; she not only bought a palace just off the Piazza Navona (1530s), but had an ongoing affair with her husband Lorenzo Cibo’s brother Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo. Malaspina denounced her first-born son (by Lorenzo) in favor of the cardinal’s son, naming him her heir. Did the choice of location of her palace speak of her power? Does its location reflect her desire to make her presence . Valone,“Architecture as a Public Voice,” 309; and idem,“Mothers and Sons,” 117. . Carolyn Valone, “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560– 1630,” The Art Bulletin 76.1 (March 1994): 129–46, at 141. . Ibid.

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known in Rome? Not all women were notorious, Costanza Farnese, the daughter of Pope Paul III, bought and renovated her own palace. Costanza established herself in the city as independent of both father and son, whose palaces were nearby. She chose to stay near her family and thus, more traditionally, situated herself in the family neighborhood. On the other hand, Maddalena Strozzi Anguillara, granddaughter of Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and widow of Flaminio Anguillara of Stabia, was a noblewoman, widow and the head of her household, without a son, but with two daughters. She seemingly chose to establish herself away from her relatives, who lived on the Esquiline Hill. Maddalena was even more active in the real estate market in Rome than either Ricciarda or Costanza. Not only did she own property with a house adjacent to the convent of Sta. Lucia in Selci in the 1560s, but as an astute business woman she also purchased multiple properties around Campo Marzio to establish not just a suburban villa but also a working farm. Other women came to Rome to do what they could not in their native cities; for example, Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici, brought up at the court in Naples, was responsible for the construction of the Palazzo Medici-Lante — something she could not have done in Florence. Other upper-class Roman women acted similarly, including Sigismonda Theobaldi and Ippolita da Maddalena. Carolyn Valone and Marilyn Dunn, through their pioneering work, established clear patterns of neglect in regards to the study of woman’s patronage of art and architecture in early modern Rome. . Natalie Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 92. . In addition to the works of Carolyn Valone cited throughout this essay see: Carolyn Valone, “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” in Beyond Isabella, Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl Reiss and David Wilkins (Kirkville, MO:Truman State University Press, 2001), 317– 35. For Marilyn Dunn, see:“Invisibilia per visibilia: Roman Nuns, Art Patronage, and the Construction of Identity,” in Wives,Widows, Mistresses and Nuns in Early Modern Italy, 181–205; idem,“Spaces Shaped for Spiritual Perfection: Convent Architecture and Nuns in Early Modern Rome,” in Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Helen Hills (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 151–76; idem,“Piety and Agency: Patronage at the Convent of S. Lucia in Selci,” Aurora 1 (2000): 29–59; idem,“Spiritual Philanthropists:Women as Convent Patrons in Seicento Rome,” in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1997), 154–88; idem,“Piety and Patronage in Seicento Rome:Two

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Through her work on nuns from aristocratic families Marilyn Dunn has demonstrated that women worked individually and collectively to found, construct and decorate convents and churches affiliated with the Catholic reform movement. Through their commissions, these women spoke publicly about family, politics and religion from behind convent walls. Carolyn Valone has documented evidence of at least fifty women who chose architecture, “that most visible, expensive and theoretically most permanent form of art, to embody their values, expectations, and motives.…” They built hospitals, colleges, churches, monasteries and convents — and a few, their own palaces — modeling themselves on their predecessors from early Christian and medieval times, underscoring the rich continuity of a tradition well know in Rome. One such model was Santa Paola Romana, known for her piety, her support of  Jerome’s reforms and her role as patron of architecture. In a letter,  Jerome described the convent Paola had built in Bethlehem for herself and her women, as well as the neighboring monastery that she had built for  Jerome. A late sixteenth-century drawing (Paola,  Jerome, and the Building of the Monastery, Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Uffizi, 1030 F) by Lodovico Cigoli shows Paola’s role as architectural patron. Paola is shown seated in the foreground; in front of her the architect explains his ideas to her while  Jerome, in the middle ground, points to the plan and gestures toward the actual building. Paola, along with other female early Christian saints, served as role models for women in early modern Rome who built both religious and secular architecture. One of those wealthy women to follow the ancient models was Portia dell’ Anguillara Cesi, whose voice is heard through an altarpiece she commissioned from Scipione Pulzone of the Immaculate Noblewomen and their Convents,” The Art Bulletin 76.4 (December 1994): 664–63; and idem,“Nuns as Patrons:The Decoration of S. Maria al Collegio Romano,” The Art Bulletin 70.3 (September 1988): 451–61. . The patronage of religious women will not be covered in this paper; however, see Marilyn Dunn’s essay in this volume, 127–52. . Carolyn Valone, “Roman Matrons as Patrons: Various Views of the Cloistered Wall,” in The Crannied Wall:Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig A. Monson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 49–72, at 49. . Ibid, 50. . Valone,“Women on the Quirinal Hill,” 143. . Ibid.

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Conception (early 1580s) for her chapel in the modest Capuchin church of San Bonaventura. More importantly, for this paper, is Portia’s renovation of her family palace. As the duchess of Cere, Portia was a great heiress and the last of her father’s line of the Orsini of Anguillara. Because there were no male heirs to inherit from her father, Giampaolo da Cere, Portia received all his lands. Her first marriage produced a daughter, Olimpia Orsini in 1562; with the death of her first husband, Portia married Paolo Emilio Cesi (1572), who was credited with her commissions. She brought to this marriage a palace given to her by her uncle, Lelio da Cere located between the Trevi Fountain and Sta. Maria in Via. Portia spent thousands of her own scudi to renovate the building to please her husband, who circulated the idea that he paid for it. In 1582, Portia bought the adjoining palace so that she could enlarge her own. In her will, Portia defended herself against the numerous lies and misdeeds of her husband, and widows could act independently and use their wealth on any manner of architectural projects; moreover, women from other Italian cities were drawn to Rome, perhaps, because it offered them greater freedom. As the widow of Piero de’ Medici (d.1503), Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici (1472–1520) chose to reside in Rome where she acquired the Palazzo Medici (now Palazzo Madama) from her brother-in-law Giuliano and her son Lorenzo for 11,000 ducats. Alfonsina was brought up at the court of Naples; her mother, the noble and wealthy widow Caterina Sanseverina, educated her daughter in court tradition. Like other widows, Alfonsina took an active role in promoting the political fortunes of her son Lorenzo. Alfonsina was not satisfied with the location of her palace in the rione of Sant’ Eustachio and, after the elevation of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici to Pope Leo X in 1513, she actively sought a new residence closer to the Vatican, renting out part of the Palazzo Madama. By May of 1514, Alfonsina began acquiring property for the construction of a new palazzo. As the year progressed into 1515, she bought up new houses on the . See Valone, “Mothers and Sons,” 112–26 for a detailed discussion of this commission. . Ibid. Carolyn Valone has untangled the web of documents to prove that Portia was the commissioner of all the works for which her husband took credit. 19. Sheryl Reiss, “Widows, Mothers, Patrons of Art: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici,” in Beyond Isabella, 129–30.

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adjoining property.The new palazzo (known as the Palazzo MediciLante) was begun in 1516.The capitals are decorated with her coat of arms — her scudo accollato (impaled coat of arms) showing the Medici palle on the left and the Orsini rose and chevrons on the right, thus asserting her natal as well as marital identity. The palazzo is considered to reflect the more conservative Florentine tradition, rather than the Roman antiquarian style. Like other women building in Rome, Alfonsina wanted to make it clear that this was her house as well as to establish her dynastic identity. Alfonsina’s granddaughter, Maddalena Strozzi Anguillara, widow of Flaminio Anguillara (d.1560) of Stabia and the head of her household was also active as a patron of architecture. Maddalena arranged prestigious marriages for both daughters: her eldest daughter Clarice (d.1591) married Sciarra Colonna of Palestrina in 1561 and her younger daughter Lucrezia (d.1617) married twice: first in 1562, Giordano Orsini (d.1569) and then in 1572, Bernardino Savelli (d.1590), duke of Castel Gandolfo. Lucrezia was often in financial distress and was assisted by her mother; moreover, issues frequently arose concerning Lucrezia’s children by Giordano Orsini — and it was Maddalena who resolved them. She maintained a relationship with the Strozzi of Florence and was influential within the Roman community. Maddalena Strozzi chose to establish herself, seemingly away from her relatives and was active in the real-estate market in Rome. In . Ibid. As Sheryl Reiss has shown (133–36), Alfonsina was an active collector and supporter of artists; as well, she was involved in other architectural projects in Florence and Tuscany. . Maddalena’s mother was Clarice, daughter of Piero de’ Medici and her father was Giambattista, called Filippo, Strozzi (1448–1538). . Letters and other documents can be found in Archivio di Stato, Rome (hereafter, ASR), Trenta notai capitolino, ufficio 4, bb. 45, 62; Congregazione religiose feminile Cistercensi, Sta. Susanna, bb. 4442, 4443, 4444. . Her mother-in-law, Lucrezia Orsini Anguillara, was also a property owner as was Maddalena’s own daughter Lucrezia Anguillara Savelli (ASR,Trenta notai capitolino, ufficio 4, bb. 45, 62; Congregazione religiose feminile Cistercensi, Sta. Susanna, bb. 4442, 4443, 4444). Indeed, several of Maddalena’s female relatives were active as property owners, managers and builders: for example, her paternal great grandmother, Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, and her grandmother, Selvaggia Gianfigliazzi Strozzi. See Amanda Lille, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth-Century: An Architectural and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9, 15.

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the mid-1560s, Maddalena purchased extensive property adjacent to the convent of Sta. Lucia in Selci, which included the house in which she lived for the next thirty years. Its large, walled garden with fruit trees bordered the monastery of San Marino nella Monte and the Strada San Pietro in Vincoli. The property was renovated on numerous occasions. Ultimately, Maddalena sold the property to the nuns and moved into the convent of Sta. Susanna on the Quirinal Hill, where she died in 1596; the documents suggest that the nuns at Sta. Lucia pressured Maddalena to sell them her property so that eventually they could expand the convent; although she agreed, Maddalena held out until she was old and very ill. It is unclear as to why Maddalena’s chose to buy property adjacent to Sta. Lucia in Selci, rather than nearer that of her nephew, Leone Strozzi, who lived some distance away on the Esquiline Hill — his house had been Maddalena’s deceased brother Roberto Strozzi’s (d.1566) home. Maddalena may simply have found suitable property in the area available for purchase, so that her motives were neither dynastic nor involved with her position within her family. This was not her only real-estate purchase; during the same period, Maddalena purchased multiple properties around Campo Marzio and established a suburban villa to which we will return momentarily. She built a house on this property and it was referred to as “il Palazzetto.” Moreover, Maddalena was responsible for renovations at the Castello at Stabia (now Faleria) that included a new façade, a grand, covered loggia and other improvements. In the 1560s, Maddalena Strozzi Anguillara purchased multiple properties around Campo Marzio to establish not just a suburban villa, but a working farm. All combined, the property included a house, more housing for tenant farmers, outbuildings, a vigna, gardens, meadows and reed thickets.Active in the management of her farm, Maddalena, . ASR,Trenta notai capitolino, ufficio 4, bb. 45, 62; Congregazione religiose feminile Cistercensi, Sta. Susanna, bb. 4442, 4443. . ASR, Congregazione religiose feminile Cistercensi, Sta. Susanna, b. 4444. . G. Agnensi, Storia di Stabbia e dei suoi castelli (Faleria, n.p., 1980). . ASR, Congregazione religiose feminile Cistercensi, Sta. Susana, bb. 4443, 4444. Maddalena also managed the farms that she inherited. Maddalena’s sister-in-law, Maddalena de’ Medici (Roberto Strozzi’s wife) had at least one income-producing farm that produced grain in Lunghezza, outside Rome (ASR, b. 1539, ff 462r-v, 467v).

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like other women, considered what crops were cultivated, how much would be planted and to whom they would be sold. Maddalena, for example, looked into the prospect of growing wheat and then invested in its production, which proved to be quite a lucrative enterprise for her. Not only did she invest in wheat, but also in orzo, fruit and grapes to make wine. Maddalena kept extensive account books attesting to her hands-on approach to the management of her property as well. She was an entrepreneur who invested her funds in money making opportunities. Her purchasing strategy was similar to that of Camilla Peretti, sister of Pope Sixtus V. As Kimberly Dennis has shown, in the 1570s Camilla collaborated with her brother in the development of the Villa Montalto on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, purchasing numerous pieces of property. Unlike Maddalena’s suburban villa, the Villa Montalto was not a working farm; rather it was a noble estate and family compound. Since her properties went to Sta. Lucia in Selci after her death, Maddalena’s motivation cannot be seen as dynastic; her youngest daughter, Lucrezia, outlived her and was well-established in her own right. Maddalena was an astute business woman, an entrepreneur and a pious widow with two daughters and no sons. Her motivations were less about dynasty and more about herself, an independent and self-assured Roman matron. As well, she collaborated with her daughter, Lucrezia, helping her buy a house; and she used part of the farm property as collateral for Lucrezia’s dowry for her second marriage to Bernardino Savelli (d.1590). Maddalena came from a long line of female relatives who acted similarly, including her paternal grandmother and great grandmother. Maddalena’s motives for her purchases were neither dynastic nor related to her social status; both of her daughters were well placed in Roman society. Maddalena was an astute business woman, an entrepreneur with a pious nature, who chose to live separately away from her relatives and on her own. Not all women patrons of architecture were of the upper echelon of Roman society. Ippolita da Maddalena, referred to in the documents as “Magnifica Hippolita Maddalena Romana,” was the daughter of Giuliano di Giuliano Maddalena and Faustina  Jacovacci and . Her account books and other documents can be found in ASR, Congregazione religiose feminile Cistercensi, Sta. Susana, bb. 4443, 4444. . Dennis,“Re-Constructing the Counter-Reformation.”

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the widow of Giambattista Mellini. She had one daughter, Giulia for whom she arranged a marriage into the Capodiferro family. Ippolita’s name is frequently linked to that of Maddalena Strozzi and mutual property dealings during the late 1550s and throughout the 1560s. In fact, Ippolita owned a house very close to Maddalena’s adjacent to Sta. Lucia in Selci and likely sold to Maddalena pieces of property bordering the monastery of San Marino nella Monte. Ippolita herself lived in a house in the rione Parione which she renovated; as well, like so many women, she owned a farm that produced a small income for her. Her final wish was to be buried next to her husband and six children in the Mellini Chapel in Sta. Maria del Popolo, and she left funds for its renovation and decoration. Like Ippolita, Sigismonda Theobaldi, widow of Bruno Capofucchi, was not of the highest born and was generally referred to in documents as “Nobile e Honesta Sigismonda Theobaldi,” unlike Maddalena Strozzi who was referred to as “Illustrissima e Nobile Donna,” suggesting a higher or more esteemed standing in Roman society. However, the two women were active in real estate. Sigismonda arranged a dowry for her daughter, Lucrezia, and a marriage for her son, Severino. She owned and maintained a house in the rione Pigna not far from Sta. Maria sopra Minerva. As early as 1546, she was buying up property in Prati for a farm and by 1560s was renovating a house on the property. During the 1560s this farm was producing enough grain to fund Lucrezia’s dowry, and Sigimonda continued to renovate various buildings on the property. At the same time, she bought up more land near the monastery of SS. Giovanni e Paolo for a vigna with a “Palazzo Magna” and, like at the Prati property, she renovated the buildings and improved the land around it, providing herself with further income. Unlike Maddalena Strozzi, we do not have Sigismonda’s account books, nor are the details related to the various properties as specific . ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, b. 1517, ff. 88r-v; b.1527, ff. 37r-42v; b. 1529, ff. 656r, 699r-70r; b. 1531, ff. 525r-26v. . ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino., b. 1529, ff. 730v-732r, 25 June 1568. . ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, b. 1507, ff. 42r-v, 61r-v, 84r-91, 145r-46v, 163v-167r, 172v; b. 1508, ff. 287r-v; b. 1509, ff. 320r-v, 330v-331v; b1511, ff. 131r-v; b. 1513 ff. 50r-53v, bb. 1514, 1515. . ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, b. 1521, ff. 20r-27r, 50 r-v; 204r-205v, 652r-v, 785v . ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, b. 1513, ff. 54r-58; bb. 1514, 1515, 1519, ff. 51, 96.

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as those for Maddalena — for example, there are no descriptions to tell us whether the vigna had gardens or was surrounded by a wall as in Maddalena’s property. But to a greater extent than for Ippolita da Maddalena, it is clear that Sigismonda was actively involved with real estate and with making a place for herself and her family in Rome. Finally, she endowed a chapel, the Cappella della Trinità in Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, and made arrangements for her own tomb. Other aristocratic women worked with their brothers or sons in the commissioning of architecture, often in an effort to elevate the family’s position in Rome. Camilla Peretti (1519–1605) was a widow with two children, Francesco (d.1582) and Maria Felice (dates unknown) and had her own money. Soon after her husband’s death, Camilla moved her family to Rome, where she collaborated with her younger brother, Felice (Pope Sixtus V; 1525–90, pope 1585–90), in the development of the Villa Montalto (1576–88) on the Esquiline Hill, purchasing numerous pieces of property. The villa sat on 160 acres (65 hectares) and consisted of two palaces, other residences, gardens, orchards, vineyards and service buildings. It was the first largescale noble family villa inside Rome’s city walls. Unlike most papal families, the Peretti were of humble origins, coming from the town of Montalto in the Marche, and Camilla was committed to establishing an impressive image for her family. Her interest in architectural and urban patronage began in 1576 with the purchase of a parcel of land, a vigna, on the Esquiline Hill near the church of Sta. Maria Maggiore. Along with her brother, over . ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, b. 1512, ff. 57v–59v.The chapel is the second on the right as you enter the church and is now called the Cappella Colonna.The chapel was built in the mid-fifteenth century by Cardinal Ubaldo Mezzacavalli and later obtained by the Theobaldi. It was granted to the Colonna and Sciarra families, and the current decoration dates from the 1670s. Interestingly, the Capodiferro and Maddaleni families also had a chapel in this church, to the left of Fra Angelico’s tomb; it was built in the late fourteenth–early fifteenth centuries and later became the Frangipane Chapel through marriage. Bernarda Capodiferro, another land owner of the not-so-noble class, may have been buried here: she owned a palazzo, a casa, a vigna and a farm (ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, b. 313, ff. 51r–55v). . Dennis, “Recovering the Villa Montalto,” 55–73; and idem, “Camilla Peretti,” 71–101. Camilla was also active as a patron of religious art and architecture, see as well, Dennis, dissertation, note 5. . For a survey of Camilla’s land acquisitions, see Dennis, “Recovering the Villa Montalto,” 63–64.

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the course of twelve years (1576–88), Camilla accumulated extensive land holdings there — this was to be the family homestead. Over the course of the next decade, the site became a sprawling compound surrounded by a high wall; inside, the layout of the grounds was a series of broad, straight paths that created dramatic views, divided the property into formal gardens and agricultural areas, and conducted visitors around the compound. The first palazzo built on the grounds was the Palazzetto Felice, which was oriented to face the northeastern side of Sta. Maria Maggiore.This impressive compound did not go unnoticed in Rome and was the inspiration for the Villa Ludovisi and Villa Borghese on the Pincian, and Villa Doria-Pamphili on the  Janiculum. By the late sixteenth century, this type of villa was understood to be a stately palazzo situated on a large piece of land and surrounded by extensive gardens rather than simply a country retreat to escape the summer heat. Unlike Maddalena Strozzi’s suburban villa, it was not a working farm. Camilla collaborated on other projects with her brother as well, including Sixtus’s chapel at Sta. Maria Maggiore, the Acqua Felice, the new neighborhood on the Quirinal Hill called the Borgo Felice di San Bernardo, and the church and convent of Sta. Susanna.Through her careful analysis of the documents and her reexamination of each of these projects, Kimberly Dennis has revealed the central role Camilla Peretti played in the implementation of the Sistine city plan, a project traditionally attributed to Felice,“a solitary genius acting alone to execute his master plan for the city.” As Dennis states, Camilla’s patronage “enriches our understanding of early modernity — of the development of early modern cities, of the relationships between male and female members of noble families, and of the practical interpretation of contemporary religious dogma…. Rome was not a sex-segregated society, and women actively shaped both the secular lives of their families and the Catholic campaign to combat Protestantism.” Camilla Peretti is not the only woman whose patronage has been recovered by Dennis; her essay in this volume focuses on Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphili (1594–1657) the sister-in-law and longtime . Ibid, 58–59. . Ibid, 60. . Dennis,“Camilla Peretti,” 71–101. . Dennis,“Camilla Peretti,” 99.

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companion of Pope Innocent X (1574–1655; pope 1644–55) and her part in the construction of the Palazzo Pamphili (begun summer 1645) in Piazza Navona. As is often the case, Innocent and his nephew, Olimpia’s son, Camillo Pamphili (1622–66) are given credit for the structure, even though Olimpia made the initial deposits and first payments to the workers.This is yet another example reflecting the historical presumption that male agency drove the major architectural campaigns in the early modern era. Dennis has unearthed archival documents confirming that, in fact, Olimpia directed the building of the Palazzo Pamphili during the years of the greatest construction activity — 1647–50, when Camillo, having renounced his cardinalate to marry Olimpia Aldobrandini, was exiled from Rome. Olimpia oversaw the work on the palazzo from beginning to end and created a grandiose monument that celebrated the power of the Pamphili in one of the city’s most magnificent squares. Her patronage demonstrates Olimpia’s commitment to the invaluable role noble women played as members of preeminent families. Other women had connections to a pope, but did not collaborate. Rather, their architectural commissions were personal, as we have already seen in the case of Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici, who was solely responsible for the construction of the Palazzo Medici-Lante where she built magnificently in the courtly environment which was home to the Orsini” and of Pope Leo X de’ Medici. The daughter of one pope (Julius II), Felice della Rovere was involved in architectural projects overseeing the renovations of the medieval palace of Monte Giordano and commissioning an up-to-date façade by Peruzzi, damaged during the Sack of Rome in 1527. Another pope’s daughter was even more active as an architectural patron, though not as a collaborator nor as a promoter of family identity. 42. I wish to thank Kimberly Dennis for sharing her research with me and allowing me to briefly discuss it here. See her essay in this volume: “A Palace Built by a Princess?,” below, 43–64. 43. Tomas, The Medici Women, Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence, 90–92; and Reiss,“Widows, Mothers, Patrons of Art,” 125–58. . Caroline Murphy, The Pope’s Daughter (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 258 and plate 28; however she does not cite specific documentation. See as well Kristin A. Triff, “Patronage and Public Image in Renaissance Rome: Three Orsini Palaces” (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 2000).

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Costanza Farnese (c.1502–1545), the daughter of Pope Paul III and widow of Count Bosio II Sforza of Santa Fiore (d.1535), chose to locate her palazzo, now called the Palazzo Ricci, near her father’s and that of her first-born son, Guido Ascanio who became cardinal in 1534 at age 14. Costanza chose to return to Rome after the death of her husband, leaving her second-born son, Sforza, as ruler of Santa Fiore and Castell’Arquato. Costanza remained politically active in Santa Fiore, frequently writing letters advising her son. More importantly, she was an influential figure in Rome, where she was a prized and respected member of her father’s court, often acting as an ambassador for the pope. Costanza was involved in the negotiations with Emperor Charles V (begun 1537) for the marriage between his daughter, Margaret of Austria and the pope’s grandson, Ottavio Farnese. As well she arranged prestigious marriages for her four daughters, like that of her daughter, Francesca, who married Gerolomo Orsini (d.1541), count of Anguillara, and likely for several of her sons as well; she had ten children. Costanza’s motivation to move to Rome and to locate her residence strategically was more about her status as a pope’s daughter and her prestigious position at his court than it was about family and patrimony. Usually overshadowed by her father, who is assumed to have purchased the property for her, the documents clearly show that Costanza bought up a number of pieces of property, including the one with this palace — and she renovated it. The confusion may lay in the fact that her father provided the funds for the purchase of the residence of her son, Guido Ascanio Sforza, in 1535, establishing the new cardinal in Rome as was customary. Furthermore, Pope Paul III gave his daughter a monthly allowance of 300 scudi and numerous pieces of property outside of Rome from which she could draw an income, allowing her to purchase the properties in Rome and transform them into her own private residence. It is the . Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (DBI) 45:81–82; and Roberto Zapperi, La Legenda del papa Paolo III (Turin: Bollati Boringheiri, 1998), 50–53. Her mother was the pope’s mistress, Silvia Ruffini, who was married at the time and had a son by her husband. . Zapperi, 50, 55–56. . After his death, Costanza arranged for Francesca to marry Lelio Anguillara da Cere in 1542. . DBI 45:81–82.

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documents related to this allowance that confuses modern scholars, who assume that the pope paid for the property. Costanza Farnese ordered extensive renovations to the palace she owned in Rome. In fact, I have found notarial documents outlining Costanza’s (not her father’s) role in the purchase of expansive property, which included a palace along the via Giulia between the Palazzo Farnese (built by her father; begun in 1517 by Antonio da Sangallo, the younger; continued by Michelangelo in 1546), and her son’s palace, now known as the Palazzo Sforza-Cesarini, the one purchased for him with funds provided by the pope. Costanza, like Maddalena Strozzi, Camilla Peretti and other women discussed in this paper, is listed as the purchaser of various properties in the notarial documents. In 1538–39, Costanza began negotiating for property adjacent to the church of San Giovanni in Ayno, today located between via Giulia and via Monserato. Between 1540 and 1543, she purchased more property in this area, including a large palazzo identified today as the Palazzo Ricci, which also had a smaller house connected to it, as well as property across the via Giulia close to the Tiber River; it had fountains, a small structure, perhaps a house, and a walled garden. The large palazzo, whose façade was decorated with stonework, had two courtyards with marble statues and fountains, a walled garden, a stable and a cantina. Subsequent renovations of the property were undertaken during this period. As well Costanza is credited with building another palace at Castell’Arquato between 1535 and 1540, following the death of her husband. Upon returning to Rome and buying a palace near both her father and her son’s residences, Costanza established herself in the city as independent of both father and son. However, she chose to stay near . DBI 45:81.This assumption parallels the concept that in this period women did not or could not buy property or build a house. . In modern literature her father, Pope Paul III, is generally credited with purchasing the property. ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, bb. 97, 99: 11 August, 25 August, 29 November, 1539; b. 100: 11 March, 12 March, 1450; b. 102: 12 December, 16 December, 1542; bb. 105, 107: 2 January, 20 April, 22 November, 1543. Guido Ascanio inherited his mother’s house, which was subsequently sold to the Ricci family (Archivio di Stato, Parma, Feudi e comunita: Sforza di Sta. Fiore, b. 226, 1541, 27 Sept.). . Eugenio Caldiere,“I Luoghi dei Farnese: Immagini di un impero mai nato,” in I Farnese: Arte e collezionismo, studi, ed. Lucia Fornari-Schanchi (Milan: Electa, 1995), 20–27, at 22, 26.

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her family and thus, more traditionally, situated herself in the family neighborhood. Costanza’s intentions were political and related to her status and influence as a pope’s daughter. Even women who we might consider notorious owned extensive income-producing property as well as the houses in which they lived. These women, courtesans or mistresses, consciously invested their money in property, much of which they renovated and sometimes rented. Cynthia Stollhans has noted that the courtesans Fiammetta and Imperia, and the famous mistress Vannozza all acquired burial chapels in three very visible and highly venerated churches of Rome, locations that might, ironically, be deemed difficult for any women to acquire. They earned and saved their money; had control over their money and had as pious motives for patronage as the well-born elite women discussed by Carolyn Valone. Fiammetta da Michele (d.1512), the famous mistress of Cesare Borgia, endowed a chapel in the church of Sant’Agostino, leaving instructions for her burial there. She was also a major property holder, with three large houses and a vigna. Fiammetta was from a middle-class Florentine family (her mother brought her to Rome) and is the first courtesan whose status as a woman of property is clearly documented through her will dated February 19, 1512.The wealthy Fiammetta had a casino on her vigna, with a garden and vineyard. While she lived in one house, she rented the other two, which were joined together by a tower. Even more ambitious in terms of the ownership of property and as an entrepreneur,Vannozza dei Cattanei (1442–1518) was the mistress of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (later Pope Alexander VI) and a married woman. Vannozza bore Rodrigo four children, Juan, Cesare, Lucrezia and Jofre Borgia. The daughter of  Jacopo Pinctoris (painter),Vannozza was probably . Cynthia Stollhans, Unpublished conference paper: “Buried in Sacred Ground: Mistresses and Courtesans and their Roman Chapels,” Sixteenth Century Studies and Conference, Fort Worth,Texas, October 2011; and see her essay in this volume: “The Pious Act of an Impious Woman,” below, 231–48. . Lynne Lawner. Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 35 for her will; and Georgina Masson, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance (London: Sacker and Warburg, 1975), 17–20. . Masson, Courtesans, 17–20. . Vannozza’s last child, Jofre was likely by her second husband, Giorgio della Croce. Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 15.

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born and brought up in Rome, though some suggest the family had Mantuan origins.Vannozza profited from her connections with the powerful Borgias and became a woman of property, though she was financially independent. She owned and ran at least two inns (osterie), one in the Borgo and another in Campo dei Fiori, where she apparently entertained rich and ambitious cardinals. With the income from the inns,Vannozza bought a vineyard, a country estate and more inns in highly desirable areas of Rome. As well, she purchased houses that she rented to artisans and prostitutes — a shrewd business woman, indeed, just like Maddalena Strozzi, Camilla Peretti or any other woman in Rome with financial resources at their disposal. Like both Fiammetta and Vannozza, Imperia (1485–1511) was financially independent. The friend of Raphael and mistress to Agostino Chigi who built the Villa Farnesina where she lived for a short time, Imperia owned her own palazzo, a vigna and a country estate outside Rome. She, too, had income earning property and, apparently, used that wealth to lavishly furnish her home. Matteo Bandello described the interior of Imperia’s palazzo: Every room was so magnificently furnished… velvet and brocade decorated the sala and the bedroom, precious carpets covered the floors. In the room just off her bedchamber, embroidered cloth of gold adorned the walls… a gilded cornice painted with ultramarine supported vases of alabaster, porphyry and many other kinds of stone. Around the room lay elaborately carved and inlaid chests and in the center of the room stood a beautiful table covered with green velvet on which were placed various musical instruments, books of music, and volumes in Latin and Italian….

Imperia, who poisoned herself in 1511, remained close to Chigi, naming him executor of her will; she was buried in San Gregorio al Celio. Yet, not all notorious women were courtesans, Ricciarda Malaspina (1497–1553), marchesa of Massa and Carrara, bought a palace in 1541 . Cynthia Stollhans, “Vannozza Cattanei: A Hotel Proprietress in Renaissance Rome,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary  Journal 10.1 (Fall 2015): 83–92. . By the time their affair ended,Vannozza was married a third time. . Masson, Courtesans, 34–38. . Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans, 6, 8 for Bandello’s description.

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called the Palazzo Campo Marzio just off the Piazza Navona on the via Tor Millina near the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone. Ricciarda lived in Rome for long periods of time, first in the late 1520s; then in the 1540s with brief stays in Massa, returning to Rome in 1550. Wife, widow and mistress, Ricciarda married Scipione Fieschi in 1515; they had one daughter, Isabella. After his death in 1519, she was forced to marry Lorenzo Cibo (d.1549), brother of Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo (1491–1550), who became her lover. Lorenzo and Ricciarda had a daughter, Eleonora (1523–94) and a son, Giulio (1525–48); with the cardinal she had at least three children, including her son and heir, Alberico (1534–1623). Presumably, Ricciarda became involved with Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo in Florence in the early 1530s when she lived with her mother Lucrezia and her half-sister Taddea (b.1505) in the Palazzo dei Pazzi, Cardinal Cibo’s residence. Incidentally, Alessandro de’ Medici was a frequent visitor, befriending Taddea. Ricciarda inherited Massa and Carrara from her father as his only heir (Taddea was his illegitimate daughter) — territories that were at one time in the . ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, b. 97, 12 Mar. 1538; b. 100, 9 June 1541; b. 115, 9 June 1542. Her father was Giacomo Malaspina, marchese of Massa, whose niece was Argentina Malaspina, wife of Piero Soderini; her mother was Taddea Pico della Mirandola. . Lorenzo Cibo was the son of Francesco ditto Franceschetto, the son of Pope Innocent III and Maddalena di Lorenzo de’ Medici, il Magnifico. Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo (1491–1550) was his elder brother and Caterina Cibo da Varano (1505–47) was his sister. Pope Leo X was involved with her marriage to Lorenzo Cibo, as was Ercole I d’Este: 1529, 16 luglio, Ricciarda received investiture by Charles V as marchessa of Massa, Carrara, Avenza and Moneta. See Luigi Staffetti, Giulio Cybo-Malaspina, Marchese di Massa: Studio storico (Modena: G.T. Vincenzi Editore, 1892), 14, 142; DBI 67:750–51, 759–60, 799–803. . Innocenzo Cibo became Pope Clement VII’s papal legate; his mother was Maddalena, daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, il Magnifico. See Luigi Staffetti, Il Cardinale Innocenzo Cibo (Florence: Le Monier, 1894), 19, 33, 45–48, 100–102. . In addition to Alberico, Ricciarda and Innocenzo had two daughters: Elena and Ricciarda.The cardinal had two other sons: Clemente and Alessandro; it is unclear who their mother was. See Staffetti, Il Cardinale Inoncenzo Cibo, 19, 33, 45–48, 100–102. . In 1525,Taddea married Giambattista Boiardo, count of Scandiano; he died in 1528. See McIver, Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 258. . Carl Strechlke, “Alessandro de’ Medici and the Palazzo Pazzi,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 81.348 (Autumn 1985): 3–15, at 8, 10–11.

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possession of the Cibo; Cardinal Cibo maintained a residence in Carrara. Her forced marriage to Lorenzo, whom she despised, was purely dynastic — meant to bring Massa and Carrara back under Cibo control. However, Ricciarda had other ideas; she wanted to establish a Malaspina-Cibo dynasty, an action supported by Emperor Charles V, with whom she had a close relationship and who visited her in Massa for the first time in 1529. Her first born son, Giulio, like his father, wanted the territories for the Cibo alone, thus removing Ricciarda’s inheritance from her control.With the approval of Charles V, Ricciarda denounced Giulio in favor of the cardinal’s son, naming Alberico her heir. By legitimizing her illegitimate son by Innocenzo and making him her heir, Ricciarda was acting as any man who had a natural son would in a similar situation. In discussing Pier Maria Rossi, his mistress Bianca Pellegrini and their illegitimate offspring, Timothy McCall has shown that legitimizing a natural son had a dynastic purpose and was often a political necessity especially in times of crisis, and it was a way to maintain feudal holdings within the family: moreover, one need only think of Borso d’Este, duke of Ferrara who himself was illegitimate. Riccarda, of course, was not a man, so in this example the positions were reversed: the natural son was legitimized by his mother to save her patrimony, with the full support of his father the cardinal. For this action Ricciarda, has been vilified by modern scholars, who read the documents to suggest that she abandoned her two children by Lorenzo, in favor of those of Cardinal Cibo, her lover. Yet, like . Modern scholarship credits Alberico with this. See DBI 67:799–803; and Ricciarda Malaspina-Cibo: Marchesa di Massa e Signora di Carrara, 1497–1553, ed. Paolo Pelu and Olga Raffo (Modena: Aedes Muratoriana, 2007), 39–47. . Though he was not illegitimate, Portia dell’ Anguillara Cesi chose her son’s second son as her heir to revive her extinct family line, the Anguillara, dukes of Cere. See Valone,“Mothers and Sons,” 122–23 and 125. 68. Timothy McCall, “Pier Maria’s Legacy: (Il)legitimacy, Inheritance, and Rule of Parma’s Rossi Dynasty” in Wives,Widows, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy, 33–54, at 33–34; idem, “Visual Imagery and Historical Invisibility: Antonia Torelli, Her Husband, and His Mistress in Fifteenth-Century Parma,” Renaissance Studies 23.3 (June 2009): 268–87; and Helen S. Ettlinger, “Visibilis et Invisibilis: The Mistress in Italian Renaissance Court Society,” Renaissance Quarterly 47.4 (Winter 1994): 770–92, at 778–80 for married women as mistresses, at 785 for women encouraged to be mistresses by their families for political gain. . DNI 67:799–803; and Pelu and Raffo, Ricciarda Malaspina-Cibo, Marchesa.

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any male ruler, Ricciarda’s motivations were dynastic; she was concerned for her patrimony as her father’s only heir, and she favored Alberico in order to preserve her father’s legacy. In addition to her palace in the heart of Rome, Ricciarda purchased a villa outside the Porta del Popolo called La Vigna Surburbana; it was both a business investment and a retreat from the city. She also built a palazzo within the castello at Massa and a palazetto at Carrara. While in her will Ricciarda left her house (and the villa) in Rome to her sister Taddea, she also had Alberico in mind and, in the end, he inherited it. Ricciarda Malaspina, married, yet a mistress and a foreigner, placed herself prominently in Rome, just off Piazza Navona and not far from the Cibo residence; her motivations were both dynastic and personal. Her choice for the location of her palace spoke of her power and reflected her desire to make her presence known in Rome. Ricciarda chose to establish the Malaspina-Cibo dynasty in Rome in a prominent and prestigious location, in part due to her alliances and close relationship with both Emperor Charles V and Pope Clement VII. Ricciarda was her father’s only heir and was concerned for her patrimony, and so she had dynastic intentions. As with so many men, Ricciarda legitimized her son by her lover in an effort to preserve her patrimony for future generations. The choice to reside off Piazza Navona was a bold statement indeed. As this essay has attempted to demonstrate, women from all levels of society and in large numbers were involved with architectural projects and owned extensive property, far more than in any other city in Italy. Some women were drawn to Rome. Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and Ricciarda Malaspina came to do what they could not do elsewhere; Claudia Rangone moved to Rome after she left her husband, Giberto of Correggio, and acquired property from Margaret of Austria, duchess of Parma and Piacenza who still maintained property in the city. She eked out a living from her vineyard. Like Alfonsina and . M.G. Maestrelli, “Le architecture dei Cibo-Malaspina: Palazzo, ville, castelli,” in Pelu and Raffo, Ricciarda Malaspina-Cibo, 155–58. . Vittoria Tolfa also chose to live in this neighborhood, renting a palazzo on the opposite side of Piazza Navona after donating her house to a charitable institution. . ASR, Collegio notarile capitolino, b. 428r-v, 446r-v. . Odoardo Rombaldi, Correggio: Città e principato, (Modena: Edizione Banca Populare, 1972), 148–50. Claudia found life in Correggio intolerable.

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Ricciarda, Claudia had connections in Rome; her uncle Baldassare Rangone was married to Giulia Orsini. Other women returned to Rome after their husbands died, as we saw with Costanza Farnese; and Gerolama Farnese Sanvitale, too, returned from Parma after her husband, Alfonso died in the 1570s. Still others visited frequently. Isabella d’Este, for example, came to Rome in February 1525 with Federico II Gonzaga and on numerous other occasions. The situation in Rome, the attraction of the papal court and connections to the old nobility drew women to Rome. The list of other women who owned their own palace and managed a farm (vigna) property includes, but is not limited to, Maddalena Strozzi’s mother-in-law, Lucrezia Orsini-Anguillara,Virginia Orsini-Savelli,Verginia Orsini of Pitigliano, Elena Anguillara-Savelli, Francesca Savelli, Camilla SavelliAnguillara, Camilla Alberoni and Fulvia Anguillara. The connection between all these women in Rome is not simply that they owned property, a house, a chapel (women did that all over Italy), but rather that they all actively invested their money in real estate — a vigna, a country estate (in and around Rome) — moneymaking property. Some also rented out houses or rooms or invested in shops or ran a business, as Vannozza dei Cattanei did with her inns. They were consciously aware of the value of income-generating property, and while there are cases elsewhere in Italy of women doing the same, these are not as common as they are in Rome.That the majority of women, no matter what level in society, had or obtained property is unique to Rome, and it allowed them an independent income with which they could invest in more property, commission art or build churches, chapels or other charitable institutions.The situation, both political and religious, allowed women greater opportunities than elsewhere in Italy. What really makes women’s patronage in Rome different is not just the fact that they often took or made strong personal statements, but that the concentration of women was greater here than in other Italian cities and, perhaps, this situation stimulated the need to make money and to make themselves and their families visible among the multitude. • . Archivio di Stato, Mantua, Archivio Gonzaga, b. 2506, c. 264r. . See footnotes 22, 26, 34 and 69 for other women. ASR, Collegio notarile capitalino, bb. 90, 91, 92, 100, 311, 312, 313, 428, 451, 622, 1135, 1136, 1606, 1507, 1520, 1521, 1532, 1534.

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A Palace Built by a Princess? Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj and the Construction of Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona Kimberly L. Dennis Numerous authors have mentioned the extensive involvement of Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj (1592–1657) in the development of Palazzo Pamphilj in Rome’s Piazza Navona, yet no study has focused on her role in the building of the palazzo. This essay will trace Donna Olimpia’s biography from the time she married Pamphilio Pamphilj (1564–1639) until the completion of the palazzo in the  Jubilee year of 1650, detailing her involvement in its construction. Viewing the evolution of the project through the lens of Donna Olimpia’s biography reveals her role as a central and constant figure actively involved in the family’s primary building program over the course of three decades. By the time of her death, Donna Olimpia’s identity had become more closely tied to the palazzo than that of any other family member. Moreover, Donna Olimpia’s architectural patronage and property acquisitions extended beyond Piazza Navona and included oversight of a building project near San Giovanni della Pigna, a palazzo near today’s Trevi Fountain, a villa in Trastevere and the town of San Martino al Cimino. Donna Olimpia Pamphilj was truly “a woman born with the vocation and the temperment of a builder.”

The Early Years

Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj arrived in Rome in the late fall of 1612, soon after her marriage to Pamphilio Pamphilj, thirty years her senior. Although just twenty-one, Olimpia had already buried a husband and son and inherited the largest fortune in her hometown of Viterbo. Olimpia and Pamphilio lived in the modest Pamphilj palazetto in Piazza Navona. In prints and paintings from the early . The most recent of these is Stephanie C. Leone’s excellent study of the architectural history of the palazzo, The Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona: Constructing Identity in Early Modern Rome (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008). Leone acknowledges Donna Olimpia’s important role as a member of the team who collaborated to build the palazzo, though her primary focus is on the contributions of Giovanni Battista Pamphilj (later Pope Innocent X). . Donata Chiomenti Vassalli,“Donna Olimpia Pamphili, costruttrice e urbanista,” Lunario Romano 7 (1978): 157–72, at 158. Translations throughout are the author’s: “una donna nata con la vocazione e il temperamento della costrutrice.”

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Fig. 1. Piazza Navona, from Mari and Marcucci, Grandezze della citta di Roma, 1625, tav. 57. Palazzetto Pamphilj is located in the upper left corner; to its right is the larger Palazzo Teofili, then Casa de’ Rossi, Palazzo Mellini (with tower), and then Palazzo Ornano.

seventeenth century, the palazetto is easily recognizable in the southwestern corner of the piazza.The three-bay structure with a roofline lower than that of its neighbors was bordered by the via di Pasquino to the south and a narrow vicolo (alley) to the north (Fig. 1). Olimpia and Pamphilio shared a small apartment facing Piazza Navona, while Pamphilio’s brother, Giovanni Battista (later Pope Innocent X, r.1644–55), occupied a larger apartment facing Piazza di Pasquino (Fig. 2). As Stephanie Leone has noted, the distribution of space within the residence during this period reflects the relative status of the two brothers.Although Pamphilio was the elder sibling and capofamiglia, he was 50 years old and childless, leaving his contribution to the family legacy uncertain. Giovanni Battista, in contrast, served as a judge in the papal tribunal, a position from which he could — and would — rise, elevating the family name along with his own. In 1619, both the family and their home grew when Olimpia gave birth to her first child with Pamphilio, a daughter named Maria. In the same year, Giovanni Battista entered into a long term rental . Leone 95.

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Fig. 2. Stefano Pignatelli, Palazzetto Pamphilj, piano nobile plan, 1615 (ADP 86.2.2). Olimpia and Pamphilio’s apartments are delineated in slightly darker ink at the left of the plan.

agreement with Belardino Teofili, owner of the property across the vicolo to the north of the Pamphilj residence (Fig. 3, below). This lease more than doubled the family’s living space, allowing them to expand into the more elegant Teofili palazzo. Soon after the family moved into their new quarters, in early 1621, Giovanni Battista’s close friend and former colleague from the Roman Rota, Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, was elected to the papacy as Gregory XV (r.1621–23). The new pope immediately appointed Pamphilj as nuncio to Naples. Due to the importance . Leone, 95; and Miroslava M. Beneš,“Villa Pamphilj (1630–1670): Family, Gardens, and Land in Papal Rome” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1989), 157. Archivio Doria Pamphilj (hereafter,ADP) 86.2.3,:“Belardino Teofili affittò la Casa al Sig.r Card. le Gio: Battista p sc. 200 l’anno p li atti di Antonio Campori sotto li nove di settembre 1619 p. nove anni, con patto di rinovare l’affitto p altri nove anni se però no si disdice dal Sig.r Card.le p tre mesi inanzi, et il detti Sig.r Belardino hà fatto una polita[?] privata nella quale si obliga di non poter servire di detta faculta di disdire durante la vita di sua Eminenza.” For the 1634 purchase of the Teofili property, see Archivio di Stato di Roma (hereafter,ASR), Not.Tribunale dell’A.C., Dominicus Fontia, b. 3137. . Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes: From the Close of the Middle Ages (London: Kegan Paul,Trench,Trubner, 1940), 28:41. . Pastor, 30:26.

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Fig. 3. Unknown artist,View of Piazza Navona (from south end), c.1630 (Museo di Roma, MR 3651). Palazzetto Pamphilj is visible in the lower left corner of the painting.

of this post, Pamphilio, Olimpia (pregnant with her second child), and two year-old Maria moved with Giovanni Battista, leaving the property in Piazza Navona empty for the next four years. The family returned to Rome in 1625, but within months Giovanni Battista was sent by thše new Pope Urban VIII (r.1623–44) with his cardinal nephew Francesco Barberini on diplomatic missions to Paris and then Madrid. The political skill Pamphilj exhibited on this trip led to his appointment as nuncio to Spain in 1626. In the late 1620s, the palazzo was occupied by Pamphilio, Olimpia, Maria and her younger brother, Camillo. A second daughter, Costanza, was born in 1629 and named for her godmother, Costanza Barberini, sister-in-law of Urban VIII. The Pamphilj’s strengthening . Donata Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia o del nepotismo nel Seicento (Milan: Mursia editore, 1979), 29. . Pastor, 30:26, and Beneš, 127. . Pastor, 30:26. . ADP 86.2.3. “Costanza nacque in Roma il primo di di[sic] Gennaro 1629 de lunedi a hore 18 e mezzo quarto fu battizzata in San Lorenzo in Damaso alli 18 del detto mese di Giovedì oltre al suo nome si li pose’ nome’ anco Anna p. devotione. Fu commare’ la Sig.ra Costanza Barberini et non ci fu Compare’.”

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ties with the papal family during the Barberini reign indicates their advancement among the Roman nobility in this period. During their time in Naples and on their return to Rome, Olimpia managed the household and collaborated closely with Giovanni Battista, performing the feminine duties that paralleled his position in the patriarchal papal court. While traveling in France and Spain, Giovanni Battista kept in constant contact with family members in Rome, even exchanging letters in code, an indication of the delicacy with which their affairs were managed. In one such letter sent by Donna Olimpia to Giovanni Battista in Madrid, she provided an update on relations with the Borghese, concluding the letter fondly,“I seek to serveYour Lordship in every way I can, and… I remind you to stay happy and maintain your good health, and I kiss your hands with every affection….Your most affectionate sister-in-law and servant, Olimpia.” As a gesture of his appreciation for her savvy management of family business in his absence, Giovanni Battista sent Donna Olimpia “two rings worthy of [her] merit” from his mission to France.

The Cardinalate

In 1627, during his time in Madrid, Urban VIII “reserved” Giovanni Battista “in secret consistory as cardinal in pectore.” The appointment was made public in late 1629, and in July 1630, one week after his return to Rome, Giovanni Battista was elevated to the purple by Urban VIII in the Sistine Chapel. Olimpia supported her brother-in-law at this key juncture in his career by paying for his cardinal’s ring, an expense of 500 scudi, or one third of the income from his titular church of Sant’ Eusebio. Pamphilj was immediately considered “papabilissimi,” and in 1634, Cardinal Pamphilj himself stated that only Cardinal . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 30. Receipts for payment of family expenses from 1637 to 1644 are collected in ADP, Archiovolo 138. . ADP 60.34.2 bis. “Io no[n] manco di servire V[ostro] S[ignore] in tutto quello che posso, e…le recordo a star allegramente e mantenessi con bona salute, e gli bacio con ogni affetto le mani… Affett.ma cogni.ta e serva Olimpia.” . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 35,“due annelletti degni del suo merito.” . Beneš, 134; Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 37. . Pastor, 30:27; and Beneš, 134. . Beneš, 139. Beneš notes that, in adition to the ring, Olimpia likely paid for many of Giovanni Battista’s other expenses before his election to the papacy.

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Guidi di Bagno would pose a significant challenge to his candidacy in a conclave. In 1640, the Venetian ambassador to Rome reiterated his sentiment, writing that “Pamphilj, Roman,… is among the most eligible for the papacy, and it seems at the papal court that he has already positioned himself with the gravity of a pontiff, keeping himself distanced from negotiations to maintain his aspirations.” In preparation for the advancement of the entire family through Giovanni Battista’s election to the cardinalate, Donna Olimpia had begun work on the renovation of the Pamphilj palazzo while her brother-in-law was in Spain. Although it was still modest by contemporary standards, Olimpia acknowledged the importance of providing a residence suitable for a cardinal by sumptuously furnishing and decorating the palazzo in anticipation of Giovanni Battista’s return. By early August of 1630, Rome was engulfed by the plague, and the location of Palazzo Pamphilj in the heart of the city placed the family at the center of the epidemic. Giacinto Gigli reported an “infinite” number of deaths each day, numbering in the hundreds to thousands.The fearful populace spread rumors that evil men had brought the plague via a deadly venom that could be mixed with water and would infect anyone who came into contact with it. Although the Pamphilj residence was expanding and becoming more lavish on the inside, Piazza Navona remained an inelegant setting. The city’s bustling weekly market had been held there since 1477, when it was relocated from the Campidoglio in an effort to restore the political and historical dignity of the city’s political nexus (see Fig. 3). The “great fair of the people” took place every Wednesday, establishing Piazza Navona as the popular heart of the city, the “forum of papal Rome,” . Beneš, 135. . Relazioni degli stati europei lette al Senato dagli ambasciatori Veneti nel secolo decimosettimo, ed. N. Barozzi and G. Berchet (Venice: Pietro Naratocich, 1878), 2:30–31, “Panfili, Romano,… è soggetto dei più papabili, e pare alla corte che già si sia posto in retiratezza e gravità di pontefice, si tiene lontano da ogni negotio, per non sturbare le sue speranze.” . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 39. . Giacinto Gigli, Diario Romano, ed. Giuseppe Ricciotti (Rome: Tumminelli, 1958), 117. . Laura G. Cozzi, “Piazza Navona Feste e Spettacoli,” in Piazza Navona: Isola dei Pamphilj, ed. Sergio Bosticco (Rome: Franco Spinosi, 1970), 39–125, at 54.

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where Romans gathered to conduct business and discuss politics. Charlatans mingled with fruit vendors, blacksmiths and booksellers, creating a loud, malodorous and dirty threshold to the new cardinal’s palace. Years later, Giovanni Battista Pamphilj would comment that he had learned how commoners lived by watching the commotion outside his windows. The anxious mood in the city caused by the plague and his recent elevation to the cardinalate likely prompted Giovanni Battista to prepare a will during the first decade of his cardinalate in which he named his brother, Pamphilio, and his nephew, Camillo, as his universal heirs. The will is unusual for its time in the importance given to Donna Olimpia, whose husband was then in his late sixties or early seventies, and who would assume joint control of the family’s administration with her son in the event that both brothers were to die. Cardinal Pamphilj left his sister-in-law the family property on the  Janiculum, the income of an office and an apartment of her choice in the family residence, including rooms for her servants, a kitchen, stables, a carriage shed and any other space she might need. If Donna Olimpia opted to live elsewhere, Giovanni Battista authorized her to rent out the property in Piazza Navona. As he was elevated to the cardinalate, Giovanni Battista thus formally acknowledged his full partnership with Donna Olimpia in the management of family affairs. An anonymous letter sent to Donna Olimpia in 1632 offering a palace for rent indicates that the public was aware of Donna Olimpia’s status within the family and of their need for a residence more suited to their position in Roman society. The Pamphilj would make the best of their modest palazzo for thirteen more years, but work was begun to renovate the palazzo following Giovanni Battista’s promotion to the cardinalate. The first step in this process occurred in September 1634, when Giovanni Battista purchased the Teofili palazzo that the family had been renting since 1619. Next, Cardinal Pamphilj hired the architect Francesco Pepperelli to reconfigure the . Cozzi, 55–57,“grande fiera cittadina” and “foro della Roma papale.” . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 129–30. . Beneš, 167. . Beneš, 168; and ADP 93.68.1. . Leone, 107. . ADP 86.2.3; Beneš, 153–54, and 157; and Leone, 95 and 107.

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Fig. 4. Palazzo Pamphilj, piano nobile, from Bosticco, Piazza Navona, isola dei Pamphilj. Development of the palazzo, 1612–1646 (plan modifications by Rebecca Charbonneau). (1) Palazzetto Pamphilj, (2) Palazzo Teofili, (3) Palazzo de Rossi, (4) Palazzo Cibo.

interior spaces, uniting the Pamphilj palazetto with Palazzo Teofili (Fig. 4). Construction was completed in March 1638, and Cardinal Pamphilj moved into the largest apartments facing onto Piazza Navona since he now indisputably outranked his older brother. In accordance with his rank, Cardinal Pamphilj’s apartments were arranged in an enfilade appropriate for reception of dignitaries (Fig. 5). Visitors entered the cardinal’s apartments via his sala dei palafrenieri and then proceeded to two anticamere, the Sala delle Marine and Sala di Mosè, named for the decorative friezes frescoed by Agostino Tassi and his workshop. The Sala di Giuseppe served as the cardinal’s bedroom. Parallel to these rooms on the interior of the palazzo were a sala di udienza, a chapel and a private oratory. Pamphilio’s apartments, located in the northwest corner of the building, were refurbished with decorated window jambs, a travertine fireplace and . Leone, 107 and 110–11. As Leone has demonstrated, Cardinal Pamphilj led the transformation of the Pamphilj palazetto into a palazzo between 1636 and 1638, most likely with financial support from Donna Olimpia. See Stephanie C. Leone, “Cardinal Pamphilj Builds a Palace: Self-Representation and Familial Ambition in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63.4 (Dec., 2004): 440–71. . See Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), Chapter 1: The Apartment, esp. 3–6. . Leone, 115–16; and Susan Russell, “Virtuous Women: The Decoration of Donna Olimpia Pamphili’s Audience Room in the Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona,” Melbourne Art  Journal 3 (1999): 14–24, at 14. . Leone, 120. . Leone, 115–20.

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Fig. 5. Palazzo Pamphilj, piano nobile, from Bosticco, Piazza Navona, isola dei Pamphilj. Francesco Pepperelli renovations, 1634–1638 (plan modifications by Rebecca Charbonneau). (1) sala dei palafrenieri (Sala di Bacco), (2) first anticamera (Sala delle Marine), (3) second anticamera (Sala di Mosè), (4) Cardinal Pamphilj’s bedroom (Sala di Giuseppe).

painted friezes (Fig. 5). Donna Olimpia moved into the southwestern corner overlooking Piazza di Pasquino. The location of Olimpia’s apartments adjacent to the main staircase leading from Piazza di Pasquino indicates that she enjoyed a higher status within the family than her husband. Her rooms opened onto the “hanging” court or garden, and were connected with the apartments of both Giovanni Battista and Pamphilio, an unusual situation, as most women’s apartments were separated from those of men in the family except their husbands. This arrangement indicates the central role Donna Olimpia had assumed in the family dynamic, demonstrating her need to collaborate with both her husband and her brother-inlaw to manage family affairs. Ironically, while the positioning of Donna Olimpia’s apartments signified her elevated status within the family, they also provided her with a clear view of the infamous statue of Pasquino, where Romans posted bitter attacks on her character in later years.The public outcry against her must have been difficult to bear, but the enduring popularity of many pasquinades from this era also attests to her status as the most powerful woman in Rome at mid-century. Some of the pasquinades aimed at Donna Olimpia remembered by Romans even today include, “He who says woman speaks harm, who says female speaks misfortune, who says Olimpia Maidalchini speaks woman, . Leone, 122–23. . Leone, 120–21. . Leone, 121. See as well Brenda Preyer’s essay in this volume, 1–20.

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harm and ruin.” Another, playing on her name in Latin called her “olim pia, nunc impia” — once pious, now impious. And in another, a dialogue between the “talking” statues Pasquino and Marforio, Pasquino asked how he could find the door to Donna Olimpia’s palazzo. Marforio responded, “He who brings [money] finds the door, he who doesn’t bring [money] won’t find the door.” Public sentiment aside, Olimpia’s position within the family was further elevated in 1639, when Pamphilio Pamphilj died following a protracted illness. His will, prepared eight years earlier, stipulated the return of Olimpia’s dowry to her, as was customary at the time. Provided she did not remarry and that she remained with their children, supporting them and overseeing their education, Pamphilio left her a carriage, servants, the right to remain in the family palazzo and any other resources needed to maintain herself in a manner appropriate to her social standing. Pamphilio’s death left Donna Olimpia and Giovanni Battista the two senior members of the family, and the cardinal demonstrated his faith in his sister-in-law by asking her to assume responsibility for administration of the family’s finances. Among Olimpia’s duties were payments for the provisions of Giovanni Battista’s sisters, Suor Agata and Suor Prudenzia, who lived in the convents of Tor de’ Specchi and Sta. Marta, respectively. Olimpia also managed a construction project on Pamphilj property located near San Giovanni della Pigna which had been inherited from Pamphilio’s aunt, Flavia Pamphilj Porcari.

The Papacy and the Family

Giovanni Battista Pamphilj was elected by his peers on September 15, 1644, as a compromise candidate between the French and Spanish . “Chi dice donna dice danno, chi dice femmina dice malanno, chi dice Olimpia Maidalchina dice donna, danno e rovina.” See Gregorio Leti, The Life of Donna Olimpia Maldachini (London: W. Godbid, 1666), 12. . “Chi porta [soldi] trova la porta, chi non porta [soldi] non trova la porta.” . ADP 93.68.1. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 53. . Payments to Suor Agata and Suor Prudenzia as well as those for work on the project at San Giovanni della Pigna are recorded in ADP, Archiovolo 138, int. 1: “Ordini di pagamenti da farsi à diversi firmati dalla Ch: Me: Card. Gio. Batt.a Pamphilj, poi Innocenzo Papa X, diretti alla Ch: Me: D. Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj di lui Cognata, dall’anno 1639 al 1644.” Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 53; and Beneš, 189 n. 16.

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factions. Rome had lapsed into a warlike state when the death of Pope Urban VIII was announced on  July 29, and the cardinals went into conclave on August 9. In early September, four cardinals’ lives were claimed by malaria, pressing those remaining to reach a decision after thirty-eight days of deliberation. Pamphilj’s election catapulted Olimpia Pamphilj — not unexpectedly — to the apex of Roman social and political life and brought a new level of urgency and ambition to her architectural patronage. Taking the name Innocent X, the new pope demonstrated his devotion to his family through his enactment of the traditional possesso, ordering a deviation of the route through Piazza Navona. As the entourage passed the family palazzo, Pamphilj’s three year-old great-niece Olimpiuccia (fondly nicknamed after her grandmother) was presented on the balcony to receive a papal blessing. With this gesture, Innocent X signified his devotion to the family residence and his full partnership with its mistress, Donna Olimpia. Only nine days after his election, Innocent X revised his will to make Olimpia his universal heir. He further stipulated that Olimpia was free to manage his estate as she deemed best, fully at her own discretion and without exception. This bequest demonstrated the new pope’s confidence in his sister-in-law’s ability to skillfully administer the family fortune after his death. In the months following his election, Innocent X also raised the fief of Bassano di Sutri to a principality, bestowing the titles of prince and princess on Olimpia’s older daughter, Maria, and her husband, Marchese Andrea Giustiniani. A few months later, a marriage was arranged for Olimpia’s younger daughter, Costanza, to Prince Niccolò Ludovisi, making her a princess by marriage. In November 1644, Innocent X appointed Camillo to the position of cardinal nephew, a title that should have made him the second most powerful figure at the papal court after his uncle. Camillo’s authority, however, was overshadowed by the influence of his mother, who was popularly recognized as the “First . Pastor, 30:14–23, and Gigli, 253–54. . Pastor, 30:22–23; Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 69; and Gigli, 254–59. . Ignazio Ciampi, Innocenzo X Pamfili e la Sua Corte (Rome: Galeati, 1878), 115. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 74. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 74–75. . Pastor, 30:36.

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Lady of the Roman Court.” Following Camillo’s appointment as cardinal nephew, the ambassador from Lucca noted his lack of efficacy in the office, writing,“The Lady, Donna Olimpia, sister-in-law of Our Lord governs absolutely the business of the house of Cardinal Pamphilj, her son.” As the prima dama of Rome, Olimpia adopted a magnificent lifestyle befitting her rank, though she attempted to offset her demonstrations of nobility with acts of charity. Among these was her direction of a group of noblewomen who collected 16,582 scudi to support the Istituto della Trinità dei Pellegrini, a hospice that provided shelter for 2,000 pilgrims of both sexes each day throughout the  Jubilee year of 1650. Public reactions, however, focused on Olimpia’s displays of wealth. For example, the ambassador from Mantua described the “grand retinue of footmen and pages” with which she traveled, a display he disparaged in comparison with the public modesty of the sisters-in-law of recent popes. Similar criticisms proliferated despite the fact that Donna Olimpia’s entourage paled in comparison to that of her male peers, such as Marchese Fontenay, the ambassador from France, who honored his sovereign by traveling with at least three six-horse carriages, twelve pages, fifteen servants, fifteen footmen, nine coachmen as well as carriage attendants, all of whom wore livery embellished with gold and silver. In deference to her new position and in an effort to court her favor, “The nobility, ambassadors, Bishops, and Cardinals showed the utmost regard for Olimpia and strove to secure her goodwill by means of rich presents.… Even some of their eminences adorned their apartments with Olimpia’s portrait.” These demonstrations of obeisance to a female member of the papal family were sharply criticized by avvisi writers, ambassadors and the general public. Giacinto Gigli reported one particularly biting exchange, in which Cardinal Pallotta lashed out at Donna Olimpia, exclaiming that it was “a shame that the government of . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 77:“Prima dama della Corte di Roma.” . Chimenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 86–87:“La signora donna Olimpia cognata di N[ostro] S[ignore] governa assolutamente l’azienda della Casa del medesimo cardinal Pamfilio suo figlio.” . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 154; and Pastor, 30:184. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 123:“gran seguito di staffieri, e paggi.” . Ibid. . Pastor, 30:35.

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Rome rested in the hands of a whore” and that it was “public knowledge that Donna Olimpia had slept with her brother-in-law before he was pope.”

The Palazzo

Disregarding the controversy surrounding them, the family began aggressive pursuit of yet another plan to transform the modest Pamphilj residence into a grand palazzo immediately following Giovanni Battista’s election. During the first two years, Innocent X, Donna Olimpia and Camillo collaborated on the project. However, between 1646 and 1648, the years when the account books indicate the greatest construction activity, Donna Olimpia assumed the role of primary director. Six weeks after his election, Innocent X appointed Girolamo Rainaldi as his architetto di casa and requested designs for a new palazzo. By early 1645, Rainaldi and Francesco Borromini had both submitted designs for the new façade which were predicated on expansion of the Pamphilj property north — through property owned by Teodosio de’ Rossi and Carlo Cibo — to the church of Sant’Agnese (see Fig. 4). The family invoked Gregory XIII’s 1574 bull De Aedificiis to acquire these properties.The bull allowed a buyer to force his neighbor to sell adjacent property if the buyer’s intent was to improve an existing structure. The first acquisition, in May, 1645, was the de’ Rossi casa purchased by Camillo Pamphilj. Camillo was also the buyer listed for the  July, 1646, acquisition of the much larger Cibo palazzo located north of the de’ Rossi property. . Gigli, 317, “Era bene una vergogna, che il governo di Roma stesse in mano di una Puttana”; and “era publica fama, che D. Olimpia havesse dormito con il Cogniato[sic], prima che egli fusse Papa.” . ADP 88.35.5 and ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, registro 1549. . Leone, 153. . Leone, 163. . Leone, 154. . ADP 88.36.3, 86.5, and Leone, 154.The price was 6,478 scudi. . ADP 88.36.4, 86.5, and Leone, 155.The price was 25,933.18 scudi. Leone notes that this acquisition posed problems even for a papal family, as the palazzo was “part of the Cibo family primogeniture and thus unalienable property.” She publishes a plan from the Archivio Doria Pamphilj likely used to demonstrate to the Maestri delle Strade that the Cibo property was essential to the realization of the plans for development of the Palazzo Pamphilj.

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Work was well underway on the new palazzo almost two years before the purchase of the Cibo property was realized, demonstrating the family’s determination to create an enduring memorial of their ascent to the papacy through their building project. As the papal family, they could proceed with confidence that no obstacle would impede execution of their plans. On  June 18, 1645 (thirteen months before the Cibo sale), the Maestri delle Strade issued a license for renovations to the façade following Rainaldi’s design. In April, 1646, the “Congregatione p. la fabrica dell’Ecc.ma Casa Pamfilia” began meeting every Thursday morning at the palazzo in Piazza Navona. The group consisted of architects Girolamo Rainaldi and Francesco Borromini, the Capo Mastro Ludovico Bossi, director of Innocent X’s building projects Monsignor Virgilio Spada and a representative of Donna Olimpia. In  June and  July of 1645, Donna Olimpia contributed to the project by making the first deposits into a building account designated “payments for the construction in Piazza Navona.” From August 1645 until November 1646, the account book registers a series of deposits made either by Donna Olimpia or by Camillo Pamphilj on behalf of his mother. As Leone has noted, these deposits indicate the ancillary role Camillo played in the construction effort, and after 1646 his name no longer appears in the account books. Donna Olimpia began making payments to the Capo Mastri, masons and stoneworkers

. ADP 88.35.1; and Leone, 156.The license was issued to Camillo Pamphilj.The copy in the Archivio Doria Pamphilj bears two drawings by Rainaldi of proposed changes to the façade, one dated October 7, 1645 and the other dated October 16, 1645.The license is transcribed in Furio Fasolo, L’Opera di Hieronimo e Carlo Rainaldi (Rome: Edizioni Ricerche, 1960), 281. . Vat. Lat. 11258, fol. 147; see also Fasolo, 303–9. . Leone, 163; ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, reg. 1549; and ADP 88.35.5,“p. pagare p. la fabbrica in Piazza Navona.” . Leone, 155; ADP 88.35.5; and ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, reg. 1549. The language of the deposits made by Donna Olimpia follows the formula: “L’Ill.ma et Ecc. ma Sig.ra Donn’Olimpia Pamphilij P’npess. di San Martino p. conto della fabrica che si fa’ al Palazzo di S.E. in Piazza Navona, deve havere Adi 20 Agosto [scudi] due milla dugento novanta cinque m.ta havuti cont.ti in [scudi] 1500 dal s.r dall’Em.mo Sig.r Card. le Panfilio” (ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, reg. 1549, fol. 1).

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on July 1, 1645. Thirteen months later, when the Cibo sale was finalized, she had already spent 21,341 scudi on the project. During the years of the Pamphilj papacy, Donna Olimpia also took advantage of her access to the privileges associated with her rank to amass substantial property holdings within and outside of Rome. In October 1645, as work was beginning on the palazzo, she made two purchases, a casale within the city limits (24,000 scudi) and the fief of San Martino al Cimino, near her hometown of Viterbo (24,500 scudi). The following month, Innocent X raised San Martino to a principality, making Donna Olimpia a princess and the third titled member of the family. In 1646, Donna Olimpia acquired a small vigna near the Colosseum, and in 1647 she bought a palazzo from the Cornaro family near the Trevi Fountain (19,000 scudi). Additional smaller purchases in 1647 and 1648 included property in Petrignano (900 scudi), a casa and vigna in Rome (1183 scudi) and vigne in Castel Gandolfo. In 1649, Olimpia acquired Prince Marcantonio II Borghese’s holdings at Testa di Lepre di Sopra (57,130 scudi). She also made canone payments on six previously purchased vigne, the one near the Colosseum, one near San Giovanni della Pigna, two near San Pancrazio and two in Trastevere. In 1651, she paid the enormous sum of 687,298 scudi to Princes Carlo and Taddeo Barberini for their feudal holdings in Valmontone and Montelanico. In 1652, she bought a vigna with a mill outside Porta San Giovanni (1,650 scudi) and the holdings of Duke . ADP 88.35.5 and ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, reg. 1549.The language of the payments made by Donna Olimpia follows the formula:“Ecc.ma Sig.ra D. Olimpia Pamphilj conto dilla nova fabrica dare adi p.o luglio scudi cento m.ta d’ordine di S.E. pagati à Bonifatio Persi disse à conto dilla Calci p. la nova fabrica in Piazza Navona” (ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, reg. 1549, fol. 224). . Ibid. . ADP 86.5. . Beneš, 234. . ADP 86.5.The account book does not list the amount paid for the vigna. . Ibid.The account book does not list the amount paid for the property in Castel Gandolfo. . Ibid.The account book does not list the amounts for these payments. As they were canone payments, presumably the amounts were much smaller than the other entries listed.

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Girolamo Mattei at Selci, Malnone and Sta. Cecilia, near Viterbo (84,500 scudi). Finally, in the last two years of Innocent X’s papacy, Donna Olimpia added to her holdings in Rome by acquiring a “casa con vigna” near her Trevi palace (8,000 scudi) and three pieces of property near Viterbo (totaling 19,220 scudi). These purchases increased Donna Olimpia’s personal wealth and social standing, but more importantly, augmented the status of the Pamphilj family, both in the present and for the future. Donna Olimpia’s 1654 will clearly stipulates that the majority of these holdings be transferred through her son Camillo for the benefit of future generations of Pamphilj family members.

Family Crisis

In late December, 1646, and early  January, 1647, rumors circulated in Rome that the pope was suffering a potentially deadly illness. These rumors were soon displaced, however, by the scandalous news that Camillo Pamphilj had resigned his cardinalate to marry Olimpia Aldobrandini, widow of Prince Paolo Borghese, princess of Rossano and the sole heir to the great Aldobrandini fortune. In light of the fact that she would bring the largest fortune in the Italian peninsula to the Pamphilj family, Aldobrandini presented a substantial list of demands to her future in-laws. Among these was a request that she and Camillo maintain a residence separate from her mother-in-law, but that they would live in one of her palaces. Aldobrandini further demanded that Donna Olimpia agree to leave her entire estate to Camillo, a stipulation that would guarantee Olimpia Aldobrandini’s children with Camillo inheritance of all of their grandmother’s wealth. Aldobrandini’s demands infuriated Donna Olimpia, and Innocent X was equally angered by the public humiliation his nephew caused when he abandoned his appointment to marry, . Ibid. Donna Olimpia also purchased four smaller pieces of property inTrastevere during these years (totaling approximately 1,700 scudi). . ADP 93.68.4. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 106. . Pastor, 30:37. . Gigli, 295. . Ibid.

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KImberly L. Dennis • A Palace Built by a Princess?

something no cardinal nephew had done since Cesare Borgia. As a consequence of their insults to the family’s public image, the couple was forced to forego a papal wedding in the Sistine Chapel, also among Olimpia Aldobrandini’s requests. Instead, they were married outside of Rome at the Villa Torre Nova and then retreated into exile at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, where they remained for the next ten months. Neither Innocent X nor Donna Olimpia attended the wedding. Camillo and Olimpia remained in Frascati until May 1648, when Aldobrandini, in her final month of pregnancy, returned to Rome and took up residence at Palazzo Farnese. Angered by her defiance but unwilling to take forcible action against the young princess carrying his family’s heir, Innocent X requested that Olimpia relocate to one of her villas outside the city. She replied that she would remain in Rome under the protection of the French. On June 24, 1648, Donna Olimpia was called to the Aldobrandini palace on the Corso, where her daughter-in-law had spent the final weeks of her pregnancy in exile within the city.That night, with Donna Olimpia in attendance, Olimpia Aldobrandini gave birth to a son who would eventually bring peace to the family. The child was named Giovanni Battista for the feast day on which he was born and in homage to his great-uncle, the pope. To express her gratitude for the safe delivery of her son, Olimpia Aldobrandini ordered that charitable donations be distributed to the poor from her palace for three days. And in an unprecedented celebration of the birth of a papal family heir, three nights of fireworks over Palazzo Aldobrandini joyfully proclaimed the arrival of little Giovanni Battista. Signifying a sort of semi-reconciliation with the pope and his mother, Camillo was finally allowed to return to Rome, though on the condition that he and his family would continue to live under surveillance in Palazzo Aldobrandini. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 112. . Ibid. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 135. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 135–36. . Gigli, 315–16. . Gigli, 316. . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 136.

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Fig. 6. Palazzo Pamphilj, piano nobile, from Bosticco, Piazza Navona, isola dei Pamphilj. Renovated apartments of Donna Olimpia, 1646–1649 (plan modifications by Rebecca Charbonneau). (1) sala, (2) anticamera, (3) second anticamera, (4) sala di udienza, (5) Donna Olimpia’s bedroom, (6) oratorio, (7) chapel, (8) private rooms, (9) galleria.

Throughout this family crisis, Donna Olimpia continued oversight of work on Palazzo Pamphilj. By December 1646, decoration of the interior spaces was already underway. The team of painters who contributed frescoes to the palazzo included Giovanni Antonio Gaulli, Andrea Camassei, Giacinto Brandi, Carlo Sacchi, Giacinto Gimignani, Giovanni Battista Serra, Giovanni Battista Magni and Leonardo Santi. Payment records indicate that the majority of the work took place between December 1647 and February 1649. Donna Olimpia’s payments to the painters during this period totaled 3,295 scudi. In late 1653 and early 1654, she made additional payments totaling 550 scudi to Brandi, Gimignani and the heirs of Gaulli and Camassei.These final payments were presumably for work the artists had executed by 1648. Once the paintings were completed, Donna Olimpia began embellishment of the palazzo with sumptuous fabrics. In September 1649, she paid 2,063 scudi for velvet imported from Venice, and the following month she purchased gold curtains from Florence for 3,845 scudi. Additional shipments from Florence

. The contributions of Giovanni Battista Santi and Leonardo Magni have not previously been explored in the literature on the palazzo decoration. The account books list frequent payments to the two artists, indicating that they worked in Palazzo Pamphilj between  January 1647 and February 1649. Santi and Magni were paid a total of 2,700 scudi during that time period, or 82% of the amount Donna Olimpia paid to her entire team of painters. ADP 88.35.5 and ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, reg. 1549. . ADP 88.35.5; and ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, reg. 1549. . Ibid.

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included twelve pieces of crimson fabric (in November, 2,294 scudi) and six pieces of gold lamé (in December, 641 scudi).

Renovated Apartments

Donna Olimpia retained use of the same rooms she had occupied before the renovation but also expanded her apartments across the length of the palazzo’s western flank, as per the provisions of her late husband’s will (Fig. 6). Pamphilj arms were installed to mark the entrance to her apartments on the piano nobile. Olimpia’s enfilade began with a sala located in the southwestern corner of the palazzo overlooking Piazza di Pasquino. Following the sala were two anticamere with frescoes attributed to Giacinto Gimignani and Pier Francesco Mola, though the latter artist does not appear in the payment records. The frescoes in the second anticamera feature men and women in eastern-inspired dress flanked by winged Victories, connecting Donna Olimpia’s reception rooms with the decoration of the Sala Regia in the papal palace on the Quirinale, which her brother-in-law preferred to the Vatican Palace. Two rooms flanking these anterooms likely served as Donna Olimpia’s private chapel and oratory. The next room, her sala di udienza, known as the Camera delle donne illustri, was frescoed by Gimignani with scenes of the biblical heroines  Judith, Esther, Abigail and Pharoah’s daughter. Gimignani’s quadri riportati celebrate biblical women who exercised great power while maintaining their virtue. They are flanked by putti bearing Pamphilj and Maidalchini stemme. As Susan Russell has demonstrated, the iconographic program of this room provided Donna Olimpia with a suitable space for receiving visitors. Gimignani’s frescoes followed contemporary prescriptions for decorating women’s apartments while also implying that Donna Olimpia shared the wisdom and virtues of the figures depicted. . Ibid. . Leone, 213. . Deoclecio Redig de Campos, “Palazzo Pamphilj,” in Bosticco, Piazza Navona, 157–92, at 187; and Leone, 214. Both authors attribute the paintings to Mola. Payments are recorded in ADP 88.35.5 and ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, registro 1549. . Redig de Campos, 187–88; and Leone, 214–15. . Leone, 215–17. . For a full discussion of the frescoes in Donna Olimpia’s sala d’udienza, see Russell. . Leone, 217. . Russell, 21.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Donna Olimpia’s private chambers, a bedroom and three additional rooms, completed the enfilade, which culminated in the Galleria. The penultimate room preceding the Galleria features a vault bearing a combination of Maidalchini and Pamphilj emblems. Leone has suggested that this and the adjacent room may have been used by Donna Olimpia for dining and entertaining, and the rooms’ direct connection with the Pamphilj Galleria would have created an ideal space for displaying the magnificence of the palazzo. The culmination of Donna Olimpia’s apartments in the Galleria also parallels the arrangement of the cardinal’s apartments on the opposite side of the palazzo, indicating that the Galleria was intended for the use of both parties. Moreover, the Galleria was known for centuries as the “Galleria di Olimpia Pamphili,” and evidence suggests that Donna Olimpia may have been its patron. In particular, a sonnet titled “On the Paintings by Pietro Berrettini in the Galleria of Donna Olimpia Maidalchini” by Vitale Mascardi was published just after Pietro da Cortona completed the spectacular vault in 1654. Mascardi’s poem plays on the similarity of the name Olimpia with the Olympian gods depicted in the fresco, equating the Galleria decoration to a sun brighter than all others.

Conclusion

In 1650, the city swelled with 700,000 pilgrims arriving to celebrate the Jubilee. Preparations had been underway since the summer of 1648, including the redesign of Piazza Navona to create a magnificent forecourt for the papal family palazzo. According to Baldinucci as well as contemporary envoys from Modena and Mantua, in 1647 Donna Olimpia had directed Virgilio Spada to “convey the program for the [Four Rivers] fountain to Bernini” and then arranged for Innocent X to see Bernini’s proposal for its design. In  July 1648, workers began . Leone, 217. . Ibid. . Francesco Cancellieri, Il Mercato, Il Lago dell’Acqua Vergine ed il Palazzo Panfiliano nel Circo Agonale, detto Volgarmente Piazza Navona, Descritti da Francesco Cancellieri: Con un Appendice di XXXII Documenti ed un Trattato Sopra gli Obelischi (Rome: Francesco Bourlie, 1811), 103–4; Leone, 269; and Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 130. . Pastor, 30:184. . Jennifer Montagu, Alessandro Algardi (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1985), 90–92; and Maria Grazia D’Amelio and Tod Marder, “The Four Rivers Fountain:

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KImberly L. Dennis • A Palace Built by a Princess?

hauling the massive pieces of the obelisk that would crown the fountain from the Circus of Maxentius. The Four Rivers Fountain would not be completed in time for the  Jubilee, but by October 1649, the colored marble pavement of new St. Peter’s was installed, and embellishment of chapels, altars and the portico was almost finalized. Innocent X’s renovations at San Giovanni in Laterano were also nearing completion, and “all the Churches, great and small, were cleaned.” When the  Jubilee year finally arrived, avvisi writers noted that pilgrims paid their respects to Innocent X at the new St. Peter’s and then hurried to Piazza Navona to see Donna Olimpia and her palace, “which then truly became the heart of Rome.” Donna Olimpia’s “anticamera of Piazza Navona was full of powerful figures, the same people who packed into Mazarin’s anticamera in Paris and who four years earlier had filled the anticamera of Olivares in Madrid.” From 1646 until the death of Innocent X in 1655, Donna Olimpia oversaw the development of the family palazzo into the requisite monument to a papal family’s power. Other family members played supporting roles, but during his papacy the majority of Innocent X’s attention was required for managing his other building projects as well as diplomatic affairs, particularly as he struggled throughout his reign to build a competent support network to compensate for the loss of his familial cardinal nipote. Due to the family dispute over his marriage, Camillo was absent from the city — or exiled within it — during the years when most of the building activity on the palazzo occurred, from 1647 to 1648. Especially during Camillo’s exile, Innocent X relied on Donna Olimpia as his closest ally and most trusted advisor. Art and Building Technology in Pamphilj Rome,” in The Pamphilj and the Arts: Patronage and Consumption in Baroque Rome, ed. Stephanie C. Leone (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, 2011), 24.. . D’Amelio and Marder, 25. . Gigli, 342–43:“tutte le Chiese grandi, et piccole furono ripolite, nettate, et fatte bianche.” . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 154:“che allora veramente divenne il cuore di Roma.” . Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 125:“la sua anticamera di Piazza Navona era affollata dai potenti, la stessa gente che a Parigi stipava l’anticamera di Mazzarino, e che fino a quattro anni prima aveva riempito a Madrid quella del ministro Olivares.”

