Writing Cities: Exploring Early Modern Urban Discourse 9789637326547

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1. Authors: Assembling an Ensemble
Chapter 2. Facades: Defining Urban Beauty
Chapter 3. Dialogues: Talking the Town
A Personal Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Wr i t i ng C i t i e s

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The Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture Series at Central European University, Budapest Series Editor: Gábor Klaniczay

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Wr i t i ng Ci t i e s E x plor i n g E a rly Moder n Urba n Di sc ou r se

James S. Amelang

C ent ra l Eu ropea n Universit y Pre ss B u d a p e s t – N e w Yo r k

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© 2019 by James S. Amelang Published in 2019 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary 224 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Website: www.ceupress.com 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, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-7326-53-0 ISSN 1996-1197 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Amelang, James S., 1952– author. Title: Writing cities : exploring early modern urban discourse / James S. Amelang. Description: New York : Central European University Press, 2019. | Series: Natalie Zemon Davis annual lecture series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017046810 (print) | LCCN 2017047505 (ebook) | ISBN 9789637326547 (pdf ) | ISBN 9789637326530 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns—Europe—History—Sources. | City and town life—Europe—History—Sources. | Cities and towns in literature. | City and town life in literature. Classification: LCC HT131 (ebook) | LCC HT131 .A44 2017 (print) | DDC 307.76094—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046810

Printed in Hungary

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Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s

Prologuevii Chapter 1. Authors: Assembling an Ensemble

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Chapter 2. Facades: Defining Urban Beauty

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Chapter 3. Dialogues: Talking the Town

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A Personal Epilogue

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Acknowledgements141 Notes149 Bibliography195 Index239 

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Prologue

This book reproduces three lectures given in December 2016 in a cold but welcoming Budapest. Many talks turned into books do their best to disguise or erase their original orality. I do a bit of that, and have made numerous minor revisions in both content and style. But the format below not only reproduces the somewhat winding itineraries of the lectures as originally delivered. It also leaves in place several phrases that obviously were turned out loud, in order to retain some of the informal tone of their delivery. The reader has nothing to fear: the audience was amiable, and Natalie Davis herself was sitting there in the front row, busily scribbling notes and occasionally emitting sounds of approval or shaking her head with demurral.1 Many of the changes I  have made have in fact been in response to the questions and lively discussion that followed each lecture, including but not limited to suggestions by Natalie herself. Since I plan to revii

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turn in the future to the themes explored below, I see this text as a necessarily abbreviated midway point between the original talks and a much more fleshed out book that will address certain questions that are only evoked in these pages. In particular, I sense that the greatest challenge to be tackled will be to link and contrast the early modern urban discourse studied here with the contemporary visual depiction of cities. Bringing texts and images together promises to be great fun as well as a great challenge, but for now that task will have to take a back seat.2 Since it may take me some time to get around to this bigger book— I have other, more pressing tasks to complete first— I take advantage of the generosity of the Central European University Press to include fairly extensive endnotes, not just because bibliographic notation is an incorrigible habit of mine, but also in the hope they may be of help to others in the interim. Early modern urban discourse is a daunting subject, especially when one considers the good news that much has survived from the enormous corpus of writing about cities from the later Middle Ages on. My aim is therefore modest, to outline and test some approaches to studying this topic, and to venture some provisional answers to a series of specific questions that one can ask of a broad swath of sources. To that end I organized the lectures in the following way. As

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their titles suggest, they pose and explore three questions: the authors, themes, and forms of early modern urban discourse. That is, who had something to say about cities, what did they say, and how did they do so. (The deeper matter of why they wrote hovers over all three.) These are huge questions, and I decided to trim them down to workable size by giving each chapter a specific focus. In regard to who wrote about cities, I highlight the diverse social backgrounds of the men and women who contributed to urban discourse. As for what these discoursers wrote, I center on one particularly revealing theme, what made for a beautiful city prior to the nineteenth century. And in regard to form, the closing chapter looks at the dialogue as a literary vehicle particularly well adapted to discussing city life and culture. My observations are driven less by any strong thesis, than by a desire to wander through the forest of discourse, in which each tree has a name and place of its own. During the wandering, I poke and prod a fair number of texts, trying to assess their potential to serve as sources for what I see to be the ultimate goal of any study of urban discourse: to obtain a better understanding not of some composite, ideal-type early modern “city,” but rather of a wide range of real cities. To that end I try to sort out what was singular as well as what was shared in what contemporaries wrote about them.3

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Readers familiar with Natalie Davis and her work will not be surprised by any of the choices I have just mentioned, beginning with the original nod toward urban history. She is, to coin a phrase, a “city woman.” While she has written memorable pages about men and women making their own micro-histories far from urban venues, ranging from southern French villages to Canadian forests or plantations in Surinam, the presence of cities is one of the strongest constants within her remarkably varied oeuvre.4 Then there is the importance of discourse as a theme. Natalie has of course done much time in the archives, and has made her way through piles of lists and ledgers around the globe.5 But as I see it, her real predilection has been to rescue what early modern men and women said, thought and believed as much as what they did. That is, she has given us—and gift is the proper word here—histories focused mostly on individuals and the sense they made of, and from, their own experience. Thus their discourse, understood in the broadest sense of the term, has been very much at the center of her approach to this infinitude of pasts. The discourse this book dwells on is vernacular in character. In other words, it was not necessarily learned, or even very articulated. Above all, it originated as description of or reflection on real as opposed to invented cities. This directness, or rooted-

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ness in experience, is what most distinguishes it from more formal discourse, such as the Italian theologian Giovanni Botero’s On the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities.6 First published in 1588, this treatise was the most widely read overview of cities in early modern Europe, and perhaps even beyond. It is an intriguing book in many respects, but when reading it one often wonders if the author had ever seen the towns he was holding forth on. Virtually all the texts cited in the following pages are not like that. Whether dry as dust (few of them are) or spellbinding (even fewer), they convey immediacy, personal experience, and a strong sense of presence. Above all, they provide excellent points of departure for further work on early modern cities, and the reader may rest assured that such tasks pending will be alluded to more than once in what follows. Three reasons drive my choice to emphasize and experiment with sources in particular. First, we are at the beginning of the study of this subject; thinking about sources is an obvious means of helping to clear the ground for the next stages of research and analysis. What is more, probing where historians get the texts and documents we work with is a very “Natalian” thing to do. Her example shows that it makes for what one could call a practical history, in sense of being driven by the most basic, even traditional task

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of historical practice: building from the ground up through hard but pleasurable work in our two natural warrens, the archive and the library (and in the case of urban historians, in the streets and squares of presentday cities whose past we study). Finally, working one’s way through this infinite variety is downright enjoyable, which is another dimension of Nataliana. Putting her sources up front, she approaches them as treasures in chests, or stretching the metaphor, as underground caves to be explored. I bring in caves here because I  like to think that although our corporate appearance is often to the contrary, we historians are children at heart, Huck Finns learning about ourselves while we do something more important, which is learning about the rest of humanity. Natalie’s work provides constant reminders that history is not only important, relevant, and interesting. It is also fun. I hope that this lesson—one of many I learned from her—shows through in the rest of this book.7 One final matter unfortunately needs to be mentioned. During the week we spent in Budapest in the Winter of 2016, the subject of the relations between the increasingly belligerent attitude of the right-wing government of Hungary toward the Central European University came up repeatedly in conversations with our hosts. The worry in the air was palpable, above all thanks to the fear that the recent election results in

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the United States would embolden Trump’s counterparts in Hungary to take steps against a distinguished center for academic excellence and democratic change that they had only mulled in the past. These fears unfortunately turned out to be justified, and now a university famous internationally for its academic quality and its firm commitment to democratic values is fighting for its life against forces that stand for replacing education with indoctrination, and democracy with the lawless misrule of demagogues.8 The international response in defense of the CEU has been impressive, as befits an institution so rightly renowned for its cosmopolitan character as well as its academic quality. It reflects the obvious truth that everyone, no matter his or her nationality and political preferences, has a stake in this battle, which is for the survival of a university which has become emblematic of the inextricable alliance between intellectual freedom and the only form of government that truly nourishes it, liberal democracy. That I was given the opportunity to deliver these lectures constitutes the greatest academic honor I have ever received, both for whom they are named, and for the extraordinary institution that so graciously hosted them.

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Chapter 1 Aut hor s: A s sembl i ng a n E n semble

Late medieval and early modern citizens wrote a great

deal about their cities. Others did as well, especially travelers. Urban historians rely on their comments and musings as sources, yet there are surprisingly few studies of exactly what early modern writers had to say about towns, how they said it, and to whom. Moreover, until recently those scholars who have followed these textual tracks have been much more inclined to focus on individual works than to survey broader clusters of discourse, much less a city-wide corpus as a whole. The relatively few exceptions to this rule include a pair of pioneering articles by the medievalist J.K. Hyde, various among the countless essays of Peter Burke, and the reflections of the handful of authors of general histories of early modern cities who have taken special pains to incorporate contemporary discourse as a source.1 Happily, recent years have seen growing interest on the part of historians in the pro-

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duction and consumption of urban discourse in early modern Europe. Most of their work focuses on writing about a single city.2 A hardy few even compare one city with another.3 Yet the lectures reproduced in this book are to my knowledge one of the first attempts to offer a minimal inquiry into urban discourse from a broader range of towns.4 A word should be said about the term “discourse” itself. It was popular when I first met Natalie Davis, in the late 1970s, and then it sort of faded away, doubtless through overuse. I confess that I still like it, largely because of its very breadth, and also because it is a word that keeps very much alive the fundamental notion that a great deal of what circulates in written form has its origins in oral speech. Thinking of discourse as bidirectional in the sense of something that often starts in speech but which also winds up being communicated in written form—and vice versa— comes naturally to someone who works on early modern history. After all, the only means historians have of trying to listen to people from the past is through written efforts to record what they say. (A word to the wise: “listen to people from the past” is merely the first of many Natalian phrases that will appear in these pages). Our starting point is the later Middle Ages, when the first, often hesitant efforts to write systematically

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about cities began. Precedents were not lacking, but relatively few works of urban description or commentary had survived from the classical past, and among these some were unknown or not readily available until the revival of interest in them among Renaissance humanists.5 The thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries witnessed a notable increment in the amount of urban discourse—once again, writing about cities—produced and recorded on parchment or paper, and consumed through reading. This was true especially of Italy, and of the German and Dutch-speaking lands to the north. The new print technology of the fifteenth century furthered this development, to be sure, but the continued expansion in civic writing drew on other sources as well. Especially significant was the general increase in the numbers of authors, and in the amount of works they wrote, both phenomena which predated the new technology. Finally, all this depended on, and at the same time contributed to, the widening social breadth of recourse to authorship.6 Exactly who these new authors were is a question easier to ask than to answer, but one can think of different ways of responding to it. One demonstrably fruitful means of locating authorship in early modern cities has been to think about specific urban places in which discourse was produced and preserved, while

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paying close attention to who was involved. One crucial guide here has been Natalie Davis herself. She has always had an eye open for the important role space plays not just in history in general, but also in the city in particular. While this is most evident in regard to Lyon, where she began her archival research many years ago, it reached a height of sorts not just in her pathbreaking collection of essays but above all in her subsequent article on the sacred and social in the early modern city.7 This was moreover one of several foundational studies which began to run in parallel with those of other historians of early modern Europe, such as her friend and former colleague Robert Darnton, who was also devoting growing attention to the cultural roles and communicative functions linked to specific spaces within early modern towns.8 Their work and that of others stimulated additional efforts to think out and chart the range, forms and themes of urban discourse produced within a single city, such as Lyon or Paris. Thanks to their pioneering research, it soon became clear that early modern urban discourse came in all sizes and shapes. I  step into the pathway they marked with the following preliminary survey, which assembles a roster of different types of writing about the city that can be documented from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries in the early modern town I know best, Barcelona. A quick

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look at the range of these forms suggests that they were as varied as were their creators and their purposes. And while this will be the first of several brief run-throughs of urban discourse, I  hope the reader will look upon them not so much as checklists but as something quite different: series of links within diverse but interrelated textual chains. Writing Barcelona The roster of different forms of urban discourse is lengthy, and can be divided into a dozen basic categories: 1. One of the best known—and certainly one of the most veteran—forms of early modern urban discourse is the civic chronicle. My checklist for Barcelona comprises 27 titles from 1450 to 1800, of which only four were published during the early modern era.9 Of these the best known was Jeroni Pau’s Barcino. Published in Latin in 1491, it provided readers with a brief but ambitious survey of the city from its foundation by the Romans to the present day.10 2. I am familiar with some two dozen early modern travel accounts that contain substantial descrip-

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tion and commentary about the city by outsiders. Of these, all but three were written by men— I know of none by women, although they must have existed—from outside present-day Spain. Among the more interesting were the accounts of the Italian historian and diplomat Francesco Guicciardini (1512), followed by others by the Venetian ambassador and humanist Andrea Navagero (1525), the Swiss physician Thomas Platter the Younger (1599), and—my personal favorite, along with Platter’s—the English merchant Robert Bargrave (1654).11 3. The most classical form of urban discourse was the encomium. This was the Greek term for what would also be known in Latin as a laudatio, that is, a formal work of praise, often pronounced aloud as an oration. I  have seen only one such text for Barcelona, a 1596 speech in Latin by the Genoese patrician Niccolò Spinola. (That he was Genoese adds a bit of spice to his otherwise bland discourse, given the bitter rivalry between the two cities during this period.)12 4. Then come contemporary works of description. Specialists refer to these as chorography, a genre that usually provided social, economic and political description in addition to reconstructing the physical features of the city.13 Such texts general-

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ly informed more about the city than did the encomia, even though they shared much the same positive attitude toward it. Three in particular stand out for early modern Barcelona. The most widely read and cited was the formal Description which the university professor Dionís Jeroni de Jorba wrote in Latin and published in Spanish in 1589.14 Then around 1630 the municipal notary Esteve Gilabert Bruniquer assembled some notes about the city from his vast registry of civic documents in a brief text known as the Summary Relation.15 Finally, around 1785 the royal intendant Francisco de Zamora commissioned (but did not publish) a lengthy and revealing bureaucratic report on the city and its surroundings.16 5. One especially detailed type of urban description was the guidebook. Barcelona resembled most other European cities in that the first works of this sort were not written for tourists, or even foreigners. Instead, they catered to the needs of outsiders to the city, usually farmers or the inhabitants of small towns, who sought guidance to the exact locations of a wide range of civic institutions. Such booklets—known throughout Spain as guías de forasteros, literally “guides for out-oftowners”—began to appear in the second half of the eighteenth century.17

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6. A somewhat less predictable but actually very informative source about early modern cities is what could be termed legal or administrative guides for more educated insiders. The barrister Joan Pau Xammar’s Civil Doctrine of 1644 is one such work. Written in sober, bureaucratic prose, it provides an exhaustive introduction to the city, beginning with its ancient history and Roman foundation, and then running through a broad array of contemporary legal, administrative, and institutional matters.18 7. Among the best known forms of writing about cities—and certainly those most likely to create lasting impressions—were literary depictions. There are nevertheless not as many contemporary works of fiction that treat early modern Barcelona as one might expect. Various reasons can be adduced to explain this gap, one of them being the similarly puzzling fact that literary works written in the local language, Catalan, were rather thin on the ground during the early modern era. However, what Barcelona lacked in quantity it certainly made up for in quality, for it shines gloriously as the only city to have been depicted in Don Quijote. Most relevant to the interests of this study is chapter 62 of Book II, in which the knight-errant visits a printshop, where he indulges in the last of

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his many discussions of the authorship and production of texts.19 8. Speaking of Cervantes: his short “archive of courtesy” passage from Don Quijote, Book II, chapter 72 constitutes the most famous eulogy of Barcelona prior to the opening chapter of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Eulogies are a particular type of urban discourse that, whether in prose or verse form, aspires openly to flattery. Judging by the frequency with which it has been reprinted (and even graffitied!), Barcelonans have responded warmly to this praise, and their scholars have produced more than one anthology in which this passage takes pride of place.20 9. One should also note that there was a light, popular literature about the city, in the form of ballads, poems, and stories. A small minority among them eventually reached print. These usually hewed to comic tones, and leaned toward the celebratory, although one occasionally comes across works in a satirical or polemical key.21 10. A close relative was the literature of ceremony. This included above all ephemera published to accompany and explicate the formal festive life of the city, and which flourished most during times of royal entries and other celebrations of broader as well as local significance.22 It also comprised

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more substantial texts occasioned by longer visits of distinguished visitors to the city, such as the book-length chronicle of Philip II’s 1585 visit to the major cities of the Crown of Aragon written by the Flemish courtier Enrique [Hendrik] Cock. 11. Like other early modern Iberian cities—and one suspects that more than most—Barcelona also generated news sheets and other ephemera that explained and often commented on events and institutions within the city. As one of the capital cities of the Iberian peninsula, and a locus of growing political turbulence beginning in the 1620s, its presses issued numerous imprints dealing not only with local news, but also with the relations between the wide range of political institutions the city housed and the central organs of the Spanish Monarchy in Madrid. This highly politicized press became even more active during the decade of separation from Spain (1640– 52), when it assumed the additional responsibility of justifying the Catalan cause both within the Principality and outside it, including Portugal, France, and Italy as well as the rest of Spain. The restoration of Spanish authority in 1652 led to a perceptible decline in what had been an intense exercise in proto-journalism, and which briefly returned to life during the War of Spanish Suc-

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cession (1705–14), when once again, Barcelona and Madrid found themselves on opposing sides, this time in an even more internationalized, panEuropean war.23 12. Early modern Barcelonans also produced a respectable amount of protest literature that reflected on—almost always negatively—public affairs and other aspects of civic life. One especially interesting example is an anonymous printed pasquinade that was first discovered on the door of the City Council chambers on 19 February 1640— that is, during Carnival—and which soon appeared in other parts of the city. Signed by the “True Angel of Light,” it called on Barcelonans to repent their gluttony, lust, and other vices, and warned that if they did not, the violence that had already begun in the Catalan countryside would soon reach the city.24 13. Dialogues were a singular—and singularly important—form of early modern discourse in general. And while I have located only one substantial one from Barcelona, it is a lengthy text of great interest, and will be discussed in chapter three below. 14. Finally, while Barcelona had a fairly dismal record in terms of the number of mentions in literary works, the same could hardly be said of

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what one could call “personal” literature: diaries, memoirs, and other forms of first-person writing. I have argued elsewhere that Barcelona was a sort of autobiographical capital of early modern Spain, in terms not just of the sheer numbers of first-person texts it gave rise to, but also regarding the social breadth of their authors.25 Three high points stand out within this large and impressive body of writing. The first is the minutely detailed diary the local barrister (and official chronicler of Catalonia) Jeroni Pujades wrote from 1600 to 1635.26 This unusually revealing text overlaps in part with another, a civic chronicle the master tanner Miquel Parets labored on from 1626 to 1660.27 And in terms of sheer length, neither of these efforts could hold a candle to the 53 (!) manuscript volumes in which the local aristocrat Rafel d’Amat, the baron of Maldà, recorded daily life in the city from 1769 to 1816.28 Having made our way through this preliminary typology, one can step back and try to make some sense of what this textual thicket adds up to as an ensemble, a term which perhaps best fits a miscellany that hovers somewhere between a sample and a fullscale corpus. In terms of size, it is medium. While minuscule compared to the discourse generated by and about much

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larger metropoli such as Rome, Paris, or London, it is not bad for a middling-sized, provincial city that was fortunate enough also to be a viceregal capital. In regard to the variety of forms and formats their authors mobilized, while only the main ones have been mentioned, the coverage across the board strikes one as pretty solid. The fact that there is at least one text of broader significance in each of the categories of urban discourse is telling.29 Finally, what one most notices here is that the vast majority of these texts circulated as manuscripts, not in print. And the same was true of the discourse of every city in Europe at this time. Readers would also perceive a fair amount of diversity in themes and points of view. Such breadth of coverage is seen for example in how the single most dramatic event in seventeenth-century Barcelona, the “Bloody Corpus” riot of 1640, was reported in writing. This intense and violent popular revolt—in which agricultural workers from the countryside invaded the city and looted various palaces in addition to lynching the viceroy and a royal judge— immediately generated narratives and commentary, ranging from substantial diary entries, news reports, and even official inquiries, to a lengthy popular song, the forerunner of what is now the anthem of Catalan nationalism. These different forms add up to a body of discourse that was respectable in size and visibly plural

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in terms of forms. It was also socially and politically diverse enough that while it very much favors elite perspectives, one can still hear discordant voices from popular sources as well.30 Finally, there is the matter of the rhythm of development. Not only did this ensemble form slowly over time, but also as it did so the reader could watch it just as slowly cohere as a corpus. In other words, by paying close attention one can register a certain eventual growth in the amount of contact, interplay, and crossreference among the texts and their authors.31 To be sure, no Barcelona discourser stood out as inaugurating a “literary tradition, with each writer consciously seeking to emulate his predecessors” the way Leonardo Bruni did in Florence, which produced what may have been the largest, most innovative, and most selfreferential body of urban writing in all of Europe.32 The Catalan texts do not match the dense thicket of their Florentine counterparts, nor do they proceed in such orderly fashion. Still, it is clear that a few works— above all the humanist scholar Jeroni Pau’s Barcino and his later admirer Jorba’s Descripción—wound up becoming standard texts of reference for writers and readers interested in the city’s past as well as present.33 All this suggests that in the case of early modern Barcelona one finds very little that is out of the ordinary for a city of its size, location, and political and

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economic roles, with two exceptions. The first has already been noted: the relative scarcity of fictional literature depicting and reflecting on the city. What is more, what little such literature that does exist is by non-local writers, such as Cervantes. And where one most expects cities to appear in Golden Age Spanish literature—the picaresque novel—none make any sustained mention of Barcelona.34 The other is the lack of a printed history of the city until the 1780s. This was a striking anomaly in the Iberian Peninsula in particular, given the extraordinary thickness of the local history-writing that reached print there beginning in the sixteenth century.35 Following this preliminary overview of the range and sorts of writing that I refer to as urban discourse, we can now move on to the principal question posed in this opening chapter: exactly who is writing this discourse. In Barcelona, the texts appear at first sight to issue firmly from the ranks of the civic elite, as one would suspect. All the authors are moreover men; women’s writing in that city seems largely focused on letters and spiritual texts, and I have found very little that has much to say about the city. These male writers are for the most part well educated and well off. Lawyers play an especially prominent role in this cohort, which is once again not all that surprising, given the enormous weight of the legal profession as the oc-

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cupation of choice among Barcelona’s middle and upper classes.36 Nevertheless, in all these categories, except for the learned encomium, one can also find one or more authors from below the level of the ruling class. Thus among chroniclers, the most widely read text today is that written by the master tanner Miquel Parets. This is in part on account of his unusually revealing narrative of the plague that attacked the city and destroyed his family in 1651. What is more, the sole chorographic text to have been produced—and in Catalan, by the way—was written by the city government’s notary, Bruniquer. And the one dialogue I have located, and to which we will return in the final chapter, was by a mercer, or cloth retailer. In other words, even the commanding heights of Barcelona’s civic discourse housed a certain social breadth in terms of authorship. One can moreover surmise that the same took place in many other European cities, where a clear majority of elite producers of urban discourse was joined by aspiring authors who hailed from lower rungs on the social ladder. Walking and Climbing Focusing on urban discourse as a broad field of forms is one pathway to discovering who was writing it.

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There are alternative routes to the same destination, and one is to undertake less comprehensive and more focused soundings. To that end I examine two other bodies of urban writing, each centering around a motif that served quite literally as a point of view, to see if a similarly wide swath of authors may be glimpsed. The first organizing motif is that of a walk.37 That many early modern urban texts mention walks is only natural. This is how virtually all city-dwellers made their way around the town; walks were part of their daily routine, and they literally provided citizen authors with their store of up-to-date urban knowledge. Some of these authors then went on explicitly to register this strolling within their texts, and a few even made it a central facet of what they wrote. One example involves the most widely-read writer on late eighteenth-century Paris, Sébastien Mercier. He consistently presents the city from the on the ground perspective of walkers, and makes constant reference to the act of promenade.38 However, to my knowledge, Mercier does not produce the sort of text I  wish to explore now, one that reveals the city to the reader by taking him or her along a specific walk. In other words, I refer to forms of writing that introduce, comment on, and reveal a city by following an itinerary. I  have pieced together a preliminary sample of such literary rambles, which includes around twen-

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ty texts, most hailing from early modern England and Spain. One is famous: John Gay’s Trivia, a satirical poem whose success when published in 1716 helped establish him as a writer about town in London. Most of the others are fairly obscure, and are known if at all only in their local contexts. They have in common at least three characteristics. Almost all were written in prose, and several with very little literary pretension. And as in our cohort of Barcelona writers, the majority of their authors were university-educated men and/or members of the clergy. But also as in the case of Barcelona, one sees a further widening of the circle of authorship. It not only includes several members of the middling to popular classes, such as the Amiens merchant Jean Pagès or the London tavernkeeper Ned Ward. It also features the most famous walking chronicler in the whole of early modern Europe, the master chandler (candlemaker) John Stow, whose Survey of London was first published in 1598, and even today remains a popular guide to the city center.39 The ranks of ambulatory authors also included at least one woman, the spry but enigmatic Isabella Whitney.40 She was a poet; indeed, she regularly shows up in literature textbooks as the first Englishwoman to publish a collection of her own secular poetry, in 1567. She followed this with a second title in

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1573, a miscellany which included her Last Will and Testament. In this short topographic poem she says an ambivalent goodbye to an ungrateful city which apparently had little use for her talents. She does so by walking around and paying a last visit to the streets, squares, and buildings she had come to know well. As an itinerary it is a bit chaotic and hard to follow, but even readers today are not likely to doubt the depth of feeling this forced farewell evokes in its author, nor the skill with which her verse brushes up against serious contemporary issues such as the way London’s growing wealth was eroding traditional understandings of (and obligations to) community. These examples provide a few clues as to what walkers saw when they ambled through towns. Buildings, streets, and squares—that is, architecture and the shapes and uses of urban space—naturally loomed large in such texts. But it was a rare author of a paper promenade who limited his or her text just to physical or topographical description. Walks rendered in prose or poetry provided valuable occasions for presenting and commenting on city life in general, and this embraced an impressively wide range of issues. Signs of growing wealth (or) poverty, the visibility of deeply embedded social distinctions, the character of local inhabitants, comparison of one town with another, and above all the pace and extent of local change (pos-

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itive or negative): these are some of the mainstay topics of a mode of urban discourse that reached a height of sorts during the early modern era, and which lingers on today largely in the personal records of tourists. Above all, the themes of these texts registered the same breadth as did their authorship. Urban walks turned out to be an easily adaptable literary theme/ form, and its flexibility attracted attention from a wide range of aspirants to authorship.41 The other sample—or actually miniature-cohort— of urban discourse not only is much larger than those of the Barcelonans or the strollers mentioned above. It also raises us literally above the vantage-point of the town scribe or the street-level walker to a higher perch from which to contemplate the city and what people—and what sort of people—wrote about it. I am referring to writing that features the motif of climbing a tower in order to have a look at a city. Please note: in regard to climbing towers, human nature did not change on or about December 1410. What was new around that time was individuals beginning to consign to paper this particular activity. Many of them moreover made explicit their purpose in so doing: nine times out of ten, it was to see, and in some cases even to depict, the city as a whole, and often the world beyond as well. This novel practice brings to light a deep, primordial fissure in the au-

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thorship of urban discourse. As a rule local citizens never write about viewing their cities from above. This naturally does not mean that they do not climb steps and have a look; they do, but as a rule, what they do not do is write about it.42 We know of these views thanks to outsiders, who trudge up the stairs in a deliberate effort to get to know an unfamiliar city better, in the limited time span afforded them by their visit.43 I  cannot say exactly when this tower-climbing started, and to my knowledge, the matter has not been systematically studied. Any such analysis would have to reckon with the recent plethora of writing on the “urban gaze,” a term which strongly evokes the work of the French philosopher and historian Michel de Certeau, and especially his essay on “Walking in the City,” which opens with the author inviting the reader to assess the Daedalus-like, even Icarian point of view afforded by “seeing the whole” of New York from the former World Trade Center.44 As far as I know, the archival and textual foot work for reconstructing the geography, chronology, and consequences of this practice has yet to be carried out. Thus, what can be done at this early moment is not so much to offer a precise timeline, but rather to single out places and moments around which the recording of tower-climbing thickened. And that had a lot to do with

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the proliferation of the types of sources most likely to record this experience. By far the best texts for reconstructing this practice—besides city guidebooks, of course, which really do not get off the ground, so to speak, until the seventeenth century—are the logbooks and other first-person narratives of travelers. For example, the Nuremberg physician Hieronymus Münzer dutifully recorded in the journal of his trip around the Iberian peninsula in 1494–95 his tramping up towers for a better, and in most cases, first look at a city. In fact, he began the Spanish leg of his journey by climbing the highest tower of the cathedral of Barcelona, “from which, as it were a watchtower, I contemplated the city and its surroundings. What an admirable spectacle!” The same “marvelous spectacle” of the city and its surroundings was revealed after negotiating 206 steps in Valencia, followed by similar skyward treks in Murcia, Guadix (whose tower was that of a former mosque), Granada, the Giralda in Seville (another former alminar), Lisbon, Zamora, Salamanca, Toledo, and Saragossa. Apparently as often as he could Münzer began to explore a city by finding and climbing the highest tower—usually located in a cathedral—with the explicit purpose of “contemplating the prospect of the place.”45 Two decades later the Italian cleric Antonio de Beatis visited over seventy cities and large towns in

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the circular trip he made through Germany, the Low Countries and France in 1517–18. The first tower he climbed was that of the cathedral of Strasbourg, where he noted that its 800 steps made it higher than the dome of the Duomo in Florence, the taller of the two towers in Bologna, or Venice’s belltower. A similar belfry provided a vantage point from which he could conclude that Ghent was “more than three times as large around as Naples, as we could easily see from the tower.” “Paris,” he later recorded, “is a city which, as can be seen from the bell tower of the cathedral church, Notre Dame, which commands the whole of it, is no less populous than Rome, and I  would say more so. . . .” And Milan, he noted, “after viewing it carefully from the top of the cathedral tower, in my opinion . . . is no smaller than Paris.”46 This could go on and on; it is hard to say which there are more of, travelers or towers. One way of moving forward with this discursive motif would be to choose one tower, wait in the shade, and register what climbers have to say when they come down. One of the best candidates would be the Campanile of Venice. Early modern reports of the view from it are legion. They start off in predictably laconic fashion; for example, in 1480 the Milanese statesman Santo Brasca en route to the Holy Land merely noted that it had seven huge bells, and that from atop it

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“one sees the whole site of the city.”47 But it did not take long for such texts to gain more weight. Much more developed, and edging near hyperbole, was the account of the most widely-read English traveler of the early seventeenth century, Thomas Coryat. He wrote that from the top of this tower one sees “the fairest and goodliest prospect . . . in all the world,” as well as the “whole model and form of the city.” For the “sight that doth in my opinion far surpass all the shows under the cope of Heaven” was the “sumptuousness of [the] buildings,” which rendered it the “Jerusalem of Christendom.” After also extolling the view beyond, which stretched from the lagoon to the Alps, he closed his paragraph of praise by solemnly admonishing the reader not to leave the city without climbing this tower.48 That both the city and what lay beyond it were of interest is confirmed not just by Coryate’s account but also by a host of others, such as the 1596 memoir of another pilgrim to Jerusalem, the Spanish cleric Juan Ceverio. He recorded in his travel book that the view from atop the Campanile brought into focus not only the city and the lagoon, but also the Paduan hinterland to the west and the snow-covered Alps to the north. “Everything being so varied and unusual,” he wrote, “makes for the most delightful view one can imagine.”49 Finally, that the Leipzig merchant Jakob Cuelbis’s 1599 description of the Ca-

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thedral of Seville should note that “next to it is the Tower which is one of the tallest, largest and fairest in the world, like the Campanile of St. Mark’s in Venice. . . .” suggests that by that point the Venetian archetype had become the gold standard for urban crow’s nests throughout Europe.50 The abundance of texts like these suggests that when outsiders wished to see cities at a distance, they seized on towers as the most convenient means of doing so.51 However, many towns offered other perspectives similar to towers from which interested parties could contemplate the urban panorama. Commanding heights within or near cities also afforded excellent views of them, and once again, a wide range of texts recorded this specific urban vista. One of the most famous of these entries was that of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of the members of the Cortés expedition, who was so struck with wonder by his first view of the Mexican metropolis of Tenochtitlán from a nearby mountain to the east that he thought he was seeing an enchanted vision from a chivalric novel.52 Countless other travelers looked upon early modern cities from privileged positions immediately beyond them. To cite just one instance, John Evelyn wrote during his 1645 visit to Naples that “an intire prospect of the whole Citty . . .” from very high up Castle St Elmo allowed him to conclude that the “strangenesse of

