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The world of renaissance Italy: arts to food and drink
 9781440829598, 9781440829604, 9781440846311, 9781440846328, 1440829594, 1440846316

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The World of Renaissance Italy

Recent Titles in Daily Life Encyclopedias The World of Ancient Rome: A Daily Life Encyclopedia James W. Ermatinger The World of the Civil War: A Daily Life Encyclopedia Lisa Tendrich Frank, Editor The World of the American Revolution: A Daily Life Encyclopedia Merril D. Smith, Editor The World of Ancient Egypt: A Daily Life Encyclopedia Peter Lacovara The World of the American West: A Daily Life Encyclopedia, Two Volumes Gordon Morris Bakken, Editor

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ARTS TO FOOD AND DRINK

The World of Renaissance Italy A Daily Life Encyclopedia

Joseph P. Byrne

Copyright © 2017 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The editors and publishers will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Byrne, Joseph Patrick, editor Title: The world of renaissance Italy / Joseph P. Byrne. Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO,   2017. | Series: Daily life encyclopedia | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016048380 | ISBN 9781440829598 (hardcover: alk. paper) |   ISBN 9781440829604 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440846311 (volume 1) |   ISBN 9781440846328 (volume 2) Subjects: LCSH: Renaissance—Italy. | Italy—Civilization—1268–1559. Classification: LCC DG445 .B96 2017 | DDC 945/.05—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048380 ISBN: 978-1-4408-2959-8 (Set) ISBN: 978-1-4408-4631-1 (Volume 1) ISBN: 978-1-4408-4632-8 (Volume 2) EISBN: 978-1-4408-2960-4 21 20 19 18 17   1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. Greenwood An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

VOLUME 1 Preface, xv Introduction, xvii Chronology, xxiii Acknowledgments, xxvii Arts, 1 Introduction, 1 Antiquity, Cult of, 3 Art, Courtly, 6 Art, Sacred, 9 Art Patronage, 12 Ceramics, Decorative, 15 Daily Life in Art, 18 Dance, Courtly, 20 Dante in Popular Culture, 22 Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork, 25 Music at Church, 28 Music at Court, 31 Musical Instruments, 33 Non-Europeans in Art, 36 Novella, 39 Painters and Their Workshops, 42 Painting: Media and Techniques, 45 Perspective in the Visual Arts, 48 Pietre Dure and Intarsia, 50 Portraits, 53 v

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Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings, 56 Sculpture, 59 Theater for the Elite, 61 Women and the Arts, 64 Women Poets and Their Poetry, 67 Economics and Work, 71 Introduction, 71 Accounting, 73 Apothecaries, 76 Apprentices, 79 Banks and Banking, 81 Book Printing and Sales, 84 Cloth Trade, 87 Clothmaking, 89 Coins, Coinage, and Money, 92 Construction, Building, 95 Credit and Loans, 98 Grain Trade, 100 Guilds, 102 Imported Goods, Sources of, 106 Manufacturing, 108 Mezzadria, 110 Notaries, 113 Putting-Out System, 115 Retail Selling, 118 Sheep and Wool Economy in the South, 121 Slaves and Slavery, 124 Spice Trade, 126 Taxes and Public Finance, 128 Trade, Seaborne, 131 Trade Routes, Overland, 134 Wages and Prices, 136 Women in the Labor Force, 138 Family and Gender, 141 Introduction, 141 Birth and Midwives, 144 Childhood, 147 Death, Funerals, and Burial, 150 Divorce, Separation, and Annulment, 152

Contents

Dowries, 155 Education of Children, 157 Espousal and Wedding, 160 Families, Laboring Class, 163 Families, Noble and Patrician, 165 Fertility, Conception, and Contraception, 168 Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption, 171 Health and Illness, 173 Heraldry, 176 Homosexuality and Sodomy, 179 Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing, 182 Inheritance, 184 Last Wills and Testaments, 186 Names, Personal and Family, 189 Old Age, 192 Pregnancy, 195 Servants, Household, 197 Siblings, 201 Virtù and Honor, 203 Widows, 206 Wives and Husbands, 209 Fashion and Appearance, 213 Introduction, 213 Art, Fashion in, 215 Attire, Children, 218 Attire, Female, 220 Attire, Male, 223 Bathing and Personal Hygiene, 226 Cosmetics, 229 Court, Fashion at, 231 Dyes and Dyestuffs, 234 Fabrics, Domestic, 236 Fabrics, Imported, 238 Facial Hair, 240 Gems and Jewelry, 243 Hair and Hairstyles, 246 Headgear, 249 Laundry, 252 Literature on Dress, 254 Livery, 257

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Mouth and Teeth, 260 Religious Habits and Vestments, 261 Scents and Perfumes, 264 Shoes and Footwear, 266 Social Status and Clothing, 269 Sumptuary Laws, 271 Tailors and Seamstresses, 274 Underclothing, 277 Food and Drink, 281 Introduction, 281 Bread, 283 Civic Fountains and Potable Water, 287 Conduct at Table, 289 Diet and Social Status, 291 Drugs, 294 Eating Out, 297 Feasting and Fasting, 299 Food Preservation, 302 Foodsellers and Markets, 305 Foreign Foods, 307 Fruits and Vegetables, 310 Galenic Health Regimens, 313 Grains and the Wheat Market, 316 Hunger and Famine, 319 Literature of Food and Cooking, 321 Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy, 324 Nutrition: A Modern Assessment, 327 Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices, 330 Sugar and Confected Sweets, 332 Tools for Cooking and Eating, 335 Wines, 337 VOLUME 2 Contents, v Housing and Community, 341 Introduction, 341 Barbers and Surgeons, 343 City Streets and Piazze, 346

Contents

Death in the Community, 349 Foreign Communities, 352 Furnishing the House, 355 Gardens, 358 Health Commissions and Boards, 361 Hospitals and Orphanages, 363 Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes, 366 Jewish Communities, 369 Neighborhood and Parish, 372 Palazzi, 375 Patronage, 379 Physicians, 381 Plague, 384 Poor, Aid to, 387 Poverty and the Poor, 390 Prisons, 392 Quacks, Charlatans, and Medical Empirics, 394 Sewage, Sewerage, and Public Sanitation, 397 Transportation, Local, 399 Villages and Village Life, 402 Villas, 404 Violence within the Household and Community, 407 Water, 410 Politics and Warfare, 413 Introduction, 413 Alliances and Treaties, 416 Ambassadors and Diplomacy, 418 Armies, 421 Arms and Armor, 423 Art, Civic, 426 Citizenship, 428 City Halls, 430 Civic Magistracies and Offices, 434 Contado and Subject Towns, 436 Crime and Punishments, 439 Exile and Exiles, 442 Firearms and Artillery, 445 Fortresses and Fortifications, 448 Guelfs and Ghibellines and Other Political Factions, 450 Mercenaries, 452

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Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates, 456 Navies and Naval Warfare, 458 Rebellions and Revolts, 460 Republics, 463 Soldiers, 466 Urban Councils and Assemblies, 469 Urban Public Safety, 472 War and Civilians, 474 War in Italy, 1494–1559, 477 War in Italy to 1494, 479 Recreation and Social Customs, 483 Introduction, 483 Calendars: Sacred and Profane, 485 Carnival, 488 Children’s Toys and Games, 491 Church Festivals and Processions, 493 Civic Festivals, 496 Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade, 499 Drunkenness, 502 Executions, 504 Gambling, 507 Games and Pastimes, 509 Madness, 512 Music and Dance in Popular Culture, 514 News, 517 Noble Pursuits, 520 Pets, 523 Pornography and Erotica, 525 Reading, 528 Songs and Singing, Popular, 531 Sports, Contests, and Competitions, 534 Street Entertainment, 537 Taverns and Inns, 539 Theater, Popular, 542 Theater, Religious, 545 Weddings, 548 Women, Letters, and Letter Writing, 551

Contents

Religion and Beliefs, 555 Introduction, 555 Bible, 558 Chapels, 561 Christian Art in the Home, 563 Churches, 566 Clergy, Catholic, 570 Confraternities, 573 Council of Trent and Catholic Reform, 575 Crucifix, 578 Demons, the Devil, and Exorcisms, 580 Friars, 583 Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, 586 Inquisitions, 588 Jews and Judaism, 590 Magic, 593 Mary, Cult of, 596 Memorials Ex Voto, 599 Monks and Monasteries, 601 Nuns and Nunneries, 603 Pilgrims and Shrines, 606 Preachers and Preaching, 609 Prophecy and Apocalypticism, 612 Protestantism, 615 Sacramentals, 617 Sacraments, Catholic, 620 Saints and Their Cults, 623 Witches and Sorcerers, 626 Women Mystics, 629 Science and Technology, 633 Introduction, 633 Academies, 636 Agriculture and Agronomy, 639 Alchemy, 641 Anatomy and Dissection, 644 Astrology, 647 Astronomy before Copernicus, 649

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Botany and Botanical Illustration, 652 Collecting and Collections, 655 Disease and Humoral Medicine, 657 Glassmaking, 660 Libraries, 663 Machines and Engines, 666 Maps and Mapmaking, 668 Medical Education, 671 Metallurgy, 674 Navigational Tools, 676 Pharmacopeias and Materia Medica, 679 Plague Treatises and Consilia, 681 Printing, 683 Secrets, Books of, 687 Ships and Shipbuilding, 689 Surgery, 691 Technical Illustration, 694 Timekeeping, 697 Tools, 699 Universities, 702 Primary Documents Arts, 707 The Artist as a Young Man: Cennino Cennini. “Vocational Advice to a Budding Painter.” Craftsman’s Handbook [Il Libro dell’arte] (c. 1410), 707 The Renaissance Stage: Sebastiano Serlio. “A Venetian Architect on Designing Stage Scenery.” Second Book of Architecture (1545), 709 Economics and Work, 711 Tuscan Landlords and Peasants: A Mezzadria Contract from Lucca (c. 1350) and a Landowner’s Memorandum (c. 1410), 711 The Merchant’s Inventory: Luca Pacioli. “What an Inventory Is and How to Make It.” The Rules of Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Particularis de computis et scripturis (1494), 713 Family and Gender, 717 Early Fifteenth-Century Households, Housewives, and Servants: Francesco Barbaro. “On Running the Venetian Patrician Household.” On Wifely Duties (1416), 717 A Future Pope’s Letter to His Father on His Own Paternity: Letter of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini to Silvio Piccolomini (1443), 719 Fashion and Appearance, 721 Venetian Sumptuary Laws (1304–1512), 721 Of Gowns, Housegowns, and Dirty Laundry: Letters of Margherita Datini to Her Husband, Francesco Datini (1397–1398), 723

Contents

Food and Drink, 725 Wine and Patronage: Giovanni Boccaccio. “Cisti’s Wine.” Decameron (1353), 725 A Fifteenth-Century Physician’s Dietary and Medical Regimen: Ugo Benzi. Physician’s Consilium #91 (1482), 727 Housing and Community, 730 Florence’s Old Market in the Later Fourteenth Century: Antonio Pucci. “The Character of the Mercato Vecchio in Florence” (c. 1380s), 730 Awaiting the Executioner: Florentine Writer Luca della Robbia on the Death Vigil and Death of His Friend Pietro Pagolo Boscoli (1513), 733 Politics and Warfare, 735 Crime and Punishment in Florence: Luca Landucci’s Diary (1465–1497), 735 The Attempted Assassination of Florentine Leader Lorenzo de’Medici: Niccolò Machiavelli. “The Failed Conspiracy of 1478” (1526), 737 Recreation and Social Customs, 740 The Festival of St. John in Florence: Gregorio (Goro) Dati. History of Florence (c. 1410), 740 The Wedding of Lorenzo il Magnifico: Letter of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici to Filippo Strozzi the Elder (1469), 742 Religion and Beliefs, 744 A Fifteenth-Century Venetian Merchant’s Understanding of the Mass: Zibaldone da Canal, a Venetian Merchant’s Manual (1422), 744 Testimony before the Inquisition against a Witch: Costanza’s “Diabolical Works” as Recounted before the Inquisition in Modena (1518), 746 Science and Technology, 748 A Metallurgist on Alchemy: Vannoccio Biringuccio. Pirotechnia (1540), 748 The Popes’ Book Collection: Michel du Montaigne. Visit to the Papal Library. Travel Journal (1581), 750

Appendix: Popes and European Rulers (1350–1600), 753 General Bibliography, 759 Index, 767

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Preface

The World of Renaissance Italy: A Daily Life Encyclopedia is one in a series of encyclopedias that is meant to expand the reader’s understanding of the ways in which life was experienced by the people of a particular time and place. The Renaissance is a label used for a cultural phenomenon that followed what historians have called the Middle Ages and that opened the early modern period of European history. For purposes of this work, I have defined it as the period from 1350 to 1600. It is a time span that includes several other major historical trends or phenomena, including the so-called Age of Exploration or Discovery, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Because many historians have chosen to avoid the label Renaissance, with its cultural focus and frankly elitist implications, the period is often split between the late medieval and early modern eras. The titles of many books and articles use these terms instead of “Renaissance,” which may confuse the young researcher. For my part, I acknowledge the problems with the use of “Renaissance” for the historical period by referring to it as the Renaissance era, unless specifically referring to a cultural or stylistic matter, such as Renaissance art or the Renaissance stage. The publisher determined the ten topical sections into which this work is divided, but I am fully responsible for the choice of articles that they contain. In each case, I have tried to pick a range of topics that flesh out the g­ eneral subject—Food, Fashion, Religion—while introducing each topic on a level appropriate to an entry-level student of the era. This is, after all, a work directed to upper-level high school and nonspecialist college students, though many others, including nonspecialist public library patrons, will find it to be of use. I have striven to avoid overly technical vocabulary, or to define such vocabulary within the text, but this work does assume the reader has a basic textbook knowledge of the time period and place. Besides almost 300 entries, The World of Renaissance Italy includes an introduction providing historical context to the entries and a detailed subject index providing effective access to important names and terms in the entries. A chronology xv

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of the period lists important dates and events, and an appendix of popes and European and Italian rulers of the period 1350–1600 is also included. A selected bibliography lists important general information resources on the period. Each entry also has a bibliography specific to its topic and cross-references to other related entries in the encyclopedia. This two-volume encyclopedia is not an introduction to the Renaissance, but to life lived during the Renaissance era. I have purposely avoided major figures and even well-known monuments to keep the reader’s focus on the broader issues and trends of the day. Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Pope Julius II rarely make an appearance. Daily life does not consist of the extraordinary, though the extraordinary can and does impact it. And vice versa. In covering painting, for example, I decided to focus on materials, techniques, and workshops rather than on styles and individual artists because these underlay the work of every painter from the most obscure to the greatest master. Such choices are made all the easier because historians in many fields have shifted their focus from the great to the common: the life of the soldier rather than the general, that of the court musician rather than the duke, or the common person’s diet rather than the great feasts. As a subject, history writing is cumulative, so the student may always seek the famous in other sources, and this is a period with an especially rich historiography in English. For those who may want to know what the famous ate, wore, or heard as they walked down the street, I hope these volumes prove a rich introduction.

Introduction

The term “Renaissance” is a cultural label originally attached to certain styles of art. It has today come to refer to a period of time during which those styles developed, roughly between 1350 and 1600. The label literally means “rebirth,” a reference to the conscious revival of classical influences, texts, styles, literature, and other elements of culture. Of course, these influences often had little impact on the lives of sheepherders, peasants, and even construction workers who labored building palaces in the classically influenced Renaissance style. Nonetheless, even beggars would have seen Renaissance sculptures in piazze, new and more realistic altarpieces in churches, and prints being sold in bookshops; and they would have heard Renaissance polyphony wafting from the cathedral on major feast days. And they would have benefitted from the monetary wealth Italian societies generated. All of this was different from what had come before, marking the period off from the Middle Ages that preceded it. If we date the beginning of the era to 1350, in the immediate wake of the Black Death (1347–1350 in Italy), then we have to admit that Italy in 1400 was little different from the peninsula in 1300. In many ways, it would be little different even in 1500. Politically, it was officially divided between the Holy Roman Empire ruled from its German lands, and the French and then Aragonese/­Spanish south. The southern kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, ruled from Naples and Palermo, remained largely feudal, with local barons loosely controlled by their rulers. Economically speaking, these kingdoms were producers of raw material, especially sheep and grain. To the north lay a checkerboard of city-states with borders that fluctuated with the endemic wars that plagued them. Although part of the Holy Roman Empire, these city-states had gained many liberties over the years and, by 1350, were essentially independent of outside control. Some were republics, ruled by oligarchies of merchants and other guildsmen who rotated offices among wealthy families. Others had been republican in structure, but sought safety or peace by trading their self-control for rule by a lord (signore), often a military leader, or, in the case of Milan’s Visconti, the archbishop. When xvii

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it suited their purposes, emperors raised some of these families to the rank of count, marquis, or duke (Milan’s rulers generously donated 100,000 ducats for the privilege). Genoa and Venice, both oligarchic republics, had elected dukes, or doges, as heads of state. Venice, however, had never been under imperial control and remained fiercely and successfully independent throughout the Renaissance era. Finally, there were the Papal States, which stretched from coast to coast across central Italy between Naples (known as Il Regno, “The Kingdom”) and the many city-states to the north. The Papal States originated from a grant of land and political independence made to the papacy by the Carolingian rulers of the eighth century. The popes, then, were the spiritual leaders of the Catholic Church, which dominated the Italian world, and to which the vast majority of Italians belonged, but also monarchs who collected taxes, made laws, and waged war. For much of the fourteenth century, popes had abandoned Rome for Avignon, which is located in what is today southern France. It took decades after the popes’ return to the city in the late fourteenth century for Rome to recover as a political force and cultural and economic center. If the south was the land of raw materials, the northern and central states were producers, merchants, and consumers. Much of the political history of Milan, Florence, Venice, and the Papal States consisted of wars to expand and protect and regain control over smaller cities and towns and their hinterlands. Much of the history of Renaissance-era Italian cities, such as Siena, Pisa, Treviso, Verona, Pavia, Perugia, Bologna, and Padua, was spent in the shadow of these larger powers. Signorial states such as Ferrara, Mantua, Rimini, and Urbino strove to retain their independence by aligning themselves with one coalition after another, often providing mercenary troops or, in the case of Ferrara, artillery. While successful wars provided the winning cities with honor and glory and a larger tax base, they also provided a rural breadbasket that fed their urban populations. In much of northern and central Italy, the medieval feudal landlords had been absorbed into urban society or swept away. Local commercial agriculture carried out on land owned by urban and rural landlords provided markets and food shops with wide varieties of foodstuffs, especially the bread, wine, and olive oil that were the staples of Mediterranean culture. But the hinterland, or contado, also provided other types of produce, cheese, fish and meat, eggs, timber, bricks, cotton and flax, wool, and firewood, as well as streams that powered mills, servants, and emigrants to replace laborers lost to recurring bouts of plague. All of these important political and economic shifts affected the daily lives of Renaissance-era Italians. Despite the economic importance of rural areas, Renaissance Italy had an urban society and an urban economy. Whether oligarchs or monarchs, Italian rulers lived in and governed from palazzi in cities, and not rural castles. With the exception of some water mills and some noxious activities, manufacturers were urban. Even the

Introduction

glassworkers cloistered at Murano were technically in Venice. The Church oversaw its flocks from urban headquarters centered on the cathedral church and the bishop’s palazzo; universities and most formal education were anchored in cities; ports, warehouses, and foreign communities of merchants were urban; and any variety at all in retail goods was only to be found along city streets. Markets and fairs filled piazze, not rural fields, and wealth was concentrated in the coffers of the state, businesses, and businessmen, and these coffers were safely tucked away in urban public and private palazzi. Wealth fueled cultural patronage, which found its venues in urban courts, cathedrals, churches and chapels, and palazzi. When rural villas became showcases for art, music, theater, or dance, it was because of urban wealth acquired through banking or trade. Even traditionally noble and rural pursuits such as jousting and horse racing took place in city piazze. All of this urbanity was reinforced by the period’s obsession with the Classical heritage of Greece and Rome. Greeks and Romans had developed civilizations that were urban, and in many ways these were the models for life in the Italian Renaissance era. Many Romans had also praised the peace and leisure one could pursue when away from the city, and wealthy Italians embraced these as well in building their rural villas. The urban economies that provided for culture and leisure were quite sophisticated and based on the exchange of money and, increasingly, on credit. Emperors had given cities the right to mint coins, and they did so. Each state had its own coinage, which encouraged banking, which was originally the exchanging of Florentine florins for Venetian ducats, and these in turn for Papal scudi. In the international forum, non-Italian coinages or values had to be translated into local currencies, and vice versa, so merchants and bankers were often the same people. Given its position in Europe and in the Mediterranean, Italy was a natural centerpoint between the great emporiums of the Near and even the Far East and markets throughout Europe. Rowers took Venetian galleys as far as the Don River in Russia, and merchants filled these in Constantinople, Alexandria, Tripoli, and Beirut with exotic goods, including fine metalwork, porcelain, silks, and spices—which were important as drugs. Italians learned to imitate much of what they saw and purchased, and excellent craftsmen were soon competing in Arab and Turkish markets with Eastern-inspired Italian products. Italian glass, ceramics, and silk and light woolen cloth especially found favor. Of course, Eastern goods returning through Venice found ready markets among elite customers in Italian cities and in northern and Spanish urban centers as well. Pack trains laden with spices and other treasures trudged across Alpine passes to Austrian, German, Swiss, and French markets. An annual galley fleet left Venice for Majorca, Cadiz, Southampton, London, Bruges, and Antwerp. By the sixteenth century, northern European ships were visiting Italian ports, cutting out the middlemen, while Portuguese and soon Dutch and English vessels were directly drawing goods from the Indian Ocean.

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Politically speaking, between 1350 and the 1490s Italy was largely left to itself. Its wars were local affairs, and even when, after 1400, Venice began grabbing Milanese territory, the emperor refrained from supporting his ally and feudatory. The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and a resurgent Milan led to the Peace of Lodi (1454) and a grand alliance of the major Italian states. A series of diplomatic missteps and basic greed led King Charles VIII of France (r. 1483–1498) to exercise French claims to Milan and the Kingdom of Naples in 1494. He did so by leading down the peninsula an army with the largest artillery train Italy had ever seen. Causing only minimal damage on the way, the French took Naples and Charles was declared king. In the face of disease and local disaffection, he pulled his army out, creating a power vacuum into which the Spanish soon moved. The emperor, roused by his loss of Milan, pressed his claims against the French for that city. Italy was now to be the arena for bellicose major European powers who sought to control Italian wealth and territory. A second French invasion by Charles’s successor, Louis XII (r. 1498–1515), and several by Louis’s successor Francis I (r. 1515–1547), kept Italy in turmoil and affected daily life throughout the peninsula in the sixteenth century. When Charles I of Spain (r. 1516–1556) also became Holy Roman emperor (as Charles V) in 1519, France was outflanked and the stakes raised. The kingdoms of Naples and Sicily lost their kings and became part of the Spanish Habsburg realm administered by Spanish viceroys. Venice nearly lost its independence in 1509; Rome was sacked by Imperial troops in 1527; and Florence was besieged 1529–30 and was forced to become a duchy under Medici rule. These events humbled and devastated Italy’s great cities, affecting the lives of Italians at all levels of Renaissance society. Proud merchants, nobles, and cardinals fled for the duration, only to return to smoldering ruins. Venice’s subject cities allied with the emperor against their Venetian mistress. In Rome, clergy were murdered, nuns violated and killed, and churches despoiled by German troops. Florentines suffered isolation and bombardment. In each case, the Holy Roman Empire won and the Italians paid dearly. Later, French and Spanish troops fought over control of Siena, which ultimately became part of the Tuscan Grand Duchy of Cosimo I, who himself married a Spanish princess, Eleanora of Toledo. Meanwhile, the popes largely withdrew from the political arena and oversaw the various sessions of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic answer to Church weaknesses and spreading Protestantism. The impact on Italian Jews, Protestants, and free thinkers was crushing. It is not a coincidence that the sixteenth century saw the first Jewish ghettoes, the Index of Forbidden Books, and the revival of the Inquisition. Under Spanish political hegemony, the Italian peninsula became a political backwater. Historians who care argue over when the Renaissance era came to an end. Was it with the Sack of Rome in 1527, or the end of the Habsburg-Valois wars in 1559,

Introduction

or the termination of the Council of Trent in 1563, or the death of Michelangelo in 1564? No single event brought the period to a close any more than the Black Death had begun it in the mid-fourteenth century. The choice of 1600 is as arbitrary as the selection of any other date or event. One thing, however, is indisputable: Italy—and all of Europe—had changed greatly by 1600. And yet, however we celebrate the many accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance, the great arc of daily life in Italy maintained a certain continuity between 1350 and 1600. Most Italians were occupied in the same jobs, they formed and conducted family life in much the same ways, they ate the same foods, heard the same sermons, and attended Mass in the same churches that their ancestors had attended. They spoke the same dialects and praised the same fourteenth-century poets. Bells still rang to start the workday, and the streets people followed to their jobs had changed little over the period. Rome was an exception with its population growth and urban development under papal patronage. In many places, the value of workers’ wages had dropped by 1600, so they could buy fewer things and less food than previous generations, a real step backward. Life in the countryside for the contadini changed little over the period, being subject to the vagaries of warfare and disease. But the accomplishments of Italian Renaissance artists, rulers, popes, and merchants were achieved only on the backs of oarsmen, peasants, seamstresses, miners, woolworkers, bricklayers, carters, food sellers, moneylenders, laundry-women, innkeepers, and all those whose daily labors go unmentioned in the guidebooks and museums today. Historians have done much to bring these lives to our attention, and to them these volumes are dedicated.

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Chronology

1347–1350 1376 1378–1381 1378–1382 1378–1417 1386 1395 1397 1397 1399–1404 1402

1405 1406 1420–1436 1423 1427 1433 1434–1494 1436

The Black Death strikes Italy; Boccaccio’s Decameron is published. Pope Gregory XI returns to Rome. War of Chioggia establishes Venetian control of eastern Mediterranean; Peace of Turin ends war. The Ciompi Revolt and government reforms begin in Florence. The Great Papal Schism begins and is by Council of Constance (1414–1418). Construction of Milan’s great Gothic cathedral begins. Giangaleazzo Visconti become Duke of Milan. Medici bank is started. Manuel Chrysoloras begins teaching of Greek in Florence. Siena surrenders sovereignty to Visconti of Milan. Giangaleazzo Visconti’s expansion of Milanese territory ends with his death near Florence; Filippo Maria Visconti begins 45-year reign. Venice begins assembling its Terra Firma empire of mainland possessions. Florence conquers Pisa. Filippo Brunelleschi oversees construction of the dome of Florence Duomo. Vittorino da Feltre opens first humanist school in Mantua. Florence’s first catasto tax census provides valuable demographic data. Cosimo de’Medici is exiled from Florence. The Medici control republican Florence. Leonbattista Alberti publishes On Painting.

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1439 1443

1444 1447–1450 1450–1500 1453 1454 1455 1458 1465 1469–1492 1478 1487 1490 1492 1494–1498 1494

1495 1497–1498 1502 1504

Council of Union of Western and Eastern Christian Churches is established in Florence. Alfonso V the Magnanimous of Aragon and Sicily becames king of Naples, ending Angevin French rule and unifying Naples and Sicily under Spanish control. Medici Palazzo begins in Florence; Palazzo Ducale begins in Urbino. Milan becomes Ambrosian Republic. Sforza family control Milan after Francesco’s coup. Ottoman Turks conquer Constantinople (Istanbul); Greek scholars migrate to Italy. Printing press is invented in Germany; Peace of Lodi ends major wars in Italy for a generation. Italic League formation lays out spheres of influence of Rome, Naples, Venice, Florence, and Milan. Sicily splits from Naples, ruled by the Aragonese Juan and Ferrante, respectively. First printing press in Italy is established, at Subiaco near Rome. Lorenzo de’Medici, Il Magnifico, controls Florence. Pazzi Conspiracy in Florence murders Giuliano de’ Medici. After two-year rebellion, Ferrante of Naples slaughters barons at Castelnuovo in Naples. Aldine Press is established in Venice; Isabella d’Este settles in Mantua, becoming a major cultural patroness. Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, lands in the West Indies. Friar Girolamo Savonarola’s reform in Florence; ends with his burning. French King Charles VIII invades Italy, beginning Habsburg-Valois or Italian Wars that end in 1559; Charles conquers Naples temporarily. French retreat from Naples, fighting League of Venice at Fornovo. Portuguese Vasco da Gama opens sea route around Africa to Indian Ocean. Reestablished Florentine Republic makes Piero Soderini Standardbearer of Justice for life, essentially doge. Aragonese reestablish control in Naples, replacing king with a viceroy; Michelangelo’s David is erected in Piazza Signoria.

Chronology

1506 1509 1512 1513 1516 1517 1519 1525

1527 1528 1530

1540 1541 1542 1545–1563 1550 1555 1559

1571 1582 1590s

Rebuilding of Rome’s old St. Peter’s Basilica begins under Pope Julius II. League of Cambrai is formed against Venice; war follows; Venice is defeated at Battle of Agnadello. Aragonese overthrow Florentine Republic, reinstated Medici as rulers. Sistine Chapel ceiling is finished; Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is published. German king Charles V becomes Spanish ruler Carlos I and king of Naples; Jewish ghetto is established in Venice. Reformation begins symbolically with circulation of Luther’s 95 Theses. Charles Habsburg is elected emperor as Charles V. French King Francis I invades Italy taking Milan but losing to Imperial army at Pavia; climax of three-decade-long Italian Wars begins. Imperial troops sack Rome. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier is published. Siege of Florence begins; Congress of Bologna ends Habsburg-Valois Wars in Italy on pro-Habsburg terms; Charles Habsburg is crowned emperor; Alessandro de’Medici is made Duke of Florence by emperor : Florentine republicanism comes to a permanent end. Society of Jesus (Jesuits) is founded. Jews are expelled from Naples. Roman Inquisition is formally revamped. Council of Trent reforms Catholic Church. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is published. Rome’s Jewish ghetto is established; Siena’s independence ends with Florence’s conquest. Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis ends French territorial claims in Italy; Index of Forbidden Books is first published by Pope Paul IV. Spanish/Venetian navy defeats Turks at Lepanto. Pope Gregory XIII establishes new calendar. Terrible famine devastates Italy.

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Acknowledgments

This is a work of synthesis that has relied entirely upon the work of hundreds of scholars working in a multitude of historical fields related to the Renaissance era in Italy. The bibliographic section lists many of these, but many more go without formal recognition. Without their work, this encyclopedia, which I dedicate to them, would not be possible. In addition, I owe debts to a few particular individuals, including Bailey Scoggin, whose work on the articles on music was invaluable; Becca Reimer, who did much for those on theater; and Mr. Pipes, whose general research helped immensely, and who, I hope, learned a few things along the way. Finally, thanks to John Wagner, whose helpful feedback and gentle prodding kept the project on schedule.

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ARTS

INTRODUCTION The arts come in many forms, and the Italian Renaissance as a creative time period made major contributions to each of them. There are the visual arts of painting, drawing, sculpting, fine metalwork, ceramics, marquetry, and printmaking; the performing arts of music, theater, and dance; literary arts of poetry, storytelling, letter writing, and literary nonfiction; and environmental arts of architecture, landscape, and interior design. Many of the trends that shaped these arts are virtually synonymous with “Renaissance.” These trends included classicism and humanism, which sought to revive Classical artistic forms and norms to advance all of these arts toward greater perfection. Another was naturalism and realism, based on a positive attitude toward the physical world and people’s place in it. This had begun earlier in some arts such as sculpture, even before the Renaissance era. A third was a process some have labeled secularization, based on similar changes in attitude, but specifically setting aside spiritual and religious values for worldly ones. This did not mean that the arts became “pagan” or lost their religious functions. Most of the great names in the arts carried out major and lasting works for the Church: Michelangelo’s frescoes and statues (David was originally meant for the Florentine cathedral), Palestrina’s Masses for the popes, and Palladio’s Venetian church designs. But next to these were advances and masterpieces that were deeply concerned with this-worldly values: madrigals on Petrarchan poetic texts of love and loss, city hall and ducal palazzo fresco cycles recalling history and Classical values, and the birth of commedia d’arte from street theater. After the Black Death, Italy’s wealth was spread out a bit more widely among the survivors, and many of these chose to spend it more lavishly than generations before. The Aristotelian idea that a city or a noble court needed to be “magnified,” or made greater by cultural activity and monuments, became popular among political and economic leaders, and magnificence became a desired quality. Even Lorenzo de’Medici, banker and de facto ruler of later fifteenth-century Florence, 1

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The Creation of Adam is the central scene in the vast fresco that covers the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel (1508–1512). Imagined as an old yet powerful human male, God reaches to His new creature to give him life. Adam’s humanity is characterized by his frank nudity, and his innocence by his facial expression. The biblical story is here turned into a humanist declaration: Humanity was made in the image and likeness of God. (Michelangelo, Creation of Adam, 1508–1512, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City)

became known as Il Magnifico for his attitudes and efforts. Patronage by such men and women of wealth and power who were neither serving the Church nor representing traditional feudal dynasties fueled production in all of the arts. A growing sense of what would come to be called good taste, as well as often fierce competition among patrons and producers alike, spurred artists, composers, writers, builders, and others not only to excel by existing standards but also to advance the standards themselves. In many arts, the first step was to emulate the ancients, the second to equal them, and the third to outperform them. Studying the arts means making contact with the works themselves to the extent possible. Most of us have to read literary works in translation; we read rather than experience plays; we view art works as pictures in books or on the web; and we listen to the period’s music through earbuds as we jog or do homework. Yet even if we have the good fortune to visit Italy, we soon realize that what we see is not what was. Churches, villas, and palazzi have changed radically; altarpieces hang on museum walls not behind chapel altars; and musical performances are often on modern instead of period instruments and in modernized venues with very different acoustics from those of 500 years ago. Despite these obstacles, students and scholars strive to understand Renaissance artistic productions, and bring to bear tools for doing so unavailable or of little interest to the people of the time.