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The account records for the palazzo project demonstrate Donna Olimpia’s oversight of every detail of the building project during this period. Between June 1645, and July 1650, she deposited 121,835 scudi into the building account. From the first payment in  July 1645 to the final disbursement in November 1650, she made payments totaling 107,492 scudi to the workers, and no other payer is listed. Donna Olimpia was the only family member to maintain a residence at Palazzo Pamphilj before and throughout the papacy of Innocent X. One version of her will demonstrates the extent of her desire to inextricably tie her legacy to the palazzo by stipulating that her apartments should remain as they had been decorated during her lifetime. Donna Olimpia’s efforts to permanently connect her memory with the elegant palazzo that dominates Piazza Navona were successful. According to a Roman legend still recounted today, Donna Olimpia’s voice and the wheels of her carriage can be heard at night in Piazza Navona in the rumbling of the Four Rivers Fountain, and her ghost can be seen appearing and disappearing in the windows of her palace. •

. ADP 88.35.5 and ASR, Camerale I, Fabbriche, reg. 1549.The payment records indicate that some of the deposited funds went toward work on Camillo’s Villa Pamphilj on the  Janiculum.Where possible, this calculation has separated payments for for the construction of the palazzo from payments for other projects underway during this period. . Luigi Salerno,“Palazzo Pamphilj,” in Bosticco, Piazza Navona, 136. . Ibid.

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The Rhetoric of Power: Della Rovere Palaces and Processional Routes in Late FifteenthCentury Rome Lisa Passaglia Bauman When Francesco della Rovere became Pope Sixtus IV in 1471, his rather prosaic family background was a handicap to his social and political authority. Since he had no “house” connecting him to part of a great continuum, extending deep into the past and far into the future, he used a variety of agents to fashion one. In some places he actively intervened, elevating six members of his family to the cardinalate and placing others in positions of power in the secular world. But in other places, those family members created the images supportive of the house of della Rovere, actions based on a climate of preconditions which the pope in part had engendered.This study of the interaction between a set of historical circumstances — a family that comes to power with limited experience and unlimited resources — and the production of a significant body of Renaissance art — della Rovere palaces in Rome — emphasizes the patterns of patronage deduced from specific choices and argues that della Rovere palaces testify to their evolving political and social strength. The primary assumption of this work is that art patronage is a rhetorical means by which the della Rovere attempted to accomplish some very practical and symbolic goals — the expression of power and the legitimization of that power to the people of Rome. . This present study is abbreviated from my “Power and Image: Della Rovere Patronage in late quattrocento Rome” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1990). My research was made possible through the generosity of Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago. I should like to thank Carolyn Valone, Cynthia Stollhans and Sheila ffolliott for their continued interest in my work and Katherine McIver and Cynthia Stollhans again as editors of this volume. The six nephews elevated to the cardinalate began with the elevation of Pietro Riario and Giuliano della Rovere on December 16, 1471. Girolamo Basso della Rovere, Cristoforo della Rovere from Turin and Raffaelle Sansoni Riario were elevated in December 1477. On Cristoforo’s death two months later, the cardinalate was given to his brother Domenico della Rovere. See Conrad Eubel, Hierarchia Catholica Medii Aevi, 8 vols. (Munich: Regensbergianae, 1913–78), 2:16, 18; Gaetano Moroni, Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica da S. Pietro sino ai nostri giorni (Venice:Tipografia Emiliana, 1840–61), 57:170–71, and 31:156–63; Francesco Cristofari, Storia dei Cardinali di Santa Romana Chiesa dal secolo V all’anno del signore MDCCCLXXXVIII (Rome: Tipografia de Propaganda Fide, 1888), 21, 35, 68, 93,

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Very little is known about della Rovere palaces. They exist in texts in very limited description, and all have been substantially renovated over time.The five major palaces claimed by this family immediately after Sixtus IV’s elevation, beginning with Pietro Riario’s renovation and Giuliano della Rovere’s subsequent completion of the palace at SS. Apostoli, Giuliano’s renovation of the palace at his titular church of San Pietro in Vincoli, the palace of Girolamo Riario at the northern end of the Piazza Navona (the present day Palazzo Altemps), the palace of Girolamo Basso della Rovere at Sant’ Apollinare and the palace of Domenico della Rovere in the Borgo, all share some stylistic features. All five palaces connect the family to the past in specific architectural details. All five appropriate the tower motif, a medieval baronial tradition, as a decorative element rather than a defensive one and, even though Giuliano’s palace at San Pietro in Vincoli was viewed as one of the most splendid in the city, all five present a stuccoed facade, a less-expensive facing material than travertine. Those choices provided this non-Roman nouveau-riche family with a local architectural heritage; in their palaces the della Rovere strove for a vernacular style. All five also offered, however, a visual equivalent of their political present — a new family trying to differentiate themselves in the urban milieu. Unlike other mid-fifteenth-century palaces such as the multi-prospected Palazzo dell’Orologio or the irregular blocks of the Palazzo Orsini, della Rovere palaces reflected a more consistent approach to building line with their regular street fronts as well as the addition of some classical details, such as painted and sgraffito facades. Their trim uncluttered arrangements placed them among the new buildings of a modern Rome and suggested a family that was a leader 124 and 338. All of the papal nephews are mentioned in Aurelio Brandolini’s De Laudibus et de rebus gestis Sixti IIII Pont. Max. See Vincenzo Pacifici, Un carme biografico di Sisto IV del 1477 (Tivoli : Società tibvrtina di storia e d’arte, 1921), 42–51. . For basic bibliography on della Rovere palaces, see Torgil Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1958); and K.J.P. Lowe, Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy:The Life and Career of Cardinal Francesco Soderini, 1453–1524 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2002). . On the exploration of antique models and sources in Renaissance palaces, see Georgia Clarke, Roman House-Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in FifteenthCentury Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the painted facades of della Rovere palaces, see Richard Ingersoll, “The Ritual Use of Public Space in Renaissance Rome” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1985), 72–74.

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in urban renovation while discreetly presenting a veneer of classicism. What architectural historians have found wanting in the palaces — their neither “from the past” nor “of the future” design — was exactly their point. The della Rovere co-opted existing ruling-class architecture — the palace, continued local traditions in some elements — the tower, retained a modest exterior appropriate to their religious dignity — the stuccoed facade, while also introducing a physical as well as a cultural order to the street. In all cases, della Rovere palaces appear to present a judicious and temperate aspect to the city. One fact about della Rovere palaces that could add to this discussion and that has not been modified through renovation is their location.The della Rovere were mindful of the appearance of their palaces and the assumptions that could accrue to those stylistic choices, and so they chose to build their palaces in very specific parts of the city because those locations also conveyed meaning. As Paolo Cortesi stated in his early sixteenth-century treatise De Cardinalatu, the palace was the effective external representation of a cardinal’s cultural position; it was immediate, grand and unmistakable. While both Giuliano della Rovere and Pietro Riario employed architectural conventions that advanced a notion of the della Rovere as visual promoters of tradition, the location of a titular church was not a choice freely made by the patron, and a cardinal’s renovation of it was not uncommon in the fifteenth century. Thus, SS. Apostoli and San Pietro in Vincoli fall outside the scope of this study. It is when other members of the della Rovere family use Cortesi’s known and shared . Magnuson, for example (322), discusses the architectural “plagiarism” in the palace of Giuliano della Rovere at SS. Apostoli, and the “curiously conservative” palace of Domenico della Rovere in the Borgo, 332. . Kathleen Weil-Garris and John F. D’Amico, The Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace: A Chapter from Cortesi’s “De Cardinalatu” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980). . On cardinals’ titular churches, see Carol M. Richardson,“The Titular Churches,” in Reclaiming Rome: Cardinals in the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 183–234. On the independence of cardinals to build their own properties in the middle decades of the fifteenth century, see Richardson, “Property Portfolios,” in Reclaiming Rome, 263–313. . In addition to its later date, and because it also enclosed his titular church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, I have also placed Raffaele Riario’s Cancelleria outside the scope of this study.

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notion of architecture as a principle means by which Renaissance nobles announced their grandeur that our story begins. When members of the della Rovere family were free to build or live anywhere in the city, it is worth exploring where they built. Between 1477 and 1484, Girolamo Riario built a new palace, today’s Palazzo Altemps, while across the street at around the same time in 1483 his cousin, Cardinal Girolamo Basso della Rovere, moved into the palace built by Cardinal d’Estouteville attached to the church of Sant’ Apollinare. Sant’ Apollinare was not Basso della Rovere’s titular church. Neither was Sant’ Agostino across the street as it had been for d’Estouteville. Nor was either man d’Estouteville’s heir to property or position. In both cases, not bound by titular church or family inheritance, the men chose to build in or move to a specific part of Rome along the via Recta. In 1478, another della Rovere nephew, Domenico della Rovere, began construction of his palace along the Borgo Vecchio in the Vatican enclave. In all three cases, the della Rovere situated themselves along Rome’s two most important processional routes because those locations allowed the patrons to join themselves in a unique way to the papacy. On two days in the year that brought the pope into the city in procession, della Rovere palaces along that route magnified the pope’s magnificence, surrounding him with family members. On a glorious day that displayed the awesome power of the papacy, the palaces inflated the glory of the della Rovere by placing them in the very part of the city and attached to the most illustrious patron of the day. Each became greater by virtue of his association with the other. A quick look at a map of late fifteenth-century Rome reveals that, unlike may quattrocento cities, Rome was uniquely decentralized. There were three principle medieval streets — via Recta, via Papale and via Mercatoria et Florea — and two major piazze — Campo dei Fiori and Piazza San Pietro.The Palazzo Venezia and Rome’s major market on the Campidoglio marked the edge of the inhabited area. The three major streets were protected by the Maestri delle Strade, two Roman citizens entitled to hold public office who were directly . On the Palazzo Altemps, see Lowe, 214–17. On d’Estouteville’s palace at Sant’ Apollinare and its inhabitants after his death in 1483, see Meredith  J. Gill,“Guillaume d’Estouteville’s Italian  Journey,” in The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art 1450–1700, ed. Mary Hollingsworth and Carol M. Richardson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 25–45.

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under the authority of the cardinal chamberlain. Because of their physical and symbolic importance to the city of Rome, these three streets were preserved with a series of statutes beginning in 1452. These required them to be kept clear of outbuildings, obstructing porticoes and overhangs and authorized a weekly street cleaning during the summer months. The statutes insured they would continue to be desirable building sites, and the construction of different types of buildings by specific kinds of patrons along them contributed to fixing their form and character. The via Papale, for example, was a curving medieval road that was part of the route for the infrequent papal possesso. It passed through the banking district and skirted Piazza Navona before finally reaching San Marco and the Campidoglio. All along its route, the anti-papal character of the papal street was evident. Allan Ceen and Richard Ingersoll have shown the via Papale as the established domain of the great families of Rome’s declining civic nobility. The Orsini were highly visible, first at Monte Giordano toward the beginning of the street and then at their palace along the southern edge of Piazza Navona. With the satiric Pasquino statue and the limited number of churches, the via Papale demonstrated an overwhelmingly republican . E. Re, “Maestri di Strada,” Archivio della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria 43 (1920): 5–102; Antonella De Michelis, “The Maestri di Strade: Political Strategies and Social Mobility in Farnese Rome,” in Proceedings of a Conference on Early Modern Rome, 1341–1667, ed. Portia Prebys (Ferrara: Edisai, 2011), 741–48. . The route of the papal possesso began at St. Peter’s and passed through the Borgo along the Borgo Vecchio to Castel Sant’ Angelo. It crossed the river at Ponte Sant’ Angelo and proceeded down the via Papale (the present via del Governo Vecchio) past the Palazzo Pichi.Then it continued down the via Papale (at this point the present Corso Vittorio Emanuele) to San Marco.The fifteenth-century version then crossed to the via di Marforio, past the Carcere Mamertino and through the Arch of Septimus Severus. After Pope Paul III, the Campidoglio was included with a passage through the Forum down the ancient Via Sacra. From the Colosseum, it was a straight passage to San Giovanni in Laterano.There the pope said Mass. On his return to the Vatican, he repeated his earlier route until the Capitoline.There he turned toward the river and followed the via Mercatoria et Florea back. On the papal possesso, see F. Cancellieri, Storia de’ solenni Possessi de’ Sommi Pontefici (Rome: Luigi Lazzarini, 1802); and Ingersoll. . Allan Ceen, “The Quartiere de’ Banchi: Urban Planning in Rome in the First Half of the Cinquecento” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977). One of the first books to analyze the character of various streets and areas in Rome is Luigi Salerno, Luigi Spezzaferro, and Manfredo Tafuri, Via Giulia: Una utopia urbanistica del 500 (Rome: Aristide Staderini, 1975).

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character. On the occasions when the pope traveled across Rome to take possession of the city, the via Papale presented a ritual challenge to his claim as ruler of the city. A good example of cardinals building along specific routes, including the via Papale, to assert their authority is seen in the example of Stefano Nardini. He was from a non-Roman family and had been elevated to the cardinalate in 1473 by Sixtus IV. He would appear to have been a cardinal with limited cause for dissatisfaction with the papacy. Neither part of the civic nobility nor from an ancient Roman baronial clan, he was a cardinal who owed his recent success to the pope. And yet Nardini deliberately selected a palace site along the anti-papal via Papale. It seems incongruous until one considers that Nardini also belonged to the Confraternity of San Salvatore ad Sancta Sanctorum, a religious organization which by the 1470s had developed into an elite brotherhood with a strong civic presence and had become an institution of the urban patriciate. Sixtus IV was the first pope to decline its membership, Nardini accepted, and architectural battle lines may have been drawn. In the humanist writer Aurelio Brandolini’s epigrams celebrating the urban renewal of Sixtus, the via Papale was characterized as a conspicuously troubled route. It may have been an important processional route in the ceremonies of Rome, but in the 1480s the via Papale was highly unsuitable for della Rovere patronage. The via Mercatoria et Florea was an ancient road and undoubtedly a popular street. It connected the financial center at the Piazza di Ponte to the market at Campo dei Fiori, edged around the Theater of Marcellus, and ended at Rome’s other market on the Campidoglio. With the opening of the Ponte Sisto in 1473, the growing business section of Trastevere was connected to the markets, and the via Mercatoria et Florea became an even more vital transport link. It was also used as the return route of the papal possesso and by mid-century sported the celebrated and extravagant palace of Rodrigo Borgia. . Ingersoll, 185; and Ceen, 42. On the Nardini palace, G. Zippel, “Il Palazzo del Governo Vecchio,” Capitolium 6 (1958): 365–77. For the Confraternity del San Salvatore, see P. Egidi, Necrologi e libri affini della provincial romana (Rome: Forzani, 1908-11), 44:311–13; 45:451–52. . Brandolini, De Laudibus. Epigram 24, BAV,Vat. Lat. 5008, in Eugene Müntz, Les arts à la cour des papes pendant le XVe et le XVI e siècles, 3 vols. (Paris : Ernest Thorin, 1878–82), 3:191.

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But it seems to have been characterized as a service road, Brandolini concentrating in his De Laudibus on its bustle of commercial and financial activity. It was the via Recta that Brandolini found the most agreeable. Here, he stated, it is not necessary to attract artisans since there is a more elevated class to be stimulated. Starting near the Canale di Ponte, Brandolini worked his way down the street providing brief descriptions of the friends, relatives and close associates of the pope who had built there: Sixtus IV’s Cardinal Chamberlain d’Estouteville and Giovanni Francesco Franciotti, a della Rovere relation. It was an elegant street paved by Sixtus IV — with churches, large palaces belonging to supporters and clear of commercial traffic. Only one powerful baronial family had a property remaining there, the nearly ruined tower of the Sanguigni (Tor Sanguigna), and only at its less populated extreme had the influential Capranica extended their palace across its path. In short, it was a desirable neighborhood. Then with the relocation of the central market to Piazza Navona and the construction of the via Sistina, Sixtus IV insured its prominence and exclusivity. . Brandolini, De Laudibus. Epigram 23, BAV, Vat. Lat. 5008; reprinted in Eugene Müntz, Les arts 3:190–91. . Brandolini, De Laudibus. Epigram 25, BAV, Vat. Lat. 5008; reprinted in Eugene Müntz, Les arts 3:191–92. . According to Giuseppe De Luca, “Un Umanista Fiorentino e la roma rinnovata da Sisto IV,” La Rinascita 1 (1938): 74–90, at 89, Franciotti was a merchant from Lucca who married the pope’s niece, Luchinetta della Rovere, and who was named depositario of the Camera Apostolica on 7 August 1480. P. Litta, Famiglie celebri di Italia (Milan: Giusti, 1819–1911), 9, dates the appointment to 1486. Antonio Grosso, husband to Sixtus’s niece, Maria, also held the office of Treasurer. On San Salvatore, see E. Fanano, San Salvatore in Lauro del pio sodalizio dei Piceni (Rome: Edizioni Roma, 1959). Like Albertini’s Opusculum, Brandolini’s epigram significantly omits Girolamo Riario and his palace. . Lowe, 215. . Sixtus IV’s via Sistina is not to be confused with the modern street of the same name. His fifteenth-century street began at the Canale di Ponte and followed the course of the river north; today its path can be followed in the present Lungotevere Tor di Nona, the via di Monte Brianzo, the via di Clementino, and then past San Lorenzo in Lucina to the Corso.The present via Sistina was constructed by Sixtus V along the route of the old Strade Felice.

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In 1477, on the suggestion of the Cardinal Chamberlain d’Estouteville, Sixtus IV relocated the central market from its ancient position on the Campidoglio to Piazza Navona.The Roman diarist Infessura claimed that the removal of the market had repeatedly been demanded by the communal council and that the Piazza Navona was enough of a popular center to warrant the transfer of a long-established institution. Certainly Piazza Navona was closer to Sant’ Eustachio where, since the reign of Martin V, the dogana for all merchandise that crossed land was located. But the decision to move the market seems more than merely convenient; it seems intentional and expressive. Latino Orsini, the previous cardinal chamberlain, had only just died on August 21 and, less than two weeks later on September 3, d’Estouteville had already authorized the market transfer. His efficiency is arresting. Since d’Estouteville owned property along the via Recta, his motivation for the development of the Piazza Navona seems understandable. With the relocation of the market, property values along the piazza would have soared, and d’Estouteville would have benefited financially. The more challenging question, however, is why Sixtus would have agreed to such a move. How was it in his self-interest, the della Rovere’s or Rome’s to effect this change? The Campus Martius area was one of the most crowded parts of Rome, and the fact that the Piazza Navona had remained vacant and unused during the Middle Ages is something of a mystery. It is true that the piazza was inconveniently blocked from the neighborhood by large amounts of scrap and rubble remaining from the ancient grandstands of Domitian’s Circus. Richard Ingersoll, however, also . Stefano Infessura, Diario della città di Roma, ed. Oreste Tommasini. Fonti per la storia d’Italia 5 (Rome: Forzani, 1890), 83. On Orsini’s death in 1477, Infessura, 82, wrote: “A di 21 d’agosto morse lo cardinal Orsino missore Latino, et fece lo testament con autorità dell papa Sixto.…” On the market move, see Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, 40 vols. (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1968–69), 4:458;  James S. Ackerman, “The Planning of Renaissance Rome, 1450-1580,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P.A. Ramsey (Binghamton: State University of New York, 1982), 3–17, at 9; Magnuson, 32–33; Gill, n. 84. . Statuti delle gabelle di Roma, ed. S. Malatesta (Rome: Pace, 1886), 74. . The idea of property development as a lucrative form of investment for a cardinal is explored in Lowe, chapter 16. . Pietro Romano and P. Partini, Piazza Navona nella storia e nell’arte (Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1947), 33. On the Piazza Navona, see Sergio Bosticco et al., Piazza Navona:

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believes that the Piazza Navona remained clear because it served as a military mustering field, a place where the citizen’s militia could be assembled. The space then had an inherently republican significance. In moving the market there, Sixtus IV managed to present himself as a populist: the people’s market restored to the people’s field. The market move also diffused some of the real civic authority of the Campidoglio.With the removal of the market, the Campidoglio lost its central function as a rallying place for citizens’ interests. The collection of antique statues that Sixtus had placed there in 1471 turned the Campidoglio into a museum of symbolic glory. The statues were testaments to Rome’s achievement and emblems of her history, and the dedicatory inscription ensured the association between past ancient glory and present papal power. The Piazza Navona was firmly locked in as a center of the abitato, and the della Rovere almost immediately arrived on the scene. Shortly after the market transfer in 1477, Sixtus constructed and paved the via Sistina or via “recta iuxta Flumen,” a new street that ran along the river from the Ponte Sant’ Angelo to the Corso. In doing so, he ensured a specific character for the via Recta. With its straight alignment between the Corso and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and its proximity to the market at Piazza Navona, the via Recta was potentially the perfect northern counterpart to the busy southern via Mercatoria et Florea. The via Sistina eliminated that possibility. The via Sistina was to be the service road allowing easier and more spacious transport for merchandise and pilgrims coming from the north. Pilgrims and merchants coming into Rome from the Porta del Popolo would encounter the modern, efficient, and shorter via Sistina first and be encouraged to take it. The end result Isole degli Pamphilj (Rome: Spinosi, 1970); Armando Ravaglioli, Piazza Navona: Centro di Roma (Rome: Biblioteca romana, 1973). . Ingersoll, 280. . On the authority deflection at the Campidoglio with the market transfer, see Salerno, et al., Via Giulia; and M.L. Madonna, “L’architettura e la città intorno al 1475,” in Roma 1300–1875: La città degli anni Santi, ed. Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), 101–24. Bosticco, et al., 22, however, see the market transfer as “restoring political and historic dignity to the Capitoline.” There are numerous sources on the subject of Sistine epigraphy. Some of the best are available in Un pontificato ed una città: Sisto IV (1471–1484), ed. M. Miglio (Rome: Citta del Vaticano, 1986).

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was that the via Recta, where the della Rovere were building, stayed clear. The conscientious desire for an efficient street system had been joined to the more prosaic impulses of land speculation and self-aggrandizement. Thus, Brandolini’s leisurely promenade down an elegant high-profile street in the center of a prime part of town was guaranteed.The via Recta was an inherently significant street in Rome, but it achieved an even greater importance through its use by certain elements of society and avoidance by others. At least two della Rovere patrons chose to live along it, and the interaction of specific rituals and ceremonies along it produced a message that the della Rovere appropriated. In living along the via Recta, the della Rovere bathed in the reflected glory of its most celebrated moment, the Annunciation procession. Processions were a feature of quattrocento Rome. Impromptu ones, such as those for funerals, weddings, baptisms and executions, were an almost weekly occurrence, while those organized to seek divine intervention, make thanksgiving or celebrate a triumph were more choreographed and infrequent events. Usually they involved moving from either a gate or stational church to another of the sixty-five stational churches in the city. But the occasions when the pope himself penetrated the abitato in procession were the rarest and therefore the most impressive. There was, of course, the papal possesso, when the new pope took possession of the Lateran as the bishop of Rome, and descriptions of that event clearly underscore the reason why pontifical processions were generally confined to the Borgo. Sixtus IV spent 28,000 florins, over ten percent of the Vatican’s annual income, on his possesso in 1471, outspending Paul II by over twenty percent. Much of the money was spent on baldachins, banners and horse trappings, but a significant portion was set aside to be thrown to the crowd at various stops on the journey. Riots broke out frequently along the route, and the pope exposed himself to a great deal of republican harassment and danger during the procession.The route of the possesso was down the via Papale, a street that had a very decided republican character. . Infessura provides a brief description of this, 81. . Ingersoll, 195, and n. 48; Clemens Bauer,“Studi per la storia della finanze papale durante il pontificato di Sisto IV,” Archivio della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria 50 (1927): 319–400.

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Fig. 1. Map of the Campo Marzio area showing part of the route of the Annunciation procession past the palaces of Girolamo Riario and Giuliano Basso della Rovere (at the second arrow). From L. Bufalini, Pianta di Roma, 1551, reproduced in A. Frutaz, Le Piante di Roma (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1962), vol. 2, tavola 201.

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The money then was a type of ransom, a bribe thrown to the citizens of Rome guaranteeing the pope’s safe passage through their city. But the possesso was worth the cost since it reinforced the supremacy of the papacy in a very visual way. In the Campus Martius neighborhood, the procession ran through Monte Giordano, a stronghold of medieval warring families, and marked the papacy’s triumph over family politics.Winding past the Campidoglio, the seat of civic government, the pope reinforced his status as king and supreme ruler. The papal possesso was a rare event though, occurring on average only every nine years in the fifteenth century. There were, on the other hand, sixty-nine days during the year that the pope and his cardinals were obliged to honor as feast days. Except for St. Mark’s day, when the pope rode in cavalcade to the church of San Marco, the only day in the year when a papal procession moved into and through the inhabited center of Rome was on the feast of the Annunciation on March 25 (Fig. 1). In 1460, Cardinal Torquemada initiated a special devotion to the Virgin on this feast at the Dominican church of Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, but it was Sixtus IV who transformed it into a papal event with a major ritual incursion into the city.The favored route from Ponte Sant’ Angelo was on the via Recta.The procession passed San Salvatore in Lauro, the Tor Sanguigna with the palace of Girolamo Riario in the background, the palace of Girolamo Basso della Rovere, and d’Estouteville’s newly constructed church of Sant’ Agostino. Just before the Palazzo Capranica at the church of the Maddalena, the group turned south to the church of Sta. Maria sopra Minerva.There, in keeping with the spirit of the feast, the pope donated dowries to fifteen poor but worthy girls.The return route had three variations: past Sant’ Eustachio and the Baths of Nero through Piazza Navona to the via Papale; south at Sant’ Eustachio to the via Papale; or south from the via Papale at the Palazzo Pichi through Campo dei Fiori to the via Mercatoria et Florea. Everything about the ritual appealed to both the Roman people and the papacy.The dowries were a benevolent act of charity given from a “father” to protect the virtue of his “daughters.” The people saw good and modest virgins guaranteed a secure future within the confines of marriage and motherhood, and the pope displayed his power and pomp under the guise of beneficence and paternalism. However, before the dowries — the justification for the annual . Ingersoll, 122–24, and figure II.11.

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invasion — were given, the pope needed to make his way in as much splendor and glory as possible through the heart of the secular city. And here the via Recta was crucial, not simply as a passageway, but as a dramatic stage. It bore all the hallmarks of a skillfully crafted set — clean, free from much of the chaos of transport traffic and commercial activity, dotted with churches and the elegant residences of papal supporters and, most importantly in Sixtus’s case, his family with the palaces of Girolamo Riario and Girolamo Basso della Rovere. For the della Rovere, it was a doubly beneficial experience: the pope was warmly received on a glorious occasion by passing down a city street conveniently filled with members of his family while the family was publicly displayed in architectural splendor on a day of auspicious papal accomplishment. Like the papal possesso, the Annunciation procession was a part of the cultural life of the city, but it also helped shape the city as the della Rovere built along its route in order to be included in its narrative and to tie themselves to the papacy. The della Rovere did not use what Allan Ceen has called “processional route architecture.” Although it is difficult to describe details of both palaces because of their extensive later rebuilding, the location of the palace of Girolamo Riario is definitely not directly on the via Recta. It is instead set back from the street behind the Tor Sanguigna Walking down the via Recta, the via dei Soldati facade would have been most visible, and it bears no explicitly dramatic stemma. Its main facade that flanked the via dell’Apollinare was possibly painted, reflecting a certain kind of enthusiasm from classicists, but it was not aimed toward nor even highly visible to the procession. Neither was the scale of either palace overwhelming.The palace of Girolamo Basso at Sant’ Apollinare was positioned in a much more procession-oriented direction since it faced the oncoming parade, but that was clearly not by the design of the della Rovere patron who only purchased the structure, not commissioned it. Both palaces used the conspicuous image of the tower to convey a seigneurial symbolic association, like many palaces of older Roman families, but in general they did not take advantage of the publicly expressive possibilities of their facades or the potential use of the street as theater. They relied instead solely on reflected prestige from the location: the Piazza Navona as the geographic and symbolic center of the city and the via Recta as a public forum. Chronologically, it would seem that Sixtus IV first encouraged the path of the Annunciation procession down the via Recta and

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then worked deliberately to ensure a specific character for the street by building the via Sistina. Then, when opportunity presented itself, Girolamo Riario and Girolamo Basso took advantage of the procession to garner some of its glory for themselves. As della Rovere patronage evolved in the hands of more sophisticated members of the family, however, their buildings would no longer be merely passive receptors of reflected glory. They actively defined Roman life and taste. This shift began in the 1480s when the job as liaison between the Camera Apostolica and the pope was shared by three men: Giuliano della Rovere, Girolamo Riario and Domenico della Rovere. All the transactions of the Camera Apostolica had to be reported to them. They were the Church’s most prominent men and, with Giuliano’s palace at his titular church of San Pietro in Vincoli and Riario’s palace on the via Recta, the city’s most conspicuous builders.The third man in this triumvirate of power, Domenico della Rovere, emerges from Raffaele Brandolini’s funeral oration as a patron who emulated the munificence and grandiosity of antiquity. Brandolini even went so far as to fashion Domenico in the role of a second Maecenas and Augustus, a comparison that suggested not only a wealthy and generous patron of the arts but also an extravagant standard of living. In many ways, Domenico and the other della Rovere cardinals and nephews could hardly help seeing themselves in the posture of Maecenas, cast in those roles inherited from Sixtus. But Domenico della Rovere arrived at a particularly opportune moment in that ongoing characterization. By the early 1480s, the della Rovere dynasty was firmly established and seen as a source of continuity and control. The construction of palaces was an explicit tribute to the dynastic thrust of their princely rule. Now with a cardinalate and finances secured, Domenico was in a position to be the first della Rovere cardinal to build a palace from the ground up. At first, della Rovere architecture had been adapted to the local traditions of Rome, and Domenico certainly continued the pattern of conservative, public and princely architecture. But increasingly the traditions and rituals of Rome were being centered around della Rovere buildings. In the case of Domenico della Rovere, one can only hypothesize as to his . Bauer, 396–97. . Raffaele Lippi Brandolini, Parentaelis oratio de obitu Domini Ruvere (Rome: Eucario Silber, 1501), fol. 245v and 246v.

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possible reasons for locating his palace in the Vatican Borgo, but his palace was responsible for defining one of Rome’s most sacred and important rituals. The Vatican Borgo was essentially a second city appended to Rome. From the Middle Ages, it was defined as a tourists’ quarter with a clear identity as a papal city, the site of St. Peter’s, some minor churches, numerous convents and pilgrim hostels. During the fifteenth century, the Borgo became the principal seat of the papacy and the curia.When Martin V (1417–31) moved the papacy back to Rome, he also transferred the curia from San Giovanni in Laterano to St. Peter’s and offered special financial incentives to encourage private building in the Borgo. Nicholas V (1447–55) continued the practice. He envisioned the Borgo as an ideal city and planned three streets arranged according to a social hierarchy connecting the Ponte Sant’ Angelo with St. Peter’s. His grand design was not carried out, but the Borgo was increasingly built up throughout the late quattrocento to satisfy the specialized functions of the papal bureaucracy. The biggest problem was traffic since there were only two major streets starting from Castel Sant’ Angelo: the Borgo Vecchio of ancient Roman origin and the major thoroughfare, and the Borgo Sto. Spirito which ran further south and parallel to the Borgo Vecchio. As street traffic increased due to the number of cardinals, prelates and members of the court who lived there, expansion became essential. Since the Borgo was outside of the city of Rome, the legalities of the Maestri delle Strade did not apply, and the area underwent dramatic urban changes according to papal will. Most of the land was owned by Vatican–dominated institutions anyway, and in 1475 Sixtus IV began Borgo renovation. He widened the Borgo Vecchio by tearing . On the Borgo during the Middle Ages, see Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 261–69; Carroll W.Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447–1455 (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974); Charles Burroughs,“Below the Angel: An Urbanistic Project in the Rome of Pope Nicholas V,”  Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 94–124. . Bartolomeo Platina, Liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum. ed. Giacinto Gaida, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. G. Carducci and V. Fiorani, 23 vols. (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1932), 3.1:338. Manetti’s mythic biography of Nicholas and the pope’s concern for his posthumous reputation has been discussed by Charles Burroughs,“A Planned Myth and a Myth of Planning: Nicholas V and Rome,” in Ramsey, Rome and the Renaissance, 197–207.

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down the remaining fourth-century porticoes, rebuilt the Borgo Sto. Spirito, the site of his new hospital, and added a third street to the north, the gently curving Borgo Sant’ Angelo, originally called the Borgo Sisto. In 1499, Alexander VI added the Borgo Nuovo, later called the via Alessandrina. Since the pope made only two official processions through the city of Rome during the year, the Borgo acted as the more permanent stage set. It was a separate urban enclave, dominated by the Church and, consequently, the site of its important celebrations. One of the most celebrated and solemn of these was the feast of Corpus Domini.The first Thursday after Pentecost Sunday, the feast honored the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.Traditionally on this feast the Corpus Domini was carried through the streets of Rome and displayed to the pious faithful, but during the reign of Nicholas V the procession was confined to the Borgo. In part, Nicholas was concerned for his safety but, in controlling the procession, he was also appropriating it as a manifestation of papal power. Here in the Borgo he could regulate every aspect of its appearance: the processional route, the size of the crowds, the hierarchical arrangement of members of the Curia. He was on home territory and all along the route — scenically transformed for the occasion with great canvas canopies strung on tall poles to protect the parade from sun and rain — the assembled faithful were physically and visually aware of the powerful image of the papacy. Although it made a seemingly simple circuitous passage through the Borgo, the Corpus Domini procession was elaborate and complex and required the lengthiest description by Sixtus IV’s master of ceremonies and historian  Johann Burchard. Starting with the reign of Sixtus IV, the procession went from the Vatican, down the northern Borgo Sant’ Angelo to Castel Sant’ Angelo, turned around, and went back via the Borgo Vecchio. After 1500, the route was shortened so that it went halfway down the Borgo Nuovo to the Piazza Scossacavalli, turned south and returned by the Borgo Vecchio. Either way, from the 1470s on, the Borgo Vecchio is consistently mentioned as the last leg of the procession. And it is along this street that Domenico della Rovere constructed his palace. . On the Corpus Domini procession, see Ingersoll, 139–62. . The Borgo Sant’ Angelo is mentioned for the first time in 1483. See Ingersoll, 153–61.

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Domenico della Rovere’s palace was located along the Borgo Vecchio opposite the Ospedale di Sto. Spirito. It was begun almost immediately after his elevation to the cardinalate in 1478 and constructed in two stages. The older part of the palace, the eastern block that faced onto the present via di Sto. Spirito, was built from 1478 to 1484. It had a simple facade with four large crossed windows and a cornice bearing the cardinal’s name. Then sometime before 1484 the cardinal received Fig. 2. Map of the Borgo showing the location of the some houses owned by the palace of Domenico della Rovere in the upper left quadOspedale di Sto. Spirito rant of the lower right sheet. From L. Bufalini, Pianta from Pio Medici, the hosdi Roma, 1551, reproduced in A. Frutaz, Le Piante di Roma (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1962), vol. pital’s preceptor, occupying 2, tavola 189. a site that extended from the cardinal’s palace to the Borgo Vecchio to the present via dei Penitenzieri. From this unspecified date in 1484 to 1490, the date that the transfer of the hospital’s property was confirmed, the second part of the palace was built. . Tomei, L’Architettura a Roma nel Quattrocento (Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1977), 194; and idem, “Di due palazzi Romani del Rinascimento,” Rivista del R. Istituto d’Archeologia e storia dell’Arte 6.1–2 (1937): 137–40, originally proved the palace was constructed in two stages. He cites a notarial document of 1490 by the preceptor of the hospital confirming the transfer of property to Domenico della Rovere. The document was originally published by F. Adinolfi, La Portica di S. Pietro (Rome: Aureli, 1859), 144 and Appendix. . Tomei, Di due palazzi.” 138, notes 1490 as the date of the completion for the second building, citing two supporting brackets of the first beam to the left of the north wall in the Sala delle Stagioni inscribed:“XPS 1490” and “HIS 1490.” D. Redig de Campos, “Il Soffitto dei Semidei’ del Pintoricchio e altri dipinti suoi restaurati nel Palazzo di Domenico della Rovere,” in Scritti di Storia dell’arte in onore di Mario Salmi (Rome: De Luca, 1961–63), 2:363–75, at 364, who was responsible for the 1950

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Its main section was situated at a right angle to the original block, a three-story wing along the via dei Penitenzieri to the west.The side along the Borgo Vecchio became the principal facade, overlooking the Piazza Scossacavalli (Fig. 2). The palace was a spectacular sight, receiving the lavish praise of Raffaele Brandolini in his funeral oration for Domenico in 1501. But fundamentally, like Giuliano della Rovere’s palaces at SS. Apostoli and San Pietro in Vincoli and the palace of Girolamo Riario at Piazza Navona, the palace of Domenico della Rovere was architecturally conservative. The facade presented a simple and severe aspect to the people of Rome. Its tower and the heavy string-courses separating the first two stories were standard elements in late fifteenth-century architecture and a frequent feature in della Rovere buildings. Its concrete faced with stucco construction, rather than the more expensive travertine or stucco with travertine edging, kept the building modest. Domenico inserted himself into the architectural fabric of Rome rather than alienated its citizens with a gesture of overt extravagance. Its impressiveness would lie in its size and prestigious location. The Borgo Vecchio was much more than a street. It was a stage crafted for papal theatrics. At its most confident moments, ringing restoration of the main block of the palazzo along the Borgo Vecchio, agrees with Tomei on this date. Redig de Campos also states that if one accepts the Vasari attribution of the palace to Baccio Pontelli — “Il medesimo [Domenico della Rovere] fece fare col disegno di Baccio un palazzo in Borgo Vechio, che fu allora tenut molto bello e ben considerate edifizio”— then the second construction could not have begun until 1482, the year in which Pontelli moved to Rome. . Redig de Campos, 365. After Domenico della Rovere’s death in 1501, the palace was briefly rented to Cardinal Francesco Alidosi of Pavia who added a small chapel on the far eastern end of the main block under the tower, and then to Cardinal Salviati was added vault decoration in the refectory and kitchen by Francesco Salviati. See Corrado Ricci, Pintoricchio, trans. Florence Simmonds (London:W. Heinemann, 1902), 62.The palace was left in Domenico’s will to the Ospedale di Sto. Spirito pro medietate. Later it passed to the Collegio dei Penitenzieri di San Pietro. After 1870, the newer part was given to the school Regina Margherita, then to the Cavalieri del Santo Sepolcro, part of the Santa Sede.The older part became and remains today the Hotel Columbus.The Piazza Scossacavalli was destroyed with the construction of the via Conciliazione. On the palace, see Giuseppe De Mori, “Il Palazzo della Rovere già Penitenzieri svelato e salvato da crollante rovina,” Strenna dei Romanisti 10 (1949): 239–44; Magnuson, 332–37;Tomei, L’Architettura, 195–97; and Tomei,“Di due palazzi,” 138–43. . Raffele Lippi Brandolini, Parentaelis oratio, 245v–246r.

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with spiritual righteousness and ordered by an elaborate hierarchy of position, the papacy displayed itself on the Borgo Vecchio. Domenico della Rovere firmly planted himself on that route and, more than any other della Rovere building, his palace was oriented to catch the eye of the marcher and convey an image. It was massive, impressive, and expressed sympathy with familiar architectural traditions. The placement of the facade on the Borgo Vecchio after the acquisition of that second piece of property is testament to a purposeful decision.Vasari stated that the palace facade was painted and incised with ornamental decoration. The Borgo Vecchio facade retains only slight traces, but the facade along the via di Sto. Spirito still provides a fairly good idea of the type and extent of the design.There a painted arch hung with trophies rests between fictive columns while above there are bands of intertwining vines, dolphins and acanthus leaves. Using a vocabulary of spoils, standards, wreaths and festoons found on the triumphal monuments of antiquity, the painted facade with its fictive architecture entered into the quattrocento revival of antique wall decoration. Generally, painted facades appeared on palaces and homes belonging to resident merchants and members of the civic nobility, perhaps as a gesture of political solidarity among those groups. But the della Rovere were clearly in the vanguard among members of the curia in adopting this classical motif. Not only did Domenico della Rovere’s palace boast one, but the palace of Girolamo Riario, possibly the palace of Pietro Riario at SS. Apostoli, and later the palace of Giuliano della Rovere at San Pietro in Vincoli were also decorated with sgraffitto. The painted facade joined these buildings to Rome’s civic nobility and suggested that those patrons were in the forefront of the taste for antiquity. For the della Rovere, their palaces were landmarks. Almost immediately the palace of Domenico della Rovere became one for the people of the Borgo as well. After Alexander VI constructed the Borgo Nuovo in 1499, the Corpus Domini procession turned at the mid-way point at the Piazza Scossacavalli, what Maria Luisa Madonna has called the “Forum of the Borgo.” There choirs and musicians entertained from specially built platforms. There are . Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1878), 3:497. . Ingersoll, 72–74. . M. Madonna, Roma, 1300–1875: La città degli anni santi. Atlante, ed. M. Fagiolo and M. Madonna (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1985), 130–31.

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two possible reasons for turning at this point. Practically, the angle where the Borgo Nuovo joined the Borgo Vecchio at Castel Sant’ Angelo was tight. The elaborate procession with banners and horses and baldachins would have had an extremely difficult time managing the turn, and the Piazza Scossacavalli was expansive and provided ample room for movement and assembly. But it was also the site of the enormous palace of Domenico della Rovere, one of the frequently named landmarks in procession accounts. One wonders how much influence Domenico, one of the keepers of the key to the papal finances, would have had with the pope and papal master of ceremonies in focusing the Corpus Domini procession on his residence.There, as the background to the choirs and musicians, the audience would be treated to the sight of two putti bearing aloft the stemma of Sixtus IV on the facade.The Corpus Domini procession may have been one of the reasons for Domenico’s initial choice of location along the Borgo Vecchio, but by 1500 it was his palace that was defining the ritual. As a group, the della Rovere were concerned with establishing their place as rulers, and architecture was a means of speaking to the broadest audience and demonstrating their legitimacy and power.The repeated acts and patterns of their palaces reveal them as masters of the delicate and potent art of patronage. The della Rovere were practicing what Ingersoll calls “territorialization through architecture.” They bought and built along streets that were historic, public and marked with cachet and prestige and, in so doing, amplified their political and social rank along with other important families of Rome. On one of the only two occasions during the year when the pope processed through the city, he and all of Rome would have passed by the della Rovere homes. The Annunciation procession wedded politics to place, transforming the via Recta into a potent symbolic device. By positioning themselves along it, the della Rovere assumed some of its power.The Corpus Domini procession conferred much of the same glory to the palace on the Borgo Vecchio.Through these processions, the palaces became the link through which the family participated in events when the temporal and spiritual authority of the pope was at its best. In that sense, the della Rovere were practicing the “cardinal” rule of real estate: location, location, location. • . Ingersoll, 51.

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Artemisia Conquers Rhodes: Problems in the Representation of Female Heroics in the Age of Catherine de’ Medici Sheila ffolliott Carolyn Valone pioneered in defining the role of Renaissance women as patrons of art, particularly architecture. One exemplary prototype for the Roman aristocratic women comprising the focus of her study was the ancient queen Artemisia of Caria (r.353–351 BCE), renowned especially for having supervised the construction and decoration of the elaborate funerary monument honoring her husband, Mausolus: a structure so significant that it gave its name to the entire genre. She was deemed a particularly suitable model for early modern women patrons because her actions arose not from her own desire for glory but rather from her devotion to her deceased husband. The most extensive early modern portrayal of Artemisia relates to Catherine de’ Medici (1519–89), queen of France. In 1559, soon after her husband Henri II died from wounds sustained in a ceremonial joust, the court poet Louis Le Roy linked Catherine with Artemisia. The dowager queen assumed an active role in government when Henri’s heir, François II, died at the end of 1560. The situation required a regent because his successor, Charles IX, had not yet reached his majority. France observed the so-called Salic Law prohibiting women from succeeding to the throne.That bias made it difficult for women to assume positions of authority, although most European countries, including France, had and would continue to have female regents when the king was away at war or when his successor was too young. In view of that eventuality, a certain Nicolas Houel, well connected at court and seeking patronage, compiled a lengthy manuscript text, L’histoire de la Royne Arthémise (1562). Dedicated to Catherine, it . I would like to thank Carol Mattusch for her insights about ancient comparanda. . Carolyn Valone, “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560– 1630,” The Art Bulletin 76.1 (1994): 129–46, at 145. . Margriet Hoogvliet, “Princely Culture and Catherine de Médicis,” in Princes and Princely Culture, 1450–1650, ed. Martin Gosman, Alasdair MacDonald and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1:103–30, at 108. . Sylvie G. Davidson, “Patronage in Paris in the Sixteenth Century:The Case of

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professed to provide her with a model female ruler to help her establish her authority. Acknowledging that he was grafting Catherine’s situation onto that of the ancient Artemisia, he felt free to embellish her story with anecdotes gleaned from the lives of other famous women. Houel, moreover, commissioned drawings to display the queen performing a variety of activities pertinent to rule. Not all the drawings were complete by the date of the Histoire manuscript but emerged in the later 1560s and 1570s. These “cartons en peinture de blanc, et de noir,” accompanied by sonnets encapsulating key episodes his Histoire, were, as Houel stated in his dedicatory preface, to be made into tapestries, the medium of prestige for large-scale wall decoration. A total of seventy-four episodes have been identified via known drawings, sonnets and tapestries. Scholars, including myself, have investigated several of the illustrations pertaining to Catherine’s role as regent. This essay will concern a less explored example, a drawing by Antoine Caron (c.1521–99), active at Fontainebleau in Nicolas Houel,” in The Search for a Patron in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Wilkins and Rebecca L. Wilkins (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996): 137–44; Nicolas Houel, L’histoire de la Royne Arthémise (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. fr. 306). . For a discussion of the fungibility of exemplary figures, see Marta Ajmar, “Exemplary Women in Renaissance Italy: Ambivalent Models of Behavior” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000), 245–63. . Nicolas Houel, L’Histoire de la Royne Arthèmise (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1562, ms. fr. 306): 4r, “pourrez fair voyr de riches tapisseries pour l’ornement de vos maisons des Tuilleries et St.Maur, ou vous recepverez aultant dhonneur que de contentement.” . Edith Appleton Standen, European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 271. . Sheila ffolliott, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow,” in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. M. Ferguson, M. Quilligan and N.Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 227–41; Katherine Crawford, Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Barbara Gaehtgens,“Gouverner avec des images: L’image du roi présentée par la reine régente, de Catherine de Médicis à Anne d’Autriche,” in L’Image du roi de François premier a Louis XIV (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2006), 77–112; idem,“Artemisia: Un programma iconografico per una reggente,” in Caterina e Maria de’ Medici: Donne al potere. Firenze celebra il mito di due regine di Francia (Florence: Mandragora, 2008), 109–16.

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Fig. 1. Philip Galle, after Maerten van Heemskerck, The Mausolaeum (The Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus), 1572, engraving on laid paper: 22.5 x 27.2 cm (8 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.).  Washington, DC:The National Gallery of Art. Gift of the Estate of Leo Steinberg  2011.139.96.

the 1540s and the principal artist involved in executing the drawings. It depicts a triumphal monument erected in Rhodes following Artemisia’s conquest. Analysis will focus on issues of gender in sixteenth-century monumental sculpture, touching on formal arrangements, the role of allegory and, not surprisingly, anxiety about women in positions of authority. Diverse ancient sources furnish information about what were actually two distinct Artemisias, now generally differentiated as Artemisia I, fl. 480 BCE, and Artemisia II, builder of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. That monument figured in sixteenth-century depictions of the Wonders of the Ancient World. In this example by Philip Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, the well-attended queen appears prominently in the foreground exercising her supervisory role (Fig. 1). It is Artemisia II, moreover, whose reputation as inconsolable widow featured especially in the compendia of famous women that Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan and other writers

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compiled. For these writers, her most striking trait was the remarkable way that she demonstrated her grief: by adding Mausolus’ ashes to her wine goblet. Artemisia’s persona served several early modern women rulers, including Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), governor of the Netherlands, and Amalia von Solms (1602–75) widow of the Stadtholder William Henry, prince of Orange; this regent owned the self-referential 1635 Portrait of Artemisia by Gerrit van Honthorst (Princeton Art Museum). By becoming the king’s living tomb, the perpetual mourner assimilated as well the masculine qualities presumed to be essential for rule. Artemisia’s is not the only such metaphor of incorporation. Marina Warner cites a passage in Hesiod’s Theogony in which Zeus convinces Metis (mother of Athena) to allow him to consume her, “so that the goddess could counsel him in both good and evil plans.” Even in Galle’s print, presenting her as architectural patron, Artemisia — incongruously — holds a cup, her identifying attribute. An intriguing story about this Artemisia appears in Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture. In discussing the building of walls, Vitruvius cites Mausolus, king of Caria, for the strength of the brick walls of his house; he also mentions the famous Mausoleum. Then he seems to digress, turning to the widowed Artemisia, to explain that the neighboring Rhodians were indignant that a woman now ruled Caria and sent a fleet to invade and depose her. She, however, outwitted them through trickery and in turn conquered Rhodes. Vitruvius is the sole ancient source to describe what happened next.To leave a reminder of her conquest, she erected a triumphal monument. Then Artemisia… put up in the city of Rhodes a trophy of her victory, including two bronze statues, one representing the state of the . Alexandra Carpino, “Margaret of Austria’s Funerary Complex at Brou: Conjugal Love, Political Ambition or Personal Glory,” in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 37–52, at 52. . Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 72. . Rosaria Vignolo Munson,“Artemisia in Herodotus,” Classical Antiquity 7 (1988): 91–106, at 94, describes a similar event involving the other Artemisia: according to Polyaenus, Stratagems of War, 8.53.4, she “captured a town by feminine wiles, hiding her army.” Historians tend to characterize women’s strategies negatively as deceptive rather than positively as clever.

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Fig. 2.  Antoine Caron, Les Deux Statues, c.1560s–70s.  Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Rès. Ad 105. 26r.  Pen and Ink with wash and white highlighting.

Rhodians, the other herself. Herself she fashioned in the act of brand ing the state of the Rhodians.

Houel’s Histoire reveals his familiarity with Vitruvius’ text. His wife’s uncle, Gilles le Breton, master mason engaged in the construction of several royal chateaux, owned a copy of the French Vitruvius, as well as additional books and several works of art including tapestries and other hangings. Presumably Houel had access to these materials in compiling his manuscript and he furnished the draughtsmen with explanatory texts. And to perpetuate her memory even more, she had erected in the main square of the city, two bronze statues, of which one represented the . Vitruvius, TheTen Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 54; Vitruvius Pollio, Architecture, ou Art de bien bastire, mis de latin en francoys, par Ian Martin (Paris:Veuve & heritiers de Ian Barbe’, 1547; reprint, Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1964), II.8: “elle y feit soudain eriger le trophée de sa victoire, qui furent deux statues d’arain, l’une de la cité de Rhodes, & l’autre de sa remembrance, laquelle imposoit le stigmates ou merques a icelle cite.” . Paul Vanaise, “Gilles Le Breton, Maître-Maçon, entrepreneur ou architecte parisien du XVIè siècle, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 68 (1966): 241–64.

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queen, who held a branding iron with which she marked the forehead of the other statue, which personified the city of Rhodes; the whole rested on two pedestals, on which was sculpted, in low relief, the victory which she had obtained against the Rhodians. 

Caron adheres to Houel’s description quite faithfully in The Two Statues (Fig. 2), embellishing the drawing with additional details. In the central narrative, we see the two statues on individual pedestals, at left: Artemisia in armor holds the branding iron or marking implement in her left hand while raising a hammer with her right. To consider this literally, it would be possible for a person to brand another person with a hot iron, but it would be difficult to brand a personified bronze statue and it would not require a hammer. Artemisia marks the figure with a gesture similar to that employed by a sculptor wielding a chisel. On the right we view the actual Artemisia, with her young son — corresponding to Catherine’s son Charles IX — at her side and accompanied by soldiers looking at the trophy. Intended to resemble the appearance of a tapestry, the drawing, moreover, features borders containing heraldic and emblematic references to Catherine, solidifying thereby the parallel between prototype and queen mother. Vitruvius’ use of the word “trophy” situates this monument squarely within the Greek practice of mounting a suit of enemy armor on a stake at the spot of their defeat. Sculpted trophy monuments, accompanied by statues of captives and victims, appeared later in Hellenistic and Roman triumphal art as well as on coins.While Caron’s monument follows the custom of marking the site of victory, it comprises not just armor but also statues. That representing Artemisia is consistent with her appearance elsewhere in this series (and with her depiction as spectator in the same drawing): her figure clearly based on a frequently represented ancient Athena/Minerva type.The personification of Rhodes, on the other hand, includes two items Vitruvius did not mention: she wears a mural crown and her hands . Nicolas Houel, L’Histoire de la Royne Arthèmise (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1562, ms. AD 105), 55v–56r; Ulrika von Haumeder, Antoine Caron: Studien zu seiner “Histoire d’Arthèmise”(Ruprecht-Karl-Universität zu Heidelberg, 1976), 138, “Et pour perpetuer daventaige sa memoyre, fit fair pour son trophée en la maitresse place de la ville, deux statues de bronze, dont lune estoyt de la royne, qui tenoit un fer de chauld dont elle marquoit le front de lautre statue qui representoit la ville de Rhodes: le tout pose, sur deux piedz destail, ou estoit insculpé en facon de basse taille, la victoire qu’elle avoit abtenue a lencontre des rhodiens.”

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Fig. 3.  Pietro Tacca and  Baccio Bandinelli, Monument to Ferdinando I, 1615–23.  Bronze and Marble. Livorno, Piazza della Darsena.

are tied behind her back. The turreted crown was the attribute of the goddess Tyche, who emerged in the Hellenistic era to symbolize Fortune: an important determinant in how people then, as well as in the Renaissance, thought about what influenced events in their lives. In antiquity, Fortune affected a city as well as an individual, whence the suitability of the mural crown to personifications of both town and Tyche. Cesare Ripa, moreover, in his iconographic manual, . Jerome J. Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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described a figure combining the crown with branding, chains, fetters or handcuffs, attributes that render it “Servitù per forza” (involuntary servitude), i.e., slavery. Branding slaves was an ancient practice: a mark on the forehead identified the slave as such. According to Pliny, branding was commonplace, but other sources considered it an especially humiliating penalty reserved for those who attempted escape. The Greek word “stigma” (echoed in the French Vitruvius’ “stigmates”) describes the brand stamped on slaves or others as a mark of disgrace. It is the act of branding or stamping, reinforced by the bound hands, that clearly demarcate the difference in status between conqueror and conquered in this monument. To bolster the notion that slavery denoted disgrace, elsewhere Vitruvius attributed the concetto of the female Caryatid to enslaved enemy women — from Caryae (in the Peloponnese). As Vitruvius explained: Caryae… sided with the Persian enemies against Greece; later the Greeks… declared war against the people of Caryae. They took the town, killed the men… and carried off their wives into slavery… so that they might be obliged not only to march in the triumph but to appear forever after as a type of slavery, burdened with the weight of their shame.… Hence, the architects of the time designed for public buildings statues of these women, placed so as to carry a load, in order that the sin and the punishment of the people of Caryae might be known and handed down even to posterity.

Here we find a concetto comparable to the Rhodes monument, which similarly, and significantly, reminded the Rhodians — personified in an enslaved female — of their defeat in perpetuity. Houel Press, 1986), 5–7; Waldemar Deonna, “La couronne murale des villes et des pays personiffiés dans l’antiquité,” Genava 18 (1940): 127–86. . Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, ed. Piero Buscaroli (Milan:Tea, 1992), 404–5. . Claude Mossé, The Ancient World at Work, trans.  Janet Lloyd (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), 68. . Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ed.  John Bostock and H.T. Riley http:// www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0137:book=18:chap ter=4&highlight=branded (accessed 27 April 2015). . Elizabeth McGrath, “Caryatids, Page Boys, and African Fetters: Themes of Slavery in European Art,” in The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem, ed. Elizabeth McGrath and  Jean Michel Massing (London:The Warburg Institute, 2012), 3–38, at 3. . Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morgan, 6–7.

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could easily have mistaken for Caryae for Caria, thereby making the monument’s meaning even more compelling. One cannot leave the topic of the bound figure in the sixteenth century without reference to Michelangelo’s Slaves, however they may be interpreted today. They were in France by the 1550s, a gift from Michelangelo himself to Catherine de’ Medici’s first cousin, the fuoruscito Roberto Strozzi, who in turn presented them to Henri II. Despite its non-finito state, the Rebellious Slave’s hands appear bound behind his back, when viewed from the front. Such shackling continued to denote mastery, as seen in monuments like Cosimo II’s 1616 commission of Pietro Tacca to supply four fettered slaves for the base of Baccio Bandinelli’s statue of Ferdinando I in Livorno (Fig. 3), which commemorates the Tuscan grand duke’s naval incursions into North Africa. This composite monument has a conventional organization with the honoree victor on a pedestal and the vanquished enemies below. In Florence there had emerged a number of freestanding two-figure groups — particularly in the sixteenth century — both narrative and allegorical that related the victor and the vanquished much more closely than the Livorno monument. Some positioned a man over a man, e.g., Bandinelli’s mythological Hercules and Cacus (1534) and Michelangelo’s allegorical Victory (c.1532?); others a man over a woman, e.g., Cellini’s mythological Perseus (1545); still others a woman over a man, e.g. Donatello’s biblical Judith and Holofernes (1455–60) or Giambologna’s allegorical Florence Triumphant over Pisa (1565), among others. These groups are all oriented vertically: one figure physically dominates the other. It is the straightforward positioning of one figure atop another that demonstrates victory or superiority. Significantly, all these groups occupied ceremonial spaces, either within the Palazzo Vecchio or in the Piazza della Signoria outside; tapestries also provided grand decoration for formal occasions, a point to which I shall return. Although neither Caron nor Houel had been to Italy, books and prints would indubitably have provided them with knowledge of ancient and contemporary monuments. Prints circulated widely, and printmaking itself emerged as a major activity around the French . Charles Robertson, “Allegory and Ambiguity in Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’,” in McGrath and Massing, Slave in European Art, 39–62, at 44. . Janet Cox-Rearick, The Collection of Francis I: Royal Treasures (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, 1996), 296; the king gave them to Anne de Montmorency for his chateau at Écouen.

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Fig. 4. Philip Galle after Maarten van Heemskerk,  Judith Displaying Holofernes’ Head to the People of Bethulia, plate seven from The Story of  Judith and Holofernes, 1564.Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago. Engraving in black on ivory laid paper; 203 x 248 mm (image); 205 x 251 mm (plate); 227 x 275 mm (sheet). Gift of Ursula and R. Stanley  Johnson in honor of Douglas Druick, 2011.1081.

court in the mid sixteenth-century. From Caron’s other works, it is apparent that he had access to works like Lafréry’s compendium of ancient Roman monuments as well as more fantastic images, such as those found in festival books. A steady stream of Italian artists, moreover, visited and worked in the French capital. Several of the drawings in the Artemisia series demonstrate the extent to which prints served as formal sources for compositions. Pertaining to the drawing being examined here, I see a formal parallel to Caron’s Rhodes Monument in another Philip Galle print after Heemskerck from his  Judith and Holofernes series (Fig. 4). It should not come as a surprise that depictions of other heroic females would influence Caron in inventing his Artemisia Stamping/Branding Rhodes. In Galle’s print, the victorious Judith and her maid Abra stand on a raised platform at left and . Henri Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 152. . The Bibliothèque Nationale de France identifies this drawing as TheTwo Statues, but that does not fully describe its narrative.

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Sheila ffolliott • Artemisia Conquers Rhodes

display their trophy: Holofernes’ head. In both images a single armed male figure at left provides a repoussoir, while on the right onlookers, many in armor, face the two women/two statues. Both depictions, moreover, combine reimagined ancient architecture with contemporary northern European buildings to complete the appearance of a public square. It is the intent of this essay to compare narrative approaches in triumphal monuments, not to allege specific influences between the French and Florentine examples. In any case, most of the latter postdated Catherine’s departure in 1533. The Rhodes monument resembles the Florentine examples in terms of its potential display for propagandistic purposes, but it differs in that the transaction (uniquely?) occurs between two women and following the requirements of the narrative, the composition is horizontal, not vertical. On many French medieval cathedral portals,

Fig. 5. Annunciation and Visitation, Reims Cathedral, c.1225.

adjoining jamb figures regularly interacted to form narratives, as in this example from Reims Cathedral illustrating The Annunciation and The Visitation (Fig. 5). The idea of figures on different pedestals engaging with one another would not seem odd to Houel, Caron or to a French audience.The horizontal composition and female actors do not, however, slot easily into the modes of interpretation that scholars have applied to some of the Florentine statue groups justifiably

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Fig. 6.  Master MZ, Phyllis Riding Aristotle, c.1500. Engraving on cream laid paper, 182 x 131 mm (sheet).The Art Institute of Chicago: Clarence Buckingham Collection, 1935.10.

emphasizing their reinscription of gender roles. Cellini’s Perseus, for example, placed the supine, dead, nude, decapitated female/monster Medusa at the hero’s feet. The vanquished in Donatello’s  Judith and Holofernes and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus at least sit or crouch, . Yael Even, “The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,” Woman’s Art  Journal 12 (1991): 10–14.

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Sheila ffolliott • Artemisia Conquers Rhodes

giving them some verticality. As will be discussed further below, placing a heroic woman atop a man, as in Donatello’s  Judith and Holofernes, struck some contemporary viewers as unnatural. Such positioning brings to mind the “Power of Women” topos, a collection of stories popular in the Renaissance that illustrate encounters between men and women thought to be contrary to nature. The arrangement of the figures in prints illustrating the story of Aristotle and Phyllis (Fig. 6), for example, purport to show the absurdity of what can happen when a man lets himself be seduced by feminine wiles. Such an example of a woman on top may present a conduct lesson, but it is difficult to take the woman’s supremacy seriously as her power is limited to sexuality. What can we conclude when we examine other portrayals of active female figures oriented horizontally rather than vertically? There are precedents for depictions of strong women dealing with other women, but not strictly speaking on the actual field of battle. Famously, Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in Mantua included woman-centered allegories lining its walls. In Mantegna’s Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (Paris, Louvre, 1502), the horizontally ordered and complex composition depicts the armored goddess forcefully chasing away primarily female figures, and a few monsters, all representing undesirable qualities. At the center of Perugino’s Combat of Love and Chastity (Paris, Louvre, 1505), for the same space, personifications of the two protagonist-qualities do battle in the center of a complex of figures. Among the messages these allegorical images conveyed were that women could police themselves. Not challenging gender norms, Isabella d’Este, via allegory, could make the case for the capabilities of her own sex to monitor the realms of virtue and wisdom. Houel must have envisaged Catherine de’ Medici, standing before a large and colorful tapestry depicting the Rhodes Monument, demonstrating a queen’s ability to deal with challenges to female authority even in war. Tapestries regularly adorned royal settings throughout Europe, and François I, Catherine’s father-in-law, had a collection that included an extensive series recounting the deeds of Scipio Africanus, famous ancient warrior and apt model for a king. . H. Diane Russell with Bernardine Barnes, Eva/Ave:Woman in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington:The National Gallery of Art, 1990), 149. . These thoughts are inspired from a long ago conversation with Christina Olsen.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Returning to Vitruvius, in the same section where he discusses Mausolus and Artemisia, he finds a reason to mention the proximity of Halicarnassus to the spring of Salmacis, which had a reputation for “making effeminate those who drink from it.” Vitruvius himself rejected the claim, but it cannot just be coincidental that he includes it in the discussion, considering what happens next. Because Houel and Caron, presumably, were working with Catherine de’ Medici’s eyes in mind, they followed the erection of Artemisia’s victory monument with an account of her triumphal entry into the city and then moved on to other events in her life.They did not include the rest of the Rhodes story, as recounted by Vitruvius. Considering the context of gender and monuments in the early modern, it’s worth examining, nevertheless.Vitruvius recounts: In later times the Rhodians, laboring under the religious scruple that makes it a sin to remove trophies once they are dedicated, constructed a building to surround the place, and thus by the erection of the “Grecian Station” covered it so that nobody could see it, and ordered that the building be called ἁβατον.

Mausolus scholar Simon Hornblower declared the “story worthless” from an historical viewpoint because Vitruvius’s own source for this episode is not verifiable. But in the production of gender ideologies, historical authenticity is not of primary concern. Understandably, with a change in circumstance, the Rhodians wanted to rid themselves of this monument calling attention to their earlier defeat, but . Strabo, Geography, ed. H.C. Hamilton and W. Falconer, XIV.2.16. http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0239%3Abook% 3D14%3Achapter%3D2%3Asection%3D16 (accessed 26 April 2015). . Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morgan, 54–55; Vitruvius Pollio, Architecture, ou Art de bien bastire, II.11–12. . Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morgan, 56; Vitruvius Pollio, Architecture, ou Art de bien bastire, II.15,“Mais quelque temps après lesdectz Rhodiens aiant recouure leur domaine, n’ozans par la religion ruiner ces statues, pource qu’il n’est licite d’abolir les trophees consacrez aux dieux immortelz, ilz feirent un hault edifice environ le lieu ou ells estoint: au moyen de quoy, & par greque industrie, couvrirent si bien cela, qu’aucun n’en pouvoit plus rien apprecevior: & ordonnerent que lon nommast celle place Avaton, c’est a dire inaccessible, ou de laquelle ne se fault enquerir.” . Simon Hornblower, Mausolus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 129, posits a “Rhodian patriotic source, perhaps Posidonios.”

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they hesitated fearing the consequences of destroying a dedication. Instead, they devised a means to obscure it from view, walling in the two statues to render them invisible and inaccessible. This denouement, furthermore, helps explain why Artemisia’s story begins and ends in Vitruvius’ discussion of the building of walls. Pulling down statues of hated figures happened in the Renaissance and continues to this day. For example, after  Julius II subdued Bologna in 1506, he commissioned Michelangelo to make a large bronze statue of himself to place on the facade of San Petronio as a reminder of just who ruled the Papal States. As soon as he was driven out, the Bolognese toppled this grand token of his dominion. Vitruvius’ explanation of the Rhodians’ humiliation by a woman ruler is hardly unique in ancient sources. Hornblower cited an episode in Xenophon involving Mania, widow of Zenis, who succeeded in obtaining the satrapy in Asia Minor previously held by her husband. She even added territories, participating herself in several battles. Using language similar to that Vitruvius employed to express the sentiments of the Rhodians towards Artemisia, Xenophon said that Mania’s son-in-law, c.399 BCE “was disturbed by certain people saying it was a disgraceful thing for a woman to be the ruler… [and not him] and… he made his way into her presence, as the story goes, and strangled her.” The persistence of such attitudes has ledYael Even and others to query the social meanings of the earlier mentioned sculptures lining Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. Geraldine Johnson and Roger Crum have neatly summarized the fluidity of meanings attaching to Donatello’s  Judith and Holofernes brought on by its shifting contexts, from display in the Medici Palace to various locations in the piazza and within the Palazzo Vecchio. Vitruvius’ tale anticipates the discomfiture surrounding the prominent position . Hornblower, Mausolus, 129; Xenophon, Hellenica, Carleton L. Brownson, http:// www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0206%3Ab ook%3D3%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection%3D14 (accessed 26 April 2015). . Even,“The Loggia dei Lanzi.” . Geraldine A. Johnson, “Idol or Ideal: The Power and Potency of Female Public Sculpture,” in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. Geraldine A.  Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 222–46; Roger Crum, “Judith between the Private and Public Realms in Renaissance Florence,” in The Sword of  Judith: Judith Studies Across Disciplines, ed. Kevin R. Brine, Elena Ciletti, and Henrike Lähnemann (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010): 291–305.

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afforded to Donatello’s  Judith, as expressed by the first Florentine herald, Francesco Filarete, at the meeting called to give advice about the placement of Michelangelo’s David in 1504.While Filarete’s sentiments are well known, it is important to recognize what the herald’s job entailed.The Florentine signoria commissioned him to write a libro cerimoniale in 1475,“so that in future the government would know how to act” when protocols were needed. The republic was increasingly conscious of the way in which it received important visitors. While various routes might bring them through the city, the most frequent point for official receptions was in the Piazza della Signoria, often facing or within the Loggia dei Lanzi. Bearing that in mind, let us reconsider his remarks as the first speaker of the meeting: The  Judith is a deadly sign and inappropriate in this place… it is not fitting that the woman should slay the man… it was placed in its position under an evil constellation because, since then, things have gone from bad to worse, and Pisa has been lost.

Like Vitruvius’ Rhodians, he was embarrassed for his city to have this group so prominently on view. For Filarete, and presumably the visiting VIPs, the specific and heroic  Judith narrative — a woman who bravely saves her people — has been drained from the sculpture and all that remained was the generic and threatening woman on top of a man. Similar anxieties gripped France at this same period. In 1526 François I returned home from captivity in Spain at the hands of his archenemy, Emperor Charles V.The court of François I was considered a “Royaume de Fémynie” because of the strong presence of women, including the king’s mother, Louise de Savoie, who had acted as regent in his absence. Also very visible and powerful, as confirmed by diplomatic reports, were his sister, Marguerite; his mistresses, the most . Francesco Filarete and Angelo Manfidi, Libro Cerimoniale of the Florentine Republic, Richard Trexler, intro. (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 14. . Saul Levine,“The Location of Michelangelo’s David:The Meeting of  January 25, 1504,” The Art Bulletin 56.1 (1974): 31–49, at 37. . Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 12, “the female form tends to be perceived as generic and universal, with symbolic overtones; the male as individual, even when it is being used to express a generalized idea.” . Royaume de fémynie: Pouvoirs, contraintes, espaces de liberté des femmes, de la Renaissance à la Fronde, ed. Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier and Eliane Viennot (Paris: Champion, 1999).

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powerful of whom was Anne de Pisselieu; his son’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers and, to a somewhat lesser extent, his wives, Claude de France (d.1524) and Eleanor Habsburg, the emperor’s sister, whom he married per a treaty provision. This was the scene to which the fourteen-year-old Catherine de’ Medici came as the bride of Henri, duc d’Orléans, in 1533. Her father-in-law, François I, was deeply involved in the Fontainebleau chateau’s planning and decoration in progress during Catherine’s early years in France. Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier has aptly identified the preponderance of themes treating the natural superiority of men and their concomitant right to rule in scenes like Rosso Fiorentino’s Unity of the State in the Galerie de François I, in which men cluster around the king and women, primarily in the form of nude statues, serve a decorative function. Elsewhere in the chateau, Francesco Primaticcio provided illustrations of Hercules and Omphale, in which the Lydian queen enslaves the ancient superman, and delivers a message about the dangers of female power. Wilson-Chevalier argues, moreover, that this complex may well have served an important function in educating Catherine de’ Medici about life at the French court. Existing reports of her attendance at ceremonial functions provide few clues as to what she may have said, suggesting that she remained strategically reticent; she was nevertheless present and observing. She watched exchanges like that occurring when Benvenuto Cellini presented his newly finished silver Jupiter in François’ Galerie at Fontainebleau, as recounted by the sculptor himself. Briefly, Mme. d’Etampes used the occasion to denigrate Cellini, but he won the day by embarrassing her in front of the king. It was a dramatic evening presentation and he had placed a veil over the god. Mme. d’Etampes suggested that it served to hide the statue’s flaws. Cellini removed it with a flourish to reveal clearly Jupiter’s masculinity. The anecdote, in which the sculptor bonds with his patron and bests his female detractor, shows the extent to which sexual innuendo provided currency for gaining status at court or causing others to lose it. . KathleenWilson-Chevalier,“Women onTop at Fontainebleau,” Oxford Art  Journal 16 (1993): 34–48; see also Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold:Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 2005). . Wilson-Chevalier, 36. . Wilson-Chevalier, 45. . Cellini, Autobiography, XLI.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Thirty years later, Catherine found herself in a position to commission artworks, including those demonstrating her own fitness for rule. Many episodes described in the Histoire d’Arthémise and illustrated for elaboration into tapestry show a queen active in decisionmaking. Although the Rhodes monument story did not originate with Houel, his choice to include it provided the opportunity for the large-scale display of the queen herself celebrating military victory that might prove useful in supporting Catherine’s authority during the sectarian civil wars that consumed France during her lifetime. I wish that I could say that she loved it and used the tapestry on many occasions. There is no evidence, however, that any tapestries were produced there in the sixteenth century. Catherine was an active art patron in many other arenas and perhaps chose to allocate her resources elsewhere. Among the numerous projects she initiated she did, actually, emulate Artemisia’s Mausoleum by commissioning the Valois Chapel at Saint-Denis to house the tombs of Henri and herself, and she commissioned an equestrian statue of Henri II for a public square in Paris: neither saw completion as she envisaged. The relevance of the Artemisia themes continued to resonate during the seventeenth-century regencies of her successor queens Maria de’ Medici and Anne of Austria when tapestries were actually woven at court. By then the specificity of the Rhodes story may have been lost or deemed unimportant. Inspired by Vitruvius, Houel and Caron invented an alternative model of triumphal monument based on slavery rather than physical might to demonstrate a woman’s military skill and success. And men in antiquity and the Renaissance expressed disquiet about depictions of women in positions of authority, not to mention their rampant anxiety about actual women in power. •

. Sheila ffolliott, “Caterina de’ Medici (1519–1589): Königin aus Zufall,” in Die Frauen des hauses Medici: Politik, Mäzenatentum, Rollenbilder (1512–1743), ed. Christina Strunck (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2012), 33–40. . Antonia Boström, “Daniele da Volterra and the Equestrian Monument to Henry II of France,” The Burlington Magazine 137.1113 (1995): 809–20.

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Elite Matrons as Founders of Religious Institutions: Ludovica Torelli and Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo Anne Jacobson Schutte

Introduction

This essay may serve as a historian’s pendant to the pioneering work on matrons as patrons of religious art and architecture begun in the 1990s by Carolyn Valone and Marilyn Dunn. They and the art historians who follow in their footsteps concentrate mainly on Rome, Florence and Bologna. As my appendix shows, these were by no means the only cities nor was Italy the only region in which elite founders operated. My sources are printed vite in Italian: biographical accounts intended to commemorate holy lives, commend for emulation those who had led them and in many cases also to initiate or further efforts already under way to promote their beatification. Using the online catalog of the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (ICCU), I have identified vite in the Italian vernacular of 880 individuals, 573 male and 307 female, that appeared in print in Italy between 1634 and 1798. The period begins when Pope Urban VIII and the Congregation of the Holy Office had virtually completed their project of crafting new rules for regularizing beatification and canonization; it ends when the Napoleonic invasions brought to an end to the Old Regime in Italy. Slightly more than a third of the subjects are women. Along with many professed religious who founded institutions, I count eleven elite lay founders of convents, houses of tertiaries, conservatories, hospitals and collegi (boarding schools), all but one of them widows. This is a conservative figure, for copies of many vite and information about their subjects’ social and marital status are nowhere to be found. Here I will analyze two particularly intriguing vite: those of Ludovica Torelli (1499–1569), written by Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli; . http://www.sbn.it/opacsbn/opac/iccu/antico.jsp, accessed frequently over the past several years. I have also consulted the separate online catalogs of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the holdings of which are not included in ICCU. . Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, S.J., Vita, et virtù della contessa di Guastalla Lodovica Torella nominata poi Paola Maria fondatrice dell’insigne monistero di S. Paolo (Milan: Giuseppe Marelli, 1686), cited hereafter as Vita Torella. There were two subsequent

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

and Eleonora Montalvo (1602–59), on which the issue of authorship is more complex. Despite the century that separates them, Torelli and Montalvo resemble each other in certain superficial ways. Both were born into elite families, married and remained childless; each established two female institutions that did not require entrants to profess formal and irrevocable religious vows. In other respects, however, they differed significantly, as we shall see.

Torelli’s route toward the holy life

Scholars recognize that in the West the life courses of early modern women and men differed much more than they do today. As Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell argued more than three decades ago, so did female and male young people’s paths to holiness. For young women, the moment of opting for chastity was crucial. Future female saints typically vowed chastity around age seven — a promise many were able to fulfill only after waiting for their husbands to die or, less frequently, persuading them to live chastely. For males, adolescence was a more typical age of embracing holiness. Adult conversions to the holy life, they assert, were quite different. Usually they involved “a editions: Opere del Padre Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, vol. 2, Maraviglie della natura, ammaestramenti morali (Venice: Paolo Baglioni, 1713), 450–518; and Milan: Bianchi, 1795. . Vita della serva di Dio donna Leonora Ramirez Montalvo fondatrice dell’umili ancille della Santissima Trinità del nobile conservatorio detto Le quiete e delle ancille della ss. Vergine dell’Incarnazione (Florence: Michele Nestenus & Francesco Moucke, 1731), cited hereafter as Vita Montalvo; Vita della venerabile serva di Dio donna Leonora Ramirez Montalvo fondatrice dell’umili ancille della Santissima Trinità del nobile conservatorio detto Le quiete e delle ancille della ss.Vergine dell’Incarnazione (Florence: Piero Matini, 1740). . See, e.g., Silvana Seidel Menchi, “The Girl and the Hourglass: Periodization of Women’s Lives in Western Preindustrial Societies,” in Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Kirksville, MO:Truman State University Press, 2001), 41–74; original ed., Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo ed età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 105–55. . Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 87–99. On five other holy women of varied social extraction who were the subjects of vite, see also my essay “Ecco la santa! Printed Italian Biographies of Devout Laywomen, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries,” in Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, ed. Alison Weber (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, forthcoming). . Ibid., 77.

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Anne Jacobson Schutte • Elite Matrons

drastic shift from a former state or condition to its opposite,” in many instances precipitated by “the death of a loved one, a serious illness, the preaching of a holy evangelist, an acute sense of worldliness [or] a sudden experience of the supernatural.” We shall encounter one and perhaps two of these precipitants in the vita of Torelli. She does not, however follow what Weinstein and Bell presented as the inevitable outcome of an adult conversion: “withdrawal from the world,” that is to say, entering a monastery or convent. Furthermore, among adults, there are more differences between genders than the two scholars allow. It is worth noting that although the terminus ad quem announced in the book’s title is 1700, they consider few sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury examples. For an early modern widow, provided that she wanted to withdraw completely from the world, becoming a professed nun was extremely difficult; for a married woman, it was impossible. There is no satisfactory full-length modern biography of Ludovica Torelli. From the sixteenth century on, almost no one has paid close attention to her early years. The only legitimate child of doting parents, the pious Milanese noblewoman Veronica Pallavicino and Achille Torelli, count of Guastalla (an imperial fief), she was born there on 26 September 1499. In January 1516, at the insistence of Massimiliano Sforza, former duke of Milan, she married Ludovico Stanghi, count of Castelnuovo di Bocca d’Adda.They had at least one child, Achille, who died at age four in 1521; another short-lived son may have been born from this or her second marriage. Little Achille’s demise was soon followed by the deaths of Ludovica’s father, murdered in 1522; her mother in 1523; and her husband, who succumbed to gout that made him stink and restricted his activities to gambling, in . Ibid., 100–119; quotations at 101, 119. . Several qualified evaluators have dismissed Aldo Zagni’s La Contessa di Guastalla (Reggiolo: Corno d’Oro, 1987) as tendentious and unreliable. See, e.g., Giuseppe M. Cagni, review of Zagni, Barnabiti studi 6 (1989): 297–302. Trustworthy thumbnail treatments include Giuseppe M. Cagni, “Louise Torelli,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité 15 (1937): cols. 1044–48; Andrea M. Erba,“Ludovica Torelli,” Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione, ed. Guerrino Pellicia and Giancarlo Rocca, 10 vols. (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1974–2003; hereafter DIP), 9 (1997): cols. 1256–58. For a comprehensive understanding of the congregations with which Torelli was associated in the broad context of sixteenth-century religious life, see Elena Bonora, I conflitti della Controriforma: Santità e obbedienza nell’esperienza religiosa dei primi barnabiti (Florence: Le Lettere, 1998). . http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Torelli,_conte_di_Guastalla, consulted 1 April 2015; Cagni,“Torelli,” col. 1044.