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the precipice, and rarenesse of the Prospect in view of so many magnificent and stately Palaces, Churches and Monasteries, [with] the Arsenale, Mole, and distant Mount Vesuvius, all in full command of the Eye, is certainely one of the richest Landskips in the World.”53 And while twenty years later Gian Lorenzo Bernini exasperated his Parisian hosts by speaking disparagingly of the capital as seen from the nearby château of Meudon, other voyagers expressed appreciation when gazing at Florence from Bellosguardo or the Belvedere, Barcelona from Montjuïc mountain, or London from Hampstead or Richmond Hill.54 Münzer, Coryat, and Evelyn have, unbenownst to each other, signalled to us the first of several crucial keywords in urban discourse: “prospect.” This, or what urban discoursers also referred to as “situation,” was the traveler’s pay-off for climbing all those stairs.55 That extra effort revealed dimensions otherwise unseen, one of them being a more precise perception of space that allowed contrast between one city and another. We can confirm this by returning to Münzer. What he most frequently remarked in relation to the views he won by climbing towers was two things. The first was the sheer pleasure these views afforded him. (Albrecht Dürer said the same thing regarding towers during his famous visit to the Low Countries in 1520– 21. For example, of the belfry of the cathedral of Ant-

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werp—which he explicitly noted was higher than that of Strasbourg—he wrote “from thence I saw the entire town on all sides, which was very pleasant.”56) The other thing Münzer repeatedly stressed was the relative size of the city, which he judged by comparison with those back home. Thus he noted that Seville was twice as large as his hometown Nuremberg, as well as impressively circular in shape. And seeing Granada from the towers of the Alhambra palace led him to conclude that there was no larger city in either Europe or Africa.57 Size was of course not the only urban quality gazing down from towers revealed. Such views also showed the city to be “beautiful, rich, noble, loyal and devoted to the king,” according to the Andalusian humanist Juan de Mal Lara, in his lengthy write-up of Philip II’s 1570 formal entry into Seville.58 Other texts also explored the broader possibilities of prospect. One of the most explicit commentaries on its significance can be found in a 1552 dialogue by the Florentine poligrafo or all-purpose writer, Anton Francesco Doni. In a guidebook to Florence he published three years previously, Doni had already recommended that the conscientious tourist should stop five miles outside the town to get an impression of the whole. The colloquy goes into greater detail as to how (and why) such a visitor could do this even better. Here a native takes by hand an

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out-of-towner “who has just arrived in this city to see everything beautiful.” After showing him the main sights, and then some lesser-known ones, the guide finally “leads him up some building which rises above the city, or up some small mountain, and from here he shows him the site, width, and length, and points out to him the public buildings, the streets, and everything [else]; thus, from this high vantage point, he forms an image of this place in his mind.”59 In all these cases, whether the evaluation is positive or negative, height makes the difference. In fact, seeing a city from an elevated spot beyond it, provided the same or even better view that the cathedral tower afforded inside it. Montaigne made this clear when he recorded in his travel journal that he climbed the Janiculum hill to the immediate west of Rome in order to “contemplate the configuration of all the parts of Rome, which may not be seen so clearly from any other place.”60 This brought pleasure, as we might suspect, as well as knowledge, of the sort that allowed the visitor to capture Doni’s “image of the place.” Needless to say, making the extra effort afforded outsiders a chance to acquire a piece of the normal visual baggage of the insider. And some of our out-of-towners hinted at even greater transformations. The same wonder that Bernal Díaz felt before the Aztec metropolis, overtook another writer on a later visit to the

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Janiculum. In the opening lines of The Life of Henri Brulard, Stendhal tells of his surveying “the whole of ancient and modern Rome” from the same prominence. He was so stunned by the panorama below that he began to muse on the depressing fact that he would soon turn fifty, and it was high time he began to know himself. Thus came into existence his most autobiographical text, summoned by the sublime but melancholy sight of the “ruins of Rome and its modern grandeur.”61 Having mentioned Stendhal, one could go on to underline the fact that the experience of seeing cities from heights, and especially from towers within their walls, finds expression in another crucial sphere of urban discourse, that of fiction. The second dialogue Doni wrote in the 1550s, I  Marmi—literally the “marbles” in the sense of the stone used for fine pavement and sculpture—opens with the author’s dreamlike fantasy of himself as large, ugly bird (uccellaccio grande grande). As he flies over Florence, he sees everything going on below, spying on what really happens behind the city’s facades.62 He then adds eavesdropping to his omnivision, when he finally perches on the marble steps—hence the title—of the Duomo, where he overhears “lively, vivid but honest conversation” on all sorts of topics. Perhaps the most unusual dialogue is the second one, which takes place

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between two pazzi, or clowns, Ghetto and Carafulla. They start discussing the odd idea that everyone is talking about: il sole non gira, noi giriamo, that the sun does not turn around the earth, but that we turn around the sun. (N.B.: this was written only one decade after Copernicus’s book was printed). Then they argue about this until the chapter ends.63 The bird keeps up the pace throughout the book, and registers a lengthy succession of chats, each involving a changing cast of two or at most three characters, and which cover an extraordinarily broad range of subjects, from injokes on the latest poetry written in the city, to the recently completed statues in the Medici chapel by Michelangelo. About a century later one encounters another such literary fantasy of urban heights, this time involving not a buzzard but a different aerial spy. A 1641 novel by the Andalusian writer Luis Vélez de Guevara featuring the diablo cojuelo, or the “clubfoot devil,” mixes that well-known figure from folklore with the motif of the bottle imp. Having been released from imprisonment in a glass jar by an infra-motivated university student, the grateful demon compensates his deliverer by taking him to the belltower of the parish church of San Salvador. This is the best watchtower in Madrid, he explains, and begins to show him everything that was happening in this modern Babylon by magical-

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ly removing the roofs of its buildings. From there the two of them look down on a wide range of individuals, whose activities within their houses reveal them to be the opposite of how they present themselves to the rest of society when walking the city streets. One lengthy passage introduces the reader to a pedant, a cuckold, a fop, a witch repairing the virginity of a girl who was to be married the following day, a “modern hypocrite” caught rubbing herself with a magic potion while preparing to fly up to the Basque Country to attend a witches’ sabbath, a pair of thieves breaking into the house of a rich merchant, a shopkeeper made obese by the many frauds she pulled on her customers, an alchemist searching for gold, and a couple that has spent everything they have on a carriage and thus must eat and sleep in it… This parade of appearance and hypocrisy goes on and on, until finally the imp confides to his new friend, “te espantas de pocas cosas,” in other words, “believe me, after all I have seen, nothing scares me now...”64 This widely read text—note that Mercier ended his essay on the chimneys of Paris by expressing his wish to become a diable boiteux65 —suggests a final observation in regard to this motif. After having started with how the experience of climbing towers began to be registered in early modern writing about cities, we have reached the point where one sees a broader

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sense of prospect generating more complex responses. These were moreover recorded in fiction as well as in the non-fictional mode that prevails in most urban discourse. In terms of the cultural direction toward which this discourse is oriented, I  do not see these texts gazing so much forward toward the panoptikon, as backward, toward a much earlier, almost primal fantasy of flight that looks down on the city as its most fruitful target. Surely one of the most obvious precedents for Doni’s avian eavesdropping, and one specifically cited in The Clubfoot Devil, is Lucian’s dialogue “Icaromenippus,” one of the more popular of his coloquys.66 Thanks to the Icarus-like voyage through the heavens its protagonist takes, it offers an unusually transparent and highly satirical view of the city as the place where humans most concentrate their follies and futile pursuits. The vast majority of early modern urban discourse was to be sure moved by purposes other than satire, above all the plain and highly prosaic aim of non-fictive description. This non-thematic theme had plenty of room for criticism, as will be seen in the following chapter’s discussion of urban beauty. However, it was only occasionally marked by any impulse toward satire. Instead, its mode fit its purpose, which tended toward relatively straightforward observation and evaluation.

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Authorship and Alterations Four final observations can be made regarding the authors under review here, and the way in which their writing changed over time. First, stepping back the better to see who wrote these texts can lead one to stumble upon one of the key dimensions of urban discourse. Writing the city is a bidirectional undertaking not just in its transforming speech into text, as mentioned earlier. It is also markedly multivalent, easily accomodating different, even opposing points of view. (Hence variety in discourse and variety in authorship go hand in hand; the one teaches us about the other). I have suggested that one of the most important faultlines of difference separates insiders from outsiders. Walter Benjamin highlighted the importance of this particular divide in perspective, when he noted that outside observers of cities focus on what is exotic and picturesque, while insiders see them in terms of layers of memory.67 I would go on to suggest that in most cases one of these two groups visibly prevails as protagonist over the other. I noted above that outsiders unquestionably predominate as authors of texts that refer to their having gained a panoramic view of the city by climbing towers. But in regard to forms, I will argue in the final chapter that one highly popular container of urban discourse, dialogues, are very much the territory of insiders.

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I  suspect that the overall profile of the authors of urban discourse did not vary a great deal during the early modern era. However, the same cannot be said for the textual ensemble itself. If one tries to measure the rhythm of change within this field of discourse, at first sight it seems to move like molasses. But despite the snail’s pace, real transformations were taking place down deep. One of the most important changes involves both the mode and extent of the author’s presence in the text. One very simple way to try to verify this would be to take a corpus of discourse of the sort I outlined for Barcelona at the beginning of this talk, and then search through it systematically in chronological order, instead of parsing it into genres the way I have done in this chapter. I honestly do not know how valuable a set of results one would get by slogging it out like this. A better use of time may be to take a shortcut by contrasting a few especially significant texts regarding the same city, recorded at different moments in time. As far as sheer authorial presence is concerned, one of the most obvious candidates would be to compare Montaigne’s description of his stay in Rome in 1581 with that of Goethe two centuries later. The matchup is very plausible: both were northern outsiders and increasingly prominent literary figures who cultivated an unusually strong analytical bent and who invested deep hopes in the personal effects of their pres-

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ence in a city they and so many others had literally dreamed about.68 Yet the contrast in results is dramatic. My impression is that both writers keep themselves very much in the foreground of their observations on Rome. Yet if the reader sees Montaigne indirectly revealing himself as he focuses on the city, Goethe very directly revels in being the center of his Roman holiday. Hence a typical entry—November 7, 1786—begins with the words “I am feeling really good.”69 I tried to look up what Montaigne had to say when starting his seventh day in Rome, but since the text is not organized by diurnal entries one is unable to specify exactly when he did what. One nevertheless reads that on the twelfth day after his arrival, far from feeling fine like Goethe, he was suffering his usual intestinal problems, and in near desperation drank a combination of cassia purge, turpentine, and almond milk, which provoked a severe and unusually painful colic.70 Yet even keeping in mind the considerable difference in their states of health, an even more crucial difference in register separates these two texts. Montaigne’s is a journal about Rome and how he read it and reacted to it. Goethe’s journal has some of that, but above all, it is a diary on its way to becoming a chapter in his autobiography. This brings us to a second way in which early modern urban discourse changed. Readers not fa-

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miliar with travel accounts from the early modern period should know that they do not register emotion like Goethe’s constantly does. Instead, they tend to be very matter of fact; long on data, they are short on commentary, much less feelings. As Andreas Franciscus, a Venetian traveler to England in 1497 put it, “I have avoided the use of any art in the writing, or beauty of style. I merely jotted down daily, while on my journey, a few remarks. . . .”71 Yet a longer view reveals that it was precisely during the early modern centuries when the bare factuality of medieval travel texts—which were more often than not itineraries with the odd comment tossed in—begins to bend a bit in the direction of the author’s expressing not only opinions but also sentiments. The whole world does not go Goethe. However, authors not only become more generous with their descriptive prose, but they also begin to show more and more of what the eighteenth century would label sensibility. And what holds for travel accounts also marks virtually all the genres of urban discourse mentioned until now. The ever growing presence of the first person pronoun, along with the feelings and opinions it expresses, is moreover not the only way authorship is transformed within this discursive corpus. One can also detect some shifts in the cargo on deck: for example, as time goes by one registers the slow loss in weight

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of the formal laudatio, which virtually disappears by the early seventeenth century, at least in its original humanistic form.72 What replaced it was more neutral, and thus more credible description. It would be tempting to argue that this gradual tamping down of local boosterism was the result of the ever expanding production and consumption of correctives from beyond the city, that is, travel narratives by outsiders. But frankly, I have my doubts about that, above all due to the fact that so few of the growing numbers of early modern travel accounts reached print prior to the later seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries. As a result the possibilities of local audience for the possibly chastening descriptions of outsiders were in fact quite limited. Which brings up another relevant issue, that of how much local circulation was there of the various forms of urban discourse I have been discussing. Were I  to go back to my original list of authors of texts about early modern Barcelona, I could reliably document a local readership for only a very few of them. Not surprisingly, almost all of these were printed at the time. My very last observation is that it would be stretching the point to see for example my tower tales as evidence of a new and recognizably modern way of seeing and thinking of the city. But I do believe that there is a general if still imprecise linkage between the panoram-

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ic view or habit of seeing city as a whole, and the slow coalescence of “urban image,” in the sense of a crystalized notion of what an entire city looked like. In other words, in various ways the early modern era promoted an increasingly tight bond among the modes in which people at a wide range of social levels saw, thought of, and envisioned the city as whole. Hence the reference in the accounts quoted above to the entire form or image of city, along the lines of what Doni suggested the visitor should be striving to nail down. I confess to being a little hesitant about all this. For instance, Stuart Blumin has argued that the proliferation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of what the Italians referred to as vedute—painted or etched city views made for tourists to take home with them, and which featured only bits and pieces of cities, above all individual buildings or at most a city square—enshrined a new, modern way of seeing and depicting the city.73 That only a handful of artists tried to render a city as a whole from the same tower from which the energetic tourist saw it goes without saying. Virtually all draftsmen and painters found it too difficult or simply not worth the effort to reproduce the circular view from towers in any literal way. One of the very few exceptions to this rule was the famous 1529 depiction of Vienna in the round.74 Here the very special circumstances of the occasion—the siege by the

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Turkish army shown as menacing the city from its outskirts—clearly explains the unusual choice of viewpoint. As a result, the real rivals to the vedute were the general views of cities rendered not from the tops of towers, but from a slight elevation outside the city, and very rarely from an exact ground level.75 [coda] I  close by stressing the delight—an almost Rabelaisian, or rather, Natalian delight—that any historian would take in the sheer variety and richness of the urban discourse I have been talking about. Like its authors, such writing came in all sizes and shapes: tall or short, overweight or skin and bone. It includes histories that tell as much about the present as the past, as well as radically contemporaneous accounts that are often haunted by earlier conflicts, for instance between the city and its enemies both within and beyond its walls. In this chapter, and indeed in much of my research over the years, I have tried to follow the footsteps of Natalie Davis, who as an explorer of sources has put to the test old as well as new documents, texts, images, and the like. In striving to do the same I hope to have laid a sufficiently solid foundation to convey some sense not just of the diversity of this discourse and of its authors, but also of the sheer wealth of themes, forms, and perspectives brought

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into play. Writing about cities near and far was one of the challenges that most stimulated our early modern ancestors, who responded by mobilizing an impressive range of intellectual and aesthetic resources. We citizens of today are fortunate to be their readers.

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Chapter 2 Fac a de s: De f i n i ng Urba n B e aut y

This book opens by drawing attention to the authors of urban discourse, and suggests that there are various ways to identify and analyze them as a group. But this discourse may be approached from other angles as well. Focusing on an especially visible theme within the same body of writing reveals some of its more prominent features, along with a few peculiarities. The theme chosen for exploration in this chapter is beauty, for two reasons: the ubiquity of its presence in urban discourse, and the elusiveness of its meaning. These closely allied if contradictory qualities mark a broad and rich terrain for exploration.1 Our starting point is the simple fact that beauty is found everywhere in early modern urban discourse. The term is constantly present in descriptions of cities, and is used so often that it means next to nothing.2 It therefore comes across as quite a paradox that amid so many references to beauty, early modern ur41

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ban discourse contains so little systematic discussion of exactly what urban beauty in particular consisted of. The vast majority of mentions of beautiful cities are terse, telegraphic, and as perfunctory as they are predictable. Since most of them are pretty much there for the record, and rarely explore much less explain what they mean by beauty, they do not tell us much.3 Given this unusually loud silence, the urban historian has to comb carefully through a great deal of writing on cities in order to piece together any sort of working consensus on what made for a beautiful one in particular. The first task is thus to sift, and that leads to a specific level of sources, those that while still being terse, nevertheless give at least a hint of what struck the observer as beautiful about a city. Three very brief passages about early modern Italian towns quickly spell out some of the basic, if contradictory, qualities associated with urban beauty: • in 1552 the antiquarian Agnolo Bardi protested the demolition in Siena of seventeen medieval towers belonging to local magnate families by noting that they had contributed to the “beauty and ornament of the city”4; • in 1644 John Evelyn resorted to an uncommon metaphor when he singled out Genoa as a telling example of civic beauty perched between archi-

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tectural regularity and natural irregularity: “[its] Streetes and buildings [are] so ranged one above the other, as our seates are in Playhouses; but by reason of their incomparable materials, beauty, and structure, never was any artificial sceane more beautifull to the eye of the beholder; nor is any place certainely in the World, so full of the bignesse of well-designed and stately palaces”;5 • and in 1739 the French jurist Charles de Brosses commented that despite its lack of impressive architecture, Turin was the prettiest city in all Europe, thanks above all to “the alignment of its streets, the regularity of its buildings, and the beauty of its squares. . . .”6 These are three unquestionably clear and concise statements, but one would be hard put to find much of a consensus here. They suggest that urban beauty—bellezza, ornamento, beauty, beauté are the keywords here—can derive from man-made regularity, topographic irregularity, and/or imposing and antique signature buildings. In other words, criteria that are not so much confused as dispersed, and not always compatible with each other. A first step toward extracting some order from this anarchy is to signal those forms of urban discourse that prove in the long run most valuable for tracing

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and explicating the vocabulary of beauty. I  briefly highlight five in particular, in ascending order of importance: 1. Where one can rely on the word beauty appearing most insistently is in the laudatio, that is, a formal, public statement of praise of a city. This form of writing was very much the preserve of the insider. And while it was naturally hopeless as a means of knowing whether the city was really beautiful or not, this sub-genre can, like others, shed some light on what the author recognized to be the more influential criteria of urban beauty. 2. Chorography. The varying literary forms that described the city differed from the prose of praise in that their declared aim was more neutral geographical and topographic description, although in practice it was a rare text of this sort that did not present a positive view of its city. Since that invariably included reference to its appearance, once again what was generally regarded as its beauty are on display. 3. A third genre, and one that developed as an offshoot or subset of chorography, is the guidebook. Most often this form of discourse literally sought to bring together an outsider reader and an insider author, with the latter assuming the role of

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informed cicerone who would enhance the other’s visit to the city through privileged advice.7 Its tone was naturally positive, but it had the advantage of explicitly signalling the places or objects regarded as most beautiful within the city. These in turn appear ever more insistently over the long haul as the targets of tourists.8 4. Speaking of tourists, travel accounts leave behind some of the most valuable assessments of civic beauty. That these were by definition the preserve of the outsider by no means rendered them more objective; neither did the difference between their public circulation as opposed to private use, or even non-use. But the authorial distance from the city that marked such external describers did have its benefits, and for studying urban appearances in particular. The presence or absence of beauty turned out to be of the more predictable criteria authors used to judge cities—and judgment, positive or negative, turned out to be a central feature of virtually all travel accounts. 5. Finally, a slightly less conventional, and still very under-studied form, sheds light on the aesthetic side of the urban image. I am referring to the documentation of what might be called “bureaucratic beauty”: proposals for public reforms whose deliberate purpose was to make the city more vi-

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sually appealing than it was. The keyword here turns out to be not so much beauty as “embellishment,” the term medieval and early modern writers used most often to denote this particular form of urban renewal and improvement. It is an important word for our purposes, because by looking at the concrete steps that citizens and their spokesmen take to make their cities more attractive, one can best see what urban beauty meant to them. What is more, it also favors pragmatic as opposed to idealized understandings of urban beauty, thanks to its being rooted in the unavoidable reality of reformers having to work with the city at hand, not the city one may dream about. Florence and Beyond Each of the forms of discourse listed above has its uses for reconstructing and evaluating contemporary notions of civic beauty.9 The most direct path to grasping how they interact is to focus on the early modern city that produced not only the earliest and most abundant, but also the most varied forms of discourse: Florence. The following time-line provides a representative sample of affirmations of the beauty of the Tuscan capital, while also illustrating the diversity in the

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literary forms urban commentators used, as well as in their authorship and contents. • A good starting-point is the 1310s, when the silk merchant Dino Compagni wrote a chronicle of the recent and very turbulent history of Florence. He opened it with a paragraph-long description of the city, which ended with the following statement: “its buildings are beautiful and filled with many useful crafts, more than any other city in Italy. For these reasons many people come from distant lands to see Florence—not because they have to, but because of its crafts and guilds, and the beauty and decoration of the city.”10 • Less than a century later, Compagni’s short paean had given way to a longer and much more ambitious text, as well as one that deliberately sought to isolate the positive characteristics that most distinguished Florence from other cities. Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio or “Praise of the City of Florence” of 1404 was the first systematic attempt by an early modern writer to imitate classical urban encomia, especially those by the ancient Greek orator Aelius Aristides. While given more to repetition and padding than to structured and detailed argument, Bruni’s text set a new standard for urban self-congratulation, and inspired many im-

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itators.11 Yet Bruni did not waste many words praising the city’s beauty. To be sure, he informs the reader from the first page that a more splendid, elegant, attractive, and excellent city did not exist elsewhere on earth. The key items contributing to its “outstanding beauty” (pulchritudine ornata) were its singular cleanliness, magnificent and splendid new buildings—above all churches and noble palaces—along with handsome squares and decorated porticoes. These were moreover found all throughout the city, not just in its center. He then moves on to Florence’s other qualities, above all its finest ornament, its people, paragons of virtue, industry, and kindness. In this unusually influential text Bruni set the pace for other early humanist flatterers of Florence, including their inevitable if rather thin allusions to the city’s beauty. And in this he may have taken a clue from his acknowledged model, Aelius Aristides, whose widely-read paeans of praise to ancient cities such as Athens, Rome, and Smyrna made relatively little mention of their physical aspect.12 • Beauty looms far more frequently as a component of praise in the remarkably compact description of Florence the local silk merchant Goro Dati included in the civic history he finished in the early 1420s.13 Despite its brevity it contains over a

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dozen usages of the adjectives bello or bellissimo, which he attaches not only to especially prominent buildings (above all the cathedral), but also to the mills alongside the Arno river, the gallery atop the Palazzo della Signoria, the four arches of the loggia in the same square, and even the countless gardens, groves, and villas outside the city gates. One has the impression that beauty is evoked so often in this short span, and invests such a wide range of spaces and buildings throughout (and beyond) the urban fabric, that the city as a whole does not need to be referred to as such. Moreover, the way Dati’s prose style combines enthusiasm with sobriety drives home even further the general association of this uniquely privileged town with the proud pairing of bellezza e grandezza. • If Bruni’s secular sermon included the city’s image among Florence’s many sources of attraction, his fellow humanist Biondo Flavio’s 1453 topographical survey of Italy reminds us that writing about urban beauty did not develop in a linear, much less progressive fashion.14 For the term barely appears in it. The best-known and most comprehensive geographical text of the early Renaissance won greater popularity for its copious information than for its literary qualities, much

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less aesthetic sensibilities. Beauty was definitely not one of his keywords, nor did urban description interest him. • The next link in this particular chain of urban discourse was the following description Bernardo Rucellai penned in 1457: “Florence . . . [has] augmented in beauty, [and is] now embellished with new churches, hospitals, buildings, and palaces with elegant facades and lavishly decorated interiors.” He then goes on to specify that this increase in beauty is the work of excellent architects, sculptors, wood carvers, stone-cutters, tapestry-makers, and goldsmiths, who skillfully design works in perspective, and show great ability, sense of proportion, and precision.15 One clearly sees that for this prominent merchant, it was precisely the combination of architecture and art, with both having recently climbed to new heights of technical achievement, that most contributed to the city’s growing stock of beauty. That, and the collective effort of artists and artisans, whose concentration in a single place facilitated both the training and perfection of a wide range of skills. • Two years later Florence received a visit from the Sienese humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who had assumed the name Pius II when he was elected pope in 1458. When describing the city in

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his well-known Commentaries he summarizes its recent history, which centered around the rise to power of Cosimo de’ Medici, whom he thoroughly detested. He then lists its more illustrious citizens, beginning with the triad of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, followed by the leading humanists of the recent past. He ends his entry with the following remark: The admirers of Florence call attention not only to her illustrious citizens but to the size of the city (which is surpassed in all Italy by Rome alone), the lofty and extraordinary thick walls which encircle it, the elegance of the streets and squares which are not only wide but straight, the magnificent churches, and the splendid towering palaces, both public and private.16

In other words, without using either term, the author links beauty with regularity, and above all, with (monumental) scale, elegance, and magnificence. • Piccolomini’s neat package-approach was soon followed by the opposite tack. In 1472 the cloth merchant and occasional diplomat Benedetto Dei inserted a panegyric of the city in a brief chronicle, each paragraph of which started with the

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same two words: Fiorenza bella. Beautiful Florence has preserved its liberty, beautiful Florence has five miles of walls, beautiful Florence rules over 400 smaller towns… this goes on for eight paragraphs more, each starting with beautiful Florence. Dei makes clear that now that the beauty of Florence has become an (insider’s) cliché, it requires no further elaboration. • A decade later the local poet Ugolino Verino issued the important reminder that not all urban discourse appeared in prose. He wrote several poems praising Florence, the main theme of which was the artistic excellence the city cultivates, which surpasses even that of the ancient Greeks. Verino’s catalogue thus confidently asserts that “every traveler arriving in the city of the flower admires the marble houses and the churches textured against the sky, swearing that there is no place more beautiful in the world.”17 • Next came what is universally referred to as the first modern artistic guidebook: the cleric Francesco Albertini’s “aide-memoire of the many statues and paintings in Florence,” written as a letter to an artist friend, and published in 1510. Largely a terse, building by building list of art works no one should miss when visiting the city, it makes no reference to specifically urban beauty. Howev-

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er, the author informs his correspondent that he is presently working on a book whose title is indeed “The Marvels and Beauties of Florence.”18 • Thereafter follow many other texts, including the Doni dialogue mentioned in the first chapter. A good stopping-point for this series of allusions is 1591. That year saw the publication of Francesco Bocchi’s Le bellezze della città di Fiorenza.19 This was the most ambitious, developed, and longest—almost 300 pages—of a spate of sixteenthcentury printed books that explicitly featured the beauty of an individual city in their titles.20 It is moreover a good instance of what could be called “pragmatic spokesman” texts, in that it mixes unrelenting boosterism with the down to earth utility of a guidebook. The second page affirms that the three types of art work that “elevate cities to the most sovereign beauty” are paintings, statues, and architecture. Indeed, the entire book is organized as a building to building pilgrimage that guides the reader through the city and along the way gives practical explanations and advice. Brief rundowns of this sort reveal the considerable advantages to focusing on how a single city is defined as beautiful over time in different forms and at different moments. But there are other ways to survey the same

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discursive field. An alternative approach is to focus on how different cities are described within a single text by a single author, paying particular attention to the presence or absence of urban beauty, along with its specific qualities, and their frequency and variation. One good candidate for this experiment is the travel journal of the Italian cleric Antonio de’ Beatis, whom we met climbing towers in the previous chapter.21 During his 1517–18 visit to the countries north of Italy he remarked the beauty of cities on various occasions. The first reference appears on the opening page of his manuscript, when after departing Ferrara his party reaches Verona, “full of life and beautiful with its streets, piazzas and palaces.” Two weeks later he says much the same thing about Augsburg: “with its squares, streets, houses and churches it makes a most beautiful, cheerful and civilized impression.” Mainz he also finds embellished with fine churches, squares, and houses, even if its streets are too narrow; he sees Koblenz while traveling on the Rhine, and notes that “from the outside the town is very beautiful and impressive.” And of Cologne he writes that it is “more beautiful and more populous than all the others [cities] we have seen in Upper Germany, both for its houses—which are commonly large and well built of stone—squares, streets and churches and for whatever else can grace a city.”

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His descriptions change somewhat when he reaches the Low Countries. Here the term “beautiful” appears less frequently, while other, related qualities come to the fore. Thus Antwerp in his eyes is “superior to all the other towns of Brabant and Flanders from the points of view of site, buildings, streets and everything else belonging to a town,” while of Bruges he affirms that “certainly its streets, squares and every other feature make it extremely magnificent.” But where his temperature cools noticeably is when traveling through France. His only general remark about Paris is that it is very large; after saying the same thing about its cathedral Notre Dame, he adds that it is “not very beautiful.” He also says the same of towns such as Lisieux and Bayeux, and of all the churches of Rennes. He lets the cat out of the bag when he gets to Lyon: while he has little to say about its physical appearance, he confesses that “the streets are well laid out, and the houses generally of stone. . . . The women of Lyons are some of the most beautiful in France. Merchants of every nation live here, but especially Italians [my emphasis] and because of all the trade the men, the women and the very earth have something of fair Italy about them. And so, such as it is, I judge Lyons to be the fairest town in France.”22 Cities do not become beautiful again until he reaches Nice, or rather Nizza, where he breaks the flow of the manuscript by adding

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a new heading, Italia bella. Here he also makes the general observation that while one finds fine churches and sophisticated music in France, nowhere does one run into “the fine squares and streets [and] the imposing houses and public buildings” of Germany or Flanders. Delighted to be back in his homeland, his enthusiasm does not wane even in Casale Monferrato, of which he writes that “although it was not at its best with everything under snow, one could see from its situation and broad streets that it must have beauty and charm.”23 Various lessons can be learned from this somewhat exasperating text. Beauty obviously makes an impression on the author, but the vocabulary he deploys when signalling it is far from specific. A similar laxity inflects the way he applies the term. Thus thanks to the wording it is often not clear whether he finds beauty in the town or site (or both). Still, he clearly avoids over-usage: of the 61 cities and towns Beatis describes in any detail, he explicitly marks seven as beautiful.24 (That said, many others contain beauty in the form of pleasing buildings, squares, or even their hinterlands). Above all, he does not wield bellezza as a constant compliment, as some travelers do. Thus while its usage begins to wane slightly in the Low Countries, it comes to a dead halt in France (he finds no beauty in Paris!) His aesthetic spirits pick up

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again only when he nears the border with Italy. Finally, neither chronological antiquity nor an ancient past seem to affect his judgment regarding civic beauty, as one might expect from the servant of a major patron of humanists. Instead, his criteria center around site or location, and what we would call urban components: streets and squares, the larger the better; private houses, especially those made out of stone; and above all public buildings, particularly churches. These two brief exercises—with one registering what different observers have to say about a single city, and the other focusing on the opposite, a single observer visiting different cities—show that if one stands back and tries to distinguish what makes for a beautiful city in early modern urban discourse, several keywords and associations appear immediately and repeatedly. One can moreover go on to think of them as constituting a sort of visual blueprint, or chain running parallel to our discursive one. This chain has three links to it: 1. In all these texts what undergirds urban beauty is abundance and economic prosperity. And not surprisingly, what beauty itself consists of is elegance, magnificence, and splendor. Wealth makes beauty possible, and beauty in turn manifests wealth.