Arts: Antiquity, Cult of

Tools for penetrating the surfaces of artworks allow modern researchers to understand the procedures and secrets of past artists better than they did themselves. Long-term studies of iconography, or the meaning of images, uncover patterns of borrowing and revival of themes, characters, and interpretation. Letters and diplomatic reports describe festivals, theatrical productions, and musical performances. How artists worked in various media is addressed in shop manuals and accounts, personal documents such as letters, inventories of shop tools and works finished or in progress, and books on the individual arts that were published at the time. Lists of personnel at noble courts and city halls reveal musicians, painters, and dance masters. Starting around 1500, publishers put out song books with words and music, dance manuals with the steps to each diagrammed, collections of instrumental music for keyboards and lute, and choir books featuring the era’s polyphonic masterworks. This is not to mention the printed editions of novelle, poetry, literary letters, artists’ biographies, plays, and Classical literature that flew from the presses, especially in Venice. One of the reasons for including arts as a category in a series on daily life is that historical research on economics, politics, religion, society, and culture generally confirms the importance of these aspects of life to the arts, and of the arts to all of these areas of human endeavor. Renaissance arts would look and sound very different had the Catholic Church not been the dominant religious force on the peninsula. Had one power, such as Spain, controlled Italy’s political life, rather than numerous city-states, then centers such as Milan, Venice, and Florence would have been provincial backwaters rather than the cultural powerhouses they in fact were. Had Venice not maintained its close economic ties with the Byzantine and Islamic worlds through maritime trade, their wealth and cosmopolitan cultural influences would have been severely diminished. To study the arts, then, is to study their contexts and the broader fields that shaped them, for the arts were expressions of political intention, religious orthodoxy, social coherence, and economic power and priorities. And all of this found its way into people’s daily lives.

ANTIQUITY, CULT OF The Classical world of Greece and Rome had its fascination for every Italian generation that followed their decline. Italians lived surrounded by antique buildings, ruins, sarcophagi, city walls, monuments, and chiseled Latin inscriptions. Some traced their ancestors to the Romans who once ruled the world, and Roman lore ­attached to every city, except Venice. Just below the earth’s surface lay gems, rings, pottery, statues, coins, mosaics, and artifacts of all kinds. When the educated read

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Roman history they touched their own past. Medieval Italians took what came their way, but Renaissance poets, scholars, sculptors, architects, philosophers, painters, political thinkers and leaders, dramatists, and a host of others sought out and directly engaged the ancients to learn from them, appreciate them, emulate them, and surpass their greatness. Imagine that in the mid-1400s excavation for a new palazzo in Verona unearths a life-sized nude female statue. It is missing an arm and its head, but its lines are supple, sensuous, and realistic. The contractors are savvy enough to brush it off and present it to the owner. He is educated and sophisticated and appreciates the piece as his own link to the Roman past. Displaying it shows his good taste, though the notion is just being born. His son finds the work erotically suggestive. Word spreads and it receives numerous visitors. A local sculptor who works in the same Classical style admires the artist’s skill and eye for feminine beauty; a local scholar compares it with other, similar works, desiring to determine its meaning, identification, and perhaps original use; the bishop condemns its pagan origins and unseemly naughtiness; a humanist notes that a Classical author from ancient Verona mentions a work that might be this one; a painter sends an apprentice to sketch the work from several angles; a dealer in antiquities provides an approximate value and offers to buy it, or to sell to the owner other ancient pieces to display with it; and the podestà sends a note of appreciation for the display, which adds to the city’s magnificence, he notes. Antiquity and its relics meant different things to different people. Eventually the owner relegates the work to the garden of his villa, to be enjoyed by visitors, himself, and future generations. Similar observations might be made of a newly discovered manuscript version of a political speech by Cicero: the new owner holds Antiquity in his hand—or so he thinks (it is really ninth-century); the philologist studies its Latin expression and compares it with other works; the book dealer offers to sell the manuscript, and the printer offers to publish it; the historian wants to put it in the context of Cicero’s other speeches; the philosopher categorizes the thought it contained, and the politician seeks to apply it to his own city-state; the humanist-collector wants a copy in his library. The remains of Antiquity stimulated a range of Renaissance-era people, especially artists and those who hired them. As they learned about Roman Antiquity by reading its authors, they discovered that their Roman forebears had also profited from those in their past, especially the Greeks. Ancient Romans uncovered, bought, sold, stole, pillaged, exchanged, and collected and displayed works of art and read works of literature, and creative Romans in their turn had been heavily influenced by what they saw. But it was a debt only realized after Renaissance-era Italians mastered Greek in the fifteenth century. In studying Cicero, Italians learned how extensively he and other philosophical Romans borrowed from Hellenistic

Arts: Antiquity, Cult of

philosophers; and poets Vergil and Ovid revealed their debts to the Greeks. The Renaissance writer, artist, patron, architect, and philosopher sought to confront the world of their own experience on its terms, and they believed that the ancients did so in ways that had been lost during the intervening thousand years (Middle Ages). In their own ways they dismissed their immediate predecessors, with their Byzantine art, scholastic philosophy, poor Latin, and ignorance of the grandeur that supposedly was Rome. The high priests of the Cult of Antiquity sought to replace all this with the remnants and spirit of the past and with new and greater accomplishments achieved in that spirit. For many, of course, the Cult was heresy, and for them the only lesson to be learned was to rely on one’s own experience or on traditions untouched by pagan Antiquity. For the peasant farmer, the fisherman, soldier, or shepherd, whose muted voice tells us little today, Antiquity was probably irrelevant unless one stole or stumbled across some bit of it of interest to a collector. For Pietro Bembo the Cult meant using only Latin vocabulary known to Cicero; to Michelangelo, passing off his Sleeping Cupid as ancient; to Machiavelli, dismissing 1,300 years of history to find worthy past political or military examples only in the Classical World. For posterity, it has meant that much of great value from Antiquity was preserved rather than burnt for lime or melted down for cheap statuettes. If Antiquity was in no real way “reborn,” it certainly served to shape and condition Renaissance-era culture that gazed intently backward to the distant past so that it might move forward. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art Patronage; Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings; Sculpture; Theater for the Elite; Fashion and Appearance: Gems and Jewelry; Housing and Community: Gardens; Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Art, Civic; City Halls; Science and Technology: Academies; Botany and Botanical Illustration; Collecting and Collections; Libraries; Medical Education; Pharmacopeias and Materia Medica FURTHER READING Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Belozerskaya, Marina. To Wake the Dead: A  Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology. New York: Norton, 2009. Christian, Kathleen Wren. “Antiquities.” In Michael Wyatt, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 40–58. Freedman, Luba. Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Galdy, Andrea M. Cosimo I  de’ Medici as Collector: Antiquities and Archaeology in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Godwin, Joscelyn. The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance. Boston: Weiser, 2002.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Grafton, Anthony, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Weiss, Roberto. The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

ART, COURTLY There were several types of noble court in Renaissance-era Italy. The older monarchies were papal Rome and Il Regno, or the Kingdom of Naples. Lords, or ­signori, had obtained power in thirteenth- or fourteenth-century cities. Some, such as the Carrara of Padua, Malatesta of Rimini, and Scaligeri of Verona, failed, and their small states were swallowed up by larger ones. Florence, long a republic at least in name, had Medici dukes thrust upon it during the sixteenth-century Italian wars. The Gonzaga dynasty of Mantua, Urbino’s Montefeltri, Ferrara’s Estensi, the ­Savoyards of the Piedmontese, Milan’s Visconti and Sforza, Rome’s popes (with many cardinals not far behind), and the Spanish rulers of Naples and Sicily used art and architecture to accomplish many goals. Fourteenth-century warlords continued to pursue military glory, often as mercenaries, but the rise of humanism and Classical education added an important layer of high culture. To medieval chivalric values were added the appreciation for book learning and the cultivation of magnificence. A fine example is the portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro of c. 1475, in which the mercenary captain relaxes in his armor and a robe of state while reading a massive book. Fifteenth-century lords, increasingly provided with noble titles, built palazzi that commanded their capital cities and villas that dotted the countryside. Rather than defensive strongholds, these were commodious spaces emphasizing comfort and stages for political and actual theater. Many were decorated lavishly in the latest styles, furnished with prized antiquities and artistic objects that displayed good taste as well as wealth and power. While many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century rulers had been raised to appreciate fine art and scholarship, the real audience to be impressed was the visitors who arrived from near and far. As on the battlefield, the lords at court were highly competitive among themselves, and their ladies no less so. Lavishly costumed balls, extravagant theatrical productions, terribly wasteful feasts, and the latest music served as propaganda. So too did fresco cycles, statuary gardens, tapestry-lined halls, and collections of small antiquities displayed in a lord’s private studiolo and shared only with special guests. Artistic themes reflected various aspects and values of the noble life. Roman Catholic iconography indicated the chapel and confirmed the orthodoxy of the

Arts: Art, Courtly

court in the face of Jews, Muslims, and Protestants. Sleeping quarters sometimes featured titillating or downright erotic paintings and probably sculptures. More public spaces displayed a range of themes. Some fresco programs such as Andrea Mantegna’s in the so-called Camera degli Sposi in Mantua’s ducal palazzo directly reflected court life itself. Here the marquis’s family relaxes among servants until the eldest son, a cardinal, arrives and is greeted by his father. Depictions of hunting parties gave artists the chance to include lots of portraits of court characters and feature the ruler in a sport that mimicked warfare and was unquestionably noble. At Ferrara and Piedmont tastes ran to the chivalric, with knights and damsels dallying and the men jousting. Sometimes such scenes include Classical figures, one of the most popular of whom was Hercules. Apart from being an Este family name, Ercole, the man turned god was a longstanding symbol of fortitude. Antiquities and Classical pictorial elements or themes directly spoke to the rulers’ appreciation of Italians’ shared Roman heritage and inheritance. They suggested a level of culture that Federigo da Montefeltro (1422–1482), Lord and Duke of Urbino and famous mercenary captain, is pictured other educated courtiers and vis- here in his studiolo with his son Guidobaldo. In this itors found congenial. Similarly, portrait (ca. 1475), attributed to either Justus van utilizing the Petrarchan theme Ghent or Pedro Berreguete, the duke is surrounded of “triumphs” in paintings pre- by the trappings of the humanist, scholar, ruler, and man of arms, as he projects the multifaceted image sented the rulers as successful of the Renaissance era ruler. Tempera on wood. and appreciative of the single (Giuseppe Masci/Alamy Stock Photo)

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greatest influence on the era’s poetry. Other allegorical and symbolic figures, such as Classical or biblical heroes and heroines or the virtues personified, presented traditional but still powerful signals of the values of the dynasty. They helped raise the ruler up from warlord to noble. There were few better ways to drive this home than with portraits that captured the complex spirits of the rulers and their family members. Stoical fifteenth-century profiles gave way to more naturalistic and psychologically intriguing personal images. These were usually canvas-supported works that could be transported easily among rulers’ various rooms or residences. One of the most famous of the sixteenth-century Medici family portraits was of the wife of Cosimo I, Eleanora of Toledo. Rather than disclose any mental or emotional cues, her stoical face seems to be of carved ivory, and her body is engulfed in Bronzino’s magnificently depicted velvet dress. Despite the presence of their son, it sends a clear message that the rulers transcend mere humanity, a note clearly echoed with Giorgio Vasari’s painted apotheosis of Grand Duke Cosimo I.

Tapestries Huge, lush, colorful, portable, practical, expensive, shot with gold and silver threads, and designed to flatter its owner, the tapestry was the Renaissance secular art form par excellence. As Renaissance painting style developed, so did that of tapestries; indeed, many Italian painters designed them. But master weavers in Paris and the Low Countries, especially Brussels, created them. Some patterns became popular, including Raphael’s “The Apostles” for Pope Leo X, which series was also purchased by Francis I, Henry VIII, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, and Margaret of Austria. Onerous Habsburg regulations (1544) and the Reformation ended tapestries’ golden age.

Rulers used all of the arts, including ceramic ware, fine metalwork, intarsia and pietre dure, expensively bound books and manuscripts, and theatrical staging. The result of their patronage was both political propaganda and cultural magnificence. Works of painters, jewelers, sculptors, and miniaturists were gifted or exchanged, and the artists and craftsmen themselves gained international renown by being lent to dynastic friends, allies, and relatives. In this way the court artist, as well as court art, served as a store of wealth and a form of currency. See also: Arts: Antiquity, Cult of; Art, Sacred; Art Patronage; Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Sculpture; Women and the Arts; Family and Gender: Heraldry; Virtù and Honor; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Housing and

Arts: Art, Sacred

Community: Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates; Recreation and Social Customs: Noble Pursuits; Weddings; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels FURTHER READING Buccheri, Alessandra. The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439–1650: Italian Art and Theatre. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Campbell, Stephen J., ed. Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300–1550. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Cheles, Luciano. The Studiolo of Urbino: An Iconographic Investigation. Wiesbaden, Germany: Ludwig Reichert, 1986. Cole, Alison. Virtue and Magnificence: Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts. New York: Prentice Hall, 1995. Folin, Marco, ed. Courts and Courtly Arts in Renaissance Italy: Arts, Culture, and Politics, 1395–1530. Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2011. Freedman, Luba. Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Furlotti, Barbara, and Guido Rebecchini. The Art of Mantua: Power and Patronage in the Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. Hickson, Sally Ann. Women, Art, and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Reiss, Sheryl, and David G. Wilkins, eds. Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001.

Art, Daily Life in. See Daily Life in Art

ART, SACRED Christianity is a religion with an artistic tradition reaching back to the catacombs. Images of holy people and sacred events, and even of God, have been created, ­respected, and even venerated, though not always without criticism. Defenders of sacred art have insisted that it serves to instill piety in people, express deep spiritual values and emotions, teach the illiterate, glorify God and His saints, and even serve as instruments of divine power. Renaissance religious art did all of this for society and also reflected the era’s new celebration of humanity, which, after all, God made in His own image. Because Christianity saturated Renaissance culture, religious art was found everywhere from byway and street corner tabernacles to nobles’ bedrooms, over fortress gates, on walls of hospitals, prisons, and city halls, in books, and, of course, in churches and chapels.

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Sacred art took many forms and served many purposes. During a day spent in Naples, Rome, or Venice one would come across panel and canvas paintings, frescoes, stained glass windows, painted manuscripts, banners, mosaics, prints and engravings, and statues in every medium, including bronze, marble, ivory, terra-cotta, wood, gold, and silver. During the Renaissance era, most religious works were purchased by lay people rather than clergy, though clergy always encouraged such art. On a spiritual level religious imagery was The Pietà (1498–1499) by Florentine artist functional and only incidenMichelangelo (1475–1564) was his earliest tally decorative. The belief was large-scale sculpture. Carved in Carrara marble, widely held that God and His the scene of a youthful Mary holding the dead Christ was created for a French cardinal’s burial saints appreciated and rewarded chapel in Rome and is today in St. Peter’s Basilica. pictorial gifts and prayers that Overhearing disbelief that one so young had they evoked. Friars preached produced the masterpiece, he carved his name into that beautiful religious images Mary’s sash. (Michelangelo, Pietà, ca. 1498–99, Basilica of St. Peter, Vatican) kept one’s eyes on the prize and off of distracting secular or even offensive pictures. For this reason, residences from hovels to palaces displayed sacred art according to the owners’ means and inclination. Gifts of fine art to God’s churches or religious houses were also spiritual good works, which is why many last wills contain money for such bequests. Church was also the place to advertise one’s thanks for a blessing or miracle, from recovery of a lost item to recovery from plague. Certain images, especially of the Virgin Mary, became known for being the instruments of divine miracles. From the New Testament on, Christianity emphasized that God rewarded faith, and traditions grew up around belief in the divine power of certain objects, especially relics and images. Miraculous images were given special treatment in churches or shrines built for them, and these drew crowds seeking favor in times of war, plague, or famine. Rulers or civic leaders would stage religious processions in which the images were paraded through city streets to bless the population and demonstrate the power of the holy one depicted. As daily routine Italians would touch a roadside or street

Arts: Art, Sacred

corner Madonna and Child image and recite a brief prayer for good health or safety. Homes had St. Christopher painted near front doors to evoke a quick prayer from those about to travel. Images of St. Ann, patroness of women in childbirth, decorated special trays given to new mothers as well as the wall behind the main altar in the huge Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Churches and their chapels contained any number of religious images. Some just lay about or were tacked to walls as memorials. Permanent examples include frescoes from the Sistine Chapel ceiling and a small Crucifixion scene over a side altar in a country church. Cycles, or series of narrative scenes, from biblical stories or saints’ lives cover walls around a church’s main altar and, where they remain, side walls separating chapels belonging to prominent families, guilds, or other organizations. Statues large and small crowded these spaces as did two or three generations worth of painted images. Illustrated—often lavishly—books kept in churches included choir books, Mass books, the Gospels, and psalters, often displaying the donor’s heraldry. Each chapel had an altar, and many had painted frontals, rectangular painted panels covering the altar’s face. On the wall behind the altar hung a large panel or canvas altarpiece. These could feature many saints, perhaps those whose names family members shared, standing in the presence of the Madonna and Child. Catholic worship spaces also included pictures or statues of the Crucified Christ on, over, or near the altar, a reminder of the connection of the Mass to Christ’s sacrifice on the altar of the cross. When religious art is displayed in museums today, it becomes accessible to all. The price, however, is uprooting it from its original environment and stripping it of its sacredness. See also: Arts: Art Patronage; Music at Church; Women and the Arts; Family and Gender: Last Wills and Testaments; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Religion and Beliefs: Bible; Chapels; Christian Art in the Home; Churches; Council of Trent and Catholic Reform; Crucifix; Mary, Cult of; Memorials Ex Voto; Pilgrims and Shrines; Preachers and Preaching; Saints and Their Cults FURTHER READING Alexander, Jonathan J. G. The Painted Book in Renaissance Italy, 1450–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Boehm, Barbara Drake. Choirs of Angels: Paintings in Italian Choir Books, 1300–1500. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009. Borsook, Eve, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi, eds. Italian Altarpieces, 1250–1550. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Cocke, Richard. Paolo Veronese: Piety and Display in an Age of Religious Reform. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Cole, Bruce. Italian Art, 1250–1550: The Relation of Renaissance Art to Life and Society. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Couchman, Judith. The Art of Faith: A Guide to Understanding Christian Images. Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press, 2012. Hall, Marcia. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Holmes, Megan. The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Kennedy, Trinita. Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy. London: I.B. Taurus, 2014. Solum, Stefanie. Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Chapel of the Medici Palace. New edition. New York: Routledge, 2016. Thomas, Anabel. Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman’s Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Wright, Rosemary Muir. Sacred Distance: Representing the Virgin Mary in Italian Altarpieces, c. 1300–c.1630. New York: Manchester University Press, 2006.

ART PATRONAGE In Italian, the arts patron was and is a mecenate, Maecenas being the wealthy middleman who commissioned art for Roman emperor Augustus Caesar. Art patronage involved three parties: the one commissioning, the artist or artists, and the public that both presumed would view the work. Often, those responsible for the space in which the work would be installed—church, monastery, hospital—were also consulted. The impulse to commission a painting, sculpture, or other artistic work for a particular setting and purpose was strong among the ruling, upper, and middle classes of Renaissance-era Italy. Popes, kings of Naples, dukes, and other signori lavished resources on decorating palaces and villas, churches and chapels, public structures and private spaces. Monks and their supporters decorated monasteries and churches; confraternities and guilds had their meeting and worship places painted; patrician families or family heads hired the most fashionable artists to adorn their chapels, palazzi, and villas; and city councils chose patriotic and moralistic themes for the walls and ceilings of their headquarters. The dying bequeathed artistic works to ensure remembrance, and their survivors commissioned works to memorialize their dead. The wealthy had their portraits painted or carved; bankers showed their sophistication by displaying classicizing myths or characters; thankful survivors of plague or injuries bought and displayed ex votos; and even relatively poor folk sometimes left money in their wills for a Madonna or crucifix. Because they controlled most of society’s wealth, men dominated art patronage. Even so, some well-placed women such as Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua, were quite active as art

Arts: Art Patronage

commissioners and collectors. While a few even commissioned buildings, most were widows who commemorated their husbands with chapels or altarpieces. Even art that was solely for a patron’s personal space—such as the portrait of a lover or a small Crucifixion—assumed that the patron would be the viewer, and it was designed accordingly. Art in a palazzo or villa attracted the gaze not only of family members but also of servants, guests, and future generations. Such images signaled the family’s or family head’s values, whether religious, historical, dynastic, mythological, or recreational (e.g., hunting or dancing). An individual or family provided public spaces with tabernacles, chapels, tombs, altarpieces, crucifixes, and gifts to monasteries, nunneries, or confraternities to evoke prayers and to reinforce their reputation in the community for piety and spiritual concern. Religious patronage was also believed to have spiritual benefits, aiding the salvation of the giver(s). Religious bodies, for their part, used scarce resources to buttress their social positions by building or rebuilding, renovating, decorating, and embellishing their quarters and semi-public worship spaces. Much of this was also “institutional advertising” that displayed the presence and power of the Church as well as the order or confraternity’s place in it. Secular institutions such as guilds, communes, and neighborhoods pooled resources to provide public buildings or art that signaled their collective concern for their town’s needs or its magnificence. Rulers magnified themselves, their dynasties, and cities—in that order—with their private and public commissions. Some of this was duly religious, as they knew well that pious patronage brought forth both popular and divine favor. Much, however, celebrated the rulers in traditional, feudal terms or through classicizing myth or history that echoed and magnified their glories, real or imagined. While the workshops of sculptors, painters, goldsmiths, ceramicists, woodcarvers, and other artists sold ready-made pieces to customers off the street, they succeeded or failed through commissions. Factors such as the shop’s location or reputation, a recommendation, or personal knowledge of previous work attracted the patron. Negotiations for a complex commission for a public space might involve a religious or historical advisor, a representative of the venue, a notary to record specifics, the patron (or his representative), and the artist. The artist might have provided preliminary drawings or a model, or mentioned existing works that seemed to reflect the patron’s wishes. Discussions would have included how much work the master would actually do; the quality of the pigments; the schedule; living arrangements if out of town; patron’s provision of transportation, scaffolding, or other necessities; and arrangements for payments. All would have been included in a formal written contract. Often the final price was decided not by artist or patron but by a panel of the local guild. Wealthy patrons wanted reputations for patience, fairness, and even generosity, to help attract the best artists. Artists wanted to be known for reliability and excellent quality to help attract the best patrons.

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Donor Portraits While medieval artists very rarely included images of their patrons in ­donated religious paintings, as early as Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (c.1305) artists began depicting donors within the picture frame. Kneeling Enrico Scrovegni is shown handing his chapel to angels as the Last Judgment takes place above them. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries such figures—hands folded in prayer or holding a book, rosary, or candle—were scaled much smaller than surrounding saints. With the rise in realism in painting donor portraits were scaled the same as other figures, though they were no less prayerful, attentive, or humble in demeanor. Aside from the occasional simple conventual patron or monk-painter, Renaissance-era patrons and artists were sophisticated men of the world. They both understood that art mattered to the society and that commissions were extensions of the patron’s public persona. They also understood that the commercialized market for art demanded work of the highest quality. Together, the patrons and artists of the Renaissance era created a body of work unsurpassed in history. See also: Arts: Antiquity, Cult of; Art, Courtly; Art, Sacred; Daily Life in Art; Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Music at Church; Music at Court; Non-Europeans in Art; Painters and Their Workshops; Pietre Dure and Intarsia; Portraits; Sculpture; Theater for the Elite; Women and the Arts; Women Poets and Their Poetry; Economics and Work: Banks and Banking; Guilds; Notaries; Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician; Heraldry; Names, Personal and Family; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Housing and Community: Furnishing the House; Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Ambassadors and Diplomacy; Art, Civic; City Halls; Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates; Republics; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Civic Festivals; Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Pets; Pornography and Erotica; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Christian Art in the Home; Churches; Clergy, Catholic; Confraternities; Crucifix; Friars; Mary, Cult of; Memorials Ex Voto; Monks and Monasteries; Nuns and Nunneries; Pilgrims and Shrines; Saints and Their Cults; Science and Technology: Glassmaking FURTHER READING Brown, Patricia Fortini. Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

Arts: Ceramics, Decorative Burke, Jill. Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2004. Hickson, Sally Anne. Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua: Matrons, Mystics, and Monasteries. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Kent, F. W., and Patricia Simons, eds. Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Clarendon Press, 1987. Nelson, Jonathan K., Richard J. Zeckhauser, and Michael Spence. The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Reiss, Sheryl E., and David G. Wilkins, eds. Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001. Zirpolo, Lilian. Ave Papa, Ave Papabile: The Sachetti Family, Their Art Patronage, and Political Aspirations. Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2005.

CERAMICS, DECORATIVE The ancient art of modeling in clay, firing the piece until solid, and painting or glazing it to taste thrived in Renaissance-era Italy. Simple objects for lower-class tables, especially cups and jugs, were simply handmade from local clays and sold cheaply. Sculptors and potters created higher-quality objects, both functional and decorative, from carefully selected clays that were carved, molded, or thrown on a potter’s wheel. Terra-cotta (“cooked earth”) used unrefined, iron oxide–rich sedimentary clay that was firm enough to be sculpted or molded; maiolica, derived from Spanish products (from Maiorca? Malaga?), utilized fine, white clay that potters further bleached in the sun; and Italian versions of even finer Chinese-style porcelain developed in late Renaissance-era courts. Fifteenth-century Florentine sculptors such as Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, and Desiderio da Settignano carved terra-cotta into patrician busts, heraldic coats of arms, and a host of other forms. The least expensive of sculptable materials, it could be gilded, painted in naturalistic colors, glazed to appear bronze-like, or left raw in its natural red-brown or other earth tone. In the 1440s Florentine Luca della Robbia began using colored glazes to polychrome his works. Workshops developed molds for easily reproducible domestic and religious objects. Even poor households could afford a small but colorful Madonna and child. Artists also used terra-cotta to shape presentation models for patrons’ consideration before beginning work in much more expensive marble or bronze. Around 1557 the gentleman-potter Cipriano Piccolpasso of Casteldurante wrote in manuscript Three Books of the Potter’s Art, the first book on ceramics. His focus was on the finely grained, polychrome glazed, and expensive

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ceramic-ware called maiolica. He noted many Italian centers of its production, such as Ferrara, Faenza, Urbino, and Venice, and local variations in colors, shapes, and styles of decoration. Initially, colorful, tin-glazed pieces arrived from Spain, and in the early 1400s Florentine potters tried to imitate these using pigments instead of colored glazes. True maiolica required a choice, white clay that was carefully strained and purified. This was shaped by hand, on a wheel (plates and bowls), or in a mold. Delicate thinness was often a quality sought by patrons, especially for fine tableware. Objects were fired first in a large kiln or furnace for 12 hours at a temperature of about 1,000° C, much hotter than terra-cotta. When cooled, objects received a coating of opaque, white glaze (pulverized sand, potash, lead, and tin). Over this dried but still permeable surface were carefully painted colored glazes using, for example, antimony and copper (green), iron oxide–rich Armenian bole and vinegar (red), and antimony with iron (yellow). A final, lead-silicate clear glaze might be applied by shaking it from the brush hairs, lest they smudge the glazes. At first, decoration was fairly simple—heraldic or geometric—but after 1500 patterns grew in sophistication and detail: Piccolpasso mentions the use of mice-whisker brushes. Unlike painters, maiolicari had to account for the second firing changing the colors of the glazes: what they saw when they painted was not what they would see; and this only experience taught them. Experience also revealed how to maintain the kiln temperature at 960° C for the 11 hours of the second firing. Lusterware was a spe­cialty provided by only a few shops. Translucent red, golden silver, or gold tints were painted on as shiny highlights, dried, and fired for three hours at 600° C in a kiln deprived of oxygen by adding smoke. Roman chef Cristoforo Messibugo wrote of a Roman feast for 54 guests utilizing some 2,400 plates over 12 courses; Bartolomeo Scappa wrote of 100 dishes being served on 436 plates with beverages served in 88 cups. Nobles and wealthy patricians ordered huge sets of matching maiolica ware: a mid-sixteenth-century potter in Faenza received orders for 3,500 pieces and 7,025 pieces. Plates were usually used for serving until late in the sixteenth century, and could be quite large. Matching or complementary covered dishes, bowls of all sizes, basins, tureens, cups, pitchers, salt dishes, cruets, and candle-sticks covered tables during feasts and decorated sideboards otherwise. Apothecaries used hundreds of labeled and decorated maiolica jars (albarelli) to store and display their many spices and medicines; collectively, these constitute the largest surviving body of Renaissance-era maiolica. Sixteenth-century istoriato ware refers to domestic maiolica decorated with narrative paintings rather than decorative patterns or heraldry. Patrons favored historical, biblical, and mythological scenes depicted with the same painterly qualities as any work of art.

Arts: Ceramics, Decorative

Pottery as Propaganda Maiolica painter Francesco Xanto Avelli served Urbino’s Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere as artist, courtier, and poet. Forty-four pro-ducal sonnets survive, most of which praise him in typical humanist and noble terms. Between 1530 and 1542 Xanto created a body of istoriated maiolica masterpieces, many signed and dated. Some surviving painted pieces feature pro-Imperial allegories of the Sack of Rome in 1527: symbols of the Medici pope lay amid corpses; Charles V’s eagle preys on the papal mule; and torches torture the feet of reclining, lascivious “Roma.” In 1532 Xanto celebrated peace with “Mars returns to the heavens.” Hard paste porcelain arrived from China and set a very high standard for fine, delicate ceramics. Italians, unable to obtain Chinese materials, experimented with less translucent soft paste imitations. From 1575 the Medici laboratories in Florence produced the most famous examples, of which 70 pieces survive. See also: Arts: Art Patronage; Sculpture; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Imported Goods, Sources of; Family and Gender: Heraldry; Food and Drink: Conduct at Table; Tools for Cooking and Eating FURTHER READING Boucher, Bruce, and Carlo Milano. Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Gentili, Giancarlo. “ ‘A New and Useful Art’: Considerations on the ‘Invention’ of Glazed Sculpture.” In Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Marc Bormand, eds. The Springtime of the Renaissance. Florence: Mandragora, 2013, pp. 188–95. Goldthwaite, Richard. “The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica.” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 1–32. Hess, Catherine. “Pleasure, Shame, and Healing: Erotic Imagery on Maiolica Drug Jars.” In Allison Levy, ed. Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 13–26. Kingerly, W. W. David. “Painterly Maiolica of the Italian Renaissance.” Technology and Culture 34 (1993): 28–48. Liefkes, Reino. “Tableware.” In Marta Ajmar-Wolheim and Flora Dennis, eds. At Home in Renaissance Italy. London: V&A Museum, 2006, pp. 254–66. Mallet, John V. G. “In Botega di Maestro Guido Durantino in Urbino.” Burlington Magazine 129 (1987): 284–98. Mallett, John V. G. Xanto: Pottery-Painter, Poet, Man of the Renaissance. London: The Wallace Collection, 2007. Sani, Elisa P. Renaissance Italian Maiolica. London: V&A Museum, 2012.

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DAILY LIFE IN ART One of the hallmarks of Renaissance aesthetics was placing the human in his or her proper environment. The ability to depict people as they actually appeared and in a naturalistic setting was the prized quality of the Renaissance artist. Frescoes, panel paintings, canvases, book illustrations, prints, drawings, even intarsia and pietre dure works were created to reflect humanity and its world, both of which were the joint product of divine creation and human effort. But humanism added a dimension: that which was worthy of being painted should be worthy of note. Before later sixteenth-century genre painting, peasants and laborers were not worthy of note; nor were children playing or families enjoying a meal. Most Italian artists did not celebrate the average or everyday, but they did not ignore it either. Often they wove it into the background of grander subjects, both secular and ­sacred, bringing the worthy into the world of the common and the common into the shadow of the notable. A literal example is from Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel fresco in Florence. The subject is St. Peter, who, dressed in first-century garb, regally strides down a Florentine street. His healing shadow is cast on a series of unfortunates whose features were taken from the local population. By age and possibly status they were types and symbolic, but they were above all contemporary individuals placed in a setting—Florence— familiar to every viewer. At Florence’s Santa Maria Novella church, Domenico del Ghirlandaio shifted the birth of the Virgin Mary from ancient Israel to an imaginary chamber in a later fifteenth-century palazzo. The infant is tended to by the midwife and a servant while a group of fashionably dressed women of the Tornabuoni family approach the reclining St. Ann. The room is tastefully neo-classical in a style championed by the architect Sangallo, the visitors are recognizable members of the prominent family perhaps in their own clothing, and the nature of the event—a formal visit by women to a new mother—is a standard Italian birth ritual. Located behind the main altar, the work is a memorial to the most prominent Tornabuoni woman, who died in childbirth; part of a religious narrative cycle; and an intersection of Antiquity and contemporary life that universalizes the ancient event. In the backgrounds to historical, contemporary, and religious paintings tiny people carry on their many daily tasks as the important figures in the foreground

Arts: Daily Life in Art

give the work its meaning. In an outdoor urban setting men work on a new building, lead packhorses, fall off the dock or bridge, play musical instruments, argue, bargain, and beg. Women lean out of windows or lead children by the hand. Shops along streetscapes are open to the passersby; ships in the harbor bob at anchor; laundry flutters in the wind; and a pet monkey navigates a ledge. Contemporary scenes of good works, such as Domenico di Bartolo’s fresco Care of the Sick in the still-intact Sienese Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, bring the viewer directly into the charitable institution with its patients, caregivers, and inspecting patrons. The level of realism is high, and among the crowded figures are clearly shown basins, pitchers, medicine boxes, bandages, and other medical paraphernalia—even a confrontational dog and cat. Though from the 1440s, some of the ceiling decorations depicted and even a foot basin still remain at the hospital. Similarly, at San Martino del Vescovo a series of depictions of charitable events include a small group compiling an inventory of household goods, probably those of the husband of the woman standing in their midst. In 1465 at the court of the Gonzaga in Mantua, Andrea Mantegna began decoration of a large chamber usually called the Camera degli Sposi. Like both Domenicos, Mantegna was a master of realistic detail. In this setting for many of the duke’s important functions Mantegna depicted the court gathered and relaxing, and adjacent the duke greeting his son the cardinal, who has just arrived from Rome. The many servants’ images are probably portraits, and those of family members do not seem to be idealized. The clothing is detailed and appropriate but not elaborate, and the duke changes from a lounging gown to a smart tunic and hose in which to welcome his son. Modern historians rely heavily on paintings, prints, drawings, and other pictorial artifacts to understand the physical aspects of the Renaissance era. They read about certain fabrics or other objects in stories, inventories, or accounts, or examine surviving objects in museums. Paintings by credible artists of feasts, battles, construction sites, rooms, wharves, piazze, shops, gondolas, or Carnival can be littered with dozens of objects that formed part of the artist’s experience but about which we need to be informed. How painters treated foreigners, Jews, or black slaves sheds light not only on the people themselves but also on the attitudes of the culture recording them. One last field is historic textiles and costume. Renaissance painters could be so precise in their depiction of clothing and textiles that modern experts can distinguish one type of velvet from another. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art, Sacred; Non-Europeans in Art; Perspective in the Visual Arts; Portraits; Family and Gender: Childhood; Servants, Household; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Court, Fashion at; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Furnishing the House;

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Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Art, Civic; Soldiers; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Civic Festivals; News; Noble Pursuits; Weddings; Religion and Beliefs: Friars; Mary, Cult of; Saints and Their Cults FURTHER READING Bendiner, Kenneth. Food in Painting from the Renaissance to the Present. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Birbari, Elizabeth. Dress in Italian Painting, 1460–1500. London: John Murray, 1975. Duits, Rembrandt. Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting: A Study in Material Culture. New York: Pindar Press, 2008. Katz, Dana E. The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Malaguzzi, Silvia. Food and Feasting in Art. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. McTighe, Sheila. “Food and the Body in Italian Genre Painting, about 1580: Campi, Passanti, Carracci.” Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 301–24. Monnas, Lisa. Merchants, Princes and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300–1550. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

DANCE, COURTLY At Renaissance-era Italian courts, dance took two primary forms. One was performances for an audience by dancers on a stage, probably led by a court master of the dance. These spectacles developed in the later fifteenth century and came to be associated with filling the gaps between scenes in a theatrical performance. The best documented of these sets of intermedii was developed for the Florentine court for the 1589 wedding of its grand duke. The other form, of course, invited the participation of the court and its guests on a cleared-out dance floor. This might be in the context of an evening’s festivities and involved scores of dancers, or limited to a few of the duke’s intimates practicing the latest steps in an informal setting. Our understanding of court dancing practices is far greater than that of dancing among the lower classes. Manuscript dance manuals by practicing dance masters appeared in the fifteenth century and were being printed in large numbers by the sixteenth. Also, observers were far more likely to describe or comment in writing on the dancing at a court festival than at a peasant wedding. Court spectacles at their grandest were multimedia shows involving sets, musicians, singers, dancers, and fancy costumes. As with many other types of court art,

Arts: Dance, Courtly

these were propaganda works that were meant to display positive qualities of the dynasty or state, or plant good feelings of harmony or peace in the viewers. They could be themed, displaying the erudition of the court in using symbolic Classical figures, stories, or allegories. Dancers, then, might assume speaking or singing parts as characters or roles as moving extras on the stage. The court dance master (ballarino) served as choreographer, coordinating the dancers as well as the vocal and instrumental music that supported the scenes. He also very likely danced. He may also have written a treatise on dance for the use of courtiers, and later, to be printed. Domenico da Piacenza worked primarily at Ferrara and trained Antonio Cornazano and Guglielmo Ebreo, both of whom moved about the peninsula’s courts. Dance masters not only trained performers, but all of the court as well. Ducal family members and female courtiers danced for visiting rulers and diplomats, sometimes performing steps native to the guests’ home country. But for both men and women to learn to dance was also to learn to move and stand with grace, to impose on the personal space of another and then elegantly withdraw. Proper training began in childhood. The quality of a court’s dancers was a sign of its sophistication, and diplomats wrote home concerning even informal displays of talent or embarrassment. No one could just pick up courtly dancing. For courtiers and guests alike, the dance floor was a competitive arena where natural talent for graceful and subtly seductive movement had to have been wedded to training in the specific dance moves expected for a given type of dance. In the early Renaissance era most dances seem to have been so-called round dances, similar to square dancing. During the fifteenth century men and women were more likely to pair up, which made things much worse for the clumsy or drunk or untrained. Dances were combinations of single steps, double steps, turns, half turns, approaches, withdrawals, leaps, skips, and pauses with changes in tempos and rhythms as the musicians dictated. Despite all, the dance floor was to be a sea of harmonious movement. Dance masters opined repeatedly that only the aristocrat could learn to dance properly, as the lower class person was simply too naturally oafish. Ultimately the instrumentalists kept the dance in motion. They had to know the structures of the many dance forms popular at the time, and it seems that they had to be very good improvisers. Intimate dancing by a few might be accompanied by a lira da braccio or lute, or a keyboard instrument such as a spinet or harpsichord. For learning to dance, to keep rhythm above all, a small drum, tambor, or tambourine may have helped. On or above the grand dance floors the consorts of choice were usually composed of wind and brass instruments, including oboe-like shawms, the trombone’s ancestor the sackbut, horns, and trumpets, along with a percussion instrument to keep the players on the beat. These admittedly noisy instruments were needed to be heard across the large halls above the din of chattering dancers, clattering servants, and the swoosh of velvet and satin.