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1524. Although according to feudal law, Guastalla should have passed to the closest male heir, Ludovica became countess on her father’s death, much to her relatives’ dismay At the urging of Francesco II, last Sforza duke of Milan, she remarried in 1525. Her new husband, the violent Brescian noble Antonio Martinengo, aimed to gain possession of her inheritance for a son from his first marriage. Soon he began to abuse her, verbally and physically. Because he had murdered his first wife, her relatives took revenge by assassinating him in 1528. Widowed for the second time after two unsatisfactory marriages, the twenty-eight-year-old Torelli was proud, vain, quick to take offense, absorbed with costly clothing and jewelry, fond of hunting and gambling (a sign, Rosignoli observed in passing, of her “masculine spirit”), always surrounded by numerous hangers-on and military escorts — in short, completely worldly. Lavish charitable giving from her abundant resources and frequent prayer constituted her only redeeming features, or so Rosignoli averred. Yet she was not content. Uncertain about what sort of life she should be leading, she prayed for guidance. God’s inspiration came through the Observant Dominican Battista Carioni da Crema (1450/60–1534), one of several “spiritual” friars in this period whose views were already beginning to attract suspicion from zealots like Gian Pietro Carafa (the future Pope Paul IV). Shortly after the two met in Milan in the late 1520s,Torelli invited Fra Battista to Guastalla to serve as her confessor. Predictably, members of her “dissolute court” disliked him, especially because he declined to say abbreviated “hunters’ masses,” and they urged Torelli to send him back to his friary. Instead, she began to follow his advice. She shed her finery, abandoned her worldly pastimes, threw herself at Carioni’s and Christ’s feet, made a general confession, took Mary Magdalen and Elizabeth of Hungary as her heavenly advocates and expanded her charitable activities. Accompanied by Fra Battista and a few virtuous servants, Torelli returned to Milan. Shedding her rich garments for humble attire, . Ibid. . http://digilander.libero.it/conti.torelli/ludovica/html, consulted 20–23 January 2014. . Vita Torella, 4–5; quotation at 15. . Ibid., 15–18; quotations at 17, 15. . Ibid., 19–24.

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she went around the city declaring the vanity of worldly life and attracting followers among affluent noblewomen and poor virgins. Her peers as well as her inferiors labeled her la Pazza (the crazy woman). She used her considerable influence in Rome to keep the Dominicans from ordering Carioni back to his designated house. They returned to Guastalla, where he died in  January 1534. That is Rosignoli’s last reference to Carioni. He refrained from mentioning that on several occasions, investigations of Torelli for heresy also implicated the deceased friar. (This is the first of two significant silences on the author’s part, probable reasons for which will be explored in a subsequent section.) Torelli then took as her confessor a man two or three years younger than she: the future saint Antonio Maria Zaccaria (Cremona, 1502–39), co-founder of the nascent Clerks Regular of Saint Paul, better known as Barnabites. At this point she began to fulfill her vocation as a founder. Before examining it, let us investigate Montalvo’s very different, seemingly smoother road to undertaking a similar calling.

Montalvo’s “Female” Route to the Holy Life

Contrary to claims in most brief biographical treatments, Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo was not born in Spain, but there was Spanish blood on her paternal grandparents’ side. In 1539 Antonio Ramírez de Montalvo, a thirteen-year-old native of Arévalo in Castile, came to Florence in the entourage of Eleonora de Toledo, Duke Cosimo I’s bride. Remaining in Florence, he married one of the duchess’s favorites, Giovanna de Gixosa de Guevara (Spanish on her father’s side and French on her mother’s). From Cosimo, whom he served as majordomo, Antonio received many gifts, including three buildings that the architect Bartolommeo Ammannati converted into a palace at Borgo degli Albizzi 26. The younger of Antonio and Giovanna’s two sons, Giovanni, was Eleonora’s father. Giovanni and his mistress, Elizabetta (surname unknown), were expelled from Florence on account of her pregnancy and set off on a visit to his paternal ancestors’ homeland. Labor pains took them by surprise them in Genoa, where . Ibid., 31. . Ibid., 24–29. . Vita Montalvo, 1–3, corrected by http://digilander.libero.it/tigrino/Montalvo. htm/.

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Eleonora was born on 6 July 1602.Two years later, her parents married. In 1606 they had a second child, Francesco. Eleonora, raised in Florence, was the very model of a little girl headed for holiness. She never cried and took the breast most readily when her wet nurse recited the rosary. Like many other biographers, the authors of her vita characterized her as a preternaturally mature child who “manifested… natural prudence and singular virtue.” She precociously demonstrated fondness for all sorts of religious reading, fasting and works of charity. Her mother had to assign two servants to keep track of her when she secluded herself in remote corners of the house to meditate and engage in mental prayer. Identical details may be found in the vite of countless other women. When Eleonora’s father died in 1607, the five-year-old consoled her and Francesco’s mother. In 1611, at age nine, she was put “in education” in the Clarissan convent of SS.  Jacopo e Lorenzo on via Guicciardini, where she remained for ten years. Like many another educanda, she backslid at the devil’s instance, becoming addicted to reading tales of knighthood. The nuns overpraised her; her vanity and self-esteem grew. By age fifteen, however, having reformed herself permanently, she welcomed the nuns’ invitation to join them. Her mother had other plans. Without consulting her daughter, she arranged her marriage to Orazio Landi, which took place on 30 August 1620. Although Eleonora had made a vow of virginity at age seven, not knowing what it entailed, respect for (the technical term would be reverential fear of) her mother inhibited her from objecting to the marriage. She had been taught nothing whatever about sex, or even picked up hints about it in chivalric literature. Only on her wedding night did she find out what “paying the marital debt” entailed, and she refused to comply. . Vita Montalvo, 4–8; corrected by Jennifer Haraguchi, “Educating Rich and Poor Girls in Seventeenth-Century Florence: Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo, her Conservatories and Writings” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2010), 19. Birth of Francesco: http://digilander.libero.it/tigrino/Montalvo.htm/. . Vita Montalvo. 9–16; quotation at 11. . Ibid., 11–28. Her father’s death: http://digilander.libero.it/tigrino/Montalvo. htm/. Landi is a Florentine patrician name, but I have found nothing about Orazio’s precise social status. He was at least a decade older than Eleonora. Fausta Casolini, “Ramirez Montalvo ved. Landi, Eleonora,” DIP 7 (1983): cols. 1203–5.The date of their marriage comes from Florentina beatificationis et canonizationis venerabilis servae dei

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Eleonora’s new husband was flabbergasted by her determination to remain a virgin but acquiesced in her decision, realizing that God had given him a treasure to preserve. For several years, nursing each other through illnesses, they lived together in Florence and the Landi villa in the Mugello. In 1626, with his permission, she moved back to the city, first into a small house with a single female companion and then with Francesco, her brother. Although Eleonora and Orazio remained friends until his death in 1656, three years before her demise, they never lived together again. After some four years, during which she took on a  Jesuit confessor, Marcellino Albergotti, and began to engage in rigorous fasting and corporal penance, she initiated her project of foundations.

Torelli the Founder

As soon as Ludovica Torelli met Antonio Maria Zaccaria, she began to transform the followers gathered around her into a female congregation comparable to his Barnabites. She purchased property and obtained papal permission to found an establishment dedicated, as were the Barnabites, to Saint Paul. Accordingly, she took a new first name, Paola Maria. In October 1535 a small group of the target population, well-born but impecunious young women, moved in. A few months later, six of them (not including Torelli) donned monastic habits. After the first monastic name they adopted, they became known as Angelics. Angelica Paola Antonia (formerly Virginia) Negri, immediately named novice mistress, emerged as the most prominent among them. She rapidly developed a reputation for extraordinary charismatic gifts.That is almost all Rosignoli had to say about Negri, whom he treated with considerable reticence. His list of works cited included the second edition of her Lettere spirituali (including a life of her by Giovanni Battista Fontana de’ Conti), which was published in Rome in 1576 and placed on the Roman Indexes of Prohibited Books issued in 1590 and 1593. Adeptly employing the rhetorical device occultatio, he stated that he could recount “such marvelous things as [her] ecstasies and predictions” but would refrain Eleonorae Ramirez Montalvo viduae Landi.… Positio ex officio compilata super introduction causae et super virtutibus (Vatican City:Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1984), 83. Many thanks to  Jennifer Haraguchi for this reference. . Ibid., 22–46; Haraguchi, 19. . Vita Torella, 46–55, 116–23.

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from doing so because the Holy See had not yet approved them. He surely knew much more about the woman whom Barnabites and Angelics called the divina madre maestra and vowed to obey as their supreme authority. Only in passing did he allude to her traveling with Torelli to found Angelic communities inVenice,Verona andVicenza. He ignored the opposition in Venice that precipitated her eventual disgrace, expulsion from the congregation and death in 1555. The Angelics maintained close relations with and received valuable gifts from numerous eminent figures, including Ferrante I Gonzaga (governor of Milan from 1536 to 1546), to whom Torelli sold the county of Guastalla in 1539 for some 22,000 scudi. Before 1563, when the Council of Trent addressed the issue of female monasticism, new religious communities of women were not obligated to adopt cloister. In the case of the Angelics, the situation changed earlier. In 1553, after long debates during which Torelli argued for maintaining uncloistered status, she came out on the losing side: the majority voted to petition Rome for permission to go into seclusion. Never having considered cloistered life her vocation but troubled about the legal status of the vow of obedience she had made to Negri almost two decades earlier, she consulted the papal nuncio in Milan. In 1555 Paul IV ruled that hers was merely a simple vow and therefore not binding.Torelli, who had already left San Paolo and relocated in a house of convertite, was free to embark on her second foundation: a collegio for the education of young maidens of legitimate birth and good family who on account of their slender means risked assaults on their virginity. . Ibid., 56–58; quotation from 58. On the condemnation of Negri’s letters, see Index des livres interdits, ed.  J.M. De Bujanda et al., 9 (Sherbrooke, Canada: Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, and Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1994), 425. Many thanks to Alison Weber for helping me to identify occultatio. . Vita Torella, 116–23. . For the full story, see Massimo Firpo, “Paola Antonia Negri, monaca angelica (1508–1555),” in Rinascimento femminile, ed. Ottavia Niccoli (Rome: Giuseppe Laterza, 1991), 35–82. . Vita Torella, 41–46, 64–66. . On the Angelics in Milan from their foundation until 1635, see P. Renée Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan (New York: Routledge, 2002). . Vita Torella, 66–71.

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In the fall of 1557, under the protection of Milan’s ruler, Philip II, the Collegio della Guastalla opened its doors to twenty girls between the ages of ten and twenty-two, each accompanied by a matron to supervise her education. Rosignoli went into great detail on the collegio’s magnificent architecture, the inhabitants’ attire, the simple vow of virginity they took, the dowry of 2,000 lire they received on departure for marriage or monachization and the institution’s rules and governance. Some years after its foundation, with the help of Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, spiritual supervision of the collegio was assigned to the  Jesuits, who had replaced the Barnabites as Torelli’s confessors and beneficiaries. Her second foundation, which relocated to Monza in 1936, now serves students of both sexes from early childhood through secondary school. So, after successive suppressions and revivals, does her first.The Angelics of Saint Paul, restored in the twentieth century to the status of uncloistered sisters, now operate in twelve nations on five continents.

Montalvo as Founder

During the four years after moving from her husband’s country villa into Florence and eventually into the home of her brother, Francesco, Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo attended to her own soul. With the consent of confessor Albergotti, she increased the intensity of her fasting and mortification. In May 1630, having decided to do something for others, she obtained Francesco’s permission to take into his house a few poor young girls. As the number of her charges grew, she had to rent increasingly larger quarters. Following the death of Albergotti in the plague of 1630, his  Jesuit successor, Cosimo Pazzi, assisted her in transforming the group into a congregation. Taking dictation from the Virgin Mary, she wrote constitutions for the foundation, called the Minime Ancelle della Santissima Vergine dell’Incarnazione, which gained approval from Archbishop Pietro Niccolini in 1645. Two years later, its new oratory and house opened on via dell’Amore — most likely the present via Amorino, . Ibid., 71–96, 123–26. . Ibid., 86–90. . See www.guastalla.org. . See http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suore_angeliche_di_San_Paolo. . Vita Montalvo, 40–51.

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just off via Sant’Antonino to the southwest of San Lorenzo in central Florence. About twenty years later, according to Montalvo’s biographers, God inspired her to make another foundation, this one for noble girls, outside the city limits.With help from her chaplain, she identified La Quiete, a former Medici villa in northwestern Florence beyond the walls, as a suitable location. Donations from supporters — including Grand Duke Ferdinando II, urged on by his consort, Vittoria della Rovere — enabled her to acquire it. There she established the Congregazione delle Ancelle della Santissima Trinità, dedicated to the education of elite girls. Montalvo’s first congregation, suppressed in 1886 by the Italian government, merged with the second. Since the acquisition of La Quiete by the University of Florence in 1992, members of Montalvo’s second congregation, who still run a school, have shared the villa with other entities.

The Rules of

the

Vita Game

Now let us shift from the subjects of these vite to their authors, attending first to the circumstances in which they wrote. Obviously, no biographical account can achieve the impossible goal of telling a life story “as it really happened” — much less so an early modern vita scripted for pious purposes. To attract and hold readers, authors needed to meet long-held expectations about what a holy life should look like, which meant following earlier models in the same genre. Moreover, in order to obtain permission to publish once the papalinquisitorial reform project had begun, they had to abide by Rome’s rules. Beginning in 1625, writers were enjoined to eschew such terms as “miracles,” “raptures,” “visions” and “prophecies.” Similarly, publishers had to refrain from including portraits depicting “lights,” “haloes” and “rays” connoting holiness. . Ibid., 51–61, 149–57; Casolini. I am grateful to Brenda Preyer for pinning down the probable location of the establishment. . Giancarlo Rocca, “Ancelle della Santissima Vergine dell’Incarnazione,” DIP 1 (1973): cols. 612–13; Alessandro Galuzzi, “Minime Ancelle della SS.Trinità,” DIP 5 (1978): cols. 349–50. . Casolini. . Urban VIII, Pope, Decreta servanda in canonizatione e beatificatione sanctorum (Rome: Reverenda Camera Apostolica, 1642), 2-6. On this collection, see Miguel Gotor, I beati del papa: Santità, Inquisizione e obbedienza in età moderna (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002), 308–25.

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Of the many provisions in Urban VIII’s and the Inquisition’s legislation, diffused rapidly and complied with by writers and publishers well before appearing in print in 1642, the most important for writers of vite was a late, undated addition to the corpus. A vita must include two declarations (protestationes/proteste), one at the beginning and another at the end, stating that since the author had no intention of preempting the papal prerogative of determining whether a deceased person deserved beatification, he did not claim to be presenting “anything other than human history.” The legislation did not prescribe the precise wording or specify the language (vernacular or Latin) of the declarations; most writers furnished only one. Nonetheless, gaining permission for publication from the appropriate authorities (whose identity and number depended on the authors’ religious affiliation and differed from one polity to another: the subject for another inquiry) necessitated observing the spirit of the regulations. The two vite under consideration here appeared so long after the biographees’ deaths that the author Rosignoli and the team responsible for Montalvo’s vita could not have had first-hand knowledge about them.They had to rely on previous treatments, some of which can be identified. Committed willy-nilly to avoiding “anything other than human history,” they were not, however, obliged to recount everything they knew.

Torelli and Rosignoli

Torelli’s biographer was born on 4 November 1631 in Borgomanero, a Piedmontese town northeast of Novara. After entering the  Jesuit novitiate at age nineteen, he went on to teach philosophy, theology and scripture and to head several colleges of his order, as well as to serve as provost of the professed Jesuit house in Milan. There he died on 5 January 1707. A prolific author, he produced twenty-two published works. In addition to the biography of Torelli, he wrote lives of Nicolina Rezzonica (c.1562–1625), founder of an Ursuline house in Como; and of two elite natives of Shanghai, exemplary converts to Christianity: the intellectual and minister of state Paolo Siu (Xu Guangqi, 1562–1633) and his youngest granddaughter, Candida Hiu (Xu Gandidi, 1607–80). . Urban VIII, 18–20. . Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 2nd ed., 11 vols. (Brussels: Polleunis et Centerick par la Province de Belgique, and Paris: Oscar

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What led Rosignoli to write vite of people he could not have known personally he did not say. Only the dedication of the Siu-Hiu biography to Marchese Pietro Isimbardi, a high official in Milan, and his wife, Silvia Cibo, provides a hint: they may have been among the “friends” who urged him to compose the book — granted, a tried and true trope for inspiration to write. The close connection of all the biographees with the  Jesuit Order constitutes a plausible explanation. A confrere of Rosignoli who served as Rezzonica’s spiritual director — either Edmond Auger or Carlo Cartotinti: he was not sure which — wrote the rule for her Ursuline house.  Jesuits converted Siu; he and his granddaughter consistently supported and defended them. In the latter part of Torelli’s life, members of the society were her primary points of reference. Jesuit writers, furthermore, provided Rosignoli’s main sources of information, especially for the double biography of Siu and Hiu. He relied both on works by two missionaries to China, Nicolas Trigault (Douai, 1577–Hangzou, 1628) and Philippe Couplet (Mechelen, 1623–Goa, 1693), and on Cina: La terza parte dell’Asia (1663) by the order’s official historiographer, Daniello Bartoli (Ferrara, 1608–Rome, 1685) who, like Rosignoli, was an armchair traveler with ethnographic interests who never set foot outside Italy. Rosignoli was not the first writer to compose Torelli’s vita. In 1592 a Milanese Jesuate, Paolo Morigia (1525–1604), whose life overlapped with hers, published a brief account, expanded and reissued eleven years later. (For reasons unknown, a second biography by the Barnabite Lorenzo Torelli, readied for publication in 1656, never Schepens-Alphonse Picard, 1890–1932; reprint, Héverlé-Louvain: Editions de la Bibliothèque S.J., 1960), 7: cols. 146–61. . Rosignoli, Vite, e virtù di d. Paolo Siu colao della Cina, e di D. Candida Hiu gran dama cinese (Milan: Giuseppe Malatesta, 1700), a2r–4v, 1; hereafter Vite Siu Hiu. . Idem, Vita e virtù della m. Nicolina Rezzonica, primogenita dell’insigne monistero di S. Leonardo in Como sotto il Titolo, e la Protettione di S. Orsola V. e M. (Como: Paolo Antonio Caprani, 1682), 93–108. . Idem, Vite Siu Hiu, 3–4. Couplet’s works included a life of Candida Hiu published in French (Paris: Estienne Michallet, 1688), Spanish (Madrid: Antonio Román, 1691) and Flemish (Antwerp: Franciscus Muller, 1694). . Paolo Morigia, Conuersione, vita essemplare, e bello fine dell’Ill. LodovicaTorella contesso di Guastalla fondatrice del monasterio delle monache di San Paolo… (Bergamo: Comin Ventura, 1592); Historia della meravigliosa conversione… (Milan: Gratiadio Ferioli, 1603), cited hereafter as Historia.

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appeared in print; it remains in manuscript in the Barnabites’ Roman archive. Rosignoli apparently never saw it.) In his first two chapters, he simply copied Morigia’s first section, including errors and omissions. Both, for instance, gave her mother’s first name as Maddalena and her birth year as 1500 and claimed that she was widowed for the second time at age twenty-five (she was actually twenty-eight). At a later point in the narrative, Morigia’s discussion of Torelli’s virtues provided a template for his successor’s considerably longer treatment. Rosignoli struck out on his own, however, when he came to her “conversion.” Unlike most writers of vite, he identified his sources not only in italicized notes but also in a proto-bibliography: “a note on books from which the information pertaining to this work were taken.” It included many printed works (Morigia’s vita and several of his numerous works on Milanese history; historical studies, biographies and works in other genres by a number of writers, mainly  Jesuits) and manuscripts (a family tree of the Torelli; writings and letters from Torelli’s second foundation). His assiduous research enabled him to bring into Torelli’s story people and problems that Morigia, a well-informed cleric and lifelong resident of Milan, probably knew about but chose not to mention. As we have seen, however, Rosignoli almost certainly could have but did not furnish detailed treatments of two people closely associated with Torelli: Battista Carioni and Paola Antonia Negri.Why not? It is not difficult to identify two reasons. In the first place, as a skilled writer, Rosignoli was conscious of the need to maintain a sharp focus on his subject and keep digressions under control: he was writing a biography of Torelli, not a history of her times. At some points, though not in the cases of Carioni and Negri, he explicitly stated that he was tempted to say much more about something or someone but had decided to refrain. After a brief discussion of Torelli’s support of Sta.Valeria, a house for reformed prostitutes, for instance, he moved on: “Now let us return to Ludovica’s story.” Following a . See Sergio Pagano,“Spigolature sulla ‘missione’ veneziana di Ludovica Torelli nel 1544-’45,” Barnabiti studi 11 (1994): 187–201, at 189. . Historia, A4v, B1v; Vita Torella, 1, 12. . Historia, C3r-D2r; Vita Torella, 97–133. Quotation at ibid., 14. . Ibid., 181–82. . Ibid., 41.

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Fig. 1. Portrait of Ludovica Torelli. Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, S.J., Vita, e virtù della contessa di Guastalla Lodovica Torella nominate poi Paola Maria fondatrice dell’insigne monistero di S. Paolo (Milan: Giuseppe Marelli, 1686), a2v. Courtesy of Biblioteca San Francesco della Vigna,Venice (A R IV 14).

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similarly abbreviated account of Ferrante Gonzaga’s benefactions to the Angelics and other religious institutions, he remarked that “it will suffice for me to have referred to them in passing, in order to accord due praise to such a worthy governor of Milan.” The second explanation relates to Rosignoli’s purpose in writing this biography. Of the possible objectives for vite identified in the introduction, one can be safely excluded: he did not aim to initiate or further efforts already under way to promote her beatification. The title of the work, Vita et virtù della contessa di Guastalla Lodovica Torella, affords one clue to the absence of this motive. He pointedly did not call her “servant of God” — which technically, of course, she was not because no process of beatification had been opened or ever would be. (The same is true of his biography of Siu and Hiu.) Positive evidence of his intention comes near the end in a chapter entitled “The example of Torelli: How profitable for other ladies.” What he wanted elite female readers to imitate were not mortification of the body, ecstasies, raptures and prophecies (never mentioned) but the virtues he discussed in the second part of the vita: humility, love of God and fear of offending him, devotion to Christ and the Virgin, magnificence and liberality, charity and patience in adversity (especially the excruciating pains of rheumatoid arthritis preceding her death). Proposing Torelli as an exemple obviously allowed for inclusion of weaknesses preceding her conversion but precluded furnishing a warts-and-all verbal portrait from that point on. Like the majority of vitae, Rosignoli’s life of Torelli was printed in quarto format. At the beginning, the publisher included an engraved portrait of the subject, reproduced here as Fig. 1.The portrait shows a mature woman dressed in secular garments who gazes full face at viewers. The name(s) of the artist and/or engraver — in some instances one and the same person — are not given.

Montalvo and Her Biographers

The title page of Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo’s vita contains no author’s name. In fact, it appears, there were several of them. According to the printer’s prefatory letter to readers, Maria Ugolini del Chiaro — “a lady known both for the eminence and nobility of her blood . Ibid., 66. . Ibid., 133–38. . Ibid., 97–154.

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and for her rare heroic virtues” — was totally responsible for the account, based solely on information left by the subject’s  Jesuit confessors. In her prolix, unsigned prefatory letter, Ugolini del Chiaro explained that at the end of some chapters, readers would find an “apologetic explanation” of Montalvo’s words, sentiments or maxims. These the author had appended with approval from the theologians charged with examining the book and those responsible for granting permission to publish it: the Jesuit vicar general, a Jesuit reader of the manuscript, the vicar general and Vallombrosan visitor of the Florentine Inquisition and the grand duke’s auditor. She went on to defend herself against critics and skeptical readers incapable of appreciating this type of book. Who was Maria Ugolini del Chiaro? The only relatively solid information I have come across is that she was a Florentine patrician who on 27 May 1695 married Leon Battista del Chiaro, a wealthy goldsmith. After the wedding, he escorted her to his family’s luxurious residence in via Ginori (now Palazzo Tolomei, a hotel), which during the previous three years he had renovated and adorned with frescos by Giuseppe Nicola Nasini and Alessandro Gherardini. The rest is mostly conjecture. Born probably in the 1670s, too young to have known Montalvo, Ugolini was very likely educated at La Quiete, where she learned about the life of the founder and came to revere her. By 1731, the printer reported, she was an aging and infirm (not to mention wealthy) widow anxious to see her work in print before she died. Hence he printed it in installments as she finished writing them. On account of her ill health, she had no opportunity to look over, revise and correct the entire book. After a thorough perusal of pertinent archives in Florence and Rome, Maria Pia Paoli has recently shown that a succession of previous authors played a role in composing the vita of Montalvo. The first, her  Jesuit confessor Cosimo Pazzi (d.1638), put pen to paper two decades before her death. Subsequently, the Lucchese Bartolomeo Guidi (d.1668), a Scolopian (member of the Poor Clerks Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, an educational order founded . Vita Montalvo, ix–x. . Ibid., xi–xxxii, xxxiv–xxxv. . http://www.palazzotolomei.it/saloni.asp. . Vita Montalvo, ix–x.

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in 1577, also known as Piarists), wrote her life, which the Ancelle of La Quiete tried but failed to get published. Next, at the instance of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere, another Scolopian, Sigismondo di San Silverio Coccapani (1646/7–1719), put his hand to the task; once again, this work too never appeared in print. Finally, a secular priest, Matteo Perini, revised Coccopani’s work. With the moral support of the Ancelle at La Quiete and the financial backing of Maria Ugolini del Chiaro, this version was published in 1731. Since the cause of Montalvo’s beatification opened at an early (unknown) date, the authors of the published version, as well presumably as their predecessors, were intent on contributing to its successful conclusion. Hence, in addition to the appellation serva di Dio in the title, they made her childhood conform to those of model female saints. They paid close attention not only to their subject’s activities as a founder but also to her visions, revelations, ecstasies and prophecies. With a single small but significant exception, the first edition and the reprint of 1740 are identical. The title of the 1740 version contains an adjective not to be found in the earlier imprint: venerabile. The explanation for its absence in 1731 lies in a pre-publication intervention by the Congregation of the Holy Office, which ordered the adjective removed. Following Archbishop Giuseppe Maria Martelli’s conferral of the appellation “venerable” on Montalvo (17 December 1739), the word made its way into the 1740 book title. The two printings of Montalvo’s vita, published in quarto, contained her portrait, engraved by Antonio Lorenzini (1655–1740), a Franciscan friar and prolific artist who worked in his native Bologna and Florence. In the exemplar from which Fig. 2 comes, Lorenzini’s . Maria Pia Paoli,“Sante di famiglia:‘Notizie istoriche’ e agiografie femminili nella Firenze dei secoli XVII–XVIII,” in Memoria e comunità femminili: Spagna e Italia, secc. XV–XVIII, ed. Gabriella Zarri and Nieves Baranda Leturio (Florence and Madrid: Florence University Press and UNED, 2011), 192–97. . See Elena Bottoni, Scritture dell’anima: Esperienze religiose femminili nella Toscana del Settecento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura), 17–18 n. 80; and Prospero Lambertini, De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione/La Beatificazione dei Servi di Dio e la Canonizzazione dei Beati, ed. Vincenzo Criscuolo, 1.1 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010), 52 n. 322. . Paoli, 195. . Filippo de’ Boni, Biografia degli artisti ovvero dizionario della vita e delle opere dei pittori, degli scultori, degli intagliatori, dei tipografi e dei musici di ogni nazione che fiorirono da’ tempi più remoti sino a nostri giorni. 2nd ed. (Venice: Andrea Santini e Figlio, 1852), 582.

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Fig. 2. Portrait of Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo. [Maria Ugolini del Chiaro], Vita della serva di Dio donna Leonora Ramirez Montalvo fondatrice dell’umili ancille della Santissima Trinita del nobile conservatorio detto Le quiete e delle ancille della ss.Vergine dell’Incarnazione (Florence: Michele Nestenus & Francesco Mouck, 1731), opposite title page. Biblioteca Civica agli Ermitani di Padova (CF.0745).With the kind permission of the Comune di Padova – Assessorato alla Cultura.

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name was trimmed off to make the engraving fit into the volume without being folded, as it was in other copies of both the 1731 and the 1740 imprints.

Comparisons and Conclusions

Ludovica Torelli in sixteenth-century Guastalla and Milan and Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo in seventeenth-century Florence were born into the elite. Each founded two congregations, one for respectable but impecunious women and another for the education of elite young girls. Initially, the inhabitants of all four foundations lived “without the bond of [solemn] vows”: that is, they were not confined to perpetual reclusion behind convent walls as were professed nuns. There the resemblances between them end. Although by the time they initiated their foundations, neither Torelli nor Montalvo lived with a husband, they achieved the single status by different routes.Torelli, twice widowed, elected not to marry a third time; no parents or male siblings who might have compelled her to do so were present in her life. From the moment on her wedding night when she made clear to her new husband that she had no intention of consummating the marriage and he accepted her decision, Montalvo (also an orphan, with a younger brother who did not veto her wishes), became for all practical purposes a femme sole. (Mis)using a term denoting an unmarried woman’s legal right to own property and make contracts in her own name calls attention to another difference between the two: economic circumstances.Torelli was wealthy. When she needed a piece of real estate to further one of her foundation projects, she had only to reach into her own deep pockets, or at least so Rosignoli’s biography of her suggests. Montalvo on the contrary was economically insecure. Neither her father nor her brother was a good manager of his resources, and she appears to have received moral but not financial support from her husband. For every foundation and its continued existence, she had to raise funds from supporters. At one point, deep in debt on account of construction expenses, she was saved from ruin by a timely legacy. In political terms, too,Torelli was better situated. Born into the feudal nobility, after her father’s death she ruled the county of Guastalla until she chose to rid herself of it. When she needed support, she . senza legame di voti.Vita Montalvo, 527. . Ibid., 187–93.

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could approach directly a higher authority, as in the case of foiling the Dominican Order’s efforts to force Battista Carione back to his friary. She was on familiar terms with members of the Milanese nobility, successive governors of Spanish Milan and, during the last four years of her life, Carlo Borromeo, the first archbishop in eighty years to take up residence in the city. After only two generations in Florence, the paternal side of Montalvo’s family belonged to the elite but not officially to the patriciate. Her father was a second son; he and her mother, of undetermined social and geographical origin, did not marry until two years after their daughter’s birth. Eleonora could not therefore swing independent political weight. Impressed by her charisma and accomplishments, highly placed supporters sought her out, not the other way around. Key figures during her lifetime who did so included members of the ruling Medici family, Grand Duke Ferdinando II and his wife,Vittoria della Rovere. Seven decades later, by dedicating the vita of Montalvo to Grand Duke Gian Gastone, the Ancelle della Trinità and their prioress sought to perpetuate the Medici connection. On Gian Gastone’s death in 1737, the principality passed to the house of Habsburg-Lorraine. The Ancelle may have received patronage from his elder sister, the widowed Electress Palatine Anna Maria Luisa, who resided at La Quiete from 1723 until her death twenty years later. The two women differed as well in their posthumous status. Very few subjects of vite have achieved the rank of “blessed” (11% of both sexes; .025% of women), much less “saint” (.9% of both sexes; .017% of women). Torelli and Montalvo are not among them. Three times, it appears, Montalvo has been declared “venerable,” the step on the cursus sanctorum immediately preceding beatification: as noted earlier, on 17 December 1739 by the archbishop of Florence, an action confirmed on 12 March 1746 by Benedict XIV; and again on 8 May 1987 by  John Paul II. Since then, her cause has proceeded no further. Given that no cause on Torelli’s behalf seems to have been introduced in Milan or Rome, she has never achieved even the status of “servant of God.” . Ibid., v–vi. . My calculations (13 June 2013). . At http://saints.sqpn.com/venerable-eleonora-ramirez-montalvo-landi. See Paoli, 193, 195.

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From our unavoidable twenty-first-century perspective, the biographies of the two women differ as well. As we have seen, Rosignoli’s sophisticated vita of Torelli, designed to provide elite women with a model of pious conduct in the world, cleverly elided the theologically suspect sides of her career. As vite go, it is relatively brief: 178 pages of text. Since he was not trying to advance a cause of beatification, Rosignoli did not consider it necessary to include a lengthy description of Torelli’s virtues, but he did include at the end ten “spiritual letters” written during the last decade of her life. Depicting her as a strong-minded, dynamic achiever, he provided some insight into her human thought processes and strategies. In contrast, the life of Montalvo, the product of many hands, seems thoroughly conventional and somewhat retrograde. It presents Montalvo as the stereotypical “wise child” who precociously adopts practices of piety and vows to remain a virgin.Thanks to a remarkably considerate spouse, about whom modern readers would like to know more, an unwanted marriage did not stand in her way; she achieved her objectives as a founder. At 625 pages, this vita is, to say the least, lengthy. In addition to a good deal of prefatory material, it contains sections on her virtues, divine favors and miracles and prophecies; a summary of her foundations written for a cousin serving at the Habsburg court in Innsbruck; and her poems. Montalvo comes across not as a human being but as the bloodless plaster statue of a saint. These concluding considerations stem inevitably from the secular perspective of the twenty-first century. What contemporary readers thought of the two biographies we cannot know, for like all but a tiny handful of the hundreds of vite I have examined, they contain no readers’ notes and comments or even owners’ names. All we can say is that authors and publishers, anticipating an audience of pious readers, were willing to invest time and money in producing them.

Appendix: Other matron founders and their vite

Maddalena Budrisich (Žirovi, Bosnia [now Bosnia-Herzegovina], 1455–Arbe [Rab, now Croatia], 1531): founder, Franciscan tertiary house. Ian Tomco Marnavi, Vita della venerabile serva di Dio Madalena… contessa di Zirovo, croata, estratto da quello scrisse il suo confessore Gio. . Vita Torella, 162–78.

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Tomco Marnavich, vescovo di Bosna, lettore & coadiutore di Zagrabia... publicata di già in poema illirico, hora lingua italiana (Rome: Francesco Cavalli, 1635). Maria Maddalena Orsini (Rome, 1534–1605): founder, Dominican convent. Bonaventura Borselli, O.P., Breve narratione della vita e virtù della venerabile madre suor Maria Maddalena Orsina (Rome: Nicol’Angelo Tinassi, 1668). Francesca Baglioni Orsini (Florence, 1543–Rome, 1626: founder, Dominican convent. Anon. (O.P.), Istoria della vita, ed azioni di Francesca Baglioni Orsini fondatrice del monistero di s. Maria dell’umiltà dell’ordine di s. Domenico (Rome: Giovanni Generoso Salomoni, 1753). Maria Vittoria Fornari Strata (Genoa, 1562–1617): founder, Annunziate Turchine (beatified 1828). Fabio Ambrogio Spinola, S.J., Vita della venerabile serva di Dio, madre Maria Vittoria, fondatrice dell’ordine dell’Annontiata (Genoa: Giovanni Domenico Peri, 1649). Maria Lorenza Requesens Longo (Barcelona, 1563–Naples, 1642): founder, Ospedale degli Incurabili and Capuchin convent (declared venerable 1692). Zaccaria Boverio, O.M.Cap., Vita, e gesti di Maria Longa fondatrice dell’hospitale degl’Incurabili, e delle cappuccini... Estratta ad literam dal primo tomo degli Annali latini de’ frati minori capuccini, trans. Benedetto Sanbenedetti da Milano (Naples: Francesco Benzi, 1683). Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal (Dijon, France, 1572–Moulins, France, 1641): co-founder,Visitandines (beatified 1751, canonized 1767). Amedeo Comotto, C.R.B., Vita della madre delle figlie di Maria sempre Vergine Giovamma Francesca di Chantal, fondatrice dell’ordine della Visitatione, libri tre (Turin: Giovanni Sinibaldi, 1646). Brigida di Gesù Morello (San Michele Pagano, Genoa, 1610– Piacenza, 1679): founder, Collegio di Sant’Orsola Piacenza (declared venerable 1980, beatified 1998). Arcangelo Arcangeli, S.J., Vita della madre Brigida di Gesù fondatrice del Collegio di S. Orsola in Piacenza... dedicata alla sacra cattolica real maestà di Elisabetta Farnese (Rome: De’ Rossi, 1759). .

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Orsola Isabella Breccika Milesi (Rome, 1639–Rieti, 1723): founder, Congregazione del Santissimo Bambino Gesù, Rieti. Innocenzio di San Giuseppe, Sch.P., Vita di Orsola Isabella Breccika Milesj romana fondatrice, e prima superiora della Congregazione del Santissimo Bambino Gesù nella città di Rieti (Rome: Stamperia di San Michele a Ripa Grande, 1726). Benedetta Van Herten Viganega (Genoa, 1651–Osimo, Ancona, 1724): founder, Capuchin convent, Osimo. Matteo Volpi, O.P., Istoria della vita, e delle virtù di Benedetta WanHerten Viganega nobile vedova genovese fondatrice dell’insigne monistero delle suore cappuccine di Osimo (Venice: Simone Ochi, 1754). •

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Nuns, Agents and Agency: Art Patronage in the Post–Tridentine Convent Marilyn Dunn In 1563, as part of its reform of the Catholic Church, the Council of Trent decreed the reestablishment and enforcement of strict enclosure for female convents, which forbade nuns from leaving their convents and outside visitors from entering them. Regulations regarding the architecture and governance of female convents sought to segregate them from secular society and their families, considered disruptive distractions to the spiritual lives and prayerful mission of nuns. Tridentine imposition of absolute cloister for nuns has been seen as profoundly disrupting the family and social networks through which convent patronage previously had functioned, but despite the Church’s efforts to regulate religious women and maintain their separation from the secular world, cloistered nuns as a corporate body and as individuals still managed to actively engage in the patronage of art and architecture for their convents and churches in seventeenth-century Rome. This essay examines mechanisms by which Roman nuns effected their patronage by considering their access to and interaction with networks of intermediaries, including cardinal protectors, convent deputies, artists and family members who facilitated these endeavors. Secluded within the walls of their cloister, nuns by necessity had to rely on male agents to handle their business affairs and transactions with the public world.While enclosure certainly imposed limitations on nuns, recent studies of art patronage, modifying the model of the “hero-patron,” have illuminated more complex mechanisms involving agents and . Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. and trans. H.J. Schroeder (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1941), 218–19. See Francesca Medioli,“An Unequal Law:The Enforcement of Clausura before and after the Council of Trent,” in Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christine Meek (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 136–52. . See Evelyn Carole Voelker, “Charles Borromeo” Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiaticae, 1577: A Translation with Commentary and Analysis” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1977); Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV), Archivum Arcis (A.A.), Arm. I–XVIII, 6492. . See Gabriella Zarri, “Recinti sacri: Sito e forma dei monasteri femminili a Bologna tra ’500 e ’600,” in Luoghi sacri e spazi della santità, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucetta Scaraffia (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990), 381–90, at 388; Silvia Evangelisti,“Art and the Advent of Clausura:The Convent of Saint Catherine of Siena in Tridentine Florence,” in Suor Platilla Nelli (1523–1588):The First Woman Painter of Florence, ed.  Jonathan Nelson (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2000), 67–82.

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other intermediaries through which the patronage of secular male or ecclesiastic patrons operated as well. Through an exploration of nuns’ relationships and collaborations with various agents and go-betweens this essay will also consider how convent patronage can be inserted into the broader context of the role of intermediaries in patronage. To ensure good governance, female convents in Rome were placed under the authority of the cardinal vicar or other cardinal protectors and were advised in their financial and business affairs by a congregation of deputies consisting of three or more prelates, noblemen or other gentlemen. These influential men were both advisors and potential intermediaries for the nuns in the public world. Abbesses, however, worked closely with their advisors, meeting with them on opposite sides of the parlor grates.The convent parlor (parlatorio) represented a liminal space between the cloister and the public world. Although nuns remained strictly cloistered in the inner parlor they could converse with approved visitors from behind a double-grated window. Archival evidence confirms that the convent parlor was the site where meetings of the congregation of deputies attended by the abbess or prioress and other convent officials took place. Nuns . Renaissance Society of America,Venice 2010, four sessions on Agents, Brokers, and Intermediaries: The Circulation of Art Works in the Early Modern Period (1500–1650) organized by Cinzia Maria Sicca Bursill-Hall, Elena Fumagalli, and Raffaella Morselli (this essay develops a paper presented by the author in these sessions); Sheryl E. Reiss, “Raphael and His Patrons: From the Court of Urbino to the Curia and Rome,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 36–55, at 37; Lisa Beaven,“Cardinal Camillo Massimo as Art Agent of the Altieri,” in Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome, ed.  Jill Burke and Michael Bury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 171–87; Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). . ASV, Congr.Visita Ap. 3, 626, 26 May, 1627. . On convent parlors see Voelker, “Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricae”; ASV, A.A., Arm. I-XVIII, 6492, 100–101; ASV, A.A., Arm. I–XVIII, 6493, 37v; Marilyn Dunn, “Spaces Shaped for Spiritual Perfection: Convent Architecture and Nuns in Early Modern Rome,” in Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Helen Hills (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 152–76, at160–61; Alessia Lirosi, I monasteri femminili a Roma tra XVI e XVII secolo (Rome:Viella, 2012), 223–35. . The female superior of a convent was called an abbess except in the case of Dominican or Carmelite communities in which her title was prioress: Lirosi, Monasteri femminili, 205. . Archivio di Stato di Roma (ASR), Congregazioni religiose femminili (CRF),

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communicated in the parlor with various other male agents who were charged with handling their dealings in the secular realm. These included a procuratore who served as their legal representative and a fattore (steward) and/or an esattore (collector of revenues) who handled business transactions. Fattori conveyed work orders and payments from the abbess or prioress to artisans and artists, made purchases, oversaw property and executed errands for the nuns. The nuns were responsible for maintaining their own administrative records and account books of the expenses and revenues of the convent, a duty performed by the nun occupying the position of economa or camerlenga who was to weekly or monthly review payments made by the fattore, meeting with him at the parlor grates. Decrees issued after the apostolic visitation of 1625 to Sta. Maria in Campo Marzio that ordered the abbess to hire another fattore who would be more diligent in keeping accounts and handling negotiations for the convent emphasize the importance of employing an astute, reliable individual in this crucial intermediary role. Although the role of men in the governance and business affairs of convents was indicative of the paternalistic attitudes of the post-Tridentine Church, these male officials and employees acted in collaboration with a convent’s abbess and her nuns who met in chapter to discuss and vote on matters pertaining to their community, including those regarding finances and projects of construction and decoration, and who managed to maintain a considerable degree of autonomy in directing the life and affairs of their convent. The professed nuns who populated Roman convents derived from the noble and upper classes and emulated their secular counterparts by participating in the long tradition of female ecclesiastical patronage to which Carolyn Valone’s groundbreaking scholarship called S. Lucia in Selci, Busta 3703, fasc. 2; ASV, Monast. femm. romani soppr., S. Marta, n. 108; Ann Roberts, Dominican Women and Renaissance Art:The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 238; Lirosi, Monasteri femminili, 223. . Roberts, Dominican Women, 218, 239–40. See ASR, CRF, S. Lucia in Selci, Busta 3702, fasc. 2, fasc. 3; Busta 3703, fasc. 1, fasc. 2 and Busta 3704, fasc. 1. . ASV, Congr. Visita Ap. 3, 626. Fabritio Credazzi, Guida della monaca religiosa (Rome: Appresso Andrea Fei, 1622), 154–61. . ASV, Congr.Visita Ap. 3, 207v–208. . Franco Borsi, L’Insula Millenaria: Il monastero di Santa Maria in Campo Marzio e la Camera dei Deputati (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1984), 252.

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attention. In seventeenth-century Roman convents, it was in fact the nuns, either as a community or as individuals, who assumed much of the financial responsibility for the construction and embellishment of their convents and public churches. Employing convent resources or utilizing private allowances (livelli) provided to nuns by their families empowered them to act as patrons. Although absolute seclusion inside the cloister drastically restricted their direct access to artists and the visual culture of Rome outside their convent walls, nuns drew upon an extensive network of influential individuals who provided connections to artists and facilitated artistic projects initiated and financed by the nuns themselves.

Convent Officials

Entrusted with the care of the spiritual welfare and oversight of the governance of a religious community, politically powerful cardinal protectors were key advocates of the female convents in their charge. In Rome, while the cardinal vicar had ultimate authority over matters of the governance, economic administration and observance in female convents, prerogatives reinforced in Gregory XV’s Inscrutabili Dei providentia (1622), the direct supervision of convents was divided between the vicar and other cardinal protectors, a system that led to considerable tensions as these parties competed to assert political power through their protection of religious institutions. Patronage of art and architecture at convents under their auspices represented a highly visible means of demonstrating the power of cardinal protectors. For instance in 1628 Cardinal Scipione Borghese donated funds for the construction of new churches at two Dominican convents, SS. Domenico e Sisto and Sta. Caterina a Magnanapoli, under his protection. In both cases, however, his contributions represented only a relatively small portion of the total cost of the projects financed principally by these convents and . See list of publications. I am most grateful to Carolyn Valone for her advice, support and friendship throughout my career as a scholar. . On cardinal protectors, see A. Boni, “Cardinale Protettore,” in Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione 2 (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1975), 276–80; Luigi Fiorani, “Monache e monasteri romani nell’età del quietismo,” Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma 1 (1977): 63–111, at 71–73; Stefano Andretta, “Religious Life in Baroque Rome, in Rome/Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. Peter van Kessel and Elisja Schulte (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 168–74, at 171–72; Lirosi, Monasteri femminili, 107–30.

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their individual nuns. Adroit appeals to their cardinal-protector figured as part of convents’ strategies to realize desired improvements. Taking advantage of Cardinal Borghese’s visit to the convent of SS. Domenico e Sisto, Suor Paola Giustini prostrated herself at his feet and beseeched his support for the construction of a sorely needed new public church. Due to her devotion to St. Dominic, Suor Paola had already offered 1,000 scudi from an inheritance to build a more commodious church, but her donation was still insufficient to finance even the foundation. Moved by her pleas, Cardinal Borghese granted his approval and generously contributed 500 scudi, enabling construction to commence. To these initial funds were added donations from individual nuns, encouraged by Suor Paola’s persistent fund-raising efforts; dowries that began to be required from converse (lay nuns); and money normally allocated for the educande and recreation.While Cardinal Borghese’s moral and financial support played an essential role in kick-starting the construction, his involvement was not simply an act of paternal patronage bestowed on a convent under his control, but rather was part of a collaborative enterprise engaged in with the Dominican nuns who initiated and found the means to finance their project. The role of cardinal protectors in matters pertaining to convents’ patronage of art and architecture often took the form of practical assistance, shepherding their petitions through the Roman Curia, as evident in the assistance rendered by Cardinal Carlo Barberini (1630– 1704) for the Augustinian nuns under his protection at Sta. Marta al Collegio Romano. One of the convent’s nuns, Maria Scolastica Colleoni, had assumed financial responsibility for the decoration of the nave vault with paintings and gilded stuccoes, but when the project expanded to include the lateral chapels, her income, derived from an inheritance, proved insufficient to meet expenses. Approvals, granted by the Sacred Congregation of the Council, of her request (1673) for permission to sell some of her shares of papal government bonds (10 luoghi di monti) to raise the necessary funds and of the convent’s later petition (1679) to utilize dowries of two nuns to satisfy remaining debts left after Suor Maria Scolastica’s death were due to . Archivio del Monastero del SS. Rosario, Rome (AMR), Sor Domenica Salamonia,“ Memorie del Monastero di SS. Domenico e Sisto,” vol 4, 53–53v; Mario Bevilacqua, Santa Caterina da Siena a Magnanapoli (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 1993), 55. . AMR, Salamonia,“ Memorie” vol. 4, 53–53v.

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the intervention of their protector, Cardinal Barberini, a member of the Sacred Congregation. Beyond their patronage by assisting their nuns in negotiating causes within the complex legal hierarchies of papal Rome, cardinal protectors could provide convents under their care with direct access to artists. Cardinal Gaspare Carpegna (1625–1714), cardinal vicar of Rome (from 1671), under whose auspices fell the prestigious Benedictine convent of Sta. Maria in Campo Marzio, appears to have been these nuns’ conduit to obtain the services of Giovan Antonio de Rossi as convent architect (1681–95) and designer of their new public church constructed in the 1680s. In this period, de Rossi was closely associated with Carpegna. Between 1675 and 1679, de Rossi was involved in the construction of the Palazzo Carpegna in the Romagna, and in 1681 he was recommended by Carpegna as architect of the new church of San Pantaleo in Rome built by the Piarists, a male religious order likewise under his protection. According to Filippo Titi’s 1686 guidebook to Rome, Cardinal Carpegna ordered the foundations of the beautiful new church of Sta. Maria in Campo Marzio and gave his attention to its decoration so that it would be equal to any other church. By the late 1680s several paintings by fashionable artists of the period — Lazzaro Baldi, Luigi Garzi, and Pasquale Marini — were placed in chapels in the Greek-cross style church.Themes of these altarpieces and laterals depicting St. Benedict, St. Gregory Nazianzen (fourth-century bishop of Constantinople) and St.  John the Baptist reflected the community of Benedictine nuns by relating to its religious order, the origins of the convent founded by Greek nuns in the eighth century and devotional cults existing in the old church. While Titi’s comments might . Marilyn R. Dunn,“Nuns as Art Patrons:The Decoration of S. Marta al Collegio Romano,” The Art Bulletin 70.3 (1988): 451–77, at 476. . Hellmut Hager, “Contributi all’opera di Giovanni Antonio de Rossi per S. Maria in Campo Marzio a Roma,” Commentari 18 (1967): 329–39; Borsi, Insula Millenaria, 95–96. . Marilyn Dunn, “Mechanisms and Vicissitudes of Art Patronage: The Piarists, Cardinal Carpegna, and the Church of San Pantaleo in Rome, Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 29 (1994): 187–211, at 191–93. . Filippo Titi, Ammaestramento utile e curioso di pittura, scultura ed architettura nelle chiese di Roma (Rome: Giuseppe Vannacci, 1686), 433–34. . Titi, Ammaestramento utile, 332–34, 433–34; Borsi, Insula Millenaria, 15–17, 24–33; Franco Borsi, et al., Santa Maria in Campo Marzio (Rome: Editalia, 1987), 157–77.

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suggest a munificent patronage on the part of a powerful cardinal, no known documents can confirm the extent of Carpegna’s role as patron. Existing documents do, however, make clear the nuns’ own initiative and expenditures in rebuilding their church. Desiring to construct a new high altar in their public church, dating from 1562–64, to display their precious icon of the Madonna Avvocata, the nuns of Sta. Maria in Campo Marzio met to compare the relative costs involved in building either a new high chapel in their old church or in constructing a new church. Considering the cost estimate of 4,400 scudi for a new high chapel and recognizing the inadequacy of the old, small church that they might wish to enlarge in the future and which in its present state could not accommodate a suitably proportioned chapel, they realized their money would be better spent on the more ambitious project that they unanimously resolved to undertake for an estimated expenditure of 9,510 scudi for construction, though the ultimate cost of the project reached a considerably higher sum of about 45,225 scudi. In contracting with the capo maestro muratore (master mason), the nuns agreed that their deputies would administer payments up to the sum of 9,000 scudi after which the nuns would be responsible for paying a third of additional expenses with the remaining two thirds being paid at a rate of 1,000 scudi per year until accounts were settled. To help finance the project in 1683 the convent obtained a censo of 2,000 scudi secured by one of their properties. Cardinal Carpegna’s support was crucial in allowing the nuns of Sta. Maria in Campo Marzio to undertake their ambitious project, to institute the censo, and perhaps to obtain renowned artists, but whether his patronage extended to any financial assistance is unclear. Convent deputies also played a key role as agents for the nuns. In conjunction with Abbess Maria Olimpia Fani, deputy Mariano Vecchiarelli, entrusted with supervision of the construction, established the contract for work in marble and travertine with scarpellino (stone carver) Carlo Torriani on 9 February 1682. Materials were subject to the approval of convent deputies and the architect.Torriani . Archivio Storico del Vicariato di Roma (ASVR), Segretaria del Vicariato,Tomo 17 (Monialium), “Monache. Memorie di regole di vita nei loro monasteri e conventi. Note amministrative, decreti, reconti 1650–1735,” 373–86. Documents are published in Hager,“Contributi,” 337–39. . ASR, CRF, S. Maria in Campo Marzio, Busta 52, 393; Borsi, Insula Millineria, 96.

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already had served the convent for many years, and the nuns desired to have the work done by this trusted artisan, but at a good price. An initial disagreement over prices was settled when Torriani agreed to abide by a price to be arbitrated by Cardinal Vicar Carpegna, convent deputies Vecchiarelli and Monsignor Imperiali, and the abbess. These documents attest to a collaborative rapport between religious communities and their protectors and advisors in their patronage. Cardinal Carpegna also appears to have played a role in the selection of artists for another community of nuns under his protection, the Poor Clares at San Silvestro in Capite, which was his titular church as well. In 1680 the nuns commenced an ambitious series of stucco and painted decorations which embellished the nave vault, crossing, tribune and transepts of their church. Contracts stipulated in 1680 for frescoes on the nave vault and in 1688 for those in the tribune and transepts of San Silvestro, painted respectively by Giacinto Brandi and Ludovico Gimignani, state that these artists had been chosen by both Cardinal Vicar Gaspare Carpegna and convent Abbess Maria Eleonora Sampieri and obligated the artists to produce works to their mutual satisfaction. Brandi and Gimignani were required to submit their compositions and subjects to Cardinal Carpegna for approval, though whether this was due to his particular role at San Silvestro or in order to receive the license required from the vicar’s office for ecclesiastical art in seicento Rome is unclear. Brandi’s vault painting of the Assumption of the Virgin with St.  John the Baptist, St. Sylvester and Other Saints and Gimignani’s frescoes in the catino of the tribune (Baptism of Constantine by St. Sylvester) and on the vaults of the transepts represented saints and relics especially venerated at San Silvestro in Capite. . ASVR,Tomo 17, 377–78; Hager,“Contributi,” 338–39. . For Brandi’s contract see ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 4993, 174–75, published in Antonella Pampalone,“Per Giacinto Brandi,” Bollettino d’Arte 58 (1973): 123–66, at 150. For Gimignani’s contract see ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 4993, 143–43v. Also Marilyn Dunn, “Giacinto Brandi and Ludovico Gimignani: Some New Documents for Their Work in S. Silvestro in Capite, Antologia di belle arti 3 (1992): 120–25. . For the 1593 edict on licensing sacred art, see Pamela M. Jones, Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 20. Cardinal Carpegna reiterated this order in 1690. See Ermete Rossi,“Roma ignorata,” Roma 19 (1941): 535–37, at 537. . See  Juan Santos Gaynor and Ilaria Toesca, S. Silvestro in Capite (Rome: Edizioni Roma, 1963); and Eileen M.C. Kane, The Church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome (Genoa: B.N. Marconi, 2005).

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Fig. 1. Designs for Gate at San Silvestro in Capite, Rome. From Contract with Girolamo Caffi, 16 October 1680 (Archivio di Stato di Roma, Congregazioni religiose femminili, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 4993, f. 177.With permission of the Ministero dei Beni e le Attività Culturali, ASR 34/2014).

Although Carpegna was involved in an official capacity in the commission of Brandi to fresco the nave vault, it was apparently the artist Carlo Maratti, a leading figure in Roman artistic culture, who recommended this artist to Abbess Maria Eleonora Sampieri. According to Lione Pascoli the abbess had requested designs for the fresco from

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Fig. 2. Giacinto Brandi, Assumption of the Virgin with St.  John the Baptist, St. Sylvester, and Other Saints, San Silvestro in Capite, Rome (Rome, ICCD, Fototeca Nazionale, E 50055. Reproduction authorized by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation).

Niccolò Berrettoni and Brandi. Pleased with Berrettoni’s design, the nuns had come to an informal agreement with him when Maratti, with whom Abbess Sampieri had discussed the designs, intervened, . Vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni 1 (Rome: A. de’ Rossi, 1730), 187–88.

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advising the abbess to convene a committee of experts to determine the final selection of the artist for such a major work. Maratti, who was head of the committee, chose Brandi’s design. Unfortunately no records of the meetings of this special committee or of the names of the other members remain. Abbess Sampieri’s consultation of Maratti and his role as advisor suggests the access to the secular world that cloistered noblewomen nuns maintained through influential networks even if it is unclear precisely how the abbess established contact with Maratti. While minutes of the regular meetings of the convent’s congregation of deputies record no discussions relating to the frescoes in the church, the deputies sometimes functioned as agents for the nuns. Seeking an artisan to fabricate a new decorative iron gate for the entrance of their public church, Abbess Sampieri turned to deputy Nicolò Rondinini and with his advice and assistance commissioned spadaro (metal smith) Girolamo Caffi.The contract (16 October 1680) includes a sketch of two alternative designs for the gate, the completed version of which combines both with slight modifications (Fig. 1). According to the contract, any additional expenses beyond the stipulated price would be subject to the arbitration of Rondinini. Another deputy, Baron Gregorio Patriarca, advised Abbess Sampieri in the commission of sculptor Girolamo Gramignoli to execute stucco reliefs of four sibyls and putti in the corners of the vault (Fig. 2). At the completion of the work, a bonus payment was to be determined by the abbess in collaboration with deputy Patriarca. Nuns’ knowledge of particular artists and access to them was not necessarily limited to a single point of connection but possibly to a web of interrelations. For instance, Gramignoli had previously collaborated with Brandi at San Carlo al Corso (1678) and could have been suggested by the painter himself, and although Maratti’s advice may have won Brandi his commission, the nuns already had a business relation with this renowned artist since he had been renting one of the convent’s properties in the Piazza di Spagna for a year before his commission. Another possible point of rapport with Brandi might have been through convent deputy Prospero Boccapaduli, a . ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 4993, 176–77. . ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 5110, Gramignoli contract,  July 1681. . ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 5081, “Posizioni diverse 1688–94”; and Busta 5048,“Catasto di tutte le case,” Case 9–11.

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well-connected Roman patrician noted for his prudence in business affairs. Although Prospero’s connection with Brandi is unclear, the artist’s work had figured in the collection of his relative Curzio Boccapaduli. Between 1695 and 1696 the nuns at San Silvestro in Capite continued the ambitious embellishment of their public church by redecorating its six lateral chapels with marbles, stuccoes and new paintings. Although individual families held the patronage rights to these chapels, the convent assumed control of their redecoration, commissioning some of the most outstanding artists of Rome — Giuseppe Chiari, Luigi Garzi, Giuseppe Ghezzi, Ludovico Gimignani and Francesco Trevisani — all of whom were at this phase in their careers stylistically related to the orbit of Carlo Maratti, who had earlier advised the convent concerning the nave vault fresco commission. Although the architectural design of the chapel renovations was owed to Mattia de’ Rossi, Ludovico Gimignani who had collaborated with him on previous projects assumed artistic supervision of the project after de’ Rossi’s death in August 1695. Gimignani, who had recently completed frescoes in the tribune and transepts and who provided paintings for two of the chapels, must have been a trusted favorite of the nuns. Payments to the artists were generally made on the convent’s behalf by its esattore Bartolomeo Taramelli, but in at least one instance convent deputy Count Ferdinando Bolognetti served as intermediary to convey a payment from Abbess Chiara Maria Causea to Luigi Garzi for his lateral paintings in the chapel of St. Francis. Further insight into the relation of nun-patrons and their intermediaries is offered by an account for work of carpenter Alfonso Baretta for the chapel altars and paintings executed on the order of the abbess, Count Bolognetti, . Pampalone,“Brandi,” 147; Marco Ubaldo Bicci, Notizie della famiglia Boccapaduli (Rome: Alla Stamparia di Appollo, 1762), 468, 473–78. . See Frank R. Di Federico, “Francesco Trevisani and the Decoration of the Crucifixion Chapel in San Silvestro in Capite,” The Art Bulletin 53 (1971): 52–67. . Gaynor and Toesca, S. Silvestro in Capite, 49; ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 4993, 211–12v, 215–15v. . For payments see ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 5091, 5092 and 5114. . ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 5113, receipt of 24 August 1695 (folder marked 1690).

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artist Ludovico Gimignani and Bartolomeo Taramelli. Baretta’s account includes expenses for transporting the new chapel paintings from the artists’ houses. Prior to their installation in the chapels, the paintings were first brought to the convent where they were viewed by the nuns before being transported to the public church to which the nuns had no physical access.This attests not only to the role of the convent’s nuns as patrons of art for their church but to their engaged interest in the work produced on their initiative to enhance the spiritual decorum of their church through its embellishment. Significantly, Garzi’s paintings also were transported to the palace of the convent deputy who seems most closely involved with this decorative project, Count Ferdinando Bolognetti, and then taken to the residence of the count’s father-in-law Marchese Carlo Teodoli, whose palace on the Corso was located nearby the Clarissan convent. Teodoli had been an early patron of Garzi as well as of another artist working at San Silvestro in Capite, Gimignani. These noblemen represent possible points of connection to the two artists. In such a major project as the decoration of the public church in the 1680s and 90s there appears to have been multiple intermediaries who assisted the nuns and an overlapping network of influential sources who connected the cloistered nuns with participating artists and artisans. While contemporary treatises voiced the Church’s paternalistic attitudes toward religious women when discussing the role of their male superiors and economic advisors considered necessary to guide these unworldly, naïve women (“e dell’esser le donne facili a’inganni, maggiormente quelle, le quali da putte sono rinchuise in un monastero senza practica delle cose del mondo”), they noted that the purpose of these advisors was not to impede the nuns but to protect them from fraud. Major architectural and decorative projects were subject to approval since it was crucial to protect convent revenues necessary for its maintenance from being expended or to develop a plan for reimbursing extraordinary expenses. Evidence from many Roman convents suggests that nuns were actually quite adept at initiating . ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 5114. . Francesco Solinas, “Politica familiare e storia artistica nella Roma del primo Seicento: Il caso dei Marchesi Theodoli,” Storia dell’Arte 116/117 (2007): 135–92, at 145. . Giovanni Battista De Luca, Il religioso practico dell’uno e dell’altro sesso (Rome: Stamperia della Reverenda Camera Apostolica, 1679), 238–39; Credazzi, Guida, 159–60.

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their own projects and understanding how to avail themselves of advice and intermediary assistance of male superiors and advisors in order to accomplish these endeavors. Abbesses ordered work and appraisals, issued payment orders and contracted with artists. Sometimes contracts listed only her name as representative of the convent, while other times the congregation of deputies, the cardinal protector or the supervising artist are mentioned as well. Though even in these cases, it was the abbess whose signature appears on the contract. Abbesses knew how to draw upon networks of influential individuals for the benefit of their convents. In an effort to persuade the uncooperative Mattei family to sell property to enable her convent of Sta.Teresa to enlarge its cramped cloister, Carmelite prioress Maria Maddalena dell’Incarnazione contacted several monsignors and cardinals who agreed to support the convent’s cause. Demonstrating that nuns could sometimes challenge their male advisors, the convent ultimately decided to expend some capital in spite of their deputies’ opposition in order to purchase land for an enlarged cloister to provide the quiet and privacy deemed essential by the nuns for their spiritual mission.

Families as Agents

Families of cloistered nuns in seventeenth-century Roman convents often functioned as advisors and agents connecting them to the artists they commissioned for projects of both corporate and individual patronage, and these family networks may have been the most vital source of agency for female convents. This mechanism of convent patronage continued to conform to patterns existing in Renaissance Italy. Traditionally nuns’ male relatives had acted as agents for preTridentine convents that followed enclosure. Family members often served in positions of factor or procurator. For instance goldsmith Ranieri d’Antonio, whose daughter Brigida di Ranieri was a nun at San Domenico in Pisa, was the convent factor who acted as middleman between the nuns and painter Paolo Schiavo for a panel . ASR, CRF, S. Silvestro in Capite, Busta 4993, 174–75, 176–77, 211, 217. . ASR, CRF, S.Teresa, Busta 4366; Dunn,“Spaces,” 163. . Roberts, Dominican Women, 238–39. . Anabel Thomas, Art and Piety in Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and Religious Women’s Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 325–27.

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painting commissioned by the nuns in 1456. He conveyed instructions from the prioress regarding the painting as well as payments to the artist. Multi-layered relationships existed between convents and family members who might be both patrons and intermediaries. At the Florentine convent of Le Murate Medici associate Giovanni Benci was patron of three altarpieces by Filippo Lippi in the church, provided financial assistance for the enlargement of the convent and negotiated necessary permissions with city officials on behalf of the convent (1439–early 1450s). Benci, linked to Le Murate by bonds of friendship with its abbess Scolastica Rondinelli and through his daughter who was a border there, exercised his patronage in a spirit of collaboration. But the integral associations of families with particular convents and family influence in convent affairs could also lead to abuses that Tridentine decrees attempted to curb. Despite the post-Tridentine Church’s desire to limit family involvement with convents and its advice that nuns should forget their families except in their prayers, Roman nuns steadfastly maintained their family ties, recognizing the benefits that these brought them and their convents by linking them to networks of influence within the social fabric of the papal city. Visits in the parlor with family members, lamented by churchmen as highly distracting to a nun’s progress toward spiritual perfection, kept nuns abreast of current events and news of artistic projects in other churches or family residences throughout Rome. Beyond their role as intermediaries in convents’ patronage, noble and upper-class families enabled their enclosed female relatives to act as patrons for their churches and convents through the practice of giving them livelli, allowances for their individual needs, in addition to the required convent dowry. Technically under the supervision of the abbess, in practice these funds were frequently employed by individual nuns in patronage for their convents and churches. . Roberts, Dominican Women, 217–18, 239–41. . Megan Holmes, “Giovanni Benci’s Patronage of the Nunnery, Le Murate,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 114–34. . Lirosi, Monasteri femminili, 246–47, also notes that strict enclosure did not sever political-social relationships. . De Luca, Il religioso, 168.

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The interrelation of nuns and family in the mechanisms of patronage is exemplified at the Augustinian convent of Sta. Lucia in Selci which, although plagued with debts, managed to decorate its church in the 1630s by capitalizing on family ties. In a manner resembling the role of Giovanni Benci at Le Murate in Renaissance Florence, Monsignor Antonio Cerri, who enjoyed a brilliant career in the curia under Urban VIII and served as legal advisor to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, assisted in multiple ways the convent where several women of his family were nuns. Their presence in the community motivated him to assume patronage of the church’s nave vault (altered, nineteenth century) decorating it with a painting of the Apotheosis of St. Lucy executed by Giovanni Antonio Lelli (1580–1640), an artist who had also participated in the decoration of the Cerri family palace. Besides his outright patronage, Cerri also functioned in an advisory capacity when the convent undertook construction of its new refectory in 1629, assisting the convent’s congregation of deputies and Monsignor Bonacini, vicegerente (representative of cardinal vicar in charge of convents), in their inspection of the site and in deliberations regarding financing. When individual nuns in the community assumed the patronage of the chapels in the public church, the wellconnected Cerri was able to act as agent providing a link between the cloistered nuns and artists. Two of Cerri’s daughters in the convent at Sta. Lucia, suore Maria Antonia and Maria Celeste, were patrons of the chapel of St. Augustine, decorating it with an altarpiece of the Vision of St. Augustine (c.1636–39) painted by Andrea Camassei, an artist under the protection of the Barberini family. Cerri’s close relationship with the Barberini placed him in a position to facilitate not only his daughters’ commission of the artist but also that of another nun, Isabella Melchiorri who paid for Camassei’s altarpiece of St.  John the Evangelist Giving Communion to the Virgin for the chapel of the Sacrament on the opposite side of the nave. His Barberini . Marilyn Dunn, “Piety and Agency: Patronage at the Convent of S. Lucia in Selci,” Aurora:The  Journal of the History of Art 1 (2000): 29–59, at 41–44. . Ibid., n. 49. . ASR, CRF, S. Lucia in Selci, Busta 3703, fasc. 2, 4 July 1629. . Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticano (BAV),Vat. lat. 11884, 218v–219; Liliana Barroreo, “Andrea Camassei, Givannibattista Speranza, Marco Caprinozzi a San Lorenzo in Fonte in Roma, Bollettino d’arte 64 (1979): 65–78; Dunn,“Piety and Agency,” 41–44, 51–52. . BAV, Vat. lat. 11884, 218v; Dunn,“Piety and Agency, 44, 50–51.

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Fig. 3. Chapel of the Trinity, Sta. Lucia in Selci, Rome (Photo: Author).

connections may have played a role in the commission of Giovanni Lanfranco to paint the altarpiece of the Martyrdom of St. Lucy (c.1630– 32) for a chapel under the patronage of suore Virginia Raimunda and Caterina Vanini since Lanfranco, like Camassei, was involved in projects for the Barberini around this time. . ASV, Vat. lat. 11884, 218v. See Dunn,“Piety and Agency,” 40, 44 n. 51.

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Not only nuns’ families, but nuns themselves might be the intermediary agents linking convents with artists through their own kinship ties to them. At Sta. Lucia both the niece, Suor Agata Margarita Cesari (entered 1619), and the daughter, Suor Maria Margherita Cesari (entered 1640), of renowned painter Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino (1568–1640) were members of the community. In the early seventeenth century d’Arpino had been one of the most prestigious artists in Rome, and while his more conservative style had been somewhat eclipsed by the 1630s, he remained a highly esteemed artist. Apparently his niece gained his services for the nuns. She was patron of a new choir gallery designed by convent architect Francesco Borromini, which projected over the entrance of the church of Sta. Lucia in Selci where the nuns were famous for their musical performances. Under the gallery d’Arpino frescoed the image of God the Father. The presence of Suor Agata Margarita Cesari in the community drew d’Arpino into the convent’s “family circle” and probably led to his execution of the altarpiece for the chapel of the Trinity, decorated 1637–39 on the design of Borromini through the patronage of Suor Clarice Vittoria Landi, whose family stemma is displayed on the altar (Fig. 3). Her direct involvement with this commission is attested by her signature on a contract for work in the chapel, appraisals of work executed on her order and payments citing money received from her. Payments to d’Arpino, however, took the form of gifts of silver and sweets rather than money, reflective of the familial relationship the convent enjoyed with the painter. In several instances when nuns engaged in either corporate or individual patronage they employed artists who worked for their families or to whom their families may have had connections through their social milieu, substantiating a pattern that scholars have suggested in pre-Tridentine convents.  Just as secular marriages created alliances . Herwarth Röttgen, Il Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino: Un grande pittore nello splendore della fama e nell’incostanza della fortuna (Rome: Ugo Bozzi Editore, 2002), 196–97. . ASR, CRF, S. Lucia in Selci, Busta 3704, fasc. 1, fasc. 4; and Busta 3684, “Culto divino,” fasc. 1. See Dunn,“Piety and Agency,” 45–46. . Roberts, Dominican Women, 238;  John R. Spencer, Andrea del Castagno and his Patrons (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 95–98; Gary M. Radke,“Nuns and Their Art:The Case of San Zaccaria in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 430–59, at 441–42; Kate Lowe, “Nuns and Choice: Artistic DecisionMaking in Medicean Florence,” in With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan

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between patrician families, nuns as “brides of Christ” forged links among the networks of families associated with their communities, and these family relationships could be a significant conduit to artists for cloistered nuns. This is evident at the Dominican convent of SS. Domenico e Sisto where individual nuns, empowered by the social prestige and livelli provided by their families, assumed patronage of the decoration of their church’s lateral chapels between the 1630s and 1650s. The most direct relationship with family patronage is evident in the chapel of St. Dominic decorated by four nuns from the Costaguti family with marbles, gilded stuccoes and an altarpiece by Pier Francesco Mola in 1648. Around this time Mola also executed a fresco in the Palazzo Costaguti probably for the nuns’ brother Cardinal Vincenzo Costaguti, who may have been instrumental in arranging for him to work for his sisters at SS. Domenico e Sisto. Roman nuns were highly conscious of bestowing honor and decorum to their churches that represented the public face of their convents. But their devotional motivations did not preclude commemoration of their family lineage as well, and chapels decorated by nuns frequently displayed their family stemmi, as in the case of the Costaguti Chapel. Through decorations in the palace and the chapel, the Costaguti siblings engaged in a collaborative strategy that enhanced their family’s prestige in Rome. Other nuns from the Giustini, Altemps and Celsi families decorated chapels with altarpieces by Francesco (or his father Flaminio) Allegrini, Giovanni Lanfranco and Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, artists who also worked at the Palazzo Costaguti, while Romanelli and Allegrini painted frescoes in the Palazzo Altemps, though Allegrini’s appear to post-date his Art and Patronage 1434–1530, ed. Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 129–53, at 132–33. . K.J.P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 66. . AMR, Salamonia, “Memorie,” vol. 5, 72–72v; Virginia Bernardini, Andreina Draghi, and Guia Verdesi, SS. Domenico e Sisto (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani and Fratelli Palombi Editori, 1991), 57–94. . See Ann Sutherland Harris, “Review of Richard Cocke, Pier Francesco Mola,” The Art Bulletin 56.2 (1974): 289–92, at 290; Luigi Spezzaferro,“Pier Francesco Mola e il mercato artistico romano: Attegiamenti e valutazione,” in Pier Francesco Mola 1612–1666 (Milan: Electa, 1989), 40–59, at 42; Giuliano Briganti,“Osservazioni sulla carriera professionale e sullo stile di Pier Francesco Mola,” in Pier Francesco Mola 1612–1666, 21–27.

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Fig. 4. Domenico Maria Canuti and Enrico Haffner, Apotheosis of St. Dominic, Nave Vault, SS. Domenico e Sisto, Rome (Rome, ICCD, Fototeca Nazionale, E 21197. Reproduction authorized by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation).

participation at SS. Domenico e Sisto. The artistic preferences of the social milieu of nuns’ families are manifested in the patronage of the chapels. Even if no direct link can be established between the artist commissioned for the particular chapel of one of these nun-patrons

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and her own family’s patronage, recommendations and knowledge of artists may have freely circulated within the convent. Later in the century when the community at SS. Domenico e Sisto commissioned Bolognese artists Domenico Maria Canuti and Enrico Haffner to fresco the vaults of the church’s tribune and nave in 1674–75 (Fig. 4) kinship ties were again instrumental. Shortly before the commission Canuti had worked for the family of the convent prioress Maria Angela Mattei as well as for Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, one of the convent’s advisory deputies and brother of several Colonna nuns in the convent. Prioress Mattei and Deputy Colonna were directly involved in supervising the fresco project since their names appear on some of the related payment orders, and either or both could have been the conduit to Canuti. Because many nuns and their advisors derived from the same aristocratic backgrounds, multiple sources had the potential to link cloistered nuns with artists in an extensive network of family relations that bound nuns with secular society. This pattern of influential relatives as intermediary agents is evident at another Dominican convent, Sta. Caterina a Magnanapoli, which drew its population from among the most prestigious families in Rome. The extensive activity of artist Giuseppe Passeri at Sta. Caterina can be traced to his long and close professional and personal relationship with the noble Patrizi family for whom he decorated palaces and produced numerous paintings. Several Patrizi women were nuns in this convent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including two sisters of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Patrizi, and the family possessed a chapel in the church. Although all . This issue is discussed in more detail in an article in preparation by the author. . Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Vite di pittori bolognesi, ed. Adriana Arfelli (Bologna: Commissione per I Testi di Lingua, 1961), 11, 33–34. . ASV, Monast. femm. romani soppr., SS. Domenico e Sisto, “Memorie delli ordini, decreti, e resolutioni delle congregazioni 1662–99”; Bianca Rosa Ontini, La Chiesa di S. Domenico in Roma (Rome: Edizione Cateriniane, 1952), 96–99, docs. 93–95, 100. . Bevilacqua, Santa Caterina, 35–36. . See Maria Barbara Guerrieri Borsoi, “Alcune opere di Giuseppe Passeri per i marchesi Patrizi,” in Carlo Marchionni architettura, decorazione e scenografia contemporanea, ed. Elisa Debenedetti (Rome: Multigrafica Edtitrice, 1988), 381–404. . Bevilacqua, Santa Caterina, 36, 68, 83; ASV, Arch. Patrizi-Montoro, B 4, 187–91 and B 31, 313–17v, 325–27v, 335–43.

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Fig. 5. Patrizi and Bonanni Primi Chapels (center and right) with Altarpieces by Giuseppe Passeri, Sta Caterina a Magnanapoli, Rome (Rome, ICCD, Fototeca Nazionale, N 33988. Reproduction authorized by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation).

six lateral chapels, some of which were endowed by families with ties to the convent, had been at least partially decorated in the seicento, around 1701/2 the nuns undertook the renovation of their church’s chapels, decorating them with marbles, gilded stuccoes and altarpieces by more prestigious artists. During this period Monsignor Patrizi’s sister Agnese held significant positions in the government of the convent. Not surprisingly, Patrizi family artist Passeri was assigned two of the new altarpieces depicting the Madonna of the Rosary and the Three Archangels, this latter placed in the Patrizi Chapel (Fig. 5), and he frescoed two medallions with scenes of St. Catherine of Siena at the entrance to the tribune. Passeri also received patronage from other friends and relatives of the Patrizi for projects in the secular . Bevilacqua, Santa Caterina, 75–88. . Francesco Valesio, Diario della città di Roma, ed. Gaetano Scano (Milan: Longanesi, 1977–78), 1:493, 2:154. . Bevilacqua, Santa Caterina, 68, 75, 83, 106.

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world, and thus his activity for the nuns at Sta. Caterina can be seen within the broader context of the Patrizi family’s recommendations of this favored artist to their associates.

Patronage, Agents, and Convents

In recent years our conception of art patronage has broadened considerably beyond traditional models of patrons in the mode of a Cosimo de’ Medici style patron-auctor, of an enlightened mecenate who promotes an artist’s career like Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte with Caravaggio or of an erudite collector like Cardinal Jules Mazarin who develops a collection according to particular tastes. Scholarship has drawn new attention to the integral role of agents and intermediaries in the mechanisms of art patronage. Patrons of all sorts commonly utilized various agents to help effect their patronage. Sheryl Reiss has noted that even a knowledgeable, hands-on Renaissance patron like Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici relied upon a network of agents drawn from relatives, friends and functionaries to assist in the supervision of large-scale artistic projects like the Villa Madama. Seventeenth-century patronage commonly functioned through intermediaries with patrons and collectors utilizing agents to inform them about artists, arrange commissions and supervise work. Friends and associates frequently recommended artists. For instance, Marcello Sacchetti brought Pietro da Cortona to the attention of his friend Urban VIII, and Enzo Bentivoglio recommended to the Barberini the young Andrea Camassei who had decorated a room in his family palace. Because of his expertise in artistic matters and close personal ties to eminent artists Camillo Massimo played an important role as art advisor and agent in the 1670s for the Altieri, the family of Pope Clement X, who made him a cardinal. He was involved in the design of the Altieri Chapel in Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, commissioning his favorite artist Carlo Maratti for its altarpiece; he supervised work in St. Peter’s and oversaw artistic projects in the Altieri family palace . Reiss,“Raphael and His Patrons,” 37. . Sheryl E. Reiss,“Giulio de’ Medici and Mario Maffei: A Renaissance Friendship and the Villa Madama,” in Coming About…: A Festschrift for John Sherman, ed. Lars R. Jones and Louisa C. Matthew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001), 281–88. . Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 38–40, 48–50.