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2. Civic beauty derives from various sources, and can take different forms. But what is most likely to render a city visibly beautiful is the presence within it of beautiful buildings. In other words, urban beauty is defined principally, although not exclusively, in terms of architecture. 3. By the Renaissance era, urban architecture had for the most part taken the decisive step toward adopting classical aesthetic criteria, the central qualities of which were order, regularity, proportion, and symmetry. These stylistic features, along with others less tied to a particular aesthetic, such as monumentality or sumptuousness, emerge as the leading criteria for defining civic beauty. And the easiest place in which to see all these qualities brought together is in a facade, hence the title of this chapter. Two quick notes deserve to be brought up here to the main text. First, I say Renaissance urban architecture had “for the most part” absorbed classicism with one caution in mind: that in much of early modern Europe, and outside Italy in particular, there still lingered a strong appreciation of the Gothic tradition in art and architecture, even among educated elites. So much so, that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries managed to produce some very inventive hybrids

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between the classical and Gothic styles, which was the subject of one of Peter Burke’s lectures at CEU in 2013.25 And second, about the shape of things: full­ scale definitions, and especially systematic statements on urban beauty, cohere very, very slowly. Before that they linger long as fragments, phrases, or brief evocations. I thus use the term “keywords” quite deliberately when talking about urban discourse, because often it does not move very far beyond that. If anything, this discourse takes a long time to shed its original laconic character.26 All of which suggests that the historian of writing about cities runs a considerable risk of packaging it too neatly. A closer look at the ins and outs of actual discourse in operation shows that its emergence and evolution are more complex than these ideal-type, step by step chains have just suggested. And there are other difficulties as well. A Slow Start Three problems in particular invest what I have presented to this point. First, early modern thinkers, no matter what they thought about, were used to finding guidance and stimulus from ancient authorities, especially the Romans. However, on the question of

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specifically urban beauty, the ancients turned out not to be very helpful. They had made a number of brief, conventional references to attractive cities, but undertook virtually no exploration of what their beauty consisted of.27 This is surprising when one considers that ancient Greece and Rome inaugurated the European corpus of urban discourse, whose richness in the realms of political thought and imaginative literature in particular no one would dispute. And it is not as if classical writers were unaware of the topic, especially since the public praise of cities was a favored, even constant theme in both oral and written discourse. Thus Pericles, in the “Funeral Oration” reported by Thucydides, alludes to the appearance of Athens twice: he mentions its “public buildings of beauty,” enjoyment of which drives away despondency, and then shortly thereafter refers to the Athenians as “seekers of beauty . . . and learning” who nevertheless shun extravagance and unmanliness. (A mere fifty years later, the professional orator Isocrates focused so tightly in his Panegyricus on pressing questions of strategy and alliances among the Greek city-states that he left no room for any other considerations).28 Quintilian also explicitly mentions urban beauty in his discussion of the different means of organizing the rhetoric of praise, and refers to it as one item among others to include when

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describing a city. He also specifically acknowledges that beauty can adhere not only to a city’s buildings (including its walls and temples), but also to its site (here he evokes cities located by the sea).29 But there is little else. What is more, it is all too easy to find the ancients silent on the subject of urban beauty in texts in which one might expect them to have something to say. Aelius Aristides was the most voluble ancient praiser of cities whose works have survived. Yet the formal encomia of the sort he, Libanius, and others practiced devote scant attention to beauty. This was especially true of his best known text, the paean to Athens known as the Panathenaic Oration, which served as the explicit model for Bruni’s 1403 exercise in Florentine flattery. Of the nearly 300 sections of his speech, fewer than a half-dozen evoke beauty, and most of these refer to the city’s surroundings.30 Pausanias’s detailed account of his travels in Greece—written in the 2nd century AD, as were the works of Aristides—provides several detailed descriptions of cities, most notably the memorable walk through the agora and around the rest of Athens that opens his text. However, he had other concerns on his mind than urban beauty; if anything, his overriding interest in sanctuaries and cult sites led him to focus much more on buildings and sculpture, in both urban and rural settings. Beau-

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ty has a certain presence in the text, to be sure, but mostly in relation to works of art, and even then, his description of them is very sober and little given to detail.31 And to cite one final example, Ausonius devotes his “The Order of Famous Cities” (Ordo urbium nobilium) to moving down the ranks from one city of the late Empire to another. After beginning with Rome, he finally winds up in his native Bordeaux, where he ends the text with the exclamation “I love Bordeaux, Rome I venerate.” He evokes the qualities of each of the twenty cities on his list, especially their wealth, trade, buildings, and natural features, but at no point does he mention their beauty.32 This reticence is puzzling. There is of course the problem of the haphazard survival of texts from ancient times; urban historians in particular have long regretted the loss of the most important text on the history of Rome as a city, Varro’s Antiquities.33 But surely other factors—above all, other priorities—offer a more convincing explanation of this clamorous silence. In the case of the Greek texts, the overwhelming focus on political and constitutional issues in civic discourse seems to have left little room for consideration of other, and what were doubtless seen as lesser (and often less urgent) matters. As for the Romans, their writing suffered from an even greater handicap: the city itself. When alluding to the beau-

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ty of Rome commentators from the late Republican period—that is, prior to the radical transformation in the city’s image that began with Augustus—opted for short, generic, and above all more idealizing and less prosaic references. This was in part a tacit recognition that Rome’s aesthetic claims were at that point more exercises in wishful thinking than anything else. As the architectural historian Diane Favro puts it, in this earlier era “individual buildings in Rome satisfied [Vitruvius’s] criteria for beauty; the city as a whole did not.” It is thus not surprising to find Strabo, whose life coincided with that of the first two Caesars, alluding to the recent change in policy toward more concerted efforts to improve the city’s appearance when he refers to their filling Rome “with many beautiful structures.”34 And the older divide between such efforts and their recognition in writing persisted. In the end it would be left to writers of much later periods to step in and fill the aesthetic gap that was Rome’s. Then there is what could be called the great anomaly. One city in particular poses unusual problems for what I have singled out as the architectural route to urban beauty. Early modern observers near and far agreed that not only one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, but also for a growing number the most beautiful city, was Venice. The gushing praise heard from

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the tower-climbers in the previous chapter is typical of the way Europeans then, just like everyone now, started to fall over themselves in heaping superlatives on Venice as a uniquely beautiful city.35 In fact, it was precisely the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that turned the acknowledgment of its beauty into a cliché of pan-European tourism. A large part of this beauty obviously came from its location, or once again, what classical and humanist theory referred to as “situation.” That it was a city that floats on water was its biggest attraction back then, as it still is today. Yet anyone could see that the aesthetic criteria of order, regularity, uniformity, proportion, and virtually every other characteristic one could associate with classical definitions of beauty did not apply in this case. If it was beautiful, and it clearly was, its beauty was just as clearly of a different order. And that calls for some sort of explanation. A final problem in simply equating architectural beauty and the beauty of cities in the way in which I have suggested that some Renaissance writers did, is that the contemporary understanding of what made for beautiful buildings was much more complex and nuanced than is commonly recognized. Renaissance aesthetic criteria may have looked crystal-clear, especially when compared to those that prevailed during the Middle Ages, but the truth is that they were not.

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Instead, neo-classical architects and their patrons, critics, intellectual spokesmen and lay admirers carried on a prolonged and often intense debate over how exactly to define and express the beauty found within a city. Unfortunately for us, this debate was mostly oral; the little that has been preserved in writing is merely the tip of an iceberg. And extending that debate from buildings to the broader sphere of the city brings its own complications, enough in fact, to suggest that architectural and urban beauty, while clearly related, were just as clearly not the same thing. Does this make a difference? When all is said and done, one has to wonder whether the beauty of the urban fabric as a whole really made a difference. Early modern town fathers knew as well as modern city managers and politicians that a little good architecture could go a long way, and that even a few signature buildings could tip the balance in civic reputation from fail to pass. The vocabulary of urban planning itself suggests as much. When in 1439 the city council of Bologna issued a decree approving a plan for enhancing the merchants’ loggia it justified its decision by affirming that “it is the duty of the city not only to make good laws but also to build worthy sites, for the ornament of the city.”36 Admittedly, “ornament” meant more back then than it does now.37 Still, the implication that attending to specific details may be

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enough over time to produce (and conserve) a beautiful city is suggestive. I am not convinced. Early modern citizens did not calculate beauty—urban and otherwise—in percentages, nor did they mark it off in checklists. Behind the facade of polite clichés about the attractiveness of all cities dwelled real, concrete criteria around which a hierarchy formed. These ranged from the fanciful to the functional, and were far from uniform. And yes, observers could pick and choose as they pleased, and wound up arguing over whether x, y or z city was prettier than their own, in ways that resemble those in which one discusses the merits of sports today (NB: one’s own team always wins the contest, if not the game). The historian’s task then is not to assemble a list of specific aesthetic desiderata, and then to mark off the minimum needed to join the roster. Rather, it is to examine discourse in action, and to see the ways in which notions of civic beauty took shape and then were wielded within concrete situations. Once that is done one can look for how specific patterns of consensus took form, and then how those patterns changed over time. Ironically, it is within the body of Renaissance architectural writing itself where one begins to find a solution both to the broader issue of the relation between architectural and urban forms of beauty, and to

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the Venetian conundrum in particular. Joining urban discourse, understood as a broad field drawing mainly from vernacular and non-professional voices, with the intellectual probing of humanist writers and learned builders who theorized about architectural beauty, provides some clues as to how these different forms of beauty could co-exist, and how in a period in which classicism was the dominant, even official aesthetic, one could also have beautiful non-classical cities. Paths to Urban Beauty The starting point once again is the fifteenth century, in the midst of the visible expansion of urban discourse that had gotten underway in the later Middle Ages. One of the major novelties of this period is the reappearance of full-scale architectural treatises, written in deliberate imitation of the great classical model, The Ten Books of Architecture by Vitruvius. These “paper palaces,” as one recent collection of studies has referred to them, began to circulate in Italy around 1450 with Leon Battista Alberti’s Of the Art of Building (De re aedificatoria), which was also the first such text to be printed (1486).38 Their production then accelerated visibly both within Italy and beyond during the following century. Even though their explicit fo-

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cus was the work of architecture itself, one finds surprisingly little treatment of the city, which was after all the leading setting wherein new buildings were to be inserted. Even the single exception to this rule— the treatise the Florentine architect known as Filarete wrote in the 1460s—deals not with real towns, but with buildings and cities invented from scratch by an architect with a notable gift for fantasy. These architectural guides were emphatically not a form of urban discourse per se, especially if one understands the latter as dealing with actual cities. And at least in this sense the discussion of Renaissance architecture on the one hand, and of Renaissance cities on the other, runs on separate tracks. These tracks nevertheless cross each other on occasion, and discourse regarding urban beauty is one such point of intersection. Few if any Renaissance architects lacked a firm idea of what a beautiful city was. For them it was not just a matter of having beautiful buildings; after all, even the ugliest city could boast some of those. Instead, it was a city like the one described thus: one that shows “singular beauty in the plans and proportions of its squares and streets, all the same . . . all the streets are alike, and... all are beautiful because of their uniformity, breadth and rectitude.”39 One could not ask for a clearer statement of what makes for urban beauty: proper proportions, unifor-

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mity, straight streets, and broad and regular spaces. All the same, one would find locating such a city in early modern Europe a frustrating experience.40 It is no accident that the city this particular description refers to is Lima, a town triumphant Spanish conquerors built from scratch as a deliberate alternative to existing Amerindian cities, and to the Inca capital of Cuzco in particular.41 We who live in post-classical times find it hard to imagine the give and take of the early stage of classicism. For us the term itself smells of system, of rules and regulations, of preferring the straight and narrow over the unpredictable and, even worse, the inconsistent. Part of our problem comes from the age-old rhetoric of classicism itself. It does insist on obeying inveterate rules, it shuns irregularity, and it elevates tight proportion and symmetry to the very center of beauty. And on first sight, the architectural discourse of the early Renaissance does little to dispel these impressions of rigidity and unreflexive adherence to ancient authority. Yet any student of Renaissance architecture knows that this was more bluff than reality. The long parade of classical architectural treatises, beginning with Alberti and running through Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture of 1570 and beyond, helped nudge into existence a suitably modern reading of ancient, that is classical, beauty. Yet the impres-

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sive achievement of greater clarity in the definition of beauty in architecture (as well as in art) from the fifteenth century on did not give rise to any similar consensus regarding specifically urban beauty. That Alberti and his successors left this and other questions unattended to is hardly surprising. After all, they had their hands full trying to nail down the fundamental ingredients of successful urban architecture. Moreover, to help them with this challenge they had only one authoritative guide from ancient times itself, the treatise of Vitruvius, which was moreover incomplete and full of notoriously obscure terminology. And while Vitruvius clearly assumed that most buildings would be lodged within cities, he and virtually all the Roman writers had precious little to say about the urban setting itself.42 For that, the Renaissance theorists had to shift for themselves, and with a few brief exceptions, they, like Vitruvius himself, pretty much avoided discussion of civic location altogether. The aesthetics of architecture was an entirely different question. Taking Vitruvius as their starting point, one after another of the major Renaissance architectural authors—indeed, all but Serlio—offered his own explicit definition of what made a building beautiful. And from the beginning one sees some intriguing idiosyncracies, and even fissures, within what looks at first sight to be a firm classical consensus.

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Alberti emerges as the key figure in developing the first modern definition of architectural beauty. He does this by venturing several crucial revisions of Vitruvius’s famous rooting of venustas, or beauty, in qualities such as harmony and symmetry.43 Just as he developed a mathematically-based vocabulary with which to define beauty in painting and sculpture, Alberti also assembled and refined several architectural keywords in the hope that greater conceptual precision would ease the task of promoting the rebirth and renewal of classical style. His most striking innovation in this regard was to revive an obscure and long forgotten word, concinnitas. A Ciceronian adjective turned into a noun, it is usually translated as “harmony,” which Alberti specified was “the principal Law of Nature.”44 In his view, this harmony was far from rigid or abstract. Like the harmony found in nature itself, it could inhabit an infinite variety of forms, as long as the parts fit together well. And while such “harmony of all parts” unquestionably had a mathematical basis, it was the naked eye that registered its achievement, at the point where “nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse.”45 I am not at all suggesting that Alberti was lax on formal requirements when it came to locating and defining architectural beauty. Reading just a few pages of his treatise shows that he was a real believer in

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rules, especially of the mathematical sort. He just as clearly felt that everyone else in the building process should believe in them as well. (Those who do not, he sniffed, can be dismissed as “ignorant, [despising] what they do not understand!”46) What I am suggesting is that just as there is a recognizably pragmatic, even flexible side to his own architectural creations, he may also have proved willing to bend some rules when it came to urban arrangements as well. In the same central chapter of his treatise just quoted from, Alberti further remarks about concinnitas that “nor does [it] arise so much from the Body in which it is found, or any of its Members, as from itself, and from Nature.  .  .  .”47 Nature, full of harmony, but not where one looks for right angles. A similarly flexible spirit informs his admission that “it is manifest, that in those [bodies] which are esteemed beautiful, the Parts or Members are not constantly all the same, so as not to differ in any respect.”48 Finally, Alberti himself transposes these observations to the urban context. Thus he concedes that in some cities winding instead of straight streets “will add to the Idea of the Greatness of the town [and] they will likewise conduce very much to Beauty and Convenience.”49 Alberti may not have had a particular city in mind when he wrote such passages, even if one wonders which city could have been more set in nature—actually, over its head—

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than Venice? But it is hard to come up with a more likely candidate than the bends in the Grand Canal when reading on the same page his endorsement of irregular streets “winding about several Ways, backwards and forward, like the course of a river. . . .”50 As these and other passages suggest, in the end there was enough leeway in even as rigorous a classicist as Alberti to allow for alternative, and markedly flexible visions of urban beauty.51 And in this flexibility architecture showed itself to be as accomodating as was art itself. In both spheres the impulse to dictate firm rules and procedures in a collective effort to revive ancient norms of beauty soon gave way to considerable flexibility in practice. Thus not long after Alberti had launched the formal discussion of beauty in buildings, both art and architectural theory acknowledged the legitimacy of “correcting” formal solutions that were perfectly orthodox in terms of theory that nevertheless were not well received by the naked eye. In fact Vignola, in the preface to his treatise Rule(s) of the Five Orders of Architecture (1562), cited Vitruvius himself as an authority for permitting the architect “to enlarge or to diminish the proportions of ornamental members in order to remedy with art where our vision has been deceived by some occurrence.”52 Thus even within what would seem to be a firm neoclassical paradigm there could be substantial debate,

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and even open competition among different understandings of beauty in art and architecture.53 One especially influential distinction between various types or degrees of beauty derived from Platonic aesthetics, which acknowledged the difference between pulchrum and aptum, that is, a universal “beautiful” as opposed to being “suitable” or “appropriate” in specific contexts or circumstances. Carlo Ginzburg has suggested that the art historian and theorist Giorgio Vasari himself relied on these criteria when he differentiated absolute beauty from beauty as defined at specific stages in the progress of art, and adds that he had found confirmation of this belief in a passage from Cicero’s De oratore he had read in Castiglione’s The Courtier.54 Finally, what had emerged by the mid-sixteenth-century as an open and energetic debate had evolved a century later into full-scale, opposing factions. In 1683 two leading French designers, the physician Claude Perrault and an architectural theorist and educator, François Blondel, publicly battled over definitions of architectural beauty in a debate central to the ongoing querelle pitting the ancients against the moderns. Blondel, drawing in part on Roland Fréart de Chambray’s widely-read treatise Parallel between Ancient and Modern Architecture (1650), which reviewed adaptations of the five classical orders by the major architects of the French

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and especially Italian Renaissance, defended a theory of beauty dictated by universal, unchanging principles and proportions inherited from the classical past. Perrault, however, distinguished this “positive” definition from his preference for more simple if arbitrary proportions based on “common sense” as manifested in custom, use, and even fashion. Rationalist universalism thus ran headlong into a flexible historicism, each with its own definition of architectural beauty, and each of these with important implications for any consideration of urban beauty.55 This is a good point to return to our principal concern: what the broader corpus of urban discourse reveals about early modern notions of civic beauty. Venice is a logical starting-point for considering any explanatory role the hypothetical of non-classical urban beauty could play in a specific civic context.56 One matter should be made clear from the very beginning: Venice did not pass the muster of beautiful cities because it was exempted thanks to its spectacular site. That there were no such shortcuts to urban beauty is confirmed this time by internal discourse itself. Two texts strike me as particularly relevant here. I have systematically traced references to beauty in the 1493 paean to Venice by the city’s official curmudgeon historian, Marin Sanudo. It turns out that in this widely read text he alludes only once to the beauty of

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the city itself, as a whole, even though as we have noted earlier, these encomia are precisely where one first looks for an abundance of such references.57 Sanudo does make a dozen generic references to the beauty of Venetian women, and of houses and palaces in specific areas. These are followed by the beauty of the Campo San Polo and its street fair, a church clock close to the Rialto, and even the fish in the nearby marketplace. Finally he identifies a few individual architectural items as beautiful. These are mostly churches, but naturally he also highlights the two buildings that house the most beauty, the basilica of San Marco and the Ducal Palace. If we ask what we can conclude from this, well, it is only one text, but still, what predominates is sheer dispersion. Venice has plenty of beauty, to be sure, but it resides more in individual parts and pieces than in the urbs as a whole. The architectural timeline must also be kept in mind. After all, Sanudo wrote his laudatio three decades before the ambitious plan to remake the city center and its architecture—the famous renovatio urbis—that began under the doge Andrea Gritti in the 1520s, and endowed Venice with a broad reputation for taking forceful steps toward urban embellishment.58 Renovation in the sense of both public and private sectors making deliberate aesthetic choices among a broad range of possible combinations played

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an evident role here. That Venetians made considerable efforts to introduce certain classical elements in their buildings prior to the 1520s is well documented.59 Yet equally well known is the fact that these were not enough to turn any aesthetic corner, and that other support was needed. It soon appeared. By the mid-sixteenth century the earlier Tuscan or Roman touches were now accompanied by a new effort to enhance the city’s image by deliberately taking advantage of Venice’s most distinctive resource: its water. Thus a campaign to intensify the effect of the city’s “spectacular waterfront architecture” took shape through the relatively simple expedient of gearing the frontage angles of major new buildings—for example Palladio’s visibly classical churches of San Giorgio and the Redentore—to be better seen not just from the Grand Canal and the Giudecca that they directly faced, but also from other points throughout the city, particularly the central San Marco area.60 If this hypothesis is correct, one can reread the sixteenth century as a period that converted what had earlier been individualistic and unplanned practice into full-scale public planning policy. What is more, the area affected by this novel initiative was not limited just to the city center. Instead, it affected a much broader field of vision, including the lower end of the entire Bay of San Marco.

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The other anomaly mentioned above is lodged in a different set of texts from the following generation: the edition, translation and commentaries on Vitruvius by another patrician, the humanist scholar and cleric Daniele Barbaro. In a recent study of great interest, Margaret D’Evelyn suggests that Barbaro saw Venice as an urban space that brought together two different types of architectural beauty. The first is artificial beauty, in the sense of being the product of the aesthetic qualities formal classical architecture deliberately promotes, especially the Vitruvian requisites of proportion and symmetry. These were lodged mainly in the large new buildings rising up in the city’s monumental center, as well as in the growing number of patrician palaces built in Florentine and Roman style. The other is a more natural form of beauty, which in the case of Venice emerged not from the new classical edifices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but rather from those undertaken or restored in the local artisanal tradition. These moreover explicitly include popular housing, which was built in brick instead of stone.61 Barbaro was cautious enough not to justify this departure from classicism’s near-exclusive preference for stone just by lodging it firmly in nature, however authoritative that might be. Instead, he located a direct ancient precedent for the same effect in the city’s elite buildings, in the Palace of Mausolus

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in Halicarnassus, which not only was famously built of brick but also combined brick with white stone, just as early modern Venetian architects did in public buildings and porticoes. Finally, that Barbaro came up with this argument is especially telling. If anyone in mid-sixteenth-century Venice was a hyper-humanist, it was he, and that he should forthrightly suggest that there are different types of beauty, that one size or model does not fit all, takes on added significance. I will go further out on this limb to suggest that while Venice was uniquely beautiful, its beauty was not unique. In other words, while Venice obviously was a singular city in many respects, its being made of vernacular brick dwellings dating from the Middle Ages, and broken only hither and yon by more monumental buildings (mostly palaces) in the classical idiom was far from singular, and not just in Italy. Acqua alta was unique; placing brick and stone side by side was not. Seen from this perspective, Venice is much less of an anomaly, and more like an especially dramatic exemplar of a standard Italian accommodation to the stringent requirements of Renaissance theory within cities whose overall fabric continued to be non-classical in character.62 For in the end it is Venice that absorbs classicism, not vice versa, and it did so in a way that allowed the two languages peacefully to coexist. This may have made Florentine or Roman

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purists choke with laughter, but the verdict of the rest of Europe was near unanimous approval. And this, I would venture, further opened a pathway by which alternative, non-classical visions of beauty, urban or not, could develop. Looking Ahead Whence then the future? One very rough sketch focusing on specific way-stations in a broad but winding trajectory would start with the suggestion that the fundamental realignment in European aesthetics— including literature alongside art and architecture— that took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries involved not so much the forging of new definitions of beauty than the reworking and extension of older ones. Venice moreover may offer the showcase evidence that notions of urban beauty in particular played a significant role in this transformation. This was thanks to its highly visible historical role as the foot in the door that led over time to ever more explicit recognition of plural criteria for—and less rigid understandings of—specifically civic beauty. And in the urban sphere one can see over the course of a very long eighteenth century a sort of bifurcation in which Paris made ever greater strides in consolidating its im-

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age as a beautiful city in terms of classical criteria— above all, by expressing magnificence through regularity and uniformity63 —while Venice more quietly offered a counter-model, one that eventually found articulation in the concept of the picturesque.64 This did not happen overnight. While the fit may seem all too predictable now, Venice’s assumption of the role of picturesque capital of Europe was long in the making.65 This was partly due to the slowness with which the quality of the picturesque itself was defined. A crucial preliminary stage involved not the concept’s break with classical aesthetics, but rather its early development within neo-classicism largely in reaction to Edmund Burke’s forceful insertion of his category of the sublime into contemporary debates over beauty. From the start Burke had no quarrel with the classical investment of beauty in regularity and proper proportions. But he broke with what he saw as the complacent system-making of Addison, Shaftesbury, and others to offer the sublime as a hitherto underestimated category whose power of sensual attraction easily overwhelmed that of conventional, that is neoclassical beauty. To my knowledge at no point does Burke consider in his discussion man-made structures such as cities; indeed, he barely mentions buildings—much less Venice!—at all.66 But his determined assault on above all the psychological assumptions that under-

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lay neoclassical aesthetics paved the way for the emergence of a rival system of beauty based upon a much more vibrant sensationalism, against which the eventual consolidation of the “picturesque” seems remarkably innocuous in comparison. Jumping ahead, one could even say that Venice did not get the recognition it deserved for its singular contribution to the history of urban aesthetics until Ruskin put its stones into the title of what may have been the most influential book written about a city since St. Augustine. Ruskin’s admiration for Venice knew few limits; as he noted in a diary entry from 1841, it was “the Paradise of Cities.”67 He also had the name and address of hell: that was the “Renaissance,” that is, classicism, the Samson-like form of self-blinding degeneration which had produced the modern city and its architecture, both of which he abhorred. But apart from their relentless message of rejection his texts also remind us that even toward the endpoint of our story we find architectural and urban beauty bumping into each other constantly, but never fully connecting, much less merging to become one. Ruskin’s vision is in fact very much marked by their separation, even if there are few fissures in his ironclad preference for a single style to suit both, the Gothic.68 Note how his understanding of “picturesque” beauty—a term he obviously did not invent, but which he

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certainly did much to develop and diffuse, especially in the memorable sixth chapter of his Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)—has a much more discrete presence in his The Stones of Venice (1851–1853).69 In the end Ruskin infuses the concept of “picturesque” with more relevance and above all much more power when he discusses buildings than when he looks beyond to the city that houses them. For him the city is the site that shelters and nourishes the edifice of his broader aesthetic vision. And the center of that vision is architecture, not the city itself. That it is difficult to separate writing about architecture from writing about cities goes without saying. The two bodies of discourse overlap and interact so closely that we should not be surprised to find them subject to the same parameters of change. One conjectural sketch of their interaction over time highlights the existence of two crucial turning points, which coincide with the opening and the closing of the early modern period. The fifteenth century witnessed the beginning of the slow gravitation of European elites toward classicism as a template for expressing and understanding beauty, with profound consequences for urban image, architecture, and infrastructure. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see a somewhat less slow gravitation away from classicism, and toward the crucial loosening of its

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hold over aesthetic practice and discourse. Change in rhythms did not take place across the board: if anything, while classicism arguably weathered the nineteenth century much better in urban architecture than in art, the opposite was true of the earlier period.70 The high costs of investing in buildings assured that the vast majority of the early modern urban fabric continued to be non-classical in structure and appearance, and until the 1800s this was as true of Paris as of any other city. Finally, one could go on to suggest that exercises of the sort undertaken in this chapter may offer some hints about how to look at discourse in broader terms. We have seen for example that urban discourse differs from architectural discourse, but cannot be separated from it; the intermeshing is simply too tight. Our winding itinerary also suggests that it is clearly misleading to oppose classical, elite, learned discourse against its demotic, irregular, vernacular counterparts; once again, the points of similarity and sharing are too numerous to be ignored. However, if we think of these clusters of discourse less as poles and more as amorphous nuclei of ideas, sentiments, and modes of expression, differentiated from each other but with visible points of connection and overlap as well as opposition, we may come nearer to the more messy and dispersed discursive realities of the early modern era.

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Or better yet, messy and dispersed, but also endowed with a touch of irony... The rise and eventual triumph of picturesque notions of beauty have traditionally been linked to the Romantic rediscovery of nature. Perhaps it also had an additional, less rural source, not just in Arcadia, but also in Athens? Venice: Selling the Myth It is important to keep in mind that discourse on urban beauty underwent important quantitative as well as qualitative changes. The flowering of just one genre—the guidebook, for example—provides one especially revealing example. The case of Francesco Sansovino in particular provides eloquent proof of the impact enterpreneurial initiative could have on civic writing. Sansovino was the son of Jacopo, the architect who contributed most influentially to reorienting Venetian buildings (and especially patrician palaces) in a classicizing direction.71 Francesco was not lacking in artistic ambitions, but he gravitated early on toward Venice’s booming printing industry. He soon became a well-known poligrafo, a term used to describe a combination of business manager, author, and jack-of-alltrades that flourished among Venetian publishers in particular.72 Sansovino issued numerous books under

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his own name, and many more with his imprint. Always the entrepreneur, early in his career he espied the opportunities Venice afforded in writing about the city itself. His first book on this topic was “All the Notable and Beautiful Things in Venice,” which he brought out (under the pseudonym of A. Guisconi) in 1556. Pitched as a dialogue between a native Venetian and an out-of-towner, it proved successful enough for Sansovino to relaunch it with a slightly different title and under his own name in 1561 and 1563. But he made his deepest mark on the image of the city with the publication in 1581 of a full-scale guidebook, “Venice, Most Notable and Singular City.” Arguably the single most widely-read text on early modern Venice, it went through three editions and was widely cited by natives and foreigners alike.73 Francesco’s last name played no little role in its success, and he did not hesitate to showcase his father’s contributions to reshaping the city’s image throughout the book. But above all he proved to be the sort of innovative cicerone who pleased readers by not just listing the city’s beauties, but also by ranking them in importance, which is something tourists in particular found helpful. (Not surprisingly, his roster of the “four best palaces” included two by his father).74 Also contributing to his success was his deft wielding of the insider terminology of both the building trade and humanist

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aesthetics, as well as his ability to tell insider stories about Venice’s recent strides in upgrading its public and elite architecture. In the end Sansovino’s career as author and publisher demonstrated the clear market appeal of certain types of urban discourse, and illustrated many of the possibilities open to those who like himself were willing to experiment with different approaches to writing about cities, and particularly about their beauty. The other reminder involves the opposite, that is, reining in one’s enthusiasm for Venice. Just as the “myth of Venice” in the history of political thought— that is, the prolonged characterization of the city as a lone outpost of republican freedom, economic prosperity, and social stability within a Europe beset by oppression, turmoil and division—has been unmasked as the self-serving propaganda that it was intended to be, something along the same lines could and should be done for its aesthetic equivalent. Venice has attracted boatloads of starry-eyed enthusiasts, but it also has had its share of dissidents, critics, and simply those who were disappointed when they finally saw (and smelled) the real city after hearing all the hype. A good candidate for the part of underwhelmed outsider would be Montaigne himself. The very short entry on Venice in his travel diary shows him spending only a week there (as opposed to five months in Rome). It reveals

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that from the beginning he was not very impressed with the place, as he “found it different from what he had imagined, and a little less wonderful.” Faithful to his habits, he inspected it with his usual “extreme diligence,” and found a number of things especially worth remarking: ““the government, the situation, the arsenal, the Square of Saint Mark, and the crowds of foreign people seem to him the most remarkable things.” Considerably less impressive than he expected was “that famous beauty that they attribute to the ladies of Venice,” and this despite his receiving a personal gift of a book of poems from the renowned courtesan-writer Veronica Franco. One thing did win his unflinching approval: the fact that despite the price of food being as high as in Paris, a gentleman could still live there cheaply, because this was the one city where he had no need of a horse or of a train of servants.75 Apart from this, though, he had little else to say, nor did Venice loom large in the rest of his writing. Tasks Pending This chapter has sought to complicate my earlier reading of early modern urban discourse by taking a closer look at a specific body of writing, that which linked architecture with urban beauty. This all too brief ex-

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ploration leaves a number of questions and chores for the future. I have only hinted at some of the ways in which one could approach urban discourse as a source for the quest for civic beauty. There are many other questions to be posed of this corpus, and ways to put it to the test. For instance, one easily manageable project would be to extend my hasty reading of Beatis’s travel journal to focus closely on what other loquatious witnesses have to say about the different cities they ran across in their wanderings. I have already cited from John Evelyn’s diaries of his journeys on the continent in the 1640s.76 One could come up with many other observant authors of equal interest, such as the English scholar-traveler Fynes Morison, who expressly included urban descriptions among the tasks that every traveler should carry out, or even Milton, who surveyed and compared various northern Italian cities during his 1638–39 tour.77 Another tack that would turn up some very clear statements about urban beauty would be to focus on writing about cities that manifestly lacked it. Naples, for example, suffered the paradox of being constantly derided by visitors, along with the occasional native, for its improvised and unattractive architecture and urban planning, although it was surrounded by spectacular natural beauty on all sides. This contradiction led one local apologist, the historian Giulio Cesare

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Capaccio, to remark in his 1630 dialogue Il Forastiero (The Out of Towner) that while it was true that Naples lacked the pretty palaces of Rome, Florence, Genoa and Venice, its beauty should not be sought in formal buildings—what he called architettura—but rather in commodità, provided by its rooftop terraces with views, its fountains and gardens nourished by fresh water, and the like.78 Here we find a transparent attempt to uncouple an urban image from its architectural components in order to favor the city, not its buildings—rather the reverse of the standard ploy of substituting a handful of handsome buildings for a broader if less inspiring civic fabric. A third, closely related approach would be to focus on cities whose beauty was dubious or in between. Early modern Madrid provides a good example of a city not especially renowned for being attractive, but that could be so at certain times or in certain places. For instance, when it was temporarily transformed through lighting, decoration, and other special effects. There is interesting testimony to this power of enhancement in the memoirs of the great scribbler about the court of Louis XIV, the duke of Saint-Simon. Toward the end of his life he was appointed ambassador to Spain. He complained about that the way he complained about everything else, and found precious little positive to say about Spain in general and

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Madrid in particular. But in writing about one evening’s procession through the city to the extramural shrine of Our Lady of Atocha, he noted that the entire route was decorated with brilliant display, with all the balconies illuminated by candles and covered with tapestries and beautiful hangings. This “admirable order,” he concluded, “was the most wonderful sight I ever saw, so full of majesty and splendour, and so perfectly orderly.”79 Finally, one should also keep in mind how definitions of beauty itself shifted over the long haul. For example, the notion of “embellishment” that loomed so large in French urban discourse during the eighteenth century sheltered a fairly wide range of issues under its umbrella.80 Voltaire’s Des embellissements de Paris of 1749—one of the most famous statements regarding the need further to beautify France’s showcase capital—actually had little to say about aesthetic issues.81 Instead, he used this rather thin, occasional, and above all policy-oriented piece to call for more public and private investment in order to bring about badly needed improvements not so much in the city’s image, as in its infrastructure. Streets, squares, markets, fountains, monuments—all required urgent attention, especially in the city’s center, “a dark, hideous” place of “shameful barbarism.” In his view—and in that of many other contemporaries—urban beau-

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ty could not be separated from utility. And if anything, this pairing would merely intensify with time, as is shown in the theoretical writings of one of the leading urbanists of the following generation, Pierre Patte. A royal engineer as well as an architect, Patte published in 1765 an essay which bore the same title as Voltaire’s. In it he intensified the emphasis on utility by stressing the crucial dimension of urban hygiene, which his predecessor had mentioned only in passing.82 Together the two texts—merely the tip of a hefty iceberg of enlightened writing on civic improvement—injected a highly utilitarian approach to urban beauty that while not lacking in precedents, nevertheless marked a visible shift in emphasis away from the more traditional aesthetic concerns that had dominated previous discussions of civic image.83 These are but a few of the ways one can poke and probe different types of urban discourse to find what it can reveal about the criteria and actual performance, so to speak, of urban beauty. Meanwhile, the issue raises yet other questions about early modern cities and the ways in which both their inhabitants and outsiders responded to them. One of the most topical in these days of globalization involves following the movement of European urban discourse and its bearers to the world beyond. If we saw travelers looming especially large as producers of urban discourse with-

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in Europe, what sort of role did they play after they left the Old World behind them? Were they missionaries with an exclusivist message readily confirmed by foreign shortcomings, or did they let wonder and strangeness get the upper hand, and suggest to them new alternatives to European understandings of urban beauty? A preliminary prospection suggests that standard conventions were put to a stress test when Europeans left their continent and ran across new types and shapes of cities elsewhere. What happened then? Did this sort of mobility induce change in the criteria for urban beauty?84 If so, how, and whom did this affect? All Europeans, or just the educated classes? Or might the latter put up the most resistance to changing their aesthetic schemae? Finally, what sort of consequences follow when Europeans begin to see similarity instead of difference between their cities and those beyond their borders? An obvious candidate would be the possible likeness or even linkage between the Venetian “model” of beauty that I have talking about, and that of, say, Istanbul. The main spokesman for the latter city today, Orhan Pamuk, has explicitly evoked this similarity, and attributes it to a shared aesthetic of the picturesque, which he tells us he first learned about by reading Ruskin.85 Travel journals of the sort I  have highlighted in this chapter make clear that the fascination that both

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Istanbul and Venice provoke involves not only the picturesque, but also classical, even antique sources of beauty. If I may borrow a page out of one of Natalie’s books, I  wonder if we could not follow here in Leo Africanus’s footsteps in search of a sort of early modern consolidation of notions of urban beauty that cross confessional as well as cultural lines, by comparing what Christians wrote about Istanbul with what Muslims wrote about, say, Paris?86 Part of the work for this is already in place. Thanks to the discourse it produced we know a fair amount about the Busbecq embassy to Istanbul in the mid-1550s and the rich discourse (as well as the astonishing drawings by Melchor Loris) it produced.87 But we have devoted much less attention to how and why the Venetian aristocrat Ambrosio Bembo when first seeing the maidan or main square in Isfahan in 1674 wrote that “for size or beauty it surpasses many of the most beautiful [squares] in Europe.” (By the way, here he was only echoing the impressions of his predecessor Pietro della Valle, who wrote in 1617 that he found this space more beautiful than the Piazza Navona in his native Rome).88 Whether contrasting the different ways cities could be beautiful, ugly, or indifferent, the crucial goal in all these circumstances is to find dense enough discourse to afford us some sense of consensus over the criteria

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for urban beauty, and how these may have changed over time. And if I may close on a note of Natalian optimism, believe me, we have more than enough sources for so rewarding a task.