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See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Music at Court; Theater for the Elite; Fashion and Appearance: Court, Fashion at; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Ambassadors and Diplomacy; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Church Festivals and Processions; Civic Festivals; Music and Dance in Popular Culture; Weddings FURTHER READING Buckley, Ann, and Cynthia J. Cyrus, eds. Music, Dance, and Society: Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Memory of Ingrid G. Brainard. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011. Caroso, Fabritio. Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the “Nobilità di dame” (1600). Edited and translated by Julia Sutton. Mineola. NY: Dover, 1986. Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro. De practica seu arte tripudii: On the Practice or Art of Dancing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. McGee, Timothy. “Dancing Masters at the Medici Court I the Fifteenth Century.” Studi musicali 17 (1988): 201–24. Nevile, Jennifer, ed. Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Nevile, Jennifer. The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Saslow, James M. The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Smith, A. William, trans. Fifteenth-Century Dance and Music: Twelve Transcribed [and translated] Italian Treatises and Collections in the Tradition of Domenico da Piacenza. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1995. Discography Alla Francesca. Istanpitta: Musiques de fête à la cour des Visconti, xive siècle [Istanpitta: Festival music at the court of the Visconti, 14th century]. OPUS111. OP30325. 2003. Anima Mundi Consort. Danze strumentali medievali italiane [Medieval Italian instrumental dances]. Tactus. TC 300003. 2006. The King’s Noyse. Italian Renaissance Dances. Harmonia Mundi. HCX 3957159. 2001. La Rossignol. Canti e danze alla corte Estense tra XV e XVI secolo [Songs and dances at the Estense court between the 15th and 16th centuries]. Tactus. TC 400003. 2004.

DANTE IN POPULAR CULTURE Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was the supreme Italian poet of the later Middle Ages. Born in Florence and marrying Gemma Donati, he dedicated himself in the manner of courtly romance to Beatrice Portinari. The Platonic relationship flowered in

Arts: Dante in Popular Culture

poetic expression and in La vita nuova (The New Life), his study of his love and his art. His role as a Florentine politician and statesman of the ­minority party resulted in his exile in 1302; this in turn prompted his greatest work, the Divine Comedy. Written in Italian in a simple rhyme scheme, the three books— “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso”—chronicle his spiritual pilgrimage from a metaphorical dark wood of d­ espair to a glimpse of the divine, thanks to the intervention of the sainted Beatrice. Most famous is the “Inferno’s” presentation of hell, which he populated with his Florentine political enemies. He spent twenty years as an exile, despite being invited back, and Among Dante portraits is that of Tuscan painter was buried in Ravenna. Giotto di Bondone (1266/7–1337), the poet’s Books, public readings, and contemporary. He appears, hands folded, among then lectures on the Comedy fed the blessed in a fresco of Paradise (1332–1337) in a Florentine public hungry to the Podesta’s Chapel in Florence’s Bargello Palazzo. For his part, Dante noted Giotto’s fame in the Divine hear and understand the great Comedy’s “Purgatorio” XI 94–96. (Corel) work. The earliest partial commentary appeared in Pisa in 1320, and by 1340 another seven appeared, including the first complete one in 1324. Previously commentaries had been strictly on biblical texts. A virtual cult of Dante began as early as 1350 and continued throughout the Renaissance. His use of the Tuscan vernacular dialect ensured that the Italian language would remain a major vehicle for authors of all kinds despite the growing popularization of Latin. In 1350 Francesco di ser Nardo’s manuscript shop provided his merchant-class readers 100 copies of the Comedy, known simply as “Il Dante.” The poet and author of the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, led the way by writing Life of Dante that appeared in 1351, 1360, and 1365, basing it on “Life of Virgil.” Others followed through the 1500s, including that of Florentine humanist and scholar Giannozzo Manetti from the early fifteenth century. Between October 1373 and his death in 1375 Boccaccio was paid by the Florentine government

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and Studio (university) for 60 public readings of and vernacular lectures on the Comedy held in the church of Santo Stefano. They were prompted by a citizen petition, whose signers sought to educate Florentines to “cultivate eloquence” and “shun vice.” They were also very popular. The “Lecturae Dantis” continued into the fifteenth century, moving into the Cathedral itself. In December 1431 Francesco Filelfo lectured to 200 Florentines. After claiming that Dante would have been anti-Medici, Filelfo found himself exiled from Florence and Dante soon found himself ironically being proclaimed a Florentine patriot. Public readings and lectures also cropped up across northern Italy: in Bologna in 1375, Verona in 1380, at the Studio of Pisa in 1385, Pistoia in 1394, and Siena in 1396. For over a century at Florence’s Studio (university) scholars such as Boccaccio, Giovanni Malpaghini, and Francesco Filelfo taught “Il Dante” to the elite youth of Florence. Between 1467 and 1470 Cristoforo Landino, who held the chair of rhetoric and poetry, presented a landmark series of lectures on Dante, confirming that Italian could be a literary language of true grace and beauty. His edition of Dante commentary, the first Florentine-printed “Dante” (1471), was likewise a landmark edition of scholarship. Indeed, the invention of the printing press served to spread and solidify Dante’s reputation. Between 1472 and 1500, 31 editions in all sizes came off the presses of Foligno, Mantua, Naples, Milan, Brescia, Toscolano, Florence (4), and especially Venice (7). The following century saw Florence produce another 3 and Venice an additional 26. Painters adopted Dante’s persona and work in two ways. One was to depict the hell he described so vividly, as did Nardo di Cione in the Strozzi Chapel of Florence’s Dominican Santa Maria Novella church, and Andrea Orcagna in his fresco in the Franciscan Santa Croce across town, both from right after the Black Death. Some believe that Classical elements in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel have their origins in his fellow Florentine’s “Inferno.” The other was depicting Dante himself: as pilgrim, poet, scholar, prophet, everyman. Before painter Sandro Botticelli fixed Dante’s distinctive facial features, the poet was distinguished by clothing—scholar’s robe and beret—or background. Botticelli created a series of images to illustrate the Comedy, a commentary on which he was said to be contemplating. Dante was famous enough even in his lifetime to be painted by Giotto. Andrea del Castagno created an influential portrait about 1450; Domenico di Michelino placed him in Florence’s Cathedral in 1465; Giuliano da Maiano in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio in 1480; and Raphael in the Vatican (“Parnassus” and “Disputa” frescoes) around 1510. Engravings of his face appeared in printed editions of his works, though outside Florence he appears more generic and less like “Dante.” Dante could stand for many things during the Renaissance, besides being author of the Comedy and notable love poetry. He was a symbol of both spiritual

Arts: Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork

and civic virtue, ironically a republican despite his work On Monarchy praising the emperor, and a model Florentine citizen despite his hatred of his erstwhile countrymen. To scholars he was a scholar and classicist as well as a theologian; to poets he was a master to be emulated; and musical composers tried to capture his spirit. He became a poster-child for Tuscan in sixteenth-century debates over the virtues of Latin and the vernacular, and among Italian dialects. The mid-sixteenth century christened his Comedy “Divine” (1555); and many praised him for his presumed role in resuscitating an interest in Classical culture and literature, creating a revival not unlike that of Giotto in the arts. His works were mimicked, praised, satirized, and most importantly read. Michelangelo is said to have memorized the Comedy, a feat hardly imaginable today though some have achieved it. See also: Arts: Antiquity, Cult of; Portraits; Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings; Women Poets and Their Poetry; Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Politics and Warfare: Ambassadors and Diplomacy; Exile and Exiles; Guelfs and Ghibellines and Other Political Factions; Recreation and Social Customs: Music and Dance in Popular Culture; Reading; Religion and Beliefs: Bible; Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; Preachers and Preaching FURTHER READING Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006. Gilson, Simon. Dante and Renaissance Florence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Korman, Sally. “Danthe Alighieri Poeta Fiorentino: Cultural Values in the 1481 Divine Comedy.” In Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd, eds. Revaluing Renaissance Art. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000, pp. 57–67. Parker, Deborah. Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Parker, Deborah. “Dante and the Art of the Italian Renaissance.” Lectura Dantis 22–23 (1998) (special number). Watt, Mary Alexandra. “The Reception of Dante in the Time of Cosimo I.” In Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosmo I de’Medici. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001, pp. 121–34.

GOLDSMITHING AND FINE METALWORK To thumb through a well-illustrated exhibition catalogue of Renaissance-era swords and armor, gold coins, ducal silverware, gilded manuscript pages, rich brocades, or gold church vessels and plate is an enriching experience. These kinds

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of objects possess a visual appeal that has captivated people since gold was first discovered and refined. If gold was king of metals, silver was queen, and gleaming steel was the tough guy at court. The arts of working all of these metals stretched back into the Middle Ages. Transforming ores into precious metals was virtually wizard’s work. The aura of alchemy continued into the Renaissance era with the search for the philosopher’s stone and the esoteric technique of turning base metals into gold. Creating fine steel also retained some of that mystique. Transforming metal into precious objects had less mystery about it, but still evoked awe. Civic precious metals craftsmen typically formed parts of several guilds: sword-makers, armorers, jewelers, goldbeaters, gilders, and goldsmiths. Workers in silver, which was often gilded to prevent tarnishing, were usually affiliated with one of these. Venice’s goldsmith guild was founded before 1233, Mantua’s before 1317, and Siena’s oldest statutes, which governed 130 artists in the fourteenth century, date to 1361. From the 1320s to 1380 Florence had 258 goldsmiths and a hundred goldsmiths in 1427. Pope Julius II organized Rome’s goldsmiths’ guild in 1508. Master craftsmen, even immigrant Germans, were always in great demand, especially at courts in cities such as Ferrara, Naples, Turin, and Milan. Milan’s dominance in steel making, working, and engraving predated the Renaissance era, and by the sixteenth century there were about 50 sword-makers’ shops in the city at any one time. In 1540 Vincenzo Figino’s shop had 37 employees, from craft masters to apprentices. Shops like his practiced a form of vertical integration. Over a 20-year period he hired 21 filers, five blacksmiths, eight burnishers, five scabbard-makers, 27 sword-smiths, 28 gilders, and one belt-maker. Milan’s armorers were likewise well organized and internationally noted as Europe’s finest. Firms such as the Missaglia and the Negroni kept many pieces in stock and filled expensive commissions. Italians were noted for decorating steel by chiseling patterns in low relief and engraving intricate patterns that were then filled with gold foil or wire, a technique known as damascening. Sword hilt designs could be amazingly intricate and artful, and were often gilded. A notable example was made for Tuscany’s Medici Grand Duke: a dagger and sword pair featuring 680 diamonds. Sixteenth-century Italian gentlemen wore swords as wardrobe accessories as well as weapons. An ensemble of coordinated belt, dagger, sword, and scabbards could be stunning. Goldsmiths, such as self-promoting Benvenuto Cellini, who witnessed the Sack of Rome and worked for the Medici Grand Dukes, are known for sculptural masterpieces created for heads of state. Wealthy people’s tables groaned under silver or gilt-silver salts, cups, pitchers, cruets, candlesticks, cutlery, food-warmers, vases, pails for cooling wine, and plates. An inventory of silver at the duke’s court in Mantua listed all of these and more, totaling 359 silver pieces weighing about 543.5 pounds. Painter Giulio Romano recorded some of these lading a credenza

Arts: Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork

in his fresco Wedding of Cupid and Psyche at the duke’s Palazzo del Te. Romano also left hundreds of sketches for fancy metalwork, heavily Classical in style, for court goldsmiths. Much surviving gold ware is church plate: gold or silver objects used in Catholic rituals. The boldest is probably the monstrance, a tall base on top of which sits a small, round glass case in which a Eucharistic Host is carried in procession. The case is surrounded by shimmering gold or gilded rays that reflect the sun or candle flames. More commonly used objects include the chalice, or stemmed cup, in which the Eucharistic water and wine are mixed, and the paten, a small round plate on which the Host is placed. Most work, however, went to lowlier artisans, such as goldbeaters and gilders. Beaters usually worked with gold coins of a standard size and weight. According to the artist Cennino Cennini, a Venetian ducat of 3.5 grams could produce 145 sheets or leaves (foglie) of gold foil measuring 80 mm2 each. Gold foil was not beaten directly, but repeatedly through protective parchment or ox-gut sheets, then polished with powdered gypsum. Rollers produced ribbons of gold foil, and wire was made by forcing (extruding) the soft metal through increasingly tiny holes in a continuous motion. Metallic threads were made of silk thread encased in very thin gold or silver foil ribbons. Gilders applied the thin gold products to a wide range of surfaces, including guns, picture frames, wooden statues, manuscript pages, furniture, and jewel settings. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art Patronage; Painting: Media and Techniques; Sculpture; Economics and Work: Guilds; Manufacturing; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Male; Court, Fashion at; Gems and Jewelry; Food and Drink: Tools for Cooking and Eating; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Arms and Armor; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Religion and Beliefs: Sacraments, Catholic; Science and Technology: Alchemy; Metallurgy FURTHER READING Capwell, Tobias. The Noble Art of the Sword: Fashion and Fencing in Renaissance Europe, 1520–1630. London: The Wallace Collection, 2012. Cellini, Benvenuto. The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpting. Translated by C. R. Ashbee. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1967. Cennini, Cennino. Il libro dell’arte. A New English Translation and Commentary. Translated by Lara Broecke. London: Archetype Books, 2015. Duits, Rembrandt. Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting: A Study in Material Culture. New York: Pindar Press, 2008. Leino, Marika. Fashion, Devotion, and Contemplation: The Status and Function of Italian Renaissance Plaquettes. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

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Metalwork. See Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork

MUSIC AT CHURCH All religious music was not sung in church, though much was. When God’s people took to the streets for a procession or other spiritual gathering, there were likely to be choirs and musicians, possibly on decorated floats, as well as the folks themselves singing religious songs or hymns they knew by heart. One of the most popular forms of lay sacred music was the laud. Written in Italian, lauds were songs of praise, thanks, or petition sung to the Virgin Mary. Beginning in the second half of the thirteenth century groups of men, or men and women, gathered to pray and to sing these fairly simple songs. This was often after the workday was over and in candle-lit chapels and churches run by the Franciscans or another mendicant order. These confraternities expanded their activities to aid the poor and suffering and perform other good works, but their shared spiritual experience was the prayerful singing of lauds. A collection from Cortona, from perhaps the 1270s, provides texts and music of 46 early works. Though not “Renaissance,” by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they, and many others, had become traditional as confraternities and the practice of singing lauds spread through Italy. The Church supported this lay movement, with the archbishop of Pisa in 1304 granting 140 days “of pardon” from time in purgatory every time a person sang or even listened to a laud. Over time, the laudesi companies became more performance-oriented, as they hired musicians and professional singers for important occasions. In monastic houses, monks, friars, or nuns gathered several times each day to sing the Divine Office, or Duty, as laid out in the Rule of St. Benedict. The heart of the Office was the weekly rotation through all of the psalms in the Old Testament. These were sung in Latin in the choir of the church by all of the community’s healthy members in a form known as Gregorian chant. Attributed (incorrectly) to

Arts: Music at Church

Pope St. Gregory I, himself an early Benedictine monk in Rome, these monophonic (no harmonies) compositions move simply and non-rhythmically up and down, with no expression of the text’s meaning. True to its Jewish roots, the Church early also adopted plainchant as the standard way of presenting its most important ritual, the Mass, also called the Liturgy (service). The priest chanted the text of the Mass from the sanctuary and a choir sang responses and supporting hymns, all in Latin. Congregational singing seems to have been limited, even in the early Renaissance era. By the later fourteenth century, composers had begun setting the basic prayers to music to be sung by the choir with or instead of the priest. By the fifteenth century, composers were taking all five basic and unchanging prayers (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) and treating them as complex polyphonic works for four or five voices (soprano-alto-tenor-bass). As only males could sing in church choirs, the higher parts were sung by boys whose voices had not changed, men singing falsetto, or male castrati. Such elaborate music could only be supported by bishops at their cathedral churches or the pope at St. Peter’s or his own cathedral church of St. John Lateran, where the noted composer Giovanni da Palestrina worked for a while. Often a composer would borrow a tune from a secular song, such as “L’Homme armé” (the armed man) and subtly adapt each part of the Mass to it or part of it. As a result, many Masses have names such as Missa L’Homme armé, though Trent banned the practice in 1563. Other Masses are named for the feast days for which they were written, such as Christmas, for a passage in the Scripture reading for the day for which the work was written, or are simply named Brief Mass or Mass for the Dead (Requiem). Motets, at which Palestrina also excelled, were usually polyphonic settings of Latin Scriptural passages such as psalms, or specific liturgical prayers in Latin. These would have been sung before, during, or after a Mass or in another religious setting appropriate to the text, as a baptism or funeral service. Church leaders at the Council of Trent argued over whether to return liturgical music to unaccompanied plainchant or to command composers to simplify the often-unintelligible polyphonic treatment of lyrics. They decided on the latter, rejecting the increasingly complex interweaving of lines of text. Among composers in this clarified style was Palestrina, who wrote many religious motets and over 100 Masses. Rulers, from the king of Naples to local signori, hired composers to create sacred music for their chapel singers and organists. Ducal choirs performed their sophisticated pieces not only in the palace chapel or church, but also in other local churches, especially the cathedral, so that the common people could hear the latest innovations. In the early 1500s this meant a kind of stereophonic treatment using two 4-voice choirs, separated in space and singing “against” one another.

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Castrati Boys aged 7 to 13 with fine voices were castrated—had their testicles disengaged—by barber-surgeons to prevent maturation of their vocal chords. This preserved their clear, high singing voices. Because women were not ­allowed to sing in churches or chapels, from the 1550s castrati began to ­replace falsetto and boy soprano soloists. Earliest were French or Spanish, but Italian boys were undergoing the knife well before 1580. Church and chapel choirs in Rome, Mantua, and Ferrara paid castrati 36 scudi per year; by the 1580s that had risen to 300 to 400 scudi, so popular had they become.

Church choirs in Padua and Bergamo seem to have pioneered this antiphonal structure, but it was at the Venetian doge’s chapel of San Marco that it reached an apex in the works of Adrian Willaert (from 1527), Giovanni and Andrea Gabrieli, and Claudio Monteverdi. See also: Arts: Musical Instruments; Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Housing and Community: Death in the Community; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Music and Dance in Popular Culture; Songs and Singing, Popular; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Churches; Confraternities; Council of Trent and Catholic Reform; Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; Mary, Cult of FURTHER READING D’Accone, F. A. Music and Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Fredman, Richard, and Walter Frisch. Music in the Renaissance. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012. Glixon, Jonathan. Honoring God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 1260–1806. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Rothenberg, David J. The Flower of Paradise: Marian Devotion and Secular Song in Medieval and Renaissance Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. DISCOGRAPHY Armoniosoincanto. Laudario di Cortona No. 91. Paraliturgical vocal music from the middle ages. Brilliant Classics 94872. 2015. Gabrieli Consort and Players. A Venetian Christmas: Music by Giovanni Gabrieli and Cipriano de Rore. Archiv 471 333–2. 2001. La Grande Chapelle. La Fiesta de Pascua [Easter] en Piazza Navona. Lauda. LAU 012. 2012. Pro Cantione Antiqua. Palestrina: Masses. Brilliant Classics. 99711/1–5. nd.

Arts: Music at Court

MUSIC AT COURT Like art, architecture, costume, food, and just about everything at Renaissance-era courts, music was a calculated display for the sake of politics and the personal honor of the rulers. As an old story such as Tristan (Strasbourg, 1210) demonstrates, musical skills had long been welcomed in Europe’s courts. Competent singers and instrumentalists were prized members of a monarch’s or noble lord’s entourage. During the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when entertainment was a form of diplomacy, fine music could lead to satisfactory policy. Italian princes aped their betters further north, and imported composers and musicians from Spain, France, Germany, Holland, and Flanders until well into the sixteenth century. And they often paid them handsomely. In a report to Mantua’s marquis we read that Milan’s Galeazzo Maria Sforza, perhaps Italy’s most avid recruiter, was paying the singer Pietro da Holi 4,000 ducats, in addition to providing a house, clothing, and additional gifts. Other talents received houses worth 700 or 800 ducats in addition to generous salaries. One way to put such stars on the rolls was to create fake offices for them to fill, or to get the local bishop to grant benefices—incomes without real obligations—to musicians. After all, the rulers would gladly loan them to cathedral authorities for major feasts and festivals. Beginning at the Aragonese court in Naples, from the later 1460s Italy’s major courts developed the royal, papal, and ducal “chapels.” Like the English Chapelle Royale, these were not worship spaces, but bodies of musicians dedicated to performing sacred music. They were the heart of a court’s musical life, and were the ensembles most likely to be loaned out. Between the late 1460s and 1475, Naples, Milan, Ferrara, the papacy, and Florence each established a chapel of singers and instrumentalists. The really valued members could sing and play and do both well. In 1474 Galeazzo Maria had a chapel of 20, and for secular performances a house chapel the same size. The royal chapel in Naples in 1479 numbered 40 members. The best instrumentalists and most pleasing singers lived at court and moved with the ruler from palazzo to villa or city to city. Also mobile were the four trumpeters, three drummers, unspecified number of fifers, and one sackbut player who served and traveled with the duke of Urbino. These played brash, martial instruments that would have been used ceremonially for fanfares, entrances, and drilling troops. Though Sforza clearly delineated his musicians, it is not clear others did. A keyboardist could play organ for Mass in the morning, teach the duke’s daughters in the afternoon, improvise on a harpsichord during supper, and on a portative organ for a dance that night. The later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw great strides in musical complexity. Both singers and instrumentalists had to be able to master new polyphonic compositions on a regular basis, a task made easier once printing music had developed by about 1500. Though popular musical forms such

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as the recent madrigal invited the participation of less than virtuoso singers, it seems that at courts these were performed publicly only by chapel or house chapel members. Courtiers could no doubt perform them for their own amusement, but presumably out of earshot of the lord. Nonetheless, music masters apparently taught girls and young women at court to play the viola, lute, and keyboard instruments. This was for their own pleasure and that of their elders. During one interlude young Bianca de’Medici performed several secular pieces on a portable organ while her sister pumped the instrument’s bellows. Whether either or both sang is not recorded. Learning to sing was also a courtly girl’s pursuit. A melodious voice was one of a young woman’s more desirable qualities, and there was no better way to show it off to potential suitors or their representatives than by displaying it in a solo or madrigal performance. By the mid-sixteenth century, female singers were performing professionally at courts by themselves or in ensembles with males. They were, however, banned from performing in church settings. Women are also believed to have composed numerous musical works performed at various courts. Perhaps most impressively, it was Mantua’s Isabella d’Este who brought the rich musical traditions from Ferrara to Mantua from 1490. She also single-mindedly championed native Italian music in the face of foreign imports from around 1500. Her commissions required Italian verse and traditional Italian musical forms at a time when the Franco-Flemish trend was in full swing. Perhaps the fact that Mantua lacked a proper chapel (until 1560) made performing highly structured music rather difficult.

The Madrigal Developed in Florence in the 1520s, the four, five, or six-voice polyphonic treatment of Italian poetry known as the madrigal was the quintessential music for the court or wealthy family’s palazzo or villa. In the 1530s Venetian presses published the first books of these by Philippe Verdelot and Jacques Arcadelt, Northerners active in Florence. Singable by small groups literate in Italian and musical notation, they evolved to a complexity only trained singers could master. Ornamenting banquets and other ceremonies, background to court life, or simply recreational, madrigals intimately explored the relationship of text and music.

Or perhaps it was a bit of nativism in the face of the Italian wars from 1494. War on this scale made diplomatic niceties such as music and feasting pale to insignificance. Music remained a vital part of court ceremonial and entertainment, but it had receded into the background.

Arts: Musical Instruments

See also: Arts: Dance, Courtly; Musical Instruments; Theater for the Elite; Women and the Arts; Family and Gender: Virtù and Honor; Fashion and Appearance: Livery; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Ambassadors and Diplomacy; Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates; Recreation and Social Customs: Noble Pursuits; Songs and Singing, Popular; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Sacraments, Catholic FURTHER READING Atlas, Allan W. Music at the Aragonese Court of Naples. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Bizzarini, Marco. Luca Marenzio: The Career of a Musician between the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. Translated by James Chater. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Boehm, Barbara Drake. Choirs of Angels: Paintings in Italian Choir Books, 1300–1500. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009. D’Accone, F. A. Music and Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Folin, Marco, ed. Courts and Courtly Arts in Renaissance Italy: Arts, Culture, and Politics, 1395–1530. Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2011. Lockwood, Lewis. Music in Renaissance Ferrara: The Creation of a Musical Centre in the Fifteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Merkley, Paul A., and Lora L. M. Merkley. Music and Patronage in the Sforza Court. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999. Prizer, William F. “Renaissance Women as Patrons of Music in the North-Italian Courts.” In Kimberly Marshall, ed. Rediscovering the Muses: Women’s Musical Traditions. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993, pp. 186–205. Discography Alla Francesca. Istanpitta: Musiques de fête à la cour des Visconti, xive siècle [Istanpitta: Festival music at the court of the Visconti, 14th Century]. OPUS111. OP30325. 2003. Hespèrion XX. Music of the Renaissance in Naples (1442–1556). EMI. CDC 7 49008 2. 1987. Huelgas Ensemble. La Pellegrina. Music for the Wedding of Ferdinand de’Medici and Christina de Lorraine, Princess of France, Florence, 1589. Sony. S2K 63323. 1998. La Rossignol. Canti e danze alla corte Estense tra XV e XVI secolo [Songs and dances at the Este court between the 15th and 16th centuries]. Tactus. TC 400003. 2004.

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS The God-given human voice was the musical instrument par excellence. During the early Renaissance era, sung music was considered natural, whereas purely instrumental music was relegated to “artificial” music. Notation suitable to instruments ­developed only in the fourteenth century, and this was long used exclusively for dances.

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In this detail from the Wedding Feast at Cana (1562–1563), Venetian Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) portrays the kind of small musical ensemble that would have entertained guests at just such Renaissance era gatherings at court or in a private palazzo. Bowed strings—viols—formed the core, with wind instruments visible in the background. Originally in the dining hall of San Giorgio Benedictine monastery, Venice; now in the Louvre, thanks to Napoleon. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

That instruments accompanied voices is clear, however, from contemporary images and references in various documents. One from France, dated 1392, mentions singers accompanied by flute, drum, harp, an early bassoon called a dulcian, or the bowed instruments the rebec or vielle, ancestors to the violin. The lute was the instrument of choice for the singing courtier, and a young woman would sing to her playing of a keyboard such as a spinet, clavichord, or harpsichord. Churches had installed ­organs with one or two keyboards and several types of pipes to play before, after, and ­occasionally during choral performances at Mass and other liturgies. Its constant tones provided a way to keep singers on key. Court chapels also had installed organs, such as that found in Ferrara’s Palazzo di Corte that Duke Leonello d’Este himself played. His choir was so large that they filled the space. In well-off homes, children or young adults were taught to play the lute or a keyboard instrument, perhaps at the same time that they learned to sing and dance. Over the period of the Renaissance era, access to musical instruments and then books of music filtered down the social scale. German luthiers in Venice created a range of stringed instrument qualities, from deluxe to cheap. In 1535 one shop

Arts: Musical Instruments

had 178 lutes in various stages of construction, repair, or decay, and 200 bellies for new lutes; in 1581 a single lute shop carried 532 for sale, resale, or repair. Manufacturers of keyboard instruments, including the harpsichord or smaller spinet and clavichord, and the bellows-driven tabletop organ, also produced a range of instruments, from furniture quality with mother of pearl inlay and painted covers to inexpensive practice models. Palazzi were home to small household ensembles who played for their own enjoyment; some hosted musical academies at which virtual instrumental concerts were given; and others hired musicians to entertain for large affairs. One such affair was held by the Venetian Doni family, and had musicians performing on a large harpsichord, lute, flutes, rather harsh crumhorns, and a “case” of bowed viols. The music was to accompany a play, but the musicians also brought vocal part books, indicating there was also singing. More typical, perhaps, were groups that entertained during banquets, staying to provide music for dancing. Guild members who played well often formed ensembles, or consorts, that performed at affairs such as the Donis’. These were more likely to be so-called wind-bands rather than groups of strings, so they could be heard over the din of diners and by dancers. Wind instruments included the double-reed shawm and double-bore early bassoon called the dulcian, and possibly recorders; brass instruments would have been cornetti, sackbuts (early trombones), and horns. Even the Florentine Signoria had a dedicated ensemble of liveried shawm and trumpet players who could be hired to play for weddings, private parties, and during Carnival. These were the best paid of the city’s civil servants and received housing and other perks. When they were not entertaining diners, ensembles of instrumentalists who were dedicated to a governmental body, guild, ruler, cathedral, or other organization performed at the will of the employers. Many of these had regular and even daily ceremonial functions at the palazzo or hall, including playing during meals. Trumpeters preceded town criers announcing new laws, and court brass and winds signaled such occasions as the entry of a prominent guest to the court or to the duke’s or marquis’s presence. As paintings show, civic and religious processions through the streets featured “loud” instruments: long, straight trumpets, crumhorns, sackbuts, bass dulcians, drums, and even bagpipes. More intimate groups of softer instruments appear in written and pictorial sources, including paired instruments constituting a bicinium. These might have accompanied singers or provided background music to the elite: a bowed and a plucked instrument such as a guitar, lute, or harp; a harp and a lute; bagpipes and the bowed lira da braccio; harp and portative organ; two recorders; and a lira da braccio and lute. Such music would have graced a midmorning in a villa’s garden or palazzo’s loggia or the family head’s studiolo; though maybe not the bagpipe. But bagpipes would have been welcome in a village festival. In the countryside and among lower classes, used instruments filtered down and were passed along

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through generations. The military fife, drum, and tabor might have accompanied a crumhorn or psaltery, with tambourine, small cymbals, or castanets for rhythm. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Dance, Courtly; Music at Church; Music at Court; Theater for the Elite; Economics and Work: Manufacturing; Family and Gender: Education of Children; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Palazzi; Villages and Village Life; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Civic Magistracies and Offices; Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Church Festivals and Processions; Civic Festivals; Music and Dance in Popular Culture FURTHER READING Coelho, Victor, and Keith Polk. Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture, 1420–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Lowe, Michael. “The Lute: An Instrument for All Seasons.” In Deborah Howard and Laura Mauretti, eds. The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 145–56. McGee, Timothy. “In the Service of the Commune: The Changing Role of Florentine ­Civic Musicians, 1450–1532. Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 727–45. McGee, Timothy J. Medieval Instrumental Dances. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Montagu, Jeremy. The World of Medieval and Renaissance Musical Instruments. New York: Overlook Press, 1976. Ongaro, G. M. “All Work and No Play? The Organization of Work among Musicians in Late Renaissance Venice.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 (1995): 55–72. Discography Le Miroir de Musique. The Birth of the Violin. Ricercar. RIC 333. 2013. Messori, Luzzaschi. Complete Keyboard Music. Brilliant Classics 94169. 2014. Musica Reservata of London. The Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Vanguard. OVC 8093/94. 1997. O’Dette, Paul. Ala Venetiana. Early Sixteenth-Century Venetian Lute Music. Harmonia Mundi. HMU 907215. 1999. Piffaro. Canzoni e danze. Wind Music from Renaissance Italy. Archiv. DGG 445 883–2. 1995. Syntagma Amici. Fagotto, Basson, Dulcian, Curtal? Ricercar. RIC 273. 2008.