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in Rome. The use of agents by patrons who could not be on the scene was naturally a necessity. Agents in Rome and Naples reported back to Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, about paintings by Caravaggio; while Leopoldo de’ Medici availed himself of a variety of artistic agents in Bologna comprised of noblemen, clerics, artists, antiquarians and professionals who served as intermediaries in his acquisition of Bolognese works for his collection. Duke of Savoy Vittorio Amadeo II’s agent in Rome wrote in 1687 to inform him that Carlo Maratti, Ciro Ferri and Giacinto Brandi were the most celebrated artists in the city at the time and recommended Brandi for a commission. After Cardinal Mazarin left Rome in 1639 he relied on three agents, Abbot Elpidio Benedetti, nobleman Paolo Maccarani and artist-connoisseur Antonio della Cornia, for advice and assistance in acquiring works of art for his collection. A trusted friend of Mazarin, Maccarani also acted as his agent in the purchase of the Palazzo Bentivoglio (1641) and supervised the construction of the façade of SS.Vincenzo e Anastasia (1646–50) for the cardinal. Seen within this context of patronage, female convents’ use of intermediary agents and networks of influential individuals to enact their own patronage mirrors well-established patterns and practices found throughout Italian society. Though enclosure necessitated the use of agents, it in no way kept convents out of the loop of artistic patronage as networks connecting nuns to artists extended inside and outside the cloister walls, nor was enclosure an impediment to patronage by nuns, who utilized their agents much like secular patrons. While the lives of cloistered nuns were certainly circumscribed, and they lived under the ultimate supervision of male Church authorities, nevertheless they initiated projects, informed their agents of their desires and engaged in a collaborative relationship with them. By . Beaven,“Cardinal Camillo Massimo as Art Agent,” 71–87. . Adelina Modesti,“Patrons as Agents and Artists as Dealers in Seicento Bologna,” in The Art Market in Italy (15th–17th Centuries). Il mercato dell’arte in Italia (secc. XV– XVII), ed. Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthews and Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2003), 367–88. . Alessandro Baudi Di Vesme, Schede Vesme 3 (Turin: Società Piemontese di Archeologia e Belle Arti, 1968), 976. . Patrick Michel, Mazarin, Prince des Collectionneurs: Les Collections et L’Ameublement du Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661). Histoire et Analyse (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999), 37–45.

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adroitly utilizing a broad, intertwined network of a variety of intermediary agents Roman nuns achieved their own agency as patrons. Through their artistic patronage enclosed and hidden nuns enhanced the devotional decorum of their churches, represented their convent’s public face and impacted the artistic culture of Rome. •

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Musical Marketing in the Female Monasteries of Early Modern Rome Kimberlyn Montford

Introduction

In a city whose most important social institution was founded upon the tenets of religious devotion, status was conferred not just by noble blood (though there were indeed many noble families in Rome whose positions were independent of popes, religious regimes and conciliar eras). Prestige could also be earned through the public, visible exaltation of God — and no less accordingly, the Roman Catholic Church — and that exaltation was demonstrated through the performance of the rites of the Church.Therefore, any undertaking that contributed to the beauty or sanctity of those rites, whether music adorning the ritual itself, or art and architecture that created a fitting setting for those rites, demonstrated one’s commitment to their maintenance and personal piety. In a number of articles, Carolyn Valone examines the means by which aristocratic Roman women fashioned an important role for themselves in religious culture through their adroit management of societal perceptions and religious belief. They used their substantial fortunes to build chapels, churches and convents, assertively controlling the projects to which they donated money, and thereby established a significant presence as patrons of architecture and art, and through their commissions, forged connections with the greater religious community. In a similar fashion, the musical programs of the numerous female monasteries in Rome were used to influence perceptions of those institutions and the women who inhabited them. Despite, or perhaps in a number of cases, because of the church imposition of strict . See Carolyn Valone,“Elena Orsini, Daniele da Volterra, and the Orsini Chapel,” Artibus et Historiae 11 (1990): 79–87; idem, “Roman Matrons as Patrons: Various Views of the Cloister Wall,” in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992), 49–72; idem, “The Pentecost: Image and Experience in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993): 801–28; idem, “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560–1630,” The Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 129–46;“Mothers and Sons:Two Paintings for San Bonaventura in Early Modern Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 108–32; and idem,“Architecture as a Public Voice for Women in SixteenthCentury Rome,” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 301–27.

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cloister nuns exploited the double-church architecture common in enclosed convents, controlling the images presented to the larger community while using the unique autonomy afforded by their cloistered lives to reinforce their own self-image privately.

Musical Marketing: Position and Reputation

In January 1656, Queen Christina of Sweden visited the Dominican convent of Sta. Caterina da Siena on Monte Magnanapoli. Christina was one of the most noted converts to Catholicism — and one of the most famous woman — of the era, and her trip to Rome represented a triumph of the Counter-Reformation Church. She was feted by the members of both the church hierarchy and the nobility of the city. Her every movement was documented, and the people and places that she graced with her presence during her stay achieved immediate status. Queen Christina was the daughter of a noted Protestant champion in the Thirty Years’ War. Her abdication and conversion to Roman Catholicism played out over the diplomatic landscape of CounterReformation Europe. In church propaganda, she became a visible sign of the resurgence and revitalization of the Roman Catholic Church after the many losses to the Protestant confessions. As were many laypeople, she was fascinated by the notion of the female monastery and visited many in Rome, sometimes staying overnight, and in one instance, for four days. At Sta. Caterina the nuns, led by their prioress Sister Emilia Cenci, received her.The queen was accompanied by her confessor, members of the church hierarchy, and some of the most learned and highest-ranked members of the Dominican Order, including the father general, Marchese Marini di Genova. She was escorted immediately into the church,“whereupon her arrival was celebrated by a concert of diverse musical instruments, . For the religious, cultural and social context of Christina’s conversion and abdication, see Oskar Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia: The Age of Gustavus Adolphus and Queen Christina of Sweden, 1622–1656 (Leiden: E.J. Brill. 1992); for her patronage of artists, musicians, writers and intellectuals in Rome, see Susanna Akerman, Queen Christina of Sweden and Her Circle:The Transformation of a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Libertine (Leiden: E.J. Brill,1991); and Lilian H. Zirpolo, “Christina of Sweden’s Patronage of Bernini: The Mirror of Truth Revealed by Time,” Women’s Art  Journal 26 (2005): 38–43. . Descriptions of Christina’s visits to female monasteries can be found in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter BAV), Vat lat. 8028, fols. 10, 15, 25.

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hearing also with much satisfaction an exquisite motet sung by a beautiful voice.”  After a sumptuous meal, she was conducted back into the church, where a Mass was heard, and she returned to the Palazzo Farnese carrying several expensive and ornate gifts from the sisters. What is fascinating about Queen Christina’s visit was the exchange of benefits for both the queen and the “noble ladies” of Sta. Caterina. Her celebrity enhanced the reputation of the convent; while at the same time their sanctity reflected upon her, casting her as a pious Christian and her visit as an important sojourn in a pilgrimage to the Holy City. Additionally, by so overtly displaying her respect for the revered institutions of the Church to which she’d converted, Queen Christina was able to experience a religious event available to only a favored few, entering one of the secreted holy spaces of the Church.

Musical Marketing: Initiative and Compliance

There is much scholarship regarding the effect of the enforcement of strict enclosure on female monasteries in the post-Tridentine Church.The often acrimonious discussions regarding even the most minute details of the implementation of enclosure involved ecclesiastical and local authorities, families associated with the convents and, to a lesser extent, the sisters themselves. They also revealed fears that the resulting physical isolation would not only limit nuns’ contributions to the religious and social fabric of the city but that it would also create serious restrictions on their economic viability. Of considerably more concern to the nuns, however, were the ramifications of enclosure in terms of their power to direct the affairs of their own monastic community.  Yet, while women religious struggled against . Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato, Historia della Sacra Real Maestà di Christina Alessandra Regina di Svetia (Modena: Soliani, 1656), 272. . Silvia Evangelisti,“‘We do not have It, and We do not want It’:Women, Power, and Convent Reform in Florence,” The Sixteenth Century  Journal 34 (2003): 677– 700. For other recent discussions of clausura and its enforcement in Italian convents, see Francesca Medioli,“An Unequal Law:The Enforcement of Clausura before and after the Council of Trent,” in Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christine Meek (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 136–52; Alison Weber,“Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000): 123–46; Helen Hills,“The Veiled Body:Within the Folds of Early Modern Neapolitan Convent Architecture,” Oxford Art  Journal 27 (2004): 271–90; Ulrike Strasser,“Early Modern Nuns and the Feminist Politics of Religion,”

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the constraints of cloister, they also learned to exploit the opportunities created by imposed isolation. The most obvious exploitation of cloister was to heighten the curiosity of the outside community about nuns’ concealed activities. Within the strictest interpretations of cloister, nuns were not allowed to perform in the outer portions of the double church. Instead, they had to sing their parts of the service from the inner choir. Craig Monson writes of nuns’ reactions to confinement and how they used music as a “powerful tool for partial deprivatization of architectural spaces — one deliberately employed by nuns to forge affective and, in the broad sense, political links with networks in the outside, public sphere.” Their music, emanating from grills or windows over the altar, not only displayed their skill and the beauty of their voices: in the absence of visible bodies producing the sound, nuns’ voices took on an otherworldly property. The English scholar Gregory Martin was particularly struck by the experience: This is the old Rule of Religious wemen, and this is renewed by that holy Councel…. that thou shalt never see a Nonne out of her cloister, and being in the Churche thou shalt only heare their voices singing their service most melodiously, and the Father himself, that is, their Ghostly father heareth their confessions through a grate in the wall, where only voice and no sight goeth betwene.… And in Bononie [Bologna] and Rome having been many times at their service in their chappels and hearing their goodly singing, never did I see one of them.

The sound of this musical promotion was profound. On feast days convent churches were filled to capacity.The visual spectacle had to have been glorious: a church festooned with the riotous colors of flowers and silk decorations, lit by banks of candles, with the rich vestments of the clergy if it was a Mass. Yet music, partially muted by thick walls and curtains, still soared from the smaller, private choir The Journal of Religion 84 (2004): 529–54; Kimberlyn Montford, “Holy Restraint: Religious Reform and Nuns’ Music in Early Modern Rome,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 37 (2006): 1007–26; and Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns:A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). . Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 11. . Gregory Martin, Roma Sancta (1581), ed. George Bruner Parkes (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1969), 141–42.

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into the main sanctuary of the church. Whether deliberately employed as a means of marketing the importance of the convents to the civic landscape, the “disembodied voices” of the female monasteries were a recognized attraction of the city, to which a number of visitors to Rome attested.

Musical Marketing: Agents

What is most interesting to note is that for many significant celebrations — for example, patronal feasts observed during the Holy Years, when Rome was teeming with pilgrims — monastic churches sometimes chose to have music organized and conducted by professional musicians. Even when the monastery itself could claim a strong choir, there were a several good reasons for this. Professional male musicians would allow for much more variety in music and performing style. According to early modern interpretations of canon law, women were prohibited from performing in public. The nuns’ choir, shut off from the main church, was considered the private part of the monastic church.Though the walls separating the two sections were often riddled with grills and small doors, and the nuns could be heard clearly in the main church, the letter of the law was observed. The use of male musicians could heighten not only the visual pomp of a lavish ritual but amplify the aural affect as well. As will be seen, these large-scale, public ceremonies often called upon the services of some of Rome’s most influential and celebrated musicians, including the maestri di cappella and musicians of the basilicas of San Giovanni in Laterano, San Pietro, and Sta. Maria Maggiore, as well as other important churches of the city. Awash in lavish vocal offerings (sometimes of up to four choirs), along with the innovative, modern instrumental compositions wildly popular in seventeenth-century Rome, these were highly-anticipated musical events. Drawing hundreds of people into the monastic churches, these liturgical services created both an avid audience for and advertisement of the nuns’ spiritual devotion, a devotion demonstrated by such generosity and attention to the worship of their “Most Holy Lord.” And just as with the visits of Queen Christina, the reputations of the musicians invited to render the music were important not only as a reflection of their musical ability, but also in the way their own fame was reflected back upon the sisters who engaged them. The female monasteries employed some of the most eminent musicians

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in the city, many of whom directed the music at the major churches and basilicas. Accomplished choral directors and organists, they were hired to provide all of the music for the specified feast at the monastic church.They contracted the singers and instrumentalists, provided the music to be performed, rehearsed the musicians, and even supplied an organ if needed. Giovanni Battista Giansetti was maestro di cappella of the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. In addition to the services he provided there as a condition of his employment, he was responsible for the music at many of the other important establishments in Rome. During the Holy Year of 1675, he directed the music at the monastic church of San Silvestro in Capite for two of their patronal feasts, programming music for multiple choirs.  An important musical event in Rome was the feast of Santa Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians. For that feast, the monastic church of Sta. Cecilia called upon the services of another prominent composer, Antonio Masini, maestro di cappella of San Pietro and chamber musician in the court of Queen Christina. In addition to his association with the famous Vatican Basilica, Masini’s distinction as a church musician and composer had been furthered during the Lenten season of 1675, which was marked by an extraordinary cycle of oratorios on number of topics. Masini contributed eight of the fourteen works performed at the Oratorio della Pietà. His service to the queen, whose presence in Rome added additional pageantry to the Holy Year festivities, brought even more status to performances in which he participated: For the feast of Sta. Cecilia, the Roman Magistrate presented a chalice and four torches to the church of the monastery of said saint in Ripa Grande, where there were abundant and charming displays of flowers and decorations.The music was most distinguished, with four choirs and graceful symphonies, directed by Signor Antonio Masini.

Alessandro Melani — the maestro di cappella of Sta. Maria Maggiore for five years before assuming a similar position at San Luigi dei Francesi — led the music at the convent church of Sta. Caterina da Siena in Monte Magnanapoli at its patronal feast. Known for his . Ruggiero Caetano, Le Memorie de l’Anno Santo MDCLXXV Celebrato da Papa Clemente X and Consecrate alla Santità di N. S. Papa Innocenzo XII, Descritte in forma di Giornale da L’ Abb. Ruggiero Caetano Romano (Roma: Marc’ Antonio e Orazio Campana, 1691), 59, 318. . Caetano, Memorie, 414.

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

polychoral music, oratorio and opera Alessandro numbered among his patrons three popes (Clement IX, Clement X and Innocent XI), the king of Poland and Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici.The political ties of Melani and his older brothers Jacopo and Atto formed an international network involving Louis XIV, Giulio Rospigliosi, the Medici family and Francesco II d’Este. His standing as a Roman composer and his relationships with powerful political and religious figures rendered his presence at such monastic churches as Sta. Caterina and San Lorenzo in Panisperna an expression of their importance in the city: The feast of Sta. Caterina was celebrated by the noble nuns of Sta. Caterina di Siena a Monte Magnanapoli with charming decoration and choice music with symphonies and trumpets, directed by Signor Alessandro Melani, celebrated Maestro di cappella.

Francesco Foggia was apparently the star of the Roman church music scene. Francesco was employed at the basilicas of Sta. Maria in Trastevere, San Giovanni in Laterano and Sta. Maria Maggiore and was among the most published maestri of the mid-seventeenth century, with his music found in chapel inventories throughout the Papal States and in Tuscany and Germany. His son Antonio served as his assistant at Sta. Maria Maggiore and later succeeded his father as Maestro di cappella. Between them, they supplied music and their celebrity at many institutions throughout the year, among them the monastic churches of Sta. Maria della Concezione in Campo Marzo, SS. Domenico e Sisto, Sant’Ambrogio della Massima: The feast of Saint Benedict was celebrated in the church of the reverend nuns of Campo Marzo with display and the choice music of Signor Foggia, Maestro di cappella, who also directed the music.… The reverend nuns of SS. Domenico e Sisto celebrated in their church on Monte Magnanapoli the feast of Saint Dominic, transferred; it was . For a discussion of Atto Melani’s activities as diplomat and spy, as well as an investigation of his extant compositions, see Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). . Caetano, Memorie, 191. . For distribution of Foggia prints and manuscripts, see Stephen Miller, “Music for the Mass in Seventeenth-Century Rome: Messe Piene,The Palestrina Tradition, and the Stile Antico” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1998), 158–70.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

celebrated with beautiful display, decoration of the altars and choice music directed by Signor Antonio Foggia, with symphonies of trumpets, horns and other instruments.

Musical Marketing: Self Representation

Clearly, female monasteries benefited from their relationships with the famous maestri di cappella of the day. Nevertheless, the most enduring reputations of monastic churches rested upon the talents of the nuns themselves. As had been noted earlier, the attraction of nuns’ music could probably be attributed to a combination of the quality of the music with the mysterious, elusive nature of the experience. Yet, to whatever degree the latter may have contributed to the cachet of nuns music, it is undoubted that without a fundamental level of excellence among the musical offerings associated with convents, that appeal would not have been sustained. Contemporary accounts relate the general distinction of nuns’ music, as well as mentioning specific women. The convents most renowned for their musical programs were Sta. Caterina da Siena in Monte Magnanapoli, Sta. Chiara, SS. Domenico e Sisto, Sta. Lucia in Selci, Sta. Maria della Concezione in Campo Marzo, San Silvestro in Capite and Spirito Santo. Not coincidentally, many of them were among Rome’s oldest and wealthiest monastic churches, housing the daughters of the most important noble families of the city and containing works of art and cherished religious relics that celebrated their connections to early Christianity. In the early seventeenth century, Pietro della Valle wrote enthusiastically about his experience at a monastic church: One Monday during Pentecost I heard a vespers service in the church of the Spirito Santo, sung just by the nuns only, all from head to foot in ornate music, that I certainly swear to your Lordship that in all my days I have never perceived a more beautiful work in this style.

About mid-century, Richard Lassels hints not only at the allure of convent music but also the custom of attending services at monastic churches as he described the music of Sta. Maria in Campo Marzo as . Caetano, Memorie, 106, 298. . The monastery and church of Spirito Santo, located near Trajan’s Market, not to be confused with the twelfth-century titular church Sto. Spirito in Sassia. . Pietro della Valle, Della musica dell’età nostra (1640) in Le Origini del Melodramma, ed. Angelo Solerti (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), 166.

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

the best in the world without dispute… where I heard divers times a Nunn sing with such perfection both of skill and voyce, that (and I speak it truly) a journey to Rome were well spent to heare that woman sing thrice.

The reports were most particular in delineating whether the music was provided by male musicians in the outer church or sung by the nuns themselves. In Rome more than anywhere else, it was imperative that the proprieties were observed. In a number of cases, male musicians were behind the scenes — in some convents they taught lessons and wrote and rehearsed the nuns’ music for the celebrations of major feasts. Yet the pretense was made of observing the basic prohibition against fraternization between male musicians and nuns: none of the accounts mentioned female singers directed by a male musician.Whether cloister was strictly enforced or not — and the number of edicts that were constantly promulgated indicate that maintaining cloister was a long-standing and ongoing problem — the wording of the official reports quite clearly denote the practices regarding monastic musical offerings and the parties that were responsible for their delivery. For example, on their patronal feast, the nuns of Sta. Lucia in Selci sung the Vespers and “accompanied with their voices and symphonies the chant of the Mass.” A document listing the music customarily performed for the liturgy not only reveals the depth of musical talent at the monastery but gives a sense of the sumptuous quality of monastic festive services: First and second Vespers; Two antiphons in polyphony Three antiphons in plainchant falsobordone with full choir Two psalms concerted in polyphony without solo verses (after the psalms the antiphons are to be repeated as concertini for two or three voices, with an additional antiphon for full choir, and one replaced by four repeats by instruments) The hymn and Magnificat in polyphony alternating with chant . Richard Lassels, An Italian Voyage; or A Compleat Journey through Italy, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Wellington & B. Bernard Lintott, 1697), 150. . For an archival study revealing the extent to which enforcing enclosure in Roman female monasteries occupied post-Tridentine religious authorities, see Montford,“Holy Restraint.” . Caetano, Memorie, 440.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

The Salve Regina concerted for full choir The mass in polyphony divided between a concertino group and the full choir; Instrumental music after the Epistle Concerted offertory for four voices Concerted motet for three voices at the Elevation.

Other convents during the Holy Year also provided lavish musical liturgies. The nuns of Sta. Chiara sang themselves for several holy days; they celebrated their own patronal feast with music of “three choirs of their own harmonious voices.” Similarly, the monastic churches of Sant’Apollonia in Trastevere, Sant’Anna dei Falegnami, Spirito Santo, and San Cosimato presented musical settings of varying degrees of grandeur. Elaborate polyphonic settings were the aural equivalent to the highly wrought architectural detail and rich visual arts of the early modern monastic church. Both were means of embellishing and enhancing the liturgy. Carolyn Valone describes the ways in which the extensive frescoes covering the apse and choir of such iconic institutions as the church of Sto. Spirito in Sassia were used to enhance the religious experience and “involve them in the mystical presence of the Holy Spirit.” In another essay,Valone links the didactic, religious and emotional effects of post-Tridentine sermons and visual images. She discusses how a connection between what worshippers saw and heard would further reinforce and internalize their affective response. Recalling della Valle’s description of a nuns’ Vespers service “all head to foot in ornate music,” i.e., in polyphony, as well as detailed documentation from Sta. Lucia in Selci of the importance of polyphonic performance practices at that institution, it would appear that female monasteries utilized the rich intricacy of polyphony in a similar manner as the highly ornamented religious art of the period. Polyphony was a marker of wealth. A monastic ensemble that performed contrapuntal works would need trained singers and extensive rehearsals. Subsidiary concerns would be the amount of time . Archivio Segreto Vaticano (hereafter, ASV), Misc. Arm. I-XV: Arm.VII, 36, 441r. . Caetano, Memorie, 300. . Valone “The Pentecost,” 809 . Carolyn Valone, “The Art of Hearing: Sermons and Images in the Chapel of Lucrezia della Rovere,” Sixteenth Century  Journal 31 (2000): 753–77.

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

set aside for music lessons and possibly the hiring of outside music teachers. The copying of music would be another demand, either upon the time of the nuns or upon their finances if they used outside copyists. Thus, the maintenance and performance of such a choir implies a substantial commitment of time and funds, something that could be maintained only by financially prosperous institutions. The benefits of such an ensemble were the attraction such services held for the outside community, with people and donations pouring into the public church on patronal feast days. The sheer beauty of polyphony was also a marker of status of a different sort.The musical complexity of contrapuntal composition was itself a medium of aesthetic import. Myriad musical meanings could be contrived just from the relationship of the voices to each other, to the melodic and rhythmic motives and harmonies upon which the composition is constructed and to the text.The fact that it was generally only educated listeners who could derive the most meaning from this music gave such performances a learned element. The absence of polyphony could also be symbolic. Possession of an important, cherished relic — the head of St.  John the Baptist — reinforced the modifier of the name of the monastic church of San Silvestro in Capite. On the feast of St.  John the Baptist, 24 June, the head was traditionally uncovered for veneration by the congregation. Perhaps to reinforce their connection with the early Christian church and its first martyrs, on this one occasion the nuns themselves eschewed both polyphony and outside musicians. They sang all of the services themselves, using only the Gregorian chant assigned for the martyr rather than more elaborate contemporary music.

Musical Marketing: Representation and Distribution

Clearly nuns used music as an integral part of their public self-representation. What is difficult to determine is exactly what messages were broadcast musically. Unlike that composed by their sisters in . “In capite” originally referenced the saint’s position: the pope as “the head” of the church. For discussion of origins and traditions of San Silvestro, see Giuseppe Carletti, Memorie Istorico-critiche della Chiesa e Monastero di San Silvestro in Capite di Roma (Rome: Cracas, 1795); Carlo La Bella, San Silvestro in Capite (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 2004); and Eileen Kane, The Church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome (Genoa: Edizioni D’Arte Marconi, 2005). . Caetano, Memorie, 269.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

northern Italy, there is no extant music known to be written by Roman madri di cappella. It is clear that a number of monastic churches had choirs famed for their singing, and while music had to have been written either by or for them to perform, this music must have circulated as manuscripts. Most likely the personal possessions of the choir mistresses, they would not have been listed in monastic inventories and, in contrast to instruments, would not have been mentioned in their personal effects. The dearth of published music associated with female monasteries could be considered a reflection of Roman church politics and perceptions. Church authorities had always held a deep ambivalence about women’s singing. In the case of nuns, it was understood that singing the Office was a fundamental aspect of monastic life. An early seventeenth-century reformer wrote: For many women religious, to whom especially it is their duty to be occupied in divine songs, to this effect they have abandoned the world, are wed to  Jesus Christ and closed between the walls of the monastery. They must be present day and night in the choir for the Divine Offices and according to the rite of their order, recite these with devotion, attention and with the proper distinction of points in an even, clear, and  distinct voice, with good words, expressed intelligibly.

However, he and later authorities charged with maintaining the integrity of female monastic institutions were concerned with the use of polyphony as a part of the liturgy. A number of edicts throughout the seventeenth century essentially echoed the injunction that “feasts are to be celebrated wholly without external music, with only plainchant employed in the interior church and without polyphony . For extensive examinations of the compositions of northern Italian nuns, see Monson, Disembodied Voices for the music of Lucrezia Vizzana; and Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns andTheir Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) for that of Claudia Rusca, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani and Rosa Giacinta Badalla. . Antonio Seneca, Prattica del governo spirituale e temporale de monasterii delle monache secondo le regole et constitutioni de Santi Padri loro fondatori et del Sacro Concilio diTrento e di Sommi Pontefici, in ASV, A. A. Arm. I-XVIII, 6492. Monsignor Antonio Seneca one of the first to conduct post-Tridentine inspections of Roman convents. His Prattica, dated 1604 but growing out of the discussions of monastic life during the final sessions of the Council of Trent (November and December 1563), was a treatise on the proper administration of female monasteries and was to be distributed as a guide for reforming and restructuring the lives of women religious.

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

anywhere until the Vesper antiphons assigned to that feast or the Magnificat canticle, which is to be performed only with full choir and no extravagance.” The tenor of thought about the proper style of liturgical music was clearly out of alignment with contemporary tastes. The underlying issue exposed by such decrees was the control of the perceptions about the purity and modesty of the nuns. Their music was tolerated by the authorities despite their official stance. However, the appearance of strict enclosure had to be maintained. Music written for nuns by male composers could suggest interaction between nuns and outside musicians, a blatant violation of the cloister. On the other hand, music written by nun-composers could imply that the nuns were not occupying themselves fully with sacred duties and might perhaps indicate a sense of pride or a need for worldly recognition on the part of a female monastic. The performance traditions of monastic churches were the source of constant monitoring, prohibitions and punishments throughout the early modern period.The authorities found that monastics were quite adept at exploiting loopholes, exceptions and the slightest bit of relaxation of the regulations regarding convent music. However, Roman publications required a number of civic and church imprimaturs. Thus the publication of music was strictly controlled, and very little associated with the convents was officially approved. Special circumstances allowed three exceptions to this situation: Padre Francesco Martini’s Sacrae laudes, Paolo Quagliati’s Affetti amorosi spirituali and Pietro Paolo Sabbatini’s Villanelle spirituali. Francesco Martini was a noted member of the Congregatione dei Oratoriani and held a benefice at the Oblate monastery of Sta. Maria Annunziata a Tor de’ Specchi. Founded in 1425 by Santa Francesca Bussa de’ Ponziani, initially the convent was conceived as an open community for laywomen dedicating themselves to service to the poor. Following the Council of Trent, the house was restructured as a monastery, but the institution was one of the few exempted from . ASV, Sacra Congregazione della Sacra Visita Apostolica, vol 7, 222v. . Francesco Martini, Sacrae laudes de B. Maria Vergine (Rome: Zannetti, 1617); Paolo Quagliati Affetti amorosi spirituali (Rome: Robletti, 1617); Pietro Paolo Sabbatini Villanelle spirituali (Rome: Fei, 1657). . For the convent’s history and artistic holdings, see Placido Lugano, O.S.B., “L’istituzione delle Oblate di Tor de Specchi secondo i documenti,” Rivista storica benedettina 14 (1923): 272–308; and George Kaftal, “Three Scenes from the Legend of Santa Francesca Romana,”  Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 11 (1948): 50–61.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

the decrees enforcing strict enclosure. In the case of Tor de’ Specchi — which housed so many of the daughters of the Roman baronial families as well as the daughters of the many families associated with the Curia — the church authorities appear to have been rather indulgent during periods when the women were not being difficult. Political forces allowed the Oblates a freedom unmatched by that of any other Roman female monastery.Yet, with an uncanny sense of the tenor of the times, they decided to voluntarily enclose themselves within their extensive building complex in ancient Rome. Martini — who at one point had given infrequent music lessons to the women at the convent — clearly had the Oblates in mind when writing the Sacrae laudes, though he did not specifically mention them, instead dedicating the collection to the Virgin Mary.Yet, he does state that this collection of motets was composed to accommodate performances by women, “because measured songs, adapted for the ways of nuns, with maidenly harmony will resound.” The collections by Quagliati and Sabbatini are of devotional music to be performed in the monastery rather than in the church. Both of these noted composers dedicated their prints to nuns, and their circumstances are remarkably similar. Quagliati was a member of a noble family in Chiogga who held several political appointments for the Farnese and Ludovisi families. A celebrated musician and composer, he served as organist at the basilica of Sta. Maria Maggiore from about 1605 until his death in 1628. He had already made a name for himself in the Roman soundscape, and his position as an important figure both politically and musically was cemented when Alessandro Ludovisi was consecrated Pope Gregory XV. Quagliati was himself the dedicatee of an anthology of arie, sonnets and villanelle by some of the most important composers in Rome. Quagliati’s fame and connections allowed him to openly show his connection with a cloistered nun. His dedicatee, Suor Anna Maria Cesi, an Augustinian nun at the monastery of Sta. Lucia in Selci, was a member of a family that had been noted for its service to the papal court since the papacy of Leo X (1513–21) and had amassed . Martini, Sacrae laudes, 2. The full contents of the title reads: “Sacrae laudes de B. Maria Virgine, quaternis, quinis, senis, septenis, octonisque vocibus et eiusdem Litanie octonis similiter vocibus concidende, omnium usui, ac pracipue Monialium accommodatae..” . Giardino musicale (Rome: Robletti, 1621). Among the composers contributing were Frescobaldi, Stefano Landi, Alessandro Costantini and Rafaello Rontani.

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

great amounts of power, money, land and titles within just one century. One member of the family was among the founders of the Accademia dei Lincei. Others served as cardinals and members of the papal administration, and a number of them held the noble titles of some small, though strategically significant territories. In the publication of the Affetti amorosi spirituali, both the composer and the dedicatee were nobly born, well connected in both urban society and the papal curia, and were highly respected. In the publication of the Villanelle spirituali, the dedicatees, Suor Innocenzia and Suor Maria Grazia — birth names Camilla (1598–1666) and Clarice (1606–65) — were members of the powerful Barberini family, which had produced Pope Urban VIII and numerous prominent cardinals. By contrast, Sabbatini was not from a well-connected family. He had been maestro di cappella for both the Arciconfraternità della Morte et Orazione and San Luigi dei Francesi in the 1620s and 1630s. He had also provided music for special holy days at the Pantheon and the Barberini-sponsored monastic church of Sta. Maria Maddalena delle Convertite al Corso, and had dedicated his Psalmi Magnificat cum quatuor antiphonis (1630) to Cardinal Francesco Barberini.Yet, at the time of the dedication of the Villanelle spirituali, there is no documentation that he was formally associated with any institution as a musician. He identified himself as “professore di musica” in his 1650 didactic book Toni ecclesiastici. It would appear that he was hoping to realign himself through this dedication with Cardinals Francesco and Antonio Barberini, who had themselves only recently returned from exile in France.

. For the Cesi family, see Edoardo Martinori and Giuseppe Gabrieli, Genealogia e cronistoria di una grande famiglia umbro-romano: I Cesi. Illustrate nel loro monumenti, artistici, ed epigrafici e nelle memorie archivistiche (Rome: Tipogr. Compagnia Nazionale Pubblicità, 1931); for the contributions of the Oliveto branch of the family, see Pompeo Litta, Famiglie celebri di Italia (Milan: Giusti, 1819–82), volume 2; on the patronage of Cesi women, see Valone, “Roman Matrons as Patrons,” “Architecture as a Public Voice” and “Women on the Quirinal Hill.” . Pietro Paolo Sabbatini Villanelle spirituali spirituali a una e due voci in diversi stili, Libro Quarto (Rome: Fei, 1657), 2. . Pietro Paolo Sabbatini, Toni ecclesiastici colle sue intonationi, all’uso romano: Modo per sonare il basso continuo, chiavi corrispondenti all’altre chiavi generali, et ordinarie (Rome: Grignani, 1650), title page.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Suore Innocenzia and Maria Grazia, quiet and retiring members of a rather larger-than-life family, had already been the dedicatees of several published works. During the Jesuit centenary of 1639, an important event in Rome with international implications, Cardinal Antonio Barberini had sponsored festivities that lasted from September 1639 until August of the following year. There were three relazione printed describing and depicting the apparati, written by Antonio Gerardi and dedicated to the two Carmelite nuns. As members of the Barberini, a family that had been the dedicatees of innumerable books and musical collections, their experience with Sabbatini was not unusual. For the most part, nuns in Rome were heard and not seen. Their names were rarely in print whether as composers, performers or dedicatees. However, even under the close scrutiny of the papal curia, musical collections associated with Roman nuns were published but only under extraordinary circumstances. In these few instances of musical publication, however, the devotion, talent and repute of Roman convents were disseminated over a wider area than just the cognoscenti of Rome.

Distribution: Liturgical Music

Sacrae laudes is a collection of Marian motets and antiphons. Many of the texts are taken from liturgical chants and could function as substitutes for antiphons and Propers in the liturgy. The majority of Martini’s settings involve small changes from the chant texts, usually in the form of interpolation of tropes of praise to the Virgin. Significantly, the interpolations generally form some sort of allusion to monastic life or to nuns. For example, in the fifth motet Beata es, Virgo Maria, the original antiphon text is elaborated by the addition of praises, here with particular significance for monastic women (those amplifications in italics): Beata es Virgo Maria, Dei genetrix quae credidisti Domino. perfecta sunt in te, quae dicta sunt tibi: . Antonio Gerardi, Relazione del solenne apparato (Rome: Bianchi, 1640). . In fact, they themselves had taken an active role in a publication by ordering their confessor Leonardi to compile their saintly mother’s biography as a memoriale — and possibly the first step in beatification — but it was never published. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticano, AB, Ind. IV, 574, as cited in Frederick Hammond, Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage under Urban VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 288.

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

Ecce exaltata es super choros Angelorum, Intercede pro nobis ad Dominum Deum nostrum. Blessed is the Virgin Mary, mother of God, you who believed in God. They are perfected in you, those whom said to you: ‘Behold, you are exalted above the chorus of angels.’ Intervene for us before our Lord God.

A common trope was describing the singing of nuns as that of angelic choirs. Martini’s interpolation creates a visual connection between singing nuns/angels and the Holy Virgin who is only slightly above them in the heavens.The new text is both a song of adoration to Mary, whose virtues they tried to emulate, and one of encouragement to themselves. It reinforces the sacred nature of their lives, shut away from the world so that they might “pray without ceasing.” It also highlights their importance as singers, creating a role in which their music is the heavenly praise prophesied to be heard eternally. Several of the motets utilize these multiple layers of meaning to form constructs upon which the nuns could proclaim their value to society and also reiterate their heightened awareness of their link to the divine. Tota pulchra es was the alleluia verse and the second Vespers antiphon for the feast of the Immaculate Conception.The text in the breviary, “You are altogether beautiful, Mary, and there is no original sin in you,” is already a gloss on the biblical text:“You are altogether beautiful, my friend, and there is no flaw in you.” � Tota pulchra es amica mea et macula non est in te, (antiphon/alleluia) Veni de Libano sponsa mea, veni coronaberis (introit) vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea sponsa in uno oculorum tuorum, et in uno crine colli tui. You are altogether beautiful, my friend, and there is no flaw in you. Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, come, you will be crowned, for you have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, with one look from your eyes, and one hair from your neck.

Motet texts based on the Song of Songs were popular during the seventeenth century. Martini’s various settings of passages from the Canticle have multiple layers of meaning. By virtue of their inclusion . Antiphon for the Magnificat, Mass of the Most Holy Rosary. . Robert L. Kendrick, “Sonet vox tua in auribus meis: Song of Songs Exegesis and the Seventeenth-Century Motet,” Schütz-Jahrbuch 16 (1994): 99–118.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

in a collection of Marian motets, the allegory of the Sponsa as Mary is obvious, yet Martini’s treatment of the scriptural passages allow for the interpretation of the Sponsa as either the female monk, the individual soul or any combination of the three. Martini opts for the original biblical text for the first line.The next line is the canticle text, ending the phrase with a word found in neither the antiphon nor the canticle “coronaberis.” This interpolation could refer to the crowning of Mary, yet it also alludes to the vesting ceremonies of the nun making her full profession when the antiphon, “Veni, sponsa Christi, accipe coronam quam tibi Dominus praeparavit in aeternum” is sung. Martini then continues with the text of the canticle and ends with another addition. The last line refers to the part of the profession ceremony in which the girl accepts having her hair cut by her bishop to symbolize her leaving behind worldly vanity.This is another instance of Martini calling upon the trope of the Sponsa as female monastic. It is important to note that several of Martini’s alterations to the text would have little significance for the Oblates at Tor de’ Specchi.The nuns made a conscious decision to accept cloister like the rest of the female monasteries in the city. Still, the women were accepted into the convent not by the traditional vesting ceremonies but also by means of an Oblation, whereby the woman could retain her worldly connections yet commit herself, her life and any private possessions to good works and to God. It would appear that Martini supported the appropriate female imagery presented publicly by the Oblates, invoking in his print a more traditional conceptualization of the nun as a cloistered contemplative. The publication of this collection would have been the most effective broadcast of the nuns’ musical representation. The monastic church of Sta. Maria Annunziata did not have an inner/outer church design.There would have been no regular audience in the church to hear the sisters sing their music. At best, those passing on the street outside of the church could listen to the nuns’ liturgical music-making, though conditions were less than ideal. It was only through the . The canticle, the Song of Songs 4:8–9, is also set as the introit for the Mass of Santa Teresa. . “Come, bride of Christ, accept the crown that the Lord has prepared for you in eternity.” This text is used both for the Vespers antiphon for the Common of Virgins and for the tract for the Mass of a virgin martyr.

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

felicitous combination of the tantalizing snippets of music that could be heard by outsiders and the publication of motets written for the Oblates that the piety, decorum and holiness of the women of Tor de’ Specchi could be marketed to the world.

Distribution: Devotional Music

In addition to providing music for their liturgical services, nuns used music as part of their private devotions and communal recreation. This devotional music functioned on several levels in the private life of the community. It supported the women’s religious activities, celebrated their strengths and afforded beauty and variety to their daily lives. It reinforced their self-image as holy daughters of God and reminded them of the intimacies and virtues of the life enclosed away from the outside world. The two collections discussed in this section were each dedicated to Roman nuns and were written for one to three voices and continuo. The first, the Affetti amorosi spirituali (1617) by Paolo Quagliati, is a collection primarily of spiritual madrigals that was dedicated to Suor Anna Maria Cesi of Sta. Lucia in Selci. As noted earlier, she hailed from a family that figured prominently in the religious and political life of Rome. As an individual, she appears to have been quite skilled not only as a musician but also at convent administration, elected to the positions of treasurer or prioress numerous times over her career. Cesi was a gifted singer. She played both the lute and harpsichord (and possibly organ), and in his dedication Quagliati praises her vocal and improvisational abilities. He also notes that she has already sung several of the spiritual madrigals and that the print was eagerly awaited by other nuns. In Quagliati’s print the general affect of the texts is one of personal devotion, reflecting upon one’s sins and renouncing the values of the world, an affect highly relevant to female monasteries. The style of the texts is founded upon the imagery and themes of struggling against sinfulness and temptations; the language is intensely personal and colorfully descriptive. It absorbs the listener into the narrative. . References to Cesi’s positions are scattered throughout the monastery’s documents: her first appearance as depositaria is in 1623 and the last document listing her as priora was the record of her death in 1669; Archivio di Stato Roma (hereafter ASR), Agostiniane in S. Lucia in Selci, Giustificazioni diverse 3685/7, 3688/24, 3703/1, and 3704/3. . Rome: Robletti, 1617, 2.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Several texts share the powerful tropes of gazing upon an icon of the wounded Jesus. In one, Mentre, Amor mio, rimiro, the horror of the sight upon which the speaker is looking is surpassed only by the enormous love with which  Jesus bears his suffering. Mentre, Amor mio, rimiro D’ogni tua piaga il sanguinoso giro; fra me stesso dich’ io ogni sua piaga E di pietade un Cielo. Muori, muori cor mio, Trafitto homai da si pietoso zelo; Ch’ al Ciel n’andrai di quelle piaghe sante, Ov’è pietoso Amor, pietade amante. While, my Love, I gaze Upon the bloody circle of your every wound, I say that your every wound Is a paradise of pity within me. Die, die, my heart, Transfixed by such merciful devotion, For you will go to Heaven by those holy wounds, where there is merciful Love, a pitying lover.

Angelo Grillo’s eight-line poem has two main divisions, with the point of address moving from  Jesus (ll. 1–4) to the heart of the speaker (ll. 5–8).The text thus changes from a prayer of devotion to a form of reflection. After looking at the icon, the speaker is moved by  Jesus’s wounds to identify with his enormous sacrifice for her soul. The dual nature of the poem is emphasized by its symmetry, employing the sounds of the words themselves to make parallel structures. The letters “m” and “r” of line one — mentre, Amor mio, rimiro — is mirrored in Muori, muori cor mio of line five. The placement of similar sounding words in corresponding parts of phrases — sua piaga and piaghe sante in lines three and seven, respectively, and pietade in lines four and eight — heightens the parallelism. On another level, the poem forms an arch by recapitulating the image of  Jesus as divine love in the last lines: the Amor mio of line one is met in heaven by the heart of the speaker as the pietoso Amor, pietade amante. The rhyme scheme of the poem reinforces the arch structure.The first two lines rhyme as do the last two, and the internal ryhme between lines four and six results in the following scheme: AA BCDC EE.

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

Musically, Quagliati emphasizes the aspects of his chosen texts that are didactic, supportive and remonstrative in terms of the soul’s search for God — or the nun’s search for a holy existence. His music incorporates rhetorical gestures and develops tonal relationships that highlight the words that articulate the ideals, sacrifices and rewards of the religious life.This collection would have widespread appeal in post-Tridentine Rome, sharing the intimate moments of the spiritual struggles of the female monastic, and thereby demonstrate the devotion of Rome’s women religious. The second collection served in a markedly different way than Quagliati’s. Pietro Paolo Sabbatini’s Villanelle Spirituali emphasized its lack of virtuosity and ornamentation: The virtuous desire of many gentle music lovers have obligated me to publish these present Villanelle Spirituali, which are the easiest that I have composed, as those among my patrons, being musical beginners have esteemed them most adequate for their satisfaction and need.…

In 1640 Urban VIII founded the Discalced Carmelite monastery Incarnazione del Verbo Divino. Maria Grazia Pazzi, niece of the Florentine mystic Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, was chosen to head the new community, which included the two papal nieces, Innocenza and Grazia. The life of the monastery, which followed the strictest clausura, centered around the private spiritual devotions of the nuns, formulated along the lines of the  Jesuit spiritual exercises. It was certainly not centered around the musical program of the convent. At least during the years in which the papal nieces were members, the monastery presented no documented liturgical services in which the nuns provided anything other than plainchant. While the Barberini nuns had obviously had some musical training, it is clear from Sabbatini’s description of his works that they were modestly gifted at best. The pieces in his collection were not the virtuosic madrigals of Quagliati’s Affetti amorosi spirituali but have a grace and charm that is accentuated by their very simplicity. . Pietro Paolo Sabbatini, Villanelle spirituali a una e due voci in diversi stili; da cantarsi in qualsivoglia instrumento, Libro quarto, Opera vigesima (Rome: Giacomo Fei, 1657), 20. . The convent published its own version of prayers and meditations, Essercitii spirituali praticati dalle RR. monache della sacra religione carmelitana dell’antica Osservanza Regolare esistenti nel monastero della SS. Incarnatione del Verbo Divino (Rome: A. Bernabei, 1658).

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

While less affective and personal than the villanelle of Quagliati’s print, Sabbatini’s collection shares similar themes: devotion to Jesus and Mary, rejection of the sins and suffering of the world and focus on the rewards of the hereafter.The language is simple, more exhortative, as in Quel Bambin dolc’e gradito. Quel Bambin dolc’e gradito che sù’l fien hor si riposa, hà beltà si gratiosa che m’hà l’alma e’l cor ferito. M’invaghisce, mi rapisce, deh lodiamo, deh cantiamo alme care sù, sù, sù, quant’ è bello il mio Giesù. Con quei cari, e santi lumi Ti fà forza, che l’honori Ti costringe che l’adori, Che per lui t’arda, e consumi, Deh venite, Deh seguite A lodare, a cantare Serafini sù, sù, sù, quant’ è bello il mio Giesù. That baby, sweet and welcome, That now rests on hay, He has such charming beauty That he has wounded my soul and heart. He infatuates me, he ravishes me, Ah, let us praise, ah, let us sing Dear souls, come, How beautiful is my  Jesus. With those dear and holy lights, He makes you strong when you honor them. He compels you when you adore him, To burn for him, and be consumed. Ah, come, ah, follow, To praise, to sing. Seraphim, come, How beautiful is my  Jesus.

While Sabbatini published several collections of villanelle in the 1630s, none show consistently any characteristics that would distinguish them as part of the genre, relying instead on their historical

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Kimberlyn Montford • Musical Marketing

associations of straightforward texts and simple harmonic accompaniments. This collection of short, strophic religious songs shares a great affinity with the laude. They are for the performance, enjoyment and edification of non-professional musicians, and they present their messages in direct language. They do not contain the sophisticated witticisms of Quagliati’s spiritual madrigals. Instead, they reflect the aspirations of those holy women to whom they were dedicated in terms that would coincide with the prayers, meditations and liturgies of their strictly ordered lives. This publication, associated with a strictly cloistered convent, would serve as the image and sound of women whose faces and voices would never again be seen in the city. In its own way, it is less marketing than the worldly proxy for the monastery dell’ Incarnazione. In contrast to the music presented in the exterior church, music written for nuns to perform in the privacy of the convent parlors or refectories served a different function: to encourage the women in their efforts to lead spiritual lives unconstrained by the outside world. Such music enlivened the existence of religious women and supported their self-image, even as the publication of this music brought greater glory to the Holy Roman Church, their monastic churches and themselves as religious women in early modern Rome. •

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Part II: notorious men and women and the arts: Sex, greed and scandal •

A Monster’s Plea Suzanne B. Butters How often is one able to hear the voice of a human “monster” from the distant past? The letter examined here offers us just that, in an epistolary plea sent from Siena by “Christofaro Tagliare Mostro” on 14 August 1583 to the region’s princely ruler, Francesco I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany (r.1574–87) (Fig. 1, below). Florence was the capital of this early modern principate, whose authority, from 1532 on, extended over the city, its countryside and its dominions and then, from 1557, over the newly conquered state of Siena as well. Distinguished from the republic that had preceded it, the duchy of Florence (1532–69), later raised to the grand duchy of Tuscany (1569–1737), was governed by a succession of dynastic rulers from the powerful Medici family.

Setting the Documentary Scene

One feature of the Medici regime’s administration was its increasingly orderly preservation of government correspondence.The princely component of these records took shape only gradually but is now preserved in Florence’s Archivio di Stato, in the 6,429 volumes comprising the so-called Archivio Mediceo del Principato. Mostly concerned with relations between the sovereigns and their foreign counterparts or with their own states and vassals in Tuscany, these letters discussed issues largely distinct from the internal ones concerning the management of the Medici court, or the state’s economy, justice system, public works and so on. Drafts and copies of letters written by the Medici rulers, for example, were recorded in separate registers by secretaries; these survive only sporadically, and not for all their secretaries. The dukes and grand dukes received far more letters . Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana: I Medici (Turin: UTET, 1976); Riguccio Galluzzi, Istoria del granducato diToscana sotto il governo della casa Medici, 5 vols. (Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1781); J.R. Hale, Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control (London:Thames and Hudson, 1983), 109–96. . Carteggio Universale di Cosimo I de Medici, ed. Anna Bellinazzi and Claudio Lamioni, 1 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982), li–lxxxv, at lii; on its gradual formation, see Antonio Panella, in Archivio Mediceo del Principato: Inventario sommario, Ministero dell’Interno. Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, I, Archivio di Stato di Firenze (Rome: Giuntina, 1966), v–xxxiii. . In the Medici archive’s “Carteggio dei Segretari,” 6 registers survive of drafts of Francesco I’s letters during his rule (1574–87), written by one of his secretaries,

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Fig. 1. Giovanni Stradano, Prince Francesco de’ Medici at work with his alchemists, 1570. Francesco’s Studiolo, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. (Photograph Antonio Quattrone.)

Belisario Vinta; none refer to the year 1583. For the same period, 28 registers containing copies of Francesco’s letters survive, written by two secretaries, Vinta and Antonio Serguidi; 2 include August 1583 (ASF, MdP 260, 261) (Archivio Mediceo del Principato, 2, 7–8). Elsewhere in the archive, numerous letters to and from both secretaries survive (ibid. 29–30); 22 volumes of letters to Serguidi survive from Francesco’s reign, including 3 containing material from August 1583 (ASF, MdP 1189, 1190, 1211); only 1 of Vinta’s survives for the period (MdP 1213). On the sixteenthcentury grand-ducal secretariat, see Giuseppe Pansini, “Le segreterie nel principato Mediceo,” in Bellinazzi and Lamioni, ix–lxix, at ix–xxxiv.

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Suzanne B. Butters • A Monster’s Plea

than they wrote, however, reflecting contemporary power relationships, the range and variety of Medici contacts, and the innumerable correspondents requesting favors from the prince. These kinds of letters, solicited and unsolicited, survive in surprising numbers. Occasionally, the prince forwarded a letter to one of his administrators, requesting further information; this would be appended in the official’s hand for resubmission to his sovereign. When and if the prince reached a decision, his rescript would be added to the letter, personally dated and initialed by him, or on his behalf by a trusted official. Pithily setting out his views on the request put to him, these idiosyncratic princely recommendations, or “rescripts” (rescritti), had gradually come to enjoy supreme authority. A huge number of letters written to individual grand dukes were never forwarded in this way, however. Now organized chronologically, bound in files (filze) and prominently labelled, these miscellaneous original letters to the prince came to form a distinct section of the Archivio Mediceo del Principato, now called the Carteggio Universale. It is among the six surviving volumes of these disparate letters, written to Francesco I in 1583, that the monster’s plea has lain dormant. The absence of a princely rescript on it suggests that the grand duke never passed the letter to a Medici official for further investigation or action; and ironically, had he done so, we might no longer have the original. No trace of a reply to it has been found in the three surviving registers recording secretarial copies of letters sent by Francesco in 1583 (no secretarial drafts of these letters survive for the period). Among the few extant volumes of correspondence . Bellinazzi and Lamioni, lxx. . On rescripts in Roman and Renaissance law, see W.W. Buckland, A Text-Book of Roman Law from Augustus to  Justinian, rev. ed. Peter Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 18–20; Luca Mannori, Il Sovrano Tutore: Pluralismo istituzionale e accentramento amministrativo nel principato dei Medici (Secc. XVI–XVIII) (Milan: Giuffrè Editore, 1994), 411–13, including n. 16, on Cosimo I’s 29 July 1561 law, “sopra la interpretatione et vigore de’ Rescritti di S. E. I.” . Anna Bellinazzi and Claudio Lamioni, “Introduzione,” in Bellinazzi and Lamioni, li–lxxxv, at liii–lv. . Archivio Mediceo del Principato, 20. . App. 1. . ASF, MdP 260, 261, 322; for the surviving registers of drafts, Archivio Mediceo del Principato, 2.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

sent from Medici administrators in Siena to the grand duke or his secretaries in 1583, no mention of the monster has been found.The historical record is patchy, then, but as it stands, it suggests that the cry for help from Siena was met with silence in Florence.

The Monster’s Plea

What form did this cry take? Despite its brevity, the letter tells us much about Christofaro’s unenviable predicament. It is as a “monster,” as he signs himself, that he has spent five years under the control of a Guglielmo Lasdal. Dragging Christofaro “about the world,” Lasdal has not only profited financially from him in the cities where they had call to stop but also beaten him at his pleasure, with great cruelty, so much so that the monster can bear it no longer. Christofaro describes his situation as “my miserable bondage” and is tormented by his loss of dignity, as he sees “my flesh sold, to my great shame and ignominy.” Now that the pair has reached Siena, Lasdal has formed a four-month partnership (compagnia) with Niccolò Romeri, presumably to manage the monster’s public display, takings and upkeep, perhaps in the manner of some nineteenth-century showmen in Britain and the United States; the agreement has two more months to run. Surprisingly, Romeri does not collude in his partner’s cruelty, however. He is not only kind to Christofaro but devoted to his wellbeing, inducing in him a feeling that he has been touched by the hand of God. Despite his business partnership with Lasdal, Romeri demonstrates that he is willing to lose all he has in order to liberate the monster. Having been informed by Romeri that the grand . ASF, MdP 1876 and 1877, two of the three extant volumes for the period 1582– 1585, when bishop Lattanzio Lattanzii was Governor of Siena. See Danilo Marrara, Studi giuridici sulla Toscana medicea: Contributo alla storia degli stati assoluti in Italia (Varese: Multa Paucis, 1981), 257. I could not check MdP 1878 (letters to Lattanzi and Giulio del Caccia, 1 March 1583–12 October 1587). . On compagnie in Renaissance Florence, in which partners pooled their capital and shared their obligations and profits, Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: The  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 64–67. These “business ventures” usually lasted three to five years. . Cf. Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1980), 78–79, 190–92; Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 4–14; Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25–26, et passim.

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Suzanne B. Butters • A Monster’s Plea

duke of Tuscany is the “greatest lord in Italy,” Christofaro writes to Francesco, begging to be admitted into his court. He affirms that he will be a loyal servant, and notes that Romeri is willing to “conduct” him to Florence. With tears in his eyes, he implores Francesco to write to him personally, ordering that Romeri bring him to Florence before the three men leave “the most happy state” of Tuscany. This last expression, rhetorically common but effective, was aimed to flatter and persuade the grand duke. Christofaro’s letter and signature are written in the same bold, fluent hand, suggesting either that he was well educated, despite his problematic physical state, or that Romeri wrote the letter for him. While by no means syntactically polished, the monster’s prose is direct and concise, without sounding like the voice of someone else speaking for him. His emotional turmoil is evident, but so too the intelligent restraint with which he manages to contain it, in order to put his case effectively.

Unpacking the Plea’s Implications

The monster was clearly unable to get away without help. In part, this must have been because Lasdal’s partnership with Romeri curbed Christofaro’s freedom, consigning him to a state that he described as “bondage.” It is possible he was using the term servitù technically rather than generically, since the agreement must have been binding between the partners, making it difficult for its subject to extricate himself. One presumes the compagnia was fixed to last only four months because Lasdal planned to then move the monster out of Tuscany. Christofaro’s repeated assertion that he is content to come under the grand duke’s authority (potere), suggests that he recognized, at least implicitly, that steps needed to be taken in order to overturn the partnership’s authority. By establishing through Romeri that the grand duke of Tuscany was “the greatest lord in Italy,” the monster was identifying a supreme authority potentially able to pre-empt that of the partners. Indeed, Christofaro’s use of the verb riscrivere, when asking the grand duke to write him a strong, impassioned letter (una sua calda lettera) ordering that he come to Florence and enter into his . Two definitions capture the range: “seruice, seruitude, bondage or thraldom, slaverie, subiection.” See John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (1598, repr. Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972); and “Nel senso civ[ile]., Obbligazione imposta, che detrae qualcosa al libero uso delle facoltà proprie e de’ proprii diritti,” in Nicolò Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario della lingua italiana, 20 vols. (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), 17:609 [VIII].

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service, suggests that the monster was requesting something more official than a simple reply, that is, an order from Francesco that carried the authority of a rescript. To prove this, one would need evidence from a case in which the terms of a Tuscan partnership were broken on the basis of a rescript or a grand-ducal order framed in a letter. If Lasdal and Romeri’s compagnia were like those in Florence, however, the agreement would have been made privately, without a notary, making its dissolution easier. It seems likely, then, that the partnership’s terms could have been trumped by a recommendation from Francesco ordering Christofaro to act in a way that went against them. Even though the grand dukes made much of observing the laws rather than overriding them, their recommendations were usually hard to resist. In light of the monster’s confined situation, then, and knowing that the grand duke’s writ ran in the state of Siena, obtaining the equivalent of a grand-ducal rescript would have been a sensible way of liberating himself from the partnership. But one also imagines that Christofaro, who may have been disabled, was physically unable to escape.The beatings had reduced him to a poor state, and it is likely that his physiognomy made him easily recognizable (the faces of Medici slaves were branded to make them easy to re-capture when they ran away). Indeed, Romeri’s offer to “conduct” (condurre) rather than to “accompany” (accompagnare) Christofaro to Florence suggests that transporting him posed logistical problems, as it might a disabled person or beast. The word “accompany,” which the monster avoids, put the two parties on equal footing, not least in the princely world of precedence and court etiquette. In contrast, the word condurre was commonly used in . Goldthwaite, 65. . Suzanne B. Butters, The Triumph of  Vulcan: Sculptors’Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence, 2 vols. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1996), 1:92–97;  John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence 1537–1609 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2–5. . For example, Suzanne B. Butters,“Magnifico, non senza eccesso: Riflessioni sul mecenatismo del cardinale Ferdinando de’ Medici,” in Villa Medici: Il sogno di un cardinale collezioni e artisti di Ferdinando de’ Medici, exhibition catalogue (Académie de France à Rome, 1999–2000) (Rome: De Luca, 1999), 22–45, at 35 and fig. 12; and Suzanne B. Butters, Elena Fumagalli, Sylvie Deswarte (with Anne-Lise Desmas), La Villa Médicis, dir. André Chastel, co-ord. Marc Bayard, Elena Fumagalli, Philippe Morel, vol. 5, Fonti documentarie (Rome: Académie de France à Rome, École française de Rome, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2010), docs. 347, 372, 373, 376. . Fonti documentarie, docs. 127, 130, 784.

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Suzanne B. Butters • A Monster’s Plea

connection with the escorted transport not only of valuable goods, such as antiquities, statues or plants, but also of living creatures, such as monkeys and slaves. What made transporting Christofaro problematic is not known, but it was probably his physical state rather than a fear that he might escape during the move.

Monsters and Nature

To understand what Christofaro Tagliare intended by calling himself a “mostro” we have to consider what the word meant at the time, and to whom. In one way or another, all the meanings originated either in the Latin noun monstrum, which meant not only “something marvelous or prodigious” but also a divine portent, via its origins in the verb mone¯re (to warn) or in the Latin verb monstrare, to show. These meanings overlapped and intermingled, depending on what aspect of the “monster” was being accentuated: the reasons for his existence or for his anomalous appearance.The more precise expression “monster of nature” (monstrum naturae) reminds us that the understanding of monsters was underpinned by the idea and reality of “nature.” The related expression “joke of nature” (lusus naturae) was more cruel but still left nature in control, however peevishly, whereas the adjective “preternatural” (beyond nature or beside its course) accentuated its mysterious, even unfathomable products and processes. According to Aristotle, a monstrosity belonged to the preternatural, that is “to the class of things contrary to nature although it is contrary not to Nature in her entirety, but only to nature in the generality of cases. . Ibid., docs. 159, 236, 379, 641; and Suzanne B. Butters,“The Uses and Abuses of Gifts in the World of Ferdinando de’ Medici (1549–1609),” in I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 11 (2007): 243–354, at 322–23 (VI, 7), 327–28 (VII, 6). . Ibid., 350–52 (IX, 6); Butters, Fumagalli and Deswarte, doc. 144. . Butters, Fumagalli and Deswarte, docs. 717, 851. . The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C.T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1966), 587; and Touba Ghadessi Fleming, “Identity and Physical Deformity in Italian Court Portraits, 1550–1650: Dwarves, Hirsutes, and Castrati” (Ph.D. dissertation, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2007), 54–57. . Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 228 (fig. 6.1); Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance:The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 269–73; David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 200, 324, 353, 367–69; and Robert O’ Bryan,“Grotesque Bodies, Princely Delights: Dwarfs in Italian Renaissance Court Imagery,” Preternatural 1 (2012): 252–88.

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So far as concerns Nature which is always, and by necessity, nothing occurs contrary to that.” People try to understand how they fit into a created universe by seeking to define the natural laws that seem to govern its operations and by learning to recognize the most common outward forms and behaviors of its living creatures. For this reason, historians have considered monsters and freaks, a category divided by the etymological origins of its terms and the professions of those who have studied them rather than by the types of its exemplars, largely within the context of the natural order of things, just as their subjects did. At the time, nature was an all-embracing concept, so it made no sense to describe Christofaro’s appearance, however odd and striking, as “unnatural” or his abnormalities as a “natural defects.” The amazing qualities of “prodigious” monsters often led to their interpretation as portents, to which we will return, but some defined “prodigies” as things that happened “against Nature,” such as a woman giving birth to a snake or a dog. Our monster cannot have been one of these natural impossibilities. Cristoforo does not describe his physiognomy, but it clearly singled him out as an unusual natural creature, and one sufficiently vulnerable to be subjugated and beaten at will. His characterization of himself as a “mostro” shows that he recognized, and accepted, his categorization by others as a “monster of nature,” that is, someone so far from the physical norm that people marveled at him, both drawn and perhaps repelled by his appearance.

Fabulous Monsters

Composite monsters, part human and part animal, had been described as existing in mythical, exotic and remote lands from the ancients on, in literary, historical and scientific texts that were transmitted by medieval writers down to those in the early modern period. It is more than likely that Christofaro and his contemporaries had heard of these fabulous creatures, not least because they were . Maclean, 269, translation from De generatione animalium, iv.4 (770b 10ff). . Bogdan, 3–6; the English word “freak” probably has a dialectal origin. . Maclean, 270–71. . Maclean, 270. . Ghadessi Fleming, 55, quoting from Ambroise Paré’s 1585 definition of “monstres” . Rudolf Wittkower,“Marvels of the East:A Study in the History of Monsters,” repr. in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London:Thames and Hudson, 1977), 45–74.

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literally the stuff of “fables” (a word that referred to classical myths as well as other fictional tales), and because popular epic poems of the Renaissance included casts of monstrous characters. These were well known, even by those who read little or nothing. But no one would have compared Christofaro to any of these creatures, even though they continued to provide a distorting lens through which contemporary “monsters” were viewed. Christofaro was no satyr, centaur or cyclops; no sciapode (who could sleep in the shade of his single giant foot) or cynocephalus (a dog-headed humanoid who spoke by barking); and not a headless person with his face between his shoulders, or an otherwise normal one with his feet facing backwards, or a person with ears stretching down to his elbows. We can certainly exclude the legendary martikhora (a creature with a man’s face, a lion’s body and a scorpion’s tail) whose true identity some thought, with Pausanias, was an Indian tiger.Thévet, the historian and cosmographer of Queen Catherine de’ Medici (1519–89), a blood relative of Francesco and exact contemporary of his father Cosimo I (1519–74), claimed he saw one of these while traveling around the Red Sea; he described it as a tail-less tiger with a well-formed man’s face, but it is now presumed to have been an anthropoid ape.

Monsters as Omens

Accounts of fabulous monsters had to be taken on trust, then, but one still wondered why such exciting but apparently implausible creatures should exist at all. One answer turned on the belief that God could be identified with the nature he had created, and his divine will with its workings. According to this explanation, all monsters constituted examples of the variety of Adam’s or Noah’s successors that God had purposefully created, either to demonstrate . Florio, 127; Onions, 341, 601. . For example, Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore (1478) and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516). . Montaigne observed that countrymen and shepherdesses all over Italy knew Ariosto by heart (“Je fus ici frappé [...] de voir ces paysans un luth à la main, et de leur côté les bergères, ayant l’Arioste dans la mémoire: mais c’est ce qu’on voit dans toute l’Italie.” See Michel de Montaigne,  Journal de Voyage, ed. Fausta Garavini (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1983), 1296–97. . Wittkower, 46–61; for some plausible prototypes, Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 26–27, 223. . Wittkower, 61.

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Fig. 2. Johannes Schenk. Conjoined twins: adult host in contemporary dress with parasitic twin (46), stillborn infants (47) and live-born infants (48). From his Monstrorum historia memorabilis (Frankfurt: 1609) 65. (Author’s copy.)

his astounding, unfathomable divine ingenuity or, from time to time, as portents of forthcoming disasters or indications of his displeasure with the moral failings of his greatest creatures. . Wittkower, 49–50, 64–65. On God intervening in his creation versus the increasingly prevalent interpretation of “miracles” as secrets of nature not yet understood, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, “‘Such Monstrous Births’: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy,” Renaissance Quarterly 38.1 (1967): 85–106, at 95; Maclean, 271–73 n. 199.

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Suzanne B. Butters • A Monster’s Plea

The births of malformed babies, most of whom were premature or short-lived, were often interpreted as divine punishments or warnings. The historian Giovanni Villani (1276–1348) described shortlived conjoined boys, born in 1317, who were refused entry into Florence’s civic palace by its priors, fearful their birth signified future harm, commemorated locally in a stone relief. Petrarch still remembered a drawing of the monster twenty-five years later, sent to his father in France where crowds thronged to view it (Fig. 2.47, 48). According to an avviso sent from Rome to Florence in 1581, an Englishman in Paris reported that signs and prodigies were often seen in his country; recently, an old woman in York had given birth to an eight-footed monster, with one human hand and foot and the others of various animals; apparently wearing a morion-style helmet, its human face had a mouse-like mouth and tail. Historically, it was not uncommon for the mother to be blamed. The ill-omened monster born in 1578 in Chieri, near Turin, wanted to eat as soon as it was born, and quickly walked and talked; portraits of it were sent to the Spanish ambassador in Venice and to Cardinal Archbishop Carlo Borromeo (1538–84). The mother was imprisoned, however, in order to determine whether she had copulated with some animal or whether the monster’s form had been caused by something impinging on her “imagination.” (The Elephant Man always contended that his condition had been caused by his mother taking fright at an elephant during pregnancy.) In sixteenth-century Avignon, a woman . Daston and Park, 55 (Fig. 1.8.2), 57. . “[...] In Parigi era venuto un gentilhuomo d’Inghilterra, il quale referiva ch’in quel Regno si vedevano spesso segni et prodigii, tra quali nella provincia di Hiorte [York] una donna vecchia haveva partorito un mostro con otto piedi, una mano e un piede a simiglianza humana, gli altri di diversi animali, la faccia humana con un morione in testa et la bocca et coda come un sorcio. [...]”(ASF, MdP 4027, fol. 48, avviso from Rome to Florence, 14 January 1581, MAP #25265). . “[...] A questo ambasciatore cattolico [Pedro de Mendoza] è statto mandato il ritratto del mostro nato in Chieri et la donna che l’ha partorito è stata carcerata per ordine del duca di Savoia [Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia] per intendere da lei se ha usato con qualche animale, overo sia stata imaginatione, havendo Sua Altezza mandato il ritratto al cardinal Borromeo et subito nato, volse magnare, camina et parla. [...](ASF, MdP 3082, fol. 564r, avviso from Venice to Florence, 8 February 1578, MAP # 27794). . Howell and Ford, 55–56, 182. On the fetus’s effect on the mother’s imagination (“maternal impression”), see Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic,

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was killed for bringing a portentous creature into the world, and in seventeenth-century New England, joy expressed when Native Americans killed another such mother. Prints allegedly depicting new-born monsters of composite kinds circulated widely, laden with dire political interpretations. The socalled “Ravenna monster” was linked, for example, with the defeat of pope  Julius II (r.1503–13) by the French “barbarians” at the 1512 battle of Ravenna. In Italy and abroad, the peculiar creatures depicted in these broadsheets and pamphlets fit happily into the long tradition of ill-omened composite monsters. Not surprisingly, many monstrous miscarriages and babies continued to be described as if they were composites, simply because their anatomical features were poorly understood. The Florentine chronicler Agostino Lapini (1515–92) wrote an account of a local case. Born prematurely on 27 June 1562, behind a bakery in the Sta. Croce parish of San Simone, the tiny, armless creature presented the confusing characteristics of a malformed baby miscarried four months before term; its sex was unidentifiable (always troubling), its head like that of a ram (with the horns), the rest of the body a sort of fleshy pulp, and its shins and feet those of a man. Lapini does not claim its birth served as a warning, however.The child died a few hours later, unbaptized. Whether to baptize or not was a theological decision.The eminent cardinal archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, pondered the issue when similar births occurred in his diocese. In 1581, he could not decide whether or not to baptize the monster born to a peasant girl near Melegnano, described as piglike from its head to its waist and human below; the nineteen-day-old infant was fed on soups because no one would nurse it. Images of Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 34, 36, 51, 56–62; Daston and Park, 196–98; Durbach, 43–44; Ghadessi Fleming, 121–22; Maclean, 269 n. 186; and Bogdan, 151. . Hanafi, 24–25, citing Varchi; Schutte, 104. . Ottavia Niccoli, Profeti e popolo nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Rome: Laterza, 1987), 52–56; Schutte, 92–93; Daston and Park, 177–80. . Niccoli, 47–87; Daston and Park, 180–90. . On hermaphrodites, see below. . Agostino Lapini, Diario fiorentino di Agostino Lapini dal 252 al 1596, ed. Giuseppe Odoardo Corazzini (Florence: Sansoni, 1900), 134. The marginal rubric reads “Nacque uno mostro.” . “[...] La notte di San Sebastiano [20  January], in una villa chiamata Bustichera,

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monstrous births, such as the drawing sent to Cosimo I of a child born in Florence in 1557, had long circulated, and would continue to do so. Agnolo Bronzino (1503–72), a favorite Medici painter and poet, drew a “portrait” of female conjoined twins, one headless, when the stillborn pair was dissected at the Orti Oricellari in 1536. In 1548, the Medici historian and academician, Benedetto Varchi (1502–65), would discuss the case in his paper for the Florentine Academy, “On the generation of Monsters & whether they are intended by Nature or not.” He cited depictions of other such monsters in the loggia of the nearby foundling hospital, Sta. Maria della Scala. One survives. Like other naturalia, human monsters were increasingly illustrated as well as described, and it would be recognized that understanding nature’s anomalies was key to understanding its regularities. Christofaro was an anomaly who had survived birth, childhood and adolescence.

A Biblical Monster?

Christofaro Tagliare lived in a period when attitudes to monsters as omens were fluctuating, but he was clearly a devout Christian, to judge from his reference to the consoling hand of God and his name. Saint Christopher, who had borne the great weight of the Christ child across a raging river, was the patron saint of travelers vicina un miglio a Melegnano [on the road to Lodi, southeast of Milan], una contadina maritata, et di qualche bellezza, partorì un mostro, assomigliante dal capo alla cintura ad un porco, et nel restante a creatura humana, il quale tuttavia vive di minestre, non havendo alcuna persona voluto alattarlo. Et se bene l’Ill.mo [Carlo] Borromeo è stato ricerco per il consenso di battezarlo, non ha però voluto fare alcuna risolutione. [...]” ASF, MdP 3254, fol. 715, avviso from Milan, 8 February 1581, MAP #10227. . “[...] Ci sarà un ritratto d’un mostro nato in questa città alli 27 del presente, il qual m’è stato portato da un pictore, con una letter che lui scrive a S. Ecc.a [Cosimo I], et per quanto intendo, fu portato l’originale di questo mostruoso parto al Cardinale Caraffa hiermattina avanti che partisse di qui [...].” ASF, MdP 465, fol. 167, letter from Lorenzo Pagni in Florence to Bartolomeo Concini in Pisa, 31 October 1557, MAP #16820. . Daston and Park, 54–55, 57, 177, 383 n. 113; Schutte, 89–90 n. 11, 94. . “Sopra la generazione de’ Mostri, & se sono intesi dalla Natura, ò nò”; on Varchi’s Aristotelian views, Hanafi, 18–22, 24–27, 29–33; cf. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 203, 209–10; O’Bryan, 272–72. . Above, text at n. 35. . Freedberg, 71, 199–200, 349–396; cf. Bogdan, 26–27.

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and a giant, so one wonders if our peripatetic monster was one too. Considered monsters, giants were much prized at contemporary princely courts, such as the Este one at Ferrara or the Habsburg one at Ambras of Ferdinand II of Tyrol (1529–95), Francesco’s brotherin-law. Perversely, the playful literary habit of nicknaming dwarves after giants, mentioned by Juvenal and exemplified in the case of the Medici dwarf, Morgante (c.1520–before 1584, the eponymous giant in Pulci’s epic poem, Morgante Maggiore), might lead one to suppose our Christoforian monster was a dwarf, but this would be misguided for two reasons. First, the tradition of naming people by their opposites was more classical and literary than Christian, and second, “Christofaro” was almost certainly our monster’s baptismal name rather than a nickname, and the symptoms of “gigantism” and “dwarfism,” usually caused by imbalances of the pituitary gland, emerge as a child grows, not at birth, near the time of baptism. Some key elements in Saint Christopher’s legend do resonate with Christofaro’s plea to the grand duke, however: Christopher was of the lineage of the Canaanites, and he was of a right great stature and had a terrible and fearful face and appearance. And he was twelve cubits of length [5.49 meters], and ... when he served and dwelled with the king of Canaan, it came in his mind that he would seek the greatest prince that was in the world, and him would he serve and obey. And so far he went that he came to a right great king, of whom the renown generally was that he was the greatest in the world. And when, the king saw him, he received him into his service, and made him to dwell in his court.... . Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed., revised and supplemented by Herbert Thurston, S.J. and Donald Attwater, 4 vols. (London: Burns & Oates, 1956), 3:184–87. . Ghadessi Fleming, 72, citing Guido Guerzoni’s unpublished research. . Daston and Park, 193–94 fig. 5.6.3, depicting the giant Giovanni Bona with the dwarf Thomerle. . Giuliano de’ Ricci, Cronaca [1532–1606], ed. Giuliana Sapori (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1972), 51 n. 4, 493 n. 2. . Juvenal, D. Iunii Iuvenalis Saturae XIII Thirteen Satires of  Juvenal, intro. and notes C.H. Pearson and Herbert A. Strong (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 135–36 n. 33. On Morgante as dwarf and giant, Ghadessi Fleming, 74–113. . Symptoms:The Complete Home Medical Encyclopedia, ed. Sigmund Stephen Miller (London: Macmillan and Pan Books, 1979), 448–49; Bogdan, 149, 272–76, 287 n. 6. . 1 cubit = 18 in. or 45.72 cm. . Butler’s Lives 3:184, 187, quoting William Caxton’s English version of the Golden Legend.

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The saint’s monstrous size and appearance, and his search for a great prince who would take him into his court, make it tempting to suggest that Christofaro had learned to emulate features of his namesake’s story, and perhaps even to assume “Christopher” as a nom de travail. But the saint would eventually find a far higher king to serve, Jesus Christ, struggle with his former protector and ultimately suffer his martyr’s death. One needs to ask, then, if invoking the potential parallels between our Christofaro and the saintly giant would be invidious (comparing Francesco to the king who had the saint tortured and executed would have been an ill-judged introduction). Scripture and Christian history reminded believers that they lived in a divinely-created world, and our monster and his managers must have been acquainted with tales and imagery of monsters. The fact that Lasdal conducted Christofaro from city to city and planned to spend relatively little time in Siena might suggest that he believed his charge could be seen as inauspicious and rouse the locals to violence. But a better explanation would be that Lasdal knew he would exhaust the financial potential of displaying his exhibition after four months in one place. Neither can Christofaro have seen himself as ill-omened. Had he done so, what community would have embraced him, let alone what prince? He had survived into the adult world, unlike most inauspicious monsters, and his plea shows that his concerns were worldly. He was the focus of a secular partnership, and he addressed his letter not to the pope or an archbishop but rather to the province’s sovereign ruler. Christofaro’s letter does not exclude the possibility of his appeal to hospitals or charities, or indeed his recourse to the healing powers of a holy person or a miraculous image, but it strongly suggests that his main aim was to find a practical solution to the problems that engulfed and smothered his daily existence.

Monsters Displayed

Displaying monsters for money had long been common in Italy and beyond, and was even being licensed by the bishop of Ferrara in 1531. Ambroise Paré (1510–90) recounts that the poor parents of . “No exhibition featuring  Joseph [Merrick, the Elephant Man] could hope to remain for more than a week or so in any one place before its novelty began to fade. For such a plan to succeed it was essential that arrangements be made for him to travel to a succession of towns. It all needed a degree of thought and organization.” (Howell and Ford, 78). . Daston and Park, 190–191.

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conjoined twin sisters born in Verona in 1475 earned good money by showing them in “many Italian towns” to “people avid to see this new spectacle of nature” (Fig. 2.48). In 1583, when he wrote to Francesco, Christofaro was already on show for money. How Lasdal sustained and protected him, what the monster earned (if anything) and where the origins of their five-year relationship lay we do not know, nor Christofaro’s age and what he had done before encountering Lasdal. The trajectory of  Joseph Merrick (1860–90), the socalled Elephant Man, suggests a range of possibilities, albeit dating to Victorian England. Although his neurofibromatosis became obvious before he was five, and he soon became lame, the young Merrick knew some family life and attended school. He held down jobs until his disease and appearance forced him to enter the workhouse. Realizing that he could only escape by exhibiting himself as a freak, Merrick contacted a showman and would eventually be managed by a business partnership; he helped prepare his promotional pamphlet, and managed to save £50. Following a London clampdown on freak shows, Merrick traveled to the more lenient Continent, only to be robbed of his money and possessions and shunned. After a near-fatal journey home, he was found in London, gripping the calling card of doctor Frederick Treves, who had once viewed him at a show opposite the London Hospital. Treves rescued him, moved him into a remote area of the hospital and saw to his medical and nursing care; here Merrick would receive the charitable attention of cultivated Victorians and the royal family. One would need to know more about how showmen managed their monsters in Italy, but Lasdal must have been this sort of operator, taking on a business partner, and carting his monster from town to town. Christofaro’s condition was probably not so extreme as Merrick’s, whose hideous aspect would have been too frightening for the genteel surroundings of a princely court. Nurses and gentlewomen who visited the Elephant Man had to be carefully coached before first meeting him, learning to smile and shake his hand rather than scream, faint or run away. . Respectively, “plusieurs villes d’Italie” and “peuple, qui était fort ardent de voir ce nouveau spectacle de nature” (Ghadessi Fleming, 56, quoting from Paré’s Monstres et prodiges). . Howell and Ford, 56–57, 62–80, 89–100, 140–51, 190–210. . Ibid., 120–39, 202–9. . Ibid., 104, 118, 201–2.

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Fig. 3.  Johann Amos Comenius.“Deformes & Monstrosi” / “Deformed and Monstrous People.” From his Orbis sensualium pictus (London: 1728), XLIV, 55–56. Manchester,Chetham’s Library.

Christofaro’s predicament arose from his physical appearance and, above all, from what his contemporaries made of it; in order to survive, he had to adapt to this. The 1599 definition of “monster” by John Florio (1553–1625) reminds us that these oddities were best understood when on show. Although their “monstrosity” might assail the senses of touch, hearing or smell (and Merrick’s did all three), a monster was chiefly recognized by sight: Móstro, shewed, put to view, or declared. Also a monster or any deformed creature, or misƒhapen thing that exceedeth, lacketh or is disordered in . Ibid., 192–94, 197.

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natural form, any thing done against the course of nature, a monstrous and incredible thing, a marvellous figure, a strange sight.

Florio’s reference to things done “against the course of nature” implies not that monsters are “unnatural” but rather out of keeping with nature’s usual drift. The 1650 rubric accompanying the illustration of “Deformed and Monstrous People” by John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) identifies a number of these (Fig. 3): Monstrous and deformed people are those which differ in the body from the ordinary shape; as are, the huge Gyant, 1, the little Dwarf, 2. One with two bodies, 3. One with two heads, 4. & such like Monsters. Amongst these are reckoned,The jolt headed, 5.The great Nosed, 6.The blubber-lipped, 7. The bulb-cheeked, 8. The goggle-eyed, 9. The wrynecked, 10.The great-throated, 11.The crump-backed, 12.The crumpfooted, 13. the steeple-crowned, 15 adde to these the Bald pated, 14.

Far from fabulous monsters, these are recognizable types of people, with problematic conditions now considered as medical in origin.