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Chapter 3 Dia log ue s: Ta l k i ng t he Tow n

From the beginning this book has suggested that certain early modern literary forms were especially appropriate or adapted well to discussing urban themes or settings. In other words, some genres reveal more about the city than do others; indeed, they revel in their heightened urbanity. I  then suggested that the walk or itinerary had shown itself to be unusually well suited for presenting a city on paper. Another obvious case is the chronicle. Focused histories of events of this sort won early prominence as a form of urban discourse, and their popularity converted them into an unusually rich and authoritative way of writing about cities. That the civic chronicle also turned out to be an inclusive, accessible form is shown by the presence of merchants and artisans among its authors, which held true even at the higher reaches of the genre, such as antiquarianism. 97

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This chapter focuses on a third candidate, a form of writing that was equally flexible and that also found an enthusiastic reception among early modern writers and readers alike: the dialogue.1 A great deal has been written about such colloquies in early modern Europe, although more about them as works of literature than as sources for history. What first drew my attention to this genre was a characteristically learned and suggestive article by Peter Burke, based upon a lecture he gave at the Warburg Institute in 1987.2 It is, like everything he writes, wide-ranging and suggestive. It is also enthusiastic. It is easy to see that he likes dialogues, and clearly enjoys reading and learning from them. But Burke is not the only prominent early modernist who has been drawn to this literary form. In fact Natalie Davis opened her tri-biographical study of Glikl of Hameln, Marie de l’Incarnation and Maria Sibylla Merian with a memorable dialogue not just among them, but also with them. It starts off with the three reluctant protagonists of the book indignantly agreeing on only two things: that the author had much explaining to do, and that it was not going to be easy…3 The texts this chapter grapples with hail from my ensemble of urban discourse, which means that most of them are much less deliberately literary than those studied by my predecessor Averil Cameron, who spoke

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three years ago on dialogues in twelfth-century Byzantium.4 Like her I try to draw attention to the form of these texts as well as to their contents, while stressing the diversity of the often very specific themes that found expression in these written conversations. I also take another cue from her in placing emphasis on the same question she posed at the beginning of her lectures—why dialogue? The reasons for choosing it in particular over other literary forms are a central concern running through this chapter as well. Dialogues in or about European cities literally began in ancient Greek theater. However, the sort of texts I will be dealing with were not dramatic. Those that were grounded in theater rarely focused on cities, although they usually had a polis in the background. And much the same can be said for the broader corpus of ancient colloquies. On the whole they preferred as settings a locus amoenus, such as a villa, or a tranquil grove outside the town gates, where their protagonists could stroll while talking. They kept cities and their agoras and other centers of busyness within sight, yet at a distance, as befitted the literary form deemed most appropriate for conveying give and take among philosophers. Dialogues that focused on the urbs itself began to breathe on their own in the later Middle Ages, as part of a general expansion in civic discourse that became

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ever more visible, especially in northern Italy.5 This time, in a fair number of cases the city moved out from behind the text to occupy its foreground. An ever-growing number of oral exchanges were not only set in urban venues, but actually looked to the city, its inhabitants, and its way of life for their subject matter. The main pioneer in this, as in so many other aspects of urban discourse and beyond, was Florence.6 Leading intellectuals from Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Matteo Palmieri, and Alberti, to Machiavelli and Guicciardini as well as many lesser lights, turned to the dialogue for both public and private purposes. Yet acknowledging Florentine protagonism and precocity in creating and circulating dialogues should not lead us to overlook how the same sort of texts flourished elsewhere as well. Urban debates abounded throughout Europe, as one form among many in the rising tide of new discourse in and about cities that these talks have been focusing on. The sheer numbers and geographical spread of such works leads one to wonder, once again: who wrote these dialogues, and why? As always, the who question is easier to answer. Most of the adepts of this specific approach to urban writing seem to have originated in more or less the same milieux: the patriciate, along with the urban middle classes, especially local bureaucrats, notaries, and the clergy. Certain individuals from below

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this social base-line also contributed to the growing numbers of civic colloquia, as will be seen. The only social groups missing, in fact, stood close to the extremes. On the one hand there were the masses of wage-earners and others among the working classes; if nothing else, the widespread illiteracy that prevailed at this social level prevented all but a few of its members from recording their conversations on paper. At the other end stood the traditional territorial aristocracy. This cohort was much given to dialogue, but in palaces and other settings at a remove from active participation in civic life, and from identification with civic discourse. Which brings up a pair of issues. I do not wish to leave the impression that all or even most dialogues celebrated cities. In fact, many of these texts were declaredly anti-urban, both implicitly and explicitly. Among the former we find those set in rural retreat from the madding crowd, and most frequently in the immediate countryside outside a city. As for the latter, some of these works specifically expressed hostility to urban life. This was certainly the case of the one of the most famous series of domestic debates that took place in seventeenth-century England, the spiritual table talk the household of Nicholas Ferrar held in 1630s at the country house known as Little Gidding, in Cambridgeshire. One running theme throughout

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these conversations was how the stoic renunciation of urban bustle and corruption found compensation in an inner peace and detachment that favored introspection as well as communal harmony.7 In short, dialogues that forsook the city instead of featuring it were legion, and one can be certain that more of these texts had their origins (and hearts) in villas than in city halls. Before moving on, another related category deserves mention: what could be called para-urban dialogues. By this I  mean colloquies that are located in a city, but which contain little or no reference to the urban setting. One example is the text known as the “Danielillo.” Of unknown authorship, it opens with a walk taken through the port city of Livorno by one Don Antonio, a Spanish nobleman recently returned from Rome where he met with frustration in an attempt to revive his failing allegiance to Catholicism. While strolling down the Via Ferdinanda, he was surprised to overhear local citizens speaking Spanish. These turned out to be observant Sephardic Jews, even though some had been baptized, and at least one had been a priest. Most interesting among them was a teenager named Danielillo. As they walk together the boy uses his simple eloquence to expound the divine truth of Judaism, while exposing the multiple deceits of Roman Catholic Christianity. The re-

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ligious content is truly fascinating, but the text makes no mention of any urban feature, save the name of the street—now the Via Grande, which housed the famous synagogue built in 1602—nor does it have anything to say about the actual physical setting of the walk. In other words the city is evoked, and then hastily recedes to the background; the rest is silence.8 As to the more complex question of why prefer the dialogue to other genres: while it would be far too simple to argue that form follows function, it nevertheless seems evident that the stylistic features specific to dialogues rendered them attractive in a number of ways. Early modern writers were quick to appreciate that dialogues not only strongly appealed to readers. They also detected in them certain strategic qualities they could turn to their own advantage. One of these seems particularly relevant in an age increasingly given to dissimulation and disguise (or so contemporaries thought).9 If used with skill the form allowed practitioners the chance to privilege individual voices while giving expression simultaneously to multiple points of view. In other words, dialogues offered a minimal level of opacity that could—if so wished, and with a bit of luck—be taken for disengagement. The promise of diminished risk—not to be taken lightly in societies peopled with active and often touchy censors—certainly helps explain the special predilection

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for the dialogue form of major champions of heterodoxy, including Torquato Tasso, Jean Bodin, or Giordano Bruno—for all the good it did the latter.10 We should not overdo the notion of dialogue as a form of protection or subterfuge for political messages, much less subversion. The powers that be were no fools, and had no trouble detecting excesses of deviance.11 Moreover, many urban colloquies showed no interest in being ambiguous regarding either their message or purpose. This was certainly true of the anonymous “Dialogue between the judges Laín Caluo and Nuño Rasura,” from around 1570. This lively Spanish diatribe has a single aim in mind: to lament the decay of the city of Burgos, rule over which had passed from the rough but just, El Cid-like warriors of its glorious medieval past, to an upstart elite of converted Jewish merchants and tradesmen.12 Similarly transparent, if far less polemical intentions marked Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos’s Sítio de Lisboa (The Prospect of Lisbon). This lengthy chat between a Soldier, Philosopher and a Político was published in 1608 in a patent if unsuccessful effort to put forward Lisbon’s candidacy for the capital of the Hispanic monarchy.13 All the same, this uniquely open form did offer a certain degree of discursive freedom. By building plurality into its construction, the dialogue quite literally gave its reader the benefit of the doubt, in the

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sense that different voices could be heard. And while some authors were indifferent to this advantage, others seized the opportunity to avoid stacking the cards in favor of a particular option, giving free rein instead to expressing diverse, even opposing points of view. Consider for example the conversation between a grain dealer and a baker on the issue of urban food supplies which the Burgos humanist Juan Maldonado published in Latin in 1539.14 The merchant argued for free trade, while his interlocutor sought to limit the open play of the market through close regulation. In this case, the dialogue form permitted the exposition of both positions. The author’s own leanings seem clear enough, given his emphasis on the moral shortcomings of standard market practices such as hoarding grain in times of scarcity in order to raise its price. But in the end he aired both sides of the argument, and offered readers a certain latitude in forming their opinions. And one could easily cite other exemplars of such openness.15 To my knowledge, no one has undertaken a general study, much less an inventory, of the early modern urban dialogue, especially from a comparative point of view. My poking around among Spanish and Italian texts in particular has come up with several dozen examples, and as ever I  am confident that many more are waiting to be discovered in a wide range of

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contexts. The following is thus a quick run-through, whose purpose is to suggest the types of authors and the themes (and cities) they discussed. First, some dialogues tackled the subject of urban beauty discussed in the previous chapter. I mentioned there that a ground-breaking sixteenth-century book about Venice—and one that predictably devoted much attention to its beauty, both as a whole and in its parts—was a dialogue, Francesco Sansovino’s Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia (1556, and substantially expanded in 1561.) Moreover, my overview of Florentine texts ended with a reference to Francesco Bocchi’s Bellezze di Firenze, first published in 1591. Another book with virtually the same title was a hundred-page colloquy by one Bartolomeo Paschetti on the “beauties of Genoa,” which used this theme as a lever with which to open a discussion on the standard set of urban questions—not just the city’s beauty and excellence, but also its history, political preeminence, the antiquity and distinction of its ruling class, and the like.16 Other dialogues also included beauty as one of various criteria for judging a city. Pedro Mejía, a humanist and one of the best-selling authors of sixteenth-century Spain, began his 1547 Diálogos with two friends bumping into each other in Seville while en route to visiting the same sick acquaintance. Bernardo says let’s take this street, there is too much traffic

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on that one, and as they walk Gaspar begins to praise all the recent improvements in local houses, especially in their facades. Ah, says Bernardo, that may be, but we’ve got a long way to go, because all this repair is taking place in single-story buildings, which cannot compare with the three or four-story houses in Barcelona. But, replies Gaspar, what is done for fermosura y ornato (beauty and ornament) can damage one’s health, especially when one has to live in such tall buildings during the summertime heat... This give and take goes on and on, until they finally reach their destination.17 And another example of these beauty contests brings us back to Venice, while keeping us in the streets. A mid-eighteenth-century poetic dialogue by the Venetian engraver Antonio Visentini features a discussion between a local virtuoso and an English visitor over what constituted “good taste” in architecture. They both wind up agreeing that the “license” Palladio had showed in crowning a giant order with a composite-Corinthian capital on the facade of the church of San Francesco della Vigna was a breach of decorum that could nevertheless be pardoned thanks to the architect’s having included an authoritative precedent from the Temple of Mars in Rome in his architectural treatise. This is obviously one of those sublime Grand Tour moments, when civil, learned conversation between insider and outsider reveals a shared sophisticat-

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ed familiarity with the classical idiom and the proper ways in which it could be contravened when the greater interest of beauty was at stake.18 Colloquys set in cities dealt with many other matters, ranging from philosophy and political thought to highly practical undertakings such as studying foreign languages.19 The following quick rundown in rough chronological order suggests some of the rich variety of themes dealt with in this particular subset of civic discourse: • Formal humanistic writing occasionally looked to the city as both setting and subject of colloquies. Among the various dialogues the renowned Neapolitan scholar Giovanni Gioviano Pontano wrote was the Antonius (post 1471), a friendly (and lightly anti-clerical) satire that congregated an odd assortment of local humanists at the Portico Antoniano—a nickname for the palace that had belonged to the renowned poet and humanist Panormita and where the meetings of his learned academy took place—located in the ancient center of Naples to bid a bibulous farewell to the recently deceased poet himself.20 Much space is devoted to idle chat, including in-jokes impermeable to modern readers. While the setting repeatedly surfaces in the conversations, and pass-

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ersby are saluted as they appear, this is a dialogue very much set in the city, yet not that focused on it. However, few other colloquys from the period reconstitute the give and talk, so to speak, of literal dialogue in an urban context so thoroughly as does this work. And fewer still are as effective in conveying on paper the sense of bustle and busy-ness of the civic setting, even if this is a mere aside to its main concern with poetry, language, and literature. • One of the earliest descriptions of an ideal city of the Renaissance appeared in dialogue form, as did its even more famous successor, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). The second major architectural treatise after Alberti’s Ten Books, and the first such work written in the vernacular, was the so-called Architectural Book that Antonio Averlino, better known by his nickname Filarete, wrote in the 1460s.21 In his beautifully illustrated manuscript the author, his patron Francesco Sforza, and members of the Lombard court discuss how to build from scratch a new town (named Sforzinda, after the mercenary turned maecenas). While the relation between this exercise in radial regularity and real cities such as the duke’s seat of power in Milan was tenuous at best, one can hardly deny its influence, thanks especially to the

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wide readership of its printed version among architects and others in Italy and beyond.22 • One of the richest urban dialogues of the entire early modern period features Mexico City. The Toledan humanist Francisco Cervantes de Salazar was a professor at the university there, and published a series of Latin-language dialogues in 1554. Three of these dealt with different aspects of metropolitan life, the first with the university where the author taught, while the third covered the nearby countryside. By far the most interesting exchange to focus on the city itself was the second. In it two local men, Zuazo and Zamora, take the foreigner Alfaro on a horseback ride around the town. After pointing out the major buildings and the special features of local domestic architecture, they wind up in the market place. There they treat the outsider to a running commentary on the sort of goods the natives are selling there, and render their foodstuffs and medicinal plants in Nahua. “Outlandish names!” complains Álvaro. “As ours to them,” replies Zamora.23 • The anonymous dialogue Viaje de Turquía is shrouded in mystery, beginning with the identity of its author, referred to in the text as Pedro de Urdemalas. Written in the mid-1550s but not published until the twentieth century, it follows

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its narrator on an odyssey—its subtitle—from Spain to Turkey and back. The picaresque memoir offers three types of urban description: a more or less formal presentation of Istanbul (referred to as Constantinople throughout the text), with which the lengthy tome closes; a more extensive and highly revealing chronicle of daily life within the Ottoman capital, in which the narrator presents himself as a thoroughly accomplished rogue who wins favor at court by convincing key figures there (above all the Sultan) of his medicinal skills; and a series of short vignettes of the Italian cities he passes through on his way home, including Naples, Rome, Bologna, Venice, and Genoa.24 The reconstruction of urban life, including the peculiar features of individual cities, is lively and convincing, and reflects the author’s skill in melding together satire, travelogue, formal description, and autobiography. • Several dialogues from the mid-sixteenth century demonstrate the uses of this form for discussing urban politics beyond its original nucleus in Florence. Rome developed an especially interesting variant of satirical reading of local—which invariably meant papal—politics. Niccolò Franco, a mid-sixteenth-century writer who specialized in bitingly critical, even obscene dialogues

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and letters, was actually executed there in 1570 for having written during the recent sede vacante a text that lampooned Pope Paul IV. His Commento took the form of a dialogue between Marforio and Pasquino, the two ancient Roman statues that symbolized popular humor mixed with political and personal satire.25 • While on the subject: an equally rough-and-tumble approach to politics, and one that also involves talking statues, can be found in the various interesting formats that appeared among the at least 6000 pamphlet mazarinades that were published in Paris during the mid-seventeenth century revolt known as the Fronde. A fair number of dialogues appeared within this cohort. Among the more imaginative was a conversation between the equestrian statue of Henri IV at the Pont Neuf and that of his son Louis XIII in the Place Royale; not surprisingly, their chat focused on the lamentable state of France since they had left the throne.26 • The most influential (and typically vehement) work written by the famous Italian religious reformer Giordano Bruno during his mid-1580s exile in England was the “Ash Wednesday Supper” (La Cena de le Cenere, published in Italian in London in 1584). It offers, to quote the title page,

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“five dialogues, by four interlocutors, with three reflections, on two subjects,” and is read today as his principal defense of Copernican cosmology. It opens with a brief walk full of clownish accidents (such a falling in a cesspool) during which the Italian and two learned colleagues stumble their way through a dark London night from Bruno’s lodgings in the French embassy close to the Strand to Fulke Greville’s house near Whitehall.27 It is valuable for our purposes not only because it joins together two of our motifs—walking and talking in cities—but also because it brings into view an image that is much less positive (to say the least) about the urban context than most of the ones featured in this book. • In a very different key was a mid-seventeenthcentury textbook for merchants written up as a series of exchanges between a foreigner and a native Flemish merchant in sixteenth-century Antwerp. The Dialogues Flamen-Françoys traictants du fait de la marchandise, by one “G. de Vivre” and published in Delft in 1642, deals with a wide range of issues regarding the local economy. These include the advantages for business of urban concentration, the positive effects of public investment in infrastructure, as well as the need for civic oversight over guilds to make sure that

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their corporativist tendencies did not interfere with free markets. Here we see a good example of the more pragmatic side of civic dialogues, which treat their urban setting not as an ideal-type locus in political theory or philosophy but pragmatically, as a center for activity and decision-making within the real world.28 • Rounding out what could easily become an endless list is the 1764 Paseos or “Walks through Granada” by the priest Juan Velázquez de Echevarría.29 The text is structured as a dialogue steeped in urban history and erudition between two figures, Forastero (the “Outsider”) and Granadino. Over a thousand pages long, and pedantic beyond belief, it nevertheless has recently won notice as one of the earliest expressions of positive appreciation of the artistic and above all architectual legacy of Muslim Spain to appear in print. This list could be extended further, but enough has been said to give some sense not only of the striking diversity of themes covered by urban colloquies, but also of how, more than any other literary form outside of theater, dialogues can reproduce much of the sheer dynamism and give and take of life in cities.30 I would go on to suggest that another singular—and singularly attractive—feature of this subgenre is its

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ability to persuade readers that they are a transcription of real speech, instead of being the artificial constructions that they are. Which raises a fundamental question regarding linkage: can written texts of this sort tell us anything about actual urban speech from the early modern period? While this is literally an impossible question to answer, I believe it belongs in the category of questions that are nevertheless “good to think.” Especially because, by happenstance, we are fortunate enough to have a reference to a particular set of oral exchanges that connects directly with the other two chapters, in that they feature a real-life dialogue about one of the most famous facades in Italy, they very much focus on what sort of beauty should prevail within the city, and they involve a very specific subset of authors, or in this case, interlocutors. Dialogues: The How is the Why Of the many unfinished facades of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, that of Bologna’s civic basilica of San Petronio is one of the most famous, as well as notorious. Its fame derives from the calibre of the architects—among them Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, Vignola, and Palladio—who submitted projects for its completion. The notoriety comes from the fact that no one ever

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won this commission. How to finish a Gothic building in classical style was a circle that failed to square, as a walk past the (still) incomplete facade in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna today makes immediately clear. Architectural historians have examined this fracas as a revealing episode in the history of styles; Erwin Panofsky devoted one of his first articles to it, and it earned an entire chapter in Rudolf Wittkower’s final set of lectures.31 I bring it up with a different purpose in mind. The cover image of this book shows the wooden model of a finished San Petronio made in 1514 by the building’s official architect, one Arduino Arriguzzi. This poor fellow had no better luck than any of the other contestants. However, his name stands out in the competition because after being rejected he filed a written complaint. In it he reveals that while inside the church he had been listening in on the conversations of his fellow townsmen as they discussed his model, and that his design for completing the facade was rejected because “people of all sorts, priests, monks, artisans, peasants, schoolteachers, handymen, servants, spindle-makers, porters, and whoever, think they are architects, and make known their opinions.”32 Even worse, popular opinion was so negative that he eventually had to suffer the indignity of having the part of the facade he had managed to build torn down and redone in a different style.

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Architectural historians have long turned to this passage as a showcase example of a sort of aesthetic class conflict between classical styles promoted by learned elites, and a local, vernacular, Gothic idiom favored by merchants, artisans, and others who were strongly committed to civic traditions, including time-worn guild organization and knowledge.33 I am drawn to it not just because it is a very intriguing discussion touching on urban and architectural beauty by an unusually wide range of participants, but also because it is precisely that, a public discussion or dialogue, unscheduled, held in the open-air (or nave), and which made its way onto paper thanks to the indignation of a deeply offended architect.34 The critiques that irritated the eavesdropping Arriguzzi so much evoke not only the infinitely broader world of everyday speech that many dialogues show an interest in reproducing. It also brings us back to our starting point: that the social identity of the persons discoursing about the city can leave a strong mark on the discourse itself. And here I return to one subset within our civic subset of dialogues, those written by artisans and other members of the urban popular classes, to see if we may not locate in this textual field the same sort of echo in writing not just of what Walter Ong referred to as “‘real’ or colloquial speech,” but also of speech with specific social, even political purposes.35

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Several popular urban dialogues stand out here for their possibilities of analysis. One of the first early modern artisans to achieve fame through his writing was the Nuremberg shoemaker Hans Sachs. A versatile author known for his pungent style in verse and prose, he produced an impressive string of colloquies that manifested not only his deep Protestant sympathies but also a strong gift for social, and especially anti-clerical satire.36 Another shoemaker, the Florentine Giambattista Gelli, also favored dialogues. Gelli used this form not only for expounding his moral and philosophical beliefs, especially in his best known book, the 1551 Capricci del bottaio—“the cooper’s whimsical thoughts,” an imaginary conversation between an artisan and his soul.37 He also circulated his controversial ideas about the origins and development of the Italian language in dialogue form, in his “Discussion of the difficulties of applying rules to our language,” written some three years later.38 However, for the text whose author most clearly stayed in as well as hailed from popular circles, and which most forthrightly tackles the discussion of specifically urban concerns, I would prefer to return to where I started, Barcelona, and to a dialogue written around 1730 by a local shopkeeper named Pere Serra i Postius.39 He lived from 1661 to 1748, and spent his life working as a mercer, or retailer of cloths. Deep-

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ly interested in local history, he wrote numerous published and manuscript works on a hefty range of topics, most of which dealt with the spiritual history of Catalonia. The only non-elite member of Barcelona’s literary academy, he did not fit in easily in local society; according to one contemporary appraisal, he was “among shopkeepers, a poet, and among poets, a shopkeeper.” He showed extraordinary diligence, if virtually no critical sense, in his historical research. And just as he sought to protect Catalan traditions from the powerful centralizing force of the absolute monarchy, he defended specifically popular knowledge and rights in the urban sphere as well. This is most visible in his most interesting work, the dialogue Lo perqué de Barcelona, which translates literally as “the why of Barcelona.” An important key to its meaning can be found in the difference in social status among its three interlocutors: a gentleman; a shopkeeper (representing Serra himself?); and a servant. What they talk about—the “Why of Barcelona” of the title—is the origins of the names of different streets and squares in the city. This virtuoso display of local knowledge—especially the intimate familiarity with topographic detail, and with the evolution over time of the names of numerous Barcelona places and landmarks—is one of the more unusual features of Serra’s text. Even more exceptional, though, is the fact that this knowledge is

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invested in the dialogue’s popular characters. In the course of this lengthy series of exercises in civic etymology, it becomes clear that the local knowledge of the shopkeeper and servant easily outstrips that of the gentleman. Throughout, the nobleman asks the questions, and his social inferiors supply the answers. There are several ways to read this intriguing socio-cultural situation. One possibility is to see Serra’s text as the work of a guildsman intent upon asserting his right to a say in civic matters. His modus intrandi was to emphasize the special knowledge and experience of craftsmen. Precisely because the life experience of artisans was more locally rooted than that of the elite, who aspired to a more visibly cosmopolitan existence and to more theoretical than practical forms of knowledge, craftsmen—especially the more settled, respectable sorts like Serra—were credited with extensive familiarity with local topography, traditions, and customs. Such knowledge often provided the recognition needed to gain admission into the world of civic discourse.40 Here Serra joined the ranks of a fair number of guildsmen who won fame as urban chroniclers. These including the most famous historian of London of all time, the master chandler John Stow, mentioned in the first chapter above, and still well known for his exhaustive Survey of London, the first of various versions of which he published in 1598.

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But just as significant, perhaps, was the fact that such claims to specific urban knowledge wound up being voiced in our dialogue form. It would not be farfetched to imagine some readers—and authors— recurring to dialogues as a participatory, citizen mode of discourse. (Note that the term “citizen” figured prominently in many urban colloquys, and marks a sort of counterpoint to the most widely read non-civic dialogue of the period, Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier, which took place in a palace.)41 The citizen approach to “writing cities” drew on at least two guiding myths. The first evoked the involvement in municipal politics of a broad citizenry which included individuals and collectivities outside the ranks of the elite. In the case of Barcelona, and in many other cities, this meant above all guildsmen. The other myth centered around a notion of polity, or res publicae, based on decision-making through discussion and other consensuary approaches. In this sense, dialogues on paper paralleled, and evoked, dialogues among citizens. These could be either real ones, in those cities where the popular classes had yet to be shorn of their rights, or imaginary ones, belonging to a bygone golden age in which the people’s voice was heard and taken into account. Neither set of possibilities would seem foreign, much less strange, to a shopkeeper whose own life experience straddled both sides of the abolition in

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1714 of Barcelona’s centuries-old municipal government, which had accorded considerable representation to the city’s then-powerful guilds.42 I  do not wish to overstate these points. That dialogues were inclusive forms that could be used to defend participation in spheres such as civic politics seems clear enough in the cases I just discussed. It is all the same important to keep in mind that they could be recruited to argue for exclusions as well. Cristòfol Despuig, a recently ennobled gentleman from the city of Tortosa near Barcelona, wrote a lengthy series of colloquies in the 1550s to deride, among other things, the “popular” government of his native city, a regime of merchants and honored citizens (quasi-noble rentiers) which deliberately blocked direct participation by the gentry. Of the three interlocutors—the author, a visiting nobleman from Valencia, and an honored citizen named Fàbio—only the latter appears in negative light, as the object of condescension and mild ridicule. In this text, local knowledge of the sort Fàbio possessed was not a virtue, but a drawback. It suggested parochialism, narrowness, and not having seen the world.43 And other writers of dialogues would go beyond what Despuig favored—that is, an inclusion of nobles that would break the back of what he criticized as popular municipal government—to argue for the out and out exclusion of the lower classes from local

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decision-making. After all, Guicciardini, in his Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze (1521), resorted to the same literary form to defend an aristocratic interpretation of the mixed constitution underlying Florence’s civic regime, one that left very little room for participation by the people.44 It should also be pointed out that the topographic knowledge of the sort Serra i Postius so proudly displayed was not the exclusive preserve of artisans, nor was it confined to a single literary genre. At least two other sets of dialogues showing the same sort of familiarity with chorographic detail issued from the pens of writers who enjoyed superior social status, although—this is perhaps significant—both hailed from only slightly higher circles, that is, from merchant, not patrician, backgrounds. The earliest of these texts was by the well-known humanist Joan Lluís [Juan Luis] Vives. He set several of his Latin dialogues in a civic context, that of early sixteenthcentury Valencia, his home town. Vives’s colloquia— written while he was in exile in northern Europe— combined general evocation of the urban atmosphere of Valencia with an impressive rehearsal of exact, detailed topographical knowledge of a city he had left behind, and to which he was never to return.45 (By the way, it was these dialogues that Cervantes de Salazar was imitating when he printed his Mexico City texts,

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which like those of Vives were written to teach students proper Latin). The other work offers even closer parallels with the case of Serra i Postius. Jean Pagès was a marchand drapier from Amiens who wrote ten lengthy dialogues in which two friends, Philambren and Pariphile—note the names—discuss the religious and civil monuments of their city and rehearse their intimate knowledge of local historical events.46 One part in particular, the Promenade du rempart, centers on a walk they take through Amiens. Herein the reader finds a detailed reconstruction of the civic past through the interlocutors’ relating historical facts and legends associated with the individual buildings they came across while strolling—a tactic Despuig and others had used as well. All this brings us back to the question of real, spoken language. Obviously, even if written dialogues make an earnest effort to incorporate actual speech or what sounds like it, we have no means of confirming its verisimilitude. Nevertheless, there are one or two clues that suggest that in the eyes of contemporaries the most popular feature—“popular” in terms of social class—of civic dialogues was precisely their language. It is not just a matter of the use of the vernacular as opposed to Latin, although it is certainly significant that most of the texts I have cited were not written in Latin. Thus dialoguists such as the Flo-

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rentine apothecary Matteo Palmieri explicitly justified the use of vernacular as a means of reaching a more extensive, and not necessarily educated, citizen audience47. It is also a question of the peculiar style of dialogues, the way they blend written and oral speech. That colloquies were literally “colloquial” was recognized by the patrician Despuig, when he noted in the dedication of his Tortosa dialogues that “to be sure, the style is low and humble, but it is not inappropriate to the composition of dialogues.”48 One could think long and hard about that phrase. One reading that comes immediately to mind is that Despuig is hinting that while dialogues are not an inherently popular literary form, they begin to move in that direction when their subject matter shifts from Platonic concerns to the city, the sphere that gentlemen like him somehow have to share with the popular classes. And with this we reach my final point, which regards the real possibilities we as historians have of capturing real urban discourse—that is, literal speech—from the past. Real Speech? Dialogues in Depositions As I see it, harvesting real speech from the past boils down to two questions: is it possible, and if so, how can it be done? The answer to the first question is yes.