NON-EUROPEANS IN ART Depictions of “the other” by Italian artists usually meant inserting a figure or two into a scene otherwise populated with folks who looked like the artist and his ­intended audience. These were servants or slaves, foreign merchants, or diplomats;

Arts: Non-Europeans in Art

biblical figures such as eastern kings or the three Magi; or figures in scenes of contemporary foreign courts. Because of their distinctive religion and the fact that many came from the Middle East, Jews were decidedly “other” and will be briefly mentioned here. Depictions of non-Europeans could be quite matter-of-fact and naturalistic, or clownish and derogatory. Italians often had not-hate–hate relations with Muslims and Jews, colored in part by contemporary local or international events, or in which city one was working. Negative stereotypes such as Jewish hatred for Christians and greed, Turkish effeminacy or brutality, or black Africans’ untrustworthiness or sloth sometimes appear in verbal depictions, such as those of blacks and Turks in the very negative On Human Physiognomy of c. 1570 by Neapolitan Giambattista della Porta. They do also in prints such as “Turkish Pride” by Niccolò Nelli. Published in 1572, the year of the Christian victory over the Turks at Lepanto, the image right side up is a swarthy “Turk” with a large nose and turban, while upside down, it becomes a bearded devil. Carnival masks, too, could be prime surfaces on which to depict racial stereotypes for a setting in which transgressive behavior and display were expected. Artists had a number of stereotyping tools with which to differentiate certain ethnic groups, whether for good or ill. Skin tone and facial features such as the nose and lips are often key indicators. Black Africans have dark brown to black skin, flat noses, and lips thicker than surrounding Europeans. If a figure’s Jewish identity was called for—and it often was not: many Hebrew biblical figures appear Caucasian rather than Semitic—then his or her skin tone would often be swarthy, the nose extended, and lips thickened. Jews were often given curly hair and beards, and blacks short and tightly curled locks. Clothing, too, could help identify figures’ ethnicity or religion. Contemporary Jewish males were draped in slightly exotic robes or kaftans, their heads topped by a tightly fitting “pillbox” type of hat. Given that many civic statutes forced Jews to wear distinctive badges or bits of clothing, the appearance of these in a contemporary scene helps make the point. Turks and other Muslim ethnic groups are often given bright, loose-fitting robes and turbans of varying size: the more prominent the figure, the bigger the turban. Black Africans were usually dressed in European-style clothing or exotic raiment as one of the Magi, rather than in native costume, of which artists would have known precious little. From the mid-1500s a growing fascination with the “other,” whether in the adjoining Italian state or around the world in Japan, led artists and publishers to market ethnic “costume books.” These contained respectful, if often fanciful, depictions of distinctive Italian, European, and non-European fashions. One of the earliest was Francesco Sansovino’s work on Turkish costume of the mid-1550s. The fullest was the second edition of Cesare Vecellio’s Ancient and Modern Costume (1598). He included what we might call national costumes for Turks, Armenians, Tatars, Jews, Africans, Amerindians, and even Japanese. Though he claimed some authority for fashions he could not have seen, much of this seems very thin indeed.

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Apart from the little known and even less often–depicted Amerindians and East Asians, no group was more affected by stereotype than black Africans. As early as Giotto’s proto-Renaissance fresco of St. Francis before the Egyptian sultan, blacks were servants, in this case to the sultan. Giotto’s figures are tall, straight, and commanding, however, rather than servile. Stereotypes about blacks reach back to Genesis and Noah’s curse on Ham, which was interpreted as black skin. Black as a color was symbolically negative, associated with ugliness and evil. It is not surprising to find black-skinned devils—though not identifiably Africans—torturing souls in hell. Europeans viewed blacks as naturally servile, since the biblical curse included Ham’s descendants having to serve his brothers’ descendants. Since most blacks in Italy had been purchased as slaves or captured fighting in Turkish or North African fleets or armies, everyday experience seemed to support the cultural tradition. They appear in paintings and prints as musicians, bodyguards, and retainers. Titian’s portrait of Laura Dianti, concubine of Alfonso d’Este, includes a wide-eyed young black page staring up at Laura. He wears fine livery of green, blue, lavender, and yellow silk. Titian also painted Fabricius Salvarsius with a liveried black page of indeterminable age, staring up at him. In this case the servant all but disappears in the surrounding darkness. Black servants wait on guests in Veronese’s Feast at the House of Levi and Wedding at Cana, and a dark-skinned woman looks down from the ceiling portal in Mantegna’s frescoes for the so-called Camera degli Sposi in Mantua. Venetians, who had the closest ongoing relations with Turks, could produce sensitive images and even portraits of their trading partners and enemies. Bellini’s famous portrait of the Sultan in Istanbul was painted when he was in the Turkish capital, and his other works of that period display a dignity and intellectual level often missing from painters who worked from stereotypes. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Portraits; Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings; Economics and Work: Slaves and Slavery; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Literature on Dress; Livery; Social Status and Clothing; Housing and Community: Foreign Communities; Jewish Communities; Politics and Warfare: Ambassadors and Diplomacy; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; News FURTHER READING Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Kaplan, Paul H. D. “Black Turks: Venetian Artists and Perceptions of Ottoman Ethnicity.” In James G. Harper, ed. The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, pp. 41–66.

Arts: Novella Kaplan, Paul H. D. The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Katz, Dana E. The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Spicer, Joaneath, ed. Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2012. St. Clair, Alexandrine N. The Image of the Turk in Europe. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973.

NOVELLA The Italian novellare meant to narrate or tell stories; novello meant new. In the fourteenth century the novella was a new kind of written story-telling, one that continued throughout the Renaissance era and beyond. The earliest authors were Tuscan, who wrote in their own vernacular with the rhythms, concision, and precise dialects of their own streets and rural byways. The characters were sometimes real people and almost always realistic people, and the situations imaginative but as natural as the sun and rain. The novella was a popular story for a popular audience or readership, meant only to be entertaining, though there could lurk a moral to the tale just under the surface. Novellas were often written in sets, usually united by a frame narrative of the tale-spinners, whose contributions to some social forum the author merely recounts verbatim. The genre was both ancient and new. Stories were drawn from Classical sources, fables, sermons, folk tales, chivalric bits and pieces, proverbs, biblical stories, and that vast store labeled tradition. Yet Giovanni Boccaccio was then, as now, credited with originating the form and format of novellas and the cornice, or frame tales, in which they were embedded. The work was his Decameron, written in the immediate wake of the Black Death after 1350. His frame tale has ten young women and men escape plague-devastated Florence for a country villa. Here they live a good life of fine food, wine, music, and dancing. On each of ten days each of the ten tells a story on a chosen theme, while colleagues comment on its appropriateness or quality. Even then, critics claimed that what Dante and Petrarch had done for Tuscan poetry Boccaccio did for the Tuscan dialect in prose: transformed storytelling into literature. Stories are humorous, serious, or tragic, but always brilliantly written. They are filled with double entendres, practical jokes, confused identities, deceptions, tricksters, wise servants, and foolish authorities. It is no accident that his opening line reads, “It is a human thing. . .”

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Boccaccio was soon followed by the Florentine merchant and poet Franco Sacchetti, of whose Three Hundred Novellas (1385–1397) only 223 survive. Lacking a frame tale and less literary than Boccaccio’s, Sacchetti’s collection reflects his own life, observations, and concerns, while his voice provides a commentary. Giovanni Fiorentino’s Percorone of about 1378 collects 50 stories, many risqué, supposedly related by a chaplain and several nuns. In his Novelle (first published in 1816), historian, merchant, and politician Giovanni Sercambi of Lucca has his storytellers escaping Lucca’s 1374 epidemic, traveling around Italy as peniGiovanni Boccaccio (ca.1315–1374) was a classical tents, and telling 100 (later 155) scholar and poet whose Decameron (1353) stories he calls exempli (examwas the model collection of vernacular novelle. A good friend of the poet Petrarch, he penned ples, usually a preacher’s tool). several other important early Renaissance literary Though consciously imitating works, including the set of 104 short biographies Boccaccio, he uses his stories On Famous Women (1374). Seventeenth–century engraving by Cornelis van Dalen after a portrait as commentary on his troubled painted by Titian (ca. 1485–1576). (Library of commune, its history, and its Congress) Guinigi family rulers. The early fifteenth-century Exempli of Filippo degli Agazzari of Lecceto contains 61 stories; nothing is known of Sienese Gentile Sermini except his 40 Novelle of c. 1424; and around 1475 Tuscan country pastor Piovano Arlotto collected tales of his own interactions with other clergy and his congregation.

A Woman as Novellatore Noble Paduan poetess Giulia Bigolina (c. 1516–c.1569) was the first female novellatore, and the only one to have a novella survive the sixteenth century.

Arts: Novella

Though her plot features comic cross-dressing, a contemporary historian praised her collection’s moral rectitude and decency, comparing it favorably to that of Boccaccio. The dearth of female novelle authors is very likely due to the genre’s earthy and often unsavory nature. Themes such as lust, fornication, deceit, revenge, and mockery were considered indecorous for women readers, let alone writers. After all, Boccaccio himself had to apologize to his female audience.

The genre’s popularity spread, finding practitioners from Venice to Naples. In 1483 were published the 61 tales of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, a barber’s son and courtier at Bologna’s Bentivoglio court. Later fifteenth-century Neapolitan Masuccio Salernitano, secretary to the Count of Marisco, penned Il Novellino, a very anti-Boccaccian collection of 50 tales. Whereas Boccaccio celebrated the witty, clever, and transgressive, Salernitano defended the power structure and the status quo that upheld it. Transgressors are not laughed off but brutally destroyed; the moods of anti-clericalism and misogyny are not light but stifling; and virtue is upheld only by punishment of vice. Florentine Anton Francesco Grazzini wrote his The Suppers during the early years of Cosimo’s Medicean regime. A widow, her brother, four boarders, and four wives with absent husbands meet during Carnival for food and entertainment. He finished 22 of the projected 30 stories, which are obliquely critical of the new regime and puritanically moralistic with a mood not unlike that of Salernitano. It was not printed until the eighteenth century. In the early 1550s, Venetian Giovanni Francesco Straparola published two volumes of 25 and 48 tales in his Pleasant Nights. His narrators met in Murano, outside Venice, exchanging stories that included mannerist situations such as an enchanted tuna, and women giving birth to a snake, a pig, and three pups. Arguably, these “monstrous” tales are the earliest fairy tales in Italian literature. Pleasant Nights was reprinted 20 times across 60 years. From Ferrara came the 100 Stories of 1565 by Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio. His ten fugitives from a Roman plague tell serious stories that were meant to support Catholic values and reflect the era of Catholic reform. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Women Poets and Their Poetry; Family and Gender: Homosexuality and Sodomy; Servants, Household; Wives and Husbands; Fashion and Appearance: Social Status and Clothing; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Neighborhood and Parish; Villages and Village Life; Recreation and Social Customs: Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Reading; Religion and Beliefs: Bible; Preachers and Preaching

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The World of Renaissance Italy FURTHER READING Allaire, Gloria, ed. The Italian Novella. New York: Routledge, 2002. Langer, Ullrich. “The Renaissance Novella as Justice.” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 311–41. Prunster, Nicole. Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare: Four Early Stories of Star-Crossed Lovers. Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2000. Rotundo, Dominic Peter. Motif Index of the Italian Novella in Prose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1942. Texts of Novellas in Translation Bigolina, Giulia. Urania: A Romance. Edited and translated by Valeria Finucci. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella. New York: Penguin, 1982. Manetti, Antonio. The Fat Woodworker. Translated by Robert L. and Valerie Martone. New York: Italica Press, 1991. Martines, Lauro. An Italian Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context. Translated by Murtha Baca. New York: Marsilio, 1994. Martone, Valerie, and Robert Martone, eds. and trans. Renaissance Comic Tales of Love, Treachery, and Revenge. New York: Italica Press, 1994. Valency, Maurice, and Harry Letow, eds. The Palace of Pleasure: An Anthology of the Novella. New York: Putnam, 1960.

PAINTERS AND THEIR WORKSHOPS Among all the arts practiced in Renaissance-era Italy, painting certainly had pride of place. Michelangelo Buonarotti, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael Santi, Andrea Mantegna, and Titian have long been among the most recognizable names in any list of artists, and all were painters who worked within the workshop tradition. To speak of “a Picasso” or of “a Monet” is to speak of the work of a single modern artist who toiled alone. Reference to “a Botticelli” is rather reference to a group effort of apprentices, associates, and collaborators with and under the direction of the master. His hand may have been light or heavy on a given work, but his was only one of several. In smaller shops of less-renowned owners, teamwork may have been even more evident since a customer was less likely to choose such a master for his distinctive or elite style. Whether the Sistine Chapel ceiling or a small ­Madonna and Child panel hanging in a modest family’s sleeping quarters, the painting was the product of a Renaissance-era workshop. The workspace or shop was probably more cramped and less well lit than one might expect. Many masters used part of their residences for their workshops, while others rented generic shop space that was outfitted for their tasks. In larger

Arts: Painters and Their Workshops

cities there was an advantage to being located close to an apothecary who provided reliable pigments, a goldsmith who gilded frames and sold thin gold foil for panels or book pages, or a woodworker who produced frames and high-quality panels and furniture to be painted. The painter’s shop had to be large enough to accommodate as many apprentices, assistants, and partners as would be working at one time; tools, supplies, pattern books, manuals, models, cartoons, and drawings; work under the brush at the moment; and finished work waiting for delivery or for a buyer. A large table might serve as a workbench, a drawing platform, and a surface on which to display drawings to a new client or finished panels to a customer. Masters were members of the local painters’ guilds, and their shops were managed under guild regulations. For example, fourteenth-century Florence required an apprentice be at least 14 and younger than 25 years of age and spend 9 years under his master. Early on he would receive food and clothing, and as he became more useful, his salary grew with his skill sets. Contracts between masters and fathers were for three years at a time, and many notable painters trained under several successive masters. Fathers of prospective painters, like customers, had many options: between 1441 and 1465 Padua’s guild listed more than 50 members; Brescia from 1517 to 1548 had 91; around 1500 Milan boasted more than 100 painters; and between 1480 and 1561 Florence had 441 painters and 101 book illuminators. Painting illustrations, borders, frontispieces, and other decorations in manuscripts or deluxe printed books was a specialty in itself. Not surprisingly, many monks and friars practiced the art. It was also a feature of many painters’ workshops, including those of Fra Angelico, Taddeo Crivelli, Francesco Pesellino, and Apollonio di Giovanni; the last two of whom were also noted for painting furniture. According to the 1480 tax census Neri di Bicci was Florence’s richest painter, whose shop between 1453 and 1475 completed over 400 commissions and works for sale. Most of these were small-scale religious panels for houses and chapels. Right behind him came Giusto Manzani, his pupil, who specialized in painted plaster religious statuettes. Florence’s Roselli shop flourished between 1475 and 1525, specializing in printing and all types of painting: on panels, parchment, paper, large candles, shields, masks, saddles, furniture, coats-of-arms, boxes, signs, mirrors, banners, tabernacles, and street decorations. Court painter Giulio Romano also designed hundreds of palazzo fixtures, from cups to fireplace andirons; Botticelli also embroidered, Squarcione was a tailor, and Verrocchio’s shop also produced sculptures and gold figures. Though contracts often specified amounts to be paid upon completion, in fact final payments were often determined by a panel of guild members. This occurred when the buyer felt the original amount too much or the painter too little for the finished product. Frescoes were often priced by the square foot or by the number of human figures; use of gold or lapis lazuli (ultramarine blue) raised cost and price

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significantly; the master’s reputation and the availability of competitors may have also affected prices. A study of prices charged by Botticelli suggests that typically 25% went for the panel and frame; 40% for colors (less without gold or ultramarine); and 35% for labor and his reputation. Finished shop products were either picked up or delivered, and mounting was provided for in the contract.

Il Libro dell’ arte The Florentine painter Cennino Cennini (d.1427) produced The Craftsman’s Handbook about 1400. Cennini was a student of Agnolo Gaddi, whose ­father had learned under Giotto. He may have written most of it while in Padua serving the Carrara court (1398–1403), but some passages reveal techniques only utilized after 1410. It is a comprehensive “how-to” painter’s manual in 160 short chapters, and may have been prepared for the Physicians and Spice-sellers’ Guild, of which artists were members. The oldest-surviving manuscript was copied in July 1437 in Florence’s debtors’ prison by two distinct scribes.

Creating frescoes in churches, villas, or palazzi—especially away from one’s home city—presented logistical challenges. Abroad, makeshift workshops had to be set up and equipped; arrangements made with local carpenters, suppliers, and laborers; families provided for back home; and temporary residences established. Courts provided adequate quarters, and getting to know who paid the bills was a most useful accomplishment. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art, Sacred; Art Patronage; Painting: Media and Techniques; Portraits; Women and the Arts; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Apprentices; Guilds; Retail Selling; Wages and Prices; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Art, Civic; City Halls; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Civic Festivals; Science and Technology: Alchemy; Primary Document: The Artist as a Young Man: Cennino Cennini. “Vocational Advice to a Budding Painter.” Craftsman’s Handbook [Il Libro dell’arte] (c. 1410) FURTHER READING Alexander, Jonathan J. G. The Painted Book in Renaissance Italy, 1450–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Bambach, Carmen C. Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Arts: Painting: Media and Techniques Brilliant, Virginia, and Frederick Ilchman. Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop. New York: Scala, 2013. Campbell, Stephen, and S. J. Milner. Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cennini, Cennino. Il libro dell’arte. A New English Translation and Commentary. Translated by Lara Broecke. London: Archetype Books, 2015. Cole, Bruce. The Renaissance Artist at Work: From Pisano to Titian. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Melograni, Anna. “The Illuminated Manuscript as a Commodity: Production, Consumption, and the Cartolaio’s Role in Fifteenth-Century Italy.” In Michele O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, eds. The Material Renaissance. New York: Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 197–221. Neher, Gabriele, and Rupert Shepherd, eds. Revaluing Renaissance Art. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. O’Malley, Michelle. Painting under Pressure: Fame, Reputation, and Demand in Renaissance Florence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Saunders, David, Marika Spring, and Andrew Meek, eds. The Renaissance Workshop: The Materials and Techniques of Renaissance Art. London: Archetype, 2013. Thomas, Anabel. The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Translated by David Ekserdjian. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1996.

PAINTING: MEDIA AND TECHNIQUES The Renaissance-era painter applied his mineral, vegetable, or animal pigments suspended in egg, water, or oil to prepared surfaces of wood, canvas, masonry, or book pages of parchment or paper. The medieval masters handed over to the Renaissance-era artists most of the tools, materials, and techniques that they used to such remarkable effect, though there were innovations. Tempera panel paintings could be tiny or many square meters in area with highly complex gilded frames. Specialists prepared poplar boards, joining them with dowels, braces, and glues made of animal skin or cheese. Because wood provides an unstable and porous surface, it was treated with a glue-like sizing and sometimes linen strips. Layers of plaster-like gesso made of chalk and sizing built up and evened the surface, which shone like ivory when finally polished. The image outline was sketched in charcoal or “pounced” with charcoal powder through a pin-pricked paper drawing. While earlier artists made trials on the actual surface, over time they came to sketch smaller-scale preliminary drawings on paper or parchment in ink, charcoal, silver-point, or mixed media. The desired outline was painted over in a pale ink and charcoal removed. Nearly translucent gold foil

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was prepared by gold-beaters, who could get up to a hundred 8.5 cm2 sheets from a single gold ducat coin. Moist red clay bole provided a deep underlayer and served to adhere the gold to the surface. Tempera paint consisted of thick or thin egg yolk in which a pigment had been suspended. Because they did not blend, coats of color were layered to achieve desired color tones and saturation. Shops bought or made their own brushes of varying sizes, tips, and hairs or bristles from fine miniver to coarse hog. Tempera had to be applied in short, even strokes that left the surface as smooth as possible. Early Renaissance-era painters experimented with linseed or walnut oil as a glaze over tempera, and Florence’s Ghirlandaio mixed tempera with oil (“fat tempera”). By 1500 artists such as Perugino were using oil-suspension paints exclusively. These dried slowly and could easily be blended on the surface to achieve subtle effects and a range of colors impossible with tempera. While oil paints were applied to wood-backed surfaces, painters found that stretched canvas provided a superior and more easily prepared one. The tradition of painting banners, flags, backdrops, and other cloth surfaces made the transition rather easy. Canvas was more stable than wood and provided a natural texture to surfaces that patrons found appealing. Canvas was sized and then primed with glue and white lead or a tint. The mirror-like surface of tempera panels gave way to much more expressive combinations of color, surface texture, and application methods that included using a flat knife. Among pigments, very expensive ultramarine held pride of place. Fine grinding of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan made for a deep and glistening blue that was often specified in contracts. Slightly greener azurite or German blue was copper carbonate with larger and heavier particles than ultramarine, but which cost 1/12 its price. The woad plant provided indigo purple, and the shell of the lac insect a fine red. Vermilion red derived from a combination of sulfur and mercury. Dozens of other natural minerals, chemical products, and organic materials provided various grades of colors. Workshops purchased prepared colors or raw materials from apothecaries and some monasteries. Merchant/patrons sometimes provided their own pigments, thus ensuring their quality and cost. The first Venetian shop specializing in pigments opened in the 1490s. How artists specifically prepared and used the pigments were workshop secrets of the first order. Fresco painting on walls and ceilings demanded scaffolding and careful surface preparation. True fresco required that the final coat of smooth plaster remain damp so that paint could chemically bond for a very high durability. As with panel painting, early Renaissance artists made trial sketches on the actual surface to be painted, while after around 1450 detailed drawings or full-sized cartoons were prepared off-site. A platoon of assistants aided the master in expanding the

Arts: Painting: Media and Techniques

fresh (fresca) dampened surface and applying the colors over the reddish underdrawing or sinopia (red ochre in water) that preceded the final translucent layer of plaster. Because degree of dampness affected the final tone of the color, uniformity of the plaster being painted was as important as uniformity of the paint’s consistency. Painting on dried (secco) plaster was cheaper, could use tempera-like media, and sometimes proved necessary. Unfortunately it left the pigment on the surface of the final layer of plaster rather than integrated with it, and thus subject to flaking off. Book painters specialized in decorating prepared parchment, vellum, or even paper supplied by specialist shops. Words were usually written or printed on the page first. Early on the medium was glair, whipped egg whites that had been allowed to settle and clarify. Later, tree gums—generically called gum arabic—provided a thinner and superior vehicle for the standard run of pigments. The miniaturists’ tools were necessarily smaller and finer than those of other painters, but their patience necessarily far greater. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art, Sacred; Art Patronage; Painters and Their Workshops; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Book Printing and Sales; Imported Goods, Sources of; Fashion and Appearance: Dyes and Dyestuffs; Science and Technology: Alchemy FURTHER READING Alexander, Jonathan J. G. The Painted Book in Renaissance Italy, 1450–1600. New ­Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Cennini, Cennino. Il libro dell’arte. A New English Translation and Commentary. Translated by Lara Broecke. London: Archetype Books, 2015. Cole, Bruce. The Renaissance Artist at Work. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Emison, Patricia. “The Replicated Image in Florence, 1300–1600.” In Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti, eds. Renaissance Florence: A  Social History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 431–53. Kirby, Jo, Susie Nash, and Joanna Cannon. Trade in Artists’ Materials, Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700. London: Archetype, 2010. Matthew, Louisa C. “Vendecolori a Venezia: The Reconstruction of a Profession.” Burlington Magazine 144 (2002): 680–86. O’Malley, Michelle. Painting under Pressure: Fame, Reputation, and Demand in Renaissance Florence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Thomas, Anabel. The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Vasari, Giorgio. Vasari on Technique. Translated by Louisa S Maclehose. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011. Ward, Gerald W. R., ed. The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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PERSPECTIVE IN THE VISUAL ARTS Florentines taught the world to see. Before the 1420s the world was considered a dim reflection of divine geometry—literally “measuring the earth”—that shaped the cosmos. Depending on the thinker’s theory, the human eye was a flawed ­instrument that either reached out to grasp what the flawed world had to offer or a passive tool for collecting what came its way. For the surveyor, architect, or maritime navigator, the approximations at which the eye and other tools arrived were good enough to accomplish their respective tasks. For artists, who sought to ­reproduce on flat or nearly flat surfaces what the eye captured, approximations were also good enough. Since the time of Giotto in the early 1300s, painters had been able to paint in such a way that there was an illusion of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. Giotto himself painted crowds in which people in the front ranks were slightly taller than those further back, and famously added a row of painted protruding beam ends that, when viewed from one spot, seemed to splay at angles to the left and right the way the eye would see real beams. Such artists understood that they wanted to paint in such a way that the result mimicked the way the eye saw and not the way things were in reality. For in reality the people in front and back were all the same height and all the beams stuck straight out. Only where we stood and the way our eyes worked called for illusion. Giotto di Bondone (1266/7–1337) is credited with For those less concerned initiating the naturalistic style of painting that with how nature appeared to a characterized the Italian Renaissance. He replaced relatively flat and lifeless human forms that were spectator’s eye, matters of size typical of Byzantine–style Italian paintings with and position were largely sym- animated and fleshed-out figures. He worked in bolic. Backgrounds were of Rome and Naples, and his famous religious fresco gold foil, angels hovered in the cycles survive in Florence (Sta. Croce), Assisi (San Francesco), and Padua (Arena Chapel). Giotto also air, and either God the Father dabbled in architecture and sculpture. (Library or Mary and Jesus were giants of Congress)

Arts: Perspective in the Visual Arts

when compared with other figures. People immediately in front of three-story buildings were half their height, as if actors before a stage backdrop. Scale was often ignored. For Byzantine-inspired artists, in the spiritual world a rectangular table-top splayed out away from the viewer (reverse perspective), whose earthly world was not to be the point of reference. This implied that the vanishing point was not in the picture frame, but in the viewer’s own space. In a sense, the world of the viewer was the fiction. In the 1420s and 1430s several Florentines concerned with giving geometric accuracy to naturalistic depictions began to change all this. The sculptor, goldsmith, and architect Filippo Brunelleschi started this process with two painted panels depicting Florence’s Baptistery from inside the cathedral door and a view of two sides of Florence’s town hall from a particular street corner. History tells us that they were both amazingly lifelike when positioned on site and seen properly. In constructing the first, Brunelleschi utilized one-point perspective, and in the second two-point, to give the receding walls the correct angles. Correct naturalistic depiction had to take the viewer’s position and basic geometry into account. Brunelleschi’s friend Leonbattista Alberti was as impressed as his Florentine colleagues the artists Donatello and Masaccio. About 1435 Alberti wrote On Painting, in which he gave literary form to Brunelleschi’s insights. To provide the illusion of depth, a painting should depict a floor (pavimento) that seems to be made of square paving tiles. This is widest directly in front of the viewer and geometrically recedes toward what we call a vanishing point. The outer edges of this form a triangle whose base is in the foreground, and is divided by receding lines into the number of rows of paving the artist chose. These lines run from the base to the apex in the distance. A second triangle with the same base but an apex shifted to the right or left of the vanishing point has the same number of lines from base to apex. Where these intersect the receding pavement lines the artist inserts horizontals that will accurately show the apparent diminishing size of the tiles as they recede from the viewer. By placing the heads of all figures at about the same level and their feet wherever one likes on the pavimento, the figures will assume the proper proportion to the frontmost figures. Shortly after Brunelleschi’s panels were painted, Masaccio created his masterpiece The Trinity (1425) in Florence’s Santa Maria Novella. Because the viewer sees the composition from below, she would not see the pavement, so Masaccio created a coffered barrel vault ceiling that achieves the same effect of seeming to recede into the wall. Other artists quickly adopted these techniques for creating the illusion of three-dimensional space, including Brunelleschi’s rival Lorenzo Ghiberti and his friend Donatello, both of whom applied them to bas-relief sculpture. Surviving drawings of painters Antonio Pisanello and Paolo Uccello display the linear geometry underlying compositions; and painters Domenico Veneziano and

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Fra Angelico applied linear perspective in their works. It became so widespread and popular that some intellectuals called it the eighth liberal art. Painter Piero della Francesca penned On Perspective for Painting in the mid-1400s, in which he explored many ways in which it could be used, especially with three-dimensional objects. Images created on ceramics or with intarsia or pietre dure popped thanks to perspective. Printmakers used geometric perspective as well as chiaroscuro, or shading, to create three-dimensional effects; mapmakers projected perspective as bases for their views of cities; technical illustrators applied perspective and scale to machinery and other plans that provided a higher level of realism than previously achieved. Finally, theater-goers began to watch dramas unfold before increasingly lifelike stage backdrops, culminating, perhaps, in the architect Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (1585). See also Arts: Daily Life in Art; Painting: Media and Techniques; Pietre Dure and Intarsia; Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings; Sculpture; Theater for the Elite; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Gardens; Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Fortresses and Fortifications; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Churches; Science and Technology: Astronomy before Copernicus; Maps and Mapmaking; Technical Illustration FURTHER READING Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson. New York: Penguin, 1991. Field, J. V. The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Raynaud, Dominique. “Optics and Perspective Prior to Alberti.” In Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Marc Bormand, eds. The Springtime of the Renaissance. Florence: Mandragora, 2013, pp. 164–71. Trevisan, Luca. Renaissance Intarsia: Masterpieces of Wood Inlay. New York: Abbeville, 2012. Turner, A. Richard. Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art. New York: Abrams: 1997.

PIETRE DURE AND INTARSIA Intarsia, or marquetry, is the art of creating two-dimensional images out of variously colored and grained wood veneers that are cut into shapes and fitted together on a flat surface. Pietre dure—literally hard stones—is essentially the same kind of inlaid decorative work, but consists of thin slices of cut and polished colored stone.

Arts: Pietre Dure and Intarsia

Both techniques were used widely in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, paralleling, in their turn, developments in painting, including perspective and the use of shading to model three-dimensional forms known as chiaroscuro. In both cases inlay artists could depend for their patterns on drawings from other two-dimensional artists such as painters. Work in stone was far the older technique. It was related to mosaic work, which constructed pictures out of small cubes of stone or gold foil–backed glass, and the even more similar art form known as opus sectile (cut work) or Cosmati, for the Italian master craftsmen who raised it to new heights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Intarsia, rather, was inspired by ­Islamic woodwork and developed as a form of art in early fifteenth-century Florence. The Tuscan center was headquarters for both art forms: in 1472 Benedetto Dei counted 84 woodworking shops that also did inlay and 54 shops that specialized in decorative stonework. Fourteenth-century intarsia began as geometric and floral decorations in parts of churches that featured woodwork or furniture, such as choir stalls, chapter rooms where monks or clergy gathered, and sacristies, in which priests prepared for Mass and stored vestments and liturgical objects. Artists from Siena worked at the cathedrals of Orvieto near Rome, Siena, Florence, and nearby Fiesole, as well as the Florentine Franciscan church of Santa Croce. A single panel from Orvieto is all that remains. Around 1430 Florentine artists, influenced by the perspective techniques of Brunelleschi, began expanding intarsia into pictorial narrative, cityscapes, and illusionistic depictions of furnishings such as cupboards and open drawers with their contents carelessly displayed. The Old Sacristy of Florence’s cathedral was the site of the earliest large-scale perspectival intarsia campaign (1436–1445). Open cupboard doors were foreshortened and appeared angled appropriately to their height on the wall, as were the objects they revealed: books, musical instruments, candlesticks. Portraits of bishops, saints, and prophets constructed of walnut, poplar, black oak, pear, and maple looked down from fictive niches. Biblical scenes including the Annunciation, Nativity, and Presentation in the Temple display both a warm simplicity and subtlety of treatment as well as the limitations of the art form. By comparison with later sixteenth-century works, early masterpieces were somewhat blocky. Nonetheless, in 1474 the newly minted Duke of Urbino chose the medium to decorate his intimate studiolos (private studies) in both Urbino and Gubbio (now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York). Botticelli and other painters created the drawings the woodworkers used as patterns. Fake shelves and cupboards now held armor as well as prayer beads, musical instruments, early scientific instruments, and seemingly carelessly placed books. Between 1484 and 1489, intarsist Pier Antonio degli Abbati completed projects in churches in Modena, Parma, Padua, and three in Vicenza. In Padua’s Basilica Church the Canozi brothers created unique seatbacks for 90 choir stalls. Large

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projects after 1500 featured greater detail and use of shading, stained wood, and highlights burned into the wood as artists tried to mimic painters, as at the Certosa in Naples in c. 1514 and Bergamo’s Basilica (1524–1533). Woodworkers’ shops also decorated furniture, large musical instruments, paneling, doors and shutters, and cupboards for high and even middle-class customers. Medieval geometric Cosmatesque work of cut and polished colored stones decorated pavements, pulpits, and other flat surfaces of churches from Sicily to London. Pietre dure began as similar carved marble geometric inlaid decorations on the walls of Roman palazzi in the early 1500s. The Farnese Table (149” ×x 66”; 1568–1573) features a gorgeous centralized pattern of fleurs-de-lys and other forms in cream and gold surrounded by a deep green border. But marble is relatively soft and true pietre dure was saved for fancy vases. Florentine artists abandoned marble and applied the carefully jigsawed semi-precious hard stone to many surfaces, often incorporating gems, cameos, and even medallions into the intricate patterns of still lives, landscapes, and other painterly compositions. Artists used a wide variety of stones with both pure and mixed shades providing a full palette of color: agate, granite, deep red porphyry, black onyx, deep blue lapis lazuli, purple amethyst, chalcedony, rock crystal, jasper, garnet, and basalt, and occasionally including pearl, mother-of-pearl, amber, ivory, ebony, and even petrified wood. Random variations in color tone, striping and veins of color, and imbedded grains allowed artists to work in textures and even chiaroscuro with amazing results. Gleaming “Florentine mosaic” decorated cabinets, tabletops, chests, altars, and smaller items such as bowls, vases, and pitchers. Florence’s Duke Francesco I de’ Medici established a ducal workshop specializing in pietre dure at the Casino di San Marco in the 1560s that standardized production techniques and created minor masterpieces for ducal palaces, churches, and gifts. In 1588, Duke Ferdinand I, a former cardinal stationed in Rome, moved the manufactory to the new Uffizi and hired carpenters, gilders, jewelers, gem-cutters, goldsmiths, pattern designers, and stone-cutters. Together they crafted Italy’s masterpiece: the interior of the funerary Chapel of the Medici Princes at San Lorenzo church, whose interior gleams in semi-precious splendor. See also Arts: Art, Courtly; Painters and Their Workshops; Perspective in the Visual Arts; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Churches FURTHER READING Cheles, L. The Studiolo of Urbino: An Iconographic Investigation. Wiesbaden, Germany: Ludwig Reichert, 1986. Giusti, Anna Maria. Pietre Dure: The Art of Semiprecious Stonework. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Trust Publications, 2006.