Surface Ugliness

Even without knowing the nature of Christofaro’s abnormalities, we can deduce something about them. Perhaps because he was physically disabled or too frightening to appear unprotected in public, or both, Christofaro was unable or unwilling to move independently. He may have been distressingly ugly, if only in parts. In the Graeco-Roman tradition, then so influential on the visual arts, most people had some “scattering” of beauty. This notion originated in the search for ideal beauty by the ancient Greek painters Zeuxis and Apelles. Asked to produce an image of the most beautiful woman in the world (the goddess Hera or Helen of Troy), and unable to find a perfectly beautiful single model, they successfully fused the finest features of five local maidens. Like all . Florio, 234. . John Amost Comenius, Orbis Pictus: A Facsimile of the First English Edition of 1650, intro. John E. Sadler (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 199 (91); the illustration for “Deformes & Monstrosi” (XLIV) is reversed with that for “Hortorum cultura” (“The Dressing of Gardens”) (XLV), so the illustration here (Fig. 3) comes from the eleventh edition, Orbis sensualium pictus [. . .] visible world [. . .], English trans. Charles Hoole (London:  John and Benj. Sprint, 1728). . On “scattered beauty,” see Suzanne B. Butters,“From Skills to Wisdom: Making, Knowing and the Arts,” in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of

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commonplaces,“scattered beauty” was grounded in experience, so physical imperfections could be overlooked in favor of attractive features.Vivacity, wit and wisdom enable the ugly to win admirers, and love (“in the eye of the beholder”) can make glaring physical defects virtually invisible, as Ghirlandaio’s portrait of a bulbousnosed old man with an adoring child makes touchingly evident. Even Merrick would gain ardent admirers. With interpreters, his speech would be understood, and he proved intelligent, curious and kind. Though his horrific appearance was terrifying, those who persisted discovered that he read avidly, adored music and was fascinated by the accoutrements of upper middle-class life à la  Jane Austen. With a beautifully formed left arm and hand, accentuated by his deformed body, he made cardboard models of buildings and gave them as gifts. Unfortunately, ugly features often command more attention than lovely ones, and slight anomalies can lead people to read adverse characters into the faces of the virtuous and interesting. During Christofaro’s lifetime, classical theory maintained that inner virtue or character was writ on the face, a worrying precept in light of the 1596 statement by one anatomist; “All that is imperfect is ugly, and monsters are full of imperfections.” The Elephant Man’s own verses show how deeply sensitive he was to the issue: Empirical Knowledge ed. Pamela H. Smith, Amy Meyers and Harold Cook (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 52–53. . Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 188 fig. 186, 276–77; his drawing depicts the man from a harsher angle, accentuating his rhinophyma, 189 fig. 187, 304. . Howell and Ford, 112, 114–15, 126, 201. . Fiedler, figs. on 173. . Howell and Ford, 123, and unnumbered fig. before 129. . E.H. Gombrich, “The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art,” repr. in The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 105–36; cf. Durban, 177–81, on Bertram Mills, the 1920s circus owner and changing attitudes to beauty and ugliness among freaks. . For example, Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 191, 193–97, 203–5. . Daston and Park, 202–3, from Weinrich’s De ortu monstrorum commentarius.

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Tis true my form is something odd, But blaming me is blaming God; Could I create myself anew I would not fail in pleasing you. If I could reach from pole to pole Or grasp the ocean with a span, I would be measured by the soul; The mind’s the standard of the man.

If our monster was similarly ugly and deformed, was he this philosophical about it?

Two in One?

It is possible that Christofaro was born with too many or too few limbs (Figs. 3.3, 4, 5), or even too many heads (James V of Scotland had a two-headed jester) (Fig. 3.4). But might he have had the genitalia of both sexes? Hermaphrodites were unsettling, but it was possible to mitigate their troubling, provocative nature by associating them with renowned classical texts and imagery. Ovid recounted the mythical origins of Hermaphroditus, son of Mercury and Venus, and Pliny had described a Hellenistic bronze statue of him, lost but potentially known through several marble copies and Renaissance drawings after a standing version. When he visited Rome in November 1561, Francesco may have seen a classical statue of the god among those that had been excavated, recorded and collected, but no marble Hermaphrodite entered the grand-ducal collection until 1669. The Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) had seen a copy of the sleeping version, however, when it was found in a Roman drain, and carefully described it in his Commentaries; the figure was lying on a sheet thrown on a mound of earth,“and turned . Howell and Ford, 189, and cf. 184. . Fiedler, 82, 211–12. . Daston and Park, 34, 48, 52, 177, 196 fig. 5.7.1, 199, 200, 203; Freedberg, 277, 371; Fiedler, 178–96. . Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1981), 234–36 and fig. 120; Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists & Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller Publishers and Oxford University Press, 1986), 128–30. . Lapini, 132. . Haskill and Penny, 235.

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in a way to show both the masculine and feminine characteristics.” Transported to Florence, it is now lost, but its fame was widespread, as was that of the ancient agate-onyx cameo showing Eros Uncovering Hermaphroditus in the Presence of Aphrodite, once owned by Lorenzo the Magnificent but now in the Farnese collection. Bearing these examples in mind, it seems right to ask if Francesco would have invited a living hermaphrodite into his court. Didn’t monstrous curiosities need to be seen to be believed? Surprisingly, the antiquarian culture of the day could have accommodated this, even in the teeth of religious objections. If the grand duke had managed to procure an ancient Hermaphroditus for his new Uffizi gallery, assembled in the very year Christofaro wrote, he might have thought it witty to allow a real hermaphrodite to comment on its sculptural counterpart to select male visitors. But Francesco would have been much more interested in employing a living hermaphrodite in his alchemical laboratories, at the Casino Mediceo (Fig. 1).The alchemical “rebis,” Hermaphrodite, represented the perfect unity of the metallic seeds, sulphur (male) and mercury (female). United, these formed the prima materia, the original form of matter stripped of all its secondary characteristics from which the philosopher’s stone, the alchemist’s ultimate quest, could then be made. Given that alchemy was the ultimate secretive art, it could be argued that Francesco and his laboratory collaborators would have found the presence of a true hermaphrodite, kept out of the public’s view, inspirational. The motto on Michael Maier’s image of Albertus Magnus pointing to the alchemical symbol of hermaphrodite reads, “All are united in one which is divided in two parts” (Fig. 4). So . Bober and Rubinstein, 130. . Antonio Giuliani, in Nicole Dacos et al., Il Tesoro di Lorenzo il Magnifico: Repertorio delle gemme e dei vasi (repr. Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1980), 41 and pl. 5. . Suzanne B. Butters,“‘Una pietra eppure non una pietra’”: Pietre dure e le botteghe medicee nella Firenze del Cinquecento,” in Le Arti fiorentine: La Grande Storia dell’Artigianato 3, Il Cinquecento, ed. Franco Franceschi and Gloria Fossi (Florence: Giunti Gruppo Editoriale, 2000), 133–85, at 165–66. . Ibid., 164–65. . Gareth Roberts, The Mirror of Alchemy: Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (London: British Library, 1994), 22, 32 fig. 16, 89, 90 fig. 51; Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 98, 153–56. . Michael Maier, Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum (Frankfurt:Typis Antonij Hummij, impensis Lucae Iennis, 1617), 238; Roberts, 32; cf. the 1639 bronzetto of the Borghese Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Penny, 234), by the Medici sculptor Giovanni

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Fig. 4. Michael Maier, Albertus Magnus points to the alchemical symbol hermaphrodite. From his Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum (Frankfurt: 1617), 238. Manchester, Chetham’s Library.

the cultural terrain in Francesco’s circle was well suited to receiving a hermaphrodite monster. But once again, it is unlikely that Christofaro was one of these, not least because hermaphrodites were fully mobile, and he was not. Conjoined twins, such as those born in Rome on in April 1503, shown standing and joined at the umbilicus in a contemporary print, rarely survived to adulthood, but some did. These were also Francesco Susini (d.1646), inscribed on the front base, duplex cor vno in pectore/ saepe invenies./ cave insidias (“You will often find a double heart in a single breast; watch out for trickery”), and, on the back, dvplicem formam / vno in corpore vides. / mirare pvlchritvdinem (“You see a double form in one body; admire its beauty”). See Giambologna 1539–1608: Sculptor to the Medici, exh. cat., Edinburgh, London and Vienna, 1978–79, ed. Charles Avery and Anthony Radcliffe (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 196–97 and fig. 189. . Caroline P. Murphy, “Il ciclo di vita femminile: Norme comportamentali e pratiche di vita,” in Monaca, Moglie, Serva, Cortigiana: Vita e immagine delle donne tra Rinascimento e Controriforma, ed. Sara F. Matthews-Grieco with Sabina Brevaglieri (Florence: Morgana Edizioni, 2001), 14–47, at 33 fig. 36.

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Suzanne B. Butters • A Monster’s Plea

examples of “two in one” but clearly unable to move easily; unlike normal twins, they had no direct alchemical significance. To exclude the possibility that Christofaro had a conjoined sibling, we would need to know how such Siamese twins referred to themselves at the time. Later evidence suggests they invariably called each other by separate names, recognizing that each had his or her separate identity, and had learned how to cope with it. And yet, the two parts formed a single unit, like the monsters that Comenius calls “one with two bodies” or “one with two heads” (Fig. 3.3, 4). Conjoined females born in Cuenca in 1562, for example, were referred to as “un mostro” in the singular, though everyone realized there were two distinct creatures, each with her own habits and personality: a drawing of them was given to Francesco, then prince of Florence and residing in Spain, to be sent on to his father Cosimo I in Florence. The description shows them acting independently from the start. It is possible, then, that Christofaro was a “mostro” with a full-sized conjoined twin, but perhaps more likely that he had a “parasitic” body attached to his own. These pairs could certainly survive to adulthood (Fig. 2.46 and Fig. 5). The thirteen-year-old boy displayed in Florence in 1513 seemed . Alchemical twins join incestuously; though not conjoined, they do form “one perfect whole” (Abraham, 206). . Fiedler, 197–219.When the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton (d.1969) were asked, “Do Siamese Twins make love?”, and implicitly, “How?,” Violet answered “Sometimes I quit paying attention.... Sometimes I read and sometimes I just took a nap... we had learned not to know what the other was doing unless it was our business to know it.” (Ibid., 205–6, 208 fig.). . Cf. Hanafi on the conjoined twins from Prato, 20–21. . “[...] fu portato pochi dì sono un mostro nato [cancelled: unreadable] in terra di Cuenca al disegno del quale harà Vostra Eccellenza [Cosimo I de’ Medici] con lettere del prencipe mio signore, et come potrà conosciere sono due bambine create in un medesimo tempo nel ventre della madre et per un solo ombilico nutrite nate però si nutriscono ciascuna in diversi tempi et giuntamente come occorre necessità, né so come stia il fatto, ho veduta l’una prendere il latte dormir l’altra pianger questa, l’altra nutrirsi in somma la una non puote partecipare del contento o discontento della altra come se in tutto spiccate et partite fussero. [...]” (ASF, MdP 5040, fol. 325v, letter from Bernardetto Minerbetti in Madrid to Cosimo I de’ Medici in Florence, 5 November 1562, MAP #27881). . Ulisse Aldovandi, Monstrorum historiae (Bologna: Typis Nicolai Tebaldini, 1642), 614; Fiedler, 219–25. Some survived only days, however. See Daston and Park, 186 fig. 5.4.

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little bothered by his “parasite,” whose head was embedded in the boy’s body while its legs, genitals and partial body hung outside; they grew and urinated together. His Spanish showman earned handsomely. Schenk’s depiction of an adult in contemporary dress with a twin of this type suggests one mode of display (Fig. 2.46). Like theater curtains, the man’s cape could be opened to reveal his naked twin. One should remember, however, that the poor Fig. 5. Adult one-headed monster with two bodies (host and embedded creature parasitic twin). From Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum hismust usually have been toriae (Bologna: 1642), 614. Manchester, Chetham’s Library. clothed, not just for decorum but to protect both twins from the ill effects of exposure.

The Court Solution

The lucidity of Christofaro’s letter and carefully reasoned arguments, possibly aided by Romeri, suggest that he had been educated and socialized. This was often the case with the kinds of monsters commonly taken into the cultivated settings of princely courts, such as dwarves, giants and hirsutes; if they lacked learning, they could . Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516 continuato da un anonimo fino al 1542 (repr. Florence: Sansoni, 1985), 343. . Johannes Schenk, Monstrorum historia memorabilis (Frankfurt: Ex officina typographica Matthiae Beckeri, impensis viduae Theodori de Bry, & duorum eius filiorum, 1609), 65. . Fiedler, 220, provides photographs of later examples of both the parasite and the host clothed. . Daston and Park, 100–108, 193–95; Ghadessi Fleming, 74–140.

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acquire it here. Were Christofaro such a monster, he was right to imagine that life at a benevolent prince’s court could provide him with stable surroundings, a secure living and attention that was more curious than cruel.We noted giants above, and will now consider hirsutes and dwarves. Abnormally hairy people were curious and amazing. Although some of those described in fabulous sources are now thought to have been great apes, such as orangutangs, examples of human hirsutes were well known in Francesco I’s day, especially in princely circles. The hirsute Pedro Gonzalez, his glabrous wife and their hairy children lived at the Valois court of Henri II (d.1559) and Catherine de’ Medici (d.1589), and then moved on to the Farnese circle in Flanders, Parma and Rome. Widely studied, they were usually portrayed in elegant court dress, except for Pedro’s son “Arrigo peloso.” Given as a gift in 1595 by Ranuccio Farnese to his brother cardinal Odoardo, “Hairy Harry” would be depicted by Agostino Carracci as a kind of uomo salvatico, clad in animal skins, together with Odoardo’s jester and his dwarf. In 1590, a bearded woman, Brigida del Rio, joined the Spanish royal court where she was depicted by Sánchez Cotán, and it would be for the Spanish viceroy of Naples that José de Ribera painted a standing portrait of Magdalena Ventura, the Abruzzese bearded lady, in 1631. Bearded ladies were staples of later freak shows, and earlier rulers may have taken them up, but Christofaro was a man. To date, then, there is no evidence that Francesco had a hirsute at his court, but he probably wanted one. It was believed that wild men, commonly associated with these monsters, could tap . Ghadessi Fleming, 125. . Wittkower, 68; Fiedler, 154–77. . Ghadessi Fleming, 115, 125–56. . Ibid., 114–140 figs. 3, 49–51, 54–59. . Ibid., 138–39 fig. 31; Beverly Louise Brown, The Genius of Rome 1592–1623, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2001), 152–55. Findlen (311–13) plausibly suggests that the jester resembles Aldrovandi, the homo sylvestris conversing with the homo sapiens. . A.E. Pérez Sánchez, in The Golden Age of Spanish Painting, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1976), p. 52. . Ibid., 51–52 and color pl. 28. . Durbach, 8, 30, 104–8, 172, 180.

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Fig. 6.Valerio Cioli, Marble fountain with copy of the dwarf Morgante riding a tortoise, 1561–64. Boboli gardens, Florence.The restored original, now in the Boboli Stanzonaccio, was replaced with a copy in 1986. (Photograph Antonio Quattrone).

into nature’s secrets, a topic supremely dear to this prince. The only six portraits that his friend, the great naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), would hang in his villa depicted Aldrovandi, his wife, the Grand Dukes Francesco I and Ferdinando I, the homo sylvester Pedro Gonzalez and his hairy daughter, Antonietta. But we should dismiss the idea that Christofaro was a hirsute. Except for their genetic hairiness, they were physically normal and mobile. Our monster’s letter suggests he found it difficult to get around. . Ghadessi Fleming, 118–19. . Above, n. 84; Butters, Vulcan, 1:241–67; Findlen, passim on Francesco de’ Medici. . Findlen, 306–11.

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Suzanne B. Butters • A Monster’s Plea

Dwarves stand out for their sheer multitude in European princely courts, as do their pungent personalities as portrayed in chivalric romances, Renaissance epic poetry and history paintings with princely implications. Francesco, like his parents, relatives and political contemporaries, employed numerous dwarves; and many dwarves were noted for their intelligence, wit and political acumen. In some cases, their deformed bodies were represented nude, in the heroic manner (Fig. 6), but their ungainly appearance could also serve as a foil for beauty. Andrea del Sarto’s nano at Poggio a Caiano, with a monkey behind him, its tail gripping his drapery, was praised by Vasari as, “so well done that it is impossible to imagine proportions more beautiful for the deformity of his most strange form than those that he gave him.” When Allori completed the fresco for Francesco, he added, to the right, a beautiful semi-nude boy holding an exotic turkey, his contrapposto contrasting with the . Ibid., 82–88; O’ Bryan; Fiedler, 48–49, 51, 56–60. . Ghadessi Fleming, 74–113, including 100 and fig. 38 (Vasari and assistants, dwarf in fresco showing The Taking of the Fort at Siena’s Camollia Gate, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio); Frederick A. de Armas, Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 70–72 (dwarf in Giulio Romano’s Vatican fresco The Apparition of the Cross to Constantine); Silvestro Bardazzi and Eugenio Castellani, La Villa Medicea di Poggio a Caiano, 2 vols. (Prato: Edizioni del Palazzo, 1982), 2:435, 437, 511–35 (dwarf in fresco showing Ceasar Receiving Tributes from Egypt, begun in 1521 for Leo X (d.1521) by Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530) but completed in 1582 by Alessandro Allori (1535–1607) for Francesco I (ibid., 527 fig. 506). On the recent distinction between dwarves and midgets, the latter acquiring greater prestige, Bogdan, 174–75; Fiedler, 43. . Ghadessi Fleming, 80–91. . Salvador Salort and Susanne Kubersky-Piredda, “Art Collecting in Philip II’s Spain: The Role of Gonzalo de Liaño, King’s Dwarf and Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Part 1,” The Burlington Magazine 148.1243 (2006): 660–65; and cf. Fiedler, 59, on Richebourg, a dwarf spy during the French Revolution. . On Bronzino’s restored pendant portraits of Morgante, seen from front and back, see Sefy Hendler, entry IV.7, in Bronzino: Pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici, exh. Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 2010–2011, ed. Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali (Florence: Mandragora, 2010), 214–17, color pls. on 215 and 216; O’ Bryan, 263–65. . “[...] tanto ben fatto, che non si può immaginare nella difformità della stranissima forma sua la più bella proporzione di quella che gli diede.” See Giorgio Vasari, Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi, ed. Paola Barocchi, 9 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1973), 5:36; and cf. O’Bryan, 257, 275, on the association of dwarves with monkeys.

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Fig. 7. Andrea del Sarto and Alessandro Allori, Caesar receives tributes from Egypt. Fresco in Great Hall, Medici Villa at Poggio a Caiano. Detail: dwarf holding a box with a chameleon (Andrea del Sarto, 1521) adjacent toYoung Boy holding a turkey (Allori, 1582). (Photograph Antonio Quattrone).

dwarf ’s, implicitly comparing deformity with beauty, a common device in the depiction of dwarves in history paintings and portraits (Fig. 7). His juxtaposition with a pet monkey and a little dog reminds us that nani, like the court dwarf depicted by Tiberio di Tito (1573–1627) among the bejeweled Medici lapdogs in the Boboli Gardens, were viewed as pets as much as servants (Fig. 8). The omnipresence of court dwarves might seem to bear out Fiedler’s claim, that “unlike other human oddities, [dwarves] belong to history rather than teratology.” This accurately reflects how they have been studied, but if we knew more about the lives of other kinds of monsters, they too could emerge from the scientific shadows into the light of history. It is tempting to suggest, then, that Christofaro was a dwarf, but this also seems unlikely, above all because being a nano was a profession in itself. Our monster signs himself “Mostro,” showing that he had embraced this identity as his own, much as artisans linked their names, for administrative purposes, to the profession they practiced or the work they did.These working epithets usually referred to the skill the person had acquired, but some alluded to his or her appearance and implied that the subject’s “professional” life was driven by it. One of these stands out . O’Bryan, 252–54, 261–63, 276–78. . Marilena Mosco, ed., Natura viva:Animal Paintings in the Medici Collection, exh. cat. Florence 1985–1986 (Florence: Centro Di, 1985), 85. On dwarves and dogs, Fiedler, 70, 76–79; Ghadessi Fleming, 81–82; O’ Bryan, 255. . Fiedler, 58.

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on a folio from Florence’s 1562 census, covering those living in the city’s parish of Sant’Ambrogio. In a neighborhood including woodworkers (legnaiuoli), mattress-makers (materassai), shoemakers (calzolai), builders (muratori), tanners (coiai), second-hand goods sellers (rigattieri), spinners (filatoiai), porters (portatori) and millers (mugnai), we find “Morgante di Bartolomeo Nano.” The best known dwarf then at the Medici court, Morgante, had many talents, and yet his work and tag were driven by his size (Fig. 6).When Christofaro Tagliare signed himself “Mostro,” he alluded to his physical condition but also to that fact that he had learned to survive by virtue of it; though the categorization of dwarves increasingly overlapped with that of monsters, Christofaro declared that he worked as a “mostro,” not as a “nano.” It is interesting, then, to reflect on the thirty-two-year-old “Tiny King” (Re Picino), living in Rome in 1585 and described as “very clever and entertaining” (Fig. 9). His small stature (2 Roman palmi or

Fig. 8.Tiberio diTito, Medici dwarf with lapdogs in the Boboli Gardens, early seventeenth century. Private Collection. Fine Art Photographic Library, London/Art Resource, NY.

. I Fiorentini nel 1562: Descritione delle Bocche della Città et Stato di Fiorenza fatta l’anno 1562, ed. Silvia Meloni Trkulja (Florence: Alberto Bruschi, 1991), fol. 135r. . O’Bryan, 270–73.

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Fig. 9. Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri, Portrait of the Re Picino in Rome, 1585. Engraving from his Opera nela quale vie molti Mostri de tute le parti del mondo antichi et moderni. British Museum, London. ©Trustees of the British Museum.

.45 meters) suggests he was a dwarf, and yet he was called a “mostro” because of his almost vestigial legs. Similarly, a beautiful contemporary eight-year-old girl, with a well-formed body, is described as “monstrous” because she has no legs or thighs (Fig. 10).Their extreme

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Fig. 10. Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri, Portrait of a Monstruosa Fanciulla in Rome, 1585. Engraving from his Opera nela quale vie molti Mostri de tute le parti del mondo antichi et moderni. British Museum, London. ©Trustees of the British Museum.

immobility and vulnerability is accentuated by their display on tables, like curious human ornaments. In the Tiny King we have a possible . The engravings come from the series published in Rome by Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri (c.1525–1601), Opera nela quale vie molti Mostri de tute le parti del mondo antichi

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prototype for Christofaro, dwarf-like and yet a monster and totally dependent on others. It is noteworthy that Re Picino was a well-known “king” among the thirty-eight plebeian “rulers” whose brigades or “Powers” (Potenze), ruled over their own territories in Florence and celebrated in the city’s festivities. Remembered in verse, he had been named Re Picino by Cosimo I for the 1545 festivities of Florence’s patron saint,  John the Baptist. Because of his “dwarf stature” the gold brocade sash the duke gave him reached the ground. Our 1585 Tiny King is surrounded by hearty food and drink, like that served in the taverns with which many potenze were associated, and the drapery set aside could be construed as a sash, though a rather plain one. It is tempting to suggest, then, that he was associated with Florentines in Rome, where this nation was amply represented. Could this Re Picino be our Christofaro, or another similar monster, taken in by one of these men and given a popular Florentine nickname, to replace the one he had been born with?

What Next?

At first, the wish of Christofaro Tagliare Mostro to be taken into the court of Francesco I seems well judged. But a closer examination et moderni con le dechiarationi a ciasch’eduno sina [sic] al prese[n]te Anno. 1585; on this print engraver and seller, Bruno Passamani, “Cavalieri Giovanni Battista,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960–), 22 (1979), 673–75. . Cronaca Fiorentina 1537–1555, ed. Enrico Coppi, (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000), 51; David Rosenthal, “The Genealogy of Empires: Ritual Politics and State Building in Early Modern Florence, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 8 (1999): 197–234, at 201, 210; and most recently David Rosenthal, “Owning the Corner: The “Powers” of Florence and the Question of Agency,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (2013): 181–96 at 181–86. . For example, the ottava “A messer Giovanni Rondinelli”, Egloghe ed altre rime di Antonfrancesco Grazzini detto il Lasca, compiled by G.D. Poggiali, ed. D. Poggiali (Livorno: s.n., 1799), 267–80 at 277. .“L’altro palco fu al canto del Giglio domandato Re Piccino, et così volse il duca che fusse chiamato. Egli donò un saio di broccato d’oro all’antica che gli dava infino in terra e lui era di statura come nano et il detto Re Piccino era nella medesima strada occhialaio.” (Coppi, 201). . Rosenthal, Genealogy of Empires, 206–7; the Re Piccino’s kingdom was centered on Florence’s Canto del Giglio, the location of one its oldest taverns (Roberto Ciabani, I Canti: Storia di Firenze attraverso i suoi Angoli (Florence: Cantini, 1984), 179. .The birth name of the Medici dwarf Morgante was Braccio di Bartolo (Ghadessi Fleming, 80).

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reveals that virtually all the grand duke’s monsters were dwarves, the group most historically and culturally adaptable to court life, and probably the easiest to find and employ. But our monster cannot have been a dwarf. Biblical overtones might lead a ruler to avoid a giant named after Saint Christopher, but most would have welcomed giants like those at Ferrara and Ambras. With a hirsute, Francesco could have competed with his Valois relations and Farnese adversaries, while exploiting the association of wild men with natural secrets, and his alchemical explorations would have been complemented by the presence of a hermaphrodite. But these kinds of monsters moved easily, and Christofaro did not. No evidence of conjoined or parasitic twins at princely courts has come to light, and yet their “two in one” nature recommended them culturally.The nineteenth-century entertainment world provides many talented and versatile examples of these. Who is to say their equivalents did not exist in 1583? But our most plausible typological model must be the Tiny King, apparently a dwarf but really a monster. Although his extreme physical dependence would have made him challenging to manage, his wit and entertainment value would have recommended him at court (Fig. 4). Questions remain. Where did Christofaro and his managers come from? Were monsters exhibited at contemporary Italian fairs? Did displaying them require a license, like the bishop’s in Ferrara? Trawling through avvisi from Italy and abroad might prove fruitful, and so too judicial records to discover more about the kind of partnership that Lasdal agreed with Romeri. Searching for a few needles in some very large haystacks springs to mind, however. But even without them, imagining Christofaro’s situation, as he described it on the point of desperation, has allowed us to empathize with the predicament of an otherwise invisible and inaudible historical protagonist.

Appendix Letter from “Christofaro Tagliare Mostro” (fol. 452r) “Al Serenissimo Gran Duca di Toscana unicho mio Signore” (fol. 455bis v), Siena 14 August 1583 (ASF, MdP 762, fols. 452r and 455bis v) Serenissimo Gran Duca . Above, nn. 51–52. . Durbach, 20; Bogdan, 28, 150, 161–175, 212–22. . I have normalized the accents and punctuation.

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[452r] Ritrovandomi al presente cinque anni sonno andare per il mondo con molto mio fastidio et travaglio con messer Guglielmo Lasdal, il quale oltre che di me facci guadagno per tutte le città dove ne occorre fermare, mi batte et percuote molto crudelmente, come più li torna bene sí come ancora ha fatto per il passato, che io più nol posso comportare. Hora il detto Guglielmo mi tiene in compagnia di messer Niccolò Romeri, et questa compagnia compagnia [sic] dura quattro mesi, de quali ne son passati dui, nel qual tempo ho ritrovato il detto messer Nicolò molto di me amorevole, et affettionato, che pare che sia stato la man de Dio per me. Io havendolo addimandato quale gliè il più gran Signore d’Italia, mi ha risposto et detto che gliè il Gran Duca di Toscana. Al quale io al presente mi offerisco et desidero che Vostra Altezza Serenissima si contenti tenermi in sua corte, ch’io mi rallegrarò grandemente quando Vostra Altezza Serenissima mi riscriverà, per una sua calda lettera, che io me ne venga in Fiorenza a suo servitio la dove io sarò suo fidelissimo servitore. Perchè il detto compagno messer Niccolò mi ci condurrà, perchè lui è disposto perdere più presto tutto quello che ha che farmi stare in le mani di detto Guglielmo perchè vede apertamente quanto crudelmente fin qui si ha portato di me. Et io, desiderando essere in potere di Vostra Altezza Serenissima, ho voluto con le lachrime agli occhi pregarla et di raccommandarmi a Lei la si contenti liborarmi [sic, liberarmi] da questa mia misera servitù poichè io vedo, con grandissima mia vergogna et scorno vendermi le mie carni, et scrivermi che il detto Niccolò mi ci voglia condurre avanti che partiamo dal felicissimo stato di Vostra Altezza Serenissima. Che Dio il salvi, et mantenga, che io mi contento essere in potere di lei, alla quale con ogni humiltà mi offero et raccommando, di Siena il dì 14 di agosto 1583. Di Vostra Altezza Serenissima Humilissino [sic, Humilissimo] servitore, Christofaro Tagliare Mostro

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Preaching in a Poor Space: Savonarolan Influence at Sister Domenica’s Convent of la Crocetta in Renaissance Florence  Meghan Callahan “Build me a simple place.” These were Christ’s instructions to Sister Domenica da Paradiso (1473–1553) when he commanded her to erect a convent in his name. In 1511, Sister Domenica fulfilled Christ’s mandate by building the convent of la Crocetta on former Medici land near the church of SS. Annunziata in Florence. Influenced by Girolamo Savonarola’s reform movement and his pleas for a return to austerity in church architecture, Sister Domenica’s convent was plain and simple. Like Savonarola, Sister Domenica was a preacher, and her voice filled the spare space of the church with rich imagery of the splendors of heaven, urging her spiritual sons and daughters to build credit with God rather than with banks. But despite her exhortations 1. I thank Carolyn Valone for first teaching me at Trinity University about nuns’ patronage. I am also grateful to the former archbishop of Florence, Ennio Cardinal Antonelli, and his successor, Monsignor Giuseppe Betori, for granting me permission to enter the cloistered areas of the convent of la Crocetta, and to Sister Osanna, Sister Maria Rosa, and Sister Antonina, for welcoming me into their home. . Archivio del Monastero di Sta. Croce (la Crocetta), Florence, (hereafter AMC); Francesco da Castiglione, Vitae Venerandae Sponsae Christi Sororis Dominicae de Paradiso, segnato 2 (hereafter Vitae), 200v,“Tu ergo O sponsa mea, aedifica mihi locum simplicem, purum, religonem, praeserentem…”; Meghan Callahan,“The Politics of Architecture: Suor Domenica da Paradiso and Her Convent of la Crocetta in PostSavonarolan Florence” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2005), 200; idem, “‘In Her Name and with Her Money’: Suor Domenica da Paradiso’s Convent of la Crocetta in Florence,” in Italian Art, Society and Politics: A Festschrift for Rab Hatfield, ed. B. Deimling, J.K. Nelson, Gary Radke (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 117–27. . Callahan, “Politics of Architecture,” 129–31. On the Medici land see Caroline Elam,“Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Urban Development of Renaissance Florence,” Art History 1 (1978): 51–53; Linda Pellecchia, “Reconstructing the Greek House: Giuliano da Sangallo’s Villa for the Medici in Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52 (1993): 323–38; Gaetano Miarelli Mariani,“Il disegno per il complesso mediceo di Via Laura a Firenze: Un significativo intervento urbano prefigurato da Giuliano da Sangallo per Lorenzo il Magnifico,” Palladio 22.1-1v (1972): 127–62. . A theme found in Domenica’s sermon of 28 July 1516. For the transcription see Rita Librandi and Adriana Valerio, I sermoni di Domenica da Paradiso. Studi e testo critico (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzo 1999), 10.

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Fig. 1. AMC, Leopoldo Veneziani, groundplan of la Crocetta, 1811. (Photo author, with the kind permission of Sister Antonina).

to ignore material goods, Sister Domenica was a keen money manager. She earned money from work in the textile industry and gathered donations from supporters such as Girolamo Gondi, Marco del Nero, Federigo de’ Ricci and the duchess of Camerino, Caterina Cibo, to build a convent that with its walled garden eventually spanned an area of roughly 12,650 square meters (Fig. 1). Beginning in about 1507, Sister Domenica’s life was chronicled by her confessor, the San Lorenzo canon Francesco da Castiglione (1463–1542). His unpublished manuscripts were used for later printed editions of her life, commissioned as part of the canonization process started by Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine in 1611, which ultimately proved unsuccessful. Sister Domenica’s biography . Measurements taken from an 1811 plan of the convent and garden, depicting the area enclosed within the walls built in 1537. . The use of “Onesti” as Francesco’s last name is incorrect. See my “Suor Domenica da Paradiso as ‘alter Christus’: Portraits of a Renaissance Mystic,” Sixteenth Century Journal 53.2 (2012): 323–50, at 325. . On the beatification process see Giulia Calvi, Histories of a PlagueYear:The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence. trans. D. Biocca and B. Ragan, Jr., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 199–229; Raffaele Argenziano,“Suor Domenica da Paradiso: L’iconografia del sepolcro di una mistica di primo Cinquecento,” Hagiographica: Rivista di agiografia e biografia della Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino 16 (2009): 317–39, at 323–25; Callahan,“Suor Domenica,” 342.

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is unique among “living saints” in the claims that Christ instructed this lower-class farm girl to build a convent. Events on the farm were interpreted by Francesco and the mystic as symbolic of her future.When she was seven, the Lord told Domenica that she would have to work and cultivate land to make sure it was arable because the land stood for the souls for which she would eventually be responsible. When she was nine, the Lord noted that he would give her many chicks to gather under her wings. Francesco recorded that the Lord also told Domenica that she would enter a monastery, leave it and then create a congregation of her own “daughters.” When a chicken bit Domenica on the nose for having gone too close to the chicks, the lesson was that she should apply similar ferocity to taking care of souls. Domenica would have to remember to be like that chicken and defend her own “chicks,” evoking  Jesus’ words “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that kills the prophets and stones them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings and ye would not.”This was also a favored motif of Girolamo Savonarola, who included it in his sermons. Francesco was surely aware of the biblical source and Savonarola’s use of the motif, and this was only one example in which he linked Domenica to both Savonarola and  Jesus in the biography. Domenica left the farm to live in Florence on 6 December 1499, about a year and a half after Savonarola’s execution on 23 May 1498. Dressed in a homemade habit and addressed as “sister,” Domenica . On “living saints” in Italy, see Gabriella Zarri. Le Sante vive: Cultura e religiosità femminile nella prima età moderna (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990). . AMC, Francesco da Castiglione, Persecutiones exagitatae contra Ven. Sponsam  J. C. Sor. Dominicam etc. De simulata Dorotheae Sanctitate, et Ultiones Divinae contra persecutores descriptae per Franc. De Honestis (hereafter Persecutiones), 8r, “…quando ella era disette annj Gli disse chella haveva a lavorare et cultivare molte terrre cherano anchora sode per quelle terre significava lanime.… ” . Ibid. See also Vitae, 5r. . Persecutiones, 8r,“Poi in dodici anni dela vita sua gli disse chella si aparechiassi ad havere cura delanime come una feroce chioccia chela mordeva nel naso toccando lei e suoi pulcini, era feroce a difinderli, cosi lei fussi dextra et veloce gallina et imparassi da quella chioccia a defendere anche le esuoi pulcini, et ricordassisi ci cio quando fussi el tempo.” . Luke 13:34, Matt. 13:37. Ronald M. Steinberg, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Florentine Art and Renaissance Historiography (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), 85.

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was neither a nun nor an official tertiary, but her healing skills and charitable activities had given her reputation for saintliness. She lived in Giovanni da Sanminiato’s home in Borgo Ognissanti, where she worked for eight years as a servant and textile worker. By 1509 Sister Domenica moved into a rented house with a growing group of female followers who became the first nuns of la Crocetta. She had earlier aligned herself with piagnoni, including Domenico Benivieni, a canon at San Lorenzo who introduced her to Francesco, and the San Marco friars Pier Paolo Beccuti, Silvestro da Marradi,  Jacopo da Sicilia and Sante Pagnini, though she later split with the friars over their attempts to control her. Despite her lower-class roots, Sister Domenica managed to attract members of the Florentine elite, including Girolamo Gondi, Marco del Nero and Federigo de’ Ricci, who supported her drive to reform the Dominican Order and quietly provided her with funding to build la Crocetta. Sister Domenica’s accomplishment in building the convent was unprecedented for a woman of low birth. As Carolyn Valone and other scholars have noted, female patronage of convents during the early modern period was usually restricted to the upper classes, who used architecture to publicly proclaim their inheritances, family dynamics and views on religious reform. Sister Domenica’s low social status would have impeded her architectural voice if not for her remarkable ability to convince her followers that she was a “living saint” who could speak directly to God. . Adriana Valerio, Domenica da Paradiso profezia e politica in una mistica del Rinascimento (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, 1992), 22; Callahan,“Politics of Architecture,” 43–54; Isabella Gagliardi, Sola con Dio: La missione di Domenica da Paradiso nella Firenze del primo Cinquecento (Florence: SISMEL, 2007), 31–37. . Callahan, “Politics of Architecture,” 17, citing Valerio, Domenica da Paradiso, 43; Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation:The Savonarolan Movement in Florence 1494–1545 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 190–93, 203. . Callahan,“In Her Name.” . Ibid., 112. . Carolyn Valone, “Architecture as a Public Voice for Women in SixteenthCentury Rome,” Renaissance Studies 15.3 (2001): 301–23; idem, “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560–1630,” The Art Bulletin 76.1 (1994): 129–46; idem, “Elena Orsini, Daniele da Volterra and the Orsini Chapel,” Artibus et historiae 22 (1990): 79–87; idem, “Roman Matrons as Patrons,” in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig Monson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 49­–72. See also the essays in the present volume.

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Meghan Callahan • Preaching in a Poor Space

Domenica was in her teens when Girolamo Savonarola came to Florence and preached, and she very likely heard some of his sermons. She certainly would have known about their content, in which he urged Florentines to curb their excessive interest in money and goods so that the city could become a new  Jerusalem. Calling for a return to simplicity in architecture, dress and behavior, Savonarola condemned the vainglorious Florentine practice of displaying family arms on chapels and building churches, chapels and palaces at the expense of the poor. Sister Domenica would later allow no family arms in her convent church; only the Cross, as the arms of her husband, Jesus Christ, was displayed.The red cross that she wore on her mantle to distinguish her from official Dominican tertiaries was adopted as the stemma of the convent. None of Sister Domenica’s spiritual followers, who provided the money for the convent and nuns’ dowries, were credited through display or in the biographies for their financial support. Instead, Sister Domenica’s legendary hard work and a miraculous tale of the Virgin providing her with gold ducats for building were the explanations for the mystic’s success. The simplicity of la Crocetta, and Sister Domenica’s rule against familial display, were not typical in Renaissance Florence.The neutral sandstone of the unfinished façades of San Lorenzo, Sta. Croce, and the Duomo contrasted with their rich interiors, where the flickering light of candles reflected off the gilded frames of large altarpieces, gold embroidered tapestries and silver liturgical vessels. Most churches contained a visual reference to who had paid for them, such as the Medici balls on the exterior of San Marco or Giovanni Rucellai’s name boldly inscribed on the façade of Sta. Maria Novella. Other signs appeared on the inside, where chapels and altar frames were adorned with family shields. In his sermons, Savonarola instructed Florentines to dress themselves and their buildings simply. Reviving what was believed to be the simplicity of the early Church had long featured in religious reform movements, including those of Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Francis of Assisi among others. . Marcia B. Hall,“Savonarola’s Preaching and the Patronage of Art,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed.Timothy G. Verdon and  John Henderson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 495–97. I thank Rab Hatfield for the reference to Savonarola’s injunction against family arms in chapels. . Callahan,“In Her Name,” 114.

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In the beginning of February 1511, about a month after Domenica had Girolamo Gondi pay 418 florins for two plots of land on via Ventura (now via Laura) in Florence, God continued to instruct her about the convent. The Lord told her that while she was building his “nest, ” Domenica should follow the examples of the “true” religious orders and their founders: St. Dominic, St. Francis and St. Benedict. All three men followed the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. They were the architects of new orders, just as Sister Domenica would be, and built new churches and convents to house their followers. In the first years of the new orders, most of the convents were relatively simple in architectural form. Domenica’s convent was to be equally simple. In the vision, Christ reminded Domenica that he was born in a stable and that good Christians should imitate that aspect of his life. He was not pleased by the vain ornament and pomp found in contemporary convents and churches. If she wanted him to live in “her building,” Domenica would do well to build “…his house simply [and] humbly so that pilgrims would come.” If the building became too ostentatious, vaulted and excessively ornamented, she should relinquish the project and run away. He concluded by telling Sister Domenica to teach her sons and daughters a lesson through her example of constructing a humble monastery. The injunction for simplicity echoes Savonarola’s description of the perfect convent by the pseudo-Burlamacchi, the translator of the Latin “Life” of the Ferrarese friar. In a section entitled . Callahan,“In Her Name,” 116, citing AMC, Ricordanze, 1r. . Callahan, “Politics of Architecture,” 200–204, citing AMC, Vitae, 200v, “Spectabo ego opera, eaq[ue] excipiam, Sanctus Dominicus, Sanctus Franciscus, Sanctus Benedictus, Multe‚ q[ue] me‚ spo[n]se, exemplaria in terris reliqueru[n]t.” . Ibid., “Tu ergo O sponsa mea, aedifica mihi locum simplicem, purum, religonem, praeseserentem.…” . Ibid.,“Si cupis ergo o sponsa me habitare in aedificio tuo, aedifica mihi domu[m] simplicem, humilem, quae peregrine conveniat.…” . Callahan, “Politics of Architecture,” 202; La Vita del Beato Ieronimo Savonarola scritta da un anonimo del sec. xvi e già attribuita a Fra Pacifico Burlamacchi, ed. Piero Ginori Conti (Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 1937). Roberto Ridolfi believed it represented a copy of an earlier, lost Italian translation. In his Opuscoli di Storia Letteraria e di Erudizione: Savonarola, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Giannotti, (Florence: Bibliopolis, 1942), 23, Ridolfi dated the Latin life of Savonarola to 1528–29, and the pseudoBurlamacchi to 1538–39. See also Ridolfi, Vita di G. Savonarola, 6th. ed. (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1981), 1:101–2; Domenico di Agresti, Sviluppi della riforma monastica savonaroliana, (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1980), 17.

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“How (Savonarola) wanted to build a new convent,” the pseudoBurlamacchi discussed a speech Savonarola made around 1493, in which the friar called for reformation of the sumptuous buildings and dress that were preventing the Dominicans from carrying out their true duties in the service of God. The Ferrarese would begin by building a new convent “…in the way and form that the ancient Holy Fathers had built.… ” The Holy Fathers “… did not make fancy palaces, but poor and simple monasteries and cells… the said monastery would be famous (through its) simplicity and not in precious stones… but humble and low to the ground.”  Small whitewashed cells would be divided by wood or cane screens, with wooden “doorjambs, hinges and thresholds” that had no “ironworks or keys.”  The cloisters and churches would be “…simple, unvaulted, with wooden columns or bricks, in the church no “curious” figures but simple and devout, without any vanities… in a way that everything would emit the aroma of devotion and simplicity.” Before gaining entry, visitors would be asked:“Are you simple? If you are simple, enter, and if you are not, leave, because here no one enters but the simple.” . Conti, 51. . Ibid., “…hedificare un altro convento nel modo et forma che gli antichi Santi Padri havevono hedificato.…” . Ibid. “Non facevono palazzi pomposi, ma poveri et semplici monasteri et celle.… Et voleva che detto monasterio fussi famoso in ogni semplicità et non in pietre pretiose… ma humile et basso a terra.…” . Ibid. “…piccole celle, li tramezzi della quali fussino o d’asse o di canne tessute et le camere intonicate; li stipiti cardinali et soglie degli usci et finestre voleva che fussino di legno con serrami di legno, senza ferramenti, o chiave, in modo che alli ladri fussino patenti; e’ chiostri et chiesa semplici, sanza [sic] volte; le colonne di legno, o mattoni cotti; in chiesa non figure curiose, ma semplice et devote, senza alcuna vanità. Et paramenti, lani o lini, secondo il costume della parrocchia nostra di Santo Domenico, e’ calici et ogn’altra cosa necessaria al culto divino senza superfluità, in modo che ogni cosa gitassi odore di devotione et semplicità.” See also Ridolfi, Vita di G. Savonarola, 101–2. . Ibid. . Ibid., “Trovandomi io presente, quando, leggendo, dichiarava questo suo desiderio, mi ricordo questo che diceva: ‘Quando sarà perfecta la fabrica di questo convento, verranno gli altri alla porta et domanderanno di parlare a tal frate et a tal padre; il portinaio risponderà: Siate voi semplici? Se voi siate semplici entrate, et se non siate partitevi, perchè qua non entra se non semplici’.”

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Although Savonarola planned the convent, found an architect and a location near Florence called Montecavo, construction never began. Older friars who did not understand the younger men’s devotion and readiness to move thwarted Savonarola’s plans. The friars’ relatives also opposed the plans, saying that the new convent would be a “…crowded mess of friars and poor young men… [because they] had too little experience, [and] had too much indiscreet fervor.” The older friars and relatives (who would most likely have funded the convent) won out, and the project was abandoned. Savonarola turned his attention to other aspects of reform, and shortly afterward the congregation of San Marco separated from the Lombard Congregation. Savonarola’s focus on simplicity and references to the ancient holy fathers were echoed in Christ’s repeated injunctions to Sister Domenica and his instructions to follow St. Benedict, St. Francis and St. Dominic as models. The similarities in the major points in the texts of the pseudo-Burlamacchi and of Francesco suggest that Domenica or Francesco might have seen a copy of the lost text used by the pseudo-Burlamacchi but also reflects a wider interest in simplicity in sixteenth-century reform movements. Francesco owned a copy of Savonarola’s De Simplicitate vitae christianae, his Compendio di Rivelazione, and printed and manuscript versions of the Triumpho della croce, all of which he left to Sister Domenica in his will. De Simplicitate vitae christianae was published in Latin in 1496 and in the same year Domenico Benivieni’s brother Girolamo translated it into Italian. Among the advice and instructions centered around . Conti, 53.Weinstein, Savonarola:The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet, (New Haven:Yale University Press: 2011), 83, did not believe Savonarola intended to move the friars to Montecavo. . Ibid., 53–54 “…a li parenti degli frati, li quali havevano apparecchiato ogni cosa, dissono che questo sarebbe un macello di frati et degli poveri giovani li quali, come di poca esperientia, havevono troppo indiscreto fervore.…” . Martin Luther would later share a similar interest in simplifying Christians’ access to God through direct reading of the Bible, and Protestants would dispense with much of the art associated with the cult of saints. . AMC, Libro di Conti, Francesco da Castiglione’s Last Will and Testament, 29v. Gagliardi, 378–82, published a copy of Francesco’s will held in the archbishop’s archive in which the Savonarolan texts were not listed. . Girolamo Savonarola, La Semplicità della Vita Cristiana, ed. and trans.Tito S. Centi, O.P. (Milan: Edizioni Arles, 1996), 5.

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living simply and modestly, Savonarola included his criticisms of monastic architecture and the trappings of convents. Monks and friars had been building “…not monasteries but palaces” and spent money on expensive robes despite their vows of poverty. Nuns were no better restrained, and Savonarola moaned he had “so much to write [about them] that there wasn’t enough paper… [they] had… too many superfluous items, both personal and communal objects, such as tunics and clothing in duplicate and triplicate as well as little goldbound books, wooden and gesso baby Jesus dolls; idols that they dressed in gold, silver and pearls.” The poor had no bread to eat, yet the nuns had no compassion for them. Savonarola, playing on the similarities between “honor” and “adorn” (onore/ornare), claimed “…many excused themselves by saying ‘We do all of this for the honor of God, in adorning and enlarging churches and walls we honor God,’” and chastised his audience by asking just how such adornment honored God. Such ornament did not serve the less fortunate, and the gold and silver chalices and crucifixes should be melted down and the money given to the poor. The poor were the true temples of Christ, not the marble temples that were built and adorned, and Savonarola urged his readers to feed the poor as Christ had commanded. Whether directly inspired by Savonarola’s words or expressing her own views on church reform, Sister Domenica ensured that la Crocetta had a simple, unvaulted hall church, and was lacking in art at a time when richly-colored altarpieces by artists such as Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino were being installed in Florentine churches. An inventory Sister Domenica compiled in 1518 with Francesco da Castiglione and the procurator Gherardo Gherardi listed several works of art but no artists: “…a panel on the high altar of the seculars’ church, painted with the story of the Savior who carries the cross, and other pictures… a panel with a tabernacle that is, a picture in it, of the Virgin, above the said altar [dedicated to the Virgin in the exterior church]… more paintings of the Virgin on panels, and in relief [i.e., sculptures] crucifixes in relief . Conti, 128. . Ibid. On nuns’ belongings see Silvia Evangelisti,“Monastic Poverty and Material Culture in Early Modern Italian Convents,” The Historical  Journal 47.1 (March 2004): 1–20. . Conti, 129.

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Fig. 2. AMC, Anonymous Florentine, Nativity, c.1475 (?). (Photo author, with the kind permission of Sister Antonina).

and figures of various saints and on the altar and in other places in the convent.” A Nativity painting hung above a wooden altar in . AMC, Libro di Conti della Fabbrica fatta a tempo della B.M. Suora Domenica dal paradiso fatto da Go. di Banco degli Albizzi Procuratore et Operaio del Convento, Segnalato

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the interior church.The Virgin Mary, working through that painting, was credited with helping Sister Domenica save the convent from a fire in 1515. Antonio del Ceraiuolo, a student of Sister Domenica’s follower Lorenzo di Credi, was paid for the high altarpiece in 1518, but the painter of the Nativity remains anonymous (Fig. 2). The altar dedicated to the Virgin also had a painted and dressed wooden statue of Mary, and two “painted children, one of terracotta and the other of gesso,” most likely figures of the Christ child or the young Saint  John the Baptist. Despite Savonarola’s condemnation of gold and silver liturgical items and costly textiles, the convent owned four gold-plated silver chalices and matching patens, three crystal reliquaries, a gold-plated brass cross, four pairs of brass candelabras for the altar and four iron candleholders with other altar fixtures. Brightly colored altar covers were fringed with red and yellow taffeta, and fuori lett. R. (hereafter Libro di Conti), Inventory of the convent, 15r “…i [una] Tavola sopra laltare maggiore delachiesa de secularj, dipinta dela hystoria del salvatore ch[e] porta la croce, & con altre pitture, & contutti esua ornamento, vale ___lire 350__.… …i (uno) Altare delegnio indetta chiesa, alavergine con/la predella, che vale intucto ___lire . 10___.… …i (una)Tavola co[n] untabernaculo cioe una pictura dentro aq[ue]lla, dela vergine, sopra immediate detta altare co[n] sua orname[n]ti lire___ .91___.… …Piu dipinture delavergine intavole, & dirilievo, Crucifixi dirilieveo, & figure divarij sancti & sopra altare & i[n] diversi luoghi del monasterio vagliono tutti insieme ___lire 140.… . AMC, Libro di Conti, “Inventory of the convent,” 15r, “...i [uno] Altare chiuso dalbero i[n] d[i]c[t]a chiesa dadentro sotto alanativita cioe alavergine et albambino, con la predella delegnio___lire 14__” In the Vitae, 255v, Francesco switched the locations of the paintings and described a Nativity in a gilded frame with other paintings around it over the altar of the Virgin, in the exterior church. It now hangs in the nuns’ interior church. On the Nativity see also Megan Holmes, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2013), 93. Holmes dates the Nativity to c.1475, see idem, 94 fig. 68. . Callahan, “Antonio del Ceraiuolo at la Crocetta and a Note on Lorenzo di Credi’s Niece,” The Burlington Magazine 152.1282 (January 2010): 7–11. . AMC, Libro di Conti,“Inventory of the convent,” 15r “…i [una]Statua dalegnio dela gloriosa vergine dipinta viso & [le ]mani, co[n] corona, vestimenti, et altri ornata, Et dua bambinj dipinti belli, uno di terra cotta laltro digesso, posta d[i]tta vergine intra un tabernaculo dilegnio a forma dicapanna, in sulaltare i[m]mediate sopradetta, It[em]j Mantollinj, deba[m]binj, fascie, gua[n]cialj, veli & altra ornamenti vagliono___lire 84___.” . AMC, Libro di Conti,“Inventory of the convent,” 15v–18r.

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others were made of damask or stamped leather. The priests’ vestments included twelve stoles, fifteen maniples, ten chasubles and sixteen shirts in materials including simple linen and expensive red kermes with gold embroidery. Like their contemporaries in other convents, the nuns of la Crocetta produced textiles and embroidery, but it is not clear if they made these particular textiles or purchased them. la Crocetta’s possessions were limited in comparison with those of other Florentine convents. La Crocetta stood out among Florentine religious houses and churches not only in having been built by a lower-class woman, but in its relatively simple aesthetic. Devoid of the family arms that Savonarola railed against in his sermons, Sister Domenica’s convent revived what was believed to be the purity of the early Church. Her focus on simplicity anticipated by about a decade the chiese povere in sixteenth-century Rome. As demonstrated by Carolyn Valone, these churches, often affiliated with the Capuchin Order, were patronized by elite women who advocated religious reform and the “new decorum of poverty” manifested through simple architecture. The duchess of Camerino, Caterina Cibo, lauded by the Capuchins as one of the “mothers of the order,” supported the friars by granting them space in her palace, then by purchasing an old house for them near Camerino that they turned into a friary in 1531. Caterina’s interest in reform drew her to Sister Domenica. The duchess’s Florentine connections were well-established, as she was the daughter of Maddalena de’ Medici (1473–1519) and niece to the Medici popes. Caterina travelled to Florence on 24 August 1533 to hear Sister Domenica preach, having previously told the mystic “…we wanted to come the following Sunday to have communion and to be [there] all day and listen to something spiritual.” Two . I thank Sharon Strocchia, who is preparing a study of convent sacristies, for suggesting that the liturgical objects were few in comparison to other convents. . On the chiese povere see Valone “Architecture as a Public Voice,” 302–8. . Ibid., 302. . Ibid., 304. . Valerio I sermoni, 147,“che voleva venire la Domenica venente a comunicarsi qui con esso noi, et starve tutto ‘l giorno et udire qualcosa di spirituale.” For the transcription (not cited in Valerio, I sermoni) see Librandi and Valerio, 127, in which Francesco noted that Domenica dictated the sermon to him on 2 October 1533.

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Meghan Callahan • Preaching in a Poor Space

Fig. 3. AMC, Box of Bulls and loose documents. Loan from Caterina Cibo, written by Giovanni degli Albizzi. (Photo author, with the kind permission of Sister Antonina).

years later Caterina moved to Florence and in 1536 she lent Sister Domenica 500 ducats. As was typical of sixteenth-century financial arrangements, the tertiary paid the duchess back in different stages, with one payment made to a third party to whom Caterina owed money for brocade and taffeta (Fig. 3). In the same years, the . AMC, Box of bulls and loose documents. Giovanni gave Domenica’s patronymic “di Francesco;” her father was Francesco di  Jacopo Narducci.“YHS Maria 1536 “Fassi fede p[er] me Caterina Cibo ducessa di Camerino qo [questo] di xx dGosto [d’agosto]

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duchess’s attendant Giovanna de’ Fitti entered la Crocetta, taking the name Sister Paola. The loan may have helped to build an extension to the convent walls, which were completed in 1537, and does not seem to be associated with the 241 ducat dowry and supplies fee Caterina paid for Giovanna. Caterina’s remarks demonstrate that Sister Domenica was known by some for giving sermons, but the mystic did not have wide fame. 1538. Come fino adj xxviij di marzo 1537 Io Ricevie’ dalla Vele Madre Suor Domenjca di franco. dal paradixo perpetua vicarrja delsuo Monastero. della Crocie di Firenze [scudi] ottatuno doro in oro largho perlemanj di Giovanni Giovannj [sic] delbancho deglialbizi, e qualj pago ilditto Giovannj per me et per mio ordine a Zanobj bucherll et per vat[luta] deb[r]ochato e tafetta, mandaj a Genova a m[esser] Stefano viGienano, et fino a dj 9 dlo [deluglio] passato riceve dallj ditta per le manj delditto Giovanni degli albizi [scudi] cinquanta doro inoro et fino adj 3 del prese[n]ti mesi dGosto [dagosto] ancora riecevie dalladitta per le manj delditto alttrj [scudi] cinquanta doro in oro largho et questo di sopraditto ho ricevuto dallej sopra ditta [scudi] dugento doro in oro largho inpertanto che tutto fa la somma dj scudi trecetottantuno [in margin 381] doro in oro largho e qual ducati 381 sono, trattj dj scudi cinquecento doro inoro largo qual dettj, lasciaj inserbo piu tempo fa alladitta ve[nerable] madre per esse chosj lavuta quelli ho fatto la p[re]sectj[presente] qujtanza questo dj sopra detto infirenz perdj dlla quantita richiamo br[o]chatontj pagate llaquito [signed] Caterina Cibo Io Giovanni delbancho deglialbizi in nome della ILlma. Sa. Caterina Cibo ducessa dj Camerinio sopradjtta, ho ricevuto qusto di xxij dGiennaio 1538 dallo sopradittj Vele. Madre Suor Domenica, scudi centodiciannove doro inoro largho inno et sono per Resto dell scudi cinquece[n]to dor inoro lasciatj in serbo dlla Sa adttj V[enerable] Madre chome disopra, et ne interamente sodjsfacta, de quali scudi coxviiij [centodicianove] doro ne ho apagare Zanobj bucharelli et Ser Zanobi pandolfini, Ser Giovanni Capellano dessa S[omma] d altrj sue creditorj come morinda [me ordina] dtta S [signora] in fede dj essi assita laverita ho fatto questo quitanza ino per per ditto dj infirenze scudi coxviiii [centodiciannove]” . On 20 January 1538 the convent received 25 scudi for her supplies.Valerio, I sermoni, 152, citing AMC, Più Ricordi et imparticulare di fornimenti di Monache. Fornimenti o corredi e Ricordi del tempo della nostra venerabile dal 1524 fino al 1574, unpaginated, and AMC, Ricordanze, 66v.Valerio noted that in 1543 she took the name Suor Paula, but see AMC, Libro di Debitori e Creditori, not cited by Valerio, which gives 23 December 1537 for Giovanna’s name change and vesting, with her profession on 15 December 1538, as recorded also in AMC, Libro delle Monache, 7r, “A di 13 di Gennaio 1536 ven[n]e la Giovanna fanciulla della signiora di Camerinio La quale sivesti adi 23 di Diecembre 1537. Elnome suo fu Suora Paula, et fece professione adi 15 di Dicembre 1538. A seventeenth-century hand added:“Passo di q[uesta]a Vita a’ di 22 di Marzo 1549.” . AMC, Libro di Debitori e Creditori, 187, dare side year 1535, year 1536.

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As a woman Sister Domenica was prohibited from giving public sermons, nor was she to sermonize in private homes. In 1501 both actions caused her to be cited for heresy and she was brought before the vicar of the archbishop. Sister Domenica avoided directly answering the charge of sermonizing, stating only that God sent her words while she was in a state of ecstasy. Had the authorities come in later years to question her again, the mystic would have been protected by the Church’s de facto rule that allowed abbesses to give speeches to their nuns as, despite not taking final vows as a nun, she held the office since 1516. Pier Andrea Gammaro, the vicar of the archbishop of Florence, had ordered Sister Domenica to become prioress in that year, perhaps to protect her against the promulgations against preaching by unauthorized persons issued the previous year by the authorities. Sister Domenica may have been motivated to build la Crocetta not just as a model of church reform, but as a safe space for herself to preach. Even before she built the convent, Sister Domenica was determined to be heard. Fully aware of the Church’s prohibition against women speaking in church, derived from St. Paul’s words “taceant mulieres in ecclesia,” Domenica spoke out against it in a sermon on 4 July 1507. Almost immediately she became worried that she . AMC, Vitae 126v; Francesco da Castiglione, Annalium Vitae B.M. Sor. Domincae de Paradiso etc. a nativitate ad annum 34 detatis suae script. per R. D. Francisum de Honestis a Castilione e jusdem servae Dei Confessarium Tomus Primus, sign. lit. A, 167r­–168r. See also Librandi and Valerio, xvii; Adriana Valerio,“Il profeta e la parola: La predicazione di Domenica da Paradiso nella Firenze post-Savonaroliana,” in Studi Savonaroliani verso il V Centenario: Atti del primo seminario di studi, Florence, 14-15 January 1995, ed. Giancarlo Garfagnini (Florence: SISMEL, 1996), 299–307; Valerio, Domenica da Paradiso, 129 citing Riconesi, Annali, 1, 163v–167v. . Librandi and Valerio, xix, xxx, noted that though the Church tried to limit their powers, abbesses were allowed to preach. . AMC, Armadio 2, box labeled “Originali di Lettere Missive della BMSD,” Filza C , 3,“Di Monsigre. Pietro Andrea Gammaro V(icari)o archiepij. ecopale [sic] alla B.M e di lej a lui,” letter number 14 of 9 April 1516. On the promulgations see Polizotto, Elect Nation, 280. . I Cor. 34:14, usually as “mulieres in ecclesiis taceant” but see AMC, Annalium Vitae 1, 416r, written by Domenico Benivieni, 4 July 1507 (to which he dates the sermon). Librandi and Valerio, Appendice, citing Antonio Maria Riconesi, Annali della Vita della Nostra V.M. S. Domenica del Paradiso, 2, 385v–387v, who noted that she spoke the day before. See also Adriana Valerio,“«Et Io expongo le scripture»”: Domenica da Paradiso e l’interpretazione biblica. Un documento inedito nella crisi del rinascimento fiorentino,” Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 3 (1994): 499–534, at 501.

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had gone too far in her criticism, but St. Paul, who came to her “glowing in a marvelous light,” reassured the tertiary that she had not. He “…told her that her husband [Christ] had sent him to comfort her… as she had not said the things that she did on her own, but inspired by the Lord, and she had spoken the truth, even if a lot of people didn’t understand it.” Paul explained that when he said that women shouldn’t speak in church, it was only because at the time he …was preaching as if… on fire with the Holy Spirit… and the women in the church made such an uproar and were contending for attention in a way that it seemed they wanted to preach, so I admonished them that they should be quiet in church, and go home and ask their husbands what they wanted to know. I didn’t admonish them to be quiet out of disrespect, or to reproach them [and] prohibit them entirely from preaching, being that they too are creatures of the Lord, whom he can use as his instruments… therefore I hadn’t thought with those words to prohibit preaching to anyone, actually I said nobody had to be quiet… and after me came many women full of the Holy Spirit who have preached; the life and doctrine of whom is celebrated in the holy church and their souls are blessed in the glory of Heaven, because in preaching they do not err, but they do the will of their Husband [i.e., Christ]. Sister Domenica’s vision of St. Paul presents a very different version of what the contemporary Church fathers expected of women. Savonarola had once suggested women form committees to enact reform but later changed his mind, claiming that God had told him that the women would only make a mess of it. Apparently . AMC, Annalium Vitae 1, 416r, see also Librandi and Valerio, Appendice, citing Riconesi, Annali, 2, 385v–387v. . AMC, Annalium Vitae 1, 416r. See also Valerio, “Et Io expongo,” 501, citing Riconesi, Annali, 2, 386v; Librandi and Valerio, Appendice, citing Riconesi, Annali, Capitolo CCLXXIX:“sono state molte donne, le quali ripiene di Spirito santo hanno predicato; la vita e la dottrina delle quali è celebre nella santa chiesa e l’anime loro sono beate nella gloria del cielo, perché predicando non errono, ma faciono la voluntà del loro Sposo.” Librandi and Valerio note the vision was originally recorded by Francesco Onesti [sic], but it is in Domenico Benivieni’s handwriting and Francesco annotated the page. . F.W. Kent, “A Proposal by Savonarola for the Self-Reform of Florentine

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however, St. Paul liked “poor little women” who were striving not for the glory of the world but the love of God. Sister Domenica often referred to her humble origins, once noting: “…I don’t know how to read, nor write, and I’m used to digging up cabbages and onions, because as a little girl I was a gardener. If you find that I expound on the sacred scriptures per virtue of my work, you reprove me as a presumptuous woman.” The vision of St. Paul’s approval of her preaching was typical of Sister Domenica, who always went straight to the highest authorities when it came time to explain her unorthodox words and actions; when she vested herself as a Dominican in 1506, she claimed that St. Dominic had given her the habit while St. Catherine of Siena looked on. Giving sermons was a risky activity for any unauthorized person, and as Savonarola and his follower Pietro Bernardino experienced, the content of sermons could get one into trouble. In 1519, Sister Domenica was accused of holding conventicles at la Crocetta that promoted the message of Savonarola and “speaking against the scriptures,” and Francesco rushed to defend her from these charges. Despite the risks, Sister Domenica continued to breach the rules by preaching to audiences that included her secular followers. In several of Francesco’s transcriptions of Sister Domenica’s sermons, he noted that he was “present at the grate and listening,” sometimes with her “spiritual sons and daughters.” Whether he intended the church Women (March 1496),” Memorie Domenicane 14 (1983): 335–41. On Savonarola and women see also Tamara Herzig, Savonarola’sWomen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). . AMC, Annalium Vitae 1, 416;Valerio,“Et Io expongo,” 501. . AMC, Epistole, 133, also cited in Gerardo Antignani, Scritti Spirituali della Ven. Suor Domenica dal Paradiso (Poggibonsi: Edizioni Tipolito Arti Grafiche Nencini, 1984), 167. . Callahan,“Suor Domenica da Paradiso,” 331 n. 34 with previous bibliography. . On Pietro, also known as “degli Unti,” or “dei fanciulli” see Polizotto, Elect Nation, 117–38; and Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1970), 324–33; idem Savanarola: Rise and Fall, 301. . AMC, Persecutiones, 24r; see also Valerio, Domenica da Paradiso, 32;Valerio,“Et Io expongo,” 499; Polizotto, Elect Nation, 309. . Some sermons have been microfilmed and are found at Fondazione Franceschini, SISMEL Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino,

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grate, which divided the interior and exterior churches, or the parlor grate is unclear, but we know that Sister Domenica invited her followers to listen to her sermons and preached even when sick. On Holy Friday 1538, despite the mystic’s weakened and feverish state, she insisted on being helped into the choir, where she preached for several hours. In doing so she took on a traditionally male role for which the Dominicans, as the ordo praedicatorum, were well known. Like Savonarola’s piagnoni, when Sister Domenica preached, her followers believed they were hearing God’s voice, and she created a rich visual world in her sermons. She promised her listeners a wealth of spiritual goods should they take heed of the Lord’s words, and violent punishments if they did not. Domenica’s visions of heaven included traditional imagery of shining lights, gold and precious stones as allegories for the saints and souls. At night, glowing visitors knocked on her cell door and took her away to visit churches with golden doors, piazze paved with precious stones and ornate staircases that led to heavily decorated golden squares. Otherworldly objects grew, shrank Microfilm:0004058, Inv: 038755, Inv. 038756. See no. 37, 1523, “Sermone dela Ven[erabi]le madre Sora Domenica fondatrice del suo monasterio di sancta Croce i[n] Firenze in via ventura delordine di san Domenico observante et prepetua [sic] vicaria di quello, al quale adi 25 di maggio 1523 fece in ditto monasterio ale sue monache, me franco da castiglione canonico di san Lorenzo difirenze, et padre sprituale di detta Venle madre et Suo collegio, presente ala grate et audiente…;”51v, “Sermone della venerabile madre Sistera Domenica dal paradiso, sopra el mysterio dele Quarantine le quale sono nella sacra scriptura, con molto altri bellissimj mysterij i [sic] et dichiarationj [lacuna] lavita spirituale, elquale essa venerabil [sic] madre hebbe per revelatione dadio, la nocte della purificatione dela gloriosa vergine Maria, nel anno 1525. Et dalei medesima recitato alle sue figliuole monache, nel suo monasterio de sancta Croce, in firenze, et ad alcunj sua figliuoli sprituali, pochi di dopo la sopradecta solennita, me presente et audiente, et dipoi da me medesimo Franceschho da Castiglione canonico di San Lorenzo difirenze [sic], et confessore didetta Venerabli madre, puramente scripto come dal lei aparola aparola [sic] dame nella fine di detto sermone e scripto, ad Laudis delo’mipotente IESU;” 69r, 1526,“ad filias suas monialis et ad filios suos eus monasterij oneratores et me audiente.” . Librandi and Valerio, xl, cited Riconesi, Annali, 4, 987r “...il venerdi santo dell… 1538… 29 aprile nel quale giorno travagliata dale sue solite febbri non si reggeva in piedi, e si sentiva tanto fiacca e debole che ebbe a esser condotta a braccia in coro, et ella stessa disse che se non avessi invitato li suoi figliuoli spirituali a sentire il sermone della Passione, no si sarebbe messa a farlo. Contuttavia cominciando a dire, se ben con gran fatica, si intervorì in maniera che riebbe la voce e la lena, e la facondia del dire, e durò parecchie ore: con grande stupore e ammirazione delle sue figliuole.” . For the following vision see Librandi and Valerio, 45–64.

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and walked on human feet, such as the golden tabernacle covered in precious stones that Sister Domenica preached about on 6 January 1524. The tabernacle, representing the Virgin Mary ascending the temple steps, was seen to walk up golden stairs “by itself, with so much aptitude and gentility that it was a miracle.” In this sermon Sister Domenica also described a large chalice, decorated with bright, glowing precious stones and enameled around the neck with shining red crosses. Christ, disguised as a beautiful young man, opened his side and poured liquid into it, then told Sister Domenica that “…1525 was going to be a year of trials and tribulations, and the people were deserving of the scourging because their sins were so great, including those of monasteries that stank all the way up the heaven.” Christ, through Sister Domenica’s voice, disparaged those who tried to accumulate material possessions, calling them “rapacious wolves” with a “thirst for things [who] don’t pay attention to anything other than leaving riches and sons. They aren’t aware of the grace and benefices received from God, but they hold back on the charitable donations and they don’t praise God for graces received. They want possessions, they don’t want to give [everything] up to God, and they don’t want God to take their things away, nor their sons.” The emphasis on the scourging hand of God was typical of Sister Domenica’s sermons, as she sat firmly in the apocalyptic tradition and often echoed Savonarola’s warnings. Her admonition against withholding charitable donations was probably intended to remind her followers to keep funding her convent through donations and dowries; accounts in the Book of Debits and Credits indicate that the complex’s first wall was completed by the summer of 1525. Sister Domenica’s sermons coincided with tumultuous years in Florence and the Italian peninsula. When she arrived in the city, Savonarola had been dead for almost two years, the Medici were in exile and the republicans in power. A year after she built la Crocetta in 1511, the Medici returned only to be exiled again in 1527. By 1529 Florence was besieged by the emperor’s troops and hit by the . Librandi and Valerio, 45 note that this is modern style 1525, as the Florentine year began on 25 March. . Librandi and Valerio, 55. . AMC, Libro di Debitori e Creditori, 72r.

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plague. One year later Alessandro de’ Medici was installed as duke, murdered in 1537 and his cousin Cosimo I set in his place. With all of this strife, it is not surprising that Sister Domenica and her followers took refuge in her visions of the heavenly world, which appeared more beautiful and safe than the frightening world that surrounded them. Sister Domenica’s visions and sermons were one of the ways in which she proved her special closeness to God. Her outward denial of worldly trappings was another. Living on minimal food, dressing simply in the habit of a Dominican tertiary and proclaiming her poverty to those around her, Sister Domenica was the image of a simple holy woman.Yet she nevertheless built up an impressive realestate portfolio for the convent, spending over 20,000 scudi on her land acquisitions, the convent, two houses next door to the convent, nine farms and rental properties. She left 8,946 ducats and four lire in cash to her nuns when she died in 1553. Sister Domenica’s acquisition of money and land contrast with her sermons and public persona, in which she urged people to give up their desires for worldly goods. Her status as a “living saint” enabled Sister Domenica to successfully convince her followers to support her vision and creation of a new, simple convent in the center of Renaissance Florence. •

. John Najemy, A History of Florence: 1200­–1575 (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 455, noted that public orations in 1529 included Savonarolan influences and a focus on poverty. . Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine divise ne’ suoi quartieri. (Florence: 1758, facs. ed., Rome, 1972), 2:271, as cited by Valerio, Domenica da Paradiso, 115, noted Domenica spent 20,950 scudi, 2 lire and 18 soldi.The sum 23,141 scudi, 4 lire soldi 15 is recorded in AMC, Libro de’ Conti della Fabbrica, no. 7,“sunto del tutto q[ue]llo ha spexo la Ve. le madre 29 giennaio 1511 – 15 dicembre 1550, fol. 7.” . AMC, Libro di Conti, 20r.

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The Pious Act of an Impious Woman: The Courtesan Fiammetta as Art Patron in Renaissance Rome Cynthia Stollhans Wealthy courtesans, like noble woman, used their money to invest in art and architecture as a way to construct their own public identities, often with family themes. Since ancient Rome, women have used patronage as their public voice, according to the work of Carolyn Valone.  In the Spring of 2000, in an article published in the Renaissance Quarterly, Valone wrote: “Nowhere can this tradition be seen more clearly than in early modern Rome, where both secular and religious women used their own wealth to commission art and architecture to communicate their ideas about family and religion.” Can this same argument be applied to marginalized women, such as the courtesan Fiammetta Cassini, who lived and worked in Rome? The answer is yes. Fiammetta has become one of the most celebrated courtesans of Renaissance Rome. In fact, in Rome today, one can still view her fine house, the Casa Fiammetta, located on the piazza named after her not far from Piazza Navona. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the fame of Fiammetta has skyrocketed because of such writers as Georgina Masson who described her as one of Rome’s “First Great Courtesans.” Fiammetta’s renown was based on her . My very first course with Dr. Valone was “Renaissance City Planning of Rome” in Rome, during the summer of 1979. It was a life-changing experience! By the late 1980’s, Carolyn Valone and I frequented the same libraries and archives in Rome. It was then that she began talking about her “pie donne” every day during our lunch breaks. As usual, I was amazed at her skill and expertise as a scholar.This essay is inspired by her, and for her. . Carolyn Valone, “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G.Wilkins (Kirksville, MO:Truman State University Press, 2001), 317–35. . Carolyn Valone,“Mothers and Sons:Two Paintings for San Bonaventura in Early Modern Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 53.1 (2000): 108. For additional female patronage studies, see Katherine A. McIver, Women, Art and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580: Negotiating Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and idem, ed., Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). . Georgina Masson, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), 17–33.

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beauty, on the perceived scandal of some recorded gifts by a cardinal and on her alleged amorous relationship with the notorious Cesare Borgia.This study will focus on how Fiammetta achieved her wealth and why Fiammetta secured and decorated a funerary chapel in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino, thus expanding Valone’s theory of what motivated women to be patrons. Fiammetta’s legacy as one of Rome’s famous courtesans began in a book, first published in Venice in 1539, entitled Dialogo dello Zoppino de la vita e genealogia di tutte le cortigiane di Roma. Although the actual dialog between Zoppino, a former pimp who became a priest, and Ludovico was fictitious, the book mentions by name many of Rome’s most notable courtesans, including the much-celebrated Tullia d’Aragona, Antea, and Fiammetta. Ludovico tells Zoppino of the beautiful Fiammetta who died and was buried in her own chapel in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino. A courtesan with a chapel in a prominent church raises questions about her accrued riches. Fiammetta’s wealth was based on her success as one of Rome’s most famous and, presumably, sought-after courtesans, along with a sizeable yet mysterious bequest from Cardinal  Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini. Jacopo was born to Costanza and Cristofano Ammannati, a noble but impoverished family from Lucca. The family originated in Villa Basilica and eventually had branches in Pescia and Lucca. It was his . Gino Lanfranchi, ed., Dialogo dello Zoppino de la vita e genealogia di tutte le cortigiane di Roma (Corbaccio: L’Editrice del Libro Raro, 1922), 73. . Dialogo dello Zoppino, 48–49, for a listing of many of the courtesans who actually lived and worked in Rome during the sixteenth century. For the same women, see Lynne Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans (NewYork: Rizzoli, 1987), 10–14. . Dialogo dello Zoppino, 73. . Christopher L.C.E.Witcombe,“The Chapel of the Courtesan and the Quarrel of the Magdalens,” The Art Bulletin 84.2 (2002): 273–92 gives an excellent overview of the life of a courtesan in Renaissance Rome, including the circumstance that as long as a courtesan paid her taxes, her business as a prostitute or courtesan was legal. . The most complete source for the life of Cardinal Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini is Sebastiano Pauli, O.M.D, Disquisizione istorica della patria, e compendio della vita di Giacomo Ammannati Piccolomini, Cardinale di San Chiesa detto il Pappiense vescovo di Lucca, e di Pavia (Lucca: P. Frediani, 1712). Other great resources for Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini are Giuseppe Calamari, Il confidente di Pio II: Card.  Jacopo Ammannati-Piccolomini (1422–1479), (Rome: Augustea, 1932); and Gaetano Moroni, Dizionario storico-ecclesiastico, 103 vols. (Venice: 1840–41), 2:22. . Pauli, Disquisizione, 6–8.

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humanist education that helped him achieve a successful career. His studies began by the age of eight in the city of Pescia, but shortly thereafter he moved to Florence to study poetry and rhetoric with Carlo Marsuppini and Leonardo Bruni. His acquired knowledge and skills led to an appointment at the Ginnasio Fiorentino, but shortly thereafter he entered the service of Cardinal Domenico Capranica, a job that would help him network into the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. In 1458 Jacopo obtained the priory of Sant’ Apollinare in Florence, two years later he was named bishop of Pavia and then cardinal priest of San Crisogono. Later, he also held the title of bishop of Lucca, his birthplace. His acquired, ecclesiastical titles transformed him from a small, poor boy from Lucca to a rich, powerful cardinal with many properties in Rome. It was Cardinal Ammannati’s close friendship with Pope Pius II Piccolomini (1458–64) that placed  Jacopo within the heart of the innermost circles of the papal court. In fact, Cardinal Ammannati adopted the last name of Piccolomini, added to his own, and claimed the Piccolomini coat of arms. Pius II traveled to Ancona as part of his ongoing crusades against the Turks. But, as the Venetian fleet arrived, loaded with soldiers, and sailed forth, the pope lay dying and could only watch. Two days later, Pius II died in the arms of his trusted friend and adopted son Cardinal  Jacopo. Cardinal  Jacopo is mostly praised for his letters and his commentaries, especially for his writings on politics and important events of the period. Why would a cardinal living in Rome leave a sizeable estate to a young woman living in Florence? According to Pio Pecchiai, Fiammetta was born to Michele di Bartolomeo Cassini and his wife Santa in the city of Florence. Pecchiai speculates that perhaps . Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini, Epistolae et Commentari (Milan: apud Alexandrum Minutianum, 1506); and Moroni, Dizionari, 2:802. . Moroni, Dizionario, 2:802. . Pauli, Disquisizione, 21. . Moroni, Dizionario, 2:22. . Paul, Disquisizione, 55–75, for the long-standing friendship between  Jacopo and Pius II. . Pio Pecchiai, Donne del rinascimento in Roma (Padua: Cedam, 1958), 90–94.The year of Fiammetta’s birth is not known; some speculate around 1465; also her surname of Cassini is recorded in another document dated 1558 published by Pecchiai where she is listed as Flammette Cassine Michaelis de Florentia. See Pecchiai, Donne, 100.