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Mind you, not because I say so, but because historical linguists say so. Here I would quickly cite just one example, the work of Laura Wright on London speech during the early modern period, which she gets to via the close reading of letters, court records, and other written evidence from the period.49 As for the other question, how can we study this, which for a historian means first and foremost where do we go to find rich enough sources, a few suggestions come to mind. All sorts of early modern bureaucratic documents register oral statements and discussion. To cite just one instance, on July 11 1585 a committee met in the church of Santa María in Alcaraz, a market town in La Mancha, to discuss the repairs that were needed both in the church building and in the town’s aqueduct. Each one of the nine male citizens mentioned in the written minute expressed his opinion, and then the group as a whole made various decisions in regard to what needed to be done.50 These townsmen were up to nothing unusual. Parishioners throughout Europe, Protestant as well as Catholic, were used to running their own churches, which included keeping their buildings in decent shape. Everyone has heard of the Opera or building board of the cathedral in Florence, Siena and other major Italian cities, but the same sort of supervisory body could be found practically everywhere, and at

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much lower levels.51 And while the committee in Alcaraz was strongly stacked toward the town’s more educated citizens—their approval was needed not only because they were expected to contribute most to the funding, but also because they had eventually to approve the architectural designs—in many parts of Europe artisans could also expect to play a prominent role in such bodies, not least because of their technical expertise. Nor was this low-level administration limited to responsibilities for buildings. Municipal administrations, parish vestries, and other micro- as well as macro-organizations all discussed how to keep their local world in good shape, and many of them left behind a paper trail of what they said as they did so. One thing is a summary; another thing altogether is transcription of actual speech, with all the starts and stops. For that one needs to find documents that have a stake in registering precise wording, and this points immediately in the direction of criminal records, especially those dealing with crimes involving saying the wrong thing out loud. What was a curse for Spaniards five centuries ago is a blessing for their historians now. In early modern Spanish cities, the most diligent equivalent of our tape recorder was the Inquisition. This tribunal paid close attention to the specifics of what people said, and showed great interest in recording for posterity

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what often looks to be very precise speech from the past. As a result, the written trial testimony of the individuals who came in contact with it that survives in the archives today is one of the best listening posts on the past. What is more, the Spanish Inquisition was an extremely urban institution. It paid very little if any attention to the 90% of Spaniards who lived in the countryside.52 That said, the documents we do have record past speech in varying levels of detail. More often than not, all that remains are just isolated references, which rarely add up to much. But in a surprising number of cases one finds a considerably denser linguistic register, as the following four examples suggest: • One of the more generous transcripts of heterodox statements within daily-life conversations among neighbors in Spanish towns and villages is a volume of depositions taken in 1486—that is, immediately after the Inquisition was founded— in the bishopric of Soria, to the northeast of Madrid. Virtually every sentence has a “he said this, she said that,” and while most focus on the reciting of prayers and other telltale signs of adherence to Judaism, some actually report in greater detail discussions and even arguments about matters of

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faith. While there is little extensive transcription, the level of linguistic precision is often impressive. And the same could be said about the contents themselves, which contain numerous expressions of skepticism and other fairly relaxed readings of the official dogma of more than one religion.53 • Another encounter striking as much for its share of dark comedy as for the linguistic precision of its heterodoxy involved recollection before the Inquisitors of a chance meeting of three men in the patio of Madrid’s Royal Palace in 1624. They had started to chat together while looking at a painted view of Algiers, which led them to wonder which city was larger, Algiers or Lisbon. It did not take long for each of the three to surmise that the other two were Portuguese converted Jews like himself. They then began to talk in a more relaxed tone about religion—the chat included many jokes about Christians, as well as irreverent puns and rhymes the conversos said to themselves when reciting prayers during mass—that eventually landed them in prison (one of them was not of Jewish background!)54 • Risky religious statements embedded within everyday settings continued to provide the Inquisition proofs of heresy against converted Jews and their descendants during several more genera-

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tions.55 They even wound up entrapping “judaizers,” or secret practitioners of Judaism, who were not of Jewish background. This was the (very singular) case of Lope de Vera y Alarcón, an “Old Christian,” that is, not of Jewish descent—who taught Hebrew at the University of Salamanca, and who was arrested there by the Holy Office in 1639. While the original trial record is missing, the summaries of depositions collected by the tribunal detail Vera’s exchanges with numerous individuals. These range from family members and acquaintances, to Portuguese—and thus assumed to be “New Christian,” or descended from Jews—students at Salamanca, with whom he discussed the Trinity, the Incarnation, images, and other aspects of Catholic doctrine regarded as especially unpalatable to Jews, as well as Old Testament practices such as ritual slaughter. His departures from orthodoxy were so thorough and his attitude so vehement that after a long examination and trial period, Vera was executed in 1644, at the age of 24.56 • Since Inquisitorial attention to crypto-Jews and Muslims on the whole focused as much on what suspects did as on what they said, the richest speech-specific documentation often involves a different quarry: Protestants. The Holy Office

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made strenuous efforts to nail down the precise details of conversations that it assumed could have only contaminating (or worse, proselityzing!) effects on Iberian Catholics. One sees this priority at work in Clive Griffin’s close reconstruction of a series of trials of dozens of French print workers by the tribunal of Toledo from 1565 to 1572.57 The Inquisitors obtained hundreds of pages of testimony regarding who said what to whom, when and where, within a loose circle of some forty print workers, almost all of whom had migrated from France. It even transcribed the words of songs—often psalms—the heretics sang in French among themselves, and provided interpreters during certain interrogations, to facilitate communication with and by the suspects. The crypto-Protestants in turn had long before learned to be careful with their words, and had invented a private code of their own; unfortunately, the Holy Office eventually cracked it. In this, as in other macro-trials, patient but relentless tracking by the Inquisitors created a written register of what originated as oral speech of considerable interest, and bought at a high human cost. Other early modern institutions produced written documentation that recorded what people said, in

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varying degrees of precision. For example, petitions for assistance and other oral declarations by the poor and illiterate could produce transcripts of speech whose interest goes beyond the remit of strictly social or economic history. “Could” is the keyword here, for to be honest, not that many early modern documents that originated as oral depositions recorded what was said in sufficient detail to allow historians to reconstruct what was said, much less how it was said. This is the case of the short but often very textually rich non-valeur statements made by residents of early sixteenth-century Toulouse who were inquested about the whereabouts (and the pending tax obligations) of former neighbors, and which have been analyzed in a suggestive study by Barbara Beckerman Davis. Yet apart from a few passing phrases, the depositions are too condensed to register full speech. (Even worse: when the deposed spoke in Occitan, the notary rapidly transformed what was said into French!)58 In the end, testimony regarding what people say, and sometimes the precise way in which they say it, can occasionally hail from non-institutional, even private venues.59 But in general, and no matter how and where they originated, what works best for linguistic purposes are sources that originate with a party that has the strongest possible interest in getting the precise details of what is said as correct as possible. It

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surely is no accident that one of the bodies of popular speech we know best in early modern Europe— the language of insult among early modern Londoners, and among women in particular—is that which brought numerous individuals to the bar for oral offenses such as defamation, slander, perjury, blasphemy, false oaths, and the like.60 Scholars working on early modern London have moreover produced not only an impressive (in quality as well as quantity) corpus of studies focusing on speech, but also some of the first works to offer guidance on the broader dimensions of what is becoming increasingly well known as sound studies.61 In short: thanks to several decades now of imaginative research by social and cultural historians with keen ears as well as eyes, we now have a much more focused view of speech patterns, and not just vocabulary, in an important and dynamic urban setting. Not the least benefit of this effort has been the creation of a strong model for future historical work elsewhere. The obstacles are formidable, to be sure. They range from the scarcity of sources (and the intractable quality of those that do exist), to legitimate doubt about the strength of the final outcomes.

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A Pe r s o n a l E p i l o g u e :

I have little to offer by way of conclusion. These lec-

tures have explored more than expounded, and much more surveying of the terrain must be done before even a preliminary synthesis can be offered. If I had to summarize these lectures in a single sentence, it would be that early modern urban discourse increasingly took written form—that is, in addition to traditional oral discussion about cities a growing number of individuals began to write about them; that these writers saw their fundamental task to be description; and while their dominant tone continued to be positive, over time a more detached and less judgmental (pro or con) mode developed alongside the traditional mood of praise. Putting more flesh on these bare bones promises to be a pleasant task for the future, but also one that will require various skills of the historian. These include a minimum of aesthetic sensibility, and an ethnographic temper, as well as a will-

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ingness occasionally to leave the armchair behind for fieldwork in addition to more bookish chores in archives and libraries. I  would like to end this text with two personal comments. In my final lecture I drew attention to one facade from early modern Bologna, that of its great civic basilica in the Piazza Maggiore. I would now bring up another, slightly more finished building, that helps to glue my three talks together. It is the Palazzo Bocchi, located on a side street only a few blocks away from San Petronio. Built in the 1540s, its outward appearance has changed little since then, having undergone only one major rebuilding.1 It has several ties with the themes of this book. Its owner and creator, Achille Bocchi (1488–1562), was a well known humanist, and the author of a number of dialogues, although he is most famous for producing one of the best known emblem books of the early modern era.2 Bocchi was also a member of the opera or building committee that supervised the church of San Petronio, the collective oral assessment of whose facade I  mentioned above.3 Finally, the design of his palace is often attributed to the local architect Vignola, the author of one of most widely read architectural treatises of the early modern era and a figure to be reckoned with in any larger discussion of civic as well as architectural beau-

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ty. A celebrated building in Bologna, the Palazzo Bocchi is nevertheless something of an urban puzzle. Or rather, it poses several puzzles, from the question of who designed it—it has been abscribed to various architects—to its deepest mystery: what on earth is a Hebrew inscription doing on the front of the palace of a Bolognese gentleman of the sixteenth century?4 That was certainly the question that crossed my mind when I  stumbled across this building on my first day as a graduate student in Bologna in 1974. Looking back, I would attribute a good part of my interest in urban history to the dumbfounded fascination I felt then, and still feel now, in the presence of such extraordinary civic architecture. (And one of the greatest gifts of Italy is that such extraordinary architecture often turns out to be quite ordinary. Even the most modest of historical towns has its corners of stunning beauty). My curiosity about this particular building led me eventually to pester my way into the presence of Carlo Ginzburg, who was teaching then in Bologna, and who was unfortunate but kind enough to listen to the misshapen conjectures that turned out to be my first venture in urban history. And from there I did not look back. Every time I return to Bologna I go by the Palazzo Bocchi, not so much to see if it is still there, as to reassure myself that I can still find it.

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There is another early modern city that begins with a B which I have not even mentioned this week: Budapest, or more properly, Buda. Believe me, I looked for allusions to its beauty during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I did not run into much, but then again, it is my misfortune that I  do not read Hungarian. The earliest reference I came up with was to the creation of a “Beautification Commission” in 1808, whose existence may explain why my search was not successful. Judging from what one sees of nineteenth-century Buda and Pest today, the commission did an excellent job.5 But for the record, I do regret the omission. Speaking of Budapest: it is a city I do not know well, as this has been only my second visit, although a delightful one, and one for which I am very grateful. But even though I grew up in the remote territory of the United States known as Kentucky, I have heard about Budapest all my life, since my childhood. The reason for that is that my father spent part of the Second World War here. His was a highly unusual experience, and one that was not pleasant for him nor for the local citizens—and I realize that for some of you here, I am referring to your grandparents or greatgrandparents. My father was a co-pilot on a B-24 that was shot down over central Hungary on April 13 1944 when returning from having bombed the Tököl

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military airfield near Budapest. He was immediately captured and turned over to the military police, who brought him back to the city he had just bombed. Bailing out of a burning airplane and surviving was an unusual, but not unique experience during this war. But while in Budapest he had another experience that was rather unique for an American, although unfortunately not for the local citizens. Shortly after his internment in a military prison his own unit, the 736th squadron of 454th bomb group (15th Air Force), returned to Budapest and bombed him along with everyone else. What most Americans would think of as a piece of fiction like the novel Slaughterhouse Five was for my father far from fictional, and he later told me that it was without any doubt the worst—actually, “most terrifying” were the words he used—experience of his life. (By the way, my father always spoke well of Hungary, and how decently he was treated. He had the same good fortune later in Poland, where he and his fellow Allied POWs at Stalag Luft III were in the hands of the Luftwaffe, not murderers from the SS.)6 I  have long thought of my father and Natalie as members of the same generation; in fact, they were born just a few years apart. For years I have had my students in Madrid read the opening pages of her “autobiography”—the lengthy interview with Denis Crouzet that came out in English as A Passion for History.7 I nudge

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them to note what she did when made her first trip to Europe, when the postwar had just begun: that when she first hit the beaches in France, she started looking right away for the Resistance. Then, alas, I have to explain to them what the Resistance was... I  belong to a generation younger than Natalie’s, but I  very much share the same admiration for the Resistance and for all those who like my father fought against the greatest threat to civilization of the twentieth century. I will be retiring soon, and after I turn in the manuscript of these lectures (and finish another book) I hope my next project will be to write on what led certain historians to join the Resistance, and on the extent to which their decision to do so may have been linked to their understanding of history and of how to be a historian. Marc Bloch is of course the best known figure here, but there were others as well: his fellow Frenchmen Pierre Brossolette and Lucie Aubrac, Emmanuel Ringelblum in Poland, in Italy Nello Rosselli and Leone Ginzburg—Carlo Ginzburg’s father, who like Bloch, Brossolette, and Ringelblum was a major leader who was murdered in 1944—and in Germany, Walter Bussmann and other members of the Kreisau circle.8 The idea for such a book came to me after reading Natalie’s article on the fraught relations between Bloch and Lucien Febvre during the occupation.9 But

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more broadly, my assumption that there was some kind of connection between these individuals’ vocation as historians and their commitment to the Resistance derives largely from having known Natalie and other historians like her, and here I  would mention Carl Schorske, Felix Gilbert, Arno Mayer, and Marino Berengo from one generation, and Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, among others from another. Throughout her entire life and work Natalie has exemplified an approach to history that is democratic in every sense of the word. I  am afraid that Europe and especially our country are losing sight now of what democracy means, along with something most of the rest of the world knows all too well, which is how hard it is to sustain real democracy after managing to achieve its outer forms. The best way to protect the latter is to practice democracy—true democracy, based on dialogue with, and respect toward others—in one’s personal and professional life as well as in public. I have been a historian for many years now, and of all the historians I have met, Natalie has most exemplified this commitment to bring together the micro and macro practice of politics in the way in which she does the same for history. It is for this, and many other reasons, that I feel so honored to have delivered, in Budapest, the 2016 Natalie Zemon Davis Lectures.

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Ack nowled gement s

I was stunned but delighted when I received an email from Gábor Klaniczay inviting me to the CEU to deliver these talks. Natalie had introduced us in Madrid in 1990, and we had been in touch on and off over the years. It was high time to catch up, and also for me to become familiar with an institution and a lecture series which I had followed from afar for quite some time. (For what it’s worth, I still have somewhere my copies of the Budapest Review of Books, to which I subscribed after I read Natalie’s notice in its New York namesake.) For specific help with my stay I  am grateful not only to Gábor but also to Csilla Dobos, whose feats of organization are the stuff of legend. Professors Katalin Szende and Matthias Riedl kindly took me under their wing and made sure that I met and had a chance to talk with a wide range of colleagues and students. The results were fun as well as enlighten143

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ing, and included attending a lengthy seminar on digital humanities, as well as joining Natalie in a question and answer session with students regarding their research projects. An unexpected treat was the presence during the week of Miri Rubin, whose stimulating 2009 lectures I had read when preparing my own. And speaking of predecessors: I was especially pleased by the presence of Bill Christian, who had delivered three characteristically unique talks in the same forum the year after Miri did. Bill was in town also to prepare a new edition of his book on the different means by which visions of divinity have been reproduced over time; no one interested in matters Natalian should forego the pleasure of making his or her way through this now thoroughly illustrated text. Some thanks go beyond Budapest. Several friends and colleagues have aided me over the years to explore the topic of these lectures. They include Antonio Castillo, who has worked the hardest and longest to bring to broader attention the study of urban discourse in early modern Spain; Peter Burke, who simply has read everything and then helps others like myself by making a special point of identifying and discussing his sources (as in his 2013 NZD lectures); and Xavier Gil, who constantly passes along references that have escaped my attention. Over the years Josep M. Fradera has labored to focus my attention on the bigger ques-

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tions posed by studying Barcelona. The same task has also been shouldered by Gary McDonogh; if I call myself an urban historian (and I do), it is because I follow his example. Closer to home, I am also grateful to Fernando Andrés, who as Department Chair (and fellow fan of autobiographical sources) facilitated in every way possible my being able to prepare and deliver these lectures. And speaking of home: while I was having the time of my life reading and writing while sequestered in my office, my wife Elena shouldered all the tasks of organizing daily existence (almost) without complaining. I am very grateful for her forbearance, and solemnly promise it will not happen again. While I have long pestered friends to read drafts of what I write, this time I have let them off the hook, at least as far as the manuscript as a whole is concerned. However, since I felt I had strayed especially far from my home territory in the second chapter, I  asked four much better informed scholars to look over it. The first victim was Alan Plattus, to whom I owe at least two debts. First, he introduced me to matters architectural many years ago, and has had ample time to regret that since then. Second, he read the chapter with what I  am sure was a deeply skeptical eye, and then offered encouragement as well as criticism in an effort to improve it. Another expert in architectural history, Jesús Escobar, read the same chapter with

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great care on very short notice, and not only corrected some mistakes but also pointed out other ways to develop my argument (including paying more attention not only to the Spanish American cities I too briefly mention, but also to Rome, which receives short shrift in comparison with the two Italian cities I most lean on, Florence and Venice). And speaking of Rome: few early modernists know it better than Laurie Nussdorfer, who gamely offered helpful comments (despite my email catching up with her while she was hiking in Cornwall!) and especially urged me to make several crucial changes in wording. Finally, Lou Rose, who pretends to the world to be a historian of modern Europe but who is in his heart of hearts a closet classicist, urged that among other things I should rethink what the ancient Greeks did, as well as wrote, about urban beauty. I thank him, along with Alan, Jesús and Laurie, for their close readings, and their even closer friendship. For me the high point of the week in Budapest was seeing Natalie herself. The last time I had done so had been in Boston in 2008, on the occasion of a big and very pleasant party Radcliffe had organized to honor her. My charge there was not to give a paper, but to offer a toast on the opening evening. That gave me the opportunity to reflect on the Arcadian village in New Jersey in which I and many others present had

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first met Natalie. I took advantage of the occasion to recall the more challenging side of life in what the ancients knew to be a place whose unfortunate inhabitants wore goat skins, ate acorns, and practiced human sacrifice. But its modern incarnation was also the venue where Panofsky wrote his great essay “Et in Arcadia ego,” which Carl Schorske assigned as the reading for the first class taken there by myself and certain others among the four friends I just thanked for their help. I recall with affection and admiration the unique community of scholars that congregated in Princeton during the time when we too were in Arcady. Being able to study with Natalie, and Carl, and with Ted Rabb, John Elliott, Stanley Stein, Lawrence Stone, Felix Gilbert, Bill Jordan, Arno Mayer, Tony Grafton, David Coffin, and many others was a priceless gift, and one for which I will always feel the deepest gratitude. But since I am an urban historian, give me Budapest any day...

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Endnotes

Prologue 1

Following universal practice, from here on out I will almost always refer in the text to Natalie Davis as “Natalie.” 2 I know of relatively few efforts to bring together textual and visual descriptions of early modern cities. One distinguished exception is Frugoni, A Distant City; see also Susan V. Nicassio’s promising experiment, “A Tale of Three Cities?.” 3 I should make clear that I have chosen to limit the purview of this book to early modern discourse about cities. A different if closely related matter is discourse within cities, in the sense of the modes—written, visual, and above all oral—by which early modern townsmen and women communicated directly or indirectly with each other, although a portion of chapter three will deal with this question briefly. Pioneering studies of intramural efforts to create and circulate discourse within civic spheres include various of the works of Armando Petrucci, for example, his Public Lettering. (For an early effort to bring together written and visual sources for the history of writing in an urban context, see his exhibition catalogue Scrittura e popolo nella Roma barocca.) For the case of early modern Spain, see the ongoing research of Antonio Castillo Gómez, including his “La letra en la pared,” as well as his still unpublished manuscript, De la inscripción al pasquín. 4 Not just in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France, but also

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in her Women on the Margins, especially the opening chapter. Natalie herself has remarked the importance of urban themes in her work in a recent interview; see Nash, “La emoción del diálogo con la gente del pasado,” 85. 5 Speaking of lists: the reader will soon detect the author’s weakness for them, for which I beg her or his indulgence. While this has deep psychic causes of little interest to anyone, I also believe lists are an obviously helpful way of organizing the sort of material I am dealing with. The crucial thing is that I have done my best to avoid presenting mere lists, which would be tedious indeed. Thus what appears occasionally below are lists extended (and enriched, I hope) with prose. I would also warn the uncautious reader of another stylistic peculiarity: I often use the endnotes for counter-argument. While I realize that his allows me to have my cake and eat it too, I am reminded of my old friend Richard Landes repeatedly asking what is the point of having a cake if you can’t eat it. 6 Botero, Greatness and Magnificence of Cities. 7 I am acutely aware that this work in progress needs further development, and warmly invite readers to convey their critical response and suggestions for improvement. My email address is james.amelang@ uam.es. 8 Readers interested in the outcome—for now—of this assault on academic freedom would do well to read these reports in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/world/europe/hungarycentral-european-university-george-soros.html) and the Times Higher Education Supplement (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/ 04/central-european-university-forced-out-hungary-moving-vienna).

Chapter 1 1

See Hyde, “Medieval Descriptions of Cities,” and his “Italian Social Chronicles in the Middle Ages,” as well as Burke, “The Discreet Charm of Milan” and “Public and Private Spheres in Late Renaissance Genoa.”

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General histories of early modern cities distinctive for their attention to discourse include Berengo, L’Europa delle città, as well as Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450–1750 and Cowan, Urban Europe, 1500– 1700. See also the brief observations in Neveux, “Les discours sur la ville.” 2 For some examples from what many (including myself) believe to be the most developed early modern urban historiography, that of London, see: Byrd, London Transformed; Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London; Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity; Wall, Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London; Slack, “Perceptions of the Metropolis in Seventeenth-Century England”; Merritt, ed., Imagining Early Modern London; Manley, ed., Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London; and Gordon, Writing Early Modern London. 3 This is the case of Karen Newman’s Cultural Capitals. 4 One precedent is the broad overview of (mostly discursive) written sources on early modern Spanish cities in Marcos Martín, “Percepciones materiales e imaginario urbano en la España moderna.” What I offer below is a necessarily brief overview of a vast field of writing. To get a sense of its size, a recent study observes that in Augsburg 50 civic chronicles survive for the period 1555–1618 alone, and estimates that anywhere between 600 and 1000 similar texts were written in early modern Nuremberg (Pollmann, “Archiving the Present,” 238). Needless to say, there are many different ways of approaching so large a subject. My effort to combine macro (covering the entire field of writing) and micro (regarding specific aspects) observations contrasts with—and complements, I trust—the concentrated focus on a particular theme running through a smaller body of texts Andrew Gordon wields in his insightful probe into how a single early modern city was represented as a community in contemporary poetry and drama, history, and written memory (Writing Early Modern London). 5 See pp. 46–53 [ch 2] below. 6 This is something I discussed a while ago in regard to autobiographical writing—see The Flight of Icarus—and in these lectures I test a similar approach to the study of urban discourse. For the record, I will also

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show the same bias toward Spanish and Italian sources, for the simple reason that the former are the ones I know best, and the latter were by far the richest (and usually most precocious) in Europe. 7 Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, and her “Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon.” For her first foray into the archives at Lyon, see Davis, A Passion for History, esp. 3–5. 8 Their efforts made a highly visible contribution to the recent spatial turn in early modern and other historiographic fields. See in particular Darnton’s “An Early Information Society; “Mademoiselle Bonafon”; and Poetry and the Police. Among the numerous other relevant works see: Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence; Schneider, Ceremonial City; De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice; Cowan, “Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice”; and Rospocher, ed., Beyond the Public Sphere. 9 See my “Memoria histórica,” 545–48. The majority of these texts include some contemporary history, as well as some first-person references. There are numerous studies of early modern civic chronicles, although relatively few of the genre in general, as is noted in Pollmann’s vigorous call to scholarly arms, “Archiving the Present.” In fact, such chronicles— that is, histories of single cities—are probably the most thoroughly studied form of medieval and early modern civic discourse. While there is a great deal of valuable scholarship on Italy and Germany in particular, most of this is circumscribed to the local level, and focuses on individual texts. Broader overviews on which I have relied include: Italy: Hyde, “Medieval Descriptions of Cities,” and “Italian Social Chronicles in the Middle Ages”; Green, Chronicle Into History; Holmes, “Emergence of an Urban Ideology at Florence”; Bastia et al., eds., La memoria e la città; and Coleman, “Lombard City Annals.” Germany: Schmidt, Die Deutschen Städtechroniken—still the “classic” work on this historiographic field; Du Boulay et al., “German Town Chroniclers”; and Monnet, “Particularismes urbains et patriotisme local” (with thanks to the author for sending me a copy shortly after publication). Spain: Quesada, Las historias de ciudades, and above all his more exten-

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sive La idea de ciudad en la cultura hispana de la Edad Moderna; Aranda Pérez, “Autobiografías ciudadanas”; and Kagan, Clio and the Crown, among other publications. England: Clark, “Visions of the Urban Community”; Barry, “Provincial Town Culture, 1640–1780: Urbane or Civic?”; and Sweet, The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England. France: Ehmke, The Writing of Town and Provincial History in Sixteenth-Century France; Dolan, “L’identité urbaine et les histoires locales publiées”; and Yardeni, “Histoire des villes, histoire des provinces.” 10 Paulus, Libellus inscriptus; more recent editions with Spanish or Catalan translation were published in 1957 (see below) and 1986. For background, see Vilallonga, “Els primers historiadors de la ciutat.” 11 The Guicciardini and Navagero accounts can be found in García Mercadal, ed., Viajes de extranjeros por España y Portugal, vol. I, 612–13, 841–42 and 878–79. In regard to Bargrave, I would note that I first saw the reference in Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans, 581, which led me to read the original manuscript in the Bodleian Library. The latter has since appeared in print as The Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave; see 178– 83 for his stay in Barcelona. Bargrave is also mentioned several times in Stoye, English Travelers Abroad, whose valuable attention to writing by travelers to early modern Spain has since been magnified by J.N. Hillgarth’s splendid The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700. Records of travel—ranging from first-person diary entries to fully developed prose (and the occasional poetic) travelogues—have long been prized by urban historians not only for their information, but also for their penchant for judging or evaluating cities, either singly or in comparison with others. Some general (including methodological) studies include: “Tales of the City”; Bottin and Calabi, eds., Les étrangers dans la ville; Elsner and Rubiés eds., Voyages and Visions; Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze; Hulme and Youngs, eds., Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing; Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World; Maczak, Travel in Early Modern Europe; Minshull, ed., Vintage Book of Walking; Petitfrère, ed., Images et imaginaires de la ville; Scott, “Travel and Communications”; and Stoye, English Travelers Abroad, 1604–1667.

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On specific cities or groups of cities: Amelang, “Myth of the Mediterranean City”; Arbel, “Port Towns of the Levant in Sixteenth-Century Travel Literature”; Balañà i Abadia, ed., Visió cosmopolita de Catalunya; van Bavel and Gelderblom, “Economic Origins of Cleanliness”; Bertrand, Le Grand Tour Revisité; Bolufer, “Orientalizing Southern Europe?”; Brandis, “El paisaje urbano madrileño”; Brilli, Il viaggio in Italia; Chaney, Evolution of the Grand Tour; De Seta, Vedutisti e viaggiatori; Edelstein et al., “AHR Forum: Mapping the Republic of Letters”; Eickelman and Piscatori, eds., Muslim Travellers; Freixa Lobera, Los ingleses y el arte de viajar; Hamilton et al., ed., The Republic of Letters and the Levant; Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700; Hornsby, ed., The Impact of Italy; Ingamells, Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers in Italy; Jezernik, “Western Perceptions of Turkish Towns in the Balkans”; Gschwend and Lowe, eds., The Global City; Kagan, “La mirada de afuera”; Lough, France Observed in the Seventeenth Century, and his France on the Eve of Revolution; McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France; Miller and Bertagnin, eds., Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter in the Muslim Mediterranean City; Newman, Cultural Capitals; Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem; Penrose, Urbane Travelers, 1591–1635; Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour; RobsonScott, ed., German Travellers in England, 1400–1800; Schlueter, Album Amicorum; Stagl, “Methodising of Travel in the Sixteenth Century”; van Strien, ed., Touring the Low Countries; Sturdy, “Images of France and Germany”; Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour; Thomas, ed., Madrid: A Travellers’ Companion; and Vaquero Piñeiro, Viaggiatori spagnoli a Roma. 12 Oratio de laudibus Principatus. The only copy I have seen is in the manuscript “Dietari” covering 1596 to 1601 in Arxiu Històric Municipal de Barcelona (AHMB)/Ms. B-100, 46–59. For an excellent background study of this genre see Ruth, Urban Honor in Spain. Angel Gómez Moreno also reviews the impact of Italian models on Spanish urban encomia, in his España y la Italia de los humanistas, 282–95. From the many titles in the rich bibliography on this subject for medieval Italy, I would signal in addition to the two ar-

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ticles by J.R. Hyde cited above Hans Baron, “Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni’s Laudatio,” although also see Antonio Santosuosso, “Leonardo Bruni Revisited,” and Gina Fasoli, “La coscienza civica nelle ‘Laudes civitatum’.” For Europe as a whole, to my knowledge the best overview is still Carl Joachim Classen’s brief but thorough Die Stadt im Spiegel der “Descriptiones” und “Laudes urbium.” 13 Standing out amid the surprisingly small corpus of work on this type of urban discourse is Hyde, “Medieval Descriptions of Cities,” although see also Strauss, “The Chorographies and their Readers”; Frangenberg, “Chorographies of Florence”; Mendyk, “Seventeenth-century ‘quasi-chorography’”; Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, esp. 123–211; Kagan, “La corografía en la Castilla moderna”; and Mulier, “Descriptions of Towns in the Seventeenth-Century Province of Holland.” Note that John Stow, the author of (arguably) the most detailed urban description of the early modern era, referred to it as a “chorographie”; see his The Survey of London, vol. I, xcvii. 14 Jorba, Descripción de las excellencias de la muy insigne ciudad de Barcelona. For background, see Vilallonga, “Primers historiadors.” 15 Bruniquer, Relació sumària. Bruniquer’s name receives daily blessings from historians of medieval and early modern Barcelona for the comprehensive subject index he drew up of the documents in the municipal archive, a task which inspires awe not only for its utility, but also for the toll of drudgery needed to produce it. 16 The report was dated 4 June 1787, and was put together by the local bureaucrat Josep Albert Navarro-Mas. It is reproduced in full in Francisco de Zamora, Diario de los viajes hechos en Cataluña, 399–484. I know of no other text prior to the nineteenth century that matches its precision and level of detail. 17 The earliest one I have seen is the Calendario manual y Guía de forasteros en Barcelona. This text went through at least six new printings (with updates) from 1778 to 1815. 18 Xammar, Civilis. I  should also mention one partial precedent for Xammar’s encyclopedic guide was Andreu Bosch, Summari índex; while its folio format made it even heftier than Xammar’s tome, and

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despite its lacking the resolute urban (and administrative) focus of the latter, it not only conveys much information on Barcelona and other Catalan cities, but also offers perceptive comments on some of the more informal aspects of local society and government, such as upward social mobility (see 370). 19 For a general overview see Solervicens, “Imatges de Barcelona.” On Cervantes and Barcelona, see: Martí de Riquer, Cervantes en Barcelona; the exhibition catalogue El Quixot i Barcelona; Riera and Serés, eds., Cervantes, el “Quijote” y Barcelona; and Parello, La Catalogne de Cervantès, esp. 126–54. 20 See for example Montoliu and Casas, “Cervantes y sus elogios a Barcelona.” While the more recent Breve antología de elogios poéticos a Barcelona focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it also includes early modern entries from outsiders such as Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Lope de Vega, as well as from a native son, the poet Joan Boscà (Juan Boscán). 21 One curious example is the four-page (quarto size) Romance en alabansa del tabaco of 1644. This anonymous text wields a wide range of arguments to defend the use of tobacco, in a light, jocose style reminscent of oral ballads. 22 For a general introduction see Garcia Espuche et al., Festes i celebracions: Barcelona 1700; for civic entries see two recent doctoral theses, Raventós, “Manifestacions musicals,” and Chamorro Esteban, “Ceremonial monárquico y rituales cívicos.” One especially thick cluster of texts appeared during and immediately after the royal entry of Philip IV in 1626, which was one of the most storied ceremonial events in early modern Barcelona’s history. Both the Municipal Archive (AHMB) and the Fullets Bonsoms section of the Biblioteca de Catalunya (BC) have full collections of these pamphlets. 23 There is a considerable bibliography on these news texts, along with several anthologies, all available thanks to the tireless efforts of Henry Ettinghausen. For a general introduction to the genre, see his “The News in Spain”; for Barcelona as a forum for printed and other news, see his “Barcelona, un centro mediático a principios del siglo XVII.” Fi-

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nally, Ettinghausen, ed., La Guerra dels Segadors is an exhaustive anthology of newssheets produced during the 1640–52 separation. 24 A complete copy survives in BC /Fullets Bonsoms 6138. 25 See my “Comparando la escritura autobiográfica.” 26 John Elliott was to my knowledge the first historian to highlight Pujades’s contribution to the urban history of Barcelona as well as that of Catalonia as a whole; see his Revolt of the Catalans, 591. He moreover missed the good fortune of future historians who, like myself, have been able to read the diary in the excellent four-volume edition by Josep Maria Casas Homs (Pujades, Dietari). For more on this eccentric figure and his texts, see: Pujol i Canelles, “Aportació a la biografia de Jeroni Pujades”; Miralles, Sobre Jeroni Pujades; and my “The Mental World of Jeroni Pujades” and “Streetwalking and the Sources of Citizen Culture.” 27 Parets is the central figure in my The Flight of Icarus. For specific documentation from his local context, see my contribution to the opening volume of the full edition of his original text in Catalan (Parets, Crónica). An English translation of a crucial portion of his chronicle is available as A Journal of the Plague Year. 28 [D. Rafel d’Amat i de Cortada] Baró de Maldà, El Calaix de Sastre. 29 I  should point out here that this survey of the types of discourse makes relatively little mention of specifically religious forms, such as sermons. The early modern era of course generated much spiritual (and specifically clerical) discourse on cities, although it often focused as much on ideal towns as on real ones. All the same, my impression is that the central role religion played in the nascent urban discourse of the Middle Ages had receded significantly by the early modern period, thanks above all to the expansion of the overall corpus and the subsequent diversification of themes within it. Further work would be needed in order to answer the question of to which extent there was an early modern equivalent to the spiritual theorizing of cities—for example, in the early fourteenth-century Florentine sermons of Giordano da Pisa—that Chiara Frugoni flags throughout her ground-breaking A Distant City. 30 Arguably the single most traumatic episode of popular violence in the history of early modern Barcelona, it lasted one full day (June 7,

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1640, the feast of Corpus Christi), and was largely confined within the city walls. For a brief account, see Elliott, Revolt of the Catalans, 445– 51, as well as Torres, La Guerra dels Segadors, 80–90. For more detailed analysis of the popular unrest of the decade of the 1640s, see La revolució catalana de 1640. 31 One notes this for example in the attention Bruniquer in his Relació sumària pays to his contemporary Pujades, and to Antoni Vicent Domènech, the author of the most widely read early modern Catalan hagiography, his Historia general de los santos of 1602. In fact, both texts were in Bruniquer’s personal library at the time of his death; see the post-mortem inventory (dated 11 April 1641) in Arxiu Històric dels Protocols de Barcelona (AHPB)/Antoni Joan Fita, Llibre 9º d’ inventaris, 1638–42, s.n. 32 Hyde, “Medieval Descriptions of Cities,” 309. On the same page Hyde attributes another novelty to Bruni: how his paean substituted classical rhetoric for the unabashed facticity (even including statistics!) of the medieval texts. 33 I have relied on the Latin edition with Catalan translation by Josep Maria Casas Homs, Barcino de Jeroni Pau. In the dedication of his Descripción Jorba refers to himself as being of the “lineage” of Pau; whether this should be taken literally, or should be read as the praise of a follower in his footsteps, is not clear. 34 By my count Barcelona is mentioned very briefly in five early modern picaresque novels. The most detailed passage can be found in the work of uncertain authorship known as “Estebanillo González,” which relates how in 1633 the narrator of this name kills a fellow soldier in a fight and seeks sanctuary in the Mercedarian convent near the waterfront, where he is seized and taken to prison at the royal shipyards. His death sentence is commuted to rowing in the galleys, but he manages to win back his freedom, rejoins the army, and leaves Catalonia via the northern route through Roses. See Valbuena Prat, ed., La novela picaresca española, 1767–69. 35 See my “Memoria histórica y tradición cívica,” as well as Kagan, Clio and the Crown.