Arts: Portraits Giusti, Anna Maria, Wolfram Koeppe, and Rudolf Distelberger. Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. Raggio, Olga. The Gubbio Studiolo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 2. Italian Renaissance Intarsia and the Conservation of the Gubbio Studiolo. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. Reese, G. “Musical Compositions in Renaissance Intarsia.” In J. L. Lievsay, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968, pp. 74–97. Tongiorgio Tomasi, Lucia, and Gretchen A. Hirschauer. The Flowering of Florence: Botanical Art for the Medici. London: Lund Humphries, 2001. Trevisan, Luca. Renaissance Intarsia: Masterpieces of Wood Inlay. New York: Abbeville, 2012.

Poetry. See Women Poets and Their Poetry

PORTRAITS A portrait is an image of someone that attempts to capture the way he or she actually appears. Classical Greek and Roman artists were experts at creating naturalistic or realistic images, an interest that disappeared during much of the Middle Ages. Part of what defined the Renaissance era was desire by artists and their patrons to have subjects depicted as they actually looked. Late medieval painters and sculptors in the Netherlands and Germany pioneered realistic portraiture, but Italians soon leapt ahead, inspired by the remains of their Roman forefathers and their own desire to be remembered. Portraits appeared in many media: sculpture, drawing, painting, and metalwork. Realistic portraits might appear in groups with other portraits or fictive images of religious or historical figures. Portraits also morphed into historical or legendary figures: a Medici youth portrays one of the three magi in the family’s chapel, a Medici mistress represents Venus, and Leonardo da Vinci becomes Plato in Raphael’s School of Athens. Painters required models, and their fellow artists often filled the need. Family portraits depicted parents and children, and in large formats other relatives and even servants. When Ippolita Sforza moved in with her royal Neapolitan husband in 1465, she insisted on having her Milanese family portrayed in her new study for her “constant comfort and pleasure.” In Mantua the ruling Gonzaga household at leisure decorates the walls of the ducal palace’s Camera degli Sposi, though other rulers, such as Medici grand dukes, preferred to pose formally, showing off splendid attire and symbols of their power. Venetian aristocratic families

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sometimes flank religious scenes such as a Madonna and Child, presenting a clear message of their devotion. Portraits of significant ancestors, a Classical Roman specialty, made a comeback as families linked their current successes with real or imagined past glories. Both republics and lordships produced portraits with increasing frequency and for a growing number of uses from the mid-fifteenth century. Individual portraits were sculpted in wax, terra-cotta, bronze, cameos, and traditional marble. Portrait medals patterned after Roman coins were easily reproduced and handed out by rulers like modern business cards. For the first time since Antiquity larger-than-life bronze statues of rulers or famed generals on horseback snarled down into the piazza below. Painted likenesses of rulers and ruled alike appeared in books, on panels and canvases, and frescoed onto walls. While earlier works retained the traditional profile view, from the mid-fifteenth century, artists experimented with three-quarter views of the head and various positioning of the body. Patricia Rubin describes this as a shift from “description to encounter” with the viewer. Greater care was taken with setting, clothing, props, and attempts to display in the face a particular attitude or psychological state, what Leonardo called “motions of the soul.” These elements of individualism were valued by patrons and subjects as they sought to distinguish themselves from family members and social peers. Whether one was depicted as warm or aloof, active or passive, sensuous or distracted gave the portrait a depth of meaning beyond merely reminding the viewer of the sitter. Yet in general, Renaissance Italian portraits muted emotions such as joy, amusement, sorrow, or concern. While children might express feelings, adult sitters tended to the stoical, depriving viewers of obvious clues. Portraits of women were rarer than those of males, and were often paired with the husband’s portrait. More privately, artists depicted men’s lovers, to be carried when men traveled or the pair lived apart. Leonardo even refers to such a portrait as an aphrodisiac that inflames the lover’s desire. What appear to be straightforward female portraits often contain subtle hints of sexuality. Provocative clothing, a glance or the shape of the mouth, a turn of the body, or even the presence of a sensuous small animal may indicate an aphrodisiac intent. For their parts, prostitutes were known to hang erotic portraits on their walls to help stimulate their customers. Renaissance aesthetics had to balance naturalistic and idealized beauty; sitters often wanted to look like themselves but better. A mirror reflected reality only for a moment and only to the subject herself; a portrait was forever. In vivid verbal images the poet Petrarch had celebrated the elements of feminine beauty, and painters could capture these and apply them to a subject’s otherwise undistinguished features. Sixteenth-century portraitists moved in many directions. They placed their sitters in outdoor settings as well as indoor, posed their bodies in novel ways,

Arts: Portraits

Portrait Medals Influenced by humanist interests in Roman portraits and coins, rulers had bronze medals cast of themselves, military leaders, and even humanists, with appropriate symbols on the reverse. Wedding medals celebrated the couples on one face and depicted reminders of fidelity or love on the other. The earliest Renaissance-era medal celebrated Francesco Carrara’s conquest of Padua (1390), with the next, Antonio Pisanello’s commemoration of ­Emperor John VIII Paleologus at the Council of Florence, appearing only in 1439. Pisanello pioneered the form, working in Mantua for the Gonzaga and Ferrara, where Lionello d’Este struck no fewer than 10,000. Collected and exchanged, medals had a second master in Niccolò Fiorentino but declined as ruler portraits began to appear on coins (testoni).

and were far more likely to depict much of their form rather than just the face. Painters such as Titian specialized in capturing the “inner life” of subjects, which led him to reduce settings and clothing to masses of blurry neutral tones lest they distract. Artists experimented with light, using it to shape the portrait’s psychological as well as aesthetic effect. Florentine mannerists wiped even subtle expressions from sitters’ faces, leaving them blank slates onto which viewers could project their own interpretations. Official portraits, such as Bronzino’s of Florence’s Grand Duchess Eleanora of Toledo, did just this, giving the impression of aloofness and distance from the lowly viewer. In her portrait of 1545 her body is, encased in a massive gown depicted hyper-realistically: she and her family ruled Florence but were apart from it a political message clearly conveyed. Titian’s 1536 La Bella is said to have been the first portrait purchased purely as a work of art: the Duke of Urbino wrote the artist urging him to complete “that portrait of that woman in the blue dress.” See also: Arts: Antiquity, Cult of; Art, Courtly; Art Patronage; Daily Life in Art; Non-Europeans in Art; Sculpture; Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician; Heraldry; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Villas; Religion and Beliefs: Saints and Their Cults; Science and Technology: Collecting and Collections FURTHER READING Campbell, Stephen. Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait Painting in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Christiansen, Keith, and Stefan Weppelmann. The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Enekel, Karl, Betsy de Jong-Crane, and Peter Liebregts, eds. Modeling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Pope-Hennessy, John. The Portrait in the Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Strozzi, Beatrice Paolozzi, and Marc Bormand, eds. The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence, 1400–1460. Florence: Mandragora, 2013. Tinagli, Paola. Women in Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997.

PRINTS: WOODCUTS, ENGRAVINGS, AND ETCHINGS Woodblock printing onto fabric or paper for wall decoration or other purposes that required repeating patterns was known by at least 1400. The color medium was applied to the raised surface of the carved wood block and carefully stamped onto the material by hand. Artistically carving the woodblock to produce an image for a book page or a single sheet evolved after Gutenberg’s press came to Italy in the 1460s. Artists or artisans created drawings of the desired images, which were then transferred to the blocks by professional woodcarvers. The block itself might have text inscribed, or blocks of text might be added at the top, bottom, or sides of the image block at the press. Printed illustrations for books or single sheets could also be painted or tinted with color, adding to their value and aesthetic appeal. Engraving, which appeared at about the same time, emerged from the practice of decorating arms, armor, and other metal objects by incising patterns or images onto their surfaces. Well-trained engravers very carefully cut the desired pattern or image onto flat copper plates with sharp v-tipped steel burins of varying widths. Printing with the plates was essentially the reverse of woodblock printing: the ink was applied to the surface of the plate and into the grooves. The raised surface was carefully wiped clean. During printing the ink was drawn onto the paper’s surface by capillary action, leaving far finer lines and detail than woodcut could. Etching entailed covering the copper plate with resin and using the burins to expose the copper rather than engrave it. Acid was then applied, etching the exposed copper surface in preparation for printing. Preparing a plate by etching was rather more forgiving of errors, since resin could be reapplied over mistakes, faster, and less expensive than engraving. A given woodblock, however, could produce about four times as many copies as a copper plate, and both etchings and engravings tended to be smaller and more prized—and expensive—than similarly themed woodcuts. Engraving was early used for producing tarot cards, and among the first artists to use the medium were the painters Andrea Mantegna of Mantua and Pollaiuolo, whose “Battle of the

Arts: Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings

The Battle of the Nude Men (1465–1475) is an engraved study in active poses of nude men by the Florentine artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo (ca. 1431–1498). The muscular figures are paired to show both frontal and back or side views. Appealing to classical, homoerotic, and anatomical interests, such images were very popular. (GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

Naked Men” (1465–75) sold so well that the initial plate needed refreshing and two woodcut editions appeared. The Florentine painter Botticelli designed and marketed a large two-plate engraved Assumption (82.6 x 56 cm), but his project to produce an illustrated printed version of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1481) with the engraver Baccio Baldini remained uncompleted. Most book illustrations remained cheaper and hardier woodcuts. The earliest Italian illustrated printed book was the 1467 Meditations on the Life of Christ, which contained 30 woodcuts. Other early illustrated editions included the Classical Roman Vegetius’s On Military Matters, the textbook Aesop’s Fables, and the sermons of the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola, which went through 23 editions. Just as printing created an entirely new audience for the book, the single-sheet print exposed new audiences to art, antiquities, news, cityscapes, and world rulers. Common folk decorated their walls and even furniture with the printmakers’ art, from devotional images of saints or the Crucifixion to calendars and print versions of Michelangelo’s masterpieces. People who would never enter the Vatican apartments, Florentine villas, or Venetian palazzi learned from prints of the masterpieces they contained, both Classical and contemporary. Master engravers worked on commission producing versions of major new artworks, such as Niccolò della Casa’s 11 plates of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Italian artists studied engravings of Roman statues and ruins for Classical imagery, and the prints of German artists Albrecht Altdorfer and Albrecht Dürer, who worked for a time in Venice, to understand better the media’s potentials. Painters such as Giorgio Vasari collected prints of their contemporaries’ works in large scrapbooks,

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and others had single-sheet prints sewn into new books when they had them bound. Prints circulated far and wide and provided models for tailors, sculptors, and architects, and patterns for silk weavers, embroiderers, and jewelers. Of a more technical nature were almanacs, maps, navigational charts, and dress pattern-books. Of a more popular nature were song sheets and other handouts distributed by charlatans, street entertainers, and even preachers. Visitors to Rome bought maps of churches and at shrines pictures or a single-sheet Life of the featured saint. Bandi were government posters hung in predictable places around the city informing the populace of new official policies or actions. These announced taxes, travel restrictions, sumptuary laws, restraints on trade, and health notices such as the presence of plague and emergency regulations related to it. Some sheets were distributed free or sold cheaply by preachers or street entertainers. Print shops marketed more valuable engravings as well as broadsheets with newsworthy subjects, and the ephemeral material in between was hawked by street vendors, tavern keepers, roving salesmen, barber-surgeons, and innkeepers. In an age whose only other mass media was gossip, the print played a vital role in communication. See also: Arts: Antiquity, Cult of; Dante in Popular Culture; Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Painters and Their Workshops; Sculpture; Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Retail Selling; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Quacks, Charlatans, and Medical Empirics; Recreation and Social Customs: News; Songs and Singing, Popular; Street Entertainment; Taverns and Inns; Theater, Popular; Religion and Beliefs: Christian Art in the Home; Crucifix; Mary, Cult of; Pilgrims and Shrines; Preachers and Preaching; Saints and Their Cults; Science and Technology: Botany and Botanical Illustration; Collecting and Collections; Technical Illustration FURTHER READING Areford, David. The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Emison, Patricia. “The Replicated Image in Florence, 1300–1600.” In Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti, eds. Renaissance Florence: A  Social History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 431–53. Lincoln, Evelyn. The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Miller, Elizabeth. “Prints.” In Marta Ajmar-Wolheim and Flora Dennis, eds. At Home in Renaissance Italy. London: V&A Museum, 2006, pp. 322–31. San Juan, Rose Marie. Rome: A City Out of Print. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Arts: Sculpture

SCULPTURE Writing around 1450, Leonbattista Alberti of Florence described sculptors as those who carved or modeled, or crafted metal. The carvers worked in wood, stone, or ivory; modelers in stucco, clay, or wax; and most fine metalworkers in bronze and gold. Sculptures ranged from huge equestrian monuments with generals or rulers placed in piazze to life-size marble saints in chapels and tiny bronze plaquettes worn as decoration. Large and complex works in bronze or marble tended to be commemorative of great men in the forms of memorials or tombs. Crucifixes and smaller sculpted religious narrative scenes invited devotion in chapels and in homes. Civic heroes and battles were also commemorated with sculpted relief panels on the walls of town halls and other public structures, while panels celebrating Christian traditions or narrating biblical passages graced church pulpits, altars, and singing lofts. The vast majority of sculpted objects were by unknown craftsmen and in styles that were matters of local tradition. Wealthier and more discerning patrons, however, were concerned with helping create works in the latest style, especially if these were to be displayed in public. In the later 1300s the style was still Gothic, with human figures realistic but stiff and often idealized. After 1400, Florentine sculptors sought and found greater naturalism and realism in the study of Greek and Roman models and in new tools such as perspective, which were used on reliefs. Geniuses such as Donatello and Lorenzo Ghiberti established the Renaissance style in public works such as Florence’s gilded bronze Baptistery doors and statues for the guild church of Or San Michele. These influenced the styles of sculpted objects large and small, as both customers and patrons demanded objects in the Classical (antica) manner. In major churches Venetian sculptors installed multilevel wall tombs composed of sarcophagi, effigies, and figures in complex Classical architectural frameworks. The High Renaissance style of sixteenth-century monumental sculpture is dominated by Michelangelo’s work, especially in Rome. Even so, his most famous work, the youthful, biblical David (1504), came to symbolize the Florentine Republic and stood outside its city hall, as a copy does today. In the midst of wars and oppression, sixteenth-century Florentine sculptors possessed of very high skill moved away from Renaissance aesthetic values such as symmetry and Classical stoicism into a fashionable style known as mannerism. Their “stylish” pieces took liberties with human forms, often creating intricate ensembles of two or more intertwined figures. In Giambologna’s originally unnamed Rape of the Sabine Woman (1583), the nude Roman wraps his arms around the victim who struggles as he lifts her from the ground. Her arm reaches to heaven as she struggles, her father helpless on the ground beneath. There is no front to the work: the viewer has to move around its spiral form to take it all in. With other public sculptures it was placed in the Loggia in the Piazza Signoria.

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Civic and ecclesiastical statuary enriched the aesthetic experiences of all who encountered it, and brought glory to the city and its religious life. Smaller-scale sculptures also enhanced the daily lives of Italians, rural, urban, rich, and poor. Because these works could be made of many types of materials, from wood to gold, even relatively poor folk could afford to purchase a painted terra-cotta or carved and painted wooden crucifix or statue of a saint offered at markets, by traveling merchants, or by the local craftsmen themselves. Some religious subjects with domestic themes, such as the Madonna and Child, were especially suited to the household. Inexpensive unglazed terra-cotta lamps spilled by the hundreds from cheap molds in amusing or even pornographic forms and all manner of household items were given shape by creative artisans. Less creative artists copied in miniature famous works by Donatello or Michelangelo, allowing locals, visitors, and pilgrims alike the opportunity of owning a tiny masterpiece in molded stucco or clay. In this age of therapeutic saints there was also a ready market for molded wax ex voto images. When one prayed to a particular saint and thereafter recovered from an illness or injury, she often visited the saint’s shrine or church and left behind a wax version of the body part or of the saint as testimony to the holy advocate’s powers. The better off could afford works in bronze and other richer materials. But if the impetus was the same, the quality and style were usually rather higher. Statuettes, candlesticks, lamps, bells, and doorknockers were cast in forms ranging from the graceful to the grotesque. The wealthier displayed their good taste with functional objects cast into the forms of little Classical satyrs, nymphs, and harpies. Carved and molded copies of antiquities, reliefs as well as statuettes, graced tables and shelves. Some of these that survive are true masterpieces, since artists working on a small and private scale could experiment with elements such as emotions and gestures unfit for larger-scale public art. Miniature bronze reliefs inspired by both Classical coins and large reliefs appeared as round medals and rectangular plaquettes. Both originated around 1440 in northern Italian courts, and each could be held in the palm of one’s hand. Medals were usually semi-official pieces featuring rulers or commemorating an important event. The plaquette was cast on only one side, and often featured Classical subjects such as Hercules or Homeric heroes. Others contained religious images and were believed by some to have prophylactic or healing powers as talismans. Owners hung plaquettes on walls or from bed curtains, wore them as pendants or attached to a hat or outerwear, or collected them as some did coins. With medals and plaquettes goldsmiths and engravers also became sculptors. High-end domestic religious sculpture included reliefs and statuettes in bronze, gilded bronze—or gold—and marble. Finally, in the wealthiest homes the Classical Roman portrait bust, usually of the late family head, made a return in marble or bronze.

Arts: Theater for the Elite

See also: Arts: Antiquity, Cult of; Art, Courtly; Art, Sacred; Art Patronage; Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Portraits; Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician; Heraldry; Fashion and Appearance: Gems and Jewelry; Food and Drink: Sugar and Confected Sweets; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Furnishing the House; Palazzi; Villas Politics and Warfare: Art, Civic; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Christian Art in the Home; Churches; Crucifix; Mary, Cult of; Memorials Ex Voto; Saints and Their Cults; Science and Technology: Metallurgy FURTHER READING Olson, Roberta J. M. Italian Renaissance Sculpture. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Pope-Hennesy, John. An Introduction to Italian Sculpture. 3 vols. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Radcliffe, Anthony, and Nichloas Penny. Art of the Renaissance Bronze: The Robert H. Smith Collection. Expanded edition. London: Philip Wilson, 2005.

THEATER FOR THE ELITE Theater for the elite was unlike commedia dell’arte, which evolved from street performance and was meant to attract the common person, and unlike Christian sacred representation, with roots in medieval liturgical drama and biblical reenactments. Associated with humanists, courts, literary academies, and universities, it developed from fifteenth-century revivals of original Latin dramas and translations. Humanists and poets began penning their own versions, and recognizable genres emerged, including the rural or rustic comedy, erudite (learned) comedy, pastoral, and lovers’ stories (from the 1530s). Performances were meant for educated and elite audiences, often taking place in restricted spaces such as villas and palazzi. In 1427, 12 plays of Classical Roman comic playwright Plautus were discovered. These were edited, translated, printed, and, in the later 1400s, performed at courts, universities, and houses of humanists. Duke Ercole I of Ferrara expanded the repertoire to include ancient Roman comedian Terence and tragedian Seneca, all in translation. Beginning in 1486 with Plautus’s Menaechmi, his court provided increasingly elaborate staging, especially when a performance was part of wedding ceremonies that included music, banquets, and jousts. At such festivities, scenes were separated by interludes, which featured music and dance. These intermedii grew in sophistication; with characters, staging, and even plots of their own they evolved late in the sixteenth century into the musical theater form known as opera.

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Early performance space was temporary, essentially a stage platform, a raised dais for the court dignitaries, and bleachers for other spectators in a large palace hall. At Mantua during Carnival in 1513, players presented Terence’s comedy The Andrians under the garden loggia behind the palace. Italy’s first permanent theater structure was Ferrara’s Sala delle Commedie (1504). Dedicated performance space soon followed in some major cities. Newly built or remodeled late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Roman palazzi often included dedicated theatrical space. The Vatican’s Belvedere and papal Villa Madama and Villa Giulia, as well as the Farnesina, were designed with amphitheater layouts. Early fifteenth-century humanist and educator Pier Paolo Vergerio wrote five-act medieval style works for chorus to shape students’ morals through rhythmic prose. Meanwhile, other humanists created new works in Classical style: Leon Battista Alberti created his Terentian Philodoxus (1426) in 20 scenes; Leonardo Bruni, Florentine chancellor, penned the Plautian Poliscene; and future pope Eneo Silvio Piccolomini wrote his 18-scene Chrysis around Classical Roman characters and situations. Niccolò Machiavelli’s Mandragola was performed first in 1526 and quickly became a hit not only in Florence but also in Ferrara, Venice, Faenza, and Rome. Students at universities in Pavia, Padua, Naples, and Rome wrote and produced plays in both Latin and Italian. The Companies of Shoes, social clubs of young Venetian noblemen, sponsored and acted in theatrical performances of all types, which appeared in spaces from small piazze to the Hall of the Great Council. While they commissioned some works, the Companies were also responsible for reviving Classical works of Plautus and Terence in Venice. Academies of humanists and literary types also contributed to cities’ theater scenes. In 1486 the Roman Academy, with the aid of cardinals and classicists at the Sapienza (university), revived Roman stoic Seneca’s Hippolytus. A few years later they staged Plautus’s comedy Asinaria in a temporary theater on the Quirinal Hill in Rome. Productions came from the pens of Siena’s Intronati and Ingannati academicians from the 1530s. Their La Pellegrina (1560s) was chosen as entertainment for the lavish Medici wedding of 1589. After seizing Siena, Cosimo I had a theater built in the Palazzo Pubblico above the prisons in what had been the Great Hall of the Council. This was perhaps as much a statement on Siena’s new lack of liberty as a gift to the theater-going elite. His own Uffizi complex in Florence featured a large theater (1589) with a raised dais for the ducal party, footlights, and “self-lighting” torches for illumination. With the discovery in 1486 of Book Ten of the Roman Vitruvius’ work on architecture, the art of set design was revived and applied. Painted scenic backdrops now used principles of linear perspective to create the illusion of depth on stage—especially street scenes—famously made permanent on the stage of the newly built (1585) Olympic Theater in Vicenza by Andrea Palladio and Vincenzo Scamozzi.

Arts: Theater for the Elite

Jewish Entertainers? Mantua’s later sixteenth-century Gonzaga court was noted for its Università Israelitica, a company of Jewish dramatists, technicians, and performers, including actors, singers, and dancers. Led by playwright and poet Leone de’Sommi, the group staged works in private palazzi and at court, and may have been granted use of a public hall. Sommi was clearly a master of his art, as displayed in sophisticated discussions of stagecraft in his Dialogues. Command performances included Duke Vincenzo’s birthdays and Carnival festivities. Of course, their activities had to cease on Fridays before sundown initiated the Sabbath, and completely on High Holy Days.

Little is known of the earliest performers, though at courts they may have been a mix of courtiers and traveling players, both men and women. Troupes of traveling buffoni had their own, growing repertoires and may have performed new or newly translated works on demand. Perhaps the most famous was I Gelosi. Known for commedia dell’arte, they also performed for Ferrara’s Alfonso II, premiering Torquato Tasso’s pastoral Aminta in 1573. By the later 1500s some courts supported their own repertory companies whose professional players performed for all manner of productions, from street theater and religious dramas to wedding entertainments for popes and kings. But plays were not only for performance. G. G. Trissino’s Sofonisba was written in 1515 but not performed until 1562. Nonetheless, between 1524 and 1620 it was printed 23 times. It seems that “performance” of dramatic works often meant interpretive readings in public or small settings rather than full staging. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art Patronage; Music at Court; Women and the Arts; Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Family and Gender: Education of Children; Fashion and Appearance: Court, Fashion at; Social Status and Clothing; Housing and Community: Gardens; Palazzi; Villas; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Civic Festivals; Noble Pursuits; Theater, Popular; Theater, Religious; Weddings; Science and Technology: Academies; Machines and Engines; Primary Document: The Renaissance Stage: Sebastiano Serlio. “A Venetian Architect on Designing Stage Scenery.” Second Book of Architecture (1545) FURTHER READING Buccheri, Alessandra. The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439–1650: Italian Art and Theatre. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Di Maria, Salvatore. The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance: Cultural Realities and Theatrical Innovation. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Johnson, E. J. “The Short, Lascivious Lives of Two Venetian Theaters.” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 936–68. Stampino, Maria G. Staging the Pastoral: Tasso’s Aminta and the Emergence of Modern Western Theater. Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 2006. Contemporary Sources for Theater for the Elite Beecher, Donald, ed. and trans. Renaissance Comedy: The Italian Masters. 3rd rev. ed. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008/2009. Bigolina, Giulia. Urania: A Romance. Edited and translated by Valeria Finucci. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Campiglia, Maddalena. Flori, a Pastoral Drama. Edited by Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Gianetti, Laura, and Guido Ruggiero. Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Tasso, Torquato. Aminta. Translated and edited by Charles Jernigan and Irene Jones. New York: Italica Press, 2000.

WOMEN AND THE ARTS The Renaissance era has long been noted for contributions to the arts in their many forms. These included painting and drawing, sculpture, theater, architecture and landscaping, storytelling and poetry, metal crafts, costume, ceramics, glassware, music, and dance. In most fields, patrons commissioned a piece, the creator produced it, and usually many more used or enjoyed it. Since most skilled creators were male, women’s roles were usually restricted to patronage and appreciation. Yet both were vital to the arts. The patron was sometimes considered the true creator of a work, since he or she gave it purpose, or its “final cause” in Aristotle’s analysis. Patrons also provided vital elements, such as performers and a stage; ­musicians to sing or play a composition; property on and materials with which to build a palazzo or garden; the celebration to be decorated for; or the wall or room to be painted. When art was shared and appreciated, it spawned new works sought by new patrons who favored either tradition or innovation. Women played key roles in the creation and appreciation of Renaissance-era art, but they also did more. Some women painted, drew, and wrote music, poetry, plays, short stories, letter collections, and religious literature. Lavinia Fontana, an artist’s daughter from Bologna, painted an altarpiece for St. Paul’s in Rome; Prosperzia Rossi of Bologna was one of the era’s few female sculptors; and Michelangelo and Vasari admired the paintings of Cremona’s Sofonisba Anguissola. Women also sang and played instruments, recited verses, acted on stage, and danced both for pleasure

Arts: Women and the Arts

and for audiences. At court, noblewomen wore brilliant costumes that displayed their taste and wealth, ate from fine maiolica ware, and sat for portraits in many media. At their own expense these women supported painters, composers and musicians, actors, poets, tailors, and dance masters. Beginning in the later 1400s noblewomen such as Isabella d’Este collected artistic works purely for the sake of owning and displaying them. Women at court provided later fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury writers their ­target audience. These women tended to be literate and valued the written and spoken vernacular. Support was rewarded with ­ dedications in published works: of 160 can- Lavinia Fontana (1552–1615) was a Bolognese zonieri, collections of poetry painter who was daughter and wife of local painters printed between 1480 and 1530, whose fame she easily eclipsed. About 100 works of hers are documented, many from her stay in Rome many carried such recognition of where she even painted a papal portrait. From a female patronage. Women also painted self-portrait (1590), original oil on panel. inspired, criticized, and argued (Library of Congress) with male writers at court; and women authors in turn learned from the likes of Ariosto and Pietro Bembo. Milan’s duchess Bianca Maria Visconti did the purchasing for her husband the condottiere Francesco Sforza. She commissioned not only tapestries, manuscripts, and embroideries, but also directed construction of the city walls and a family villa. Women in nunneries were often far from embracing poverty. In addition to using their own resources to decorate their spaces, many had benefactors among relatives or nobles or patricians with ties to the community. Often community leaders decided on the programs of frescoes or altarpieces. Nuns also sang new compositions, both sacred and profane, and were known to perform dramatic works, if only for their own enjoyment. From the 1540s the Italian stage began to feature actresses, a huge break with Western tradition. One of the first recorded was Vincenza Armani, but within

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two decades most troupes included women players. Best known and most praised was Isabella Andreini. Daughter of a laborer from Padua, she wrote for and acted with I Gelosi, a troupe that played from Rome to Paris. She performed in her own Mirtilla, and published collections of poetry in 1601 and of letters posthumously. Female poets and authors of published letters were far from unknown, at least during the sixteenth century, and their printed works found eager readers among both women and men. Some circles of women poets or religious authors helped women find their voices and create works of very high quality even for the Renaissance era. Last wills contained instructions for gifts to friends, relatives, and churches, including art, that had spiritual value for the giver. Art in wills included fulfillments of religious vows, final requests to saints for intercession, and commemorations such as chapels or tomb sculpture. A woman could direct her own art patronage through her will, and as executor a widow her husband’s final commissions. And finally, of course, women appear as subjects in countless works of painting and sculpture, from portraits and saint’s images to biblical, mythological, and historical scenes. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art, Sacred; Art Patronage; Daily Life in Art; Music at Court; Musical Instruments; Portraits; Theater for the Elite; Women Poets and Their Poetry; Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician; Widows; Recreation and Social Customs: Women, Letters, and Letter Writing; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Christian Art in the Home; Nuns and Nunneries FURTHER READING Bowen, Jane, and Judith Tick, eds. Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Chieffo Raguin, Virginia, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church. New York: SUNY Press, 2006. Harness, Kelley. Echoes of Women’s Voices: Music, Art and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence. Chicago: University Press, 2006. Hickson, Sally Ann. Women, Art, and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Jacobs, Frederika H. Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa: Women Artists and the Language of Art History and Criticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lawrence, Cynthia, ed. Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, Connoisseurs. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. McIver, Katherine A. Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Panizza, Letizia, ed. Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Oxford: Legenda, 2000. Periti, Giancarla. In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

Arts: Women Poets and Their Poetry Prizer, William F. “Renaissance Women as Patrons of Music in the North-Italian Courts.” In Kimberly Marshall, ed. Rediscovering the Muses: Women’s Musical Traditions. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993, pp. 186–205. Solum, Stefanie. Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Chapel of the Medici Palace. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Tinagli, Paola. Women in Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity. New York: University of Manchester Press, 1997. Tinagli, Paola, and Mary Rogers, eds. Women and the Visual Arts in Italy c.1400–1650: Luxury and Leisure, Duty and Devotion: A Sourcebook. New York: Manchester University Press, 2012.

WOMEN POETS AND THEIR POETRY Poetry played a major role in Renaissance-era life. Street poets entertained ­audiences at markets, festivals, and during Carnival. Literary poets performed for elites in palazzi and at villas. Composers turned religious poems to music that was sung by confraternities and congregations in churches, while the madrigal crossed from poetry to secular song. Florence, Perugia, Siena, and other cities paid poetic secretaries to write official letters and other documents in Latin verse, while gifted critics used Latin and vernacular poems to inform, comment, and even undermine government policies and actions. Humanists studied verse of long-dead Romans such as Ovid, Catullus, and Vergil, while students of the Tuscan dialect—led by Pietro Bembo—championed and displayed its richness and flexibility. Fourteenth-century Tuscans Dante and Petrarch provided models of vernacular love poetry, and after 1460 printers circulated it all. Prior to about 1530 poetry was a male preserve, though there were religious works by a few women such as Florentines Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici and Antonia Pulci. Il Magnifico’s mother penned five verse translations of biblical stories of John the Baptist, the biblical Tobit, and heroic Hebrew women Judith and Esther. She used Dante’s terza rime and Petrarch’s sonnet forms, and contributed nine popular hymns of praise (laude) sung to secular tunes. Antonia Gianotti Pulci’s husband was a poet; when he died, she became a nun known for her poetic religious plays or sacre rappresentazioni. The sixteenth century saw female poets come into their own. Some were wives, widows, or daughters of literary men; others courtesans or nuns. Some became correspondents or members of poetic circles that accepted, validated, and honed each other’s work. Northern Italian courts were increasingly shaped by strong women and their patronage of female poets. For two decades women with court associations held sway, but after 1550 women of lower status found their voices. After

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1530 publishers recognized that there was profit to be made from collections and anthologies of women’s poetry.

The Renaissance Legacy of Francesco Petrarch (1304–1372) His impact was wide and deep. Important Venetian poet Pietro Bembo published a pocket-sized version of Canzoniere (Poems, 1501), insisting that Petrarch’s Italian was its only pure form. Triumphs, Petrarch’s allegory describing a parade of floats on themes such as love and death, provided models for festival decorations, frescoes, and tarot cards, and writers modeled his rhetorical stances against scholasticism, physicians, astrology, and bad Latin. Twenty-four of 25 madrigals in Jacques Arcadelt’s 1559 Musica nova (New music) are Petrarchan. Women sought to become the Laura celebrated by his poems, and some wrote their own Petrarchan poetry even using masculine voice. The Inquisition banned four of his poems, and poet Gerolamo Malipiero rewrote many, replacing profane with spiritual love (1536). Roman noblewoman and marchioness of Pescara Vittoria Colonna was widowed at 35 and became center of a circle of Italian religious reformers and poets. Charismatic and scholarly, she exchanged sonnets with poets Ludovico Ariosto, Pietro Aretino, Michelangelo, and Pietro Bembo, who published one in his 1535 anthology. A decade later she published Spiritual Poems (1546), a self-fashioning Petrarchan collection that reflected her need as a widow for consolation from grief and regret, as well as a religiosity that was dangerously Protestant-leaning. Daughter of minor Neapolitan nobility, Petrarchan poetess Laura Terracina received encouragement from Vittoria and from fellow members of Naples’s Academy of the Unknowing. In 1548 she published Poetry, which was reprinted five times by 1600 and followed by eight additional volumes of her work. Her Discorso—reprinted 15 times—was a poetic epic in the chivalric genre that played off Ariosto’s very popular Orlando Furioso. A feminist who nonetheless disparaged her own work, Laura praised that of other women, including Florentine Laura Battiferra. Laura was the wife of Florentine sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati and was in the circle of the Medici court. She wrote in praise of her husband and of the court, and in her later years translated the seven penitential psalms into Tuscan. She helped found a literary academy that championed Tuscan and published her First Book of Tuscan Works as a tribute to Eleanora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I. Considered by some today the era’s greatest female poet, Gaspara Stampa was a well-educated member of Padua’s society and academies. Never married, two torrid affairs provided the emotion-drenched material for 311 poems collected in her posthumous Poetry.