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Michele took part in the famous Pazzi Conspiracy against the Medici in 1478 and was killed, leaving a young widow with two children. In the same year as Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini’s death, 1479, the widow Santa and her children move to Rome where Fiammetta became the legal heir of the recently deceased cardinal. Pecchiai hypothesizes the Pope Sixtus IV helped the family by carving a dowry for the nubile Fiammetta out of the deceased cardinal’s properties, perhaps as a means to help the exiled family. I would like to propose a fresh look at the circumstances of the cardinal’s death and Fiammetta’s dowry. Cardinal Jacopo Ammanati Piccolomini died on September 10, 1479 at the age of 57, while staying at San Lorenzo alle Grotte near Bolsena. The next day his body was transferred to Rome, where he was eventually buried in the church of Sant’Agostino, although his inscription indicates the cardinal’s desire to be interred near his mentor, Pope Pius II. Shortly after the cardinal’s death, his will, for unknown reasons, was suppressed by Sixtus IV, whom Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini did not support in the conclave of 1471. Sixtus convened a committee of four to decide what should be done with Cardinal Jacopo’s will, his considerable properties and other material goods. On November 13, 1479, the Sistine commission conceded to Donna Fiammetta Cassini properties earmarked as her dowry, while other riches of the cardinal went to . Pecchiai, Donne, 93. I cannot find any evidence for this account of the death of Michele Cassini. . Pecchiai, Donne, 93. . Pauli, Disquisizione, 96–98. . Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter BAV), Arch. del Capitolo di San Pietro, Arm. 46, 1. Catasta Domorum intra Urbem, (1606–1868), fol. 43; also discussed in Pecchiai, Donne, 89. The document cited in the BAV is a 1606 summation regarding Sixtus IV and the committee. The first part of Cardinal Ammannatti’s last will can be found in Pauli, Disquisizione, 100–107; the part of the will regarding the distribution of properties has never been discovered, only the 1606 recap of the committee formed by Sixtus IV. For the conclave of 1471, see Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, 40 vols. (London: Kegan Paul,Trench,Trübner, 1923–53), 3:370. . BAV, Arch. Del Capitolo di San Pietro, Arm. 46, 1, fol. 43 lists the committee members as Pietro Gulielmo Rocca, archbishop of Salerno; Giovanni Gianderoni, bishop of Massa Marittima; Bartolomeo Maraschi, bishop of Città di Castello; and the protector of the Ospedale di Sto. Spirito in Sassia.

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the hospital of Sto. Spirito. The lucky Fiammetta, referred to as Donna Fiammetta, legally took possession of two joined houses in the city of Rome in the Rione Ponte and a vigna near the Porta Viridaria, not far from the Vatican. This bequest made Fiammetta quite wealthy! Why did Cardinal Ammanati-Piccolomini leave these properties to Fiammetta? What was the relationship between the cardinal and the courtesan? Since the 1863 publication of Adinolfi’s book, which included a transcribed last testament of Fiammetta, scholars have believed that she was the cardinal’s courtesan lover. Most conclude that Fiammetta must have been a very skillful but young courtesan, perhaps as young as 12 or 13, since no one has been able to decipher exactly the year in which Fiammetta was born. Gossip is always more fun than facts. For Fiammetta, 1479 seems to be a year of total transition for her life as she inherited valuable properties, not in the city of her birth but in Rome. Pecchiai concluded that Fiammetta, her mother, Santa, and her brother, Andrea, moved to Rome after the death of Michele, husband of Santa. And, to their good fortune, Sixtus IV generously provided a sizeable dowry for Fiammetta. I have found no documentation to prove anything about the Cassini family’s circumstances in Florence, Michele’s death or when several family members moved to Rome. Based solely on documentation from the 1606 summation of the distribution of Cardinal Ammannatti Picclomini’s will, one can only conclude that, for whatever circumstances, Santa Cassini and Fiammetta can be found living in Rome in 1479. The 1606 summation of the 1479 will of the cardinal calls her the Donna Fiammetta, indicating that she was of a legal marriageable age. I ask: was she too young to be so good at the sexual skills of a courtesan by this age or could Fiammetta and the cardinal have a different relationship that has been undetected or misunderstood? . BAV, Arch. del Capitolo di San Pietro, fol. 43 and Pecchiai, Donne, 89, with the words “Dei amore, pro dote et nomine dotis.…” . Pasquale Adinolfi, La Torre dei Sanguigni e San Apollinare (Rome: Menicanti, 1863), 128–36; the copy of her will transcribed and published by Adinolfi can be found in Arch. Del Capitolo di San Pietro, Misc I. XXVII, f. 143 and is mentioned in Masson, Courtesans, 15–17. . Pecchiai, Donne, 93; and repeated in DBI 47:345. . BAV, Arch. del Capitolo di San Pietro, fol. 43.

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Let us propose two more questions. If Fiammetta and her mother came to Rome in 1479, how did they know Cardinal Ammannatti Piccolomini, who was living in retirement near the grottoes of San Lorenzo at Lake Bolsena while Fiammetta was in Florence? When did they get together? The documented dates and places for the cardinal and Fiammetta don’t add up to them having time together in any city as Fiammetta was in Florence and the cardinal lived mostly in Rome. I would like to propose another reading of the scenario. Perhaps it was Fiammetta’s mother, Santa, who had been the mistress of Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini. The good cardinal frequented Florence and the environs for many years since he was very young, and this is well-documented. If so, could Fiammetta have been his daughter because she hardly had enough time to be a practicing courtesan during the very limited time period of the cardinal being in Florence before his retirement. Legally, Fiammetta would take the name of her mother’s husband, thus she is known as Fiammetta of Michele Cassini. Mistresses were often married to one man and living with or having relations with another. One famous Renaissance example of this arrangement is Vannozza dei Cattanei who lived with Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia but was legally wed to another man, in fact, three other men. Could the reality be closer to something like this: in 1479, Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini died. His mistress who was also recently widowed, Santa Cassini, and daughter named Fiammetta moved to Rome because she knew that her daughter would likely be named in the will? Relying on the 1606 summation of the distribution of the cardinal’s properties from his 1479 will, there seems to be a strong alliance between Cardinal  Jacopo and Santa Cassini. The document incontestably stated that if Fiammetta died childless, the cardinal’s properties would pass to her mother. And, if Fiammetta and her mother were deceased, the properties were to go to Fiammetta’s husband and to her brother. In an age when hereditary laws favored males over . Moroni, Dizionari, 2:802 . Marion Johnson, The Borgias (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 78–79. . BAV, Arch. del Capitolo di San Pietro, fol. 43 and Pecchiai, Donne, 89. . BAV, Arch. del Capitolo di San Pietro, fol. 43,“…donna Flametta moreretur sine filiis devenirent ad matrem et post obitum matris ad maritum et fratrem donnae

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females, and families’ often left more to sons than daughters, it is odd to find a will in which the second heir is a generation older than the first-named heir — and the first and second heirs are both females. Surely the cardinal’s line of heirs from Fiammetta to her mother, then to Fiammetta’s husband and brother, signifies a strong bond and solid relationship between the cardinal and the family. Interesting to note, that if Fiammetta, her mother and all of her siblings were dead at the time of the cardinal’s passing, then the properties would go to the Sistine Chapel, no doubt giving in to the wishes of Sixtus IV. Fifteenth-century cardinals of the Catholic Church had concubines or mistresses who bore their children, and there are examples where the offspring were sometimes legally recognized in a last will. One notable cardinal, for example, was Guillaume d’Estouteville (1412–83), created cardinal of San Martino ai Monti in 1439, later to be named cardinal-priest of Sta. Maria Maggiore, one of the highest titles after that of pope. As soon as he was named a cardinal, d’Estouteville moved to Rome, where he enjoyed a large palace near Sant’ Apollinare, not far from Sant’Agostino. Girolama Tosti, a women from a noble Roman family, lived with him. Together they had two sons and three daughters, who all married into proper families. According to d’Estouteville’s will, each child inherited 3,000 ducats, which for the daughters would have guaranteed a sizeable dowry for a solid marriage contract. D’Estouteville died in 1483 and was buried in Sant’Agostino, the same church were Cardinal Ammannati Piccolimini was laid to rest four years before him. It is possible that Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini was providing for his mistress and daughter with the gift of properties as a dowry for the still young Fiammetta, as had done his peer, Cardinal d’Estouteville. When Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini died, his body was quickly transferred by the familiari of his household to the city of Rome, Flammettae.…” Except for the name of Fiammetta, neither the name Santa nor the name Andrea was used; only the relationships mother and brother to Fiammetta are used in the document. Pecchiai, Donne, 89, discusses this same document but using the names Santa and Andrea, as if they appeared, for whatever reasons. . BAV, Arch. del Capitolo di San Pietro, fol. 43; and Pecchiai, Donne, 89. . DBI 43:456–60; his will can be found in ASR, Coll. Not. Capit. 175, cc. 371r– 376r with four codicils at cc. 384, 401, 405, 409. . Meredith Gill, “Death and the Cardinal: The Two Bodies of Guillaume d’Estouteville,” Renaissance Quarterly 54.2 (Summer 2001): 347–88.

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Fig. 1. Circle of Andrea Bregno and Mino da Fiesole,Tomb of Cardinal  Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini, after 1479. Photo: Lisa Passaglia Bauman.

where he was interred in Sant’Agostino. His sculpted marble tomb is artistically straightforward (Fig. 1).The overall tomb design fits into the common but celebrated type by fifteenth-century standards. The deceased cardinal’s effigy is shown in a peaceful, eternal sleep. . Pauli, Disquisizione, 96–98. . Gerald San Davies, The Sculpted Tombs of the Fifteenth Century in Rome (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1916), 112–18, 193–94.

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On both sides of his sculpted image, one can note prominence of his coat of arms, the adopted crest of the Piccolomini family displaying five crescent moons in the shape of a cross. However, because it has been transferred from the church to a cloister, some parts and perhaps another inscription are now missing The visible inscription reads, in translation: Lucca was my country by birth, Siena by law; my name while I lived was Jacopo; virtue by patent of nobility. Pope Pius gave me the see of Pavia and he too honored me with the cardinalate and a place in his family and house. Him whom I revered in life I have not left in death. Here I lie, a son sleeping by his father’s sacred bones.You who read this, live on and seek after celestial things, for all our glory here on earth comes at last to ashes.

In his will, Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini detailed where he wanted to be buried if he died in Italy — near the tomb of his adopted father Pope Pius II in the basilica of St. Peter’s — and even penned his own epitaph. It is pretty evident that Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini wrote this and believed that his wishes would be followed after his death. Sixtus IV released the previously written tomb inscription found in the will even though he suppressed the section of the will about property disbursement.The cardinal expected that he would be buried near the “bones” of Pope Pius II, whom he called his father, in a grave in St. Peter’s. But he wasn’t — instead his tomb was placed in Sant’Agostino, where in 1477 he had buried his own mother Costanza. His own tomb was commissioned from the same circle of artists practicing the style of Andrea Bregno and Mino da Fiesole. Exactly who placed his tomb near his mother Costanza is not clear, but no doubt it was the best choice given the fact that Sixtus IV had disregarded his wishes relating to Pius II. In 1863, Pasquale Adinolfi brought to light the will of the courtesan Fiammetta, dated February 19, 1512 and published his transcription. He added a title for Fiammetta not found in the original document: “Will of Fiammetta of the Duke of Valentino,” also . Pauli, Disquisizione, 96–98.The English translation is from the Vatican website at: http://www.elfinspell.com/PaoloPart2style.html#topref36. . Pauli, Disquisizione, 105. . Adinolfi, La Torre, 128–36; and for the will of Fiammetta, see Arch. del Capitolo di SanPietro, Misc, I. XXVII, f. 143; and for a cache of documents related to Fiammetta and her descendants see ff. 135r–146v.

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known as Cesare Borgia (1476–1507), the son of Pope Alexander VI and one the most notorious men of his time period. If they met, then there are two possible time periods for their relationship to have blossomed: 1493–95, just after Cesare quit his studies and came home to be with his father who had been elected pope in 1492 or between 1500 and 1503, again when both Cesare and Fiammetta were in Rome. Fiammetta would have been perhaps ten years his senior. It is interesting to note that in the body of the will, Fiammetta is called “Donna Fiammetta of Michele of Florence.”The will listed her properties as three houses and a vineyard, including the properties that she inherited from Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini. As property meant wealth and income, Fiammetta would have been considered a rich woman by early sixteenth-century standards. Fiammetta’s will of 1512 reveals her explicit plans for her own burial and final resting place; in 1505 she had acquired a chapel in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino, the same church which housed the tombs of Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini and his mother. Founded in 1286 for the Augustinian Hermits, in Fiammetta’s day Sant’Agostino had been rebuilt in the 1480s by the French Cardinal d’Estouteville during the papacy of Pope Sixtus IV della Rovere. During the fifteenth century, numerous courtesans must have attended mass at Sant’Agostino because Johann Burchard, master of ceremonies and diarist for Pope Alexander VI Borgia, commented on the appearance of courtesans in the church of the titular saint on . Adinolfi, La Torre, 128–36, “Flammettae Ducis Valentini Testamenti Transumptum.” All original quotations from her will are from this published source; translations are my own.Whereas the Dialogo of Zoppino, cited above, is reason to believe that Fiammetta was a courtesan, the title “Fiammetta of the duke of  Valentino” implies more a concubine or mistress situation. Other scholars cite this relationship. See Domenica Gnoli, La Roma di Leon X (Milan: Editore Ulrico Hoepli, 1938), 204, who says,“La Fiammetta, amica del Valentino.…” Perhaps the first published source to comment on Cesare Borgia and Fiammetta is Francesco Cancellieri, Il mercato, il lago dell’acqua vergine ed il palazzo Panfiliano nel Circo Agonale, detto volgarmente Piazza Navona, descritti da Francesco Cancellieri: Con un appendice di XXXII documente ed un trattato sopra gli obelischi (Rome: Francesco Bourlie, 1811), 128. . Sarah Bradford, Cesare Borgia (NewYork: Macmillan, 1976); and Michael Mallett, The Borgias (London: Granada Publishing, 1981). . Filippo Titi, Pittura, Scoltura, Architettura nella chiese di Roma (Rome:Tinassi, 1721), 425–30; and Anthony Blunt, Guide to Baroque Rome (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 6–7.

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August 28 in the year 1497. Burchard described the scene of the meretrici occupying the area in front of the section where the cardinals sat. The churchmen had, without question, quite a privileged viewing of the woman directly in front of them! Augustinian records show that the order had no objection to having prostitutes, including Fiammetta, buried in the church. Giulia Campana, Tullia d’Aragona, Beatrice Spagnola and Camilla da Fana were all laid to rest in Sant’Agostino. In fact, one prostitute called a “mamola” was buried before the altar of the Pietà, Fiammetta’s own chapel, on September 12, 1506, although this was six years before Fiammetta’s death. Fiammetta’s chapel, which no longer exists, was the first on the left side aisle. Her plan included commissioning artists to complete the decorations soon after her purchase in 1505. In the life of  Jacopo detto L’Indaco,Vasari gives enough details for a complete description of Fiammetta’s chapel, which contained frescoes of the descent of the Holy Ghost in the vault, the calling of Sts. Peter and Andrew on one side of the altarpiece, and on the other side the feast in the house of Simon with the Magdalen washing Christ’s feet with her hair. . Liber Notarum of  Johannes Burchardus, ed. E. Celani (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1906), 2:50 which reads: “Omnia fuerunt sine ordine: meretrices at alie viles personal steterunt ab omni parte, inter altare ed cardinals…”; also cited in Alexander Nagel, “Michelangelo’s London ‘Entombment’ and the Church of Sant’ Agostino in Rome,” The Burlington Magazine 136 (1994): 164–67, at 166 n. 25, who, in the same note, also mentions a 1517 letter from the courtesan Beatrice da Ferrara to Lorenzo de’ Medici commenting on the church of Sant’Agostino being frequented by “puttane.” . Nagel, “Michelangelo’s London Entombment,” 166 n. 26. Documents can be found in Archivio di Stato, Rome, (hereafter ASR), Agostiniani Sant’Agostino (hereafter ASA), 109, Introitus, fols. 13v, 128v and 134r. . ASR, ASA, Introitus, 109, fol. 13v and Nagel, “Michelangelo’s London Entombment,” 164 n. 26:“Item recevei adi dicto [12 September 1506] per la sepultura duna mamola fu sepolta dinanzi al’altar della piatà apresso la porta bl.Trenta.” . Giorgio Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), 3:680.“È di sua mano in quella città, nella chiesa di Sant’Agostino, entrando in chiesa per la porta della facciata dinanzi, a man ritta, la prima cappella; nella volta della quale sono gli Apostolic che ricevono lo Spirito Santo, e di sotto sono nel muro due storie di Christo; nell’una quando toglie dalle reti Pietro ed Andrea, e nell’altra la Cena di Simone e di Maddalena; nella quale è un palco di legno e di travi molto ben contraffatto. Nella tavola della medesima cappella, la quale egli dipinse a olio, è un Cristo morto, lavorato e condotto con molta practica e diligenza.”

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On the altar, Vasari described a panel that depicted the dead Christ, and he praised it highly.This, some believe, is an unfinished panel by Michelangelo, commissioned not by Fiammetta but by the heirs of the previous owner, Bishop Giovanni Ebu of Crotone. Apparently the painting was installed in the chapel shortly before the chapel was transferred to Fiammetta, who included the painting in her own decorative plans. In 1603 the chapel was sold to the Cavaletti and now holds Caravaggio’s altarpiece of the Madonna of Loreto. The original, lost paintings exhibit important themes that reflect Fiammetta’s interests: the dead Christ that appeared in the main altarpiece speaks not only of death but of resurrection and the promise of salvation for all, especially for Fiammetta, the chapel’s patron.The three saints — Peter, Andrew and the Magdalen — who populate the fresco scenes also hold special significance for the patron. Peter was surely included due to his importance for the city of Rome and the papacy, which in turn suggests that the courtesan who made her money the “old fashioned” way wished to express her allegiance both to the highest church authority and to her urban home. Saint Andrew was the name saint of Fiammetta’s brother and heir, indicating her desire to display a sense of familial piety that was not uncommon in early modern Rome. The Magdalen as the penitent prostitute unquestionably appealed to Fiammetta as a role model. Fiammetta has, through her selection of subject matter, decorated her chapel with references to her city, her church, her family, her business and her own hopes for salvation. Fiammetta’s chapel paid tribute to her faith and her family. She especially addressed attention to her brother Andrea (c.1477–1543). Fiammetta and her brother must have been very close, as can be deduced from reading numerous documents that become like breadcrumbs, leaving a trail of their relationship. The earliest connection is the 1479 will of Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini, naming Fiammetta’s brother as possible heir were Fiammetta and her . Nagel,“Michelangelo’s London Entombment,” 164–67. . For Fiammetta’s chapel and the documents regarding the changeover to Cavalletti, see Nagel, “Michelangelo’s London Entombment,” 164–67; and for the chapel of the Loretto see Pamela M.  Jones, Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 75–136. . Adinolfi, La Torre, 128–36.

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mother to die before the cardinal. Fiammetta’s 1512 will reads:“She likewise has left and bequeathed to Andrea her full brother [not of a different mother or father, but of the same parents] for his use for the entirety of his life her own home in the Ponte region.” And in the sacristan’s ledger from Sant’Agostino, there are references to Fiammetta and Messer Andrea having masses said at the chapel of the Pietà for many decades. One of the most significant is a sacristan’s entry for December 6, 1505, for a Mass to be sung for the death of their mother Santa, for which Fiammetta paid “quattro carlini.” In fact, sacristan notations recording Andrea having masses said during the month of October for Fiammetta can be followed from the year of her death all the way through to the year 1541, just two years before Andrea died. The masses said in commemoration of Fiammetta’s death during the month of October become concrete evidence of Andrea continuous dedication to the memory of his beloved sister. But these masses don’t end with the death of Andrea. In 1543 Andrea’s wife Giulia is recorded as having a Mass said at Sant’Agostino in October, just like Andrea had done for years. Andrea lived a long life, dying at the age of sixty-four. And, because of his wealth obtained through his sister’s generous will, Andrea was a property owner with considerable annual income. Perhaps these . BAV, Arch. del Capitolo di San Pietro, fol. 43; however, only the word for siblings appears and not the specific name of her brother Andrea. . Adinolfi, La Torre, 128–36. “Item reliquit et praelegavit Andreae ejus germano fratri ad usumfructum toto tempore vitae suae unam ipsius testatricis domum sitam in regione Pontis.…”  . ASR, ASA, 109: 2r;“…per una messa cantata de mortis per l’anima della matre della Fiammetta, carlini quattro.” Further references can be found in Pecchai, Donne, 104. Masson, Courtesans, 18–19 gives a discussion of why she thinks Andrea might be Fiammetta’s son. . ASR, ASA 109: f. 121r (October 1, 1516); 110: f. 18r (October 12, 1520); f. 30v (October 16, 1521): 112: f. 9r (October 27, 1530); f. 19r (October 19, 1532); 38v (October 15, 1533); 49r (October 16, 1534); 56r (October 22, 1535); 63v (October 18, 1536); 90v (October 22, 1539); 97v (October 20, 1540); and 104v (October 1, 1541). . ASR, ASA 112: f. 116r,“22 bolognini received from Madonna  Julia.…” . There are two perhaps related parchment document covers with the names Andreas Flammate Fr., Anno Domini 1501; and Andreas Michaelis, Domini 1503 in Arch. de Capitolo San Pietro, Puntature 11 and 12.The 1501 cover is decorated with a coat of arms (perhaps of Andrea?) hanging from a papal coat of arms.The contents of the two do not relate to Andrea.

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acquired assets helped Andrea marry up into a respectable family, the Cavalieri of Rome,perhaps best known forTommaso Cavalieri,friend of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Andrea married Giulia Cavalieri, and together they had at least one son, Angelo. Although the family may have enjoyed the benefits of the legacy from Fiammetta, the wheel of fortune turned against them following Andrea’s death in 1543. The canons of St. Peter’s reviewed the 1512 will of Fiammetta and stripped the widow Giulia and her adopted nephew of the two joined houses and the vigna, awarding the properties and their income to the Sistine Chapel, a favorite project of Sixtus IV who setup the original disbursement of Cardinal Ammannati Piccolomini’s papal distribution of his assets. As it was set in 1479 by Pope Sixtus IV, all of the cardinal’s properties were to go to the Sistine Chapel if all of the named, legal heirs were deceased. Fiammetta spoke of her family and herself in her chapel in Sant’Agostino, just as many noble women did in early modern Rome. According to Valone, one such woman was Portia Orsini dell’Auguillara Cesi, duchess of Cere, who dedicated a chapel to the Immaculate Conception in the Capuchin Roman church of San Bonaventura in the second half of the sixteenth century. The altarpiece, by Scipione Pulzone, still has its original frame, which shows Portia’s coat of arms proclaiming her patronage. More importantly the painting reveals Portia’s family. Below the Blessed Virgin, the mother of all, we see Portia’s kneeling son, Andrea, being presented by his name saint, Andrew, who gestures towards the boy. Standing behind him are Saints Francis and Clare, models for Capuchin spirituality, and St. Catherine of Alexandria, patron saint of the Cesi family. Fiammetta also spoke via saints in her chapel: Andrew for her brother, Peter for Rome and the papacy and Mary Magdalen, her own role model. Thus women — courtesans or noble — used the same vocabulary to speak publicly through their patronage. Depicting the Immaculate Conception with Portia’s son, Andrea Cesi, shown among saints in the lower half, Portia was able to construct a bilinear . Pecchiai, Donne, 94. . Pecchiai, Donne, 98–100. . Valone,“Mothers and Sons,” 112–13. . Cynthia Stollhans, St. Catherine of Alexandria in Renaissance Roman Art: Case Studies in Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 145–49.

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Cynthia Stollhans • The Pious Act

family tree for herself in the public space of her chapel — giving praise to her father’s side as much as to her husband’s lineage. In addition to discussing Portia’s chapel, Valone published sections of Portia’s will — the first section contained the usual legal Latin verbiage with the date followed by the list of seven witnesses and the name of the notary.The three main sections of Portia’s will were her personal bequests to charities, her disposal of the bulk of her estate to her son and daughter and then a lengthy polemic against her husband. The will ended with the naming of three proper executors. The successful courtesan Fiammetta left a similar will — the usual Latin legal formulas with the date of February 19, 1512 — which was witnessed by four men. The two main sections of the will followed the same order of personal bequests to charities and disposing of her estate to her brother. Fiammetta’s will ends with the naming of three proper executors. If we did not know about the notorious Fiammetta, we would never know from her will or her chapel that she was anything but a pious wealthy woman, like Portia. Additionally, I would like to draw a comparison between marginalized women — courtesans and mistresses — and noble ones that will open a frank discussion of how history has, indeed, misrepresented all of these women. In “Piety and Patronage:Women and the Early Jesuits” in 1994, Valone discussed how women, nearly unnoticed by historians, paid for the majority of the chapels in the Gesù, the new  Jesuit mother church in Rome in the sixteenth century. Other scholars have continued this argument for retrieving the public voice of women. If women from the greatest families of Rome (Colonna, . Valone,“Mothers and Sons,” 117–19. . Adinolfi,“La Torre,” 128–36. . Carolyn Valone, “Piety and Patronage: Women and the Early Jesuits,” Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy, ed. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 157–84; idem, “Matrons and Motives,” in Reiss and Wilkins, Beyond Isabella, 317–35; idem,“Architecture as Public Voice for Women in Sixteenth Century Rome,” Renaissance Studies 15.3 (2001): 301–27; Kimberly Dennis, “Recovering the Villa Montalto and the Patronage of Camilla Peretti,” in Wives,Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy, 55–73; and “Camilla Peretti, “Sixtus V, and the Construction of Peretti Family Identity in Counter-Reformation Rome,” Sixteenth Century Journal 63.1 (Spring 2012): 71– 101; and her essay in this volume:“A Palace Built by a Princess? Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphili and the Construction of the Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona,” above, 43–64; Marilyn Dunn,“Invisibilia per visibilia: Roman Nuns, Art Patronage, and the

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Orsini, Cesi, etc.) had trouble “becoming visible” in modern histories it is not surprising that Fiammetta, like other courtesans/mistresses such as Imperia, mistress of Agostino Chigi andVannozza dei Cattanei, mistress of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (later Pope Alexander VI) experienced a similar fate — not because they were courtesans but because they were women. All of the chapels of the mistresses and courtesans were turned over to more prominent, perhaps more respectable, individuals within a hundred years of their dedications, thus wiping out the visual, public architecture paid for by these women. According to Vasari, a famous, unidentified courtesan of Rome acquired and decorated the fifth chapel on the left in Trinità dei Monti in 1524. And, just thirteen years later in 1537, her chapel was ceded to Angelo Massimi. The lovely courtesan Imperia, who poisoned herself to death over a broken heart, was laid to rest by Agostino Chigi, her one-time lover and father of her daughter, in a tomb “fit for a queen” in the Roman church of San Gregorio. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, or within one hundred years, Imperia’s marvelous tomb of multi-colored marble was radically changed, wiping out all references to the tomb’s original occupant. Likewise,Vannozza dei Cattanei took possession of a chapel in Sta. Maria del Popolo in 1500, with the authority of the vicar general of the Augustinians. Vannozza’s chapel was in the prominent location just to the right of the main altar, but it was destroyed in the renovations of 1559.That the known chapels of these women all disappeared within one hundred years of their foundation indicates purposeful acts of destruction. Pecchiai commented that in the second half of the sixteenth century there Construction of Identity,” in McIver, Wives, Widows, Mistresses, 181–205; Marilyn Dunn, “Spaces Shaped for Spiritual Perfection: Convent Architecture and Nuns in Early Modern Rome,” in Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Helen Hills (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 151–76. . Vasari, Le opera, 5:417. . Witcombe,“Chapel of the Courtesan,” 273. . Pecchiai, Donne, 46–51; and Masson, Courtesans, 53–56. . Masson, Courtesans, 56. . Simonetta Valtieri,“La presenza Borgiana,” Santa Maria del Popolo: Storia e restauri, ed. Ilaria Miarelli Mariani and Maria Richiello, 2 vols. ( Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2009), 1:220–22.

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Cynthia Stollhans • The Pious Act

must have been some papal edict to expunge from Roman churches the memorials to and by these “women of negative fame.” Early modern women in Rome used art and architecture as their public voice, no matter how they acquired their wealth. Family and religion were often the focus of their messages. Fiammetta is a legitimate part of this tradition of matron as patron. •

. Pecchiai, Donne, 50, with the words:“…delle donne di mala fama.”

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More Trials for Artemisia Gentileschi: Her Life, Love and Letters in 1620 Elizabeth S. Cohen The publication of Lettere di Artemisia (2011) has renewed discussion of the painter’s personal life as a context for her art. In particular, the casting of Artemisia Gentileschi as a “woman of passion,” as done by the international exhibition of 2011/12, rests in part on reading the recently recovered correspondence of 1620 as “love letters.” Like the rape trial, these sources offer a vivid, perplexing picture of a troubled moment in Artemisia’s life. Treating this correspondence as “love letters,” however, engages only one of its several dynamics. Artemisia and the young Florentine patrician, Francesco Maria Maringhi, were bound by romance and sex but also by patronage and friendship. Furthermore, the 1620 correspondence was in fact triangular. It consists of about thirty letters written to Maringhi between February and September by Artemisia and by her husband, Pierantonio Stiattesi. About half the letters came from each spouse, and eighteen were paired, so that both Artemisia and Pierantonio wrote on the same day. A close reading of this correspondence as a whole tells a tale not so much of two lovers’ transgressive passion or of one painter’s personal travails as of an artist family’s collaborative struggle against a cascade of woes. These rare sources show how a woman, atypically the family breadwinner, responded to a major personal and professional crisis with the help of two men devoted to her. More broadly, this story shows the workings of patronage shaping painting as business, as politics and as all too human relationships.The letters represent characteristically early modern dynamics in which love and utility, the emotional and the material, were not, as modern ideology sometimes . Lettere di Artemisia, ed. Francesco Solinas (Rome: De Luca, 2011). . Roberto Contini and Francesco Solinas, ed., Artemisia Gentileschi: The Story of a Passion (Milan: 24 Ore Cultura, 2011). An undocumented view of Artemisia as a writer of love letters appears much earlier: Eleanor Tufts, Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of  Women Artists (NewYork, 1974), 59. . Elizabeth S. Cohen, “The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History,” Sixteenth Century  Journal 31.1 (2000): 47–75. . The 1620 correspondence appears as letters 7–36 in Lettere. . On reading correspondence as a collaborative whole,  John M. Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4–10.

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expects, opposites. Instead, in real life motives and behavior they tangled inextricably. In a contentious scholarship Artemisia Gentileschi has posed problems because her behavior and gender fail to fit a master narrative of artistic achievement draped in virtue and nobility. In contrast to the woman artist who was first and foremost respectable, Artemisia appeared repeatedly mired in moral transgression, social inferiority, improvised education and economic improvidence. Even if the rape trial did not stigmatize her indelibly, she could never pretend to the posture of leisured man of culture. In editing the 1620 correspondence and using excerpts to narrate Artemisia’s dramatic flight from Florence and restablishment in Rome, Francesco Solinas, co-curator of the 2011 exhibition, elaborates this ambivalent assessment. He admires Artemisia’s artistic talent, cleverness and energy but cannot overlook her imperfections. For him, Artemisia’s letters reveal “a subtle, sharp intelligence, a strong will, and an extraordinary creativity” but also “a disconcerting intimacy, at times frank and quasi-libertine,... her prose awkward but profound, ungrammatical but cultured... the painter lived a consuming sensual passion and an almost lascivious desire.” Identifying with Maringhi, enthralled by a compelling but rough-edged upstart, Solinas imputes his own fascinated unease to the gentleman lover: “Francesco Maria doubtless felt tenderness and sympathy for the defects of his chameleon-like social climber, whose personality had totally lured him in.” While celebrating Artemisia, Solinas creates an image of a labile, bourgeois temptress, an inversion of the ideal of the autonomous noble, male painter. Although Artemisia emerges from the 1620 letters, as from the 1612 trial records, framed in unconventional and even illicit circumstances, she was in fact not so anomalous. Solinas’s condemnation of her social climbing misunderstands the hierarchical normality of early modern Italy. Art was a way to rise in the world, if only for a few. . Nevertheless, Jesse M. Locker, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2015), documents the painter’s success in several Italian courts. . Francesco Solinas, “Return to Rome, 1620–1627,” in Artemisia Gentileschi:The Story of a Passion, 79–95. . Solinas, Lettere, 13–14. . A correspondence that navigates patronage and hierarchy, Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (NewYork: Academic Press, 1980), 131–58.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

While some, like Sofonisba Anguissola, were born into local aristocracies, most, including Artemisia, had to adapt to courtly environments, where relationships of patron and client standardly crossed social ranks. For both parties the value of these bonds usually rested on just such differences. Furthermore, love affairs, in literature and life alike, often involved people who were socially unequal and so, for that or other reasons, ineligible to marry. Such alliances, while irregular, were socially and culturally recognized as part of life. As was common in early modern societies, the family economy and well-being of Artemisia’s household depended on collaboration. Work and domesticity were humanly and spatially entangled. Already an established painter when, at the age of 19, she married Pierantonio Stiattesi, she was, from the start, to be the family’s principal breadwinner. The couple arrived in Florence with introductions to members of the ducal court, and Artemisia began painting and cultivating patrons. From 1613 to 1618, often pregnant, she bore four children. Pierantonio helped manage the family business and enabled Artemisia to do as much as she did. Such an inversion of expected gender roles — where the woman was the headliner and major earner and dealt with male associates outside the family — was atypical. Yet among early modern artists and performers, such familial collaborations between women and men sometimes delivered what the patrons wanted. Examples include the painter Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) in Bologna and later Rome, and Artemisia’s contemporary at the Tuscan court, the musician Francesca Caccini (1587–c.1645). In this pattern the artistic productivity and household fortunes of Artemisia and Pierantonio benefited from their joint, coordinated efforts.Their marriage, like many in this era, had its roots in instrumentality rather than personal fulfillment. In marriage as in friendship, . Caroline Murphy, “The Economics of the Woman Artist,” in Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque, ed.Vera Fortunati, et al. (Milan: Skira, 2007), 25–26. . Examples literary: Boccaccio, Decameron; and historical: Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). . Elizabeth Cohen,“Miscarriages of Apothecary  Justice: Un-separate Spaces for Work and Family in Early Modern Rome,” Renaissance Studies 21 (2007): 480–504. . Murphy, “Economics,” 26–28; Suzanne Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

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for early modern people love and utility often worked together. A partner with whom to build a family and a livelihood provided not only economic assets but also the means to social and emotional security. On this basis, according to church teaching, marital love commonly matured after the union. Obviously, this ideal did not always work. Yet the letters suggest that Artemisia and Pierantonio developed a reciprocal emotional reliance, even if only for a time. Both husband and wife recognized that their household’s success depended on Artemisia’s cultivation of patrons, most of them men. Among these patronage bonds, in 1617 Artemisia struck up an adulterous romance with Francesco Maria Maringhi, a wealthy young gentleman of her own age and a lover of art as well as women. The relationship’s origins remain shadowy, but, based on these letters, it was a strong, mutual, fleshly and emotional alliance in which love and utility again converged. Maringhi was Artemisia’s lover but also the couple’s patron and friend. At some point well before 1620, Pierantonio had to know what was going on and had good reason to accommodate it. Although religious law condemned adultery and honor ethics shamed a cuckold, early modern culture, more flexible than prescriptive codes might suggest, sometimes had spaces to absorb irregularity. Concerns about reputation and the discourses of honor played not only up but also down the social scale. Deeply situational, transgressive behavior could read differently, depending on the timing, the observers and the social relations of the participants. Dishonorable acts might go long known without denunciation. When, as for Artemisia in 1620, scandal did erupt, sexual misconduct was often the gossip’s ammunition rather than the trigger. Wifely adulteries, especially where conforming to social hierarchies, were sometimes solicited and tolerated. A powerful male, for example, the sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, occasionally enjoyed with fair impunity the sexual favors of a subordinate’s wife, here Costanza Piccolomini married to his employee Matteo Bonucelli. Yet, when . Cecilia Cristellon, “Public Display of Affection: The Making of Marriage in the Venetian Courts Before the Council of Trent (1420–1545),” in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. Sara Matthews-Grieco (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 174–78. . Cristellon,“Public Display,” 182–85. . Sarah McPhee, Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 43–61.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

Bernini later learned that Costanza had betrayed him with his younger brother, Luigi, the great man avenged his own honor by arranging the slashing of her face.This high-handed business pressed gravely on Bernini’s underlings, but they reclaimed their reputations in time. So, sometimes adultery had to be overlooked, but it left a family’s honor vulnerable, as the 1620 letters also show. Letters proliferated in Renaissance Italy.The “familiar” letters in the classical tradition that set the models for literary correspondence differed from what I call here “family” letters, those written by people of varied rank and situation concerning their own everyday business and private affairs. These letters, if less artful, nevertheless were not transparent, because a number of our modern expectations about letters do not apply. First, nearly all such letters were more instrumental than expressive; that is, the writer took up the pen to accomplish a specific practical purpose — seeking and reporting information, personal as well as public, asking for services or following up on requests. Secondly, the rhetorical habits of “family” letters were often disjunctive. A letter, especially one with more than a few lines, likely addressed several topics by abruptly juxtaposing disparate concerns.Wording featured a lot of formulas, set by religion and the conventions of proper epistolary style. Before the rendering of human emotional sensibilities that we owe to the eighteenth century and after, it is difficult to gauge authenticity of feeling in these early modern compositions. Thirdly, the writing and reading of “family” letters were often collaborative. Proficiencies varied, and privacy was not presumed. Because of uneven skills, but also of circumstance and the kind of letter needed, friends and neighbors as well as secretaries and scribes might have a hand. And “family” letters often circulated . Najemy, Between Friends, 18–57. On women’s letters, Meredith K. Ray, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); on unpublished letters, 6, 224–25 nn. 13–14; P. Renée Baernstein, “In My Own Hand: Costanza Colonna and the Art of the Letter in Sixteenth Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 66.1 (2013): 130–68, at 138–40. See also James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 229–32. . Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, “Form and Persuasion in Women’s Letters,” in Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1500–1700, ed.  Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 3–18. . James Daybell, “Female Literacy and the Social Conventions of Women’s Letter-Writing in England, 1540–1603,” in Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1500–1700, ed.  J. Daybell (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 59–76.

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not to a broad “republic” of educated readers but among a modest circle of people who knew one another. Women participated actively in the early modern culture of family letter-writing. If their skills were often less well tutored than those of their menfolk, their goals and sentiments were not necessarily sharply gendered. For convenience or a more polished product, women, like men, often used scribes. As the advantages of being able to write became clearer, however, more and more women learned to do so.Writing in your own hand was a sign of privacy, sometimes intimacy, but the porous boundaries — routine for family letters — still applied. As texts, the 1620 correspondence by Artemisia and Pierantonio are rich but difficult. Francesco Solinas, with his assistants, has prepared an effective edition on which I rely here. Accompanying thirty annotated transcriptions are photographic versions of all of Artemisia’s letters and, for comparison, one of Pierantonio’s. These facsimiles highlight the project’s challenges, including scarce punctuation, irregular breaks between words and unconventional orthographic habits, all of which obscure grammar and leave meanings uncertain. Pierantonio was the more experienced writer of the two, though he too had his quirks. The troubled circumstances of the writers — haste, distress and sometimes appetite to obscure — further complicate decoding. Together, the pervasive ambiguities make it hard to know surely what meaning was intended, and the reconstruction of the generic and situational contexts of writing is all the more critical to best possible readings. . Italian examples include Gabriella Zarri, ed., Per lettere: La scrittura epistolare femminile, secoli XV–XVII (Rome:Viella, 1999), essays by Tiziana Plebani, Maria Pia Fantini, Manuela Doni Garfagnini and Maria Fubini. Also, Marina D’Amelia,“‘Una lettera la settimana’: Geronima Veralli Malatesta al suo fratello, 1575–1622,” Quaderni storici 83 (1993): 381–413; Deanna Shemek, “Isabella d’Este and the Properties of Persuasion,” in Women’s Letters Across Europe, 123–40; Deborah Stott, “‘I Am the Same Cornelia I Have Always Been’: Reading Cornelia Collonello’s Letters to Michaelangelo,” in Women’s Letters Across Europe, 79–102; Ann Crabb, “If I Could Write: Margherita Datini and Letter Writing, 1385–1410,” Renaissance Quarterly 60.4 (2007): 1170–1206; Carolyn James, “Marriage by Correspondence: Politics and Domesticity in the Letters of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga, 1490–1519,” Renaissance Quarterly 65.2 (2012): 321–52. For digitized examples of women’s letters from Renaissance Italy, see www.lisakaborycha.com/letters-of-renaissance-women. . Daybell,“Female Literacy,” 70–71. . For Pierantonio’s hand, Lettere, 29, 35.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

Although Pierantonio occasionally served as scribe for Artemisia, each mostly wrote in his or her own hand. How often one of them read what the other wrote we cannot tell. While at least some of Artemisia’s letters were likely private, together they are very much part of a larger correspondence that is intricately connected in form and content. Both spouses sometimes appended postscripts to the other’s letter. Husband and wife wrote to Maringhi about the same events and the same problems, and they talked about each other. Artemisia told of Pierantonio’s defense of her, and he regularly reported on her health and mood, her work and her wishes concerning family business. For Pierantonio, Francesco was a precious patron in troubled times and Artemisia as painter and lover was the hook to keep him sweet. As characteristic of early modern “family” correspondence, the 1620 letters were centrally about solving problems, of which the couple then faced many. Threats to the couple’s critical assets both material — money and personal property — and social — reputation and legal status — occupied most of the correspondence. A third theme was their relations, and in particular ways Artemisia’s, with Francesco Maria Maringhi, on whom they jointly depended to help address unusual and immediate challenges. In his letters Pierantonio positioned himself consistently as Maringhi’s grateful servant. In her letters Artemisia struggled amidst travails to negotiate — both with Francesco and with herself — an altered understanding of their bond.Tracked in the correspondence, their fortunes followed something of an arc. Pressures building in Florence prodded the couple to leave precipitously in mid-February, and the letters seeking assistance from Maringhi began at once. A major issue was an uncompleted commission for Grand Duke Cosimo, funded by a fifty scudi advance, that prompted official confiscations of the household’s moveable property. Their departure also stirred ill will that spread to Prato, then Rome and even Pisa as their troubles reverberated into the summer. During these intense months, Artemisia suffered from stress, at times acutely. Meanwhile, Pierantonio carried on a wary, strategic management of the family’s embroiled affairs. Yet epistolary communication was unpredictable. . In a cash-poor economy, debt was a chronic state for many. As in the case of adultery, the timing of prosecution of debtors was often personal and political. . From a modern perspective, it appears that a stress-related illness with psychic and physical dimensions began even before Artemisia left Florence.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Resolutions of many specific and broader problems came slowly, but by summer both finances and reputation were stabilizing. February 12 found the couple in Prato in domestic and legal disarray, writing to Maringhi, who undertook, at some expense and political risk to himself, to attend to their abandoned Florentine affairs. That first day Pierantonio wrote not once, but twice. His first letter, after reporting the perils of winter travel on horseback, solicited their patron’s aid in securing letters to placate the authorities and, as an afterthought, in arranging care for four-year old Christofano and twoyear old Prudenzia left behind. This last detail suggests the layered intimacies of the couple’s reliance on Maringhi. Artemisia’s five-line postscript in her own hand incorporated some, to us, surprising juxtapositions. Addressing Maringhi as VS, the abbreviation for Vostra Signoria (Your Lordship), a phrase she used consistently, even in her most loverly passages, Artemisia first asked that he send a hat, so that Pierantonio could dress suitably when he approached the podestà of Prato for aid.Without a sentence break and larded with the orthographic ambiguities typical of her letters, Artemisia continued, “please amor mio, don’t falter in the face of my troubles, and I kiss your hands, and don’t you worry for I know your constancy and your love adio.” This fragment, materially a part of Pierantonio’s letter, is the first lover’s statement in the 1620 correspondence. Artemisia calls Francesco, “my love” and, using the formal second person plural, invokes his reciprocal care for her by citing his constancy.This language immediately follows a prosaic request for a hat to smooth official negotiation of the couple’s predicament. From the very start love and utility, social deference and assertiveness move together. The first letters moved quickly across the short distance between Prato and Florence. Replying to Maringhi, Artemisia wrote twice on . Letters 7 and 8:29-33. . Given other evidence in the letters, this represented unexpected haste rather than child neglect. . Lettere, 31–32. Though by a more accomplished writer than Artemisia, Tullia d’Aragona’s letters in the 1540s to her patron, Benedetto Varchi, provide a useful comparison on epistolary rhetoric and sentiments. See The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona, ed. and trans.  Julia Hairston (Toronto: Iter, 2014), 290–306. Compare also Artemisia’s own letters to patrons in the 1630s and 1640s, Letters 37–64 in Lettere. . Lettere, 32 n. 17. As elsewhere in Artemisia’s letters, with all the ambiguities, tone is difficult to determine. Solinas’s “effrontery” is to me “loving urgency.”

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

February 13 and 14. First a letter signed by her, but scribed and likely prompted by Pierantonio, followed his points of the previous day. After conventional thanks for Maringhi’s answer, Artemisia reported that things were going not just badly, but worse, and so she and Pierantonio could not return to Florence. Courteously, she hoped that their affairs would not bring Francesco great grief. Yet, belying this good sentiment, there followed more instructions concerning the abandoned paintings and bringing the children to Prato at the first opportunity. The next day, this time writing in her own hand and a more personal voice, Artemisia returned to Francesco’s implied proposal that she come back to Florence. This possibility, linked to the delivery of the grand duke’s promised picture, threaded through the correspondence. At this time, however, Artemisia, declining to do Maringhi’s bidding, asked instead that he visit her in Prato. After explaining that people’s talk would make her feel unsafe on Florentine streets, she exclaimed, “My dearest heart,VS pardon me if I disobey you, but there I cannot defend my reputation.” As she begged his indulgence with loverly endearments, it was less their own alliance that troubled her than a surge of public gossip. The next letters are dated two weeks later, once the couple, with their children, had arrived in Rome.At this distance mail couriers traveled weekly, and for the next months the arrival or non-arrival letters was a recurrent concern. On March 2, a single letter from Pierantonio set much of the agenda for the correspondence to follow. He addressed Maringhi with a respectful formula that became his standard, “To the very illustrious Lord and my most worthy patron.” Pierantonio reported that they were all “healthy and safe” despite much snow on the roads. As they had decided en route, they did not stop first at the Roman house of his father-in-law, Orazio Gentileschi, but instead directly took their own lodgings. As strained relations with Artemisia’s family festered, Rome posed its own difficulties for the beleaguered couple. Pierantonio then asked for news from Florence . Letter 9:33–35. . Letter 10:34, 36. . Lettere, 34; compare endearments in a brief letter of 1618/19, 22–23. . Letter 11:37–38. . The couple lodged first near Chiesa Nuova, and then, through Maringhi’s connections, near the Ripetta; rent payments were another recurrent problem.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

and Pisa about the dispersed networks of their patrons, creditors and enemies.The Maringhi letters were only one strand of his larger epistolary campaign to buttress the family’s honor and credit. Then he raised the central topic of their embattled property — paintings, supplies and household furnishings — that underpinned both livelihood and reputation.They awaited the arrival from Florence, he wrote, of a chest of goods so that Artemisia could resume painting for the grand duke. Meanwhile, he asked that his lordship protect their Florentine belongings and concluded, “I kiss your hands, along with Artemisia, and may God grant you every contentment.” Such deferential courtesies and prayers were common to both correspondents.Also typical were Pierantonio’s frequent references to Artemisia, whose layered bonds with Maringhi were critical social capital. In the next letters, a pair dated March 5 and 6, both correspondents initiated a new epistolary convention: pseudonyms. Appearing on the outside of folded letters, these offered a modicum of discretion. Pierantonio henceforth addressed Francesco as not Maringhi, but Francozzi; inside, however, he continued to salute “my most worthy patron,” to sign with his own name and to refer often to Artemisia. She, who used a greater range of greetings, began to inscribe her letters formally to Fortunio Fortuni and to sign most with, oddly, the same name, Fortunio Fortuni. Inside letters, she used various generic terms, sometimes informal like “my heart,” but most often the formal Vostra Signoria. This deferential phrase obscured his identity, but also reflected something very real about their relationship as not only lovers but also patron and protege. On March 5, Artemisia packed several themes into a dense letter. She opened playfully, “Ben mio, If VS could see how great was my joy when I got your [letter], no one would wonder had VS become an angel, for otherwise you could not have seen it.” Then, abruptly shifting mood, she complained, “Tuesday my scoundrel of a brother [Giulio] and I quarreled in very nasty words, so that, had my husband not been there, he might even have dared to attack my face”; and again, on Friday evening, Giulio “put his hand to his weapons, . Letter 13:40; about Francozzi, 37.These pseudonyms likely had more rhetorical than practical value. . Letter 12:38–39, 41–43. . Lettere, 38-39.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

and my husband got between us and was about to kill him.” This rough scene of sibling combat and Pierantonio’s bodily defense of his wife marked the continuing static inside the Gentileschi family. Maringhi in Florence had some part in these transactions, and Artemisia thanked God and “voi” for aid so that these difficulties were not worse.Then she switched tone again, Enough of that, I have learned that I can rely on my husband, now I am well in all things and already I have lots of work, and I have quite a nice house and in good order, nothing is missing except you. I want to know everything about my affairs [in Florence], please tell me exactly how they stand.... I want so much that you love me beyond imagining.... Remember me one thousandth as much as I remember you, and I am all yours, and I remind you of your promises, and everything, everything. The chest has not come; as soon as it does, I know my obligations. Be happy as can be. Adio, my dearest life, without you I am nothing, and I kiss your hands that please me so much. Most beloved VS, your faithful servant, Fortunio Fortuni.

This long passage illustrates many characteristic elements, especially the jumpy juxtaposition of tones — stressed and upbeat, intimate and formal, romantic and deferential — and the entangled concerns about social relations, reputation and material goods. At this moment Artemisia eagerly represented herself to her lover/patron as doing well, including, notably, enjoying confidence in Pierantonio. Her comments about the house echoed the couple’s shared ambition to appear in Rome as honorably established. Pierantonio’s letter of March 6, labeled as postscript to Artemesia’s, further detailed two matters. He reported that the anticipated chest had in fact arrived at the customs house, but that, because of Lent and dilatory officials, they had not yet collected it. He asked Maringhi to send several more items, including colors so that Artemisia could work, which, Pierantonio confirmed, she was ready to do. After his signature, he added a caution to Maringhi, who had dealt with Giulio in Florence, about his brother-in-law’s violence and his husbandly steps to protect Artemisia from familial affronts. . Money was one issue, but details are hard to fit together; see Lettere, 44-46, 51, 66-67, n. 3. . Lettere, 39. . Lettere, 40.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

By March 20, after a nearly a month in Rome, stress continued to mount. In paired letters the correspondents wrestled with familiar problems in different voices. Pierantonio, opening with his usual courtesy, was pleased to read in Maringhi’s letter of the 14th that the patron was healthy and content. As indeed are we, the attentive husband continued, “Artemisia has never been better than now, both in bodily health and in quietness of spirit, and her credit is rising greatly among the leading men (principi).” Furthermore, he assured Francesco, the important painting for his highness was almost done.This was what Pierantonio knew a patron should hear, but he whistled in the wind. As his letter continued, and as Artemisia laid out in her own graphic terms, their affairs and mood were in fact seriously precarious. Artemisia’s letter also began conventionally, if in a more familiar tone.“My soul,” she wrote,“I feel such pleasure to hear news of VS, and rightly so, since it is the thing dearest to me in this world.” As in her letter of March 5, however, she turned soon to bitterer business, this time to Maringhi’s report that in Florence in February, Margherita, a scandalmonger, now charged the couple with theft. Although Artemisia replied that she had heard from the podestà of Prato that a serving woman was the likely culprit, she proceeded to badmouth Margherita for her false and malevolent claims. Claiming to be above all this and thus immune to its pain, Artemisia nonetheless derided Margherita with street talk as a “poltrona” and “ruffiana.” She said that she would refrain from repeating Margherita’s words about Francesco, since “an obscene and plebeian mouth can speak no better, and if she spoke well of me, it would provoke me, since it might lead those with good judgment to think me no better than her, who is a lousy whore, she and her daughter.” Thus condemning Margherita for her crude language, Artemisia fell into the same trap. Nor was Margherita the only vituperative thorn in Artemisia’s side. The painter next bewailed “an utterly scandalous letter against me and my husband with a sonnet as infamous as can be” sent by . Letter 15: 45-48. . Letter 14: 44-45, 55-57. . Lettere, 45-46, 47, n. 6. Solinas identifies Margherita Quorli as Maringhi’s friend. Her position and motives are not clear. . Lettere, 44.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

Bernardo Migliorati, an officer in the Medici Guardaroba, to Orazio Gentileschi. Her reputation battered by a campaign of slander, both oral and written that stretched from Florence to Rome, Artemisia felt deeply distressed. Typically, after the outburst against Migliorati, Artemisia immediately reminded Francesco to send the needed goods. The couple’s imperiled belongings were a major practical problem, but, linked to identity and reputation, they also preyed on Artemisia’s psyche. Linking lover, husband and belongings, Artemisia declared that this service of dispatching goods, according to Pierantonio’s instructions, was the best way Francesco could show his love for her.  Finding it now a great effort to write, she would dictate what she wanted. Still, she mustered the stamina to address her lover. She expressed fear now that she would not return to Florence, but cherished hope that their love would survive. Without that, she would die, she wrote. Several lines of loverly protestations concluded with words paraphrasing Petrarch: “in the end, you should take to heart, the sweet peace and the sweet angers and the dear replies and, in sum, all the fruits that we gathered in the garden of love.” Then she veered sharply again: “My husband will write everything,” including about a desired scissors case. So, in the last third of his March 20 letter Pierantonio listed the things that “Artemisia wishes” to have Maringhi send by the next available muleteers: a mattress, bedding, linen cloths and rags, damaskcovered chairs, some ladies’ accessories and the azzurro still wanting for the duke’s picture. Then, after reporting that Migliorati’s scathing epistle so upset Artemisia that she had taken to her bed, Pierantonio closed with requests for letters from a mutual friend to placate father Orazio. In the battle for honor, written words trumped oral ones that faded or mutated in memory. Lastly, in this complicated letter, Pierantonio asked Maringhi to intervene because brother Giulio had pawned in Florence goods entrusted to him for Artemisia, so that he could pay “for gaming and continually whoring.” With less dramatic shifts of rhetorical register than Artemisia, as correspondent Pierantonio did move from larger to smaller matters and back again. . Lettere, 45 n. 11. . Lettere, 44. . Lettere, 46–48.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Next, on March 25, Artemisia wrote a single letter different from those before and after. Dropping the pseudonyms, she addressed it directly to her “most worthy patron Francesco Maria Maringhi” and signed herself in full, “Artemisia Lomi.” As was characteristic for early modern “family” letters, her first sentence coupled love and utility. Her two great desires were to see her lover soon and to recover her property, with his help, in order to set up her Roman workshop. Less commonly for this genre, Artemisia’s next words evoked Ovid’s Metamorphoses to imagine a future meeting of the lovers. Would Francesco recognize her, as “I will be changed in body, and VS in spirit”? The vagaries of orthography make it hard, as often, to parse her sentiment. Nonetheless, compared to some letters, the tonality was strikingly hopeful and purposeful. That mood may be related to her use of real names. Nevertheless, if we read the letters as a sequence, Artemisia still shouldered great strain. Two days later, on March 27, the couple dispatched three anxious missives. In a brief paragraph in the role of lover Artemisia fretted over not hearing from Francesco, although only a week had passed. On the same day, Pierantonio wrote a long letter, and then on a separate sheet added a postscript. Invoking explicitly “Artemisia’s words,” he opened with unease, since they had no response from Maringhi. First, as often, Pierantonio recounted news, here of an armed ambush in the street against an ironically designated “friend.” Then he reverted to his most urgent concern, the goods listed in “our two letters,” of which “we have extreme need.” Along with arrangements for payment and delivery, the letter underlined items that Artemisia wanted or that Pierantonio thought would help their professional status.The last included some “corami,” gilded leather wall-coverings, that must be recovered from a second-hand merchant,“because here we must present . Letter 16:48–49, 59–60. . For closing with her own name or initials, see Letters 10, 32, 33, 35, 36. . Lettere, 49 n. 10: On changes to her body, Solinas suggests recovery from Florentine stress and gaining weight.Yet stress has not yet been overcome. . Letter 17:49–50, 61; the positioning on the folio of the copied epigrams is not clear. . Letters 18 and 19:50–52. . Lettere, 50, 51 n. 7; see also 58 n. 8. Agostino Tassi was the victim, but the suggestion that Pierantonio or Maringhi were implicated remains undocumented.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

great decorum” and show that we were not impoverished. He then stated, almost as a litany, that the duke’s painting was almost done. Before closing, Pierantonio returned to the Gentileschi family drama. In his version, Orazio had a week ago come again to their house to quarrel with Artemisia, and as husband he had had to step in. Therefore he had declared his in-laws “enemies” and told them to keep their distance. Because of such no-good folk (genterella) who want to “tear out the soul and heart” from Artemisia, Pierantonio as her protector reminded his lordship not only to secure the goods but also to arrange for the letters previously requested. Later the same day, in a separate postscript, Pierantonio reiterated, highlighting Artemisia and the need to show her father and the rest of their world that in Florence she was no “ordinary woman” and now in Rome should not have “mad dogs” barking at her heels. The need for such a thorough defense suggests battles not yet won. The next pair of letters went out a fortnight later on April 11. In Pierantonio’s pointed words, the couple had “after a long wait” heard from Maringhi. In the meantime, the family’s fortunes worsened sharply, as “we have been in travails every hour, in laments and burials.” Five days earlier, their young son, Cristofano had died; having suffered for eleven days, he must have taken ill just after the preceding letters had been sent. Receiving news of Maringhi mitigates our affliction, wrote the father with labored epistolary courtesy. Yet he segued from Christofano’s death to a politely deferential but insistent request, “I beg Your Lordship with all my heart that you would be willing to do me the service of sending word of exactly which of our goods have been sold” and,“if by chance, the wall-coverings and the damask chairs have been saved, please arrange for a mule driver to bring them immediately.” Furthermore, there has been no azzurro, so now the oft-promised painting is delayed. Although Maringhi . Lettere, 51, 52. . Lettere, 52. . Letter 21:54–55. . The boy died of bachi, a pernicious dysentery. See Ann Carmichael, Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 41–45. . Lettere, 53 n. 4. Solinas reports word of sanctions imposed by the grand duke’s administration against the Lomi/Stiattesi household or Maringhi. . Lettere, 54.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

must have been busy on their behalf in Florence, moveable property on which livelihood and lifestyle depended were still out of reach. Finally, Pierantonio reported steps to uncover the source of another defamatory letter. Artemisia’s companion letter showed her much distraught. It was full of odd juxtapositions and meanings not easy to decode. Using poetic language evoking Petrarch, she began, “Restorer (refrigerio) of my life,” and then continued, having received two letters from VS I am greatly distressed to hear that VS has so much trouble on my account, but I am deeply upset that the only way to fix my affairs is to sell all my belongings, and I do not know what Love has made me do, so now that nothing is left, I go about like a hermit. I see now that fortune has turned her back on me, and deprives me completely of all that I hold dear and that can serve me.Truly, consider that God has taken my son, it has been five days since he died and I have been dying of grief.

To complete the roster of losses, she lastly bemoaned the tailing off of Francesco’s love. Under great stress, Artemisia’s attachment to people — her son, her lover — and to things ran together. Dire emotions confounded the usual business of letter writing. Amidst all this, almost three weeks passed before the Roman correspondents resumed with a flurry of letters in early May. Artemisia was still much troubled. On May 1, she wrote in high dudgeon. Acknowledging with cool courtesy the receipt of two letters from Maringhi, she started immediately to chastise. “I would be content if I really believed what you say, but I know in what waters I fish,” she complained, and “I know very well everything about your doings, when you are with women and when you go to the tavern.” Again she conflated feelings and things: although she has loved Francesco so intemperately that she must answer to God for it, she begrudged his distraction and his failure to tend to her searing needs for money and goods. So, for the moment, she turned her rhetorical back on all . Lettere, 58 and n. 9; 45 n. 11. It is unclear how many such letters circulated. . Letter 20:53–54, 72–73. . Lettere, 53; also for refrigerio, 74. . Letter 22:58, 62, 78. Evidently from Maringhi or otherwise, news arrived that made losses of Florentine property look even worse. . Lettere, 58, 62; also for the fishing metaphor, 65.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

things Florentine, including him, and instead praised the prospects for a Roman career where she will be better treated and appreciated.Yet, for the moment, she cut no ties. At the end of the letter, her tone shifting again, she reverted, as often, to concrete details. She asked Maringhi’s help in sorting out her rent payment and proposed that, if he came to Rome, as evidently had been suggested, she would accompany him back to Tuscany with the grand duke’s picture. Although unsettled by reports of Francesco’s Florentine life without her, the prospect of returning with him publicly when she has met her professional obligations to the Medici court felt plausible, even welcome. The very next day, May 2, Artemisia wrote again, this time notably in parallel with a short letter from Pierantonio. Here, atypically, she adopted his formal, deferential address. After that, she launched into a mostly courteous, but also biting commentary on the themes of the day before. She decried the hazards of writing letters and then cast herself in the bitter role of the lover wronged. “If you cause me illness, I will seek medicine in others, because, for an ingrate like you, it is wrong to speak and act rightly, and if it were your diva Olimpia who is a whore [talking], you would believe it all.” Because Francesco had been her lover, of whom she would expect better, Artemisia blamed him for the parlous state of her affairs. Although this was hardly fair, she was still seriously distraught and indeed ill. As Pierantonio explained in his letter, “Artemisia is so very angry that she has retreated to bed at the thought that all her belongings have disappeared as smoke.” The rest of Pierantonio’s letter spoke of practicalities in a more positive vein. He was glad that, at long last, the azzurro had arrived and proposed ways to rescue as much as possible of their goods, including the wall-coverings. Pierantonio would likely attribute his wife’s illness to material losses rather than amorous ones. Yet we should not assume that for Artemisia, in her tangle of trials, either the waning love affair was the only real, or even preeminent, cause of distress. On May 9, the couple dispatched paired letters that reflected, in different modes, the depth of Artemisia’s illness, now physical as well . Letter 23:62–63, 89–91. . Lettere, 63 n. 23. Solinas identifies Olimpia as another member of the troublesome Quorli family. . Letter 24:64.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

as psychological. She managed nevertheless to write a long letter, which she closed:“Here I am stopping with the pen but not the cries of my spirit, because it is on account of you that I am in bed with fluxes of blood and high fevers, so that this letter was written in sixty pieces, in bed, this the 9th of May 1620.” Opening “To my enemy who falsely played the lover,” she cited Orlando furioso on the shallow flaring of men’s love for beautiful women.Yet, the core of her distress was less Maringhi’s personal disloyalty than his failure to resolve her family’s untidy business affairs. After the Ariosto reference, she turned immediately to the recovery of her dispersed property. “If Your Lordship cannot handle it,” she declared, she will have to send “her husband” to Florence. However devoted Maringhi may or may not be, in the crunch she must rely on Pierantonio. At this fraught juncture, Artemisia’s words tumbled less with rhetorical strategy than by emotional association. Pierantonio’s letter of May 9 was also more than usually dismayed and urgent, as he worked to sort out, yet again, the many challenges to the household’s financial security and good reputation. Like Artemisia, he feared “seeing my property going down the drain (in malora).” He too used the metaphor that his goods, like “my dowry,” threatened to disappear as “smoke,” as things worth 300 ducats yielded only 50 when sold. Enacting the couple’s good standing, he himself will deliver Cosimo’s painting in Florence, to prove that “my wife was no fugitive when she went home to visit her kin and for the good of her health, and with official permission that I will take with me to show.” This dubious claim pointed up Pierantonio’s vulnerabilities, not least in calling attention to Artemisia’s in fact precarious health.The letter gave his version of her recent crisis: “one who suffers great pain cries out, and because of these things my wife is not herself (lascia il pelle), and I have not seen her out of danger, and her mind wanders from fever, that she did not think VS would have to do thus, and I let no one into the room when she is in these furies so they cannot hear her.” In this passage it remained muddled just whom Pierantonio deemed responsible, but the depth of Artemisia’s illness was clear.

. Letter 25:64–65, 98–100. . Letter 26:66–67.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

During the next six weeks, between mid-May and late June, there were four single letters, first one by Artemisia and then three by Pierantonio. On May 13, less than a week after her dramatic letter of “sixty pieces,” but seeming once more in possession of herself,Artemisia wrote briefly and coolly. After noting that Francesco had replied to Pierantonio but not to her, she nonetheless thanked him, as his grateful client, for handling the rent problem and for the offer of a place to stay in Florence. “We would do the same for VS, if you would deign to come. I won’t bother telling VS to love me because I see that it’s all obviously in vain, for one cannot keep a foot in so many stirrups.” She sent no more letters for many weeks.The reason, however, was not only lover’s pique but also the resumption of a busy career. On May 17 and 30 and on  June 12, writing in a purposive, upbeat tone about the family’s business, Pierantonio foregrounded Artemisia each time. In the first letter he suggested that, when the duke’s picture was ready, Artemisia and he might like to return to Florence; perhaps he thought the prospect of a reunion with his wife might stir Francesco to act on other matters. Two weeks later, Pierantonio begged his lordship’s forgiveness if Artemisia did not write,“because she has so much to do and so much work, and so many cardinals and leading men seek her out that our house is always so full that she has no chance to put hand to mouth,” that is, to eat. His message was that, for all the Florentine and Roman stresses that had dominated the letters, Artemisia was back at work, with well-placed, knowledgeable patrons at her door. Later, to prod Maringhi, he inserted into Artemisia’s mouth a request of his own, to follow up on a letter to the Office of Contracts. A quick postscript from her, probably prompted by Pierantonio and signed with affection, not passion, refers to the needed document. Artemisia herself was more interested in Francesco’s sending a special majolica plate. As some financial problems seemed to be resolving, Pierantonio’s third letter of  June 12 was full of thanks to Maringhi, including the claim that “Artemisia holds it very dearly and thanks Vostra Signoria infinitely.” . Letter 27:67–68, 106. . Lettere, 67. . Letter 28:68–69. . Letter 29:69–70. . Letter 30:71.

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After six weeks’ silence, on June 26, Artemisia penned two very different letters. On the surface they were similar, both addressed to Fortunio Fortuni but signed with the initials, “A.L.,” instead of pseudonyms. The shorter, more conventional one asked Maringhi to give her cousin a place to stay in Florence; “if you love me, do me this service from your heart,” she ended. This letter was an odd mate to that day’s other composition, one that has attracted special attention in the context of love. Artemisia’s nadir among the Furies was long past. The family’s affairs had improved: the malign subversion of its reputation had abated, and Artemisia was attracting new commissions. Although she acknowledged her lover’s waning ardor, she continued to seek his very personal patronage. Artemisia’s longer letter of June 26 was more exclusively about love than the others. After earlier letters in which she had berated and regretted Francesco’s amorous distraction and his ebbing love for her, he apparently wrote to her protesting his faithfulness.This, to us, invisible letter evidently revived her romantic feelings and shaped her ardent but decorous response. [My] heart, I have received from VS one of those letters that restore me (sono mio refrigerio) and bring me back from death to life. If you knew how happy I feel, surely if it is true that you love me, you would adorn yourself in happiness. Vostra Signoria tells me that you have no other woman than your right hand, so envied by myself because it has something that I cannot have, and then you thank me for inviting you to stay at my house. Oh, my dear life! You wrong me.You must know that I am yours until my last breath.The only thing that troubles me is not to see you near me.You must know that I long for you the way I await the grace of God. I am resolved to shun that commerce [sex] if I cannot have it with you, and, if you do not come here, I will never, never break my chastity [abstinence]... my heart throws off its bridle when I receive letters from you. I have kept myself going to this point, but my heart sees only difficulty in the future.... I would beg you with all my heart concerning my portrait, that you not do what you should not and that you promised me not to do, that thing that perhaps VS is doing. I remind you that it is a great sin, and I would have you remember that I love your soul as well as your body.

. Letter 32:75, 119. . Letter 31:74, 111–12.

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Aside from refrigerio, this letter lacked the poetic language and allusions featured in several of Artemisia’s loverly passages. It did speak, though indirectly, about sex or about carnal desire for a beloved out of reach. We should remember that early modern culture, while it knew sexual shame, did not relegate women’s fleshly appetites into polite oblivion; nor were these inherently ungodly. When women spoke about sex privately or publicly, as sometimes in court, there are various respectable vocabularies available. Artemisia did not play the impious libertine of Solinas’s reading. If her letter alluded to her own sexual desires, Francesco probably raised this topic. In responding, she did not use the rough diction that she flung against women whose gossip threatened her good name. Nor did she engage in the kind of erotic joking that turned up in some men’s letters. Rather she resorted to euphemistic circumlocution. Similarly, her injunctions against misuse of her portrait were not blasphemous. God appeared repeatedly in the letters in a mode that was often formulaic, but not irreligious. Artemisia should be taken at her word as she expressed concern for Francesco’s soul as well as body. The love portions of Artemisia’s letters fit into emergent early modern patterns. Like other epistolary forms, love letters multiplied in this era. Those written by ordinary people belonged to a larger culture but without the high polish and expectation of public circulation that shaped elite correspondence. The archives of the Roman criminal court preserve non-literary love letters that help to contextualize Artemisia’s words to Maringhi. A young man’s . Elizabeth Cohen, “She Said, He Said: Situated Oralities in  Judicial Records in Early Modern Rome,” Journal of Early Modern History 16.4–5 (2012): 403–30, at 427–29. . Guido Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 109–41; Molly Bourne, “Mail Humour and Male Sociability: Sexual Innuendo in the Epistolary Domain of Francesco II Gonzaga,” in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, 200–221. . About a poem in which Castiglione’s wife, in his absence, converses with and caresses his portrait, David Rosand, “The Portrait, the Courtier and Death,” in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1983), 94 n. 2. . Lettere, 80-81 and n. 20. . On literary love letters by women, including as farce, Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 14– 15, 122, 214, 286-87 n. 93. Also, Daybell, Material Letter, 205, 207.

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illustrated love letter of 1602 displayed startling male juxtapositions of epistolary form, florid rhetoric and visual crudity. Love letters from women differed in tone. A trial record from 1592 includes missives from Sveva Gualtieri, a widowed gentlewoman with grown sons, to an official in a cardinal’s guardaroba. If less combative than Artemisia’s, these letters sound like her in their language of deferential respect, of complaint and pleas for help and of the heart as the seat of suffering. Sveva wrote, My illustrious and most worthy Lord, Against my own will, I forced myself to wait all day for Vostra Signoria to come to me, as, by your grace, you had led me to expect. Now I can suffer no more, feeling my heart break and fearing that you had others.... So I am sending the bearer just to discover if some legitimate obstacle has detained you. I wish to lament so very much of Your Lordship, that stones would feel pity. Having so inflamed me, you then turned your back, and had no compassion for me, a thing unfitting to your nobility. And I beg you to forgive me, because jealousy now would be too much to bear. I kiss your hands a thousand thousand times, and praying you to help me because I find myself in greatest travail.

In 1605, another love letter from a woman, smuggled into the jail, wrapped in a shirt, complained against a heedless lover. The scribal transcription read in part, “My dearest love, hostelry for my heart, you are the one who torments me at all hours; I would never have believed that you would ever do me such wrong; but when I think of that lovely face, my heart clenches....” She continued that, if she could, she would buy his release from jail, but “he has left her, poor wretch, with nothing but debts and pain.” Although Artemisia’s correspondence was more complex, these samples suggest that that it was not altogether exceptional. A fortnight later, on  July 9, Pierantonio and Artemisia dispatched the last of their paired letters. With perhaps more grounds than before, Pierantonio was eager to show that everything was going well. Delighted to invite Maringhi to stay with them in Rome, he told him how to find their house — “at the Ripetta, it’s called the Palazzo del Vantaggio, and ask for la pittora and immediately you will . Cohen,“She Said,” 402–4. . Archivio di Stato di Roma, Tribunale criminale del Governatore, Processi xvi secolo, Busta 256, f. 498.The original letter is filed with the transcript. . ASR,Tribunale criminale del Governatore, Investigazioni 352, f. 12.

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Elizabeth S. Cohen • More Trials for Artemisia

be shown the way.” He continued that Artemisia “has told me that she cannot write because she has just finished two paintings for the duke of Bavaria and has had to work, as the saying goes, both day and night; they try, with both hands and feet, to take her to Bavaria, and she has a chunk of work for the duke.” Despite Pierantonio’s disclaimer, Artemisia did make time to write, if briefly, and displayed a renewed confidence touching both her relations with Francesco and her work.  Juxtaposing fondness and business again, she exclaimed, “Oh, my dear sweet life,” before declaring that within a month Cosimo’s commission would — finally — be ready for delivery. “I am in good form, I am walking a good path,” she announced, with a year’s worth of well-paid work lined up in Rome and pressure on behalf of the duke of Bavaria to go paint in Germany. If Maringhi would come to Rome, she wrote, he would see how she flourishes and admire her well-appointed home. The correspondence then lapsed for another six weeks and ended with two letters in September from Artemisia alone. Both bearing the salutation “My Lord,” and signed “A. Lomi,” sought to re-negotiate a personal and professional relationship where Francesco’s earlier passion had, after all, subsided. In a short letter of September 2, there was an Artemisian edge to her comments, but the overall goal was to sustain an emotional connection. She apologized for not replying quickly to Maringhi’s recent letter, because,“I have been so busy that I have not even an hour of free time; being in Rome with my repute you can’t fool around; I recognize that you no longer feel the same desire to hear of me, but only a sort of friendship, for which even so I thank you. At the last, everything has an end.” A longer, less resigned letter of September 12 returned to the charged emotions of earlier correspondence. Although the worst difficulties have receded, several problems, including delivering the grand duke’s picture, remain still unsettled. Instead of the usual, grateful opening, Artemisia immediately declared that for some time she had been angry at Maringhi and decided now to speak out. She launched a lengthy spiel where her feelings about the grand duke, . Letter 34:76–77, 79. . Letter 33:75–76, 120. . Letter 35:79, 123. I read the word “bai[ ]” as ‘baie’. . Letter 36:80–81, 138–40.

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her husband, her lover and even her father tangled. According to the July 9 letters, Maringhi was to come to Rome with more of her things and then to return to Florence with the painting. Here she lambasted him for not keeping these promises, “I see that you are totally Spanish, that is, your word is carried off by the wind, it means nothing.” So, she will have “to send her husband” to handle the transfers, and that, she warned, will leave her alone in Rome, exposed to her fractious kin. Artemisia knew that Maringhi had not done, perhaps could not, all that she wished to remedy their residual Florentine woes.Yet, in the rhetoric of the neglected lover, she tried once more to move him, evoking her sexual deprivation and finally threatening to disappear and never write to him again. And it seems that she did not, at least in 1620. Nevertheless, she and Francesco sustained an alliance, if intermittently, for many years. A dramatic historical source, the 1620 letters must be read as a group, that is, involving three correspondents, and as texts formed to generic, rhetorical and cultural conventions and social practices. In them, Artemisia represented herself, and was represented by Pierantonio, as a femme forte, a strong-willed professional woman who carried heavy responsibilities for the material and social well-being of her family. With her household she was also, in those eight months, unusually beleaguered and so fell into what looks like stress-related illness. For differing reasons, but in full knowledge of the other’s relationship, two men — her husband Pierantonio Stiattesi in Rome and her lover Francesco Maria Maringhi in Florence — invested heavily in Artemisia and the family business in this time of troubles. The woman painter and her sometimes volatile temperament had a role in how her household’s difficulties arose and unfolded. Nevertheless, many other people and their interests were also in play. We should not see these months as only about Artemisia. Nor should we generalize from this time of hardship to a narrowly detrimental view of her personality and moral character. •

. Lettere, 80. Note the Spanish saying,“Palabras y plumas el viento las lleva.” . Pierantonio has, in fact, not mentioned tension with the Gentileschi men for some time.

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Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome Michael Sherberg Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita is a curious work, one that has attracted attention from a variety of perspectives: art historical, autobiographical, linguistic and more. Cellini’s energetic style, colorful language and superabundance of detail about artistic practices, political and cultural networks, art markets, Florentine, Roman and Parisian court politics, and so forth provide multiple possibilities for analysis of a swath of European cultural history that spans much of the sixteenth century. For all that, however, the work intends itself as autobiography, and it opens with some essential indicators of its guiding principles. The record Cellini seeks to establish is one of accomplishment, which by his reckoning men must seek. Every man, Cellini believes, who has done “qualche cosa che sia virtuosa” (something that is virtuous) in his life, or something that resembles virtù, should give an honest account of his life in his own hand. Moreover, no man should undertake this enterprise, impresa, before he reaches the age of forty, presumably because one cannot expect to have built up a catalogue of virtuous accomplishments before then. Cellini then notes that he has not begun his own account until the age of fifty-eight, mostly because many perversità — adversities — have intervened to keep him from writing. Still, looking back on his life, he marvels that he . The bibliography on, and interpretation of, the Vita is extensive. See Bibliographical Excursus below, pp. 290–91. . The argument has deep roots in classical and humanist biography; see Marziano Guglielminetti, Memoria e scrittura: L’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 312. Here as throughout I cite from Benvenuto Cellini, La vita, ed. Guido Davico Bonino (Turin: Einaudi, 1973). All translations are mine. . In truth, Cellini does not “write” the book; he avers that he began by writing it himself but then decided he was wasting his time, so he dictated it instead to the thirteen-year-old son of Michele di Goro who, being malaticcio, sickly, presumably was well-suited for this task.The dictation took place while Cellini continued working on other projects, which may account for its conversational style. At the same time, however, it appears to be too well-organized chronologically not to have been subject to some degree of later revision. For an analysis of the manuscript and its composition, see Paolo L. Rossi,“Sprezzatura, Patronage, and Fate: Benvenuto Cellini and theWorld of  Words,” in Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, ed. Philip  Jacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55–69. Nor does Cellini’s decision to begin writing at age fifty-eight have much to do with the principles stated here. Rather, Cellini found himself under house arrest in Florence, accused of sodomy.