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To be sure, there were alternatives to this “Barcelona model” of the slow emergence of a broad and diversified textual ensemble focusing on the city. One of the cases that stands most out for its difference is that of Berlin. It is well known that late medieval and early modern Berlin struck almost everyone who saw it as a distinctly unimpressive place. It moreover continued to lack a well-defined, much less positive image until the mid-eighteenth century, when suddenly a veritable eclosion of writing appeared, (mostly) praising the changes taking place thanks in great measure to an ambitious program of modernization sponsored by the Prussian monarchy. The example of Berlin strikes me as one of relatively few instances of an almost overnight crystallization of a radically new urban image in terms both of image and of discourse. In regard to the former see Balfour, Berlin: The Politics of Order, 1737–1989, 17– 44, and Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 43–85; the novel discourse is thoroughly explored in Erlin, Berlin’s Forgotten Future. Also see more generally Rürup, “‘Parvenu Polis’ and ‘Human Workshop.’” 36 Further details in my “Barristers and Judges in Early Modern Barcelona,” and the summary in Honored Citizens of Barcelona, 68–73. 37 The following is drawn from my “The Walk of the Town,” written in tribute to my friend and colleague Richard Kagan. While this essay provides some basic bibliographic orientation, it is worth recalling here that the study that first brought scholarly attention to the presence of itineraries in early modern urban discourse was Penelope Corfield’s “Walking the City Streets.” 38 For a sample of his urban commentary in English translation, see Mercier, Panorama of Paris: Selections from Le Tableau de Paris. For a hefty anthology in the original French see Mercier and Restif de la Bretonne, Paris le jour, Paris la nuit. 39 See Brant and Whyman, eds., Walking the Streets of London (the text of Gay’s poem can be found on 170–205); [Jean Pagès], Manuscrits de Pagès, 427–534; Ward, The London Spy (orig. ed. 1698–1700); and Stow, The Survey of London. Among these, and indeed, all walking authors of the early modern era with whom I am familiar Stow has by far received the greatest

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amount of attention. On his vision and depiction of London, see: Power, “John Stow and his London”; Archer, “The Nostalgia of John Stow”; Wall, “Grammars of Space”; Bonahue Jr., “Citizen History: Stow’s Survey of London”; Beer, Tudor England Observed: The World of John Stow, esp. 127–46; Berlin, “Delineation of a City”; Merritt, ed., Imagining Early Modern London; Gadd and Gillespie, eds., John Stow and the Making of the English Past; and Gordon, Writing Early Modern London, 110–54. 40 Whitney has attracted considerable notice ever since Betty S. Travitsky’s edition of “‘The Wyll and Testament’ of Isabella Whitney.” Gordon, Writing Early Modern London, 220–22 provides an updated bibliography of the deluge of recent studies; see also 84–109 for a contextualized discussion of her depiction of London. I first ran across reference to Whitney and her work in Newman, Cultural Capitals, 70–72. 41 I take the opportunity here to draw attention to another subset (or offshoot) of these walking town discoursers, the small group of early modern writers known to their contemporaries as “intelligencers.” These were (usually private) citizens who gathered news and gossip about what was happening in their cities and elsewhere while taking walks and stopping to talk to others. This unusual—not for walking and talking, but for mentioning it in writing—but recognizable type of urbanite describes (almost always) men who (normally) belonged to the civic elite, who in terms of personality were (often) obsessive, and who (invariably) fell between being dismissed as cranks or indulged as pedants. They were found far and wide—every town worth its salt had at least one—and merit further study. For some preliminary observations, see my “Streetwalking.” 42 That we know that the local chronicler Marin Sanudo climbed up the Campanile of Venice in September 1513 in order to see the fires enemy troops set in the city’s hinterland gives some idea of the extreme circumstances that led local inhabitants to record such an effort. See Venice, Cità Excelentissima, 11–12. 43 See Burke, “The Sources: Insiders and Outsiders,” on the importance of this distinction for historical analysis. And in regard to cities in

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particular, note Donald J. Olsen’s observation that “the actual resident, his perceptions dulled by familiarity, will have less to tell us than the foreign critic or visiting tourist. The latter will be on the alert for whatever makes the foreign city different from his own, the distinctive tone that gives it its special character, and he can make comparisons that would not occur to the person for whom the city is the background for daily life” (The City as a Work of Art, 6). I realize that there are some exceptions to this rule. For example, one of the (literal) highlights in Sébastien Mercier’s huge chorography of Paris is his brief 1781 essay on what the chimneys as seen from the towers of Notre-Dame reveal about the city’s houses and their inhabitants. However, what this may show us is just that by the end of our period, native writers about cities may have learned a trick or two from the outsiders (in this case, via Lesage?). See his Tableau de Paris, book X, excerpted in Mercier and Restif de la Bretonne, Paris le jour, Paris la nuit, 326. (I originally came across this passage cited in Roche, A History of Everyday Things, 134.) 44 de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” esp. 91–93. 45 Münzer, Viaje por España y Portugal, 9 (Barcelona), 41 (Valencia), 65 (Murcia), 85 (Guadix), 97 (Granada), 153 (Seville), 173 (Lisbon), 213 (Zamora), 215 (Salamanca), 249 (Toledo), and 293 (Saragossa). The “prospect” passage is found on 293. 46 Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis, 74, 95–96, 115, and 181. For background see: Gombrich, “Earliest Description of Bosch’s Garden of Delights”; D.S. Chambers, “Isabella d’Este and the Travel Diary of Antonio de Beatis”; and Melani, “Di qua’ e ‘ di là da’ monti”, vol. I, passim. 47 Cited in Chambers and Pullan, eds., Venice: A Documentary History, 22. 48 Most Glorious and Peerless Venice, 36. This is a modernized and annotated version of the final section on Venice in Thomas Coryate, ­Coryat’s Crudities. For further reading on this influential traveler, see Rubiés, “Instructions for Travellers”; Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, 101–107; and especially O’Callaghan, The English Wits, 102–52. 49 Ceverio de Vera, Viaje de la Tierra Santa, 21–23.

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50

Cited in Domínguez Ortiz, “Thesoro Chorographico,” 194, which quotes extensively from the original manuscript in the British Museum. 51 It was only a matter of time before early modern travelers began to look to tower-climbing as the first thing to be done after reaching a new city. Travel diaries such as Goethe’s Italian Journey—written as a chain of letters to unidentified recipient(s)—provide ample testimony to this habit, as in his entry from Cento, near Bologna: “As usual, the first thing I did was to climb the tower” Goethe, Italian Journey, 92. 52 “Next morning we came to a broad causeway and continued our march toward Iztapalapa. And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns and cues [temples] and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadís. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. It is not surprising therefore that I should write in this vein. It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed of before.” Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, 214. 53 Diary of John Evelyn, 88; also cited in Porter, ed., Baroque Naples, 28. 54 Fréart de Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s Visit to France, 98; for more on Bernini’s misencounter with Paris, see Newman, Cultural Capitals, 11–16. 55 Thus when listing the sights visitors to Venice must see, the Kentish merchant Robert Bargrave included “the Prospect from St. Markes Tower, whence you may best observe the most incomparable Situation of Venice” (Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave, 227). 56 Dürer’s Record of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries, 73. 57 By the way, he noted that the town where I now live, Madrid, where he did not climb a tower, was no larger than Biberach (!). He can be forgiven for this slight, as this is almost seventy years before it became the capital of the Spanish empire (see Münzer, Viaje, 97, 153, and 261). 58 Mal Lara, Recibimiento, 189. 59 Doni, I mondi del Doni, ff. 3r.–v.: “onde da questo luogo superiore, egli viene a stabilirsi nell’Idea la imaginatione della terra” (my empha-

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sis). I  originally found this passage highlighted in Thomas Frangenberg’s excellent study, “Chorographies of Florence,” 48. 60 Montaigne’s Travel Journal, 79. 61 Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, 1–3. (Full disclosure: I have belabored this point before, in my “Transcultural Autobiography,” 77). 62 Doni, I  marmi del Doni, 6. I  first came across Doni in Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 1530–1560; see esp. 49–69, 127–35, and 240–52. I also found further mention of this text in Pon, “Michelangelo’s Lives,” and above all in Rizzarelli, ed., I marmi di Anton F ­ rancesco Doni. 63 Doni, I marmi, 18–24. 64 Vélez de Guevara, El diablo cojuelo, 80–88. 65 Mercier, “Chéminées,” in his Tableau de Paris, tome X, nº 836 (in Paris le jour, 326). 66 As has been noticed for example in the introduction to Vélez de Guevara, El diablo cojuelo, 16–21. A more immediate precedent remarked in the same scholarly literature is Rodrigo Fernández de Ribera’s Anteojos de mejor vista. This text from the 1620s presents a “Licenciado Desengaño” who from his perch in Seville’s Giralda tower sees the local citizens as they are, not as they try to appear to be. For a modern edition, see Rodrigo Fernández de Ribera, Los anteojos de mejor vista. 67 As cited in Elon, “Thanks for the Memory,” 35. Or as Richard Kagan puts it, “the tourist ‘sees’ a town, the resident ‘knows’ it.” (Kagan, with Marías, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 108.) 68 Thus Goethe wrote on his first day in Rome that “all the dreams of my youth have come to life. . . . Wherever I walk, I come across familiar objects in an unfamiliar world; everything is just as I imagined it, yet everything is new. . . .” See Goethe, Italian Journey, 116. 69 Goethe, Italian Journey, 21. 70 Montaigne’s Travel Journal, 73–74. 71 From his Itinerarium Britanniae, as cited in J.R. Hale’s excellent introduction to the Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis, 19. 72 Thus Leonardo Bruni, despite being the author of the most famous urban panegyric of the Renaissance era, was clearly aware of the limita-

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tions of the genre. When he compared it to historia, he underscored that the latter was not only longer and more developed, but also that it did not rely on “rhetoric of simplification and exaggeration” in order to impress its readers (cited in Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 153). 73 Blumin, The Encompassing City. For more on the visual perception and depiction of early modern towns, see: Alpers, The Art of Describing; and Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze. 74 This circular representation of a besieged Vienna, attributed to Hans Sebald Beham (and others), is based on sketches allegedly made from the Cathedral towers by Niklas Meldemann. See Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance, 17–19; Marías, “From the ‘Ideal City’ to Real Cities,” 222; and Benedict, Graphic History, 103. 75 One extremely well known example is Vermeer’s depiction of Delft, ca. 1660, now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Chapter 2 1

I wish to make clear here at the outset that this chapter deals solely with discourse. As I stated in the preface, I hope in the future to link discussion of visual and especially artistic images of cities with written discourse, but that ambitious project will have to await another occasion. Such images are by far the best studied aspect of the depiction of early modern cities, but one kept curiously at a distance from the parallel practice of writing about them. In fact, I am struck by how many of the major studies of early modern urban imagery manage to keep civic discourse at bay as they probe their paintings and drawings. That said, my aim is at least in part to apply to written sources what others—especially the historians and art historians listed below—have learned about the evolution of the visual depiction and perception of medieval and early modern towns. And it goes without saying that keeping visuality at least in the back of our minds is especially important when one discusses the question of urban beauty. (For the record: I also firmly believe that when working on this subject, beans-and-bacon urban histo-

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rians like myself would do best to follow the lead of historians of architecture as well as art, even if we might try to readjust their focus a bit.) For some general studies of the images of late medieval and early modern cities, see: Alpers, The Art of Describing; Frugoni, A Distant City; Nuti, Ritratti di città; Kagan, with Marías, Urban Images of the Hispanic World; Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze; De Seta, ed., Tra oriente e occidente; Blumin, The Encompassing City; Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour; and Fournier-Antonini, Barcelone, Gênes et Marseille. (And lest we forget our debts to our venerable elders, see also Lavedan, Représentation des villes dans l’art du Moyen Age, and Links, Townscape Painting and Drawing.) Especially useful are two brief if tightly packed essays: Marías, “From the ‘Ideal City’ to Real Cities,” and Ballon and Friedman, “Portraying the City in Early Modern Europe.” For some studies of depictions of individual cities, see: Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice,” as well as Romanelli et al., eds., A volo d’uccello; Warner et al., The Image of London; Chiarini and Marabottini, eds., Firenze e la sua immagine; Valerio, Piante e vedute di Napoli dal 1486 al 1599; Zorach, ed., The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome; Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined; and Ernst and Ernst, Die Stadt Berlin in der Druckgrafik. 2 I do not wish to leave the impression that all early modern texts were prodigal in their recourse to this keyword. Note for instance the extremely spare reference to beauty in Palladio’s 1554 Antiquities of Rome. By the end of his text he had used the term fewer than a dozen times, and always in reference to individual buildings, such as the Palace of Claudius, or more often to specific features such as the columns in Augustus’s Palatine palace or the Basilica of Maxentius, the portico of the Pantheon, and more modern works such as “the chapel Michelangelo decorated” in the Vatican Palace. His Description of Churches from the same year is even more reticent, and steadfastly avoids any general allusion to beauty, confining its usage to a handful of buildings (see Palladio’s Rome, esp. 55, 76, 78, and 87). Should this be chalked up to a standard guidebook’s dilemma, in which once one starts using the term there would be no way to avoid overdoing it?

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3

A (partial) exception to this rule appears within the best known contemporary survey of early modern cities, Giovanni Botero’s On the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, originally published in 1588. The sixth chapter “On Pleasure” links the tendency of humans to gather to the pleasure they derive from the “site” or “artistic beauty.” The former includes natural features such as breezes, valleys, forests, good hunting, and abundant water, while the “domain of art”—understood here as human skill or artifice—comprises straight streets, public buildings made magnificent by skill and their materials (including theaters, ampitheaters, porticoes, circuses, and the like), as well as sculpture and paintings. In the author’s view, the two contemporary cities that provide the most pleasure in this aesthetic sense—feasting the eye, delighting the senses, and stoking curiosity—are Rome and Venice, the respective exemplars of ancient greatness and present-day magnificence. He goes on to number along the specific attractions of the latter its “miraculous site” and its huge Arsenal, along with the “height of its towers, the richness of its churches, the splendor of its palaces, the beauty of its squares, and the variety of its crafts. . . .” See Botero, Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, 14–16. 4 Cited in Pepper, “Siege Law,” 585n. 5 The Diary of John Evelyn, 65 (17 Oct. 1644). Evelyn closes this passage by citing as visual proof of his observations “that rare booke in a large folio” which Rubens had published about the Strada Nuova, i.e., I Palazzi di Genova. I first came across this quotation in Gorse, “A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility,” 325. 6 Cited in Pollak, Turin, 1564–1680, 1 and 58. The (longer) original passage reads thus: “Turin me paraît la plus jolie ville de l’Italie; et, à ce je crois, de l’Europe, par l’alignement de ses rues, la régularité de ses bâtiments et la beauté de ses places, dont la plus neuve est entourée de portiques. Il est vrai que l’on n’y trouve plus, ou du moins rarement, ce grand goût d’architecture qui règne dans quelques endroits des autres villes; mais aussi n’y a pas le désagrément d’y voir des chaumières à côté des palais. Ici rien n’est fort beau, mais tout y est égal et rien n’est médiocre, ce qui forme un total, petit à la vérité (car la ville est petite),

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mais charmant. . . .” In de Brosses, Lettres d’Italie, 568. De Brosses’s travel “journal” has long been recognized as one of the most interesting testimonies written about eighteenth-century Italy; see for example the appreciative reflections of Carlo Levi in “Il ‘Viaggio in Italia’ di De Brosses.” 7 For some scattered studies of early modern urban guidebooks, see: De Beer, “Development of the Guidebook”; Corfield with Kelly, “‘Giving directions to the town’”; Webb, “Guide Books to London before 1800: A Survey”; Shaw and Coles, A Guide to European Town Directories; Chabaud, “Images de la ville et pratiques du livre”; Chabaud et al., eds., Les guides imprimés du XVIe au XXe siècle; Thompson, “Knowing Paris”; and DeJean, How Paris Became Paris, 1–3 et passim. 8 Recall Anton Francesco Doni’s reference in his 1549 Florence guidebook to the out-of-towner “who has just arrived in this city to see everything beautiful,” cited in Chapter One above [p. 28]. 9 A quick word about their opposite number, the forms of civic discourse that shed the least light on the question of beauty. My guess is that the city chronicle would win this contest. One of the most influential (as well as prolific) types of urban text, and also moved by the same purpose of creating and conveying a highly positive image of the city, the chronicle nevertheless rarely devotes much space to the physical description and evaluation that are easily found in the genres I just mentioned. 10 Dino Compagni’s Chronicle of Florence, 5–6. 11 For detailed background on the redaction and later influence of this text, see Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, esp. 151–71; the original Latin version is found on 232–63. I quote from the English translation in Kohl et al., eds., The Earthly Republic, 135–75. The references to beauty cited here are concentrated on 135–42. 12 More on this on pp. 61 below. 13 Gilbert, “Earliest Guide to Florentine Architecture, 1423”; 44–46 contain the original Italian text of Dati’s Istoria di Firenze dal 1380 al 1405. A different section (book nine) is far better known, as one of the most compact descriptions of the highly complex Florentine political

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system. For an English translation, see “The Structure of the Florentine Government,” in the infinitely useful anthology by Baldassarri and Saiber, eds., Images of Quattrocento Florence, 44–54. 14 Biondo Flavio, Italy Illuminated. 15 Rucellai, “A Merchant’s Praise of Florence,” in Baldassarri and Saiber, eds., Images of Quattrocento Florence, 73. 16 Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope, 109. 17 Cited in Verino, “The Beauty of Florence Surpasses that of Ancient Athens,” in Baldassarri and Saiber, eds., Images of Quattrocento Florence, 210. 18 Albertini, Memoriale di molte statue et picture. I quote from “An Artistic Vade Mecum for the City of Florence,” in Baldassarri and Saiber, eds., Images of Quattrocento Florence, 213–26; also note the recent edition with English translation in Albertini, Memoriale di molte statue et picture sono nella inclyta ciptà di Florentia. 19 Bocchi, Le bellezze della città di Fiorenza. For more on Bocchi’s influential writings regarding beauty, see: Summers, Judgment of Sense, 143–46; Frangenberg, “Art of Talking about Sculpture,” and “The Style of the Divine Hand”; and Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy, 187–222. 20 A partial list includes Bernardino da Firenze, Le bellezze et chasati di Firenze, ca. 1500; Ioan Berardino Fuscano, Stanze sopra le bellezze di Napoli, 1531; and Bartolomeo Paschetti, Le bellezze di Genova, 1583. 21 Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis. 22 “Et per tanto commercio li huomini soi, le donne et lo terreno sanno de non so che de la bella Italia, de modo che per quel tanto che è la judico la più bella villa de Franza”: from Antonio de Beatis, Die Reise des Kardinals Luigi, 147–48; see also Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis, 139. 23 Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis, citations on 59 (Verona), 66 (Augsburg), 75 (Mainz), 76 (Koblenz), 77 (Cologne), 92–93 (Antwerp), 96 (Bruges), 116 (Paris), 121–22 (Lisieux, Bayeux), 126 (Rennes), 139 (Lyon), 163 (Nice), 166 (France as whole), and 180 (Casale). 24 I admonish the reader that I think that this sentence has just run

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up against the upper limits of what a purely quantitative approach can contribute to the study of urban discourse. 25 Burke, Hybrid Renaissance, esp. 3–77. 26 And while we’re at it: this is true not only for our keyword “beauty,” but also for its cognate “embellishment.” While I am not aware of any Wortgeschichte of this specific term, I suspect it developed more or less along these general lines: it began to be used throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages largely to mark specific artistic and architectural projects (public or private) that sought to dignify certain buildings or spaces in cities. It then received further impetus from high-visibility public competitions such as the various contests held in Florence from the fourteenth century on to approve overhauling the external image and decoration of what is now referred to as the Piazza del Duomo. Just a few decades later, architectural and urbanistic reforms in Rome promoted by pope Nicholas V in particular stimulated an even more programmatic (and theorized) approach to rendering specific urban spaces and structures more attractive, as well as improving logistics. By the mid-eighteenth century at the latest, “embellishment” had become a central term in the theory and practice of both architecture and urbanism—to the extent that they could be separated by this point; more on this below. For further details, see Monclús Fraga, “Teorías arquitectónicas y discurso urbanístico” (and here I offer a word of thanks to a colleague who long ago first brought early modern projects to beautify cities to my attention). 27 The general lack of urban description in ancient Greece and Rome is noted in Hyde, “Medieval Descriptions of Cities,” 310. 28 Greek Political Oratory, 34–35 and 99–136, respectively. For this genre, see Nicole Loraux’s stimulating The Invention of Athens. 29 See his Institutes of Oratory, III, vii, 26. See also Ruth, Urban Honor in Spain, 14–15, as well as the more general discussion on 5–87. One brief but especially helpful study of urban discourse from ancient Rome is Edwards, Writing Rome, although it makes little mention of civic beauty. For a reading of one Roman historian that pays particular attention to his reference to urban space and monuments,

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see  ­Jaeger, Livy’s Written Rome. I  would also note that Lidia Storoni Mazzolani’s The Idea of the City in Roman Thought stays tightly focused on the city—that is, Rome—as a center and symbol of political, military, and ideological power. I found no reference to civic beauty in it. Finally, the central theme of Gail Kern Paster’s The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare is the impact of early modern understandings of past as well as present cities on the late Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, and especially on the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton. Among the former figure depictions of urban life in classical poetry and drama, especially Horace, Juvenal and Plautus, who are dealt with on 33–57. Unfortunately for our purposes, urban beauty receives only passing mention. 30 [Publius Aelius] Aristides, Panathenaic Oration and In Defense of Oratory; sections 10, 11, 20, and 21 praise the beauty of the islands and mountains near Athens, and 246 mentions the city’s beautiful temples and statues. 31 Pausanias, Guide to Greece, Volume 1: Central Greece, 12–83. In fact, the editor of an earlier translation of Pausanias, W.H.S. Jones, explicitly noted that the Greek traveler made very few allusions to the general appearance of cities and villages; see his Pausanias, Description of Greece, I, x. See also the useful background material in Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece, and Alcock and Thurnau, eds., Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Ancient Greece. 32 See Ausonius; the Bordeaux quotation can be found on 285. 33 For a brief summary of Varro’s contribution to Roman civic discourse, see Edwards, Writing Rome, 4–6. 34 Favro, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome, 47 and 140. See 42–56 for the first stage of the embellishment of ancient Rome. 35 To cite just one example: Coryate referred to the “incomparable beauty” of St Mark’s Square, and further assured his readers that “no place whatsoever, either in Christendom or Paganism might compare with it”: see Most Glorious and Peerless Venice, 27. One advantage of singling out Venice for study is that so much has been written about it, by insiders and outsiders alike. It moreover has

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a strong presence in literature as well as travel writing. For good introductions to the literary image of this city, see Tanner, Venice Desired, and Pemble, Venice Rediscovered (the latter is more focused on the nineteenth century). 36 “ . . . pro reipublice ornamento digna loca fiant et construantur,” 6 June 1439 proclamation by the Anziani of Bologna, as cited in Friedman, “Monumental Urban Form in the Late Medieval Italian Commune,” 338. 37 Alberti distinguished beauty and ornament in theory, but in practice saw them as intricately linked; in his view a building was not likely to become fully beautiful without incorporating the right sort of ornament (beginning with columns and the proper orders). Note how he separated yet paired the two concepts in his On the Art of Building, IV.7, when stating that “the city of Smyrna . . . is said to have been very beautiful (pulcherimam) in the layout of its streets and ornamentation (ornamentis) of its buildings.” For more on this duo, see Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, 42–43 and 214. For an example of the use of ornato as a virtual synonym of beauty, see Tamborrino, “Bologna, XV–XVI secolo,” 440–41. This tightly packed essay mentions the creation in Bologna in 1504 of a “beauty office”—the Assunteria d’Ornato—whose specific charge was to take measures to enhance ornato pubblico. Her main argument, however, is that these and other steps wound up having little impact on the city, due to quiet but steadfast resistance on the part of merchants, shopkeepers, and other social groups to any major restructuring of civic space. 38 The standard reference work is Wiebenson, ed., Architectural Theory and Practice from Alberti to Ledoux; see also Hart and Hicks, eds., Paper Palaces, and Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance. 39 The seventeenth-century friar Buenaventura Salinas y Córdova, as cited in Kagan, with Marías, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 33. 40 Among the few exceptions were newly-built “fortress cities” located in frontier zones, such as Palmanova in northeastern Italy or Valletta on the island of Malta. For more on this “military urbanism,” see Pollak, Cities at War in Early Modern Europe, esp. 155–78.

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41

Much can be learned about early modern Europeans’ expectations regarding virtually all facets of urban life from the history of their encounter with cities in the parts of the world they controlled beginning in the late Middle Ages. One especially revealing experience is the readaptation of the highly urbanized parts of the Americas that fell under Spanish control beginning in the 1520s. Fundamental studies here include: Morse, “Urban Development of Colonial Spanish America”; García Zarza, La ciudad en cuadrícula o hispanoamericana; Hardoy, “Forma de las ciudades coloniales en Hispanoamérica” (a reprint of the original 1975 article with a commentary by Fernando Terán); Kagan, with Marías, Urban Images of the Hispanic World; Escobar, “Toward an Urbanismo Austríaco”; and Schreffler, “Inca Architecture from the Andes to the Adriatic.” 42 Vitruvius deals explicitly with the civic context of architecture mostly in sections 4–7 of Book I. For a recent re-reading of the relations between his treatise and the built urban environment, see Reitz-Joosse, “The City and the Text in Vitruvius’s de Architectura.” Vitruvius was laconic not only about urban beauty; many early modern readers saw him as not forthcoming enough on architectural beauty as well. This was the case of Raphael, who wrote Castiglione that he sought to “find the beautiful forms of ancient buildings . . . on which Vitruvius shed much light, but not enough” (“trovare le belle forme degli edifici antichi . . . me ne porge gran luce Vitruvio, ma non tanto che basti,” cited in Morolli, “Le belle forme degli edifici antichi”, 7). 43 On Alberti’s absorption (and re-reading) of Vitruvian notions of beauty, see Rykwert, “Theory as Rhetoric,” which strongly emphasizes his urban interests and ambitions. Naomi Miller devotes similar attention to Alberti’s stress on the “civic function of architecture” in her Renaissance Bologna, esp. 154–55, and the bibliography she cites. The reader should be aware that like Vitruvius, Alberti mentions cities fairly infrequently in his treatise. The most extensive discussion is found in Book IV, which considers their location or “situation,” and then their size, walls and fortifications, public and private thoroughfares, drainage, havens (harbors) and squares; Book V deals with a wide

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range of public as well as private buildings. His approach to all these facets is markedly pragmatic, and generally does not touch on aesthetic considerations. 44 Alberti, The Ten Books of Architecture, 195 (IX, v). For the intricacies of Alberti’s vocabulary regarding architectural beauty see Luigi Vagnetti’s close survey of the different uses of his most famous neologism in his “Concinnitas.” Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, 32, notes that here he melded into a single construct two important if characteristically vague terms in the Vitruvian lexicon, dispositio and symmetria. He defines these respectively as “congruity in all the parts of a building,” and the “use of a consistent module throughout the whole design.” See p. 39– 48 for an excellent reconstruction of how Alberti refined his aesthetic vision, particularly in relation to architecture, along with Westfall, “Society, Beauty, and the Humanist Architect in Alberti’s de Re Aedificatoria,” 79 (note especially his deductive summary of Alberti’s notion of urban beauty on 78). 45 Alberti, Ten Books, VI, ii (113). Not surprisingly, sight is also the medium by which beauty allows men to feel “Pleasure and Delight” (112). For general background see Trachtenberg, “What Brunelleschi Saw,” and his The Dominion of the Eye. For a study of Alberti’s aesthetic theories that draws on the full range of his oeuvre (above all his dialogues), and not just his expository treatises, see Jarzombek, On Leon Battista Alberti. 46 Alberti, Ten Books, VI, ii (113). 47 Alberti, Ten Books, IX, v (195). My emphasis. 48 Alberti, Ten Books, IX, v (194). 49 Alberti, Ten Books, IV, v (75). Christine Smith, in “Varietas and the Design of Pienza,” in her Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, 119 also draws attention to Alberti’s weakness for winding streets. My analysis is much indebted to her stimulating reading of early Renaissance architecture as more attracted to the principle of varietas than to the uniformity or regularity that would become the broader norm later. If anything, I have taken her argument one step further, by stressing

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the persistent strength of alternatives to the emerging classical aesthetic consensus in cities less influenced by—or more resistant to?—Florentine and Roman criteria. 50 Ibid. (modernized spelling from D’Evelyn, Venice and Vitruvius, 57, my source for this text and much else). 51 Anthony Grafton highlights the “winding streets” passage while making a subtle but strong argument in favor of Alberti’s intellectual flexibility in his Leon Battista Alberti, esp. 273 and 287–92. D’Evelyn also latches onto the same sentence when suggesting that the Venetian humanist and architectural theorist Daniele Barbaro’s attempt to present Venice as a fulfilment of Vitruvian ideals (!) depended in part on his “habit of ‘reading’ Vitruvius through Alberti’s all’antica writings”; see her Venice and Vitruvius, 57, as well as her earlier “Venice as Vitruvius’s City in Daniele Barbaro’s Commentaries.” Also in relation with rule-bending, D’Evelyn makes an intriguing argument regarding Barbaro’s evocation of the classic legal principle of equity in his justification of unconventional architectural decisions (Venice and Vitruvius, 69 and 102–106). 52 Cited in Hart and Hicks, eds., Paper Palaces, Appendix 2: “Preface to Vignola’s Regola,” 362. All this fit in perfectly well with contemporary tinkering with the recently-invented technique of linear perspective that further legitimized ignoring the letter of earlier precept. Still, tacit liberties of this sort could not resolve the tension that emerged from the daily-life practice of visual correction by which both architects and lay viewers read the surfaces of buildings for the immediate impression they produced against more theoretical calls among professionals to hew to fixed, predetermined rules. That discussion among the latter soon reached levels of complexity that rendered it incomprehensible to outsiders contributed to separating urban from architectural discourse, despite the evident kinship between them. For an example of a particularly impenetrable debate over architectural details see Connors, “Ars Tornandi: Baroque Architecture and the Lathe.” 53 David Summers has thoroughly documented the coexistence of rival understandings of artistic beauty in sixteenth-century Italy in his Michelangelo and the Language of Art, and The Judgment of Sense.