Arts: Women Poets and Their Poetry

Other sixteenth-century female poets of note include courtesan Veronica Franco; Lucca’s Chiara Matraini; Roman-Florentine courtesan (?) Tullia d’Aragona; Venetian actress Isabella Andreini; Sienese academician Laudomia Forteguerri; and Città di Castello’s spiritual poet Francesca Turina. Women’s poetry was best enjoyed in popular collections and anthologies, since decorum—and much of their content—precluded their public recitations. In 1559 Ludovico Domenichi, senior editor for Venice’s famed Gioliti Press, published the first poetic anthology featuring all female authors: Diverse Poems of Some Very Noble and Most Virtuous Women. Despite the title, he published in Lucca to avoid Roman Church authorities who had just burned some 10,000 to 12,000 volumes of seemingly subversive poetry. His 53 authors were grouped as if their poems were responding to one another: art imitating life. See also: Arts: Dante in Popular Culture; Music at Court; Women and the Arts; Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Family and Gender: Education of Children; Widows; Recreation and Social Customs: Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Reading; Theater, Religious; Women, Letters, and Letter Writing; Religion and Beliefs: Women Mystics; Science and Technology: Academies FURTHER READING Cox, Virginia. The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Cox, Virginia. Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Eisenbichler, Konrad. The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in SixteenthCentury Siena. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Jaffe, Irma B., and Gernando Colombardo. Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune: The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women Poets. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002. Murphy, Caroline P. Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Nicolson, Elizabeth S. G., Carol C. Frick, and Stefania Biancani eds. Italian Women Artists: From Renaissance to Baroque. New York: Rizzoli, 2007. Rabitti, Giovanna. “Vittoria Colonna as Role Model for Cinquecento Women Poets.” In Letizia Panizza, ed. Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. London: Legenda, 2000, pp. 478–97. Robin, Diana. Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Primary Sources of Poetry Andreini, Isabella. Selected Poems of Isabella Andreini. Edited by Anne MacNeil. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Colonna, Vittoria. Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Abigail Brundin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Fonte, Moderata. Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance. Edited by Valeria Finucci and Julia Kisacky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Kirkham, Victoria, editor and translator. Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Matraini, Chiara. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Eleanor Maclachlan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Stampa, Gaspara. The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Stortoni, Laura Anna, ed. Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies and Courtesans. New York: Italica Press, 1997. Tornabuoni, Lucrezia. Sacred Narratives. Edited by Jane Tylus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Turina, Francesca. Autobiographical Poems. Bilingual Edition. Edited by Natalia CostaZalesow. New York: Bordighiera, 2009.

ECONOMICS AND WORK

INTRODUCTION Economics is essentially the study of how people acquire the goods and services they need to survive and thrive. Much of this is bound up with trade, especially the exchange of one’s labor for necessities and luxuries. Italian communities ­between about 1350 and 1600 were sophisticated societies within which economic ­exchanges were carried out in rather complex and efficient ways. Feudal relationships had been largely pushed out by commercial relationships, except in the south, and even that was beginning to change. Taxes replaced feudal dues, and rents in cash replaced many payments in kind. Money was created in cities all across the peninsula, and it circulated widely. Accounting practices emerged in the fourteenth century for keeping track of exchanges, as did new financial instruments from documents that worked like checks to insurance on ships’ cargoes. The introduction of paper in Italy just before 1300 made handwritten recordkeeping practical and inexpensive, as the later use of the printing press changed forever the relationship of the author to his or her text and audience. The political and economic organizations known as guilds had long played important roles in directing civic governments, but the Renaissance era saw these governments take ever bolder steps in regulating and ordering cities’ economic lives. But economies were ultimately based in the countryside. This was not the manorial or feudal land of northern Europe, but the contado directed by urban landowners who exploited its resources for commercial purposes. In the Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, arguably the least commercially developed Italian regions, the two great rural products were wheat and sheep’s wool. Both of these were exported north to cities from Siena to Venice to Torino. Closer to home, these cities and others carved out spheres of influence and then of conquest as they sought to control the flow of food and other rural products, from draft animals and fish to dyestuffs 71

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and timber for palazzi and ships. And when plague cut down a city’s population, it depended on the urban migration of contadini to fill the ranks of laborers and servants. Even those who remained village bound were affected by the urban centers as they paid their rents and taxes, suckled the infants of patrician women, marketed their surplus in city streets, participated in putting-out phases of certain manufacturing processes, and sought credit from urban lenders and the services of urban notaries. If the hinterlands provided the fuel, the Italian cities were the Though The Money Changer (1675) by Jan van engines of the economy. From Haensbergen is Dutch and post–Renaissance era, the Arsenale shipbuilding works it captures the intensity of the Italian banker of the previous century as well as the Spartan nature of his in Venice to gunsmiths and home or office. His wife’s presence is a reminder of weavers in Milan, the segment the important roles that spouses often played in the of the economy that p­roduced business world. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/ Getty Images) manufactured—literally handmade—goods was located in urban areas. The financial capital and credit were here, as were the concentrated raw materials, the expertise, skilled labor, the markets, and much of the demand. That which was produced for export made its way to Italian urban port cities, from which it was carried in the bottoms of Italian or foreign ships that hailed from cities as far afield as the Baltic and Black Seas. The same ships that took out Italian goods imported cargoes of all sorts, from Chinese porcelain to English wool, Polish wheat, and Sumatran spices. These goods were distributed to high-end retail shops in Rome, weavers’ looms in Genoa, Venetian public granaries, and Neapolitan apothecaries’ shops. Of course, ultimately they graced cardinals’ tables, clothed lawyers, fed plague-stricken glass workers, and soothed the Neapolitan viceroy’s pregnant servant. The world grew rather smaller between 1350 and 1600. Contemporary sources on economics and work are varied, complex, and rarely translated into English. The Renaissance era in Italy is far better documented than Italy before the fourteenth century or the rest of Europe at the time. Personal

Economics and Work: Accounting

records include diaries, ricordanze (personal or household record books), letters, household account books, estate records, probate records (wills and inventories of estates), and contracts for commissions, rents, apprenticeships and servitude, and other matters. These are regularly used by scholars for their information on purchases, sales, networks, stores of wealth, dowries, prices, wages, time spent away on business, and anxieties about the markets. Some matters such as wills, probate inventories, and contracts were routinely recorded by notaries, many of whose books can be found in archives. Business records of purchases, sales, credit given and received, changes in prices, wages paid, rents paid or received, profit margins, supply problems, changes in taste, and other aspects of demand are somewhat scarcer, since while families continued on and notaries had to file their books, business records usually disappeared with the business. The reason that Francesco Datini of Prato, who died in 1410, figures so prominently in discussions of the era’s economy is that his mountain of business records was preserved in his palazzo, sealed away until discovered in 1870. Other types of sources include guild records of regulations, infractions and judicial decisions, and other business. Other courts left accounts of criminal activity: abuses of workers, apprentices, or servants; fraud; counterfeiting; and property damage. Civic records document patterns of taxation and the income they provided, as well as expenditures for goods and services of all kinds. Many institutions such as hospitals, monasteries, and rulers’ courts left records of income (e.g., gifts, rents and other dues, and payments for services) as well as payments for purchases, wages, and salaries. Less obvious sources include preachers’ sermons condemning everything from usury to new French fashions; novelle, poetry, and other literary works that shed light on working conditions, buyers’ and sellers’ attitudes, and a host of related matters. Finally, visual and tangible materials include contemporary paintings, drawings, and other illustrations of shops, machines, ships, workers, professionals, and markets, while actual remains from the period range from the watermarked paper of account books to coins, tools, and textiles.

ACCOUNTING Renaissance-era Italians encountered the need for financial recordkeeping at every turn. Larger households needed records of dowries promised, servants’ salaries owed, loans receivable from deadbeat in-laws, expenses paid for weddings and funerals, and debts owed to artists for work completed. The parish, guild, confraternity, monastery, commune, and court treasurer had to keep track of income and expenses, especially if credit was involved. Italy led Europe in developing

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techniques for keeping relatively sophisticated records in part because of the ­advanced stage of its commercial life. It was the world of business, and especially banking, that established the foundations of modern accounting. The volume and complexity of business transactions grew greater as businesses stretched across Italy and Europe. Over just a six-year period from 1367, an early partnership of the international merchant Francesco Datini recorded some 10,000 transactions involving hundreds of clients. That averages to about 4.5 per day every day. His need for accurate and accessible records was clear. As his businesses expanded, he established branches in Majorca, Bruges, Milan, Barcelona, Avignon, Genoa, and Florence, and each branch had to keep its books the way he did in Prato. Datini’s 10,000 early transactions were only recorded once, as either credits or debits, a method known as single-entry bookkeeping. Twenty-five years later he had fully adopted a new system. In fact, Italian bankers and merchants developed a virtually uniform system of recordkeeping around the concept of the double entry: each transaction was recorded twice, since the business both received something and lost something. Each transaction was both a debit and a credit to a business’s accounts. Cash sales seem not to have been recorded, especially by smaller retail companies. Therefore, let us assume a sale of shoes on credit. The debt to the shop was recorded immediately in a ricordanza book that noted who bought the shoes, the price, the quality or grade of the product, and the date. If paid quickly, the entry was simply lined through or marked pagato (paid) to indicate the debt had been paid. If not, it was eventually posted to a memoriale book that had debts owed by customers located in the front half and debts owed to suppliers in the back half. From there it was more formally recorded in the company’s ledger. In the memoriale or ledger a second line beneath the first indicated when and how the transaction was completed: who paid how much when. In fact, small businesses usually used only a ledger for credit accounts, including goods sold and purchases made from suppliers, in which the business became the debtor. Larger businesses with multiple employees, large volumes of business, many credit transactions, and often long repayment lags relied on ricordanze and memoriali as precursors to the ledger. Accounts were kept in Italian, and until well into the fifteenth century usually using Roman numerals for monetary amounts in lire, soldi, and denari. Personal names being as spotty as they often were, retail businessmen had to be as specific as they could when recording those of customers or suppliers. “Giovanni” was not enough. Giovanni had to be “son of” someone, “from” somewhere, “the carpenter who lives next to the prison,” “the one-eyed,” or “Ser Giovanni” (denoting a notary). “Brother Giovanni” had to be “the Franciscan” or belong to a particular monastery, be “the young” or “the old.” A woman could not simply be Giovanna, but “wife of Pietro the painter,” “widow of Roberto from Parma,” or Mona Giovanna Frescobaldi. As the Datini archive in Prato reveals, the books themselves

Economics and Work: Accounting

were purchased from paper-sellers ready-bound with hard covers. Each would have a different title inscribed on the cover, such as Memoriale C, and the first page was marked with a cross and headed “For God and Profit.” A second line might mention the specific partnership involved or other purpose to which the book was being put. Apart from ricordanze, memoriali, and ledgers, separate books might have been kept by a business for cash, profit distributions to partners, goods received and delivered, salaries due and paid, and debtors. One apothecary left a book of debtors with 106 names outstanding. A separate book might also be kept for large accounts: the duke’s court, for example, or a hospital or monastery. Because a single transaction might appear in several books, easy cross-referencing was essential. When all transactions on a page were completed, the businessman penned a diagonal line through it. Larger cities with active commercial sectors hired teachers to prepare boys in basic arithmetic and, increasingly in the fifteenth century, young men in bookkeeping. This helped spread the use of Arabic numerals for entering monetary amounts and kept Italian bookkeeping practices from fragmenting into regional or personal variations. Probably the most famous of these teachers was Luca Pacioli, a mathematician working in Venice and Milan who was so highly reputed that Leonardo da Vinci made a note in 1495 to “learn multiplication from the root” from his colleague Pacioli (Gleeson-White, 49). At the same moment Pacioli had just completed his encyclopedia on mathematics, which included 24,000 words on bookkeeping. See also: Economics and Work: Apprentices; Banks and Banking; Credit and Loans; Retail Selling; Taxes and Public Finance; Trade, Seaborne; Family and Gender: Education of Children; Names, Personal and Family; Politics and Warfare: Civic Magistracies and Offices; Crime and Punishments FURTHER READING Brown, R. Gene, and Kenneth S Johnston, ed. Paciolo [sic] on Accounting. New York: McGraw Hill, 1963. Gleeson-White, Jane. Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2013. Goldthwaite, Richard A. “Schools and Teachers of Commercial Arithmetic in Renaissance Florence.” Journal of European Economic History 1 (1972): 418–33. Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Kent, Dale. “The Lodging House of All Memories: An Accountant’s Home in Renaissance Florence.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 66 (2007): 444–63. Peragallo, Edward. Origin and Evolution of the Double Entry Bookkeeping: A Study of Italian Practices from the Fourteenth Century. New York: American Institute, 1938. Soll, Jacob. The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

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APOTHECARIES Like modern pharmacists, apothecaries—from apotheka, meaning “storehouse”— prepared and sold medicines that physicians prescribed for patients. Known as speziali, they also sold cooking spices, which were believed to have medicinal as well as culinary properties. But there was more: painters bought pigments, children candies, women perfumes, mourners candles for funeral processions, and banquet hosts sugar sculptures and distilled liqueurs. In the sixteenth century Florence’s Giglio shop processed nearly two tons of sugar annually. Some had their own gardens for fresh herbs, and others displayed collections of oddities from antiquities to pickled animal fetuses. Part warehouse, part store, and part workshop, these were meeting places for doctors and patients, spice merchants and cooks, gossips,

Apothecaries in Venice and other cities publicly prepared the complex drug theriac in annual, outdoor, and public festivals to ensure and advertise quality. Officials inspected the ingredients and judged the final products. This woodcut is from The Book of the Craft of Distilling, published by Hieronymus Braunschweig in Strasbourg, ca. 1500. (INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo)

Economics and Work: Apothecaries

self-proclaimed drug makers looking for new retail outlets, and old men looking for a game of chess or a political debate. A heavy counter separated owner from customers and a door the shop from the workroom and storage in back. Shelves behind the counter displayed scores of labeled ceramic and glass jars. Giglio featured 46 meters of shelving holding some 200 large jars, 132 containers for fluids and syrups, and 40 boxes of pills, herbs, and other dry goods. A shop in Messina, Sicily, ordered from a potter 238 majolica jars, which are displayed today in Roccavaldina. All this was in addition to cases of drawers and large cupboards, mortars and pestles for grinding, scales and measures, religious images, presses for extracting juices and oils, recipe books, account ledgers, distillation equipment, chairs, and benches. Smaller shops with limited wares or specialties opened directly onto the street for better exposure and quicker service. Customers brought their own containers for their purchases, though shops provided glasses or ampoules for liquids; jars for creams, ointments, or syrups; small boxes for pills, and folded paper envelopes for powders. Florence’s 1427 tax census lists 113 speziali, though only 60 appear in 1480’s census. Given all of the necessary capital, one might think most of it stayed in families; yet only 17 of the 60 were related to the 113. In the 1570s, Florence had 66 apothecary shops and Venice 71. Thirty more appeared in Venice by 1617. Venetian pharmacists and their shops were viewed as Europe’s finest, thanks to the city’s long history of trade with the spice-producing East. Europe’s medicinal spices arrived from Asia through Venice; and foreign merchants, specialty buyers, scientists, students, and physicians mingled with local specialists in its marketplaces. Its university in nearby Padua claimed fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe’s premier medical school and earliest medicinal botanical garden. Venice was also the heart of Italy’s printing industry, and its shops contained numerous books on related subjects from cooking to surgery, including works such as Prospero Borgarucci’s 900-page Manual for Apothecaries (1567). Most cities had a guild for apothecaries or joined them to another more or less related occupation. Florence united them with physicians, and Bologna with grocers, candle-makers, and brewers. Though lacking a guild, Venetian apprentices spent five years learning the craft, while studying the pharmacopeia (the catalog of standard medical preparations), making deliveries, candles, and candies, and grinding everything from seed pods to deep blue lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Three more years of working with and for a practicing professional was required before one could open a shop, though some spent even more assisting various masters to gain the secrets that made an apothecary stand out. Venetian apothecaries were divided into medicinal specialists and all others, and were licensed and overseen directly by the Giustizia Vecchia (Old Justice) magistracy (and from 1520s to 1548 by the Health Magistracy). In 1565 they formed the Collegio degli

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Speziali, putting them on the same organizational level as physicians. Yet, across Italy apothecaries became subordinated to civic medical authorities that appeared in the midst of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century plague epidemics. Physicians, too, had gained organizational strength and power over all aspects of sixteenth-century medical practice from midwives to charlatans, including apothecaries. In some cities doctors invested in and worked directly with specific apothecaries, while in others laws banned such partnerships. Apothecaries served institutions as well as individuals. Ducal and royal courts, monasteries and nunneries, orphanages and hospitals had their favorites. Meanwhile, some monasteries and convents competed with apothecaries supplying wholesale or retail herbs and medicines, especially to the poor. Because knowledge of Latin was necessary for reading catalogs, recipe books, and manuals, women were usually absent—or banned, as in Rome—from guild lists. Venice was different, and in 1569 counted five women among its 85 registered speziali. These were generally directly associated with a male apothecary, as was Camilla Erculiani of Padua, whose father was a spice merchant and two successive husbands were apothecaries. Her Latin allowed her to pen Letters on Natural Philosophy (1584). See also: Arts: Painters and Their Workshops; Economics and Work: Guilds; Retail Selling; Family and Gender: Health and Illness; Fashion and Appearance: Cosmetics; Food and Drink: Drugs; Foreign Foods; Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Sugar and Confected Sweets; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Physicians; Science and Technology: Alchemy; Collecting and Collections; Medical Education; Pharmacopeias and Materia Medica; Secrets, Books of FURTHER READING Cohen, Elizabeth S. “Miscarriages of Apothecary Justice: Un-Separate Spaces of Work and Family in Early Modern Rome.” Renaissance Studies 21 (2007): 480–504. DeLancey, J. “Dragonsblood and Ultramarine: The Apothecary and Artists’ Pigments in Renaissance Florence.” In Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthew, and Sara Matthews-Grieco, eds. The Art Market in Italy: 15th–17th Centuries. Modena, Italy: Panini, 2003, pp. 141–50. DeVivo, Filippo. “Pharmacies as Centres of Communication in Early Modern Venice.” Renaissance Studies 21 (2007): 505–21. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gentilcore, David. “For the Protection of Those Who Have Both Shop and Home in the City: Relations between Italian Charlatans and Apothecaries.” Pharmacy in History 45 (2003): 108–21. Kostylo, Joanna. “Pharmacy as a Centre for Protestant Reform in Renaissance Venice.” Renaissance Studies 30 (2016): 236–53.

Economics and Work: Apprentices Laughran, Michelle A. “Medicating without Scruples.” Pharmacy in History 45 (2003): 95–107. Palmer, Richard. “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice in the 16th Century.” In Andrew Wear, Roger French, and Ian M. Lonie, eds. The Medical Renaissance of the 16th Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 100–17. Shaw, James, and Evelyn Welch. Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence: The “Speziale al giglio” in 1494. New York: Rodopi, 2011.

APPRENTICES The boy growing up in rural Italy had few choices before him, and was likely to remain an agricultural worker. From the time he could walk he followed adults around, absorbing what they did, how they did it, and the results. Urban fathers may have wanted their sons to follow in their trade, though members of lower classes often had higher aspirations. Many larger Italian cities had schools where boys could learn to read and write in Italian, and to manipulate numbers. Some boys learned these skills at home, either from parents or from tutors. By age nine or ten artisanal-class boys, and fortunate lower-class lads, were ready to begin vocational education as an apprentice, or assistant to a guild master (both “boss” and “teacher”) in the field chosen by the boy or his father or guardian. The boy might stay with his father and family, or join another master’s shop and household for a number of years. Apprenticeship was the mechanism by which the guild system in Italy provided help to current masters and brought up the next generation of skilled guildsmen. Guild regulations were usually quite careful in laying out rules for accepting new apprentices, providing for their welfare and education, and setting expectations for workers who were essentially children. In Genoa, masters and guardians or fathers signed detailed notarized contracts. A study of 8,400 of these between 1450 and 1540 revealed the types of terms expected and their variations among different occupations. The child joined the family of the master, who usually took full responsibility for his safety, health, and well-being. Parents or guardian provided a stipend to help with the child’s upkeep, at least during the early years when the boy could make little more than a small economic contribution to the host family. Many boys followed in their father’s craft or occupation, though with different masters. Over time this may have served to homogenize occupational practices as young men acquired and applied similar skill sets. Florentine guilds, on the other hand, had far different expectations of masters. A boy did not as a rule join the master’s family, but stayed in his birth home or elsewhere. Written contracts seem to have been rare, and boys seem to have moved

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more freely among masters than was the case elsewhere. In some ways they were caught between fathers who had sent them away and masters who did not reintegrate them into family life. This may help explain why Renaissance-era Florence had unique issues with its young men. In the early 1400s the government replied to the perceived trend toward homosexual activity by subsidizing brothels; later in the century the Church developed special confraternities for young men and boys; in the 1490s reforming friar Savonarola used such boys and teens as minions to harass the unholy; and in the sixteenth century Cosimo de’Medici used youth groups of potenze (bullies) to replace older, established social groups. Florentine boys tended to change occupational apprenticeships more frequently than those in other, more rigid systems, and fewer followed in their father’s craft or trade. According to tax censuses (catasti), in 1427 there were 113 apothecaries in Florence and in 1480 only 60. But of the 60 only 17 were related to the 113 of 50 years earlier. These druggists had big investments in inventory, and elsewhere this meant sons would often take over. This was true in Florence of some occupations, such as those requiring heavy capital investment such as kilns or foundries. Goldthwaite points out that in many cities painters and other artists created small occupational dynasties across generations, but not Florence. Andrea Verrocchio’s father was a brickmaker, and the father of Verrocchio’s prize student, Leonardo, was a notary in Vinci. Botticelli’s father was a tanner and his brothers a banker and a goldsmith. In this case the sons achieved what many families sought: movement up the social ladder. Goldthwaite suggests that this ability to operate within the guild system with relatively little interference stems in part from the very important role that guilds played in the city’s political life. Since they controlled the government—pace the Medicis—they could afford to be lax in apprentice oversight. Such laxity may also have contributed to the Florentine libertarian streak that one searches for in vain among Romans, Venetians, or Neapolitans. Finally, this relative fluidity may account for the versatility and freedom of development one finds in Florentine art, business, and other fields. To protect apprentices, from 1291 Venice required that all of them be registered with the state, which itself oversaw the guilds. Assuming that the apprentice had learned what he needed to strike out on his own, when his contract was up, he became a journeyman who could now work as a full assistant for one or a series of employers. Some never left this stage to become masters in their own right. While formal apprenticeship was unique to the guild systems, the concept of learning by doing from “masters” was really pervasive. Young girls who were sent out to toil in households as servants were simultaneously acquiring the skills and attitudes of the housewives they were expected to become. Before there were seminaries, boys interested in becoming priests often served local priests as deacons for five years while learning clerical skills. Noble boys and girls learned from parents,

Economics and Work: Banks and Banking

courtiers, and their social betters how to serve with decorum. Noble Venetian youth of at least 20 paid a fee to become “bowmen of the quarterdeck,” skilled crossbowmen who learned sailing and sea-craft on the job. So important was this entrée to maritime and commercial life that the Senate mandated ships have four (around 1400) and eight (1483) of these apprentices on board. See also Arts: Painters and Their Workshops; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Book Printing and Sales; Clothmaking; Guilds; Notaries; Family and Gender: Childhood; Education of Children; Families, Laboring Class; Fashion and Appearance: Tailors and Seamstresses; Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons; Hospitals and Orphanages; Physicians FURTHER READING Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

BANKS AND BANKING The original, medieval “bank” was the bench or table behind which sat the man with a strongbox full of cash—some local some foreign. Though he probably had an office—perhaps in his house—where he stored papers, pawned goods, and more cash, the bench came out on festival and market days, and at fairs where buyers and sellers from distant towns gathered. Foreigners exchanged their coins for local ones, at a commission, of course, and merchants who accepted foreign money traded it in for the local sort, also at a commission. By the fourteenth century men with letters of credit appeared at the bench. The banker exchanged this formal promise to pay, or evidence of payment having been made to a partner at the foreigner’s home, for local cash, minus a commission. Foreigners selling goods might also deposit funds with the banker, saving them the trouble and risk of carrying the cash back home. The banker might then lend these funds to a local manufacturer who chose to deliver goods on credit but who needed working capital—cash for wages, rent, raw materials, or taxes—to provide a bridge until the buyer paid up. The Renaissance-era banker performed all of these functions locally, but as Italian trade increased across Europe and the Mediterranean the number and complexity of bankers’ functions increased. In Lucca, “foreigner” increasingly referred to English merchants rather than those from nearby Pisa, and successful bankers

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developed networks of branch offices that radiated out from Florence, Siena, and Venice. Early international banks developed along with the international wool trade carried out from Siena and Florence. Powerful families from these rival cities vied for the privilege of loaning their accumulated cash to the papacy and the kings of Naples and England. When, on the very eve of the Renaissance, England’s King Edward III decided he could not repay his Florentine lenders, the Bardi and Peruzzi companies, the Italian city’s economy crashed. Nonetheless, Italians continued to compete for Edward’s business. Perhaps the most famous of the international banking families was the Medici of Florence. They spent 60 years near the top of the list and used their profits in extraordinary ways to promote Florentine arts and learning, and themselves. Viero de’Medici and his father worked for the Baronci family firm from 1348, and Viero became a partner in 1352. He was enriched by forming additional partnerships and by 1370 ran a leading concern. He had a major branch in Rome and others in Bruges, Genoa, Venice, and Zara in Dalmatia. In 1385, Giovanni, the son of Viero’s cousin Bicci, who was a small-time lender in the Mugello valley near Florence, joined the firm, contributing his new wife’s dowry of 1,500 florins. Giovanni relocated to Rome as executive partner. In 1393 he bought out Viero and returned to Florence four years later. This marked the beginning of the Medici bank, which existed until 1494. Though in no way typical, its fortunes illustrate international banking’s possibilities and pitfalls. Giovanni opened a branch in Naples in 1400 and one in Venice in 1402. He reaped 75% of the bank’s profits between 1397 and 1420, during which he averaged 6,644 florins per year. Giovanni’s son Cosimo took over in 1420, and up to 1433 (his exile) raised annual family profits to 11,648 florins Over the following 15 years under Cosimo family gains averaged 19,386 florins. Business was good, indeed, but Cosimo’s revenge against his political persecutors also played its part in eliminating competition. In the 1420s Florence hosted 72 banks, but by the 1470s the number fell to 33; six disappeared in the 1460s alone as the economy worsened. Giovanni had established wool factories (1402, 1408), and Cosimo added silk to the portfolio (1433). Cosimo also multiplied branches abroad: Geneva (1426), Basle (1433), Ancona (1436), Bruges (1439), Pisa (1442), London and Avignon (1446), and Milan (1452). Each branch had four to eight employees, including the cashier, notary, scribe, messengers, and shop boys. One ledger recorded all normal transactions and a second, secret one, contained confidential dealings as well as wages and other business matters. Cosimo’s successes faded as his son Piero appointed inferior managers and Piero’s son Lorenzo (Il Magnifico) essentially ignored the family business. Poor management, bad loans and investments, internal squabbling, and wars involving France, Burgundy, and England brought the Medici bank

Economics and Work: Banks and Banking

to its end. The branch in London closed in 1472, and from 1478 to 1481 so did the branches in Avignon, Bruges, London, Milan, and Venice, as did that in Pisa in 1489. When Piero de’Medici fled Florence in 1494, he took bank funds with him.

Monti di pietà By the 1460s, Christian leaders had grown resentful of Jewish pawnbrokers and pressed for a Christian alternative. Monti di pietà—“piles of mercy”— were semi-public pawn operations funded by depositors earning 5% annually. Borrowers left items on pawn, usually for short periods. Between 1462 and 1510, cities established 70 monti across Italy. Florence’s monte began in 1495 but foundered until the 1530s. By the 1540s it had some 50,000 pawned items in storage; by the later 1560s, 171,000 items—of which 90% were eventually redeemed—for a total of 370,150 florins in loans. Supporting this activity were 2,794 deposits totaling nearly 1,000,000 florins.

Smaller enterprises operating locally or regionally continued to meet people’s needs, but the Italian Wars (1494–1559) made huge demands on Italian funds and large-scale lending very risky. Meanwhile, northern firms such as Augsburg’s Fuggers moved south in the wakes of Imperial armies. Combined with the sixteenth-century economic shift to Spain, England, and the Netherlands, Italy devolved into a relative backwater. Venice in 1499 had only four banks, one of which went bankrupt causing two others to undergo runs, during which depositors demanded immediate cash. The fourth, that of Alvise Pisani, had a brilliant and courageous leader who promised cash, borrowed it, and came through. Unlike the Florentines, Venetian banks predominantly served to pay on depositors’ accounts—pay their bills—rather than loan out money. In Florence several welfare institutions, including the orphanage of the Innocenti and the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in the mid-1400s, had begun taking deposits and making small loans in competition with smaller banks. In 1564, at the Innocenti 293 common folk had deposits totaling 45,000 florins. See also: Arts: Art Patronage; Economics and Work: Accounting; Coins, Coinage, and Money; Credit and Loans; Guilds; Trade, Seaborne; Family and Gender: Dowries; Housing and Community: Jewish Communities FURTHER READING Arcelli, Federico. Banking and Charity in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Holy Monte di Pietà of Rome (1539–84). Greenville, SC: Upfront Publishing, 2003.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Padgett, John F. “Organizational Genesis, Identity, and Control: The Transformation of Banking in Renaissance Florence.” In James E. Rauch and Alessandra Casella, eds. Networks and Markets. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001, pp. 211–57. Parks, Tim. Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New York: Norton, 2005.

BOOK PRINTING AND SALES By assembling moveable type, a modified cider press, relatively cheap paper, and sticky, oil-based ink, Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized communication. Presses appeared in Italian cities from 1465, when the first was opened in Subiaco, then in Rome (1467), Venice (1469), Ferrara, Florence, Milan, Bologna, and Naples (all 1471), and Padua, Parma, and Verona (1472). By 1500, 80 Italian towns had presses, though many quickly failed and closed. Renaissance-era Italian printers produced around 77,000 editions (64,500 in the sixteenth century) of books both grand and simple, modern and Classical, popular and esoteric, utilitarian and ­poetic, in Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Slavonic, and Arabic. The publisher—who might be the printer, author, or an entrepreneur—selected and provided the text, bought necessary paper, made arrangements with the press (pay a set fee or share profits), chose and obtained the type font(s), and decided how many copies to print. Setting up a print shop was expensive. Ample space was needed for press or presses, for setting and proofreading pages, storing paper and other materials, hanging newly printed pages to dry, and keeping completed books. Presses were complicated and expensive and required many sets of type in multiple sizes and fonts. Eight of Venice’s first 12 printers failed, as did all of Florence’s. Between 1469 and 1500 across Italy 233 shops started and failed. Threats to success included undercapitalization (too little cash or credit), fire, flood, fraud, inexperienced or bad management, market changes, poor marketing, and cheap competition in a world without copyright. Some printers traveled: the earliest pioneers were Germans and none of Venice’s printers were native Venetians. Heinrich of Cologne set up shop at various times in Bologna, Brescia, Lucca, Modena, Milan, Siena, and Urbino. Venice was known for its polygraphs, men who served as writers, editors, translators, proofreaders, copy editors, and as often as not, plagiarizers. Sixteenth-century Venice hosted more than 1,000 printers and publishers. They produced some 27,298 editions of books and countless broadsides, prints, and pamphlets. This was three times as many as Roman printers and five times Florentine output. Inventories and catalogs of print shops and booksellers provide some

Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales

idea of the supply of and the demand for books. The Venice-based Giunti Company had branches in Rome, Siena, Naples, Palermo, and Messina, and expanded to Lyon, France, and Spanish Burgos and Salamanca. In 1557 the Burgos branch claimed 15,837 copies of 1,579 editions in stock. Their late sixteenth-century Florentine branch was the city’s largest, and its catalog advertised 13,685 titles as being on hand. Booksellers’ shops featured walk-in showrooms with tables, lecterns, and shelves covered with books, usually unbound. Books were retailed as groups or sheaves of pages without covers, which were procured by the shop at the customer’s request. In 1484 the Dei Libri shop in Bologna displayed over 400 printed books and 45 manuscripts, and had hundreds of other copies stored upstairs. All told it held over 2,700 books, many of them university texts. By comparison, in 1537 the Milan warehouse of Niccolò Gorgonzola contained 80,450 copies of 205 editions. Owners of both shops sold their own published works, Gorgonzola’s comprising about 25% of his inventory. Since both blank and printed paper had to remain dry and had to be protected from vermin, large Venetian companies used spaces in monasteries and large houses for warehousing stock. Retailing books—especially popular or devotional texts—occurred not only in shops but also at street stalls, in churches, at shrines and markets, and, especially at the wholesale level, at local or regional fairs. Major foreign fairs for book dealers were in Lyon and Frankfurt. Venice held fairs at Christmas and a15-day affair around Ascension (late spring). Local Dominicans rented out stalls at La Quercia near Viterbo in May and September; in the fall Recanati hosted a fair aimed at booksellers and pilgrims en route to Loreto; and in the south Lanciano conducted Italy’s most important book fair beginning in 1477. The city closed shops and rented spaces in loggias to vendors.

Censorship Church and state had always sought to control heretical or subversive writings. With printing, this became easier, due to the known locations of presses, but more difficult because so many copies of offensive works could circulate. Civic authorities tried to control political speech, while bishops and inquisitors attempted to monitor religious writings. In 1559 the Roman Church adopted the Index of Forbidden Books, a list expanded and edited and overseen by the Inquisition. Many objectionable books underwent minor changes, others were extensively purged, and a growing number was simply banned. Savvy authors had their works previewed by authorities, who could grant an imprimatur—it may be printed—if deemed harmless.