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has even reached this age, and he now remembers both the piacevoli beni (pleasant good things) and the innistimabili mali (inestimable bad ones) that have marked his life. Cellini’s notion of virtù here appears to differ from other definitions. His is neither the traditional Christian virtue, a life lived in purposeful acquisition of heavenly glory, nor the Machiavellian virtù of Roman manliness understood as the ability to create and seize opportunities in order to advance a political aim. It is rather more consistent with the knightly ethos, the achievement of recognition of oneself through one’s actions. It should be enough, Cellini argues, that a man, having made himself known through his efforts, be seen “come uomo e conosciuto,” as a man and known; his reputation should not have to follow from his lineage. To the extent that this effort at recognition is a solitary one, the perversità one encounters present unique challenges, redoubling the sense of loneliness while increasing the challenge. Nor is the requirement of truthfulness trivial in this context, for any attempt at embellishment would undermine the subject’s virtù rather than advance it. Cellini values the role of the actor in history, not the conversion of history into fable. One can of course doubt the authenticity of Cellini’s claims here; the rhetorical purpose of this introduction seems transparent, and much of what follows does not always ring true. On the other hand, this is the world as Cellini remembers and reconstructs it, not the world as it truly was; it is therefore truthful inasmuch as it remains authentic to him and to his self-glorifying purpose. Taken together these statements foretell the structure of Cellini’s narrative, which will rely on the interplay between his own efforts to fulfill the standards of virtù against the perversità that have undermined, or sought to undermine, those same efforts. In recording that . Cellini attaches a variety of meanings to the word “virtù.” It is often synonymous with talent or skill (“mi pregò che io tirassi inanzi e non dovessi perdere una cosí bella virtú,” 25: he asked me to carry on and not to love such a beautiful talent). Elsewhere, used in the plural, it stands for a set of positive qualities in opposition to vices (“‘Vedete voi che la compagnia di quelle virtú che noi giudicammo in lui, sono queste, e non sono i vizii?’,” 41: Do you see that these are the company of those virtues that we judge in him, and they are not vices?). Elsewhere still it acquires a clear moral valence (“Giovanni si scoprí seco d’amore sporco e non virtuoso,” 71: Giovanni turned out himself to be of dirty love and not virtuous), and so forth. . The same notions inform the work’s prefatory sonnet, in which Cellini mentions the “alte diverse ’mprese ho fatte e vivo” and boasts that his achievements have

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struggle he likewise imposes on himself the obligation to be truthful, veritiero. Each of these terms carries an ethical freight, and together they lend the Vita a sort of grandiose purpose as encapsulated in the term impresa, which resonates with the chivalric lexicon and suggests the importance of individual action. It may seem strange that I propose to read Cellini’s narrative in an ethical context, particularly given the widespread consensus that so much of it relies on hyperbole and fabrication. What matters in the context of the narrative, however, is the rhetorical claim of veracity rather than the historical truth, and the way in which that claim serves to position Cellini favorably with respect to his enemies. So when he confesses his errors, he defuses the attacks of his critics, and when he denies the accusations leveled against him, those denials enjoy greater credibility thanks to his prior confessions.To the extent that Cellini may be borrowing from the chivalric tradition,  his remark about the importance of being defeated his crudel Destin, his cruel destiny, otherwise unspecified. He also sees his life in terms of a competition: “grazia, valor, beltà, cotal figura che molti io passo, e chi mi passa arrivo” (7–8: grace, valor, beauty, such a figure that I pass many, and I catch up with those who pass me). . The solitary aspect of knightly adventure arises in the Middle Ages: “The essential hallmark that distinguishes [medieval adventure] from the classical conception is that adventures are undertaken on a voluntary basis, they are sought out (la quête de l’aventure, ‘the quest for adventure’), and this quest and hence the adventurer himself are glorified.” See Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5.The Italian chivalric literature of the Renaissance reaffirms this ideology; for example, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso Rinaldo, arriving unexpectedly in Scotland, sets off on his own: “Senza scudiero e senza compagnia / va il cavallier per quella selva immensa, / facendo or una et or un’altra via, / dove piú aver strane aventure pensa.” See Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 4.54: without a squire and without company goes the knight through that immense forest, taking one then another path, where he thought he would have the most unusual adventures. . Rossi,“Sprezzatura, Patronage, and Fate,” 57, for example, argues that “statements in Renaissance biographies and autobiographies concerning great deeds should be viewed with the greatest skepticism.” . Galetti also has noted a thematic resonance with the chivalric epic, though she argues that “in effetti – grazie soprattutto agli abbassamenti di stile – si avvicina di più alla commedia o alle novelle popolari” (“Tradizione e innovazione,” 68). Paul Barolsky has called Cellini “the swaggering sculptor-soldier,” describing him as “a kind of Benvenuto Furioso” during the casting of the Perseus. See Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and Its Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,

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truthful resonates with chivalric texts from the Italian Renaissance. Boiardo refers to “[l]a vera istoria di Turpin” (Turpin’s true history), supposedly the source for his own narrative ; and Ariosto echoes the attribution: “Il buon Turpin, che sa che dice il vero, / e lascia creder poi quel ch’a l’uom piace…” (Good Turpin, who knows that he tells the truth, / and lets others believe what they like). Cellini’s insistence on truthfulness rankles, I believe, because he writes a first-person narrative, which subjects him to (modern) standards of honesty that might differ from those of third-person narrative. The historiographic tradition of the sixteenth century is hardly wholly truthful, but to some degree we excuse the fabrications of a Guicciardini because his method is consistent with approaches found in ancient writers like Livy. If we do not extend to Cellini the same latitude, it may be because we fail to read him in the proper key. Cellini writes in the key of literature. Northrop Frye makes an important point in this regard: “In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing a structure of words for its own sake.” The verbal structure that Cellini builds is 1990), 141–42. Of course chivalric epic, particularly the works by Pulci and Boiardo, though one may include Ariosto in this list as well, is hardly immune to stylistic ups and downs, at least until Tasso. For a compelling analysis of the question of the veracity of Cellini’s narrative see Antonio C.M. Gil,“Truth and Form in Autobiography: Some Notes on Cellini’s Vita,” Proceedings of the Pacific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages 29 (1978): 77–80. . Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando innamorato, ed. Riccardo Bruscagli (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 1.4.1. . Ariosto, Orlando furioso, 26.23.1-2.These lines recall a remark by Dante, when he describes the arrival of the fantastic beast Geryon, who will carry him and Virgil into the eighth circle of Hell, where ordinary fraud is punished:“Sempre a quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogna / de’ l’ uom chiuder le labbra fin ch’ el puote, / però che sanza colpa fa vergogna; / ma qui tacer nol posso/ e per le note di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro” (Faced with that truth which seems a lie, a man / should always close his lips as long as he can— / to tell it shames him, even though he’s blameless; / but here I can’t be still): Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1982), 16.124–27. . See for example Galetti, “Tradizione e innovazione,” 68, who argues that “[i]l racconto in prima persona è infatti troppo soggettivo per servire a questo scopo,” that is, for the purpose of offering an objective history of events. . Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 74.

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that of the hero, specifically the epic hero, a leader among men.As Paolo Rossi puts it, “the Benvenuto Cellini of the Vita is not the Benvenuto who is writing, but a character setting out an idealized image of himself for posterity,” though his claim that Cellini puts forth an “idealized image” of himself rather misses the important details that are less than ideal. It is precisely that mix of the ideal and the imperfect that makes the Cellini of the Vita into a specific type of hero, one whose greatness earns forgiveness for his evident flaws. The Vita itself abounds with examples of this form of recognition, which Cellini carefully inserts in the narrative. After he kills his enemy Pompeo, for example, he wins powerful protection despite repeated efforts to have him punished. Ippolito de’ Medici declares that he wants to “aiutare e difendere: e chi farà contra di lui, farà contra di me” (159: help and defend [him]: and those who will act against him, act against me). In like manner Paul III, hearing of the events, declares that “gli uomini come Benvenuto, unici nella lor professione, non hanno da essere ubrigati alla legge” (160: men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, do not have to follow the law). This last remark is such a curious non-sequitur that it can only be Cellini’s invention.The notion that his talents excuse him from lawful purpose underscores his exceptionality; in the world of the Vita he operates in the same sphere as the epic hero, who may kill his enemies with impunity because, by being his enemies, they represent an obstacle to the fulfillment of whatever grander design has been assigned to the hero.The argument reaches its apex at the end of the first book, when Cellini reports that while imprisoned on charges of having stolen papal jewels he noticed an isplendore or radiance atop his head visible in the shadow cast by his head early in the morning and at sundown. He calls it “la maggiore [cosa] che sia intervenuto a un . Frye (34) defines the epic hero as “superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment.… He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.” . Rossi, “Sprezzatura, Patronage, and Fate,” 59. In this same context Riccardo Scrivano has contributed some valuable insights: “nel raccontarla [his life] Cellini aliena da sé la propria esistenza e quanto più aderisce alla verità assoluta del momento in cui scrive, tanto più quello di cui scrive diventa estraneo e, per questa via, teorema da dimostrare, o per sostenere una dimostrazione di altro.” See “Committenza e alienazione: Casi celliniani nella Roma del Cinquecento,” in AA.VV., Letteratura e filologia: Studi in onore di Cesare Federico Goffis (Foggia: Bastogi, 1985), 143.

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altro uomo” (279: the greatest thing that has ever happened to a man), and he offers it as proof that God has confided divine secrets in him. By specifying that this is human experience conferred by the divinity, Cellini carefully avoids an explicit comparison between himself and Christ, though he comes close. Nevertheless, the claim of divine recognition trumps anything that humans can give him and effectively exonerates him from any culpability attendant to his imprisonment. Cellini may have to suffer the injustice of human law, but in the end he answers only to God, who truly recognizes his worth. As an artist Cellini is probably best remembered today for his monumental bronze statue of Perseus and the Medusa, a work that exemplifies the ethos of the solitary effort to achieve recognition both in its execution and in the story it tells. Cellini and Perseus have much in common, and the Medusa herself perfectly emblematizes the very perversità that he laments in the opening of the Vita. There is nonetheless no small measure of irony in the fact that Cellini today enjoys recognition specifically for this work, admired by the thousands of tourists who throng Florence’s Piazza della Signoria every year to photograph the display in the Loggia de’ Lanzi. For Cellini was not, as he continues to insist throughout his Vita, a sculptor by birth; rather, he was a goldsmith. By 1558, however, when he began to write his autobiography,Vasari had already published the first edition of his Vite, which did not include a life of Cellini. Cellini felt an enduring animosity for Vasari, as he records in the pages of his Vita, . I note in passing that Cellini’s Perseus wears a fanciful, winged helmet, which implicitly associates him with knighthood. . My suggestions here are in no way meant to contradict the standard political reading of the sculpture as representing Cosimo de’ Medici’s heroism in rescuing Florence from past tyranny. See for example  Jane Tylus,“Resisting the Marketplace: The Language of Labor in Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita,” in Reconfiguring the Renaissance: Essays in Critical Materialism, ed. Jonathan Crewe (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1992), 34–50, at 37–38. Rather, I would like to suggest that there are multiple ways to read this statue, including an autobiographical way. For a feminist political reading of the sculpture, seeYael Even,“The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,” Woman’s Art  Journal 12 (1991): 10–14. . In this vein it is striking that little of the secondary literature about the Vita focuses on Cellini’s career as a goldsmith. Much of the bibliography follows his own path of self-elevation, which is in turn consistent with the artistic values expressed in Vasari’s Vite.

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Michael Sherberg • Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome

which may have motivated Vasari’s decision to exclude Cellini from his history of Italian art. There is, however, another reason for Vasari’s exclusion of Cellini, one that bespeaks the cultural norms that Vasari was both recording and advancing with his book, which Cosimo de’ Medici had embraced and to which Cellini had finally bowed with the Perseus. Vasari’s interest in painting, sculpture and architecture bespeaks a valorization of the monumental, the public, the ostentatious; he promotes the cause of these three arts over others in part because he sees them as the best path by which the artist can advance both himself economically and the social and political cause of art more broadly. As Lisa  Jardine has detailed in her book, Worldly Goods, the Renaissance did not simply produce a superabundance of commodities, it also repeatedly undertook to put them on display.To the extent that many of the objects displayed in paintings were produced by craftsmen or artists working in minor fields, paintings offer a visual record of those works while also subsuming them as part of a greater work of superior social and economic value. The humbler, small-scale arts hold far less fascination for Vasari, it would appear, precisely because they do not participate directly in the social and cultural project that is art as he would define it. As Michael Baxandall documented in his landmark Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, the social status of the artist evolved over the course of the fifteenth century, as concern about skill took precedence over materials. Vasari’s work undertakes to cement that social status, but at the cost of obscuring the way that the world of the arts, writ large, continued to straddle both the major and the minor. Cellini himself enters the world of the arts through . In the Vita Cellini refers to Vasari as “Giorgetto Vassellario,” little George the Pot-maker, and he insinuates that Vasari is both a sodomite and suffering from an unnamed skin ailment: “gli aveva una sua lebbrolina secca, la quale gli aveva usato le mane a grattar sempre, e dormendo con un buon garzone che io avevo, che si domandava Manno, pensando di grattar sé, gli aveva scorticato una gamba al ditto Manno con certe sue sporche manine, le quali non si tagliava mai l’ugna” (189: he had a dry little scab, which he always used to scratch with his hands, and sleeping with a good young man who I had, who was named Manno, thinking he was scratching himself he skinned the leg of said Manno with his dirty little hands, the nails of which he never cut). . Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 14.

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the door of a craftsman’s shop, specifically that of a potter, and it is from that door that he emerges as an esteemed goldsmith. So when one thinks about Cellini’s efforts to achieve recognition, one needs to recall that by 1558 he no doubt fully understood where the cultural winds had blown, and he knew that by and large they had cast him out of the mainstream. If we resist the sort of teleological reading of Cellini’s Vita that brings us to the Perseus as its logical endpoint, and to which all else is subordinate, it becomes easier to focus on the contours of a career spent doing other things. Indeed, Cellini did not even begin his career in the material arts, for he started out as a piper, at his father’s insistence, and had to struggle to win the freedom to practice the art for which he believed he was destined. His brief career as a piper deserves note nonetheless, however, because it suggests an aspect of Cellini’s talents that will trail him through much of his life: he was a performer.Thus while the Vita records the many objects he created, other parts detail activities that one might associate with his performative side, as is the case of the making of the Perseus, or the episode in which he convincingly disguises a companion, the sixteen-yearold Spaniard Diego, as a girl for a dinner party to which he was obliged to bring a date. Diego in drag is a work of art, and Cellini’s presentation of Diego as a woman just another performance. To focus on the Perseus as the central moment in Cellini’s career, or as the central episode of his Vita, is therefore to miss the point of both.To the extent that we prize the large bronze over Cellini’s other works, we effectively subscribe to the scale of artistic values that Vasari had sought to instill in us. Moreover, as the extended episode of the creation of the Perseus makes clear, that work for Cellini is as much about its execution as it is about the finished product, and this is consistent with his own performer’s bent. Nor is it a coincidence that the Perseus is a bronze, because his lifelong work with and understanding of metal no doubt both enabled and suggested this medium to him as one in which he could ply his well-developed talents. . For an example of a teleological reading of the Vita see Andreas Grote,“Cellini in gara,” Il Ponte 19 (1963): 73–94, who labels the Perseus episode “il punto culminante dell’opera e il suo nucleo centrale” (76). . Tylus makes this point in her essay, “Resisting the Marketplace,” which insists on the importance of il fare or labor itself in Cellini’s Vita, as opposed to the final product.

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Michael Sherberg • Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome

In this context, the young Cellini’s discovery of Rome reveals itself to be all the more instructive, for it represents the first step in the young hero’s quest for recognition. Consistent with the paradigms of what Frye calls the high mimetic mode of epic, Cellini gravitates toward the capital city and its court, and his quest is existential. The principal locus for the fulfillment of that quest will be the papal court, though Cellini will detail a number of other stops along the way. Once there he will figure himself entirely in the heroic mode, not simply through the successful execution of commissions but also through the defense of Castel Sant’Angelo during the Sack, and the important scene subsequent to that period wherein he confesses having kept some of the papal gold for himself and receives absolution for his sin. Cellini’s life in Rome thus combines two essential features of the knight’s quest: its specific existential goal and the danger of errancy, here understood not as wandering but as a moral error for which he must atone. Cellini’s errors are not unlike that attributed to Orlando in the Orlando furioso: having allowed his improper love for the pagan Angelica to impel him to try to kill his cousin Rinaldo. The epic hero must always somehow atone for his error because, being superior to the rest of us, he must model the ethical behavior we are all expected to follow. Along the way to reaching his goal, Cellini shows us what happens when an artist with a unique eye peruses this remarkable repository of antiquities. His first trip to Rome, in 1519, comes about . I am reading here in opposition to Guglielminetti’s claim that in the Roman chapters “non si tratta tanto di pagine informative della sua ‘professione’ di orafo… come lí per lí parrebbe” (Memoria e scrittura, 321). Guglielminetti’s analysis wholly ignores those chapters that deal with Cellini’s work as a goldsmith. The assumption that the Vita is about something other than the artist’s career tends to dog the critical literature and points to a fundamental weakness in the way this text has been read. There is, in fact, a repeated attraction to the more colorful narratives as the expense of the more mundane ones, and if Cellini wanted us to read the text in this way, then he succeeded. For an example of this practice see Fernando Stoppani,“L’avventurosa vita di Benvenuto Cellini a Roma,” Urbe 25 (1962): 4–10. On the other hand, to ignore other narratives because they do not resonate with scandal has a distorting effect, making the book into something rather different than what it is in its complexity. . “The high mimetic period brings in a society more strongly established around the court and capital city…. The distant goals of the quest, the Holy Grail or the City of God, modulate into symbols of convergence, the emblems of prince, nation, and national faith” (Anatomy of Criticism, 58). . Orlando furioso, 34.69.

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in common cause with an artisan, the woodcarver Giovanbattista Tasso:Tasso was angry with his mother, Cellini with his father; both were ready to abandon Florence for the allure of the Eternal City. Cellini already appreciates what Rome has to offer, because, having befriended Filippino Lippi’s son Giovanfrancesco, likewise a goldsmith, he had gained access to the painter’s notebooks, which contained drawings “ritratti dalle belle anticaglie di Roma; la qual cosa, vedendogli, mi innamororono assai” (27: drawn from the beautiful antiquities of Rome; with which, upon seeing them, I fell very much in love). Arriving in Rome, Cellini finds work in a shop run by Giovanni Firenzuola d’Arda, who produced large vases and plateware of the type that regularly appear as details in Renaissance paintings. Cellini makes a good first impression, provoking Firenzuola to comment to another of his workmen that Cellini was a Florentine who knew how to do things, as opposed to those who did not. The associations with Tasso and Firenzuola locate Cellini in the same social and professional ambit of the minor arts and crafts that Florence offered him, while at the same time asserting their vitality in early cinquecento Rome.The city almost surely provided a stronger market for woodcarvers and potters than fresco painters, with income depending more on the quantity and quality of the objects produced than on the size of the commission and the reputation of the artist. Moreover, as Cellini makes clear, to be a Florentine in Rome brought both attention and judgment. The Medici papacy may have lent a certain cachet to being Florentine, so that along with the many social stratifications that would occur naturally in an urban setting in the sixteenth century, there was the additional one of the division between Florentines and non-Florentines. Rome functions as a magnet for Cellini not just because it offers employment and the allure of antiquity, but because it represents a return to his own genealogical roots. Cellini establishes the importance of Rome early in his narrative, revisiting the hoary myth that Romans had founded Florence, though he adds important embellishments. As he tells it, the Romans settled the land along the Arno after they had conquered Fiesole; this much he borrows from Giovanni Villani, duly citing him. At this point the story becomes more personal. One of Julius Caesar’s captains, Cellini’s own ancestor Fiorino da Cellini, was stationed down there, so when the Romans needed to see him they would say, “Andiamo a Fiorenze”

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Michael Sherberg • Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome

(8), let’s go to Florence. Caesar codified this practice because he believed that flowers brought good luck, and Fiorino’s name and its derivative conjured the image of flowers. The story, which follows immediately upon Cellini’s initial claim that lineage should not matter, suggests just how much it does. Cellini positions himself as closely to Caesar as he can, and by bringing Caesar into the story he validates Florence’s current monarchical structure, and its status under Cosimo as an imperial client, as consistent with the city’s origins. On a more personal level, however, the story also serves to rationalize Cellini’s own connection to Rome: he descends, after all, from a Roman. By returning to Rome and perusing its antiquities he was imaginatively revisiting his own ancestral past, a past for which Florence was but a poor copy. None of the old Florentine structures built by the Romans could do justice to the original: “sono ditte fabbriche molto minore di quelle di Roma” (8: said buildings were much smaller than those of Rome). By this account Rome becomes much more than the papal city: it is the sine qua non of the Florentine who wants to discover his roots. Not surprisingly, Cellini’s first explorations of the city involve the same monumental structures whose imitations formed the core of early Florence. Cellini first mentions his habit of visiting ruins as a lead-in to a longer discussion of his habit of hunting doves: “io me ne andavo il giorno della festa volentieri alle anticaglie, ritraendo di quelle or con cera or con disegno” (55: on Sundays I willingly went to see the ruins, drawing them at times in wax, at other times on paper). We can only surmise Cellini’s motives in copying or making models of the ruins, though Filippino Lippi’s prior practice may have inspired him, and others would do likewise. It is also clear from the Vita that he had recognized an emergent Roman style and may have inferred that to succeed in Rome one needed to understand . This is also a story that causes readers to roll their eyes about Cellini’s standard that autobiographers be veritieri. I choose to be less cynical, however, because as we know genealogical inventions were far from rare in the Renaissance; see the opening paragraph of Ascanio Condivi’s Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, or any number of Renaissance epic poems, including Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, for other examples. While the details Cellini introduces into this narrative suggest a careful reading of Villani’s chronicle, as Davico Bonino notes (8 n.), it is nevertheless not absurd to imagine that Cellini had been raised with the notion that his family had Roman origins, and he simply invented a founding father because that was standard practice.

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that style, in both its antique origins and its contemporary iterations. During his second trip to Rome in 1523 he joined the workshop of “maestro Santi orefice,” possibly Santo di Cola, the papal goldsmith. During this time, he reports that he had occasion to visit — specifically for the purpose of ’mparare (learning) — both the Sistine Chapel and the Villa Farnesina, home of Agostino Chigi, which housed works by Raphael. Cellini executes drawings based on what he has seen, including a  Jupiter that he copies from Raphael, likely from the Cupid and Psyche cycle. Clearly he understands who the leading painters are in papal Rome, and he studies them because he knows that their style has recognized value. This visit also brings him into contact the world of female patronage. One day Cellini encounters Sulpizia, wife of Sigismondo Chigi, and Porzia, wife of Aguzzati di Siena, who, impressed by his draftsmanship, at first asks if he is a painter or a sculptor. When he replies that he is a goldsmith Porzia commissions him to produce a lily encrusted with some of her diamonds. He first makes a wax model and then executes the work,“adorno con mascherini, puttini, animali e benissimo smaltato; in modo che li diamante, di che era il giglio, erono migliorati piú della metà” (40: decorated with little masks, cupids, animals and very well enameled; in such a way that the diamonds, which were in the lily, were improved by more than half). The specific details here, beyond the central lily, suggest that Cellini has marked well the motifs one would commonly find in the Roman pieces he was studying. Later Cellini will affirm his understanding of local styles. The explanation comes in the context of a discussion of some small daggers that he has acquired, whose handles were executed in the Turkish style, with arum leaves and sunflowers, which are different from the leafy designs found in Italy: Benché innell’Italia siamo diversi di modo di fare fogliami; perché i Lombardi fanno bellissimi fogliami ritraendo foglie de elera e di vitalba con bellissimi girari, le quali fanno molto piacevol vedere; li Toscani e i Romani in questo gener presono molto migliore elezione, perché contra fanno le foglie d’acanto, detta branca orsina, con i sua festuchi e fiori, girando in diversi modi; e in fra i detti fogliami viene benissimo accomodato alcuni uccelletti e diversi animali, qual si vede chi ha buon gusto. 67: Although in Italy we have different ways of making foliage; because the Lombards make beautiful foliage by copying leaves of briony and ivy with beautiful curves, which are very pleasing to see; and the Tuscans

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Michael Sherberg • Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome

and the Romans make a much better choice, because they make acanthus leaves, called bear’s foot, with their stalks and flowers curling in different ways; and among the said foliage some little birds and different animals can easily be accommodated, as one who has good taste can see.

These remarks do not lack for an ethnocentric subtext.The Turkish motifs pale by comparison: they have “qualche poco di grazia,” are somewhat graceful, but they do not compare favorably to Italian floral designs. So too does the Lombard style not equal that which characterizes Tuscany and Rome.The fact that the same detailing appears in both Tuscan and Roman works again suggests a close association between Florence and Rome, which is crucial to Cellini’s argument. If Cellini began his study of antiquities by looking at large-scale ruins, he soon discovers another type of antiquity, ancient gems and medals. In a lengthy passage dating to his 1523 sojourn, he recounts how he had befriended a group of hunters of small antique valuables. He details a variety of objects that spilled forth from the Roman earth: “medaglie antiche, agate, prasme, corniuole, cammei: ancora trovavo delle gioie, come s’è dire ismeraldi, zaffini, diamante e rubini” (56: antique medals, agates, chrysoprases, cornelians, cameos: I also found some jewels, like emeralds, sapphires, diamonds and rubies). The searchers were able to acquire these objects cheaply, presumably because the farmers who dug them up did not recognize their value; they were, after all, villani, country folk, whose discoveries were incidental to their hoeing of vineyards. Cellini would buy these objects from the hunters, often at a much higher price:“davo loro tanti scudi d’oro, molte volte di quello che loro appena avevano compero tanti giuli” (56: I gave them so many golden scudi, many times the giulios that they had just paid). He would then resell them, often for ten times what he had paid, but the higher price did not appear to bother all the Roman cardinals who would buy them, and to whom Cellini endeared himself. This is not a new market. In fact, as Jardine recounts, Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga amassed a noteworthy collection of gems and cameos in the late fifteenth century, the latter displayed in special trays, twenty of which were made of silver. The silver trays eventually became collateral against the cardinal’s debts to the Medici bank, though they were never redeemed, apparently because of disagreements over their current value. They initially were valued at 3,500 ducats, but . Jardine, 66.

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when the Gonzaga family sought to reclaim them in 1486, the Medici bank demanded 4,100 ducats.  Jardine mentions other collectors of gemstones, including Albrecht Dürer ; and Cellini’s own account suggests that he understands the nature of the market. He gives a list of specific items, including a dolphin’s head carved from an emerald, which eventually was set into a ring and sold for a very high price; a topaz the size of a large hazelnut, carved with the head of Minerva; and a cameo representing Hercules binding Cerberus. Of the latter Cellini reports that “il nostro gran Michelagnolo ebbe a dire non aver mai veduto cosa tanto meravigliosa” (57: our great Michelangelo once said that he had never seen such a wonderful thing), a remark that serves the validate the worth of these objects. Cellini also mentions a large bronze medallion featuring the head of  Jupiter. The passage details a number of aspects concerning the retrieval of these antiquities and the market for them.The increased value of the objects, particularly the stones, depends on the fact that they are carved, which enables the connoisseur to identify them as antiquities. I underscore the role of the connoisseur here, because Cellini makes clear that the villani who dig them up really have no understanding of the objects’ worth. Once they leave the hands of the grape-growers they enter a market, populated by middle-men and goldsmiths, where their value is clearly understood. Eventually they reach their buyers, in this case the Roman cardinals, who are paying for an object whose value involves some combination of the quality of the original piece and any new setting which it has gained. The added value of the setting involves not just the precious metal used but also the skill reflected in its execution. Indeed, Cellini is working in a field in which the goldsmith’s skill was considered comparable to that of the painter. Baxandall cites St. Antoninus’s Summa Theologica, written in the mid-fifteenth century, in which he argues that the goldsmith deserves recompense comparable to that of the painter, provided their skills match. The fact that jewelry can function as an adornment also reveals its potential downside: Cellini does not work in the sphere of pieces bought uniquely for display but one of investments in objects whose value is highly variable. The Gonzaga family’s experience with the . Jardine, 93–94, 102. . Jardine, 100. . Baxandall, 23.

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Michael Sherberg • Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome

Medici bank suggests as much, and the value attached to these objects may be greater for their component parts than for the finished product. This becomes clear in an account Cellini offers dating to the Sack of Rome, when Pope Clement tasks him to remove all the gems from the gold settings of the papal jewelry. The gems themselves are then sewn into the clothing of the pope and his assistant, Cavalierino, while Cellini takes the gold, some 200 pounds’ worth, and melts it down in his room in Castel Sant’Angelo. The decision to handle the papal jewels in this way was motivated by a desire to protect their value not as small works of art, which the stones become in their settings, but rather as so many component parts with raw economic value, precious and semi-precious stones and so much gold.This is, I would argue, a function in part of their size and how they are constructed: you simply cannot break down a painting in the same way that you can break down a broach. At the same time, however, the episode reveals that the jeweler’s art, which relied on the interplay between stone and setting, did not always enjoy the same value as that of a painter or sculptor.The pope’s decision is analogous to removing a painting from a frame, though he misunderstands that the value of these particular frames does not lie solely in the material from which they are made, but in the artistry of their specific construction. That is Cellini’s whole point when he states that Porzia’s diamonds improved in value thanks to his setting. In many cases, on the other hand, the pope’s jewels are likely anonymous works, and the settings may seem outdated; thus they are expendable, like old flatware or dishes.To understand this is to understand as well Cellini’s struggle for recognition. He saw himself as more than a craftsman, but he worked in a field whose clients did not always fully appreciate the nature of his art. In this context we might pause for a moment to consider the relationship between form and function in Cellini’s career. Even as his reputation grows and he gains ever more impressive commissions, he remains rooted in an industry in which function can edge out form.This is the case, for example, of a significant commission from François I of France, who ordered “dodici statue d’argento, le quali voleva che servissino per docidi candelieri intorno alla sua tavola” (313: twelve silver statues, which he wanted to use for twelve candlesticks around his table). Cellini’s very words underscore the fact that the form of the works will be subordinate to their function. To be

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sure, the statues will be made of silver, but they will also be relatively small-scale objects, like the gold salt-cellar and a number of other smaller objects dating to the same period. It is telling, in fact, that the commission for the Perseus comes in a conversation with Duke Cosimo in which Cellini details the works he had produced for the French king. The duke clearly wants a monumental work from Cellini, in which form and function would synergize triumphantly, and Cellini senses too an opportunity to prove his worth to the members of the Accademia del Disegno, who did not recognize him as a sculptor. The Perseus represents a turning point in Cellini’s career because it is one of the earliest examples of a work in which form does not submit to function but in which form is function. Cellini’s Roman adventures thus mark his struggle to achieve notoriety as an artist in a field not fully recognized for its artistry. Another episode from the Roman sojourn of 1523 serves to illustrate that same point. While working on his commission for Porzia, Cellini enters into a debate with Lucagnolo da Iesi, who ran the papal goldsmith’s shop after the death of Santo di Cola; the workshop had passed into the hands of Santo’s son, who according to Cellini had delegated its management to Lucagnolo. Cellini confesses admiration for Lucagnolo’s talents, although he works principally in grosseria, larger pieces. Lucagnolo, observing Cellini’s work on the diamond lily, argues that he is wasting his time: “piú volte dicendomi che io mi farei molto piú utile e piú onore ad aiuitarlo lavorar vasi grandi di argento, come io avevo cominciato” (40: telling me repeatedly that I would earn more [money] and honor by helping him create large silver vases, as I had started doing).The key terms here, utile and onore, refer respectively to income and reputation. Cellini replies that he is perfectly capable of making large silver vases, but that the sort of commission he was executing for Porzia did not come along every day, and that “in esse opere tali era non manco onore che ne’ vasi grandi di argento, ma sí bene molto maggiore utile” (40: in such works there was no less honor than in the large silver vases, but much more money): in other words, the work was no less reputable but it paid better. Lucagnolo disagrees, pointing out that he will complete his large silver vessel in the same amount of time and earn the same amount of money. The two then engage in a sort of race, each completing his piece in ten days. Cellini describes Lucagnolo’s bowl as suitably ornate, covered

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Michael Sherberg • Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome

with little masks and foliage, destined as it was for the papal table, where it would be used as a fancy garbage pail for discarded animal bones and fruit peels. He compliments Lucagnolo who, feeling vindicated, takes the object to the pope and receives his due payment. Cellini meanwhile delivers his piece to Porzia, who tells him that even if she gave him a castle it would not suffice, and Cellini declines any remuneration at all. Nevertheless, payment arrives the next day, at which point the two rivals compare their earnings. Lucagnolo had pocketed twenty-five scudi di giuli, but Cellini has earned half again as much, all in gold, and true to his performer’s instinct he reveals his booty by lifting the envelope high into the air and letting the coins spill forth as if, he says, they were so much grain falling from a mill wheel. Cellini does not end up pocketing as much as Lucagnolo, because he must give one-third of his money to his boss, but Lucagnolo learns his lesson nonetheless. As Cellini puts it,“potette piú la temeraria invidia che la avarizia in lui, qual doveva operare tutto il contrario, per essere questo Lucagnolo nato d’un contadino da Iesi” (42–43: his rash envy was stronger than avarice in him, when it should have been the opposite, since this Lucagnolo was born of a peasant from Iesi).The incident, in other words, provokes a reversal in Lucagnolo’s character; as the son of a peasant he should be interested primarily in lucre, but now he envies the recognition Cellini has earned. It thus also validates Cellini’s claim in the introduction to the Vita that men live for recognition. Lucagnolo curses his own arte, declaring that thenceforth he will abjure grosseria in favor of “quelle bordellerie piccole, da poi che le erano cosí ben pagate” (43: those little nothings, since they paid so well).This remark reflects a prior assumption on Lucagnolo’s part that larger pieces pay better, but Cellini, by earning more for his smaller piece, actually is signaling a shift in the way the market works. He finishes his account by pointing out that not everyone is suited to the sort of work he does,“ogni uccello faceva il verso suo” (43: every bird did its thing), suggesting that despite his best efforts Lucagnolo would never succeed in small works. Cellini’s life in Rome involves a number of activities outside of his chosen profession, including the cross-dressing incident, his involvement in the Sack, his experiments in necromancy and more. Cellini’s Rome, particularly under the Medici popes, is a place that affords some advantages to Florentines while also embracing opulence and

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excess. In some ways it offers a perfect fit for Cellini, who in his own way finds excess attractive. First and foremost, however, it is a social world of carefully articulated networks, both vertical and horizontal, where success depends both on the successful navigation of those networks and on the chance encounter that propels the artist forward. It is a world that offers a noteworthy degree of mobility, in the sense that Cellini moves among different circles with little resistance. It is also a world in which the standards of value remain in flux. Among its many virtues, in fact, the Vita details for us the variety of artistic and artisanal activities in papal Rome, and how they interfaced. Cellini’s own effort to establish himself as an artist rather than a craftsman is the first step in his plan to make himself seen “come uomo e conosciuto,” and his success validates the life that, many years later, he would record for posterity.

Bibliographical Excursus on the Vita.

I offer here a sample of the various readings of Cellini’s Vita: Maria Galetta, “Tradizione e innovazione nella Vita di Benvenuto Cellini,” Romance Review 5 (1995): 65–72, for whom the Vita represents a break with humanist values and with Castiglione’s standard of sprezzatura, becoming a sort of Bachtinian autobiographical novel;  Jonathan Goldberg, “Cellini’s Vita and the Conventions of Early Autobiography,” Modern Language Notes 89 (1974): 71–83, who locates in the Vita relations to earlier conceptions of the self, such as those of Augustine and Boethius; Marziano Guglielminetti, Memoria e scrittura: L’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 292–386, who reads the Vita in the hagiographic key of the triumph over the devil; similarly  James V. Mirollo, “The Lives of Saints Teresa of Avila and Benvenuto of Florence,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24 (1987): 54–73; and Laura Lazzari, “Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita: Autobiography of a Saint?,” in About Face: Depicting the Self in the Written and Visual Arts, ed. Lindsay Eufesia, Elena Bellini and Paola Ugolini (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 41–56; Emanuela Calura,“L’orizzonte mitologico e fantastico nella Vita del Cellini,” Lingua e stile 22 (1987): 51–71, who locates the Vita between the mythological and the picaresque; Cécile Terreaux-Scotto, “Les nouvelles dans la Vita de Benvenuto Cellini: La construction d’un roman personnel,” in Nouvelle et roman: Les dynamiques d’une interaction du Moyen Âge au Romantisme (Italie, France, Allemagne), ed. Patrizia De

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Michael Sherberg • Mr. Cellini Goes to Rome

Capitani, Cahiers d’études italiennes 10 (Grenoble: Université Stendhal, 2009), 129–55, who examines the role of the novella in the structure of the Vita; Michele Mari, “Di alcuni ossessioni celliniane,” Acme: Annali della Facoltà di lettere e filosofia dell’Università statale di Milano 55 (2002): 33–57, who studies the ways in which Cellini represents himself an as anti-academic artist; Andreas Grote,“Cellini in gara,” Il Ponte 19 (1963): 73–94, who reads all of Cellini’s writings as the story of his struggle to be acknowledged as the best among his contemporaries; along the same lines  Jane Tylus,“Cellini, Michelangelo, and the Myth of Inimitability,” in Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor, Goldsmith, Writer, ed. Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo L. Rossi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7–25; Paolo L. Rossi, “The Writer and the Man: Real Crimes and Mitigating Circumstances: Il caso Cellini,” in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 157–83, which focuses on the themes of crime and punishment in the Vita; similarly Margaret A. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), who reads the Vita in forensic terms; Paul Barolsky, “Cellini,Vasari, and the Marvels of Malady,” Sixteenth Century  Journal 24 (1993): 41–45, who focuses on the intertwining themes of illness and art; Maria Luisa Altieri Biagi, “La Vita del Cellini: Temi, termini, sintagmi,” in AA.VV., Benvenuto Cellini artista e scrittore (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1972), 61–165, who does a thorough analysis of Cellini’s language; in the same volume Nino Borsellino, “Cellini scrittore,” 17–31, who hypothesizes that the Vita remained unpublished until the eighteenth century precisely because it dangerously exposed the dark side of power;  James V. Mirollo’s chapter “The Mannerisms of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571),” in Mannerism and Renaissance Poetry: Concept, Mode, Inner Design (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1984), 72–98, who focuses on Cellini’s literary mannerism. Dino S. Cervigni has published a monograph on the Vita: The Vita of Benvenuto Cellini: Literary Tradition and Genre (Ravenna: Longo, 1979). Readers may find additional bibliography in Benvenuto Cellini, La vita, ed. Guido Davico Bonino (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), xxiii–xxviii. •

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“Un Monsignore troppo abbondo contro le monache”: Alfonso Paleotti Meets His Match Craig A. Monson Alfonso Paleotti is probably best known as the author of the early modern bestseller Esplicatione del lenzuolo ove fu involto il Signore (1598). Born in 1531, Alfonso Paleotti studied law at the University of Bologna before seeking his fortune in the Caput Mundi. After several years of rather worldly existence in Rome, a long, serious illness and the eventual influence of Filippo Neri prompted an amendment of life. Alfonso Paleotti was ordained in 1571 and returned to Bologna as canon of the cathedral of San Pietro. He played an important ancillary role to the distinguished cardinal archbishop Gabriele Paleotti in the running of the archdiocese, particularly after 1591, when Cardinal Paleotti returned to Rome. Alfonso was appointed coadjutor archbishop in February of that year with right of succession and became archbishop of Bologna on Cardinal Paleotti’s death in 1597. Strongly influenced both by Gabriele Paleotti and Carlo Borromeo, Alfonso Paleotti participated actively in Bolognese implementation of Tridentine decrees. As coadjutor he pursued this enterprise with singular enthusiasm, particularly with regard to convents and their music, about which he recognized few shades of gray and no middle ground. Once he succeeded Cardinal Paleotti he seemed to take a proactive role, ferreting out loopholes and working to introduce further musical restrictions at any opportunity. In 1600, for example, he managed to convince the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars in Rome, which oversaw all aspects of monastic discipline, to exclude convent outer churches from one of Bologna’s most important civic rituals, the annual processions of the Madonna di San Luca around the city during Rogationtide (a tradition that continues to this day). Claiming that such visits were “contrary to custom” (not quite true, in fact, since Our Lady had made the rounds of no fewer than ten convents in 1595, six in 1596 and eight in 1599), Paleotti successfully persuaded Rome to ban such “innovations.” This hardline approach would characterize the rest of his reign. . Esplicatione del lenzuolo ove fu involto il Signore delle piaghe in esso impresse col suo pretioso sangue (Bologna: Eredi di Giovanni Rossi, 1598). . Paleotti’s request survives in Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Sacra Congregazione dei Vescovi e Regolari (ASV, VR below), posizione 1600, A-B (dated 10 May 1600).

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Nuns therefore had a formidable adversary in Alfonso Paleotti. He challenged them to discover strategies to work around tightening restrictions, particularly when it came to music.The decade after Gabriele Paleotti’s death thus provides a particularly revealing illustration of convent strategies of resistance and subversion. Convent musicians in Bologna learned never to take “no” for a final answer, to test limits and press for every advantage. Passing information along the convent gossip circuit, they experimented with variations on shared strategies. Recognizing the importance of intermediaries, they cultivated powerful friends and formed alliances with others who shared their interests.They recognized the importance of putting aside intramural differences to band together in the face of a common enemy. They also tried to avoid direct confrontation with those in authority. To the extent it was even possible, they sought to make an ally of Rome’s Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars Not all nuns’ strategies were well conceived. After Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti passed to a better life, the Cassinese Benedictine nuns of Sta. Margarita naively tried to overturn his cornerstone prohibition of 1584 regarding the placement of convent organs: out of sight and theoretically out of earshot. In 1601 they brazenly requested to move the instrument from its hidden position in the inner church right back to the outer church. Such a bald attempt to turn back the clock on twenty years of reform had no chance of success. Shortly thereafter, the more enterprising Lateran canonesses of San Lorenzo tried a novel way around the vexed, perennial prohibitions regarding musical outsiders and convent musical education. Sister Ginevra from Bologna’s powerful Pepoli family also added an important, potent factor to the mix: family influence. She enlisted an influential Pepoli nephew to present her proposal to the Sacred Congregation. San Lorenzo’s future organist, who still lived at home, where her music master could teach her, should be permitted to enter the convent just long enough to perform on the feasts of San Lorenzo, the Virgin’s Nativity and the Virgin’s Assumption; then she would be sent home. This time the strategy worked: the Pepoli family carried the day and the Sacred Congregation granted the request. The Madonna di San Luca’s late-sixteenth-century visits to Bolognese convents are documented in Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna, MS B3567. . ASV, VR, Reg. Regularium 3 (1600–1601), fol. 93v (2 May 1601). . ASV, VR, posizione 1602, A-B

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Craig A. Monson • Archbishop Alfonso Paleotti

Further concessions in 1601 and 1602 suggest possible shifts in Rome from Alfonso Paleotti’s hard line in more flexible directions that could favor the nuns and their allies. In 1601 the Sacred Congregation had imposed restrictions on convent grates and ruote; Paleotti responded enthusiastically to enforce them. So the Dominican nuns of San Pietro Martire pleaded to Rome that the solitary grate above the high altar that Paleotti permitted them prevented their edification: sermons in the outer church were now inaudible for all but a few sisters. (They made no mention of music, though another grate would enhance music’s audibility in the outer church as well.) The Congregation requested that Paleotti look into the matter: “Although it is certainly plausible that you have considered and undertaken everything with maturity, it is nevertheless desirable that your lordship act with discretion.” Though cardinals hoped to avoid causing the nuns further disappointment, they might also be hinting that the archbishop’s un-nuanced, hardline enforcement of the letter of the law was tipping toward zealotry. The nuns of Sant’Agnese quickly got wind of their fellow Dominican sisters’ success in going over Paleotti’s head and likewise requested an additional grate to enhance sermons’ audibility (not to mention music’s). In January 1603 Paleotti had to admit that “the grate that they have above the high altar really is insufficient for the needs of all the nuns.” They too would have to be permitted another,“but sufficiently high above the floor that it is inaccessible except from the pulpit.” (They settled on about eighty-one inches above ground level.) Perhaps Alfonso Paleotti perceived such modest successes as evidence of laxity and a new slippery slope around convent choir lofts. In January 1603 he formally reiterated a decades-old prohibition of convent music-making by outsiders, which he also promulgated in print in January 1605. The strategy backfired, however, prompting unparalleled resistance from convents and laity throughout the city. The powerful Clarissan convent of Corpus Domini, home to . “E benche si creda che il tutto sia stato fatto et considerato da lei con maturità, si desidera nondimeno che VS facia con discretezza,” ASV VR, Reg. Regularium 3 (1600–1601), fol. 113r (12 July 1601); “realmente la grata ch’hanno sopra l’altare grande non è bastante per il bisogno di tutte le Monache… ma tant’alta da terra che non vi si possi arrivare se non co’l pulpito,” at a height of 9.25 palms, Ibid., posizione 1603, B-C (10 January 1603). . ASB, Demaniale 51/3918 (Sta. Margarita) (27 January 1603). AAB, Misc. Vecchie 808, fascicle 6 (1605 prohibition).

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Bologna’s beloved “santa cittadina,” Blessed Catherine Vigri, led a counterattack. Corpus Domini turned to a powerful intermediary, Count Romeo Pepoli, to intercede with the secretary of the Sacred Congregation regarding the celebration of Catherine’s feast day with lavish music,“in accordance with most venerable custom” (a custom that by implication long predated the whims of this latest archbishop). But the wily sisters of Corpus Domini did not ask the congregation directly to overrule Paleotti, but simply for a little clarification, “because it has proved impossible for the said archbishop to deign to concede them a copy of his decree, even after the many requests that they have made to him.” Pressured by Rome, the stiff-necked Paleotti reluctantly gave in, protesting all the while, however, “I have had universal orders in triplicate that in convents and their external churches I should not permit outside musicians to sing.… That is what I have required and that is what I shall require in order to obviate the notable disorders that I have on other occasions described to the Sacred Congregation.” Corpus Domini immediately pressed its advantage with a request that the recent, one-time license be extended to include the many other masses and votive services commonly presented in their public church, “for the greater glory of the Blessed Catherine and for the reputation of the city.” The nuns thus highlighted Corpus Domini’s and Catherine Vigri’s increasing importance in Bologna’s civic prestige, which would soon rival that of the basilica of San Petronio and the cathedral of San Pietro. Word of Corpus Domini’s continued successes must have passed from parlatorio to parlatorio.The Vallombrosan nuns of Sta. Catterina di Strada Maggiore successfully petitioned to bring in outside musicians for their feast day because their new inner church was still under construction. The Sacred Congregation likewise sided with . “Poiche non è possibile, che’l sud[ett]o Arciv[escov]o ne habbia voluto concedere la copia per molte instanze che se li siano fatte,” ASV, VR, posizione 1605, B-F. . “Hò però havuto triplicati ordini universali, ch’a monasterij di Monache et loro chiese esteriori io non lasci cantare da Musici; dovendo bastare la Musica che sapranno fare le stesse monache, come hò fatto, et faccio osservare, per ovviare a notabili disordini, com’altre volte hò dato conto alla medesima congregazione,” ASV, VR, posizione 1605, B-F (4 March 1605). . “A maggior gloria di q[ue]lla B[ea]ta et à riputatione della Città,” ASV, VR, posizione 1605, B-F.

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Craig A. Monson • Archbishop Alfonso Paleotti

the Dominican nuns of San Guglielmo, affirming to Archbishop Paleotti that “one need fear no scandal or disorder” if friars sang an anniversary mass in the convent’s outer church.When the Cistercian nuns of SS. Leonardo ed Orsola also followed suit, citing the increase in alms when pleasant music attracted the faithful to their church, an exasperated Archbishop Paleotti could only trot out the Congregation’s musical prohibitions of the 1580s, 1590s and 1600 yet again. Though they had been intended specifically “to eradicate musicians’ many illicit practices, which greatly disturb the virtue and religion of the convents,” now the cardinals were choosing to ignore them. Besides, as he put it,“this convent of Sant’Orsola is one of the wealthiest and most aristocratic in this city and doesn’t need alms or outside music.” (Though Sant’Orsola only ranked about sixth in the monastic pecking order in terms of income, the nuns did manage to live within their means, so Paleotti was at least partly right.) And he hinted darkly that “I discovered that persons greedy for lucre and for the introduction of new revels fostered this importuning — just how pernicious it would be, your Illustrious Lordships can judge for yourselves.” It is unclear how much Rome’s quiet shift in a more “liberal” direction had to do with new convent strategies or with Paleotti’s stiff-necked struggled to maintain a hard line. By 1606 the Sacred Congregation had begun to echo Corpus Domini’s own rhetoric, describing solemn masses in polyphony as the convent’s accustomed practice “since most ancient times” and a practice in no need of “any innovation” — which is to say, Paleotti’s oft-cited prohibitions. A month later the cardinals also politely pushed back against the archbishop’s attempt to deny the Dominican nuns of Sta. Maria Maddalena access to a chapel grate, similar to those already cropping up at San Pietro Martire and Sant’Agnese. Before the feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria rolled around again, the archbishop . ASV, VR, posizione 1605, A-B; ibid., Reg. Regularium 6 (1605), fols. 71v–72r (8 August 1605) and fol. 81v (5 September 1605); ibid., fol. 100v (5 November 1605); “essendosi con queste ordine distaccate molte prattiche di Musici, che vi turbavano grandem[en]te le honestà, e religione de Monsterij.… Essendo questo monastero di S[an]ta Orsola uno de più ricchi, et nobili di questa Città che non ha bisogno d’elemosine, ne di Musica esteriore.… Scopro che quest’instanza si fa da persone avide di guadagno, et di introdurre nuovo bagordi; il che qua[n]to sia pernicioso lo potranno giudicare coteste Ill[ustrissi]mi Ssri,” ibid, posizione 1605, A-B (26 November 1605); ibid., Sacra Congregazione del Concilio,Visite ad Limina 136A, fol. 55 lists an incme of £10,000 and expenses of £9,600 for Sant’Orsola in 1614.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

discovered that the convent of Sta. Catterina di Strada Maggiore had once again outflanked him: the Sacred Congregation apparently did not even observe the nicety of requesting Paleotti’s opinion in the matter. Should the nuns request a license for performances by outside musicians on their feast day, he should simply provide it (without objection and without obstruction). Matters came spectacularly to a head just a few months later. On January 31, 1607 the beleaguered archbishop sent off a tirade against the Clarissan nuns of SS. Naborre e Felice, the so-called Abbadia, documenting the lamentable and inevitable outcome of this sort of musical license. (The exact meaning of his self-consciously musical rhetoric is not always clear): Two nuns who practice music, in order to confound the regular organist… and cause strife and contention, surreptitiously and unbeknownst to me, had a very large organ built. They had it secretly brought into the convent and installed on one side of the choir. And when they began playing it, with dissonance and disturbance that caused great discord for the whole convent, it divided the house into two factions. One group of singers followed these two authoresses of novelty and another faction followed the old organist, resulting in discords in heart and mind. They all sang in their own way with diversity of motets and of voices so that listeners in the external church, when they heard such dissonant songs and such manifest discords betwixt these nuns, have remained totally scandalized ever since they began performing such musical disorder. “Never in all my time have I wanted to permit two organs in any of my convents,” the archbishop further exclaimed.“Because I knew that they are the cesspool [sentina] and spawn of discord. Since your Illustrious Lordships have always prohibited them, I remain quite astonished at the presumption of these two nuns.” Paleotti therefore dispatched the vicar general and his bailiffs to pluck the pipes from the new organ until such time as the whole offending instrument could be dismantled and removed. “Then these authoresses of evil and their adherents began to shriek loudly and to revile the regular organist, exclaiming that if they couldn’t play their new organ, then nobody was going to play the old one either.” . ASV, VR, Reg. Regularium 7 (1606), unnumb. (22 February 1606); fol. 72 (15 March 1606); ibid., fol. 133v (15 November 1606).

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Craig A. Monson • Archbishop Alfonso Paleotti

“I wished to convey these facts so that, in your wisdom, you may decide on the appropriate action,” Paleotti concluded. “I know that you will not approve that they retain two organs in this convent, because then all the other convents will want two of them, which will cause all the more strife there as well. And I believe that you will praise what I have done thus far in breaking up that organ and that you will expressly command that I leave behind no trace of this second organ in the convent.” The Sacred Congregation’s muted response two weeks later, which fell short of the total eradication of the second organ that Paleotti recommended, suggests possible concern with their fellow prelate’s judgment. Though the cardinals required the new instrument’s removal from the choir loft, they nevertheless permitted its retention elsewhere inside clausura, so long as it was inaudible in the public church. “And as for the disagreement that some of the nuns provoked, we leave it to the will of your lordship, whether it will result in serious repercussions for them.” The nuns of the Abbadia, on the other hand, closed ranks against their common archiepiscopal foe. In a carefully moderate tone, they pointed out that what Paleotti described as “un organo assai grande,” was in fact “un organino piccolo” (with only three stops). Nor was it quite the novelty that Paleotti made it out to be, since it improved upon and replaced a broken down old harpsichord in one of the convent’s two choir lofts.The nuns also pointed out that the alleged renegade “authoresses of novelty” had first obtained permission not only from the mother abbess and the convent bursar but also, apparently, from Paleotti’s own vicar of nuns.As for the archbishop’s alleged long-standing prohibition against two organs as a “cesspool of dissension,” the nuns stipulated that “nothing against them has ever been published.” (Where there was no law, there could be no violation.) Sister Claudia Volta, who had commissioned the organino piccolo, revealed that what Paleotti characterized as factions “singing in their own way with diversity of motets and voices” in fact described weekly alternations between the convent’s two choirs, each led by its respective organist, in its individual choir loft. She did attribute a certain amount of envy and complaining to her senior organist . ASV, VR, posizione 1607, A-B (31 January 1607). . Ibid., Reg. Regularium 8 (1607, 1608), fol. 48 (17 February 1607).

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

colleague, who was now dissatisfied with the convent’s decrepit, older organ. But Suor Claudia implied that it was Paleotti’s destruction of the organino that had fomented the real crisis and caused uproar. “It seems that the information Your Illustrious Lordships recently received was ill-intended,” Suor Claudia continued. “All the more so because in Bologna there’s certain knowledge that Monsignor the Archbishop lately licensed the convent of the Convertite to keep two organs.” Over the next two weeks the sisters recruited allies among both the laity and the clergy to make their case. To counter Paleotti’s claim that a second organ represented an invidious novelty, the convent enlisted the help of local organ builders Fabio Malamini and Paolo Cipri. These two submitted duly sworn testimony that pairs of organs were also in use at the convents of Sta. Cristina, Sta. Maria Maddalena, San Guglielmo and San Giovanni Battista. Finally, the nuns also sought the help of a male superior. The convent’s father confessor affirmed that Suor Claudia was far from the hell-raiser Paleotti made her out to be: “devout, frequenting the sacraments at appropriate times, she greatly loves peace and is far removed from any sort of sedition.” He further insisted, “Nor do I know that between Sister Claudia and Sister Emilia Zambeccara there is any discord or enmity.” The nuns wisely left this male superior to articulate a musical compromise that they had worked out behind the scenes. The senior and junior organists agreed to hand the keys to the two organs and direction of the combined two convent choirs back and forth in alternate weeks.This reconfiguration of their former musical practice would literally act out the concord and good order that characterized music making at the Abbadia. When the Sacred Congregation wrote to Alfonso Paleotti on March 20, reversing the initial directive that the Congregation had based on the prelate’s zealous over-exaggeration, not to say perjury, the cardinals lauded the solution that the nuns had worked out (with no help from their pastor), “It does not result in the slightest scandal, but rather encourages tranquility and contentment among these sisters.” Rome concluded rather pointedly, “and that should also lie at the heart of Your Lordship’s business.” . Ibid., posizione 1607, A-B; Reg. Regularium 8 (1607, 1608). All the documents are transcribed in Craig Monson, “Organi e organiste nei monasteri femminili di Bologna,” L’organo Rivista di culture organaria e organistica 30 (1996): 95–102.

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Craig A. Monson • Archbishop Alfonso Paleotti

The very next week, the nuns of San Pietro Martire were next in line to complain that Paleotti “is too vehemently opposed to nuns governed by Dominican friars.” He had bricked up their new grate near the high altar where they listened to sermons. This time the Sacred Congregation completely bypassed the archbishop and referred the matter instead to the papal legate. Word of this decision quickly reached the Dominican nuns of Sant’Agnese; when it came time to install the organ in their new inner church that year, the sisters requested that the Sacred Congregation likewise refer the matter to the papal legate. On the very same day when the archbishop received the Sacred Congregation’s mild rebuke regarding the Abbadia, he learned that he was also under direct attack by Bologna’s much maligned secular musicians. Camillo Cortellini, “detto il Violino,” prominent local composer and long-time member of the Concerto Palatino of Bologna, cheekily requested that the Sacred Congregation overturn Paleotti’s old bans on secular musicians’ performances at funerals in convent chapels. Citing “the city’s ancient custom” and the unlikelihood of scandal, Rome informed the archbishop that he was to license such performances in future. An incredulous Paleotti responded that Cortellini must surely have hoodwinked cardinals in Rome with “false declarations.” As Paleotti had told them repeatedly, these orders came, not from him, but from Pope Gregory XIII in 1584 and 1595 and from the future Pope Leo XI in 1600.“I would remind Your Lordships that if musicians return to their music making as Il Violino wishes, if they once again return with so much shame and scandal to loitering around the nuns, apart from the resultant dishonor to God, it will scandalize the city. And I will be unable to provide for all of the secret goings on that musicians undertake in such situations. If you would have the convents preserve their good names, I am sure that you will not tolerate opening this door to scandal.” Paleotti went so far as to include copies of the old, original prohibitions to jog the cardinals’ memories. Rome’s response must have seemed incomprehensible: “Their Lordships order me to write once again that you should execute . ASV, VR, posizione 1607, lettere A-B; Reg. Regularium 8 (1607, 1608), fol. 58r. . ASV, VR, posizione 1607, A-B; Reg. Regularium 8 (1607, 1608), fol. 54v (20 March 1607).

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

what they had already commanded me to tell you on March 20.” It cannot have lessened the sting when Camillo Cortellini presented the archbishop with a copy of Rome’s directive in person, which Paleotti acknowledged in May. It comes as no surprise that Il Violino, too, continued to press his advantage. When Paleotti declined to license subsequent festivals because they had not been specifically stipulated in the April ruling, Cortellini petitioned that the Sacred Congregation expand its permission to a general license for use on all such occasions without repeated recourse to the local curia. Rome could be pushed only so far, however. In November the Sacred Congregation rejected Cortellini’s request and held its previous line. After this defeat in 1607, which had effectively undone decades of reform, no major musical disruptions marred Alfonso Paleotti’s declining years. But secular musicians’ elaborate music continued to resound in the convents’ public churches, judging by the Sacred Congregation’s continued licenses for high masses on feast days in the chapels of Sta. Catterina, Sant’Orsola, San Bernardino and Sant’Omobono. One has to wonder if Paleotti’s adamantine opposition during the prolonged battles with Bologna’s nuns may not have called into question the aging archbishop’s judgment and talent for independent leadership and pastoral care. One also wonders if by the time Alfonso Paleotti passed to a better life in October 1610 he had perhaps resigned himself to the reality that a cardinal’s red hat would always remain beyond his grasp. Paleotti would be the only Bolognese archbishop in 450 years never to be made a cardinal. •

. ASV, VR, posizione 1607, A-B and Reg. Regularium 9 (1607, June– December), fol. 66r (7 November 1607); Reg. Regularium 8 (1607, 1608), fol. 127v (12 March 1608); posizione 1609, A-M (8 May 1609); Reg. Regularium 10 (1609), fol. 78 (3 July 1609).

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Suis manibus fecerat: Queen Dido as a Producer of Ceremonial Textiles Gretchen E. Meyers In the essay “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” Carolyn Valone argues that early modern women constructed public personae through the selective patronage of architecture, challenging the traditional notion that female identity arose from the domestically focused roles conscribed by the patriarchal society in which they lived. Through her documentation of the patronage records of architectural constructions in fifteenth and sixteenth century Rome, Valone has proposed numerous examples of early modern women who financed building projects for personal reasons such as commemoration of family, religious and social values. As a result of her important work a whole generation of subsequent scholars has been emboldened to challenge traditional views and liberate the public personae of these early modern women from obscurity.

Fig. 1. Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, Dido Showing Aeneas Her Plan for Carthage, c.163035. Photo: The Norton Simon Foundation.

. Carolyn Valone, “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Woman Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press), 317–35.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

In framing the motives for the architectural patronage of early modern women Valone argues that famous ancient women most likely served as inspirational humanist models. For example Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus, who built a tomb for her husband Mausolus in the mid-fourth century BCE, survived in both the written and visual tradition as an example of a wife, “who wished to build a sepulcher to her husband’s memory to serve forever as his memorial.” While Artemisia epitomized a wife commemorating her husband, the mythical Queen Dido of Carthage remained the female builder, par excellence. The heroine of the Roman poet Virgil’s epic Aeneid composed between 29 and 19 BCE, Dido is pictured in one Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s tapestry cartoons of 1630–35 (Fig. 1). In it the widowed Dido orchestrates and manages the building of her own city in northern Africa, showing off architectural plans to an enamored Aeneas. Although a legendary figure rather than a historical personage, Dido was likely the pinnacle in a long line of early Christian and ancient role models for female architectural patrons in early modern Rome, anchoring their own public beneficence among the noble pursuits of ancient ancestors. This essay builds on Valone’s observations of Dido’s famed public persona as a builder by turning to another aspect of her behavior in the Aeneid that is rarely discussed, and certainly never in terms of public life or impact, namely her role as a producer of ceremonial textiles linked specifically to family-oriented ceremonies such as weddings and funerals. At several points in his text Virgil intentionally describes textiles made by women that impact well beyond the domestic sphere, and in fact even influence the very public world of politics. From a grieving mother’s garment for her Italic soldier son to Queen Dido’s gold-spun gifts to Aeneas, Virgil’s language directs our attention to the handwork of women. Even in one of the most patriarchal of ancient Roman literary works, the ceremonial textiles of the Aeneid serve as tangible markers of female involvement in the public realm. . See Carolyn Valone,“Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560– 1630,” The Art Bulletin 76.1 (1994): 129–46, at 145. Her discussion is continued in Valone,“Matrons and Motives,” 318–21. . Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl  J. Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 123.

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Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido

In general the search for female public personae in the ancient world is limited by the small number of surviving textual sources, particularly as the vast majority belong to male authors. Moses Finley argued that the women of ancient Rome remain utterly “silent,” lacking a true voice in documentary sources. Other scholars, such as Beryl Rawson, have looked to the words of ancient (male) historians in combination with inscriptions and laws to reconstruct aspects of the public and private lives of Roman women. Still other scholars have examined the remains of ancient art and architecture to resurrect the impact of mostly elite females in the public realm. Indeed scholars of ancient Rome are able to repopulate the past with female Romans, but to a much lesser extent than their male counterparts. Within these constraints the tradition of Queen Dido is similarly difficult to recapture. As a literary creation, Dido of  Virgil’s Aeneid is a mystery. Although vestiges of her exist in the literary and legendary tradition prior to Virgil, it is well known that he embellished the love story between her and Aeneas. More importantly Virgil imbued Dido’s character with culpa (blame) when he attributes her tragic suicide to her typically female emotional dismay at Aeneas’ abandonment of her and her own violation of the oath of chastity she swore to her deceased husband. On the one hand, her character is deeply sympathetic, resonating with readers across time beginning with St. Augustine who claimed he wept at her death. On the other hand, the literary creation of Dido is inextricably tied to Virgil’s times — “a model of the interaction of woman and empire . Moses Finley,“The Silent Women of Ancient Rome,” in Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Reading and Sources, ed. Laura MacClure (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 147–56. . See Beryl Rawson, “Finding Roman Women,” in A Companion to the Roman Republic, ed. Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 324–42. . For example, Margaret Woodhull, “Matronly Patrons in the Early Roman Empire:The Case of Salvia Postuma,” in Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization, ed. Fiona McHardy and Eireann Marshall (London: Routledge, 2004), 75–91; or I Claudia:Women in Ancient Rome, ed. Diana E.E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). . R.D. Williams, The Aeneid of Virgil. Books 1–6 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 332–34. . St. Augustine, Confessions, 1.13.20–21.

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in Roman thought.” To ancient Romans, Dido’s city building was no doubt far from inspirational. In fact, many ancient scholars would be in agreement that the lessons Dido was intended to teach were more about the dangers of women participating in the male world. She was certainly a timely reminder of the very real dangers posed by a foreign queen, so immediately associated in the Augustan age with Cleopatra. Thus, it is unlikely that in the male-dominated world of Augustan poetry Dido was intended as anything other than a portrait of the perils in a world inverted by females in power. As I have noted above, a less familiar aspect of Dido’s literary persona is her proficiency in textile production. Although female characters in the Homeric epics, such as Penelope and Helen, are well-known for their spinning and weaving skills, Dido’s participation in this most typical of ancient female behaviors has been relatively ignored by scholars. Naturally, as an epic creation it is expected that Virgil’s Dido would engage in textile production, but it is worth noting that the textiles produced by women in the Iliad and the Odyssey operate within the particular confines of Homeric epic. For example, Melissa Mueller has examined the instances of weaving in the Odyssey, and she argues persuasively that weaving and textiles are principally used as tools in the navigation of guest-host hospitality and friendship and that the textiles themselves are a source of kleos (fame) among females. She points specifically to instances in the Odyssey, such as Queen Arete’s recognition of her own daughter’s weaving on the clothes worn by the shipwrecked Odysseus or Helen’s gift of a peplos to Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, which she claims is “a monument to the hands of Helen, . Sharon L.  James,“Vergil’s Dido,” in A Companion toWomen in the AncientWorld, ed. Sheila L.  James and Sheila Dillon (Chichester:Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 369–71, at 369. . Alison Keith, Engendering Rome:Women in Latin Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115–19. . See Maria Pantelia, “Spinning and Weaving: Ideas of Domestic Order in Homer,” American  Journal of Philology 114.4 (1993): 493–501. . There are a few exceptions. See Nicholas P. Gross,“Mantles Woven with Gold: Pallas’ Shroud and the End of the “Aeneid,” Classical Journal 99 (2004): 135–56; and Susan F. Wiltshire, Public and Private in Vergil’s Aeneid (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 52–55. . Melissa Mueller, “Helen’s Hands: Weaving for Kleos in the Odyssey,” Helios 37 (2010): 1–21. . Homer, Odyssey, 7.234.

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Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido

for your wife to wear, on the day of her wedding, but until then it must lie by your mother’s side.” According to Mueller, in these examples the textiles operate almost as a “woven communication” system between women, as tokens not only of the maker, but also of the fame accorded the maker because of her skills. Textiles allow Homeric women a means to communicate with one another, in a manner akin to the heroic world of men, but still separate from it. A closer look at the text of the Aeneid indicates that Dido was indeed as accomplished as her Homeric counterparts in textile arts. Garments made for and gifted to Aeneas by her appear at striking moments of ceremony, namely Dido and Aeneas’ “marriage” in Book 4 and the funeral of Pallas in Book 11. While some elements of the poem do resonate with the Greek epic tradition,Virgil’s particular language makes clear that Dido’s textiles, as well as several others in the poem, communicate not only among females, but also among the male domains of epic. As with her role as city builder and ruler, Dido’s actions in the realm of textile production exceed the norms of her gender, while simultaneously placing her, a foreign queen, within a recognizable Roman context. It is commonplace among ancient scholars to associate the skills of spinning and weaving with female domestic virtue — a connection that surely extends back to antiquity, when numerous inscriptions (written by men) espouse a deceased wife’s or daughter’s excellence in textile production with the phrase lanam fecit (“she made wool”). In addition, when the Roman historian Livy introduces the most virtuous woman in all of Roman legend, Lucretia, who took her own life after her rape, rather than live as an example of a woman who disgraced her husband, she is presented as burning the midnight oil and weaving. While shorthand between textile production and . Homer, Odyssey, 15.125–28. See Mueller,“Helen’s Hands,” 11 for the translation. . Mueller,“Helen’s Hands,” 4. . For a summary see the work of Lena Larsson Lovén, including “Lanam Fecit: Wool-Working and Female Virtue,” in Aspects of Women in Antiquity: Proceedings of the First Nordic Symposium on Women’s Lives in Antiquity, ed. Lena Larsson Lovén and Agneta Strömberg (Jonsered: Paul Aström Förlag, 1998), 85–95; and idem, “Textile Production, Female Work and Social Values in Athenian Vase Painting,” in Perspectives on Ancient Greece: Papers in Celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the Swedish Institute at Athens, ed. Ann-Louise Schallin (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, 2013), 135–51. . Livy, ab Urbe Condita, 1.57–58.

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ancient female virtue is familiar and often taken for granted in scholarship, I would note that the view of generic wool-working as a symbol of domestic virtue does not always acknowledge the skill or labor of the craft itself. In fact, the types of textiles produced and the function of those textiles as completed products has meaning beyond the simple fact that an ideal matron spins and weaves. Production of ceremonial textiles allowed Roman women a certain degree of social agency in which they participated in and impacted family rituals deeply connected to lineage and status. Sources suggest that Roman women (undoubtedly elite women) wove their own wedding garments — by some accounts on an upright loom the night before their wedding. Interestingly Pliny links this practice to an Etruscan queen,Tanaquil, who he says is responsible for Roman brides carrying a decorated distaff and spindle with thread at the wedding ceremony because Tanaquil herself “first wove the tunica recta of the kind worn by novices and newly married brides.” Tanaquil is similarly attested in other sources with the production of a range of significant garments, a royal tunic woven for and worn by her adopted son, Servius Tullius. She also may have been first the weave with gold, as her husband, King Tarquinius Priscus, may have been the first to wear golden garments in ceremonies. These references, which derive from an antiquarian tradition originating in the late Republic or Augustan age point to a relationship between the Etruscan Tanaquil and wool-working skills: not generic textile production but specifically the production of garments for weddings, political ceremony or other key moments of familial transition and public display. I have suggested elsewhere that the Roman association between women and textile production in the end of the Republic was not limited to quotidian production of garments, but in fact may very well preserve Etruscan practices, where elite women took an active role in social and even political . Karen K. Hersch, “The Woolworker Bride,” in Ancient Marriage in Myth and Reality, ed. Lena Larssen Lovén and Agneta Strömberg (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 122–35. . Pliny, Natural History, 8.194. See Pliny: Natural History, vol. 3, Books 8–11, Loeb Classical Library 353, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940). . Pliny, Natural History, 8.194–97. . Pliny, Natural History, 33.63; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 3.61.

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Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido

behavior through the production of specific ceremonial garments that marked transitions, especially familial, and thus ensured and protected the continuation of elite lineage through emblematic display. Within this context of the social significance ascribed to elite ceremonial textile production near the end of the Roman Republic, Virgil’s particularly pointed references to textiles in the Aeneid seem to operate beyond simple epic convention and may also point to a long-standing tradition of female participation in ceremonies through their production of elaborate garments. Several textiles appear in the Aeneid in contexts associated with both marriage and death.Two instances in particular deserve our attention. The first occurs shortly after Dido and Aeneas’ supposed wedding in Book 4. Although Dido has sworn a vow of chastity to her dead husband, thanks to the arrows of Cupid she falls in love with Aeneas to the point of madness. Shortly afterwards Dido invites Aeneas to accompany her on a hunting trip in Carthage. A storm arises and they shelter together in a cave. Although the text is unclear about the actuality of events, Virgil states that later Dido “refers to [the event in the cave] as a marriage (4.171).” At this point Aeneas is complicit (or oblivious) in Dido’s understanding of their relationship. For when we next see Aeneas he is literally building her city walls, bedecked in a garment she has made for him.The Latin line is: …Atque illi stellatus iaspide fulva ensis erat Tyrioque ardebat murice laena demissa ex umeris, dives quae munera Dido fecerat, et tenui telas discreverat auro. His sword was enstarred with yellow jasper, and from his shoulders hung a cloak blazing with Tyrian purple, a rich gift which Dido had made embroidered finely with gold.

Here although she herself is not present, Dido makes an appearance through her handwork.The textile itself adds to the impression of the couple as city co-builders, as Aeneas literally builds her walls in the . Gretchen E. Meyers, “Tanaquil: The Conception and Construction of an Etruscan Matron,” in A Companion to the Etruscans, ed. Sinclair Bell and Alexandra Carpino (Chichester:Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming). . Virgil, Aeneid, 4.171. See Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), 82 for translation. . Virgil, Aeneid, 4.261–4. See Lombardo, Aeneid, 85 for translation.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

wool cloak she has made for him. It is possible that the cloak itself is more than just a simple gift, but may in fact be a wedding garment. In the very next line the god Mercury sent by  Jupiter confronts Aeneas about his apparent forgetfulness of his own mission to found his own city (Rome) and begins by deriding Aeneas as uxorius. This word, which is translated “of or belonging to a wife,” is rare in Latin. Its appearance here — in such proximity to Dido’s handwoven cloak — may indicate Mercury’s recognition of the cloak’s significance as a wedding garment and reinforce the textile’s role as a marker of ceremony and more significantly of the couple’s political union. The reciprocity of the exchange may also be inferred from a textile gift that Aeneas had already given to Dido in Book 1. At their first meeting Aeneas allows his son Ascanius to present Dido with textiles taken from the ruins of Troy and made by Helen: pallam signis auroque rigentem et circumtextum croceo velamen acantho (a mantle stiff with gold-stitched figures and a veil fringed with saffron acanthus). While Aeneas’ initial gift to Dido functions more like a textile gift from the Homeric world, even perhaps allowing Dido to appreciate it as a “monument to Helen’s hands,” her later gift to him operates differently by the very fact that it is intended for male eyes and male usage. The pairing of the two garments is further emphasized by the usage of the ablative auro in the description of the textiles’ golden weave. Rather than adopt the familiar Homeric meaning of textile gift exchange, Dido’s handwork takes on far greater significance as a marker of ceremony and union. A second occurrence of Dido as a producer of ceremonial garments evokes not the wedding ceremony but the funeral. At the end of Book 4, Dido takes her own life, but she reappears in the Aeneid in Book 11, again thanks to her textile production prowess. . Virgil, Aeneid, 4.266. . Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. uxorius. . Virgil, Aeneid, 1.648–9. See Lombardo, Aeneid, 23 for translation. . See also the scene at Aeneid, 3.482–91 where Aeneas reunites briefly with Helenus and Andromache, the widow of the Trojan hero Ascanius. At their parting Andromache gives Ascanius garments woven in gold that she had made for her deceased husband and son. She tells Ascanius that the textiles are “monuments of my hands (manuum tibi monimenta),” utilizing the language of Homeric women. It is fitting that Andromache should continue to use this terminology and that the scene occurs in Virgil’s epic in Book 3, which is entirely narrated by Aeneas himself.

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Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido

At this moment, Aeneas is officiating at the funeral of young Pallas, killed in battle by Aeneas’ rival Turnus. Because Pallas’s life had been entrusted to Aeneas by the young man’s father, Pallas had assumed a pseudo-filial role for Aeneas. At lines 11.72–5 Virgil describes the scene at Pallas’ funeral where Aeneas provides a funeral shroud for his pseudo-son made by his pseudo-wife: Tum geminas vestis auroque ostroque rigentis Extulit Aeneas, quas illi laeta laborum Ipsa suis quondam manibus Sidonia Dido Fecerat et tenui telas discreverat auro. Then Aeneas brought forth two cloaks heavy with purple and gold, which Dido once, long ago, made for him joyfully with her own hands, embroidered finely with gold.

The use of verbal echo here cannot be other than a blatant reinforcement of the relationship between these textiles and the previous one Aeneas wore in Book 4. Not only is it possible that the garments are the same, clearly we are yet again encouraged by Virgil to envision Dido’s role in ceremony, in this case Pallas’ funeral — a role that we would not otherwise have expected from her because she essentially serves as a mother. Elsewhere in the Aeneid Virgil provides examples of mothers whose garments drape the bodies of their deceased soldier sons: the grieving mother of the soldier Euryalus in Book 9, who hears of her son’s death before she can give him the robe she has made for his funeral or the Etruscan soldier Lausus, who is pierced through the “tunic his mother had woven of soft gold threads.” As she had clothed the wifeless Aeneas in Book 4, now Dido helps adorn the motherless Pallas in Book 11. Although not a Roman herself, Dido’s garments serve to unite the faux family of Aeneas, Dido and Pallas. Despite her physical absence from the narrative in Book 11, Dido’s active participation in funeral of Pallas is emphatically noted through the use of the descriptive phrase, “laeta laborum” (happy in her endeavors) and the ablative phrase “suis manibus” (with her own hands). The reference to the weaver’s hands is particularly interesting, given its common appearance among Homeric women as a means of . See Lombardo, Aeneid, 279 for translation. . Vergil, Aeneid, 9.481–92. . Vergil, Aeneid, 10.817–18. See Lombardo, Aeneid, 272 for translation.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

immortalizing their work. Here however, Dido’s hands do much more than enshrine her own abilities for other women to appreciate. In both this instance and the scene in Book 4, Dido’s work is associated with the ceremonies of marriage and death, and the garments she produces literally cover males as they engage in the tasks of city building and war. Dido’s partnership in this way is even more significant when we recall that Pallas’ death plays a crucial role in the founding of Rome. In the Aeneid’s final scene, while in a single combat battle with Turnus, Aeneas contemplates sparing Turnus’ life, but becomes enraged at the sight of Turnus wearing Pallas’ sword belt as a spoil of his victory over the young man. As a result Aeneas kills Turnus and paves the way for the ultimate founding of Rome. Virgil’s intentional language and imagery in these scenes allow textiles to communicate well beyond the female realm and to impact the world of men. As Susan Wiltshire points out in reference to the weaving of the grieving mothers in the Aeneid: “in each of these cases the private world of family affection — of women’s work — intrudes into the events of history.” But perhaps for Dido it is more than an accidental intrusion. Dido’s textiles serve as a component of her persona in a public arena in a way that would have been easily recognizable to ancient Roman women, and possibly men, and also much less threatening to the established social order than the Cleopatra-laden image of her building and ruling her city. In the Aeneid, while Dido’s competence as a ruler slowly unravels, as she is more and more enslaved by her womanly desire and irrationality, her textiles live on beyond her demise and permit her a role in the events leading up to the founding of Rome. It seems no accident that as a foreigner Virgil’s Dido would naturally possess a close resonance with the Etruscan queen Tanaquil, who at this same time period was linked by antiquarians with the origin of certain elements of ceremonial textile production by Roman brides. At the end of the Roman Republic Virgil’s Dido and the elaborate textiles she produced surely embody a familiar and perhaps traditional method by which ancient Roman women were able to navigate and participate in a male-dominated culture. Through his language, imagery and placement in the text,Virgil suggests these textiles of Dido’s hand are worthy of attention. . Wiltshire, Public and Private, 54.