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54

See his “History and/or Memory,” 203–204. I have consulted [Roland Fréart de Chambray], Parallèle de l’architecture antique et de la moderne, which has a brief but useful foreword. Apart from the summary in Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700, 341– 45, see Herrmann, The Theory of Claude Perrault, and DeJean, Ancients against Moderns, which focuses on the literary side of the debate. See also the texts assembled by Anne-Marie Lecoq in La Querelle des Anciens et Modernes (with thanks to Giovanni Levi for the reference). 56 The city’s beauty was merely one of several elements making up the fabled early modern “myth of Venice.” Articulated by the Venetians themselves, it also comprised the greatness of its empire, the piety of its citizens, and its exceptional liberty (in the sense of independence). This paraphrase (of a 1958 study by Gina Fasoli) can be found in Martin and Romano, eds., Venice Reconsidered, 9. 57 Marino Sanudo, “Laus urbis Venetae,” in his De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis venetae, 19–36. An English translation with brief notes can be found in Chambers and Pullan, eds., Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630, 4–21. 58 See for example Tafuri, ed., “Renovatio Urbis.” 59 In Brown, Venice and Antiquity, and Howard, The Architectural History of Venice, 120–49. 60 See Savoy, “Palladio and the Water-oriented Scenography of Venice,” and his Venice from the Water. Finally, I raise in passing the possibility that references to Venice’s beauty as a general, city-wide feature increase as references to its power and preeminence decrease. While this is admittedly a rather hydraulic reading of the workings of discourse, it would help explain the reticence regarding city-wide beauty not just in Sanudo’s influential text, but also in earlier works such the anonymous 1420 paean to Venice mentioned in Brown’s Venice and Antiquity, 99. 61 D’Evelyn, Venice and Vitruvius, e.g., 245 (amid an entire chapter devoted to bricks). 62 This is a good place to note that Venice was merely the most obvious exemplar of non-classical civic beauty. Other candidates would in55

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clude, say, Genoa, which as we saw in the Evelyn quotation above, was marked by a similar combination of an irregular but beautiful site with (eventually) a cohort of classical buildings concentrated largely in one area of the city. (Note that Burckhardt himself described it as “picturesque”; see his Vedute d’Italia, 51.) 63 See above all Joan DeJean’s vigorously-argued How Paris Became Paris, esp. 101–106. 64 For a brief summary of the development of “picturesque beauty” by William Gilpin and others in the 1770s–80s, see Buzard, “The Grand Tour and After (1660–1849),” 45–47, as well as Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 615–61 passim, and Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze, esp. 135–65. Finally, I cannot forbear citing here a classic essay much worn with use, Arthur O. Lovejoy’s “The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism.” I first read it during my freshman semester at graduate school, in Carl Schorske’s seminar on Modern European Intellectual History, and mention it now in homage to an extraordinary teacher, scholar, and fellow admirer of Natalie Davis. 65 I  look forward to undertaking future research on how the specific chronology and vocabulary of descriptions of early modern Venice evolved from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and to charting the precise development of its aesthetic discourse. I am particularly interested in exploring the extent to which Venice may have been one of the few cases in which civic beauty was asserted, and indeed determined, more by outsiders instead of insiders. 66 Burke inserts a brief passage on the qualities of architecture—which he identifies as succession, uniformity, magnitude, magnificence, light, and color—in his A Philosophical Enquiry, 116–24. I believe it safe to say in general that the eighteenth-century aesthetic revolution was heavily focused on physical, that is, rural nature, and devoted far less attention to cities. 67 Cited in Lang, Designing Utopia, 27. For a good summary of Ruskin and Venice, see Pemble, Venice Rediscovered, esp. 122–39, as well as Cosgrove, “The Myth and the Stones of Venice,” and Donoghue, “Ruskin, Venice, and the Fate of Beauty.”

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68

One telling detail is how in Ruskin’s catalogue of Venetian arches Gothic has pushed all the competitors into a canal. See for example the seven-row illustration “The Orders of Venetian Arches,” originally in vol. 2 of The Stones of Venice. 69 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 188–93. Ruskin’s characteristically tortured presentation irrevocably links the “picturesque” to the “sublime,” only to insist on the fundamental difference between them. 70 For a synthetic overview of beauty in nineteenth-century European cities, see Olsen, The City as a Work of Art, especially 254–80. 71 See Deborah Howard’s still unsurpassed Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice. 72 This uniquely polyvalent cultural figure has received much attention as of late. See in particular: Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 1530– 1560; Cherchi, Polimatia di riuso; Burke, “Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication”; Braida, Libri di lettere; Tommasino, L’Alcorano di Macometto, esp. 257–68 (with thanks to the author for helping me through this bibliography); and Salzberg, Ephemeral City. For Francesco’s life-long participation in the print trade see Elena Bonora’s richly documented Ricerche su Francesco Sansovino imprenditore librario e letterato; for a recent attempt to reconstruct his imprints see Mula, “‘Dipinto in scrittura.’” See also Grendler, “Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History,” as well as the brief summary in Fenlon, The Ceremonial City, 238–39. 73 Tutte le cose notabili e belle che sono in Venetia (1556), and Venetia città nobilissima e singolare (1581), with new editions in 1604 and 1663 (the so-called Martinioni or enlarged version). Sansovino also brought out at least one title about cities outside the Veneto, his Ritratto delle più nobili et famose città d’Italia. 74 On the four palaces and the reasons why he chose them, see Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, 41–43. Deborah Howard, in her authoritative biography of his father, summarizes the wide-ranging criteria on which the son based his judgment as “architectural merit, grandeur, size, cost, skilled stone-carving and, above all, adherence to the rules of Vitruvius” ( Jacopo Sansovino, 126).

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75

Montaigne’s Travel Journal, 56–57. Granted, Evelyn was perhaps not the most representative spokesman for broader notions of civic image; his visible regard for outdoor nature as the highest state of beauty meant that while he admired fine buildings, he often found their gardens more attractive. See James Fenton’s interesting comments on Evelyn’s horticultural writings in his “A Friend, a Booke, and a Garden.” 77 At the very beginning of his work Morison informed the reader that one of his main themes would be “the situation of Cities [and] the description of them with all Monuments in each place worth the seeing. . . .”; see Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, xxxvi. For Milton on Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice in particular, see Arthos, Milton and the Italian Cities, especially Part I. 78 Capaccio, Forastiero. Dialogi di Giulio Cesare Capaccio, 852. For more on this fascinating text, see Galasso, “Una capitale dell’impero,” esp. 341–44 and 361–66, and above all Marino, “The Foreigner and the Citizen”; “Emblematic Knowledge”; and his Becoming Neapolitan, esp. 49–63. These were among the last works John wrote, but I remember with gratitude his sending me a copy of what I believe was the first paper he wrote on Capaccio, which he delivered at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 1997. He was obviously quite attached to that infinitely rich text, and managed to squeeze more out of it each time he returned to it. I deeply regret we will never discuss it again. 79 Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. III. 1715–1723, 343– 44 [26 Nov. 1721]. By the way, this was the same Our Lady of Atocha that Voltaire later satirized in The Travels of Scarmentado (1756). 80 It is revealing that Jean-Louis Harouel, in his L’embellissement des villes, centers his comprehensive presentation of eighteenth-century French urban planning around the concept of beautification. That said, embellishment was not the exclusive property of the French; the term was absorbed elsewhere in Europe as well, as in Ruffo’s 1789 Saggio sull’abbellimento di cui è capace la città di Napoli. 81 Voltaire, “Des embellissements de Paris” (1749). 82 Patte, “Des embellissements de Paris.” For more on this text, see 76

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Monclús, “Teorías arquitectónicas y discurso urbanístico,” 29–30, and Carbonnier, “La monarchie et l’urbanisme parisien.” 83 Much closer to the latter stood the best-known discussion of the embellishment of eighteenth-century Paris, the chapter on urban beautification in the Jesuit Marc-Antoine Laugier’s 1753 Essai sur l’architecture (I quote below from the English version, An Essay on Architecture). This text stands out for its subtle argument that eschews uniformity for planned irregularity as a means of enhancing the “natural” beauty of the city, giving rise thus to a combination of “order and yet a sort of confusion. . . everything in alignment yet without being monotonous” (129) that would moreover help remedy the profound disorder of urban life. It is notable also for its use of the term “picturesque,” which Laugier claimed could “be found in the pattern of a parterre as much as in the composition of a painting” (128). For more on Laugier, including his appeal not only to rethink the nature of urban beauty, moving it more toward nature itself, but also his articulation of a historical anthropology which he believed revealed the basic principles of architecture, see Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze, 47–48, as well as Joseph Rykwert’s classic On Adam’s House in Paradise, esp. 43–53. 84 Citing one particularly well-known example, Patricia Brown in her Venice and Antiquity, esp. 81–91, argues for the direct impact on Venetian art and architecture of Cyriacus of Ancona and other travelers in the Eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth century. 85 Pamuk, Istanbul, 221–38. 86 One may need to go beyond the more predictable places to find this; unless I missed something, neither Uzbek nor his correspondents have anything to say on the beauty of Paris (or Venice or Ispahan) in the Lettres persanes. 87 See The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, esp. 34–40; Amanda J. Wunder’s well-illustrated “Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities, and the Image of the Turk in Early Modern Europe”; and Westbrook et al., “Constructing Melchior Lorichs’s Panorama of Constantinople.” 88 The Travels and Journal of Ambrosio Bembo, 334. For della Valle, see

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Viaggi di Pietro Della Valle, Il Pellegrino, vol. I, 454. Howard, Venice and the East is an excellent study of this sort of impact in the sphere of architecture.

Chapter 3 1

This chapter took its first, very primitive form over two decades ago, as a paper delivered at the Colloquium “La Ville à la Renaissance: Espaces, Répresentations, Pouvoirs,” held in Tours in July 1996. Gérald Chaix kindly invited me to this memorable gathering, and Peter Burke, Vanessa Harding, Richard Kagan, and the late Richard Trexler in particular offered useful suggestions and criticism. A decade later I published an abbreviated version focused on Spain—“Aspectos de la cultura urbana en la España moderna”—and then a more extensive rendering in “Artisans Discuss the City,” to which I refer the reader for more detailed discussion. Another decade has passed, and I return to a subject that to my knowledge has received surprisingly little new attention since then (I refer to specifically civic dialogues; dialogue in general thrives as a subject in early modern history, thanks in good measure to Natalie herself). This earlier string of texts provides the nucleus of two sections of this chapter, although I have taken advantage to rewrite and expand some passages and above all to update the bibliography. I would also put in a special word of thanks here to Kenneth Gouwens, as ever for keeping me up to date with Italian texts, which he knows better than did their authors. 2 Burke, “The Renaissance Dialogue.” 3 Davis, Women on the Margins, 1–4. 4 See Arguing It Out: Discussion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium, as well as her Dialoguing in Late Antiquity. 5 As mentioned above, on pp. 2–3. For general studies of early modern dialogues, see Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue, and his Lucian and the Latins; Mulas, “La scrittura del dialogo,” with thanks to the author for the gift of a copy; Jones-Davies, ed., Le dialogue au temps de la

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Renaissance; Wilson, Incomplete Fictions; Ferreras, Les dialogues espagnols du XVIe siècle; Gómez, El diálogo en el Renacimiento español; Burke, “The Renaissance Dialogue”; Snyder, Writing the Scene for Speaking; Bigalli and Guido Canziani, eds., Il dialogo filosofico nel ‘500 europeo; Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue; Winn, ed., The Dialogue in Early Modern France; Pugliese, Il discorso laberintico del dialogo rinascimentale; Rallo Gruss, La escritura dialéctica; Solervicens, El diàleg renaixentista; Dykstal, The Luxury of Skepticism; Godard, Le dialogue à la Renaissance; Heitsch and Vallée, eds., Printed Voices; Kushner, Le dialogue à la Renaissance; Smarr, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women; Rallo Gruss and Malpartida Tirado, eds., Estudios sobre el diálogo renacentista español; Guérin, ed., La dialogue et ses formes connexes; Vian Herrero, ed., Diálogos españoles del Renacimiento; Culpeper and Kytö, Early Modern English Dialogues; and Vian, Vega, and Friedlein, eds., Diálogo y censura en el siglo XVI, España y Portugal. 6 For a brief summary of the dialogue tradition in Florence, see Cox, Renaissance Dialogue, 19–22. The influence of Italian models on Spanish dialogues is summarized in Gómez Moreno, España y la Italia de los humanistas: primeros ecos, 197–214; see also Alcoberro, “La influència de la cultura italiana a la Corona d’Aragó (segle XVI).” 7 For a partial transcription see Conversations at Little Gidding. A large bibliography has arisen around these table-talks, which were well known even before T.S. Eliot derived from them the title of one of his “Four Quartets.” See for example Barbour, “The Caroline Church Heroic,” and Ransome, The Web of Friendship. 8 The “standard” version is still Caplan, Danielillo ó Respuestas á los Cristianos; see also Orfali, “Il Danielillo da Livorno,” esp. 209. I  would note here that the opposite of this self-denying civic dialogue also existed: that is, those colloquies that on the face of it deal with strictly domestic matters, yet which wind up revealing much about urban life. One instance of this would be the ­Declarationboich the Cologne merchant-patrician Hermann Weinsberg wrote for his descendants in order to explain to them the complications of owning property in cities. His especially helpful—and realistic—touch was to structure

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it as a dialogue between a lawyer and a testator. See the summary in Lundin, Paper Memory, 88. 9 A predictably reliable authority states that early modern Italy housed “a cluster of ideas and tales associated with disguise, ruse, stratagem, and tricks, sometimes reproved, often applauded,” and goes on to cite in this regard texts by Castiglione, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini (Davis, Trickster Travels, 113–14). For an overview see Zagorin, Ways of Lying. 10 See Lord and Trafton, eds./trans., Tasso’s Dialogues, esp. 4–7. For Bodin, I have consulted the French translation by Roger Chauviré of Books IV–VI of his Colloquium heptaplomeron de abditis rerum sublimium arcanis. For a hard-to-find version in English, see the Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime. For Bruno’s many dialogues, see the relevant articles in Bigalli and Canziani, eds., Dialogo filosofico, as well as the works cited below. 11 Note the sound warning against idealizing dialogues as cultural vehicles for modern values of rationality and liberty in Solervicens, El diàleg renaixentista, 25–26. And here I add a brief note of gratitude to a learned colleague and friend who over the years has kept me well supplied with his innovative studies of early modern Catalan dialogues and theater. 12 Foulché-Delbosc, ed., “Diálogo entre Lain Caluo, i Nuño Rasura.” I am grateful to Richard Kagan for bringing this text to my attention. 13 An issue much in the air at the time, given the recent return of the court from Valladolid to Madrid; on this see Bouza Alvarez, “Lisboa Sozinha, Quase Viuva.” The original text is available as Mendes de Vasconcelos, Do Sítio de Lisboa: Diálogos. Mendes closely followed the Latin encomium of the city the humanist Damião de Góis published in 1554; for translations, see the Descrição da cidade de Lisboa, and Lisbon in the Renaissance. 14 In his “Eremitae,” [IV], appended to Joannis Lud. Vives Exercitationes linguae latinae, ff. 88v.–90r.; see also García García’s summary in his El pensamiento comunero y erasmista de Juan Maldonado, 20. 15 To be sure, what I refer to here as openness was not found in all these texts. Some colloquies headed in fact in the opposite direction, which would help explain why the “true” opinions of one of the earliest pro-

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moters of dialogues, Leon Battista Alberti, are so notoriously hard to pin down. Thus while his most developed colloquy—“The Books of the Family,” available in English as The Family in Renaissance Florence—contains much of interest regarding urban life, Alberti offers surprisingly little direct reflection on the city as a political, social, or even public sphere. 16 Paschetti, Le bellezze di Genova. 17 Pedro Mejía [Mexía], Diálogos o Coloquios, esp. 213–16. 18 Which also fits the emphasis in chapter two on the underlying flexibility of early modern aesthetic conventions. The undated dialogue appears as an appendix in Foscari and Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti, 213– 17; see p. 216 for the Temple of Mars precedent. The reference to a section of Palladio’s treatise is to the Four Books, IV, xv (illustrations 38–39 in the 1738 Leoni-Ware version). 19 One especially chatty walk through London whose purpose was to help a Frenchman learn English is found in Miège, Nouvelle Methode Pour Apprendre l’Anglois. I thank John Gallagher for this reference. 20 Pontano, “Antonius.” 21 See the summary in Giordano, “On Filarete’s Libro architettonico.” An English translation is available in Averlino, called Filarete, Treatise on Architecture. For more general background see Eugenio Garin’s “The Ideal City.” 22 For another example of an architectural treatise written in dialogue form, see the Spanish cleric Diego de Sagredo’s 1526 “Roman Measures” (Medidas del Romano), a guide to classical building techniques. Pamela O. Long mentions the general connection between architectural exposition and dialogues in her Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 77–80; for more on Sagredo, see Llewellyn, “‘Hungry and Desperate for Knowledge.’” 23 Cervantes de Salazar, Life in the Imperial and Loyal City of Mexico; see 58–63 for the section featuring the original Aztec names. For a reading of this text that locates it in a broader field of colonialist discourse, see Merrim, “The Work of Marketplaces,” 225–28. 24 These different modes of description take up respectively chapters 23, 5–9, and 13–14 of the Viaje de Turquía. Much has been written

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about this fascinating text, which attracted the attention of scholars such as Marcel Bataillon, who put special emphasis on its “Erasmian” character in his Le Docteur Laguna auteur du “Voyage en Turquie”. (This was one of the reasons why he attributed its authorship to a converted Jewish author, the humanist physician Andrés Laguna.) Studies that emphasize its dialogue form include T.R. Hart’s short but illuminating “Renaissance Dialogue and Narrative Fiction,” and Jean-Marc Pelorson, “Entre conversation et conversion.” 25 Details in the Epilogue to Niccoli, Rinascimento anticlericale, 158– 64. Note that in a considerably different context, Hans Sachs also drew repeatedly on the dialogue form in a similar mix of religious and political satire (see below). 26 Lettre du Roy Henry IV en Bronze, du Pont neuf, à son fils Louis XIII de la Place Royale, as mentioned in Newman, Cultural Capitals, 41 and 167, and DeJean, How Paris Became Paris, 90–91. 27 For the walk, see Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, 110–15. If the reader will indulge me a moment of nostalgia, I would note that I first came across this text—as did countless others—when reading Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. As she noted (254), Bruno later told his Venetian Inquisitors that the supper did not take place at Greville’s house, but at the embassy itself, that is, virtually at the starting point of the “walk”; on this, see also the late John Bossy’s Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, esp. 38–49 and 110–15. 28 I cannot tell a lie; I have not seen this text. Instead, I take not only the citation but also the summary of its contents from Limberger, “‘No Town in the World Provides More Advantages’,” 54–55, which relies in turn on Goris, Étude sur les colonies marchandes, 133. For more recent discussion of the same issues, see Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce. 29 Velázquez de Echevarría, Paseos por Granada y sus contornos. 30 In this vein Solervicens, El diàleg renaixentista, 29–30 notes how the relatively late codification of norms for literary dialogues in sixteenthcentury Italy allowed the form to flourish as a relatively free and “permeable” genre. 31 See Panofsky, “The First Page of Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Libro’,” and Witt-

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kower, Gothic vs. Classic, 65–82. Other studies include: Zucchini, Disegni antichi e moderni per la facciata di San Petronio di Bologna; Bernheimer, “Gothic Survival and Revival in Bologna”; Lotz, “Reflections on Palladio as Town Planner”; Tuttle, “Urban Design Strategies in Renaissance Bologna”; Thurber, “Architecture and Civic Identity in Late Sixteenth-Century Bologna”; Faietti and Medica, eds., La basilica incompiuta (exhibition catalogue); and Simoncini, La memoria del Medioevo nell’architettura dei secoli XV–XVIII, 71–89 (perhaps the best short summary). 32 “Da che se comencio a mettere dite pilastrade in opera s’è svegliato tanti architetori che non aveva creduto ne fosse tanti in tutto il mondo. E dogni sorte, preti, frati, artexani, contadini, maestri di scola, mandandori, scudelari, fuxari, fachini e fino a queli, dalaqua mostrano architetori, e diceno el suo parere. . . .” Cited in Miller, Renaissance Bologna, 158n, from Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI, II, 140–43. Arriguzzi’s own model is one of the several that still survive in the Museo di San Petronio. For discussion of it, focused especially on the question of Tuscan influences, see Bernheimer, “Gothic Survival,” 268–69 et passim. On the architect himself see the entry by A. Ghidiglia Quintavalle in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. IV, 323–24. 33 That this is not so farfetched an idea is suggested by the decisive intervention by the tailor Carlo Carazzi in the extensive public debate over the proportions of the vaults in the church’s nave that began in 1589. For details, see Panofsky, “The First Page,” 203–204n., Bernheimer, “Gothic Survival,” 266–67, 278 and 279n., and Wittkower, Gothic vs. Classic, esp. 67–71. 34 There is a large and rich bibliography on public discussions of architectural styles in late medieval and early modern Italy. One of the longest and best known controversies involved the facade of the cathedral of Milan; see in particular Ackerman, “‘Ars Sine Scientia Nihil Est’” (originally published in 1949); Wittkower, Gothic vs. Classic, esp. 17– 64; and Schofield and Repishti, Architettura e Controriforma. These exchanges should be seen in the broader context of both structured and spontaneous citizen discussions related to public competitions regard-

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ing civic art and architecture. Some of these are extremely well known, such as the Florentine contest between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi for the design and execution of the so-called Gates of Paradise of the Baptistery, or the extended arguments over where exactly to place Michelangelo’s statue of David in 1504 (see R.W.B. Lewis’s The City of Florence, 84 and 112–18 for an engaging summary). Such open-air debates merit further study, as well as a general overview. 35 This reference originates in a well-known statement by Walter Ong that present-day readers could detect such speech in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry, alluding to Shakespeare’s sonnets as one example. See Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, 286–87. Ong made this observation as part of a more general argument that the sixteenth-century dialogue was a form in decline, doomed as it was by the hostility to orality inherent in the privatized and anti-social nature of emergent print culture. Virginia Cox takes up the same theme in her Renaissance Dialogue; see 99, for example, for the general evolution from “open dialogue to closed book.” The examples cited in this chapter might be interpreted in a slightly different key, as confirming the ongoing vigor of dialogue in locales not that dominated (yet) by the innovations of literary and/or political elites. 36 One handy collection is Die Prosadialoge des Hans Sachs; I have also consulted the translation in Hans Sachs, Elf Fastnachtspiele/Once farsas de carnaval. For background, see: Beare, “Later Dialogues of Hans Sachs”; Merzbacher et al., eds., Handwerker, Dichter, Stadtbürger, especially 33–37; and Broadhead, “Guildsmen, Religious Reform and the Search for the Common Good.” That Sachs publicly affirmed his artisan status was evident by his mentioning in the title of his first dialogue its authorship “von einem Schumacher und Chorherren” (title page reproduced in Merzbacher et al., Handwerker, 105). 37 Gelli, Opere, 125–288. 38 Gelli, Opere, 449–81. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, 41–45, also mentions Pier Francesco Giambullari’s Origine della lingua fiorentina altrimenti il Gello, a 1546 dialogue set in the cloisters of San Lorenzo and which brings together Curzio, an out-

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of-towner in search of instruction on the antiquity of Florence, with Carlo Lenzoni, a mutual friend of Giambullari and Gelli. Recall as well that Machiavelli’s early efforts at dialogue focused on questions of language; see his “Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua” (ca. 1514), in his Opere, 703–20. Note moreover that Gelli wrote a short treatise on the foundation of Florence and the tangled history of the Tuscan language; see [Gelli], Il trattatello dell’origine di Firenze. 39 Originally published as “Un manuscrit català ‘Lo Perqué de Barcelona’ de Pere Serra i Postius,” it is now more readily available in the recent philological edition by Joan Tres i Arnal, Lo perquè de Barcelona y memòrias de sas antiguedats. For valuable biographical information, see Madurell i Marimon’s “Pedro Serra Postius,” and “Más sobre Pedro Serra Postius.” Other background can be found in: Comas, Història de la literatura catalana, vol. IV, 128–34; Kenneth Brown, “Encara més sobre Serra i Postius”; and José Luis Betrán et al., “Pere Serra i Postius.” See also my brief remarks in “Memoria histórica y tradición cívica.” 40 For the especially revealing case of the Reims carpenter Jehan Pussot, see my The Flight of Icarus, esp. 213 and 221. 41 It was found, for example, in the title of an undated exchange by one Romanello Manin, which pitted the city of Udine against hostile lords in the surrounding countryside: “Dialoghi tra cittadino e castellano,” in the Biblioteca Civico, Padua/Ms. CM 44, as summarized in Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, 45–46. See also the Aragonese humanist Juan Costa’s widely-read “The Citizen”: El Ciudadano de Iuan, with revised editions in Salamanca, 1578, and Zaragoza, 1584. (Xavier Gil Pujol has dealt with this author in various studies, most notably his “Ciudadanía, patria y humanismo cívico en el Aragón foral.”) The poet Damasio de Frías’s 1582 “Diálogo en alabanza de Valladolid” similarly features a conversation between a Pilgrim and an unnamed “Ciudadano”; see the version in Alonso Cortés, Miscelánea vallisoletana, vol. II, 225–87. Finally, for the circulation of Castiglione’s widely-read text, see Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier. 42 For background, see my Honored Citizens of Barcelona, 28–33 and 219–22, and more broadly, my Flight of Icarus, 196–237.

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43

See Despuig, Los col·loquis de la insigne ciutat de Tortosa, especially 126–27, although see also 23. This work is now available in English translation as Dialogues: A Catalan Renaisssance Colloquy Set in the City of Tortosa. Another dialogue that made fun of upwardly-mobile merchants was included by the Veronese jurist Giovanni Fratta in his 1590 Della dedicatione de’ libri; for a brief summary see Berengo, Città italiana e città europea, 183–84. 44 In his Opere, VII, 3–172. For background, see Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft, 31–37, and Alison Brown’s introduction to her translation of the Dialogue on the Government of Florence, vii–xxviii. It would not become a work honoring so optimistic a scholar as Natalie Davis to lament too much the dialogues we have lost, or that were never recorded. But were I to mention one, I know which one it would be: the symposium the Andalusian humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda alluded to in an undated letter to D. Juan Esteban Manrique de Lara, III. Duke of Nájera, concerning a luxurious banquet he had attended in Barcelona (Epistolario de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, 131–34). The author remarks that when the dinner conversation reached the topic of the recent unrest within the city, he defended “popular government” against his aristocratic hosts’ preference for oligarchy. Such a speech would be of interest not only because it would seem to counter the image of the author—yes, this was the infamous opponent of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas in the Valladolid debates over the degree of humanity of the indigenous inhabitants of the New World—but also because it dealt with the Spanish city in which the popular classes retained the greatest degree of political representation. 45 Vives, Diálogos y otros escritos, especially IV and XXII. For some further comments, see Rosselló, “La percepció de l’espai urbà a la València de Joan Lluís Vives.” 46 In a similar work the enlightened reformer Louis de Mondran cast his plans for redesigning eighteenth-century Toulouse in the form of an imaginary conversation between a local proponent of the new urbanism and an approving outsider from Paris. See [Louis de Mondran],

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Plan général pour l’embellissement de la ville de Toulouse. For further details on this energetic urban planner see Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 1463–1789, 345–52. There are several Italian exemplars of having a native citizen explain his city to a foreigner. Perhaps the best known is Giulio Cesare Capaccio’s exhaustive exposé of Naples, Il Forastiere, originally published in 1634. (My thanks to the late John Marino for sending me a copy of his unpublished 1997 paper “Counter-Reformation Naples Reads Its Past: A Foreigner-Citizen Dialogue,” which was finally incorporated into his Becoming Neapolitan, esp. 49–63.) Another instance is part V of Doni’s I marmi del Doni, which reproduces conversations allegedly overheard in Florence between, for example, a local inhabitant (“Fiorentino”) and a foreign tourist (“Peregrino”) regarding the quality of the art work throughout the city (at the Orsanmichele, in the Medici chapel in San Lorenzo, the Medici palace, etc). 47 Libro della vita civile composta da Mattheo Palmieri cittadino fiorentino, 3. Despuig also defended writing in Catalan, as Latin is “understood only by a small readership and by fewer amongst our [Catalan] nation than I would wish, as it is in their honour and for their pleasure that I have written it” (Dialogues: A Catalan Renaisssance Colloquy, 37). 48 Despuig, Dialogues, 36. For the record, a related if idiosyncratic feature of this work was its frequent use of proverbs, of both Catalan and Castilian origin. 49 See for example her “Speaking and Listening in Early Modern London.” I am indebted to Dr. Wright for advice about this field, and for directing me to the work of Dawn Archer, especially her Historical Pragmatics. NB: the documentation of this valuable study is almost exclusively urban in origin, but the civic setting is not one of the questions dealt with in the book. It also draws attention to the “Corpus of English Dialogues, 1560–1760” (released in 2006), which assembles a large data base of dialogues drawn from both “authentic speech” (such as transcriptions of courtroom trials) and “imaginary,” that is, literary speech. For more on this project see the host page at the University of Uppsala (http://www.engelska.uu.se/Research/English_Language/Re-

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search_Areas/Electronic_Resource_Projects/A_Corpus_of_English_ Dialogues/), as well as the findings reported in Culpeper and Kytö, Early Modern English Dialogues. 50 The full document is cited in Pretel Marín, Alcaraz en el siglo de Andrés de Vandelvira, 455–59. By the way, one of the men speaking at this meeting was Miguel Sabuco, either the father or the brother of the most famous woman physician in Spanish history, Oliva Sabuco de Nantes, the author of an extraordinary text that was printed the same year, and whose blistering attack on Galenic medicine won her a European-wide reputation. For details see Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, The True Medicine. 51 See Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence, 90–95 for a summary of what he refers to as “citizens’ works committees.” 52 As has been remarked in major studies such as Contreras, El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Galicia, 131–34 and 585–90, or Starr-Lebeau, In the Shadow of the Virgin, 19. 53 Fontes Iudaeorum Regni Castellae. II. For a suggestive study based on this material, see Edwards, “Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain.” 54 Note that the interrogations in the trial record reconstruct the specific interventions by each individual. Michael Alpert summarizes their conversation in his Criptojudaísmo e Inquisición en los siglos XVII  y XVIII, 103–14, which is based on the original depositions in Archivo Histórico Nacional/Inquisición, leg. 134 (18). 55 See for instance Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, 243, for Orobio de Castro’s conversations with his fellow converted Jew Diego Duarte Serrano. 56 See the detailed account in Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses, 153–77. 57 Griffin, Journeymen-Printers, Heresy, and the Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Spain; the Spanish version (Oficiales de imprenta, herejía e Inquisición en la España del siglo XVI) includes appendices that contain the oral autobiographies (discursos de la vida) various prisoners rendered under interrogation. 58 See Davis, “Reconstructing the Poor in Early Sixteenth-Century Toulouse,” with thanks to the author for sharing this and other por-

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tions of her research with me. In the opening footnote Davis specifies that the article had its origins in a symposium held at Boston University in 1990 to honor Natalie Davis (no relation!), to whom she expresses her warm gratitude. I  would also note that Susan Broomhall uses a similar source in her “Identity and Life Narratives of the Poor in Late Sixteenth-Century Tours”; however, in this case whatever oral origins that lay behind the petitions for relief submitted to the city government were effaced thanks to the survival in the records she consulted only of summaries, not the original petitions themselves. 59 Needless to say, bygone literary as well as legal texts have long been pressed into service for what they reveal about speech. For a discussion of some of the possibilities (as well as technical difficulties) involved from the perspective of classical linguistics, see Poccetti, ed., Oratio obliqua. 60 See for example: Gowing, Domestic Dangers; Capp, When Gossips Meet; Hubbard, City Women; and more generally Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, esp. 51–111, and Fox and Woolf, eds., The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850. 61 See Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor—the “O-Factor,” by the way, refers to the special sound conditions in the “wooden O” of the Globe theater—and Syme, Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England, which argues that even if early modern court depositions are emphatically not direct transcriptions of speech—something that was clearly known at the time—they can still be studied as forms of self expression from that period.