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Devotional and religious titles by women and men generally headed lists of stock or sales volume. From 1465 to 1501 this included 35% of Bologna’s output, 46% of Venice’s, and 70% of that of Florentine shops. In 1491 a single shop in Parma stocked 579 Books of Psalms. This trend was reinforced during the years of Catholic resurgence after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Some of these books, especially in Venice and before stricter censorship from the 1540s, were Protestant or otherwise “heretical” texts sold both as propaganda and to resident Protestants. Popular poets included Dante (31 editions to 1500), Petrarch (93), and Boccaccio (81). Aesop’s Fables in Latin remained a constant best seller (as a basic reading textbook), as did the Latin grammar text called the Donato (300 copies in the Parma shop). In university cities textbooks sold well, in Rome tourists and pilgrims purchased guidebooks and books about saints’ lives, and sheet music flew from Venetian shelves. Hebrew-language presses also flourished in Venice from 1515 to 1553, when they were shut down, and then from 1560s under the Inquisition’s close monitoring. Jews were forbidden from publishing, though they could write, edit, and print books. The German Christian Daniel Blomberg published some 200 titles, including a complete Talmud, between 1516 and 1548. Another hundred titles in Hebrew came from two publishers between 1545 and 1553. Venice’s Paganini press produced the first printed Qur’an in Arabic (1537–1538), a venture that found few buyers of the error-ridden edition. See also Arts: Dante in Popular Culture; Novella; Painting: Media and Techniques; Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings; Women Poets and Their Poetry; Economics and Work: Credit and Loans; Retail Selling; Family and Gender: Education of Children; Last Wills and Testaments; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Food and Drink: Literature of Food and Cooking; Recreation and Social Customs: Calendars: Sacred and Profane; Music and Dance in Popular Culture; News; Pornography and Erotica; Reading; Songs and Singing, Popular; Religion and Beliefs: Bible; Christian Art in the Home; Council of Trent and Catholic Reform; Mary, Cult of; Pilgrims and Shrines; Preachers and Preaching; Prophecy and Apocalypticism; Protestantism; Saints and Their Cults; Science and Technology: Anatomy and Dissection; Astrology; Botany and Botanical Illustration; Libraries; Maps and Mapmaking; Medical Education; Plague Treatises and Consilia; Printing; Technical Illustration; Universities FURTHER READING Cayley, Emma, and Susan Powell. Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, 1350–1550. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Del Puppo, Dario. “All the World Is a Book: Italian Renaissance Printing in a Global Perspective.” Textual Culture 6 (2011): 1–22. Nuovo, Angela. The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Boston: Brill, 2013.

Economics and Work: Cloth Trade Parker, Deborah. “Women in the Book Trade in Italy, 1475–1620.” Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 509–41. Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Robin, Diana. Publishing Women: Salons, The Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Salzberg, Rosa. Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford, 2014.

CLOTH TRADE Silks, woolens, cottons, and linens were among the products Italians most often bought and sold. While some rural folk may have found it more convenient and cheaper to weave their own homespun cloth for their families, most regions of Italy had access to markets where cloth could be purchased at reasonable prices. Even inmates of urban institutions wore clothing made from inexpensive but commercially made textiles. Italians had long manufactured cloth commercially, with centers of fine cloth production in Florence, Milan, and Siena at the beginning of the Renaissance era. The Black Death and repeated plagues slackened demand, so production shifted to finer wools and, slowly, silks for export outside Italy. By the sixteenth century, new centers of production and distribution emerged, including Venice and Genoa. At the same time, northern European and Turkish production had provided real competition in a market that was growing wider geographically yet more integrated. Though many studies of the cloth trade focus on the brisk international trade in high-end woolens and silks, most cloth was produced to serve local markets. In both cases, cloth producers rarely sold directly to the final users, unless the product was a special order or the buyer was a royal court or other single large-volume consumer. Some did run their own retail shops in major cities, but guild regulations often made this difficult. In general, cloth manufacturers sold their products wholesale either in Italy or abroad. Annual fairs all over Italy featured producers’ cloth purchased by wholesalers who brought it home for resale or consignment to retail cloth sellers. Retail merchants, then, provided the final users with the material, grade, and color they desired. Over the sixteenth century, Florence consistently hosted some 100 woolen fabric shops, perhaps 152 in a 1561 census. There was no sector of pre-tailored, off-the-shelf clothing, though tailors no doubt spent time away from commissions to sew standard-sized items such as camicie, the ubiquitous, tunic, or shift-like undergarments of both men and women. For more visible apparel, the customer brought his or her choice of fabric to the tailor.

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Silk thread was produced in many regions of Italy, including Abruzzi, Calabria, the Marches, Romagna, Sicily, Tuscany, and the Veneto. Because local, this was inexpensive but useful only for cheaper taffetas, velours, satins, and velvets, or blending with other fibers. For high-end brocades and damasks, imported raw silk was needed. Italian silk fabrics outcompeted eastern Mediterranean products and found ready markets in Constantinople/Istanbul, Damascus, and Tripoli. They were in high demand at cathedrals and courts throughout Europe, with major purchasers in Paris, Antwerp, London, and Bruges. Popularity was based not only on general quality of the fabric and dyes, but also of the weaves that borrowed or imitated Chinese or Iranian patterns of fantastic beasts or flowers in bloom. Silk fabrics varied widely in price depending on how they were prepared, so local sellers of silk textiles had a widely ranging clientele. Since wool clothmaking and sales played a huge part in the Florentine economy, between 1350 and 1400 foreign wholesale buyers who visited the city were given a special tour of shops selling Florentine wool cloths. Guides pointed out the unfinished cathedral, the guildhall, and other sights, and led buyers down the major streets along which shops were located. Potential customers had two weeks within which to make deals. In the end, buyer and sellers were joined by a guild-provided broker who helped hammer out the final deal. During the same period, the Datini wool firms centered in Florence were shipping finished wool to their branches in cities such as Bruges, Genoa, Valencia, Ibiza, and Barcelona. One large shipment originally destined for Valencia had part left there, the remainder delivered to North Africa where more was sold, and the last portion dropped in Majorca. In Venice, another Datini market, cloth wholesaling took place around the Rialto, the city’s commercial heart. From the 1480s Florentine weavers began processing a newer type of Castilian wool that produced a lighter and finer fabric than the Abruzzi Italian fibers from Naples. The resulting rascia cloth became one of the mainstays of Florentine trade, with ready customers in both the Near East and northern Europe. As Venetian production swamped the Turkish world due to better distribution networks than Florentines had, rascia became ever more popular at the fairs in Castile and Lyons and in the developing market in Antwerp. One element of its popularity was that it took very well the dyes producing a fine black color, and black had become the color of the day.

Francesco di Marco Datini da Prato (1335–1410) Orphaned in the Black Death, with his inheritance Datini became a successful merchant in papal Avignon. Marrying a Florentine, he returned to Prato, near Florence, and established a network of business partnerships from Bruges and London to Venice and Barcelona. Trading mostly in cloth, he bought and sold just about anything, and spent a few years as a banker. He

Economics and Work: Clothmaking

died childless, leaving his enormous fortune to his foundation for children, headquartered in his Prato home. Today, Palazzo Datini also houses his unparalleled archive: 125,549 commercial and 10,000 personal letters from 267 places and scores of business and household account books. In 1377, Bologna reported 4,000 people working in cotton production; a few decades later Venice had 5,000 to 6,000, and around 1450 Milan’s industry employed 6,000, including 2,000 weavers. Cotton always had a ready local market, which was important after 1455, when Turkish supplies supplanted Italian products in the Near East. Cotton was often blended with other fibers to produce cloth types such as bombazine, which was made of linen and cotton and used for mattresses, tablecloths, and bedcovers, or sciamiti, a blend of silk and cotton that, when napped, was used for drapes, canopies, and upholstery. Even with limited Near Eastern demand, northern European markets made high Italian production levels worthwhile. Unlike wool, cotton could not be grown commercially north of the Alps. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Clothmaking; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Dyes and Dyestuffs; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Social Status and Clothing; Sumptuary Laws FURTHER READING Faroqhi, Suraiya. “Ottoman Textiles in European Markets.” In Anna Contadine, ed. The Renaissance and the Ottoman World. New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 231–44. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Jenkins, David, ed. Cambridge History of Western Textiles, I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Molà, Luca. The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Nigro, Giampiero, ed. Francesco di Marco Datini: The Man, the Merchant. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2010.

CLOTHMAKING Silks Silk was strictly an import item in Italy until the later Middle Ages. By the beginning of the Renaissance era, however, Lucca was Europe’s center of silk production, followed by Venice and Florence. Later fourteenth-century upheavals

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dispersed Lucchesi silk workers, and the fifteenth century saw the industry planted in Ferrara, Genoa, Modena, Naples, Perugia, Siena, and Milan. Within 30 years Milan had 300 silk weavers and 15% of its population worked in the silk industry; it was also Genoa’s largest employer, and grew into the late sixteenth century. Tuscan production more than doubled in this century’s final quarter: in 1567 tiny Pescia alone sold 1,654 pounds of raw silk to a single buyer, and by 1600 Florentine firms were purchasing a total of 170,000 pounds annually. Silk was derived from the cocoons of worms that fed on mulberry trees or bushes. Eggs were laid out in the sun in May or June, and the worms were fed dry mulberry leaves as often as every half hour. The completed cocoon was steamed or boiled to kill the worm and soften the filaments. These were teased out and wound onto spools by reelers; spinners then wound and twisted four or five filaments into a thread of even thickness. Water wheels often powered “throwing” machines that did this work. Different fabrics required varieties of thread thickness and evenness. More steaming and boiling cleaned and further tightened the threads. Some went to a goldbeater or trained nuns who very carefully encased them in foil or very thin wire of gold or silver. Most was woven into textiles, the apprenticeship for which in Venice lasted eight years. Weavers specialized because silk was often mixed with other materials—such as wool and linen—and silk itself was the basis for a wide range of fabrics, including satins, velvets (13 distinct types), and brocades. In 1493 Venice had some 500 silk guild masters; in Genoa in 1573 alone 193 new masters joined its silk guild. Women handled the early stages of silk production, but weaving and dyeing remained in male hands. Dyeing silk cloth could be tricky business, and the Venetian state conducted careful tests of novel New World dyestuffs such as cochineal before allowing their use.

Cotton Cotton is a vegetable fiber, essentially seed hair grown by plants of the Gossypium genus. These require high seasonal temperatures, rainfall of 40 inches or more, and six to eight months’ growing time. This meant Italian cloth-makers had to import cotton from places such as Egypt, Armenia, Damascus, and Cyprus. Cotton’s quality was directly related to the length of the natural fibers, from a half inch to two inches. Production began with separating the fibers from the seeds, though most imported cotton was processed at least this far. Fiber bolls were beaten or treated with a vibrating bow that opened them up and began separating individual fibers. Skilled urban men or women carried this out between two and five times. Cleaned of sand, the fibers were then carded or raked with two parallel spiked boards to straighten the fibers, which were then twisted into thick thread. Drawing these out and twisting them into longer and thicker yarn was accomplished by rural women

Economics and Work: Clothmaking

in their homes, usually using a spinning wheel. Also contracted out was warping, which attached standardized parallel individual yarn lengths to a weaver’s loom frame. A trained male weaver then wove the weft, the perpendicular threads that interlocked with the warp and, if desired, created the cloth’s patterns. After bleaching with wood ash and lime, and then sun-drying for 8 to 16 weeks, either the yarn or the woven cloth was dyed. The dyed cloth was washed to even the color and then dried for several weeks before being napped or sheared if it was to be a brushed or smooth fine fabric. The fifteenth century seems to have been the heyday of cotton production, when Milan had some 2,000 weavers and another 4,000 cotton workers, and Venice had perhaps 5,000 to 6,000 weavers. The sixteenth century saw production and export plummet, so that following a Venetian warehouse fire in 1530 the guild simply dissolved.

Wool Renaissance-era Italian wool had many sources, including England, Spain, and the Neapolitan Kingdom. Quality depended on length of the fleece fibers (staple), the breed of sheep, and where on the body the wool originated (the more exposed the worse). Once sheared the wool was washed several times to remove dirt and body oils (lanolin). Long staple fibers were straightened and aligned with long-toothed combs, while short-stapled wool was carded using spiked brush-like tools. Short-staple remained separated but balled up and unaligned, waiting for the spinner to tease out and twist threads more or less tightly as directed, depositing them on the wheel’s spindle. There were many types and qualities of wool weave, from light to heavy, rough to finely finished, or mixed with other fibers. Either the yarn or the finished cloth could be dyed, a process that could take several weeks. Though wool export sustained many Italian civic economies early in the Renaissance era, by the later sixteenth century northern European competition greatly undermined Italy’s wool economy.

Linen Like cotton, linen is made of vegetable fibers. Flax grew readily along river banks, and most linen was produced in the countryside for local use. The woody stems of the flax plant are made of long fibers that line up end-to-end, and have a natural strength and luster. Difficult to dye, linen may retain its brown to gray color or be bleached in the sun. The stalks were combed to remove leaves and separate fibers, and then set in water or the open air to rot. This separated the inner from outer fibers, but could not last too long or the useful fibers would weaken. Beating

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the moist fibers further loosened and separated them, and a final combing straightened and aligned the fibers while removing any residual woody material. As with other fibers, the material was teased and spun to make thread for weaving. Weavers were also largely rural, with only a couple of dozen calling Florence home in the later 1400s. While linen was usually used for utilitarian purposes, including towels, bedclothes, and undergarments, carefully bleached and finished cloth was stitched or embroidered by nuns and used on church altars or sold as luxury items. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Imported Goods, Sources of; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Dyes and Dyestuffs; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Social Status and Clothing; Sumptuary Laws FURTHER READING Davids, Karel, Bert de Munck, eds. Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Huang, Angela Ling. Textiles and the Medieval Economy. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014. Lanaro, Paola, ed. At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland (1400–1800). Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2006. Mazzaoui, Maureen. The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Molà, Luca. The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

COINS, COINAGE, AND MONEY By the Renaissance era, Italy’s commercial economy was based upon money. ­International bankers and merchants, popes and bishops, lay lords, small farmers, guildsmen, artists, mercenary soldiers, and beggars all relied on cash or accounts expressed in monetary terms. Dowries, bequests in wills, wages, rents, wholesale and retail prices, gifts to the Church, fines, loans, debts, alms, and fees for service were matters of money promised, owed, paid, or collected. Minting money had originally been an Imperial monopoly, but many Italian authorities had acquired the right by the 1350s. Actual cash was in coin form, either silver or gold or some mix or precious and base metals. The Carolingians (750–c. 950) had adopted and passed along a variation on the Classical Roman monetary system, and Italian cities and states adapted it. Each minted a variety of coins whose value was expected

Economics and Work: Coins, Coinage, and Money

to reflect their metal content, which could fluctuate unpredictably. International merchants and money-changers had to keep abreast of such changes for literally dozens of cities and non-Italian states. In addition, certain monetary values were strictly for accounting purposes (money of account) and were not the face value of actual minted coins. This landscape was confusing and shifting, and required a sharp mind to navigate it. The Carolingian and related monetary systems were based upon one real and two imagined silver coins: the real silver penny, denarius, or denaro; the solidus, soldo, or shilling; and the pound, libra, or lira. A pound of silver yielded 240 denarii, and 12 denarii amounted to a soldo; 20 soldi constituted a lira. Though Charlemagne and later emperors minted the gold augustale, Italian mints produced gold coins only from 1252, when Florence began minting the gold florin and Genoa the genovino (later the ducat or florin); Venice followed in 1284 with its gold ducat. Each of these weighed approximately 3.55 grams, a standard that needed to be maintained so that foreign trade partners would readily accept the coins. Silver coins, on the other hand, were generally used locally, so their purity was less an issue. The value of both silver and gold fluctuated with supply, demand, and other economic factors. In general, silver dropped in value relative to gold (nominal debasement); and silver coins dropped even more as they were diluted with copper or other base metals, a process called physical debasement. The florin was set in 1252 at the value of one pound of silver (lira), but by the 1450s the florin was worth between 4 and 5 lire and a half-century later 7 or more lire. The gold ducat, also adopted by Milan and Rome, followed a similar pattern, so that by 1600 the Venetian ducat was worth 10 lire. Briefly, silver coinage lost its value relative to gold, so that those with florins could buy more silver coins—and goods—over time. Conversely, poorer people who had silver coins saw their value drop in the long run. Since the value of a florin or ducat in lire could rise or fall even in a matter of weeks, long-term contracts often not only stated monetary amounts in florins or ducats but also specified the current value of the gold coin in lire-soldi-denari. When the parties settled up, this original amount would be due. Silver coinage varied over time and among the major city-states. Where the denaro had long been the only silver coin, it disappeared as its value fell. The quattrino, or four-denari coin, was about as small as any Renaissance-era coin got (though fourteenth-century Siena used the denaro). They were made of copper with enough silver to make them appear dull silver, an alloy called billon. At various times Venice minted a silver soldino worth 12 denari, a two-soldo gazzeta, a grosso worth 32 denari and a half-grosso, and a ten-soldo marcello. The first silver lira came from Venice in 1472. Since the coin displayed a realistic image of the doge for the first time, it was nicknamed a testone, from testa (“head”). Milan, Savoy, and Genoa followed with silver testoni weighing half again as much as Venice’s.

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In the sixteenth century, governments minted large silver scudi (“shields”), influenced by the French écu and Spanish escudo, which were circulating thanks to the Italian Wars. Other foreign coins once limited to border areas or banks included the Tyrolian guildiner, Bohemian thaler, and Spanish pieces of eight. By the 1550s Habsburg Milan hosted around 40 different types of coins. In Florence, Duke Alessandro introduced the gold scudo in 1533, and in 1537 Duke Cosimo had all gold coins melted down, to be replaced by his new scudi. He was making the point that Florence’s coinage was really his coinage: in 1539 he introduced the silver Cosimo, a half-testone worth 1 lira.

Insulting Coinage The right to mint coins was a privilege medieval emperors granted to cities. Coins such as Florentine florins or Venetian ducats displayed patriotic images. When Florence and Pisa went to war, they mocked each other by openly counterfeiting the other’s coinage outside the defenders’ city walls. In May 1363, Florentines minted a full run of Pisan coins; months later victorious Pisa retaliated by minting “Florentine” florins featuring the Pisan Virgin Mary and eagle, which held Florence’s lion (Marzocco) in its talons. Ultimate victory went to Florence, whose St. John trod on a rabbit and carried the chains guarding conquered Porto Pisano.

Many problems dogged Italian coins and their use. Foreign governments and counterfeiters created fakes—especially florins and ducats—that undermined the value of authentic pieces. The penalty was usually death. Cities underwent periods when coins were simply scarce, despite their importance to internal trade. In Florence the mint created coins when individuals brought in silver or gold to be melted down and returned as coins. When this supply dropped, circulating coinage could drop as well, especially as fairly pure silver coins were removed from the market in favor of billon. The hoarding and melting down of coins was known as culling, and in 1393 Venetian nobleman and culler Leonardo Gradenigo was sentenced to loss of his two eyes and right hand, and banishment. Criminals also “sweated” coins of their silver by bathing them in mercury, and clipped edges of gold and silver pieces. Finally, even the personnel at the various mints had to be trusted not to clip, steal, or unofficially debase coins. See also: Arts: Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Economics and Work: Accounting; Banks and Banking; Credit and Loans; Wages and Prices; Politics and Warfare: Crime and Punishments; Science and Technology: Metallurgy

Economics and Work: Construction, Building FURTHER READING Caferro, William. “Honor and Insult: Military Rituals in Late Medieval Tuscany.” In Samuel K. Cohn, ed. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013, pp. 183–210. Cipolla. Carlo. Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Stahl, Alan M. Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

CONSTRUCTION, BUILDING When a painter is given credit for a painting, it is because he imagined it, designed it, prepared all the materials, and applied them given his highest level of skill. When other hands are apparent on the wall or panel, the phrase “with workshop” or “workshop of . . .” often appears on the caption. When an architect is credited with a building, it is really just recognition that he laid out a design that others followed—however brilliant the design. In some cases he oversaw construction and ordered alterations if the occasions arose. In the case of Filippo Brunelleschi’s providing the cathedral of Florence with its iconic dome, he even designed the cranes and other tools that made the construction possible. In no way, however, can one say that he “built” the structure. In the case of the Duomo’s dome, that distinction fell to about 300 hard-working, ill-paid, and sometimes wounded laborers and their bosses. Some possessed exquisite skills and trained others, while many were merely human machines of legs and arms connected by strong backs. These latter felled the trees for scaffolding timbers; carried water; mixed mortar; made and transported bricks; managed animals; quarried and carted stone, and helped it defy gravity by countering its weight with their own on the other side of a pulley’s wheels. Working beside the laborers were the masters and their apprentices. These carpenters, woodcarvers, bricklayers, masons, sculptors, metal-smiths, glaziers, and other craftsmen applied their expertise to the materials on the site and directed their placement in the structure itself. Over both groups were site managers who made sure that everyone was occupied and doing what was expected. They oversaw the flow of materials onto the site and into the structure, making sure that nothing ran out. Their concern for safety ensured that they tested equipment and guarded against overloading it, which was easy to do with bricks and stone. They also had a surgeon on call to bind wounds and set broken limbs, and kept track of each worker’s daily work record. The crews were paid by the foreman and clerk of the Cathedral works at end of the day on Saturdays,

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and had Sundays free for rest and worship. The skilled craftsmen belonged to guilds whose regulations guided their practices, though a project as grand as this—it took over 49  years (1420–1469)—imposed its own norms. They brought their own tools and food to the site, though hot meals appeared in 1426. Despite the battalions of workers engaged, Renaissanceera society viewed the architect as the man who made it all happen, and many would have credited the patron who hired him. The culture was much more willing to give credit to the intellectual achievement in matters architectural than to the manual labor that necessarily brought the ideas to fruition. It was an old pre-Marxist bias that went Florence’s Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore was back to the Greek and Romans. begun in 1296 under the direction of Arnolfo di The revival of the architectural Cambio. Designed for a huge dome, a feasible design emerged only in 1420. Sculptor and architect work by Roman architect VitFilippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) created an ruvius reinforced this attitude. ingenious double-dome system with wooden and The many Renaissance veriron chains, and work was completed in 1469. sions of his books by practicing The exterior is faced with marble from across architects such as Leonbattista Tuscany, and the structure measures 153 meters long, 90 meters at the transepts, and the dome’s Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio, and top 114.5 meters from the ground. (Corel) Andrea Palladio also privileged the mental and aesthetic elements over the actual construction. Yet it was not the idea but the structures themselves that lent magnificence to Palladio’s Brenta Valley or the streets of Rome or Florence. Much construction work of the period was not new, from the ground up, but like adding the cathedral dome, a process of extending, or removing some old feature and replacing it, as at St. Peter’s in Rome, or of consolidating existing structures, as in many Florentine palazzi. The Palazzo Medici in Florence replaced some

Economics and Work: Construction, Building

20 buildings and shops. Other projects involved repairing or renovating older buildings. Sometimes this was done, so the building could serve other or additional purposes: a hunting lodge or small castle in the country became a villa. In monarchies, new rulers often sought to put their stamps on their families’ built spaces, as in the Paolina and more famous Sistine chapels in the Vatican. Florence’s Brunelleschi designed the new Pazzi family chapel at Santa Croce and renovated the interiors of Santo Spirito and the Medici church of San Lorenzo. Or rather, he provided the revolutionary designs carried out by the men who performed the labor. In Rome, the construction industry was second only to the cloth and clothing industries in the number it employed. In 1526, on the eve of the hugely destructive Sack of Rome, it utilized 16% of adult workers. Goldthwaite has estimated that 25% of Florence’s guildsmen belonged to the construction trades, and that they were the city’s fastest-growing sector. When the Strozzi family in Florence built its famous palazzo beginning in 1489, during the first 600 days they employed 89 stonecutters. A later generation’s lack of funds and interest left the original project incomplete. Construction, of course, also included all of the finishing work required, whether on villa or church. Venice’s patrician Ca d’Oro (Golden House) palazzo employed workers in 64 different crafts. These included plasterers, painters, gilders, weavers of draperies, tilers, cabinetmakers, intarsia artists, woodcarvers, glassmakers, glaziers, and metal-smiths. The Middle Ages are known for its castles, cathedrals, and city halls and walls. Yet, the Renaissance era contributed enormously to Italian cityscapes. Between 1350 and 1600 major churches included Florence’s Duomo, Rome’s St. Peter’s, and Milan’s Cathedral. Every city gained many major patrician palazzi and monarchical capitals noble palaces. Italy’s countryside was dotted with villas both modest and grand, and outside cities grew up great fortresses with low, sloped walls and gun platforms for artillery. Oh the shovel-ready jobs these provided. See also: Arts: Antiquity, Cult of; Economics and Work: Apprentices; Book Printing and Sales; Guilds; Families: Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Palazzi; Villas; Water; Politics and Warfare: City Halls; Fortresses and Fortifications; Religion and Beliefs: Churches; Science and Technology: Machines and Engines; Tools FURTHER READING Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Rev. ed. Translated by Neil Leach and Robert Taverner. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. King, Ross. Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Palladio, Andrea. The Four Books on Architecture (1570). Translated by Richard Schofield and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pepper, Simon, and Nicholas Adams. Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Tronzo, William, ed. St. Peter’s in the Vatican. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

CREDIT AND LOANS Despite the fact that a large percentage of economic transactions in Renaissance-era Italy were in kind, the economy was based on money. Values of raw materials, finished products, labor, rents, donations, and many other economic goods were understood and expressed in monetary terms. An exchange on credit was one in which the good or service was provided but payment was delayed by a set time. When a lender made a loan, he provided the borrower with a sum of cash in return for the promise of future payment of the sum. The borrower often had to provide the lender with the pledge of something of roughly equal value to the amount loaned, such as real estate or jewelry, to be taken should the borrower be unable to repay the sum due on time. This collateral made lending money rather safe; loans without collateral were much riskier. A pawn occurred when the collateral was handed over to the lender for safe-keeping until the debt came due or was paid off. Since both credit transactions and loans were forms of contracts, failure to live up to the terms could result in legal actions and imprisonment for debt. By the mid-fourteenth century most forms of borrowing against the future were well developed and very common across Italy. Those who extended credit were usually people who sold raw materials or wholesale or retail goods. Those who provided services also routinely provided their labor with an agreement for future payment. Purchases on credit were routinely made by people at all levels of society, from kings and popes to urban laborers and peasants. Landowners needed credit for purchasing more land, for buying expensive capital such as new buildings, plows, vines and trees, livestock, and annual seeds. Peasants and landowners alike relied on sale of the harvest to repay creditors. Wealthy landowners often extended credit to their peasants or laborers, providing food, agricultural implements, seed, or other necessary materials against future repayment at harvest. Printers received wholesale paper on credit; cloth merchants obtained wool on credit; and spice merchants extended credit to grocers and apothecaries. Small businesses gave credit to customers, taking care to note every detail of the transaction. While cash sales were rarely recorded, those on

Economics and Work: Credit and Loans

credit filled account books. Debts for credit could also be exchanged: if Giovanni owed Luca 11 florins, and Luca owed Marco 10 florins, then Luca could “pay” Marco by passing Giovanni’s larger debt to Marco. Credit worthiness was the key: if both Giovanni and Luca were businessmen of good repute, or property owners, or otherwise well off, then Marco could feel safe in extending credit to Luca and trust that Giovanni was good for the full sum he owed. Poorer folk were clearly at a disadvantage in obtaining credit, and strangers had little chance at all. Credit might be given to these by extending payments due, such as rent. Powerful men made credit a part of their patron/client relationships, extending credit to those who supported them or offering credit to those who promised to do so. Loans of cash were not quite as common, but many of the same elements applied. Kings and other lords borrowed cash to pay everyone from tailors to mercenary armies. Large-scale merchants borrowed cash when abroad rather than carrying large amounts with them while traveling. In Rome a Genoese merchant would borrow the necessary cash, carry out his transactions, and have his partners back home either repay or extend credit to the Roman lender’s branch in Genoa. By the Renaissance banks were playing this intermediary role. Locally, small businesses that handled cash would loan it, as did notaries, widows, landowners, Jews, clergy, institutions such as hospitals, and even well-off peasants. Bosses made loans to workers as advances on their wages so they could pay their regular or extraordinary bills. According to a study of small-scale merchants in Prato, near Florence, a single apothecary made 933 loans over 14 years in the later 1300s. It also found that 95% of loan debts were paid off, usually within days or even hours. Most small loans were secured with pawned collateral, often in the form of a gold florin worth far more than the debt. Absent collateral, the transaction might be witnessed by two or three neighbors, whose names the lender would record. In a village this was often the only kind of record made of loans, unless the local priest was willing and able to write down the details. Smaller loans were often guaranteed by the pledge of a reputable third party, who essentially agreed to assume the debt if the borrower defaulted. Larger loans with payment due in months or years might be recorded by a notary. Both credit and cash loans were very important elements of the Italian economy, though most small deals were made between family members, neighbors, friends, renters, business associates, and other people known well to each other. Honor played a role as well, as sustained debt was a blot on one’s reputation. Nonetheless, debtors’ prisons rarely lacked inmates. The Council of Vienne (1311–1312) expressly forbade Christians to charge interest on borrowed money (usury), and Dante reserved a place in hell for usurers. Nonetheless, lenders took the spiritual risk and often embedded hidden interest by having the repayment in another currency or simply lending 9 florins and recording and collecting 10 in repayment. Penalties for late repayment could also be used to

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hide interest: if the reasonable repayment date was the 15th the agreement might be for the first, with the two-week “penalty” covering the agreed-upon lending fee. Jews were not subject to Christian religious law, and their willingness to lend at interest made them both necessary and despised in many communities. See also: Economics and Work: Accounting; Banks and Banking; Mezzadria; Notaries; Retail Selling; Wages and Prices; Family and Gender: Families, Laboring Class; Housing and Community: Villages and Village Life FURTHER READING Fontaine, Laurence. The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Machette, Ann. “Credit and Credibility: Used Goods and Social Relations in Sixteenth-Century Florence.” In Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, eds. The Material Renaissance. New York: Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 226–41. Shaw, James, and Evelyn Welch. Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence: The “Speziale al giglio” in 1494. New York: Rodopi, 2011. Smail, Daniel Lord. Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Welch, Evelyn. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

GRAIN TRADE For most Renaissance-era Italians, grains provided an estimated 50% to 75% of their daily caloric intake. Wheat was at the top of the carbohydrate-rich list, which in Italy included spelt, millet, rice, barley, buckwheat, rye, and oats. Pure white wheat bread was a luxury food, as most producers or growers considered it a cash crop necessary to sell at market. Peasants used other grains to extend wheat flour when it was available, or in forms other than bread, including porridge, pancakes, gruel, dumplings, and as a soup thickener. Maize or corn came to Italy from the New World after 1493, but was considered little more than an animal feed until the seventeenth century. Rice was initially cultivated in Spain and the Balearic Islands, arriving in northern Italy as plants in the fifteenth century. It grew well in the wet lowlands from the Po Valley to Sicily, but served as a food for the poor and during famines, and its flour was mixed with those of other grains as an extender. Buckwheat’s origins were north of the Alps, and buckwheat had to be specially prepared for human consumption in mush and “gray polenta.” Millet was another poor person’s grain, but it had the advantage of a long shelf-life: up to ten years if

Economics and Work: Grain Trade

kept from sprouting. Sixteenth-century Venice kept large stores of millet, as well as wheat, against famine, war, or isolation due to plague. Because wheat had a largely urban demand, and could command healthy prices, there was an Italian market for imported wheat that stretched from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance era. By the mid-1300s merchants from Florence, Venice, Siena, and Genoa regularly imported wheat from the Mediterranean’s major fields in Apulia, Sicily, and to a lesser extent, North Africa. Unlike Rome, Milan, or Naples, none of these cities had a hinterland, or contado, in which wheat could be produced in sufficient quantity. Wheat was temperamental to grow, but could be stored for fairly long periods in well-built granaries or below deck in seagoing ships. The demand of urban merchants and customers kept wheat’s price buoyed, but its yield in the field was very low compared with modern hybrids. Competition, then, could be fierce. Demand for all cereal grains grew as post–Black Death population levels slowly recovered, especially in cities. Arguably, Florentine expansion into Tuscany from the later 1300s was due to a desire to control a wheat-growing hinterland, despite generally poor regional wheat-growing conditions. Its acquisitions of Pisa in 1406 and Livorno (Leghorn) and Porto Pisano in 1421 were in part to insure that the city upriver would have unimpeded access to seaborne imports. Venice’s creation of its mainland Terraferma empire in the Veneto region served a similar purpose. Even so, great roundships—averaging 100 to 540 tons each— plied the peninsula’s east and west coasts loaded with cargo from grain-rich Naples or Palermo, or any of the 11 depots along the Sicilian coast. Apulian ports of Manfredonia, Trani, and Foggia regularly sent out loaded ships to Naples, Ragusa, and Venice. In the sixteenth century Genoa annually imported some 8,000 tons of wheat, the equivalent of two dozen medium shiploads. In the mid-sixteenth century, urban populations increased and demand outstripped Italian supply, which meant that wheat began to arrive from the eastern Mediterranean, southeastern Europe, and even Baltic regions. In 1554 alone, Italian bottoms are said to have carried 40,320 tons of Egyptian wheat, barley, and beans. This was despite the Turkish Sultan’s ban on sales to Italians. His ban on Egyptian sales may have been due to Turkish (Anatolian) surpluses from 1551, which he happily dumped on Italian markets. In 1551, Venice and Genoa imported some 28,000 tons of Anatolian wheat. That amounts to 94 shiploads at an average of 300 tons per vessel. Greater efficiencies were to be had from larger cargo capacities, so merchant ships rated at 600 tons soon appeared in Italian ports. European wheat also reached a price level that made its transport profitable. From the 1450s Genoa had imported French wheat that had been shipped down the Rhône River to Marseilles. The grain from Spain stayed mainly on the plains surrounding the burgeoning cities north of Naples, with whose wheat it competed.

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In 1527, grain ships from Flanders and England made port in Venice, and a dozen years later 16 vessels left Antwerp loaded with wheat bound for granaries in Genoa, Florence, and Lucca. By the 1540s many Tuscan towns were being supplied from Flanders. From the 1560s to 1600 and beyond, famine or near-famine conditions across Italy put heavy strains on grain supplies and imports. From 1586 even normally dry Sicily suffered heavy rainfalls that ruined crops. In northern ports, including Danzig and Hamburg, Florentine agents of both the Medici grand dukes and independent merchants succeeded in attracting grain southward. As an aid, the Medici made Livorno a free port that charged no taxes on commercial exchanges. Wheat was sold retail as flour and in the grain, which had a much longer shelf life. Guild bakers sold bread, but they also baked loaves of dough brought to them. When supplies were strained or drained by war or famine, civic or royal governments relied upon stored grain to feed not only the poor but everyone else as well. Florence’s famous church of Or San Michele was a communal granary during the Black Death; in 1602 Venice reported 44 state grain warehouses. See also: Economics and Work: Retail Selling; Trade, Seaborne; Trade Routes, Overland; Food and Drink: Bread; Grains and the Wheat Market; Nutrition: A Modern Assessment; Housing and Community: Poor, Aid to; Villages and Village Life; Politics and Warfare: Contado and Subject Towns; Science and Technology: Agriculture and Agronomy; Ships and Shipbuilding FURTHER READING Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 vols. New York: Harper Collins, 1972. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Tielhof, Milja. The Mother of All Trades: The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries. Boston: Brill, 2002. Tracy, James D. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

GUILDS The Renaissance-era Italian guild was an association of professionals (lawyers, physicians, bankers), artisans (bakers, tailors, masons, cloth dyers), merchants (wool cloth, silk clothing), retailers (apothecaries, grocers, fishmongers), or ­service providers (notaries, barbers, innkeepers). The guild—societas, arte, universitas— had its roots in Roman law and its revival in twelfth-century cities. Each was a

Economics and Work: Guilds

club of masters that protected the interests of all members by regulating apprentice training, entry into the local market, and activity in it (product or service quality, pricing, technology, wages, working conditions). Civic constitutions formally recognized guilds and registered their statutes and regulations. In Florence, the communal government directly represented the guilds, requiring membership for political position. Only the Perugian Bankers and Merchants guilds had places on their city’s ruling priorate, dominating all other guilds in power and prestige. In other cities, guilds vied with governments for political and economic power. Guild mem- The Tailor, painted by Venetian G. B. Moroni bers appeared together for civic (ca. 1523–1578), ca. 1565, displays the professional gatherings and processions, and demeanor sought by guildsmen, especially in market centers such as Venice or Florence. His clothing guaranteed Christian burial of is impeccably up to date and clean, his trousers dead members and support for fashionably slashed to reveal a contrasting fabric their families. In most cities and beneath. He sports a beard of a contemporary cut many towns guilds formed a ma- and looks at the artist/customer with an eye of confidence and willingness to please. Oil on canvas. trix within which economic life (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) was organized. Neapolitan guilds appeared throughout Il Regno, and were the means by which royal and baronial governments controlled local economies. Political authorities had to approve all guild activities, and guilds removed themselves from any political participation. Like guilds everywhere, Neapolitan guilds held tribunals to arbitrate disputes and punish fraud and infractions of rules. State courts, however, had appellate jurisdiction and could overturn their decisions. Guilds could be forced to enroll new masters, or masters to employ more workers to remedy unemployment. Guilds of food suppliers, preparers, and retailers were strictly regulated by feudal or royal orders when provisions were low. In Naples itself, there were as many as 350 guilds, many of which specifically served the needs of the royal or vice-regal court.