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Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido

Carolyn Valone’s “matrons as patrons” used their own money to contribute to their society’s male-dominated public discourse; so too does Virgil’s Dido use her hands to simultaneously communicate about topics important to wives and mothers, and also to shape the destiny of Rome. Valone was the first to excavate the evidence of women’s patronage in early modern Rome; in my field it is the task of ancient scholars to similarly liberate women’s work in textile arts from stereotypes and place it firmly among the attributes of ancient female public identity. •

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What to Wear in the Decameron and Why It Matters Elissa Weaver A distinctive feature of Boccaccio’s art of storytelling in the Decameron is his attention to historical detail. It is a strategy that lends verisimilitude to even the most implausible narrated events. The Decameron opens with a description of the plague, each novella begins by carefully and convincingly situating its characters and action in time and place, and throughout the narration there is richness and breadth of observation that is historical and precise and yet economical and functional in the plot and meaning of the tale. One such element of historical detail that appears throughout the Decameron is costume. In the Decameron Boccaccio devotes considerable attention to dress and to fashion, more than in his other works: he names articles of clothing precisely and often describes them briefly, their style, their rich or simple fabrics. Moreover, he makes clothing contribute to the action of his stories. It is sometimes used as a narrative strategy to give structure to a tale: dressing and undressing often move the action forward and bring it to a close. Clothes figure in the Decameron for their economic value, and in many tales they are among the valuable gifts bestowed upon worthy characters as their just reward. Throughout the Decameron Boccaccio elicits the symbolic potential of dress to signify the social rank, wealth, culture and occupation of his characters, and he changes their clothes to reflect temporary conditions or predicaments in which they find themselves, or to correspond to their new circumstances. He is careful to point out class distinctions associated with a way of dressing and the proper decorum for wearing certain garments.There is serious criticism or ridicule in the stories of characters who dress improperly, either carelessly, foolishly or in order to deceive, to present themselves falsely to others. He seems to insist that there must be truth expressed through one’s presentation in society, and forms of bodily adornment, but primarily clothes, are a major component of one’s public persona. Boccaccio’s interest in dress and fashion and in their narrative potential that is expressed in the novelle can be seen as well in his autograph illustrations that appear in two manuscripts of the Decameron. These exhibit similar attention to sartorial detail. For the manuscript copied around 1360 by Giovanni di Agnolo Capponi Boccaccio

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made seventeen illustrations that visualize events narrated in the stories and framing tale, and in the copy he made himself many years later, c.1373/74, he decorated the catchwords with representations of some of his characters, thirteen of which have survived, while others were on sheets that have been lost. In this brief study I will discuss Boccaccio’s verbal and visual representations of fourteenth-century fashions and their meaning for his Decameron stories. Since I have addressed elsewhere his use of costume to structure his tales, I will concentrate in this occasion on the social meaning of clothes in the Decameron and, especially, on Boccaccio’s insistence on decorum, on the appropriateness of dress determined by the character’s profession, class, gender and the social situation in which he finds himself. Boccaccio portrays contemporary, fourteenth-century dress in the Decameron stories and in his illustrations. An item of basic clothing . The Capponi manuscript is in Paris, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BNF Ms. It. 482, and Boccaccio’s autograph copy of the Decameron is the Hamilton 90, in the collection of the Berlin Staatsbiblothek. For the attribution to Boccaccio of the illustrations see Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto and Vittore Branca, “Boccaccio ‘visualizzato’ dal Boccaccio,” Studi sul Boccaccio 21 (1994): 197–234 (followed by 48 illustrations); Vittore Branca, “Introduzione: Il narrar boccacciano per immagini,” in Boccaccio visualizzato: Narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, 3 vols., ed.Vittore Branca (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1999), 1:3–37; Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto,“L’iconografia nei codici miniati boccacciani dell’Italia centrale e meridionale,” in Boccaccio visualizzato, 2:3–52; and Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto, “Il rapporto testo e immagini all’origine della formazione artistica e letteraria di Giovanni Boccaccio,“ in Medioevo: Immagine e racconto. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, ed. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle (Milan: Electa, 2003), 456–73.The images are published in Boccaccio visualizzato, 2, schede 6 and 7, and also in Bernard Degenhart and Annegritt Schmitt, Corpus der Italienischen Zeichnungen 1300–1450, 1.1, cat. nos. 65 (134–37) and 67 (137); 1.3, figs. 109–12 and 114, incomplete, only eight catchword images (Berlin: Mann, 1968). . Elissa Weaver, “Dietro il vestito: La semiotica del vestire nel Decameron,” in La Novella italiana: Atti del Convegno di Caprarola 19-24 settembre 1988, ed. Enrico Malato (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1989), 2:701–10; and idem, “Fashion and Fortune in the Decameron,” in Boccaccio 1313–2013, ed. Francesco Ciabattoni, Elsa Filosa and Kristina Olson (Ravenna: Longo Editore, forthcoming 2015). . For an illustrated history of Italian costume in Boccaccio’s time, see especially Rosita Levi-Pisetzky, Storia del costume in Italia 2, “Il Trecento” (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1964), 8–209; see also Margaret Scott, Medieval Dress & Fashion (London: British Library, 2007), 78–121; and the two exhaustive studies of medieval textiles, clothing and ornamentation by Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, including Guardaroba medievale: Vesti e società dal XIII al XVI secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999);

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Elissa Weaver • What to Wear in the Decameron

mentioned often in the stories is the camicia¸ a shirt, shift or chemise, the garment men and women wore closest to their body. Over the camicia men wore a farsetto, a lightweight padded vest, or doublet, to which were attached hose, or footed stockings. This was sufficient for a man of the merchant class to wear in public, but over it one often wore a belted gonnella, a dress. A giubba (or giubbotto) was a more elegant doublet, worn by men of greater means and was appropriate attire for important occasions. The gonnella might be covered by a gown, a guarnacca, open at the sides, and a mantello, or outer cloak, could be worn over all the other layers of clothes and came in many styles and cuts appropriate to men of all social levels. Long garments, which could be fur-lined, called cioppe or pellande, toghe, tuniche and tabarri, were worn by men of distinction, such as judges, doctors, various sorts of officials and prelates. Women wore garments of the same names, except for the farsetto and giubba, which were exclusively male. They wore a gonnella over their camicia, and their outer gowns, the guarnacca, pellanda or cioppa, often had sleeves from which hung long strips of cloth or fur. In Boccaccio’s time the style of dress had changed dramatically from that of the previous generation, when both men and women wore long, loose-fitting gowns. By mid-fourteenth century clothes became clearly gendered. Men’s gonnelle were very short, and over them they wore low belts from which their purses, scarselle, hung. This style has been attributed to the influence of foreigners, as Boccaccio reports in his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, where he strongly disapproves of it, indeed condemns it as an incitement to concupiscence; and idem, Gli inganni delle apparenze: Disciplina di vesti e ornamenti alla fine del medioevo (Turin: Paravia, 1996). Men’s dress in the Decameron was studied in the late nineteenth century by Carlo Merkel in his Come vestivano gli uomini del Decameron (Rome: Tipografia dell’Accademia dei Lincei, 1898; rpt Rome: Insubria, 1981). Merkel discusses each piece of men’s clothing mentioned in the text and the proper decorum for wearing them. He does not discuss women’s clothes. . The terms used to represent these garments varied regionally and over time, and even to indicate differences in the cut, the quality of cloth or the decoration. . This change in style is documented in the painting of the early fourteenth century with the early 1340s as the watershed moment, see Luciano Bellosi, Buffalmacco e il Trionfo della Morte (Turin: Einaudi, 1947), 41–54; and his two articles:“Moda e cronologia. A) Gli affreschi della Basilica inferiore di Assisi,” Prospettiva 10 (  July 1977): 21–31; and “Moda e cronologia. B) Per la pittura del primo Trecento,” Prospettiva 11 (Oct. 1977): 12–27.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

perhaps it was because by then he was an old man. Giovanni Villani claims that it was brought to Italy from France in 1342 by Walter of Brienne, the duke of Athens. Women’s clothes at the time also began to emphasize sexual difference.Their necklines were cut more and more widely, almost shoulder to shoulder, as the century wore on; their bodices became tighter and their Fig. 1. Giovanni Boccaccio, catchword portrait, in skirts long and bell-shaped. ink and watercolor, of Landolfo Rufolo (Dec. In the Decameron novelle serII 4). Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin-Preussischer vants and shopkeepers, members Kulturbesitz (SBB-PK), Ms.Ham 90, fol. 16v.. of humble professions, are described wearing a farsetto in the exercise of their professions: Cecco Fortarrigo (IX.4) loses his gambling, and Guccio Imbratta (VI.10), Friar Cipolla’s untrustworthy servant, has an old and dirty, patched doublet, while Cisti the baker (VI.2) is seen every morning in front of his shop in “a very white doublet and a freshly washed apron” (“un farsetto bianchissimo indosso e un grembiule di bucato”§11). Officers of the night watch in Naples lay down their arms and take off their gonnelle to drink from a well; presumably they still have on their doublets (II.5). Merchants, too, are generally depicted wearing a gonnella and also a cloak (mantello), if they are on a journey, and it is only when brought down by Fortune that they are left in only a farsetto. This is the case of Landolfo Ruffolo, a very rich merchant from the Amalfi coast who is reduced to wearing only a shabby doublet (“un povero farsettino” §15) when his ship is plundered by Genoese sailors; but Fortune ultimately rewards him with a cask of jewels, and friendly . Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la comedia di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio (Milan: Mondadori, 1965), 6:334–35.This style is the subject of a long polemic in his commentary on Inferno V.(ii).332–39. . The Villani reference is cited by Levi-Pisetzky in her illustrated history of Italian costume, Storia del costume in Italia, “Il Trecento,” 2:9. . All quotations from the Decameron are from the edition edited by Vittore Branca (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1984, rev.). All English translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

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Elissa Weaver • What to Wear in the Decameron

cloth merchants give him new clothes. In the Decameron it is the fate of many characters like Landolfo that they meet with misfortune, and when their fortunes again look up they either get back their clothes or they are rewarded with other garments appropriate for their social condition. In the Hamilton 90 manuscript Boccaccio has left us a catchword portrait of Landolfo, depicting him as a welldressed merchant, wearing a short scalloped cloak and a hood that is stylishly draped on his head and hanging to one side in a sort of tail, called a becchetto or beccuto (Fig. 1). All of the catchword portraits in the Hamilton manuscript are half-figures like the one of Landolfo Ruffolo, yet, despite the limitations of the form, Boccaccio succeeds in situating the characters through their attire in their social milieu, sometimes quite precisely. The portrait of the lascivious and hypocritical abbot in the First Day story (I.4), for example, shows him dressed in a Benedictine habit that, according to Vittore Branca, identifies his fictional monastery in Lunigiana, even though Boccaccio does not mention its name (Fig. 2). Gianni Lotteringhi (VII.1) is Fig. 2. Giovanni Boccaccio, catchword portrait, portrayed wearing the hood of in ink and watercolor, of the abbot (Dec. his confraternity of the Laudesi I 4). Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin-Preussischer and sprouting the metaphoric Kulturbesitz (SBB-PK), Ms. Ham 90, fol. 8v. . Branca, “Il narrar boccacciano per immagini,” 16, calls the cloak a “mantelletta dall’orlo smerlato,” and he claims that Landolfo is wearing a mariner’s hat (“copricapo marinaro”), which, instead, seems to be simply the fashionable way to wear a hood in the fourteenth century, as described by Levi-Pisetzky (66) and illustrated with a figure from the wall of the Camposanto in Pisa (Fig. 27). . The thirteen figures are in brown ink and watercolor, on parchment.They include the abbot (I.4), Landolfo Rufolo (II.2), Alatiel (II.7), Neifile (framing tale, end of II),Tedaldo (III.7), Filippo Balducci (Intro IV), officer of the Watch (IV.6), soldier (V.3), Ercolano (V.10), Gianni Lotteringhi (VII.1), the scholar (VIII.7), Iancofiore (VIII.10), and Donno Gianni (IX.10). . Branca,“Il narrar boccacciano per immagini,” 15–16.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Fig. 3. Giovanni Boccaccio, catchword portrait, in ink and watercolor, of Gianni Lotteringhi (Dec. VII 1). Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SBB-PK), Ms. Ham 90, fol. 79v.

Fig. 4. Giovanni Boccaccio, catchword portrait, in ink and watercolor, of Neifile, story-teller and Queen of Day Two. Staatsbibliotek zu BerlinPreussischer Kulturbesitz (SBB-PK), Ms. Ham 90, fol. 31v.

horns his wife has given him (Fig 3). Neifile, one of the ten Florentine story-tellers and queen of the Third Day, is represented in an elegant gown (guarnacca or cioppa), with a stylish, low and wide neckline and a strip of cloth hanging from the sleeve opening, a dress indicative of the elite class to which the narrators belong (Fig. 4). In her hair she wears a garland of flowers, the crown, which is passed from one of the ten narrators to another as she or he takes on the position of ruler for the day of their locus amoenus in the Florentine countryside. All of Boccaccio’s catchword figures appear in costume that situates them distinctively in the story to which they belong. In the Capponi manuscript most of Boccaccio’s illustrations refer to the beginning of a day of storytelling and visualize actions of the day’s first novella or of its opening in the framing tale. To . Regarding his costume, see M.G. Ciardi Dupreé,“I codici. Boccaccio disegnatore e illustratore e codici fiorentini dell’epoca,” scheda 6, in Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato, 2:62. Boccaccio has illustrated the story of Gianni Lotteringhi (VII.1) also in the Capponi manuscript, but there he depicts the wife’s lover rather than her husband. . Branca, “Il narrar boccacciano per immagini,” 16, for Branca’s reading of the portrait of Neifile. . The seventeen illustrations are drawn and shaded in brown ink, on parchment. They portray, from the Proem and Introduction, the storytellers seated in a garden, two couples on horseback, a historiated initial “H” in which Boccaccio in cathedra offers his book to a group of assembled ladies, and a scene of the plague.The other illustrations represent Dec. I.1, II.1, III.1, IV Intro., IV.1, V.1, VI Intro. and 2, VII.1, VIII.1, IX.1, IX.9, X.1, and X Conclusion.

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Elissa Weaver • What to Wear in the Decameron

Fig. 5. Giovanni Boccaccio, illustration, in ink, of the Martellino story (Dec. II 1). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. It. 482, fol. 23v. Below, detail of Martellino hung.

introduce the Second Day he chooses the first tale, that of Martellino and two fellow Florentines, known in court society for their entertaining impersonations. Martellino plays a prank in Treviso that gets him in serious trouble, and for a time he loses his clothes: the angry, offended townspeople beat him, tear off everything he is wearing (“stracciatili tutti i panni indosso” II.1§18) and bring him before a judge “in camicia” (§31). In the Capponi illustration (Fig. 5) Boccaccio represents the opening events of the tale, portraying Martellino in and out of his clothes from his arrival in Treviso to the low point in his fortunes, when he is being tortured. On the left, we see Martellino and his two friends at the city gate; they are elegantly dressed in short cloaks (mantelli), which barely cover their skirts (gonnelle), and they wear tall hats with turned up brims, the appropriate head covering for travel. In the second . For Ciardi Dupré (“Boccaccio ‘visualizzato da Boccaccio,” 215), by ending the illustration with Martellino’s punishment, Boccaccio underscored the moral announced by the story-teller at the beginning of the tale, that it has often happened that one who tried to play a joke on another, especially concerning things that one should revere, has sometimes found that it was only he who was made the fool and even harmed (“Spesse volte, carissime donne, avvenne che chi altrui sé di beffare ingegnò, e massimanmente quelle cose che sono da reverire, s’è con le beffe e talvolta col danno sé solo ritrovato” II.1§2) . Levi-Pisetzky, 69 and Fig. 54.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

scene Martellino pretends to be a paralytic and is carried into the church where he will feign a miraculous cure, making fun of the faith of the Trevigiani. The next scene shows him, after he has been recognized and his impersonation revealed, without his cloak and hat, being beaten by the outraged citizens. In the last scene of the illustration (Fig. 5, detail), but not of the tale, he is hanging from a pulley, dressed only in his shirt (camicia) and underpants (panni lini), his hose falling down, since they are no longer attached to a doublet by the garter (cintolino) we see sticking out in the back. Martellino has been falsely accused of being a pickpocket by many townsmen who are hoping to make some money from the excitement. Before him stands the judge who oversees his punishment, appropriately dressed in a tabarro and cappuccio, the long cloak and hood worn by members of his profession. The story has a happy ending, as do all the tales in Day Two, and Martellino and his friends will be rewarded, each with “una roba” (II.1§33), an ensemble of garments, by the local signore, or lord, who has a better sense of humor than the others. Boccaccio’s visualization of the events portrays Martellino’s progressive undressing, to which it adds details not in the novella, and, in particular, the portrayal of the three Florentines as they have just arrived in Treviso.Their elegant clothes and stately posture are not part of the novella’s verbal account but can be inferred from its mention that they frequent court society: they are “men who, when they visit the courts of lords, entertain the company, disguising themselves and doing impersonations” (“uomini li quali, le corti de’ signor visitando, di contraffarsi... li sollazzavano” §6).This visual portrayal of them, so well poised and fashionably dressed, sets them apart from the crowd of fanatical Trevigiani and anticipates the camaraderie they will enjoy at the conclusion of tale with the town’s Signore. It is the case of most of the illustrations that Boccaccio provided for the Capponi manuscript that they add to our experience of the text by visualizing not only what we read but also aspects of the story that can be implied, as we have seen in the depiction of Martellino and his companions. In the illustrations he provides for the Decameron . In the trecento a “roba” usually consisted of gonnella, guarnacca and possibly also a mantello. . Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto finds Boccaccio’s structuring of the illustration effective, through his use of an architectural background (the gate, church and scaffold) to organize the scenes and in the way he unifies them by placing the animated crowd at the center (“Il rapporto testo e immagini,” 465).

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Elissa Weaver • What to Wear in the Decameron

Fig. 6. Giovanni Boccaccio, illustration, in ink, of the Filippo Balducci exemplum (Dec. Introduction Day IV). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. It. 482, fol. 79v.

Fourth Day, Boccaccio chooses not only the first novella of the day but also another that is told in the “Author’s Introduction,” an interruption in the organization of the collection in which Boccaccio defends himself from the accusations of his critics, who attack him for, among other things, paying too much attention to women. He responds with an exemplum that will demonstrate that it is impossible to do otherwise, since even a child raised in isolation from the world, when he first sees a woman, will feel an irresistible attraction. It is the story of Filippo Balducci, a rich and happily married man, whose wife dies suddenly, leaving him so despondent that he decides to abandon the world he knew, taking with him his two-year-old son, to live and serve God as hermits on a mountain near Florence. The boy has been taught only about God and the saints, but when, at eighteen years old, he accompanies his father on a trip to the city and sees women for the first time, despite his father’s attempt to convince him that they are a bad thing, he wants nothing more than to take one home. The Capponi manuscript illustration visualizes the entire tale in three scenes, adding to the verbal account especially through costume, architecture and gestures (Fig. 6). The initial scene dramatizes Filippo’s grief at the death of his wife. She is surrounded by three women mourners, who express their anguish in stylized gestures: the first quite animatedly with her arms in the air and her long hair loose, the second, whose covered head is slightly bent forward and . The author insists that he will not tell an entire story but only “part of one” (“non una novella intera... ma parte d’una” §11), since he does not want it to be counted with those of the ten internal narrators. . Filippo tries to hide the nature of the women from his son by calling them “pappere,” geese.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

supported by her hand on her cheek; the third and youngest, judging from her hairstyle, is slightly bent forward in a quiet and contemplative gesture of sadness. Filippo and his son, behind the women, are elegantly dressed for the solemn occasion in belted gonnelle, the father’s is rather long, as his social status and the solemn occasion require, and he wears a cloak attached at his shoulders; like the central mourner, he holds his hand to his cheek signifying his grief. The son holds his father’s hand and looks up to him, his head back and mouth wide open to suggest that he is crying.The next scene to the right, raised and set back, shows father and son in their small cell on Mt. Senario, dressed as hermits in long tunics and hooded cloaks; the son is tonsured and holds a book.The final scene is set in Florence and portrays the conclusion of the exemplum, in which the boy, now grown, sees women for the first time and gestures toward them, as he turns to tell his father that he wants one. The scene is framed by a city gate and landmarks of the city’s religious and political center: the baptistery and, behind it, a small church, the old cathedral of Sta. Riparata and its bell tower, Giotto’s newer tower and Palazzo Vecchio, a generous elaboration in the illustration of what in the text are simply “the palaces, houses, churches and all the other things of which the city is full” (“i palagi, le case, le chiese e tutte l’altre cose delle quali tutta la città piena si vede” §19). The two hermits are wearing their hooded tunics, the father, now old, is distinguished by his beard and slightly curved body; the son, standing tall, wears a hat.The women are all in stylish gowns, like those worn by the lovely daughters of Neri degli Uberti in a story of the Decameron Tenth Day: tight from the waist up and below the waist full, tent-shaped skirts that reach down to their feet (“dalla cintura in sú era strettissimo e da indi ’n giú largo a guisa d’un padiglione e lungo infino a’ piedi.” X.6§11). At least one lady has a wide. Levi-Pisetzky observes that a longer gonnella was appropriate attire for a distinguished man, while others, especially young men, wore them very short (see her figs. 15 and 16). Boccaccio makes this distinction by giving a longer gonnella to Filippo Balducci (Fig. 6) and shorter ones to Martellino and his friends (Fig. 5). . The old cathedral of Sta. Riparata and its bell tower were destroyed in 1357, and the new bell tower by Giotto was finished in 1359. See Ciardi Dupré,“Boccaccio ‘visualizzato” dal Boccaccio,” 216; and idem, “L’iconografia dei codici miniati,” 11–12. Degenhart and Schmitt identify the small church to the left of the old tower of Sta. Riparata as the ancient church of San Michele Visdomini, destroyed between 1359 and 1368, Corpus der Italienischen Zeichnungen 1, no. 65, 136. . They are “vesti a campana,” bell-shaped dresses, according to Branca in a note to

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Elissa Weaver • What to Wear in the Decameron

cut neckline and all are differentiated by their hairstyles. Gestures, not mentioned in Boccaccio’s verbal account, animate all three scenes, and the clothes and architecture situate the story in contemporary Florence, underscoring the beauty that surrounds the two hermits in the city, a feast for the young man’s eyes, in stark contrast to the tiny, unadorned mountain cell where his father sought to keep out all mention of the world. Throughout the Decameron the stories demonstrate the importance of observing decorum in dress by wearing what is appropriate for one’s gender, social class, circumstances or occasions.This is seen most clearly, and famously, in the Griselda story (X.10), the final novella of the collection. Griselda changes her clothes with her social status. When the Marquis Gualtieri comes to her village to take her from her father, a poor man, she is dressed in humble, country clothes (“poveri panni… abito villesco” §25). Gualtieri has her undress entirely (“spogliare ignuda” X.10§19) and gives her to wear beautiful rich gowns (“robe belle e ricche” §14) he has had made for her and an ornament for her hair, attire appropriate for her new status as the wife of the marquis. When he sends her away, she asks only for a chemise (“una sola camicia” §45), in order to preserve her honor in public, and she returns to her father “in a chemise, barefoot and with nothing on her head” (“in camiscia e scalza e senza alcuna cosa in capo” §47). Gualtieri sends back the simple clothes she had been wearing when he first came for her, and she puts them on. There is much to the dressing and undressing in this story that suggests that it is an allegory, and that the patient Griselda is a Christ figure, or as Petrarch read it, the Christian soul, or Job, tried by God; and that may be, but the literal level of the tale depicts a family drama and the appropriate decorum of dress in different social circumstances and milieus. Another example of the importance of wearing the appropriate clothes, and there are many, is the story of the fool Cimone (V.1), who is transhis edition, 1159. . “quegli vestimenti che fatti aveva fare [“piú robe belle e ricche”X.10§14], prestamente la fece vestire e calzare e sopra i suoi capelli, cosí scarmigliati come erano, le fece mettere una corona” (§19). A roba for a woman or a man was generally a complete outfit or ensemble, consisting of a gonnella, guarnacca and possibly a mantello as well. . “i panni che spogliati s’avea quella mattina che Gualtier la sposò; per che recatigliele e ella rivestitiglisi...” (X.10§48).

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

formed by love into an educated young man.The first thing Cimone does when he recognizes the change in himself is to ask his father to dress him well like his noble brothers (“di andare di vestimenti e d’ogni altra cosa ornato come i fratelli” §17), and his father very happily obliges. Boccaccio also illustrated this tale in the Capponi manuscript, where he portrays the change of clothes: Cimone is first seen wearing the loose smock of a rustic and leaning on a club and, subsequently, in the short, stylish gonnella of a young nobleman. All of the illustrations in the Capponi manuscript use costume to distinguish the characters by age, social class and profession and to situate their stories in time and place. Characters in the Decameron who do not respect the proper decorum are ridiculed and punished. Egano (VII.7), who puts on one of his wife’s dresses and a veil (“una guarnacca della donna e un velo in capo” §36), is summarily beaten and cuckolded.While cross-dressing is seen in other stories as necessary often for protection, it is only sanctioned when women cross-dress as men. A man in a woman’s clothes is not only dressed improperly for his sex, he is also understood to have lowered himself in the social hierarchy; whereas, when Madonna Zinevra (II.9) cross-dresses, she proves that she is as capable as a man and achieves success.The judge from the Marches, inVIII.5, becomes the victim of a practical joke which is justified because the fur lining of his hat is dirty (“il vaio tutto affummicato in capo”), his dress is longer than his coat (“piú lunga la gonnella che la guarnacca”), and his pants hang down around his knees (“a mezza gamba gli agiugnea” §7). His slovenly dress makes a mockery of his social and official position and so he is punished by Maso del Banco and like-minded friends, who pull down his pants in a prank that is witnessed by everyone in the courtroom. In another novella, Mastro Simone, the foolish doctor of VIII.9, a man of greater wealth than learning (“più ricco di beni paterni che di scienza” §5), is misrepresented by the fur-lined scarlet gown and hood of his profession and consequently deserves the elaborate practical joke played on him by Bruno and Buffalmaco that sullies his undeserved doctoral robes. The narrator, Lauretta, introduces the story . Anthropologists point out an asymmetry in the gender of almost all objects including clothes: what is feminine is marked and exclusive, what is masculine can instead be used by both sexes and often appears in feminine versions. See Marshall Sahlens, “Notes on the American Clothing System,” in his Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 190.

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Elissa Weaver • What to Wear in the Decameron

saying that those who tricked Mastro Simone were to be commended and not faulted since the victim of the elaborate prank was “a physician who came to Florence from Bologna, covered in vair, like the stupid sheep he was, from head to toe.” Contemporary women are denounced for ostentation in dress by Pampinea, the narrator of the tale of Maestro Alberto da Bologna (I.10), who reproaches them for thinking that by wearing clothes of so many colors, stripes and trimmings (“li panni piú screziati e piú vergati con piú fregi” §5) they will receive greater consideration and honor, and Tedaldo, in III.7, lashes out at friars, who no longer wear the coarse garments that were meant to indicate disdain for worldly things and now are not ashamed to strut around like peacocks in “ample habits that are well lined and cut from the finest, most smoothly textured material” (“larghe e doppie e lucide e ...finissimi panni” §34). Boccaccio denounces the fools in the Decameron who dress inappropriately in order to deceive others and gain, perhaps, something they do not deserve, but he also observes that there are, indeed, admirable people, whose outward appearance is not what one should expect, given their other excellent qualities, whose clothes and whose very bodies seem inappropriate and do not reveal the truth about them, do not, one might say, respect decorum.This, he claims, is Nature’s error. His example is the Sixth Day story of the famous painter Giotto and the brilliant jurist Forese da Rabatta (VI.5). Forese, the narrator Panfilo tells us, is as ugly and misshapen as one of the Baronci, the Florentine family another narrator says were made before God learned to draw (VI.6), and Giotto, he adds, despite being the great artist who has brought glory to Florence, was no better looking than Forese. In the tale of which they are protagonists, they are also badly dressed in old, worn out clothes (“mantellacci vecchi di romagnuolo e due cappelli tutti rosi dalla vecchiezza” VI.5§11, two shabby old woolen cloaks and two hats, threadbare with age” ). The two friends, realizing how awful they look, exchange good humored insults, noting that no one could . This is Wayne Rebhorn’s brilliant rendering of the passage, “un medico che a Firenze da Bologna, essendo una pecora, tornò tutto coperto di pelli di vai” (VIII.9§3), from his translation, Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 660. . The translation is Rebhorn’s, 256. . Ibid., 489.

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Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Fig. 7. Giovanni Boccaccio, self-portrait, in ink and watercolor, on parchment. Frontispiece of Buccolicum Carmen. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. 34,49, fol. IVv. Published here with the permission of MiBACT.

believe that the one could paint or the other knew his abcs. In this case it is Nature’s lack of decorum and not the fault of men. Clothes are everywhere in the Decameron, in words and images, a reflection of Boccaccio’s understanding of their importance in trecento Italy and in the world. It is not, however, only in his Decameron that he was attentive to fashion and to the value of costume for representing reality. In another example of his visual art, a self portrait that appears on the frontispiece of the Laurentian Library manuscript of his Buccolicum carmen, Boccaccio depicts himself in scarlet robes lined in ermine, lecturing to a group of seated friars (Fig. 7). He is dressed . The illustration is in ink and watercolor, on parchment. It is now generally accepted that the frontispiece portrait in the Buccolicum carmen manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea laurenziana, MS Pluteo 34.49) was made by Boccaccio himself. The arguments for the attribution, codicological and stylistic, are convincingly set forth by Ciardi Dupré in “Boccaccio ‘visualizzato’dal Boccaccio,” 222–24, and idem, “I codici. Boccaccio disegnatore,” scheda 8, 2. 73–74.

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Elissa Weaver • What to Wear in the Decameron

in a gown with full sleeves (cioppa), over which he wears a fur-lined cloak (mantello) attached at his shoulders, and, on his head, a hood pulled together in the back (cappuccio a gote), which is also lined in fur. The batolo, or long back of the hood, is draped, and Boccaccio has indicated the fold by a highlight, like the ones that also define the drapery, and perhaps the shine of the cloth, of his outer garment and his sleeve as well. The thick pieces of ermine are shown in sections, suggesting the way they were pieced together. His figure is plump and imposing, and scholars have pointed out that his features, as they are represented here, correspond to what we know of them from surviving documents. It is a portrait of an illustrious scholar, lecturer, author, artist and fashion connoisseur, dressed with the distinction befitting his prominence and public role, very likely a good image of himself, given what we know of his talent for representing the world. •

. Ermine is distinguished from other less prestigious furs by its tiny dark tails, which Boccaccio has taken care to paint on each section of fur in this portrait. . Giovanni Villani has left a description of Boccaccio, and there was a donor portrait, now lost, but for which copies survive, that appeared on an altarpiece Boccaccio commissioned for the church of SS.  Jacopo and Michele in Certaldo. See Victoria Kirkham,“L’immagine del Boccaccio nella memoria tardo-gotica e rinascimentale,” in Boccaccio visualizzato, 1:85, 120–21 and scheda 13.



Bibliography of Carolyn Valone’s Works 2015

“Architecture as a Public Voice for Colonna Women in Rome, 15501620” (under review). “Women and the Oratorians in Early Modern Rome.” In Scritture, carismi e istituzioni: Percorsi di vita religiosa in età moderna. Studi per Gabriella Zarri. Ed. Concetta Bianca, Adelisa Malena, Maria Pia Paoli and Anna Scattigno. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura (forthcoming).

2011

“Giovanni Antonio Dosio: Gli anni Romani.” In Giovan Antonio Dosio da San Gimignano: Architetto e scultor fiorentino tra Roma, Firenze, e Napoli. Ed. Emanuele Barletti. Florence: Edifir, 2011, 155-68. “Paolo IV, Gugliemo della Porta, Dosio e la riconstruzione di San Silvestro al Quirinale. In Giovan Antonio Dosio, 169-181.

2001

“Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome.” In Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy. Ed. Sheryl Reiss and David Wilkins. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 317-35. “Architecture as a PublicVoice in Sixteenth Century Rome.” Renaissance Studies 15.3: 301-27.

2000

“The Art of Hearing: Sermons and Images in the Chapel of Lucrezia della Rovere.” The Sixteenth Century  Journal 31.3: 753-77. “Mothers and Sons: Two Paintings for San Bonaventura in Early Modern Rome.” Renaissance Quarterly 53: 108-32.

1994

“Piety and Patronage: Women and the Early Jesuits.” In Creative Women in Early Modern Italy. Ed. E. Ann Mater and John Coakley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 157-84. “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560-1630.” The Art Bulletin 76.1: 129-46.

1993

“The Pentecost: Image and Experience in Late Sixteenth Century Rome.” The Sixteenth Century  Journal 24.4: 801-28.

1992

“Roman Matrons as Patrons:Varied Views of the Cloister Wall.” In The Crannied Wall:Women, Religion and the Arts in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Craig Monson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 49-72.



Patronage, Gender and the Arts

1990

“Elena Orsini, Daniele da Volterra, and the Orsini Chapel.” Artibus et Historiae 22: 79-87.

1984

“Michele Desubleo: A New Look and New Work.” Arte Veneta 38: 79-86.

1982

“Il Padovanino: A New Look and New Work.” Arte Veneta 36: 161-66.

1977

“Paul IV, Guglielmo della Porta and the Rebuilding of San Silvestro al Quirinale.” Master Drawings 15.3: 243-55. “A Note on the Collection of Niccolo Gaddi.” Critica d’Arte 42.5 (August): 205-7.

1976

“Giovanni Antonio Dosio: The Roman Years.” The Art Bulletin 58 (December): 528-41.

•



Index A Abigail 61 Abra 94 Accademia dei Lincei 167 Acciaiuoli, Margherita 14, 15 Accolti, Benedetto 11 Adam 185 Adinolfi, Pasquale 235, 239 Aeneas 303, 304, 305, 307, 309, 310, 311, 312 Aguzzati di Siena, Porzia 284, 287, 288 Albergotti, Marcellino S.J. 109, 111 Alberoni, Camilla 41 Alberti, Leon Battista 3, 17 Alberto da Bologna 327 Albertus Magnus 197, 198 Albizzi: Giovanna degli 5; Giovanni Battista 7 Aldobrandini, Olimpia 33, 58, 59 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 200, 201, 202 Alexander vi, pope 36, 80, 83, 240, 246 Alidosi, Francesco 82 Allegrini: Flaminio 145; Francesco 145 Allori, Alessandro 203, 204 Altieri, patronage 149 Amalfi 318 Ambras 190, 209 Ammannati: Bartolommeo 107; Costanza 232, 239; Cristofano 232 Ancelle della Trinità 122 Ancona 233 Andrew, St. 241, 242, 244 Andromache 310 Angelico, Fra 31 Angelics 109, 110, 111, 117 Anguillara: Clarice 27; counts of 34; Flaminio 24, 27; Fulvia 41; Lucrezia 27; Lucrezia Orsini 27; Maddalena Strozzi 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 41 Anguillara-Cesi, Portia 22 Anguillara da Cere, Lelio 34 Anguillara-Savelli, Elena 41 Anguissola, Sofonisba 251 Anne de Pisselieu 101 Anne of Austria 102 Annunciation 74, 75, 76, 77, 84

Antea 232 Antoninus, St. 286 Apelles 194 Arete, queen 306 Arévalo 107 Ariosto, Orlando furioso 266, 275, 281 Aristotle 96, 97, 183 Arno River 282 Artemisia i, queen 87 Artemisia ii of Halicarnassus, queen xvi, xx, 85–102, 304 Ascanio, Guido 34, 35 Ascanius 310 Asia Minor 99 Athena 88, 90 Auger, Edmond 114 Augustine, St. 305 Augustinian Hermits 131, 142, 240, 241, 246 Augustus, emperor 78 Austen, Jane 195 Avenza 38 Avignon 187 B Badeor-Giustinian, Agnesina 21 Bagno, Guidi di 48 Baldi, Lazzaro 132 Balducci, Filippo 319, 323, 324 Bandello, Matteo 37 Bandinelli, Baccio 91, 93, 96 Barberini: Antonio, cardinal 167, 168; Camilla 167; Carlo 57, 131, 132; Clarice 167; Costanza 46; family 47; Francesco, cardinal 46, 142, 167; Grazia 173; Innocenza 173; patronage 149;Taddeo 57 Bardi, Ilarione de’ 6 Baretta, Alfonso 138 Barletti, Emanuele xiv Barnabites 107, 109, 110, 111, 115 Baronci, family 327 Bartoli, Daniello 114 Bassano di Sutri 53 Battista, Gabriella 1 Bauman, Lisa xx Bavaria, duke of 271 Baxandall, Michael xviii, 279, 286



Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Beccuti, Pier Paolo 214 Bell, Rudolph M. 104, 105 Benci, Giovanni 141, 142 Benedetti, Elpidio 150 Benedictines 294; habit 319 Benedict, St. 132, 159, 216, 218 Benedict xiv, pope 122 Benivieni: Domenico 214, 218, 225, 226; Girolamo 218 Bentivoglio, Enzo 149 Bernardino, Pietro 227 Bernard of Clairvaux, St. 215 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 62, 252, 253 Berrettini, Pietro 62 Berrettoni, Niccolò 136 Bethlehem 25 Bible, Song of Songs 169, 170 Boccaccio, Giovanni xxiv, 87; dress in Decameron 315–30; illustrations of Decameron 315, 316, 320, 322, 323, 326 Boccapaduli: Curzio 138; Prospero 137, 138 Boiardo: Giambattista 38; Matteo Maria 276 Bologna 99, 119;Abbadia (See Bologna: SS. Naborre e Felice. ) archbishop xxiii; art agents 150; Concerto Palatino 301; conquest by Julius ii 99; Convertite 300; Corpus Domini 295, 296, 297; elite patronage 103; in Boccaccio 327; Lavinia Fontana 251; liturgy 156; Madonna di San Luca 293; music xxii, 301; San Bernardino 302; San Giovanni Battista 300; San Guglielmo 297, 300; San Lorenzo 294; San Petronio 99, 296; San Pietro 293, 296; San Pietro Martire 295, 297, 301; Sant’Agnese 295, 297, 301; Sant’Omobono 302; Sant’Orsola 302; SS. Leonardo ed Orsola 297; SS. Naborre e Felice 298; Sta. Catterina di Strada Maggiore 296, 298, 302; Sta. Cristina 300; Sta. Margarita 294; Sta. Maria Maddalena 297, 300; University of 293; women patrons 103 Bolognetti, Ferdinando 138, 139 Bolsena 234, 236 Bonacini, Monsignor 142



Bona, Giovanni 190 Bonucelli, Matteo 252 Borgherini: Giovanni 15; Pierfrancesco 13, 14, 15; Salvi 13, 15 Borghese: family 47; Marcantonio ii 57; Paolo 58; Scipione 130, 131 Borgia: Cesare 22, 36, 59, 232, 240; family 37; Jofre 36; Juan 36; Lucrezia 21, 36; Rodrigo, cardinal 36, 70, 236, 246 Borgomanero 113 Borromeo, Carlo 111, 122, 187, 188, 293 Borromini, Francesco 55, 56, 144 Bossi, Ludovico 56 Braham, Allan 14 Brandi, Giacinto 60, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 150 Brandolini: Aurelio 66, 70, 71, 74; Raffaele Lippi 78, 82 Breckinridge, James i Bregno, Andrea 238, 239 Breton, Gilles le 89 Bronzino, Agnolo 189 Bruni, Leonardo 233 Bruno and Buffalmaco 327 Budrisich, Maddalena 123 Bulst,Wolfger 2, 5, 6 Buoninsegni, Giovanni 7; Lena 8 Burchard, Johann 80, 240, 241 Burlamacchi, pseudo 216, 217, 218 Bursill-Hall, Cinzia Maria Sicca 128 Butters, Suzanne xxii C Caccini, Francesca 251 Caffi, Girolamo 137 Callahan, Meghan xxii Camassei, Andrea 60, 142, 143, 149 Camerino 222 Camilla, Peretti 21 Camiz, Franca xxiv Campana, Giulia 241 Canaanites 190 canon law 157 Canuti, Domenico Maria 146, 147 Capodiferro: Bernarda 31; chapels 31; family 30 Capofucchi, Bruno 30 Capponi: Giovanni di Agnolo 315; Niccolò di Giovanni 18

• Index

Capranica, Domenico, cardinal 233 Capuchins xvi, 26, 124, 125, 222, 244 Carafa, Gian Pietro 106. See also Paul iv, pope. Caravaggio 149, 150, 242 Caria 85, 88, 93 Carioni, Battista 106, 107, 115, 122 Carmelites 128, 140; Discalced 173 Caron, Antoine xx, 86, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 98, 102 Carpegna, Gaspare 132, 133, 134, 135 Carracci, Agostino 201 Carrara 23, 37, 38, 39, 40 Carter,Tim 20 Carthage xvi, xxiii, 303, 304, 309 Cartotinti, Carlo 114 Caryae 92, 93 Caryatids 92 Cassini: Andrea 242, 243; Angelo 244; Fiammetta 231–48; Giulia 243; Michele di Bartolomeo 233, 234, 235; Santa 233, 235, 236 Castel Gandolfo 27, 57 Castell’Arquato 34, 35 Castelnuovo di Bocca d’Adda 105 Castiglione: Baldassare xvii; Francesco da 212, 213, 214, 218, 219, 227 Castile 107 Catherine of Alexandria, St. 244, 297 Catherine of Siena, St. 148, 159, 227 Catholic reform 25, 32 Cattanei,Vannozza dei 36, 37, 41, 236, 246 Causea, Chiara Maria 138 Cavalieri: Giulia 244 (See also Cassini: Giulia.); Tommaso 244 Cavalierino 287 Cecilia, St. 158 Ceen, Allan 69, 77 Cellini, Benvenuto xxiii; 273–92; chivalric lexicon 275; Jupiter 101; Perseus 93, 96, 98, 275, 278, 279, 280, 288; Rome 281; Turkish motifs 284; virtù 274; Fiorino da 282 Celsi, chapel 145 Cenci, Emilia 154 Ceraiuolo, Antonio del 221

Cerberus 286 Cere xvi, 39; Giampaolo da 26; Lelio da 26 Cerri, Antonio 142 Cesari: Agata Margarita 144; Maria Margherita 144 Cesi xiv; Andrea 244; Anna Maria 166, 171; Paolo Emilio 26; Portia dell’Anguillara xiv, xvi, 25, 39, 244, 245; women patrons 246 Chabot, Isabelle 6, 18 Chantal, Jeanne-Françoise de 124 Charles ix, king 85, 90 Charles v, emperor 34, 38, 39, 40, 100 Chiari, Giuseppe 138 Chiaro: Leon Battista del 118; Maria Ugolini del 117, 118, 119, 120 Chieri 187 Chigi: Agostino 37, 246, 284; Sigismondo 284; Sulpizia 284 Chiogga 166 Christ. See Jesus Christ. Christina of Sweden, queen 154, 155, 157, 158 Christine de Pizan 87 Christine of Lorraine, grand duchess 212 Christopher, St. 189, 190, 208 Cibo: Alberico 38, 39, 40; Alessandro 38; Carlo 55; Caterina, da Varano 38; Caterina, duchess of Camerino 212, 222, 223, 224; Clemente 38; Elena 38; Eleonora 38; Francesco ditto Franceschetto 38; Giulio 38, 39; Innocenzo, cardinal 23, 38, 39; Lorenzo 23, 38, 39; Ricciarda 38, 41; Silvia 114; Taddea 38, 40 Cigoli, Lodovico 25 Cimone, fool 326 Cipri, Paolo 300 Cistercians 297 Cisti the baker 318 Clare, St. 244 Clarissans 295, 298 Claude de France 101 Clement vii, pope 38, 40, 287 Clement ix, pope 159 Clement x, pope 149, 159 Cleopatra, queen 306, 312



Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Clerks Regular of Saint Paul. See Barnabites. cloister for nuns 127–52 Coccapani, Sigismondo di San Silverio 119 Cohen, Elizabeth xxiii Cola, Santo di 284, 288 Colleoni, Maria Scolastica 131 Colonna xiv; chapels 31; Lorenzo Onofrio 147; Lucrezia della Rovere xiv; Sciarra, of Palestrina 27; women patrons 245 Comenius, John Amos 193, 194, 199 Como 113 Condivi, Ascanio xxiii Congregation of the Holy Office 103, 119 Congregazione delle Ancelle della Santissima Trinità 112 Conti, Giovanni Battista Fontana de’ 109 Cornia, Antonio della 150 Corpus Domini 80, 83, 84 Corsi, Luigi 16 Cortellini, Camillo 301, 302 Cortesi, Paolo 67 Cortona, Pietro da 62, 149 Costaguti: chapel 145;Vincenzo 145 Costantini, Alessandro 166 Cotán, Sánchez 201 Couplet, Philippe 114 courtesans, as patrons 231–48 Credi, Lorenzo di 221 Cremona 107 Croce, Giorgio della 36 Crotone 242 Crum, Roger 99 Cuenca 199 D Dante 276 d’Antonio, Ranieri 140 d’Aragona,Tullia 232, 241, 256 d’Arpino, Giuseppe Cesari 144 Dennis, Kimberly xix, 29, 32, 33 d’Este: Borso 39; court 190; Ercole i 38; Francesco ii 159; Isabella 21, 41, 97 d’Estouteville, Guillaume, cardinal 68, 71, 72, 76, 237, 240



d’Etampes, Mme. 101 Diane de Poitiers 101 Dido, queen xvi, xxiii, xxiv, 303–13 Dieciaiuti, Paolo 12 Domenica da Paradiso, Sr. xxii, 211–30 Dominicans xxii, 76, 106, 122, 124, 128, 130, 131, 145, 147, 154, 214, 215, 227, 230; Bologna 295, 297, 301 Dominic, St. 131, 145, 146, 159, 216, 218, 227 Donatello 93, 96, 97, 99, 100 Dosio, Giovanni Antonio xiii, xiv Douai 114 Dunn, Marilyn xxi, 24, 25, 103 Dürer, Albrecht 286 E Ebu, Giovanni 242 Egano 326 Eleonora de Toledo 107 Elephant Man 187, 191, 192, 195 Elizabeth of Hungary, St. 106 England,Victorian 192 Eros Uncovering Hermaphroditus in the Presence of Aphrodite 197 Esther 61 Euryalus 311 F Faleria 28. See also Stabia. Fana, Camilla da 241 Fani, Maria Olimpia 133 Farnese: collection 197; Costanza 24, 34, 35, 36, 41; family 166; Flanders 201; Francesca 34; Odoardo, cardinal 201; Ottavio 34; Parma 201; Ranuccio 201; Rome 201 Felice: Francesco 31; Maria 31 Ferrara 21, 39, 114; bishop 191; d’Este court 190; giants 209 Ferri, Ciro 150 ffolliott, Sheila xx, 65 Fiammetta da Michele xxii, xxiii, 22, 36, 37, 231–48. See also Cassini, Fiammetta. Fiedler, Leslie 204 Fieschi: Isabella 38; Scipione 38 Fiesole 282 Filarete, Francesco 100

• Index

Finley, Moses 305 Firenzuola, Giovanni 282 Fitti, Giovanna de’ 224 Florence: 16th-century xiii; Academy 189; Accademia del Disegno 288; Archivio di Stato 1, 27, 41, 45, 128, 135, 171, 177; Archivio Mediceo del Principato 177, 178, 179; as new Jerusalem 215; Boboli Gardens 204; Borgo degli Albizzi 11, 107; Borgo Ognissanti 214; Campanile 324; Casino Mediceo 197; census of 1562 205; court politics 273; ducal palaces 16; Duomo 215; Ginnasio Fiorentino 233; grand duchy 107, 177; la Crocetta xxii, 211–30; La Quiete 112, 118, 119, 122; Laurentian Library 328; Le Murate 141, 142; Loggia dei Lanzi 100; Loggia de’ Lanzi 278; Lungarno 7; Montecavo 218; Orti Oricellari 189; Palazzo Boni-Antinori xix; Palazzo Borgherini 13, 14, 16; Palazzo Canigiani (Bardi) 6; Palazzo Capponi-Barocchi 16, 17; Palazzo Corsi-Horne 15; Palazzo Coverelli (See Florence: Palazzo CapponiBarocchi); Palazzo Della Stufa 16; Palazzo Gianfigliazzi xix, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13; Palazzo Gondi 12, 13, 16; Palazzo Medici 2, 5, 6; Palazzo Nori 16; Palazzo Pazzi xix, 9, 11, 13, 38; Palazzo Rucellai 19; Palazzo Tolomei 118; Palazzo Tornabuoni 3, 4, 5, 11; Palazzo Torre 7; Palazzo Vecchio 93, 99, 324; Palazzo Zanobi (Nori) 10; Palazzo della Signoria 93, 99, 100, 278; plague of 1529 230; Potenze 208; Roman 282, 283; San Lorenzo 46, 67, 71, 112, 159, 212, 214, 215, 228; San Marco 69, 76, 214, 215, 218; San Simone 188; Sant’Ambrogio 159, 204; Sant’ Apollinare 66, 68, 77, 233; sculpture 93; siege of 1529 229; SS. Annunziata 211; SS. Jacopo e Lorenzo 108; Sta. Croce 188, 215; Sta. Maria della Scala 189; Sta. Maria Novella 215; Sta. Riparata 324; Uffizi 25, 197; University of 112; via

Amorino 111; via del Proconsolo 12; via de’ Neri 7; via Ginori 17, 118; via Giraldi 11; via Guicciardini 108; via Sant’Antonino 112; via Ventura (Laura) 216;“wife’s room” xiii, 1–20 Florio, John 193, 194 Foggia: Antonio 159, 160; Francesco 159 Foglianti xvi Fontainebleau 86, 101 Fontana, Lavinia 251 Fontenay, French ambassador 54 Fortarrigo, Cecco 318 Fortini, Alessandra 20 France 167 Francesca Bussa de’ Ponziani, St. 165 Franciotti, Giovanni Francesco 71 Francis of Assisi, St. 215, 216, 218, 244 François I, king 97, 100, 101, 287 François ii, king 85 Frascati 59; Villa Aldobrandini 59 Frescobaldi, Girolamo 166 Friar Cipolla 318 Frye, Northrop 276, 281 Fumagalli, Elena 128 Furies 268 G Gagliano, Piero da 5 Galle, Philip 87, 88, 94 Gammaro, Pier Andrea 225 Garzi, Luigi 132, 138, 139 Gaulli, Giovanni Antonio 60 Genoa 107 Gentileschi: Artemisia xxiii, 249–72; Giulio 258, 261; Orazio 257, 261, 263 Gerardi, Antonio 168 Geryon 276 Gherardi, Gherardo 219 Gherardini, Alessandro 118 Ghezzi, Giuseppe 138 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 196 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 195 Giambologna 93 Gianfigliazzi: Bongianni 7; Ginevra 5, 6 Giansetti, Giovanni Battista 158 Giberto of Correggio 40 Gigli, Giacinto 48, 54



Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Gimignani: Giacinto 60, 61; Ludovico 134, 138, 139 Ginori, Lorenza 18, 19 Giotto: and Forese da Rabatta 327; campanile in Florence 324 Giugni, Fiametta di Bernardo 11 Giustini: chapel 145; Paola 131 Giustiniani, Andrea 53 Goa 114 Goldthwaite, Richard A. xxi, xxii, 20 Gondi: Girolamo 212, 214, 216; Giuliano 13 Gonzaga: family 286; Federico ii 41; Ferrante i 110, 117; Francesco, cardinal 285; Vincenzo i 150 Gonzalez: Antonietta 202; Pedro 201, 202 Gramignoli, Girolamo 137 Greenblatt, Stephen xviii Gregorian chant 163 Gregory Nazianzen, St. 132 Gregory xiii, pope 55, 301 Gregory xv, pope 45, 130, 166 Grillo, Angelo 172 Griselda 325 Gualtieri: marquis 325; Sveva 270 Guastalla 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 116, 117, 121 Guevara, Giovanna de Gixosa de 107 Guglielminetti, Marziano 281 Guicciardini, Francesco 276 Guidi, Bartolomeo 118 H Habsburg: court at Ambras 190; Eleanor 101; Ferdinand ii of Tyrol 190 Haffner, Enrico 146, 147 Hangzou 114 Helen of Troy xxiv, 194, 306, 310 Helen, St. xv Hell 276 Henri, duc d’Orléans 101 Henri ii, king xx, 85, 93, 102, 201 Hera 194 heraldry: Costaguti 145; Christ’s cross 215; della Rovere 77; la Crocetta, Florence 215; Landi 144; Maidalchini 61, 62; Pamphil(i)(j) 61, 62;



Piccolomini 239; scudo accollato xvi, 27; stemma xvi, 77, 84, 144, 215 Hercules 286; and Omphale 101 Hermaphroditus 196, 197 Hesiod 88 Hiu, Candida (Xu Gandidi) 113, 114, 117 Holy Eucharist 80 Holy Ghost 241 Holy Year. See Jubilee. Homeric epic 306 Hornblower, Simon 98, 99 Horne, H.P. 16 Houel, Nicolas 85, 86, 89, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 102 I Iesi, Lucagnolo da 288, 289 Imbratta, Guccio 318 Imperia, courtesan 36, 37, 246 Imperiali, Monsignor 134 Index of Prohibited Books 109 Infessura, Stefano 72, 74 Ingersoll, Richard 69, 72, 84 Innocent iii, pope 38 Innocent x, pope xx, 33, 43, 44, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64 Innocent xi, pope 159 Innsbruck 123 Inquisition 113, 118 Isimbardi, Pietro 114 Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (ICCU) 103 J Jacopo da Sicilia 214 Jacopo detto L’Indaco 241 Jacovacci, Faustina 29 Jardine, Lisa 279, 285–86 Jerome, St. 25 Jesuits iv Jesus Christ: birth 216, child 174, 189, 219, 221; Cross 215; death 242; devotions to 117, 172, 174; husband 145, 164, 170, 215, 226; king 191; Mary Magdalen 106, 241; poor 219; suffering of 172, 325; teacher and prophet 211, 213, 218, 229, 278 Job 325 John Paul ii, pope 122

• Index

Johnson, Geraldine 99 John the Baptist, St. 132, 134, 136, 163, 208, 221 Jubilee 43, 54, 62, 63, 157, 158, 162 Judith 61, 954 100 Julius Caesar 282, 283 Julius ii, pope 33, 99, 188 Jupiter 284, 286, 310 Juvenal 190 K Kress, Susanne 1, 6 L Lafréry, Antoine 94 Landi: Clarice Vittoria 144; Orazio 108; Stefano 166 Lanfranco, Giovanni 143, 145 Lapini, Agostino 188 Lasdal, Guglielmo 180, 181, 182, 191, 192, 209 Lassels, Richard 160 Laudesi 319 Lauretta 327 Lausus 311 Lelli, Giovanni Antonio 142 Lenzi, Lorenzo di Anfrione 19 Leone, Stephanie 44, 56, 62 Leo x, pope 26, 33, 38, 166 Leo xi, pope 301 Le Roy, Louis 85 letter writing 253–72 Lillie, Amanda 12 Lippi: Bernardo di Uguccione 4; Filippino 282, 283; Filippo 141; Giovanfrancesco 282 liturgy: Annunciation 76; Antiphon 169; chant 168, 173; Common of Virgins 170; Corpus Domini 80, 83, 84; Divine Offices 164; Elevation 162; Epistle 162; feast days xxi, 59, 76, 80, 156–65, 163, 169, 294–98, 302; Immaculate Conception 25, 169; Magnificat 161, 165, 167, 169; Mass 69, 155, 156, 159, 161, 169; Mass of a virgin martyr 170; Mass of Santa Teresa 170; monastic 157; music 153–76; processions xx, 65–84, 293 Proper 168; Rogationtide 293; Salve

Regina 162; Vespers 161, 162, 165, 169, 170;Virgin’s Assumption 294; Virgin’s Nativity 294 Livorno 91, 93 Livy 276; women 307 Lombard Congregation 218 London Hospital 192 Longo, Maria Lorenza Requesens 124 Lorenzini, Antonio, O.F.M. 119 Lotteringhi, Gianni 319, 320 Louise de Savoie 100 Louis xiv, king 159 Lucca 54, 71, 232, 233, 239 Lucretia 307 Ludovisi: Alessandro 45, 166 (See also Gregory xv, pope.); family 166; Niccolò 53 Lunghezza 28 Lunigiana 319 M Maccarani, Paolo 150 Maddalena: Giuliano di Giuliano 29; Ippolita da 24, 29, 30, 31 Maddaleni, chapels 31 Madonna, Maria Luisa 83 Madrid 46, 47, 63 Maecenas 78 Maier, Michael 197, 198 Malamini, Fabio 300 Malaspina: Argentina 38; Giacomo 38; Lucrezia 38; Ricciarda 23, 24, 37, 39, 40;Taddea 38 Malaspina-Cibo dynasty 39, 40 Malnone 58 Mania 99 Mantegna 97 Mantua 21, 37, 41, 54, 62, 97 manuscripts & prints 94; Berlin Staatsbiblothek, Hamilton 90 316, 319; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BNF Ms. It. 482 316, 321; Capponi (See manuscripts & prints: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BNF Ms. It. 482); Florence, Biblioteca Medicea laurenziana, MS Pluteo 34.49 328; Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Rès.Ad 105. 26r. 89



Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Maratti, Carlo 135, 136, 137, 138, 149, 150 Marche 31 Margaret of Austria 34, 40, 88 Margherita of Florence 260 Maria Antonia, suor 142 Maria Celeste, suor 142 Maria Maddalena dell’Incarnazione 140 Maringhi, Francesco Maria xxiii, 249–72 Marini di Genova, marchese 154 Marini, Pasquale 132 Mark, St. 76 Marradi, Silvestro da 214 Marsuppini, Carlo 233 Martelli, Giuseppe Maria 119 Martellino 321, 322, 323, 324 Martinengo, Antonio 106 Martin, Gregory 156 Martini, Francesco 165, 166, 168, 169, 170 Martin v, pope 72, 79 Mary Magdalen, St. 106, 241, 242, 244 Mary, Virgin 8, 76, 111, 117, 134, 136, 142, 166, 168, 169, 219; as patron 215; as sponsa 170; at Temple 229; Cesi chapel 244; miracles 221 Mascardi, Vitale 62 Masini, Antonio 158 Maso del Banco 326 Massa 23, 37, 38, 39, 40 Massimi, Angelo 246 Massimo, Camillo 149 Masson, Georgina 231 Master MZ 96 Mattei: family 140; Girolamo 58; Maria Angela 147 Mattusch, Carol 85 Mausoleum at Halicarnassus xx, 87, 88, 102 Mausolus of Halicarnassus 85, 87, 88, 98, 304 Mazarin, Jules Raymond, cardinal 63, 149, 150 McCall,Timothy 39 McIver, Katherine xix, 65 Mechelen 114 Medici: Alessandro de’ 38, 230; Alfonsina Orsini de’ 24, 26, 33, 40; Anna Maria Luisa de’ 122; bank



285, 286; Catherine de’, queen xx, 17, 85, 90, 93, 97, 98, 101, 185, 201; Cosimo de’ 4, 6, 149; Cosimo i de’ 107, 179, 185, 189, 199, 208, 230, 278, 279, 283, 288; Cosimo ii de’ 93, 255, 266, 271; court 265; exile and return 229; Ferdinando i de’ 91, 93, 202; Ferdinando ii de’ 112, 122, 159; Francesco i de’ xxii, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185, 190, 196, 197, 199, 201, 202, 203, 208; Gian Gastone de’ 122; Giovanni de’ 26 (See also Leo x, pope.); Giovanni di Bicci, 4; Giuliano de’ 26; Giulio de’ 149; heraldry 27; Ippolito de’ 277; Leopoldo de’ 150; Lorenzo the Magnificent 4, 5, 26, 38, 197; Maddalena de’ 28, 222; Maddalena di Lorenzo de’ 38; Maria de’ 102; musical patronage 159; papacy 282, 289; Piero de’ 26, 27; Piero di Cosimo de’ 6; Piero di Lorenzo de’ 5, 6; Pio 81; slaves 182 Melani: Alessandro 158, 159; Atto 159; Jacopo 159 Melchiorri, Isabella 142 Mellini, Giambattista 30 Mercury 196, 310 Merrick, Joseph 191, 192, 193, 195. See also Elephant Man. Metis 88 Meyers, Gretchen xxiii, xxiv Mezzacavalli, Ubaldo 31 Michelangelo xxiii, 35, 93, 99, 100, 242, 244, 286; David 100; Slaves 93; Victory 93 Migliorati, Bernardo 261 Milan 106, 113, 114, 117, 121, 189; archbishop 188; Jesuits 113; papal nuncio 110; San Paolo 110; Sforza dukes 105; Spanish 111, 122; Sta. Valeria 115 Milesi, Orsola Isabella Breccika 125 Minerva 30, 31, 76, 90 Minime Ancelle della Santissima Vergine dell’Incarnazione 111 Mino da Fiesole 238, 239 Modena 62 Mola, Pier Francesco 61, 145

• Index

Molho, Anthony 12 Moneta 38 Monson, Craig A. 156 “monsters” (Renaissance mostri) 177– 210; as omens 185–89; at princely courts 200–208; biblical 189–91; conjoined twins 192, 198–200; dwarves 190, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 208; etymology 183–84; fabulous and mythical 184–85; giants 190–91; hermaproditism 196–200, 209; Melegnano 188, 189; of Ravenna 188; on display 191–94; physical ugliness 194–96; wild men 201, 209 Montalto 31 Montalvo: Antonio Ramírez de 107; Eleonora Ramierez xxi, 103, 104, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 117–22; Francesco 108, 111; Giovanni 107 Monte, Francesco Maria del 149 Montelanico 57 Montford, Kimberlyn xxi Monza 111 Morello, Brigida di Gesù 124 Morgante 190, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208 Morigia, Paolo 114, 115 Mt. Senario 324 Mueller, Melissa 306 Mugello 109 Musacchio, Jacqueline 7 N Nano, Bartolomeo 205. See also Morgante. Naples 45, 47; art agents 150; court 24, 26; Spanish 201 Napoleonic invasions 103 Nardini, Stefano 70 Nasini, Giuseppe Nicola 118 Native Americans 188 Negri, Paola Antonia (formerly Virginia) 109, 110, 115 Neifile 319, 320 Neri, Filippo 293 Nero, Marco del 212, 214 Netherlands 88 New England 188 Niccolini, Pietro 111

Nicholas v, pope 79, 80 Nicosia xv Noah 185 Nori, Francesco 7, 10, 11 Northwestern University

xiii

O Oblates 166, 170, 171 Odysseus 306 Olivares 63 Oratorians 165 Orsini: Aldobrandino xv; Clarice 5; Elena xv; Francesca Baglioni 124; Gerolomo 34; Giordano 27; Giulia 41; heraldry 27; Latino 72; Maria Maddalena 124; of Filacciano xv; Olimpia 26; Verginia, of Pitigliano 41; Vittoria della Tolfa xiv; women patrons 246 Orsini-Anguillara, Lucrezia 41 Orsini-Savelli,Virginia 41 Ovid 196, 262 P Pagnini, Sante 214 Palazzo Carpegna 132 Paleotti: Alfonso 293–302; Alfonso, archbishop xxii, xxiii; Gabriele xxiii, 293, 294 Pallas 307, 311, 312 Pallavicina, Laura 21 Pallavicino,Veronica 105 Pallotta, Cardinal 54 Pamphil(i)(j): Camillo 33, 49, 53, 55, 56, 58; Costanza 46, 53; Giovanni Battista 7, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 59, 60 (See also Innocent x, pope.); Maria 46, 53; Olimpia Maidalchini xix, xx, 22, 26, 32, 33, 43–63; Pamphilio 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52; Suor Agata 52; Suor Prudenzia 52 Pampinea 327 Paola Romana, St. 25 Paoletti, John T. xiv Paoli, Maria Pia 118 Paolini, Claudio 15 Papal States 99; music 159 Paré, Ambroise 184, 191



Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Paris 102; court politics 273; embassies to 46; English in 187; Louvre 97; Mazarin’s apartments 63; sculpture 102 Parma 21, 40, 41 Pascoli, Lione 135 Passeri, Giuseppe 147, 148 Patriarca, Gregorio 137 Patrizi: Agnese 148; chapel 148; family 147; Giovanni Battista 147; patronage 149 Paul ii, pope 74 Paul iii, pope 24, 34, 35, 69 Paul iv, pope 106, 110 Paul, St. 109, 225, 226, 227 Pausanias 185 Pavia 82, 233 Pazzi: Conspiracy 10, 234; Cosimo, S.J. 111, 118; Jacopo 7, 9, 11; Maria Grazia 173; Maria Maddalena de’, St. 173; Piero 7; Piero de’ 11 Pecchiai, Pio 233, 234, 235, 237, 246 Pellecchia, Linda 13 Pellegrini, Bianca 39 Peloponnese 92 Penelope xxiv, 306 Pentecost 80 Pepoli, Ginevra 294; Romeo 296 Pepperelli, Francesco 49, 51 Peretti: Camilla 21, 22, 29, 31, 32, 35, 37; Felice 31 (See also Sixtus v, pope.) performance and ritual 153, 162, 163, 165, 175 Peri, Jacopo 20 Perini, Matteo 119 Persians 92 Perugino 97 Peruzzi 33 Pescia 232, 233 Peter, St. 241, 242, 244 Petrarch, Francesco 187, 264; Griselda 325 Petrignano 57 Pharoah’s daughter 61 Philip ii, king 111 Piacenza 40 Piarists 119, 132. See also Scolopians. Piccolomini: Costanza 252, 253; Enea



Silvio Bartolomeo 233 (See also Pius 239; Jacopo Ammannati, cardinal 7, 9, 11, 20, 36, 108, 159, 214, 223, 232–34, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 244 Pico della Mirandola,Taddea 38 Pinctoris, Jacopo 36 Pisa 93, 100, 140, 189, 255, 258 Pitti, Francesca di Luca 5 Pius ii, pope 233, 234, 239 Pliny 92, 196, 308 Poggio a Caiano 203, 204 Poland 159 Pompeo 277 Pontormo 219 Poor Clares 134 Porcari, Flavia Pamphil(i)(j) 52 Portinari: Maria 12, 13; portaits 13; Tommaso 12, 13 Power of  Women topos 97 Prato 199, 255, 256, 257, 260 Preyer, Brenda xix Primaticcio, Francesco 101 Princeton Art Museum 88 Priscus 308 processions. See liturgy: processions. prostitutes 21, 37 Protestantism 32, 154 Pulci, Luigi 190, 276 Pulzone, Scipione 25, 244 ii, pope.); heraldry

Q Quagliati, Paolo 165, 166, 171, 173, 174, 175 Quorli, Olimpia 265 R Radke, Gary M. xiv Raimunda,Virginia 143 Rainaldi, Girolamo 55, 56 Rand, Olan xii, xiii Rangone: Baldassare 41; Claudia 40, 41 Ranieri, Brigida di 140 Raphael 37, 284 Ravenna, battle of 1512 188 Rawson, Beryl 305 Red Sea 185 Reims Cathedral 95 Reiss, Sheryl 149

• Index

relics 163 Renaissance Quarterly xvi, 231 Renaissance Society of America 128 Re Picino 205, 206, 207, 208 Rezzonica, Nicolina 113, 114 Rhodes 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102 Riario: Girolamo 66, 68, 71, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 83; Pietro 65, 66, 67, 83; Raffaele 67; Raffaelle Sansoni 65 Ribera, José de 201 Ricci, Federigo de’ 212, 214 Rio, Brigida del 201 Ripa, Cesare 91 ritual 70, 76, 84, 153, 157. See also liturgy. Romagna 132 Romanelli, Giovanni Francesco 145, 303, 304 Rome: 16th-century xiii; abitato 73, 74; Acqua Felice 32; antiquarian style 27; antiquities market 286; architectural styles 67; archives xiv; Arch of Septimus Severus 69; Arciconfraternità della Morte et Orazione 167; Augustan age 306, 308; banking district 69; Baths of Nero 76; Borgo Felice di San Bernardo 32; Borgo Nuovo 80, 83, 84 (See also Rome: via Alessandrina.); Borgo Sant’ Angelo 80; Borgo Sisto 80; Borgo Sto. Spirito 79, 80; Borgo Vecchio 68, 69, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84; Camera Apostolica 71, 78; Campidoglio 48, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76; Campo dei Fiori 37, 68, 70, 76; Campo Marzio (Campus Martius) 24, 28, 38, 72, 76, 159, 160; Canale di Ponte 71; Cancelleria 67; Cappella Altemps 145 Cappella Altieri 149; Cappella Cavaletti 242; Cappella Colonna 31; Cappella Costaguti 145; Cappella della Trinità 31; Cappella Frangipane 31; Cappella Mellini 30; Cappella Patrizi 148; Caput Mundi 293; Carcere Mamertino 69; Casa de’ Rossi 44; Casa Fiammetta 231; Castel Sant’ Angelo 69, 79, 80, 84, 281, 287; Chiesa Nuova 257; Circus

of Maxentius 63; classical details 66, 77; Colosseum 57, 69; Confraternity of San Salvatore ad Sancta Sanctorum 70; Congregation of Bishops and Regulars xxiii; Corso 59, 69, 71, 73, 137, 139; Corso Vittorio Emanuele 69; courtesans 232; court politics 273; Curia 80, 166; decorative elements 82, 83; della Rovere palaces 65, 66–84; dogana 72; Dominicans 107; Domitian’s Circus 72 (See also Rome: Piazza Navona.); Esquiline Hill 24, 28, 29, 31; family chapels 145; Forum 69; Four Rivers Fountain 62, 63, 64; Galleria Pamphil(i)(j) 62; Gesù 245; Incarnazione del Verbo Divino 173, 175; Istituto della Trinità dei Pellegrini 54; Janiculum (Gianicolo) Hill 32, 49, 64; Jesuit College v; Jubilee of 1650 63; La Vigna Surburbana 40; Lungotevere Tor di Nona 71; Maddalena 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 38, 41, 76; Maestri delle Strade 55, 56, 68, 79; merchants 73, 83; Monte Giordano 33, 69, 76; music 153–76; Oratorio della Pietà 158; Orsini holdings 69; Ospedale di Sto. Spirito 81, 82; Palazzetto Felice 32; Palazzetto Pamphil(i)(j) 43, 44, 45, 46, 50; Palazzo Aldobrandini 59; Palazzo Altemps 66, 68, 145; Palazzo Altieri 149; Palazzo Bentivoglio 150; Palazzo Campo Marzio 38; Palazzo Capranica 71, 76; Palazzo Cibo 55, 56, 57; Palazzo Cornaro 57; Palazzo Costaguti 145; Palazzo dell’Orologio 66; Palazzo del Vantaggio 270; Palazzo Farnese 35, 59, 155; Palazzo Madama (Medici) 5, 24, 26, 27, 33; Palazzo Medici-Lante 24, 27, 33; Palazzo Mellini 44; Palazzo Ornano 44; Palazzo Orsini 66; Palazzo Pamphil(i) (j) xx, 33, 43–64; Palazzo Pichi 69, 76; Palazzo Ricci 34, 35; Palazzo SforzaCesarini, 35; Palazzo Teofili 44, 45, 49, 50; Palazzo Trevi 58; Palazzo Venezia 68; Pantheon 167; papal possesso 53, 69, 70, 74, 76, 77; Pasquino 44, 51, 52,



Patronage, Gender and the Arts

61, 69; Pasquino and Marforio 52; Piazza di Pasquino 44, 51, 61; Piazza di Ponte 70; Piazza di Spagna 137; Piazza Navona xx, 23, 33, 38, 40, 43–64, 66, 69, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 82, 231; Piazza San Pietro 68; Piazza Scossacavalli 80, 82, 83, 84; pilgrimage 54, 62, 63, 73, 155; Pincian Hill 32; plague of 1630 48; Ponte Sant’ Angelo 69, 73, 76, 79; Ponte Sisto 70; Porta del Popolo 40, 73; Porta San Giovanni 57; Porta Viridaria 235; Prati 30; processions 74; Quirinale Palace 61; Quirinal Hill 28, 32; realestate market 27; Republic 309; rione Parione 30; rione Pigna 30; rione Ponte 235, 243; rione Sant’ Eustachio 26; rione Trastevere 43, 57, 58, 70, 159, 162; Ripa Grande 158; Ripetta 257, 270; Rota 45; Sack of 1527 33, 281, 287, 289; Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302; Sacred Congregation of the Council 131; San Bonaventura 26, 244; San Carlo al Corso 137; San Cosimato 162; San Crisogono 233; San Giovanni della Pigna 43, 52, 57; San Giovanni in Ayno 35; San Giovanni in Laterano 63, 69, 79, 157, 158, 159; San Gregorio 246; San Gregorio al Celio 37; San Lorenzo in Damaso, 67; San Lorenzo in Lucina 71; San Lorenzo in Panisperna 159; San Luigi dei Francesi 158, 167; San Marco 69, 76; San Marino nella Monte 28, 30; San Martino ai Monti 237; San Pancrazio 57; San Pantaleo 132; San Pietro in Vincoli 28, 66, 67, 78, 82, 83, 84; San Salvatore in Lauro 76; San Silvestro in Capite 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 158, 160, 163; Sant’Agnese in Agone 38, 55; Sant’Agostino xxiii, 22, 36, 68, 76, 232, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 244; Sant’Anna dei Falegnami 162; Sant’ Apollinare 66, 68, 77, 237; Sant’Apollonia 162; Sant’ Eusebio 47; Sant’ Eustachio 26, 72, 76; sgraffito 66;



Sistine Chapel 47, 59, 237, 244, 284; Sistine city plan 32; Spirito Santo 160, 162; SS. Apostoli 66, 67, 82–84; SS. Domenico e Sisto 130, 131, 145, 146, 147, 159, 160; SS. Giovanni e Paolo 30; SS. Vincenzo e Anastasia 150; Sta. Caterina a Magnanapoli 130, 147, 149, 154, 159, 160; Sta. Cecilia 58, 158; Sta. Chiara 160, 162; Sta. Lucia in Selci 24, 28, 29, 30, 142, 143, 144, 160, 161, 162, 166, 171; Sta. Maria Annunziata a Tor de’ Specchi 165, 166, 170; Sta. Maria della Concezione 159, 160; Sta. Maria del Popolo 30, 246; Sta. Maria in Campo Marzio 129, 132, 133, 142; Sta. Maria in Trastevere 159; Sta. Maria in Via 26; Sta. Maria Maddalena delle Convertite al Corso 167; Sta. Maria Maggiore 31, 32, 157, 158, 159, 166, 237; Sta. Maria sopra Minerva 30, 31, 76, 149; Sta. Marta 52; Sta. Marta al Collegio Romano 131; Sta. Susanna 27, 28, 32; Sta.Teresa 140; statutes 69; Sto. Spirito in Sassia 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 160, 162, 234, 235; St. Peter’s 28, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 78, 79, 82, 83, 149, 157, 158, 239, 244; Strada San Pietro in Vincoli 28; Strade Felice 71;Theater of Marcellus 70;Tor de’ Specchi 52, 165, 166, 170, 171;Tor Sanguigna (Torre Sanguigni) 71, 76, 77; Trajan’s Market 160;Trevi Fountain 26, 43, 57;Trinità dei Monti xv, 246; Vatican 26, 61, 68, 69, 74, 79, 80; Vatican Borgo 32, 37, 67, 68, 69, 74, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84; Vatican Palace 61; via Alessandrina 80; via dei Penitenzieri 81, 82; via dei Soldati 77; via del Governo Vecchio (Papale) 69; via dell’ Apollinare 77; via di Clementino 71; via di Marforio 69; via di Monte Brianzo 71; via di Pasquino 44; via di Sto. Spirito 81, 83; via Giulia 35; via Mercatoria et Florea 68, 69, 70, 73, 76; via Monserato 35; via Papale 68, 69, 70, 74, 76; via Recta 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 84; via “recta iuxta Flumen” (See Rome: via Sistina.);Via Sacra 69; via Sistina

• Index

71, 73, 78; via Tor Millina 38; Villa Borghese 32; Villa Doria-Pamphil(i) (j) 32; Villa Farnesina 37, 284;Villa Ludovisi 32; Villa Madama 149;Villa Montalto 29, 31; Villa Torre Nova 59 Romeri, Niccolò 180, 181, 182, 200, 209, 210 Rondinelli, Scolastica 141 Rondinini, Nicolò 137 Rontani, Rafaello 166 Rosignoli, Carlo Gregorio, S.J. 103, 106, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 123 Rospigliosi; Giulio 159 Rossano 58 Rossi: Giovan Antonio de’ 50, 132; Mattia de’ 138; Teodosio de’ 55 Rossi, Paolo 277 Rosso Fiorentino 101, 219 Rovere xx; Basso della 65, 66, 68, 75, 76, 77; Cristoforo della 65; Domenico della 65, 66, 67, 68, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84; Felice della 33; Francesco della 65 (See also Sixtus iv, pope.); Girolamo Basso della 65, 66, 68, 76, 77, 78; Giuliano della 65, 66, 67, 78, 82, 83; palaces 65–84; Vittoria della 112, 119, 122 Rucellai: Giovanni 18, 215; Paolo di Pandofo di Giovanni 18 Ruffolo, Landolfo 318, 319 Russell, Susan 61 S Saalman, Howard 12 Sabbatini, Pietro Paolo 165, 166, 167, 168, 173, 174 Sacchetti, Marcello 149 Sacchi, Carlo 60 Saint-Denis 102 Saint Louis University xiii Salic Law 85 Salmacis 98 Salviati, Francesco 82 Sampieri, Maria Eleonora 134–37 Sangallo, Antonio da 35 San Lorenzo alle Grotte 234 San Martino al Cimino 43, 57

Sanminiato, Giovanni da 214 Sanseverina, Caterina 26 Santa Fiore 34 Santi, Leonardo 60 Sanvitale: Alfonso 41; Gerolama Farnese 41 Sarto, Andrea del 203, 204, 219 Sassetti, Francesco 15 Savelli: Bernardino 27, 29; Francesca 41; Lucrezia Anguillara 27 Savelli-Anguillara, Camilla 41 Savonarola, Girolamo 211–30; sermons 222; writings 218 Scandiano 38 Schenk, Johannes 186, 200 Schiavo, Paolo 140 Schutte, Anne Jacobson viii Sciarra, chapels 31 Scipio Africanus 97 Scolari, Antonia di Lorenzo di Ranieri 13 Scolopians 118, 119 scudo accollato. See heraldry: scudo accollato. Selci 24, 28, 29, 30, 58 Serguidi, Antonio 178 sermons 162 Serristori, Maddelena 9 Servius Tullius 308 Sforza: Bosio xiv 34; Caterina de’Nobili xiv, xvii; Francesco xiv 106; Fulvia Conti xiv, xvii; Massimiliano 105 Sherberg, Michael xxiii Sieci 11 Siena 148, 191, 209, 210; under Florence 177, 180, 182 Simone, Mastro 326, 327 Simon, the leper 241 Siu, Paolo (Xu Guangqi) 113, 114, 117 Sixtus iv, pope: election 65, 66; Fiammetta da Michele 234, 235, 237; Heraldry 84; Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini 239, 244; Nardini 70; possesso 74; processions and rituals 76, 77, 80; Sant’Agostino 240; urban works 71, 72, 73, 79 Sixtus v, pope 22, 29, 31, 71 Soderini: Maria 19, 20; Piero 38; Tommaso 19



Patronage, Gender and the Arts

Solinas, Francesco 250, 254, 269 Spada,Virgilio 56, 62 Spagnola, Beatrice 241 Spain 46, 47, 48, 100, 107 Sparti, Barbara xii, xxiv sprezzatura xiii SS. Jacopo and Michele in Certaldo 329 Stabia 24, 27, 28 Sta. Cecilia 58 Stanghi, Ludovico 105 stemma. See heraldry: stemma. Stiattesi: Christofano 256, 263; Pierantonio 249, 251 St. Mary’s College xiii Stollhans, Cynthia xxiii, 36, 65 Strata, Maria Vittoria Fornari 124 Strozzi: Alessandra Macinghi 27; Giambattista (Filippo) 27; Leone 28; Roberto 28, 93; Selvaggia Gianfigliazzi 27 Stufa: Luigi di Messer Pandolfo della 16; Monna Lena della 17; Pandolfo della 17 T Tacca, Pietro 91, 93 Tagliare, Christofaro xxii, 177, 183, 189, 205, 208, 209, 210 Tanaquil, queen 308, 312 tapestry 90, 97, 102, 303–13 Taramelli, Bartolomeo 138, 139 Tarquinius, king 308 Tassi, Agostino 50 Tasso: Giovanbattista 282;Torquato 276, 282, 283 Telemachus 306 Temperani, Manno 4 Teodoli, Carlo 139 Teofili, Belardino 45 Terranuova: Andrea di Agnolo da 6; Andrea di ser Agnolo da 12 Testa di Lepre di Sopra 57 Theatines xvii Theobaldi: family 31; Sigismonda 24, 30 Thévet, André 185 Thirty Years’ War 154 Thomerle 190 Tiber River 35



Tiny King. See Re Picino. Titi, Filippo 132 Tito,Tiberio di 204, 205 Tolfa,Vittoria della xvii Torelli: Achille 105; Lorenzo 114; Ludovica xxi, 103–25 Tornabuoni: Costanza di Filippo 11; Giovanni 5; Lorenzo 5 Torquemada, cardinal 76 Torriani, Carlo 133, 134 Tosti, Girolama 237 Trebbio 11, 12 Trent, council of xvi, xxi, 110, 127, 156; convent reforms 141, 155, 161, 165, 293 Treves, Frederick 192 Trevisani, Francesco 138 Treviso 321, 322 Trigault, Nicolas 114 Trinity College xiii trophy monuments 90 Troy 310 True Cross xv Turin 65, 124, 187 Turks 233 Turnus 311, 312 Turpin 276 Tuscany,: architecture 27; grand duchy xxii, 177, 181, 265; music 159; sculptural style 285 Tyche 91 U Uberti, Neri degli 324 Urban viii, pope xxi, 46, 47, 53, 103, 113, 142, 149, 167, 173 Ursulines 113, 114 Uzzano, Agnolo Da 2 v

Valle, Pietro della 160, 162 Vallombrosans 118, 296 Valmontone 57 Valone, Carolyn xiii, xix, xxiv, 21, 23, 24, 25, 36, 65, 85, 103, 129, 130, 153, 162;“Architecture as a Public Voice for Women in Sixteenth-Century Rome,” xix; Capuchin church patronage 222; dissertation xiii;

• Index

“Elena Orsini, Daniele da Volterra, and the Orsini Chapel” xv; female patronage and class 214;“Giovanni Antonio Dosio and His Patrons” xiii; “Matrons and Motives:Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome” xv; “Matrons and Motives:Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome” 303, 313;“Mothers and Sons:Two Paintings for San Bonaventura in Early Modern Rome” 231; on Cesi 244–45;“Piety and Patronage:Women and the Early Jesuits” 245; teacher 211, 231 van Heemskerck, Maarten 87, 94 van Honthorst, Gerrit 88 Vanini, Caterina 143 Varchi, Benedetto 189, 256 Vasari, Giorgio xxiii, 15, 82, 83, 203, 241, 242, 246, 278, 279, 280 Vatican Basilica. See Rome: St. Peter’s. Vecchiarelli, Mariano 133, 134 Venice 21, 22, 60; Angelic communities 110; Spanish ambassador 187 Ventura, Magdalena 201 Venus 196 Verona 192; Angelic communities 110 Vicenza, Angelic communities 110 Viganega, Benedetta Van Herten 125 Vigri, Catherine 296 Villani, Giovanni 187, 282, 318, 329 Vinta, Belisario 178 Virgil xxiii, xxiv, 276; Aeneid 304, 305, 306, 307, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313 vite: as sources xxi, 103, 108, 113, 114, 115, 117, 122, 123; authorship 112; restrictions on 112, 113; subjects 104 Viterbo 43, 57, 58 Vitruvius 88, 89, 90, 92, 98, 99, 100, 102 Vittorio Amadeo ii 150 Volta, Claudia 299, 300 von Solms, Amalia 88

William Henry, prince of Orange 88 Wilson-Chevalier, Kathleen 101 Wiltshire, Susan 312 Wonders of the Ancient World 87 x

Xenophon 99 Y York 187 Z Zaccaria, Antonio Maria 107, 109 Zambeccara, Emilia 300 Zenis 99 Zeus 88 Zeuxis 194 Zinevra, Madonna 326 Zoppino 232

•

W Walter of Brienne 318 Warner, Marina 88 Weaver, Elissa xxiv Weinstein, Donald 104, 105



This Book Was Completed on August 2, 2015 At Italica Press in New York, NY. It Was Set in Adobe Bembo and Bembo Expert. This Print Edition Was Produced On 70-lb White Paper in the USA and Worldwide. •