A Personal Epilogue 1

Much has been written about this intriguing edifice. See above all: Schmidt, “Zu Vignolas Palazzo Bocchi in Bologna”; Monari, “Palazzo Bocchi”; Orazi, Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, 1528–1550; Roversi, Palazzi e case nobili, 46–59; Miller, Renaissance Bologna, 135–40; Scanna-

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vini, MDXLV. Palazzo Bocchi; Watson, Achille Bocchi, esp. 63–66 and 148–52; and Mattei, “Architettura, committenza, eterodossia.” 2 This was Bocchius, Symbolicarum quaestionum. For an excellent study of Bocchi’s life and diverse cultural interests, see Watson, Achille Bocchi; for a succinct biography see Rotondò, “Bocchi, Achille.” (A remark in passing: I trust I surely am not the only reader who remembers first coming across Bocchi as the creator of the emblem of Harpocrates that graces as its frontispiece Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory.) 3 Watson, Achille Bocchi, 21. 4 A fair amount of ink has been spilled trying to answer this question. Not surprisingly, Watson spends the final pages of her admirable book mulling over its meaning. 5 I  have consulted above all travel texts such as those surveyed in Klusáková’s “Between Reality and Stereotype.” The situation improved immeasurably—that is, mentions of the city multiplied—when I reached the nineteenth century, where I was helped in particular by Hanák, Garden and the Workshop, 3–43; Lukacs, Budapest 1900, 25– 66; and Meller, European Cities, 1890–1930s, 77–116. 6 Still, when he was finally liberated in Stalag VIIA in Moosburg, Bavaria in May 1945, his medical record shows that he had lost most of his body weight. If the Third Army had taken another week to reach his new camp, it is probable that he and most of his fellow prisoners would have starved to death. 7 Davis, A Passion for History, esp. 3–5. 8 In point of fact, according to standard academic taxonomy Leone Ginzburg was a philologist (his 1931 university degree was in Lettere moderne, with a thesis on Maupassant), and he remained deeply committed to literature as a publisher and editor as well as a scholar throughout his life. However, a distinctively strong historical sensibility also informs his writing from early on; one in fact wonders if the reader of works such as, say, his 1932 essay on Herzen and Garibaldi (and Mazzini) would be able to tell that the author was not a historian by training (see his “Garibaldi e Herzen”). That his son shows such a visible loyalty toward philology as well as history (and art history, phi-

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losophy, and anthropology) closes a circle made all the more distant by the absurd hyper-specialization of academia today. 9 Davis, “Censorship, Silence and Resistance.”

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Inde x

A academies, 108, 119 Addison, Joseph (English essayist, 1672–1719), 81 Administration, 8, 127, 156 Aelius Aristides (ancient Greek orator, 117–181 AD), 47–48, 61, 170 Africa, 27 Alberti, Leon Battista (Florentine humanist/architect, 1404–72), 67, 69–73, 100, 109, 171–74. 183 Albertini, Francesco (Florentine cleric/scholar, 1469–1520), 52, 68 Alcaraz (Spanish market town), 126–27, 190 alchemy, 31 Algiers, 129 Alhambra (palace in Granada), 27 d’Amat, Rafel, baron of Maldà (Barcelona diarist, 1746–1819), 12, 157 Americas, 146, 172 Amerindians, 28, 69, 183 Amiens, 18, 124 Andalusia, 27, 30, 188 antiquity/antiquarians, 8, 29, 42, 43, 47–48, 52, 57, 59–63, 67, 70– 80, 94, 97, 99, 106, 112, 146, 165–75 Antwerp, 55, 113, 168 Aragon, 10 Arcadia, 85, 146–47 architecture, 19, 42, 43, 50, 53, 58, 63–92, 107–10, 114–17, 127, 136–37, 145, 165–80, 183–86 archives, 4, 21, 128, 136, 152, 155, 156

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Arno river, 49 Arriguzzi, Arduino (Bolognese architect, d. 1531), 116–17, 185 art/artists, 38, 50, 53, 58, 62, 70, 73–74, 78, 80, 84, 85, 114, 164–69, 174, 179, 185–86, 189, 192 artisans/craftsmen, 50, 78, 97, 116–20, 123, 127, 186 Athens, 48, 60–61, 85, 168, 170 Atocha, Our Lady of (Madrid shrine), 91, 178 Aubrac, Lucie, 140 Augsburg, 54, 151, 168 Augustine (early Church Father, 354–430 AD), 82 Augustus (Roman emperor, 63 BC–14 AD), 63, 165 Ausonius (ancient Roman writer, 310–395 AD), 62, 170 authors and authorship, 1–40, 44–45, 54, 85, 89, 97, 105–15, 121 autobiographical or personal literature, 12, 29, 35, 111, 139, 145, 151, 190 B Babylon, 30 bakers, 105 balconies, 91 ballads, 9, 156 barbarism, 91 Barbaro, Daniele (Venetian humanist, 1513–70), 78–79, 174 Barcelona, 4–16, 18, 20, 22, 26, 34, 37, 107, 118–22, 145, 153–59, 161, 165, 187–88 Bardi, Agnolo (Sienese antiquarian, 16th century), 42 Bargrave, Robert (English merchant/traveller, 1628–61), 6, 153, 162 Basque Country (between Spain/France), 31 Bayeux, 55, 168 Beatis, Antonio de’ (Italian cleric/traveller, fl. early 16th century), 22–23, 54–57, 89, 161, 168 beauty of cities, 27–28, 41–95, 106–108, 115, 117, 136–38, 164–80

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Bembo, Ambrosio (Venetian noble/traveler, 1652–1705), 94, 179 Benjamin, Walter (German writer/philosopher, 1892–1940), 33 Berengo, Marino, 141, 188 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo (Neapolitan artist/architect, 1598–1680), 26, 162 Biondo, Flavio (Italian historian/geographer, 1392–1463), 49, 168 birds, 29–30 blasphemy, 133 Bloch, Marc, 140 Blondel, François (French architectural theorist, 1618–86), 74 Blumin, Stuart, 38, 164–65 Boccaccio, Giovanni (Florentine writer, 1313–75), 51 Bocchi, Achille (Bolognese humanist, 1488–1562), 136–37, 191–92 Bocchi, Francesco (Florentine writer, 1548–1618), 106, 168 Bodin, Jean (French philosopher/political theorist, 1530–96), 104, 182 Bologna, 23, 65, 111, 115–16, 136–37, 162, 171, 172, 185, 191–92 Bordeaux, 62, 170 Botero, Giovanni (Savoyard theologian/scholar, 1544–1617), 150, 166 Brabant, 55 Bracciolini, Poggio (Florentine humanist, 1380–1459), 100 Brasca, Santo (Lombard diplomat/traveller, 1444–1522), 23 brick (as building material), 78–79, 175 Brosses, Charles de (French writer/traveler, 1709–1777), 43, 167 Brossolette, Pierre, 140 Bruges, 55, 168 Bruni, Leonardo (Florentine humanist/chronicler, 1370–1444), 14, 47–49, 61, 100, 155, 158, 163 Bruniquer, Esteve Gilabert (Barcelona notary, 1561–1642), 7, 16, 155, 158 Bruno, Giordano (Italian theologian/philosopher, 1548–1600), 104, 112–13, 182, 184 Buda/Budapest, 138–39, 141, 192

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bureaucrats/bureaucracy, 7, 8, 45, 100, 126, 155 Burgos, 104, 105 Burke, Edmund (Irish politician/philosopher, 1729–97), 81 Burke, Peter, 1, 59, 98, 144, 150, 160, 161, 169, 176, 177, 180, 181, 187 Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de (Imperial diplomat/humanist, 1522–92), 94, 179 Bussmann, Walter, 140 Byzantium, 99, 180 C Caesar, Augustus (ancient Roman emperor, 27 BC–14 AD), 63 Caesar, Julius (ancient Roman soldier/statesman, 100–44 BC), 63 Cambridge, 101 Cameron, Avril, 98 Capaccio, Giulio Cesare (Neapolitan poet/historian, 1552–1631), 90, 178, 189 Capital cities, 10, 12, 13, 26, 46, 69, 81, 91, 104, 111, 162 carnival, 11 Casale Monferrato, 56 Castiglione, Baldassare (Italian humanist/writer, 1478–1529), 74, 121, 172, 182, 187 Catalan language, 8, 14, 16, 153, 157, 158, 182, 189 Cathedrals, 22, 23, 26, 28, 49, 55, 126, 164, 185 Central European University, 59, 150 ceremonies, 9, 156 Certeau, Michel de (French historian/theorist, 1925–86), 21, 161 Cervantes, Miguel de (Spanish novelist/playwright, 1547–1616), 9, 15, 156 Cervantes de Salazar, Francisco (Toledan humanist/professor, d. 1575), 110, 123, 183 Ceverio de Vera, Juan (Spanish cleric/pilgrim, late 16th century), 24, 161

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chandlers, 81, 120 chorography, 6, 16, 44, 123, 155, 161, 163 chronicle, 5, 10, 12, 16, 18, 47, 51, 97, 111, 12, 150–53, 157, 160, 167 Cicero (Roman writer/philosopher, 106–43 BC), 71, 74 citizens/citizenship, 1, 17, 21, 40, 46, 51, 66, 102, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 138, 160, 163, 175, 178, 185, 187, 189, 190 Classicism, 58, 67, 69, 73, 78–84 clergy, 18, 22, 24, 52, 54, 78, 100, 108, 118, 157, 183, 184 clocks, 76 clowns, 30, 113 Cock, Hendrik (Flemish writer, d. post-1598), 10 Cologne, 54, 168, 181 commerce/trade, 55, 62, 105, 168 communication, 2, 4, 131, 149, 152–53, 177 community, 19, 147, 151 Compagni, Dino (Florentine merchant/chronicler, d. 1324), 47, 167 comparisons and comparative history, 19, 27, 82, 105, 146, 153, 161 competitions/contests, 74, 107, 116, 167, 169, 177, 185, 186 Concinnitas. See Harmony Copernicus, Niklas (Polish mathematician/astronomer, 1473–1543), 30, 113 Cortés, Hernán (Spanish soldier, 1485–1547), 25 Coryat, Thomas (English traveller, 1577–1617), 24, 26, 161, 170 crime, 127 Crouzet, Denis, 139 Cuzco (Peru), 69 D Daedalus, 21 “Danielillo” (fictional Jewish guide to Livorno, mid-17th century), 102, 103, 181 Dante Alighieri (Italian poet, 1265–1321), 51

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Darnton, Robert, 4, 152 Dati, Goro [Gregorio] (Florentine merchant/chronicler, 1362–1435), 48–49, 167–68 Davis, Barbara Beckerman, 132 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 2, 4, 39, 94, 98, 139–41, 149–50, 152, 176, 180, 188, 191 decoration, 47, 48, 50, 90, 91, 165, 169 defamation, 133 Dei, Benedetto (Florentine merchant/chronicler, 1418–92), 51 Delft, 113, 164 democracy, 141 Despuig, Cristòfol (Catalan gentleman, 1510–74), 122–25, 188–89 D’Evelyn, Margaret, 78, 174–75 Devil, 30–32 dialogues, 11, 16, 27, 29, 32, 33, 53, 86, 90, 97–133, 136, 141, 173, 178, 180–91 diaries/journals, 12–13, 22, 28, 35, 54, 82, 87, 89, 93, 153, 155, 157, 161, 162–63, 166, 167, 168, 178, 179 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal (Spanish soldier, 1492–1584), 25, 162 diplomats, 6, 51 Don Quijote (1605), 8–9, 156 Doni, Anton Francesco (Florentine writer, 1513–1574), 27–29, 32, 38, 53, 162–63, 167, 189 Dürer, Albrecht (German artist, 1471–1528), 26, 162 E elegance, 48, 50, 51, 57 embellishment, 46, 50, 54, 76, 91–92, 169, 170, 178–79, 189 emblems, 136, 192 emotions, 36 encomium/laudatio, 6–7, 16, 37, 44, 47, 61, 76, 154, 155, 182. See also praise

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England, 6, 18, 24, 36, 89, 101, 107, 112, 153, 160, 189–90, 191 Enlightenment, 92, 188 entries, royal, 9, 27, 156 ephemera, 9–10, 177 epistles/letters, 15, 52, 112, 126, 162, 177, 179, 188 eulogies, 9 Evelyn, John (English statesman/writer, 1620–1706), 25–26, 42, 89, 162, 166, 176, 178 F facades, 29, 50, 58, 66, 107, 115–16, 136, 185 farmers/peasants, 7, 116 Favro, Diane, 63, 170 Febvre, Lucien, 140 Ferrar, Nicholas (English scholar/writer, 1592–1637), 101 Ferrara, 54 Filarete (Andrea Averlino) (Florentine architect, d. 1469), 68, 109, 183 Flanders, 55–56. See also Netherlands/Low Countries flight, 31–32 Florence, 14, 23, 26, 27, 29, 46–53, 61, 68, 78, 79, 90, 100, 106, 111, 118, 123, 126, 146, 152, 155, 157, 163, 167–69, 174, 178, 181, 183, 186–90 food/food supply, 88, 105, 110 foreigners, 7, 86, 88, 93, 108, 110–13, 161, 178, 189 fountains, 90–91 France, 10, 211, 23, 43, 55–56, 74, 91, 112, 113, 131, 132, 140, 153– 54, 159, 162, 168, 175, 178, 181, 183 Franciscus, Andreas (Venetian traveller, late 15th century), 36 Franco, Niccolò (Venetian satirist/writer, 1515–70), 111–12 Franco, Veronica (Venetian poet/courtesan, 1546–91), 88 Fréart de Chambray, Roland (French writer/architectural theorist, 1606–76), 74, 175

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G galleries, 49 gardens, 49, 90, 178 Gay, John (English poet/playwright, 1685–1732), 18, 159 Gelli, Giambattista (Florentine shoemaker/philosopher, 1498–1563), 118, 186–87 Genoa, 6, 42–43, 90, 106, 111, 150, 176 Germany, 3, 23, 54, 56, 140, 152, 154 Ghent, 23 Gilbert, Felix, 141 Ginzburg, Carlo, 74, 137, 140, 141 Ginzburg, Leone, 140 Giralda (tower in Seville), 22, 163 Giulio Romano (Roman architect, 1492–1546), 115 Glikl of Hameln (Jewish merchant/diarist, 1646–1724), 98 globalization, 92 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (German writer, 1749–1832), 34–36, 162, 163 goldsmiths, 50 Gothic (style), 58–59, 82, 116–17, 177, 185 graffiti, 9 Granada, 22, 27, 114, 161, 184 Greece/Greek, 6, 47, 52, 60, 61–62, 99, 146, 169, 170 Greville, Fulke (the elder) (English writer, 1554–1628), 113, 184 Griffin, Clive, 131, 190 Gritti, Andrea (Venetian ruler/reformer, 1455–1538), 76 Guadix (Spain), 22, 161 Guicciardini, Francesco (Florentine diplomat/historian, 1483–1540), 6, 100, 123, 153, 182, 188 guidebooks, 7–8, 18, 22, 27, 44–45, 52–53, 68, 85, 86, 165, 167, 170 guilds/crafts, 47, 113–14, 117, 120–22, 186

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H Halicarnassus, 79 harmony, 71–72 Hebrew, 130, 137 Henri IV (king of France, 1553–1610), 112 heresy, 129–31, 190 historians and historiography, 1–2, 6, 8, 15, 42, 47–51, 62, 75, 97, 106, 114, 116, 119, 124, 125, 126, 132–33, 135, 137, 140–41 historicism, 75 horses, 88, 110 hospitals, 50 houses/housing, 31, 52, 54–57, 76, 78, 83, 107, 161 humanism/humanists, 3, 6, 14, 27, 37, 48–51, 57, 64, 67, 78, 79, 86, 105, 106, 108–10, 123, 136, 154, 173, 174, 181, 182, 184, 187, 188 Hungary/Hungarian, 138–39, 150 Hyde, J.K., 1, 150, 152, 154, 155, 158, 169 hybrids, 58 hygiene (urban), 92 I Iberian Peninsula, 10, 15, 22 Icarus, 21, 32, 151 identity/identities, 110, 117, 153, 185, 191 images and visual depictions of cities, 20, 28, 38, 39, 45, 49, 57, 63, 77, 83, 86, 90–92, 113, 116, 130, 149, 153, 159, 160, 163–72, 174, 178 infrastructure, urban, 83, 91, 113 Inquisition, 127–32, 184, 190 insiders, 8, 28, 33, 44, 52, 86–87, 107, 160, 170, 176 institutions, 7–10, 128, 131–32 insults, 133 intendants, 7 Istanbul/Constantinople, 93–94, 111, 179

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Italy/Italians, 3, 6, 10, 22, 38, 42–43, 46–58, 67, 75, 90, 93–94, 100–103, 106–109, 111–18, 125, 136–37, 140, 150–89, 191–92 itineraries, 17, 19, 36, 97, 159, 163 J Janiculum/Gianicolo (Roman hill), 28–29 Jorba, Dionís Jerònim de (Barcelona humanist, late 16th century), 7, 14, 155, 158 journalism/newssheets, 10, 157 K keywords, 26, 43, 46, 50, 57, 59, 71, 132, 165, 169 Koblenz, 54, 168 Kreisau Circle (Second World War resistance network), 140 L language/languages, 8, 79, 108–10, 118, 124, 126, 128–29, 132–33, 174, 187, 189, 191 Latin, 5–7, 105, 110, 123–24, 158, 167, 182, 189 lawyers/barristers, 15, 159 Leipzig, 24 Leo Africanus (African captive/geographer, b. ca. 1494), 94 Levi, Carlo, 167 Levi, Giovanni, 141, 175 Libanius (ancient Roman orator/rhetorician, 314–394 AD), 61 liberty/liberties, 52, 174, 175, 182 libraries, 136, 158 Lima (Peru), 69 Lisbon, 22, 104, 129, 161, 182 Lisieux, 55, 168 literacy/illiteracy, 101, 132, 191

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literature, 8–18, 20, 30, 34, 44, 47, 49, 60, 80, 97–99, 109, 114, 119, 123, 125, 151, 171, 175, 184, 186, 189, 191, 192. See also novels; poetry Little Gidding (country home of Ferrar family), 101–102, 181 Livorno, 102–103, 181 loggia/loggie, 49, 65 London, 13, 18–19, 26, 112–13, 120, 126, 133, 151, 155, 159–60, 165, 167, 183, 189 Louis XIII (king of France, 1601–43), 112, 184 Lucian (ancient Greek satirist, d. after 180 AD), 32, 180 Lyon, 4, 55, 152, 168 M Machiavelli, Niccolò (Florentine political theorist, 1469–1527), 100, 182, 187 Madrid, 10, 11, 30–31, 90–91, 128, 129, 139 magnificence/splendor, 26, 48, 51, 55, 57, 81, 92, 250, 166, 176 Mainz, 54, 168 Mal Lara, Juan de (Spanish humanist, 1524–71), 27, 162 Maldonado, Juan de (Spanish humanist, 1485–1554), 105, 182 manuscripts, 12–13, 54, 55, 109, 119, 153, 154, 162 mathematics, 71–72 marble, 29, 52 Marforio (ancient statue in Rome), 112 Marie de l’Incarnation (French nun/missionary, 1599–1632), 98 Markets (commercial), 76, 91, 110, 183 Mausolus (ancient satrap of Caria, 377–53 BC), 78 Mayer, Arno, 141 Mazarinades (mid-17th-century French satires), 112 Medici, Cosimo de’ (Florentine banker/ruler, 1389–1464), 51 medicine/physicians, 6, 22, 74, 110, 111, 184, 190 Mejía/Mexía, Pedro (Spanish humanist, 1497–1551), 109, 183

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Mendes de Vasconcelos, Luís (Portuguese noble/writer, d. ca. 1623), 104, 182 mercers/cloth retailers, 16, 18 merchants, 6, 18, 24, 31, 47, 51, 55, 65, 97, 10, 105, 113, 117, 122, 123, 162, 168, 171, 181, 188 Mercier, Sébastien (French writer, 1740–1814), 17, 31, 159, 161, 163 Merian, Maria Sibylla (German naturalist/artist, 1647–1717), 98 Meudon (French town near Paris), 26 Mexico City/Tenochtitlan, 25, 100, 123 Middle Ages, 1, 2, 36, 42, 46, 64, 67, 79, 99, 104, 115, 150, 152, 157, 169, 172 Milan, 23, 109, 150, 185 military/soldiers, 104, 138–39, 158, 162 models (architectural), 116, 185 Montaigne, Michel de (French philosopher/writer, 1553–92), 28, 4–35, 87, 163, 178 monumentality, 51, 58, 78–79 More, Thomas (English lawyer/writer, 1478–1535), 109 mosques, 22 mountains, 25, 26, 28, 170 Murcia (Spain), 22, 161 music, 56 Münzer, Hieronymus (German physician/traveller, d. 1508), 22, 26, 27, 161–62 N nature, 43, 62, 71–72, 78, 85, 89, 166, 176–79 Naples, 23, 25, 89–90, 108, 111, 162, 178, 189 Navagero, Andrea (Italian humanist/diplomat, 1483–1529), 6, 153 Netherlands/Low Countries, 3, 23, 26, 55, 56, 154, 155, 162 New York, 21 Nice/Nizza, 21

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notaries, 7, 16, 20, 100, 132 novels, 15, 25, 30, 139, 158 Nuremberg, 22, 27, 118, 151 O obscenity, 111 Ong, Walter, 117, 186 orality. See speech orators/oratory, 47, 60, 74, 169–70 order (aesthetic quality/criteria), 14, 58, 64, 91 orders (architectural), 73–74, 107, 171, 177 ornament, 42–43, 48, 65, 73, 107 Orwell, George (English writer, 1903–50), 9 outsiders, 33–34, 37, 44–45, 87, 92, 107, 110, 114, 156, 160–61, 170, 174, 176, 188 P Padua, 24, 187 Pagès, Jean (Amiens merchant/chronicler, 1655–1723), 18, 24, 159 Palmieri, Matteo (Florentine apothecary/humanist, 1406–75), 100, 125, 189 Palladio, Andrea (Venetian architect, 1508–80), 69, 77, 107, 115, 165, 175, 183, 185 pamphlets, 112, 156 Pamuk, Orhan, 93, 179 Panofsky, Erwin, 116, 184–85 panoramas, 25, 29, 179 “Panormita” (Antonio Beccadelli, Sicilian humanist, 1394–1471), 108 Parets, Miquel (Barcelona tanner and chronicler, 1610–61), 12, 16, 157 Paris, 4, 13, 17, 23, 26, 31, 55, 56, 80, 84, 88, 91–92, 94, 112, 159, 161–63, 167–68, 176, 178–79, 184, 188 parishes, 30, 126–27

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Paschetti, Bartolomeo (Veronese physician/writer, d. 1616), 106, 168, 183 Pasquino (ancient statue in Rome)/pasquinades, 112 Patte, Pierre (French architect/urbanist, 1723–1814), 92, 178–79 Pau, Jeroni (Barcelona humanist/historian, d. 1497), 5, 14, 158 Pausanias (ancient Greek traveller, 110–180 AD), 61, 170 Pericles (ancient Athenian statesman/orator, 494–429 BC), 60 Perrault, Charles (French physician/architectural theorist, 1628– 1703), 74–75, 175 Peruzzi, Baldassare (Sienese architect, 1481–1536), 115 Petrarch/Petrarca, Francesco (Tuscan humanist/poet, 1304–74), 51 philosophy/philosophers, 21, 99, 104, 108, 114, 118, 176 picaresque, 15, 111, 158 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius (Pius II) (Sienese humanist/pope, 1405– 64), 50–51 picturesque, 33, 81–85, 93–94 plague, 16, 157 Plato (ancient Greek philosopher, d. 348 BC), 74, 125 Platter the Younger, Thomas (Swiss physician/traveler, 1574–1628), 6 poets/poetry, 18, 19, 30, 52, 107, 108–109, 119, 151–53, 156, 170, 186–87 Poland, 139, 140 polemics, 9, 104 Pontano, Giovanni Gioviano (Neapolitan scholar/poet, 1422–1503), 108–109, 183 popular culture/literature, 9, 13–14, 112, 117–25, 133 porticoes, 48, 79, 108, 165–66 poverty, 19, 132, 190–91 praise of cities, 6, 24, 37, 44, 47–48, 60–63, 76, 107, 135, 155, 168, 170. See also laudatio prices, 88, 105 print, 3, 8–15, 30, 37–53, 67, 85–86, 110, 114, 123, 131, 155–56, 177, 181, 186, 190 processions, 91

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proportion, 50, 58, 64, 68–69, 73, 75, 78, 81 prospect, 22–27, 32, 104, 161, 162 protests/revolts, 11, 42 Protestants, 118, 126, 130–31 psalms, 131 psychology, 81 public vs. private, 11, 28, 44–45, 51, 56, 60, 74, 76–79, 87, 91, 100, 113, 117, 141, 149–53, 160, 166, 169, 172–73, 177, 183, 185–86, 189 Pujades, Jeroni (Barcelona jurist/chronicler, 1568–1635), 12, 157–58 Q Querelle (Quarrel) of Ancients and Moderns, 74, 175 Quintilian (ancient Roman rhetorician, 35–100 AD), 60 R reform, religious, 112, 187 urban 45–46, 169, 188 regularity/irregularity, 43, 51, 58, 64, 69, 73, 81, 84, 109 religion, 15, 101, 112, 119, 124, 129, 157, 186, 190 Rennes, 55, 168 Resistance (Second World War), 140 rhetoric, 60, 69, 155, 158, 164, 172 Rhine river, 54 Rialto (Venetian bridge), 76 Romanticism, 85, 176 Rome, 5, 8, 13, 23, 28–29, 34–35, 48, 51, 59–63, 70, 77–79, 87, 90, 94, 102, 107, 111–12, 154, 163, 165–66, 169–70, 174, 178, 183 Rosselli, Nello, 140 Rucellai, Bernardo (Florentine merchant/chronicler, 1448–1514), 50, 168 rural/countryside, 11, 13, 61, 85, 101, 110, 128, 176, 187 Ruskin, John (English writer/artist, 1819–1900), 82–83, 93, 176–77

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S Sachs, Hans (Nuremberg shoemaker/poet, 1494–1576), 118, 184, 186 Saint-Simon, Duke of (French courtier/diarist, 1675–1755), 90–91, 178 Salamanca, 22, 130, 161, 187 San Petronio (Bolognese church), 115–17, 136, 185 sanctuaries, 61 Sansovino, Francesco (Venetian writer/printer, 1521–86), 85–87, 106, 177 Sansovino, Jacopo (Florentine architect, 1486–1570), 85–86, 177 Sanudo, Marin (Venetian patrician/chronicler, 1466–1536), 75–76, 160, 175 Saragossa/Zaragoza, 22, 161, 187 satire, 9, 18, 32, 108, 111, 112, 118, 178, 184 Schorske, Carl, 141, 176 sculpture/sculptors, 29, 50, 61, 71, 166, 168 sensationalism, 82 sensibility, 36, 50, 135, 192 Serlio, Sebastiano (Bolognese architect, 1475–ca. 1554), 70 Serra i Postius, Pere (Barcelona mercer/historian, 1661–1748), 118–20, 123–24, 187 servants, 57, 88, 116, 119–20 Seville, 22, 25, 27, 106, 161, 163 Sforza, Francesco (Milanese soldier/ruler, 1401–66), 109 Sforzinda (ideal city), 109 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, III Earl of (English aristocrat/ philosopher, 1671–1713), 81 shoemakers, 118 sieges, 38, 164, 166 Siena, 42, 126 silk, 47, 48 skepticism, 129, 181 skills, 19, 50, 103, 111, 135, 166, 177 Smyrna, 48, 171

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Soria (Spain), 128 Spain/Spaniards, 6–7, 10, 12, 15, 18, 22, 24, 69, 90, 102, 104–106, 111, 114, 127–28, 144, 149, 151–56, 162, 172, 180–81, 183, 188, 190 speech, 2, 6, 33, 60–61, 65, 100, 115, 117–24, 136, 149, 156, 186, 188–91 Spinola, Niccolò (Genoese patrician, late 16th century), 6 squares, 19, 38, 43, 48–49, 51, 54–57, 68, 88, 91, 94, 119, 166, 170, 172 stone (as building material), 29, 50, 54–57, 78–79, 82–83, 162, 176–77 Stow, John (London chandler/chronicler, 1525–1605), 18, 120, 155, 159–60 Strabo (ancient Greek geographer, d. ca. 24 AD), 63 Strasbourg, 23, 27 streets, 19–20, 28, 31, 43, 51, 54–57, 68–69, 72–73, 76, 91, 103, 106–107, 119, 136, 152, 157, 159–60, 166, 171–74 sublime, 29, 81 Switzerland, 6 symmetry, 58, 69, 71, 78 T tapestries, 50, 91 Tasso, Torquato (Italian poet, 1544–95), 104, 182 taverns, 18 terraces, 90 theater/playhouses, 43, 99, 114, 166, 170, 182, 191 Thucydides (ancient Greek historian, 460–395 BC), 60 Toledo, 22, 131, 161 topographies, 19, 43, 44, 49, 119–20, 123 Toulouse, 132, 188–90 tourists/tourism, 7, 20, 27, 38, 45, 64, 86, 161, 163, 165, 189 towers, 20–33, 37–39, 42, 51, 54, 64, 161–66 travel, 1, 5, 22–28, 36–37, 45, 52, 54–57, 61, 87, 89, 92–93, 111, 153–54, 161–63, 167–68, 170–71, 178–79, 182, 192 treatises, 67–74, 107, 109, 136, 171–73, 183, 187

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Turin, 43, 166–67 Turkey, 39, 111, 154, 179 Tuscany, 46, 77, 185, 187 U uniformity, 64, 66, 68, 81 universities, 7, 18, 30, 110, 130, 192 urban images, 28, 38–39, 45, 49, 63, 77, 83, 86, 90–92, 113, 116, 153–54, 159, 163–72, 178 V Valencia, 22, 122–23, 161, 188 Valle, Pietro della (Italian traveler, 1586–1652), 94, 179–80 Varro (ancient Roman antiquarian, 116–27 BC), 62, 170 Vasari, Giorgio (art historian/theoretician, 1511–74), 74, 184 Vedute (artistic views of street scenes), 38–39, 165, 176 Velázquez de Echevarría, Juan (Spanish priest/historian, 1729–1808), 114, 184 Vélez de Guevara, Juan (Spanish writer, 1611–75), 30–32, 163 Venice, 6, 23, 25, 36, 63–64, 67, 73, 75–88, 90, 93, 94, 106–107, 111, 146, 152, 154, 160–65, 170–71, 174–80, 184 Vera y Alarcón, Lope de (Hebrew professor/executed heretic, 1619–44), 130 Verino, Ugolino (Florentine poet, 1438–1516), 152, 168 Verona, 54, 168, 188 Vesuvius, 26 Viaje de Turquía (anonymous Spanish picaresque novel, ca. 1550s), 110–11, 183–84 Vienna, 38, 164 Vignola, Jacopo Barozzi da (Bolognese architect, 1503–73), 73, 115, 136, 174, 191–92 Visentini, Antonio (Venetian artist, 1688–1782), 107

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villas, 49, 99, 102 virtue, 48 Vitruvius (ancient Roman architect, d. 15 AD), 63, 67, 70–71, 73, 7, 172–77 Vives, Joan Lluís (Juan Luis Vives) (Valencian humanist, 1493–1540), 123–24, 182, 188 “Vivre, G. de” (pseudonym in 1642 Dutch book), 113–14 Voltaire (French writer/philosopher, 1694–1778), 91–92, 178 W walks/walking, 16–21, 31, 61, 97, 102–103, 107, 113–14, 116, 124, 153, 157, 159–63, 184–84 walls, 29, 39, 51–52, 61, 158, 172 War of Spanish Succession (1705–14), 10–11 Warburg Institute (London), 98 Ward, Ned (London tavernkeeper/writer, 1667–1731), 18 water, 49, 61, 64, 73, 77, 90, 158, 162, 166, 175 wealth (urban), 19, 27, 31, 57, 62 Whitney, Isabella (poet, late 16th century), 18–19, 160 witchcraft/witches, 31 Wittkower, Rudolf, 116, 184–85 women, 6, 15, 18–19, 55, 76, 133, 149–50, 180–81, 190–91 Work (labor), 13, 50, 53, 68, 101, 118, 126, 131, 133, 140, 157, 164, 183 Wright, Laura, 129, 189 X Xammar, Joan Pau (Barcelona jurist, d. 1666), 8, 156 Z Zamora (Spain), 22, 161 Zamora, Francisco de (royal Intendant of Barcelona, late 18th century), 7, 155

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