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Numbers of guilds tended to expand in any given area. Neapolitan King Ferrante founded a new silkmakers guild in 1465; and Genoese dry pasta sellers gained a guild in 1574. In 1403, 74 guilds represented Genoa’s economic interests; 82 did by 1550. Genoese male and female fruiterers split, as did tavern-keepers and innkeepers, and local spice retailers and apothecaries. Elsewhere in the sixteenth century, guilds of barbers and surgeons tended to part company, as did grocers and apothecaries, while new technologies such as printing added guilds of papermakers, printers, and booksellers. Rome’s guilds came into their own only in the fifteenth century. They operated under the eyes of Rome’s civic government located on the Campidoglio (Capitoline Hill), where guild officials held tribunals. They had no political power and were often filled with non-Roman “foreigners”: Lombards and Florentines as well as Germans, French, English, and Spaniards. Guilds were a means of keeping an eye on these outsiders, who in turn often benefited from guild loans, dowries, or burial benefits. The major exception was the cattle breeders guild, which consisted of nobles from the nearby Campania region. Venice was a city controlled by the interests of great international merchants who had no guild. Here, too, guilds served many typical functions but were largely apolitical, having been banned from political participation in 1297. Nearly 100 existed in 1600, half of which were retailers and three of which dealt with different types of fur. Large guilds could have as many as 1,000 members, while an average was closer to 250. By the fourteenth century, each guild had a confraternity, or scuola, attached, making institutional the expected religious side of city residence. Each guild had its chapel and altar, where brothers gathered to pray for past and current members. Income to support worship, banners for processions, and burial of indigent brothers came from fees, dues, fines, and income from donated properties. The government’s Office of Justice oversaw guild activities, and in 1539 each guild was required to provide naval reserve oarsmen for state galleys. Though Venice banned guilds from participation in government, Florence organized its government as a federation of 7 Greater and 14 Lesser guilds. The major guilds were cloth importers, bankers, physicians and spicers, furriers, judges and notaries, cloth retailers, and silk makers. Their fourteenth-century guildhalls were impressive additions to the city’s landscape. Woolworkers who had been hit hard by plague epidemics rioted and temporarily won guild status in the Ciompi Revolt (1378–82). In 1382 oligarchic reaction—led by butchers—was swift and brutal; the Ciompi losing their new guilds and Lesser guilds as a whole losing their political power. In 1532 the new Medici duke erased all distinctions among Florentine guilds and in 1534 consolidated them all under his growing bureaucracy.

Economics and Work: Guilds

Trademarks Rooted in Roman and medieval precedents, Renaissance-era producers and merchants affixed their specific and often registered symbols to a wide range of goods. For some the local guild’s hallmark sufficed. Merchants marked their bales, boxes, barrels, and other containers; brick makers stamped and masons carved theirs; and cities required that bolts of cloth have the manufacturer’s as well as the guild’s marks attached to the edge of each bolt. By the fourteenth century paper had watermarks and printers affixed their logos to title pages and forgers forged them. This practice led to branding and painters signing their works. Many cities recognized the need for a central commercial court that did not represent a single guild or even the interests of the city government. These emerged as the Mercanzia in Florence, Merchants’ Forum in Bologna, and Milanese Merchants’ Consuls. Staffed by representatives from at least the major guilds, they judged disputes between members of guilds, between guilds, or between the city and a guild. The Mercanzia often had its own building. Siena’s, opened in 1309, featured upscale retail shops on the ground floor and rooms for judicial business on the floor above, a layout shared with many northern Italian Mercanzia halls. See also: Arts: Painters and Their Workshops; Economics and Work: Apprentices; Retail Selling; Wages and Prices; Politics and Warfare: Republics; Recreation and Social Customs: Civic Festivals; Religion and Beliefs: Confraternities FURTHER READING Astarita, Tommaso. “Charity Begins at Home: Community, Identity, and Solidarity in the Naples Guilds.” Italian History and Culture 9 (2003): 7–30. Astorri, Antonella, and David Friedman. “The Florentine Mercanzia and Its Palace.” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 10 (2005): 11–68. Cohen, Elizabeth S. “Miscarriages of Apothecary Justice: Un-Separate Spaces of Work and Family in Early Modern Rome.” Renaissance Studies 21 (2007): 480–504. Franceschi, Franco. “The Rituals of the Guilds: Examples from Tuscan Cities.” In Samuel K. Cohn, ed. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013, pp. 65–92. Guenzi, Alberto, Paola Massa, and Fausto Piola Caselli, eds. Guilds, Markets, and Work Regulations in Italy, 16th-19th Centuries. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1998. MacKenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250-c.1650. London: Barnes and Noble Books, 1987.

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IMPORTED GOODS, SOURCES OF Italy’s geographical position, commercial infrastructure, and mercantile spirit sustained by the notion that business and profit were good made the states on the peninsula economic powerhouses in Europe and the Mediterranean. By the fourteenth century, goods were flowing into, out of, and through the peninsula via the ports of Venice, Naples, Bari, Ancona, Genoa, Livorno, Palermo, and Messina, and along roads connecting urban centers such as Florence, Rome, Turin, and Milan. Ships sailed from the peninsula in every direction and returned laden with foreign goods; Venice and Genoa maintained colonies and trading posts in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Seas. For many years Italians essentially monopolized trade with eastern Mediterranean Muslims, Byzantine Greeks, and merchantmen and caravans from points further east. Much of what arrived at Venetian docks quickly moved north across the Alps, or to French or Spanish ports, but a good deal was left behind to enrich the accounts of local merchants and the lives of well-off Italians. Foodstuffs flowed into Italy from all directions. Grain supplements during periods of shortage came from North Africa, Spain, Hungary, Turkey, Greece, and even Poland. During Lent the demand for fish rose, leading to imports of Newfoundland salted cod from England, smoked and salted herring from the Baltic, and fresh catches that arrived at Naples and Genoa in French and Catalan boats. Even Russian caviar appeared on Italian tables. Certain palates preferred non-Italian wines, which flowed in from France, Spain, and Greece. Certain hardy fruits and vegetables such as melons and citrus fruits arrived from Islamic ports, along with palm dates and other exotics. There were no real lines between spices and a wide range of medicinal “simples,” or ingredients. Turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, ginger, and a host of other fragrant barks, flowers, seeds, leaves, and roots were sold wholesale in Islamic ports, having been transported by ship or caravan from their places of origin in Asia, Africa, or the Indian Ocean. Sugar, too, was both food and medicine. It had its roots in the East, but Spanish and Portuguese plantations such as Madeira produced it less expensively, opening the door to Caribbean sugar works. Contact with the Americas brought new edibles such as corn (maize) and the tomato that could be grown in Italy. American peppers found buyers in Italian shops, but it was South American guaiac wood, or Jesuit bark, that really caught on. It was a remedy for syphilis. Italian apothecaries handled the sweet and the spicy, as well as aromatic woods and incense that arrived from Islamic ports. They also carried painters’ pigments and dyestuffs for turning cloth from drab beige to stunning blues and scarlets. These sometimes traveled long distances, as did the most famous deep blue pigment lapis lazuli. It was also known as ultramarine as it originated “across the

Economics and Work: Imported Goods, Sources of

sea” in Afghanistan and nowhere else. Musk deer oil used as a base for expensive perfumes came from Tibet, and what became the standard for red dye, cochineal, from Mexico. The cloth industry also relied on imported raw silk from eastern ports and wool from many places, including Scotland and England, Flanders, Provence, Spain, the Balkans, Crete, and Turkey. Different breeds of sheep, climatic conditions, and even diets produced wools of varying qualities. This was processed and turned into cloth of varying qualities by expert Italian artisans. Much of this in turn was exported. Italians had stolen the technology of silk-making and made it their own. Their deluxe products were second to none in the West, which meant a continued demand for raw silk, a good deal of which was imported from Islamic ports. Exotic Chinese silks and brocades, like Chinese porcelain, had a strong cachet in Italy, and importers found ready markets. Partially finished silk cloth from eastern looms was also welcome. Since Italians wore fur as accents or garment linings, and since Italy is warm and native furbearing animals did not produce the finest product, much had to be imported from northern climes, as far afield as Russia. Italians were less deft at producing certain decorative cloth items, such as tapestries, most of which had to be imported from Netherlandish artisans, and the beautiful and expensive carpets that appear in so many paintings. These last were produced in Turkey, Egypt, and to a lesser degree in Iran, were shipped from Cairo and Damascus, and were used on tables and hung on walls. Both Spain and the Muslim Mediterranean world provided Italians with high-end leather and leather goods, from shoes to decorative shields to book covers. Both areas also supplied the best ceramic ware, at least until Italians mastered the technique of Valencian lusterware. Milan may have been the center for fine armor and weapons, but lower-end brass objects, especially highly decorated ones, were Mamluk and Turkish specialties. The key here was incising surfaces or incising and filling the grooves with gold or silver to accentuate the pattern, a process known as damascening. Turkish and Egyptian artists were second to none in their skills at applying arabesques, floral designs, Arabic calligraphy, and interlacing. Some European metal products were sent to Cairo or Damascus just for decorating. Muslim artisans produced a range of goods from ewers, buckets, and candlesticks to perfume burners and plates just for the Italian market. See also: Arts: Painting: Media and Techniques; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Book Printing and Sales; Cloth Trade; Grain Trade; Slaves and Slavery; Spice Trade; Trade, Seaborne; Trade Routes, Overland; Fashion and Appearance: Dyes and Dyestuffs; Fabrics, Imported; Gems and Jewelry; Scents and Perfumes; Food and Drink: Foreign Foods; Grains and the Wheat Market; Wines; Science and Technology: Pharmacopeias and Materia Medica

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The World of Renaissance Italy FURTHER READING Bulbeck, David, et al. Southeast Asian Exports since the Fourteenth Century: Cloves, Pepper, Coffee, and Sugar. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Foster, N., and L. Cordell, eds. From Chiles to Chocolate: Foods the Americas Gave to the World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Mack, Rosamond. Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Tracy, James D. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

MANUFACTURING The word manufacture literally means to make with the hands. Unlike today, during the Renaissance era this was literally true. Tools and even machines such as power looms, printing presses, and water mills did much of the repetitive work, but these in turn were built manually—by the human hand. It took the Industrial Revolution to harness the power of steam and the modern age that of fossil fuels and the atom. Nonetheless, during the Renaissance era Italy was Europe’s center for manufactured goods and their distribution. The repetitious process of printing on a press is a clear example of manufacturing. Paper, ink, and lead type were assembled, and the press placed the paper in contact with the inked type. Even so, skilled humans set the type, applied the ink with ink balls, positioned the paper, and used human power to put the two into contact. The process was repetitious, but not automated. Venice was the center for printing, and it also hosted Europe’s largest “manufactory” or factory, the Arsenale. This was the state-controlled shipyard from which uniformly designed and produced galleys slid into the Adriatic and sailed beyond for war and trade. This facility was a prototype of the factory in the modern sense: it gathered skilled workers, materials, and tools, and provided space for production from laying the keel to locking oars and setting the rigging for the sails. Ropes were twined on the long, narrow ropewalk known as the Tana; canvas cloth was sewn into sails; there was even a workshop of makers of breastplates worn in naval battles. Warehouses contained everything a ship needed to go to sea, even wine. Gunpowder had a special shed, but after an explosion in 1569 it was stored outside the facility. Like a printer’s shop, the Arsenale housed repetitious processes, but here was an early example of vertical organization, in which each distinct stage in a very complex program was carried out in one place under one director. This model of state-directed production was never attempted by other Italian rulers, at least not on

Economics and Work: Manufacturing

the scale of the Arsenale. Smaller versions included papal gunpowder production, the duke of Ferrara’s artillery founding, and the several workshops of the Medici Tuscan grand dukes. Venetian glassmaking was certainly a case of manufacturing. With deep medieval roots it was carried out by private firms but rigidly regulated by the state. Like the Arsenale, glassmaking was concentrated, on the island of Murano, but workshop organization was entrepreneurial rather than centrally directed. Each factory trained its workers and carefully guarded its chemical and technical secrets. The state did not need glassware as it did ships, but it was enriched in taxes and reputation by the work produced. It encouraged immigration by trained and skilled craftsmen and sought to stop emigration by Venetian glassworkers. Milan had long been known as the Italian center for the production of fine weapons and armor. Milanese lords certainly encouraged the immigration of German and Swiss artisans, and of course used some of what was produced. Some shops specialized in one or another step in production, while others gathered all of the necessary specialists under one roof. Like Venetian glass, Milan’s metalwork was prized across Europe and throughout the Mediterranean, so there was a constant demand for its products. Also like glassware, some products were plain and utilitarian and easily reproduced, while many orders were for unique articles of great beauty and quality fit for a sultan or the Holy Roman Emperor. After agriculture, cloth manufacturing was Italy’s biggest employer. Cipolla (p. 64) provides a few examples of the dominance of the industry: in 1409 it employed 37% of Verona’s workforce; in 1439, 30% of Como’s; in 1541, 25% of Monza’s; and in 1552, 41% of Florence’s. Most cloth was made from either animal sources—wool and silk—or plant fibers—cotton, linen, and hempen canvas. The journey from source to garment or other product was unique to each type of material, and consisted of many stages. Early stages were tedious and required little skill or judgment. Those who owned the material often “put-out” the raw material to experienced and trustworthy workers who performed the tasks at home. Weaving, dyeing, and other, later processes required skilled workers and equipment that might have been assembled by a single entrepreneur or farmed out to specialists. There were thus many different models of organization and production in the cloth industry at any one time. As with glassmaking and arms manufacturing, there were low-end and luxury fabrics. There was a constant local demand for both cheap and expensive fabrics, and an export market from major Italian cities that suffered from increasing competition during the sixteenth century. Florence, noted for its woolens, could count some 270 workshops around 1500, a number that dropped to 64 in 1537 thanks in part to war and plague. By century’s end, only some 100 workshops were active.

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The line between manufacturing and craft production was both thin and blurry. Yet even a quick overview reveals the variety of businesses and products that fell under the label manufacturing. See also: Arts: Ceramics, Decorative; Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings; Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Clothmaking; Putting-Out System; Housing and Community: Foreign Communities; Politics and Warfare: Arms and Armor; Science and Technology: Glassmaking; Machines and Engines; Metallurgy; Printing; Ships and Shipbuilding; Tools FURTHER READING Cipolla, Carlo. Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1994. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Lanaro, Paola, ed. At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland (1400–1800). Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2006, pp. 143–84. Lane, Frederic Chapin. Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934. Mazzaoui, Maureen. The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Molà, Luca. The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Rosenband, Leonard N., and Thomas Max Safley, eds. The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

MEZZADRIA Mezzadria was a kind of sharecropping arrangement between a landowner and an independent farmer and his family. Essentially, the owner provided the land, equipment, and half the annual seed (or the trees or vines), while the farmer and his family provided half the seed and the necessary agricultural labor. Typically maintenance and repairs to buildings, roads, bridges, and canals also fell to the laborer, who usually lived on the property being leased rather than in a village. After a crop was harvested, it was divided evenly between the two. This was a contractual agreement, often notarized, and its terms were enforceable in local courts. Considered by some modern scholars to have been midway between medieval manorialism and modern capitalism, mezzadria began in Tuscany in the mid-1200s

Economics and Work: Mezzadria

as manorialism and serfdom, to the extent they existed in northern Italy, fell apart under the revival of Roman concepts of landed property ownership, and the rise of a land-owning urban middle class. Since typically contracts lasted only two or three years, it was in both parties’ interests to live up to their obligations, assuming they got along. Presumably mezzadria provided an efficient exploitation of the land and allowed both parties to enjoy a measure of self-sufficiency. But should the laborers prove lazy or thieving the owner could simply not renew the contract. If an owner proved overly demanding or tried to cheat his workers, they could find another landlord, a real threat after the Black Death sharply shrank the labor pool. This labor shortage persisted until the 1470s. Fifteenth-century Siena strove to retain these sharecroppers by protecting them through laws and the courts, and by reducing certain taxes and granting immunity or swift appeals. In some ways there was a thin line between rental and mezzadria arrangements, but there were also important distinctions. Tuscan rental contracts were typically for 29 years. Unlike rent, half of the produce harvested self-adjusted without reference to market conditions, weather, or other external factors. A renter took all the economic risks, hoping that whatever he produced would cover both rent payment and provide food for his table. In good years he could cover the fixed rent with plenty of produce left over to feed his family and have some to take to market. In years of bad or disrupted harvests, or when market prices dropped, renters often fell into debt. They might have had to sell or pawn household goods or vital equipment and purchase seed the following year on credit. Sharecroppers had a certain protection from these events, though half of little was very little. Though one might think of landlords as nobles living on their estates, in mid-fifteenth-century Tuscany fully 75% of those offering mezzadria contracts were city folk, and many of them far from the wealthiest. Florence’s 1427 census shows that two-thirds of taxpayers owned some rural land. Merchants and artisans cobbled together country farms and let them out, though a worker’s cropland could be scattered in several places. The idea was that a single sharecropper would work a single holding, perhaps 100 acres, which would be enough to provide for both parties. Other landowners included rulers, wealthy nobles, monasteries, and bishops with extensive and often scattered holdings. Some of these preferred mezzadria, but half of a major cash crop, such as wheat or wine, was too high a price to pay. For them, hired peasant workers met their needs better, and allowed renters and sharecroppers to supplement their income by hiring themselves out. Studies have shown that in Tuscany, many sharecroppers actually owned land and sold their crops, but served bigger landowners as sharecroppers to provide a hedge against market forces and to put food on their tables. Such farmers could also benefit from borrowing the richer landowner’s farm animals, tools, equipment, and facilities—mills, kilns, winepresses, threshing floors—with or without his consent. Of course, there

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were many variations on classic mezzadria, depending on the region and types of land or crops involved. For example, if land produced both wheat and wine grapes, the farmer might owe annually half of one crop and a fixed cash rent for the other. At the end of a season the parties often relied on a third party to estimate the shares due each. Unless the owner had a rural villa or other storage facilities, the farmer would cart the share to town in the owner’s wagons and the owner would pay the gate toll. If the owner did have a casa di signore—(land)lord’s house—this was often occupied by a paid overseer or administrator who kept an eye on things and reported any problems. The practice of mezzadria spread throughout Tuscany during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and to the surrounding regions of Umbria, Romagna, and the Marches. In the fifteenth century it moved into Emilia, but never penetrated north of the Po, where more traditional forms of land exploitation continued, including renting and limited-scale ownership of smallholds. In Liguria local nobles seized land and introduced manorialism. South of Tuscany and the Marches feudal and manorial practices remained in place alongside renting and smallholding. The strength of mezzadria was also its ultimate weakness. It did not respond to market forces of supply and demand, nor did it encourage innovation in agricultural practice. Almost everywhere sharecropping provided only limited surpluses for sale, which meant that the workers could hardly accumulate any resources to advance their economic position. Only in the Marches did owners and sharecroppers export sizeable quantities of food, in their case to and through Venice. For even large landowners, however, mezzadria did provide a useful hedge against high food prices or low market supplies. Indeed, the first reason to own rural land was to provide for one’s family. See also: Economics and Work: Notaries; Taxes and Public Finance; Family and Gender: Families, Laboring Class; Food and Drink: Foodsellers and Markets; Grains and the Wheat Markets; Housing and Community: Gardens; Villages and Village Life; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Civic Magistracies and Offices; Contado and Subject Towns; Science and Technology: Agriculture and Agronomy; Primary Document: Tuscan Landlords and Peasants: A Mezzadria Contract from Lucca (c. 1350) and a Landowner’s Memorandum (c. 1410) FURTHER READING Balestracci, Duccio. The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Peasant. Translated by Paolo Squattrini and Betsy Merideth. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Money. See Coins, Coinage, and Money

Economics and Work: Notaries

NOTARIES The notary was an indispensable figure in any Renaissance-era Italian community. He was privately trained and licensed by the papacy or Holy Roman Empire to create and preserve a wide range of legally enforceable documents. Rooted in Classical Rome, notaries operated throughout the Middle Ages in Mediterranean Christian societies, but became especially vital and numerous with the adoption of Roman law in much of Italy from the twelfth century. Thirteenth and fourteenth-century “notarial art” handbooks as well as legal studies in the new universities standardized much notarial practice, though local custom dictated particular elements of it. Notarial guilds or colleges tested applicants and carefully monitored practice. Becoming a notary, however, was not a matter of university education but of practical learning from one’s father, as an apprentice, or in special civic schools overseen by the notarial guilds. Notaries were professionals with clearly defined skill sets, including at least basic Latin, but they did not have the status or high incomes of university graduates such as lawyers. Apart from basic competence, the notary’s most important quality was his reputation for honesty and trustworthiness. From peasants to great lords, Italians relied on notaries to draft and preserve every sort of private legal document: marriage offers, dowry arrangements, and contracts with wet nurses, teachers, or masters with whom children were apprenticed; partnership agreements, insurance, contracts for works of art, sales contracts, loans, and deeds of gift; agreements ending disputes, land transfers, tenancy agreements, and last wills and testaments. Sometimes the client presented a written version of terms that the notary would dress up in the necessary legalese and record. Typically the party or parties involved, along with at least two witnesses (seven if a will) first met with the notary and discussed specifics, of which the notary made a rough draft in their presence. In the case of a dispute, this was the most authoritative version of the document. He then added necessary legal terms and customary clauses and preserved this version in his official—and public—record (protocol) book. Legal formalities included dating by year, date, and indiction: specifically where the agreement or terms were made, the list of witnesses, and the notary’s name and certification. If an issue arose, the notary’s written version trumped the testimony of anyone else involved. A notary, of course, could err: important terms could be omitted or recorded incorrectly; necessary legal language could be mangled or omitted; or a document presented to a court could just be a forgery, as signaled by erasures, a second hand, or poor grammar. Clients often requested a copy of the official version for their own records, though this had no legal force. Savvy clients knew to note the name or number of the record book and page number in which the notary had it recorded. Despite their importance, these books remained in their notaries’ hands and with their heirs (often notaries). Public

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archives for these were usually late in developing: Florence in 1569 and the Papal States in 1588. Notaries also served all manner of public officials, institutions, universities, courts, and other bodies. Church and civil courts used notaries to record depositions and court proceedings, or as witnesses in civil cases. The papal curia in Rome enrolled 101 notaries (1507) who had paid for the prestigious position. Guilds relied on notaries to record meetings, judicial proceedings, initiations, and elections. Hospitals, orphanages, and other charitable institutions required notaries to handle supply and employment contracts, land and other gift transfers, and rental agreements. Civic councils or assemblies employed notaries as correspondents with other cities, authors of new laws or changes to existing ones, diplomats to record negotiations, and scribes for the body’s debates. In 1381 Perugia had 108 on its government payroll. Some civic notaries also maintained either official or informal chronicles of their cities, which are especially important to historians. In the fourteenth century notarial interest in local and Roman history was a seedbed for antiquarian interests in Classical literature, history, and artifacts. Their fascination with Classical Latin carried over into their professional work, especially in composing elegant Latin correspondence and official speeches. These Classical interests and activities were vital in shaping early Italian humanism. Florence so valued Classical eloquence that it required its chancellor, essentially its chief public notary, to be a humanist.

Hebrew Notaries Renaissance-era Rome had a long-standing Jewish community. Unlike other, more recently developed subcultures, Roman Jews adapted to the dominant legal culture, especially after the establishment of the Ghetto in 1555. Though they usually used Christian notaries when dealing with Christians, among themselves emerged notaries—usually rabbis—who used Hebrew instead of Latin and exclusively served private needs. Hebrew notaries drew up documents touching marriage, divorce, gifts; contracts for apprenticeships and teaching positions; and inventories after a business sale or death. Sixteenth-century father and son Judah and Isaac Piatelli even created a Hebrew version of the “notarial art.” Notaries were common throughout Italian societies. One Sienese peasant utilized around 30 over time, and rural-dwelling notaries were often the only literate village people apart from the priest. In Florence in 1427 there was one notary for every 125 people. It was the city’s most frequently listed profession. Across Italy notarial guilds were among the largest and most powerful, and were often joined with judges or lawyers. Notaries on retainer for governments, the Church, or public bodies, or

Economics and Work: Putting-Out System

institutions made steady, if not, impressive salaries that they could augment with service to private parties. Genoese and Venetian notaries served their homelands’ colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Seas, and some worked as secretaries to lords or other important men. Some Venetian notaries served as bureaucrats in its Terraferma (land empire). More prosaically, since they had command of Latin, many notaries had sidelines as grammar school or notarial school teachers. See also: Economics and Work: Antiquity, Cult of; Apprentices; Guilds; Family and Gender: Dowries; Espousal and Wedding; Inheritance; Last Wills and Testaments; Housing and Community: Jewish Communities; Plague; Villages and Village Life; Politics and Warfare: Ambassadors and Diplomacy; Civic Magistracies and Offices; Urban Councils and Assemblies FURTHER READING Ago, Renata. “Enforcing Agreements: Notaries and Courts in Early Modern Rome.” Continuity and Change 14 (1999): 191–206. Faulhaber, Charles B. “The Summa Dictaminis of Guido Faba.” In James J. Murphy, ed. Medieval Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Medieval Rhetoric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, pp. 85–111. Kedar, Benjamin Z. “The Genoese Notaries of 1382: The Anatomy of an Urban Occupational Group.” In Harry Miskimin, David Herlihy, and Abraham Udovitch, eds. The Medieval City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977, pp. 73–94. Martines, Lauro. Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. Nussdorfer, Laurie. Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Wray, Shona Kelly. Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

Overland Trade Routes. See Trade Routes, Overland Prices. See Wages and Prices Public Finance. See Taxes and Public Finance

PUTTING-OUT SYSTEM The Industrial Revolution began the concentration of repetitive production activities in mill towns and factories. Before the eighteenth century large-scale facilities for manufacturing dotted the landscape, but multistage processes often had phases

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that could be subcontracted to men, women, and even children who remained where they lived, worked when they had the time, and earned a piece-rate wage to supplement other income. A simple example was rural women who served as wet nurses to upper-class urban women’s infants. The husbands of both made the contract according to which the new parent’s child would be well fed and cared for in exchange for a set fee per month. The lactating country woman may have lost her own child or farmed her off to a neighbor to feed while she earned precious cash. The most typical use of putting-out, however, was in the many stages of both wool and silk cloth production. Wool merchants purchased raw wool from wholesalers in England, Spain, and Sicily and had it shipped to northern Italian ports, including Venice and those of Florence. The merchant either sold it to a cloth manufacturer or managed its production himself. In the later 1300s merchant Francesco Datini of Florence and Prato had a facility in Prato that employed ten men, and he may have kept as many as 1,000 people in the area around Prato occupied with various stages of production. His copious records reveal that he provided tools, the raw wool, and an advance on wages. When finished with their stage, workers were provided with the remainder of their agreed-upon wage. After washing, wool was put out to be carded and combed and spun into thread, tasks that would have been familiar to rural families who raised sheep and made their own “homespun” cloth and clothes. These early tasks required minimal skill, and urban women and even children could master them quickly. Institutions such as convents and monasteries, orphanages, foundling homes, and hospitals could help subsidize their operations by taking in wool to work. Additional stages, such as weaving, dyeing, and finishing the cloth, were also often let out, but to skilled shops or individuals. The merchant who owned the wool determined such matters as weave, color, and type of finish, and judged whether the artisans had completed their tasks satisfactorily. He knew the markets in which the product would be sold, and took all of the risks across what could be a process of many months. While Florentine merchants seem to have relied heavily on this system, Venetians had variations on it. In one, merchants sold or bartered the raw material or partially finished cloth to artisans who performed their tasks and then resold the product to the merchant at a value-added price. In another, noble merchants, who were not subject to the wool guild, provided wool or partially finished cloth to manufacturers who then let the material out to the appropriate individuals or shops for processing before returning it to the merchant to sell. The growing silk manufacturing industry also took advantage of the putting-out system. Merchants with silk worm eggs and the mulberry leaves on which they fed pioneered its use in Lucca, and the necessary skills and knowledge traveled with immigrants to Florence and Venice. Unlike sheep’s wool, raw silk is produced from

Economics and Work: Putting-Out System

worms that can be grown by the thousands in warm, fairly compact spaces. When the worm has spun its cocoon, this is dried and then boiled. Timing is important, but the process is fairly simple. Dried again, the cocoon’s silk filament is then reeled onto a spindle, a task that is made simpler with small or delicate fingers. Another winds the filament on a more open reel, and finally a “thrower” twists two to five filaments together to form a thread. A single cocoon’s filament may be nearly a kilometer in length, but it can take up to 300 cocoons to make a pound of thread. Washed to remove natural gum, the thread is reduced in weight and ready for dyeing. Recent studies suggest that charitable institutions housing children and young women were perfect places for locating these activities. Indeed, in Florence and Bologna the respective silk guilds founded and supervised the cities’ largest foundling homes. Putting-out served both the entrepreneur and laborers. The former had a flexible workforce that received piecework wages, whom he paid only for production, and to whom he did not have to provide working space nor, usually, tools. Unless they broke contract, he had no labor issues and was generally protected by guild regulations. Workers could undertake as much work as they could foresee finishing and had no capital costs beyond their tools. They could work counter-cyclically, taking on these obligations when other work was difficult to find or seasonal work was finished. Many tasks could be done by wives and older children, adding precious cash to a family’s coffers. But there were also drawbacks. Merchants had to trust that workers would honor their obligations on time, without supervision, and without ruining or selling the product. They had to trust that market demand for the finished product would remain stable or increase across the time the process took. For their part, workers could not rely on a steady income, and institutionalized labor amounted to little more than slavery. See also: Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Clothmaking; Family and Gender: Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing; Fashion and Appearance: Fabrics, Domestic; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Villages and Village Life; Religion and Beliefs: Nuns and Nunneries FURTHER READING Goldthwaite, Richard. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Mola, Luca. The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Mozzato, Andrea. “The Production of Woolens in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Venice.” In Paola Lanaro, ed. At the Centre of the Old World. Toronto: C.R.R.S., 2006, pp. 73–109. Terpstra, Nicholas. Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

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RETAIL SELLING Retail sales were those in which the final users of goods were directly involved. Wholesalers bought in bulk, used warehouses for storage, and sold to those who then sold to the general public. Wholesalers made a profit by selling for a higher price than they had paid their suppliers, and retailers sold goods for more than they had paid in turn. Retailing provided consumers with convenience, reasonable quantities, and a local guarantee of quality. Many retail sellers operated out of small specialty shops located in specific parts of town or among their customers, while others, such as those who grew foodstuffs, had stalls in markets that were open every day or only on Saturdays. Some were mobile, moving from village to village or town to town, or circulating through larger towns with their goods—often food—on handcarts or in large baskets. Even established shops would send out shop-boys to peddle merchandise through the streets, especially on days of fairs or festivals. Most retailers were organized into local guilds, whose elected officials ensured quality, proper weights and measures, and fair pricing. Since many retailers sold their own handmade goods, such as shoes, bread, or jewelry, guilds oversaw production as well as sales. The principle of transparency ensured that the producers, sellers, and producers/sellers kept no secrets from the public. Production spaces in larger shops were open to view from the street, and goods for sale were openly displayed. Shops often had a front wall made of three horizontal pieces: the top would fold up and out over the street to provide customers and goods with shade and protection from rain; the mid-section folded down and in to create a counter, while the lowest portion remained stationary. Some businesses, however, needed internal sales space. Apothecaries needed many shelves for their herbs and drugs, and often had chairs for barbers to perform bloodlettings; large booksellers needed to keep their stock perfectly dry, and some had chairs for readers sampling the wares; and a cloth merchant needed to keep his merchandise dry and clean while unrolling his bolts. Sellers often lived above their shops, storing inventory upstairs or in a cellar if appropriate. They usually rented their quarters from guilds, churches, hospitals, the city, or other landowners, changing locations as needed. A given shop often had a permanent and generic sign, so that “at the Eagle” might mean a baker’s, tailor’s, or potter’s shop, depending on the renter. Large cities had hundreds of shops: Florence had 1,560 in 1427, 1,660 in 1480, and 2,172 in 1561, and Venice added 517 new shops between 1560 and 1597. Renaissance Genoa hosted 70 cheese shops, in addition to grocers and itinerant sellers. Small towns and villages also had retailers to meet local needs. Sixteenth-century Tuscan Altopascio—population 700—kept five shoemakers, two grocers, a blacksmith, and a ceramics store in business. In 1590 Poppi, also in Tuscany, had nine grocers, two bakers, three apothecaries, a

Economics and Work: Retail Selling

mercer, barber, tailor, shoemaker, and a regular fair for 1,450 residents and rural neighbors. Shopkeepers were usually individuals, though clearly some formed partnerships with family members, creditors, or even suppliers. A study of Tuscan Prato demonstrated that tradesmen’s wealth consisted of cash, inventory, furnishings, tools, and equipment, debts owed to the shop, and personal wealth such as dowry, inheritance, or land. Their expenses included inventory, rent, taxes, guild dues and fines, apprentices or other shop-workers, repairs, bad credit, upkeep and repair of the shop, and interest on loans. Profit margins were probably fairly low, since both competition and guild restrictions limited these. Scanty evidence shows that cheese-sellers and apothecaries could make 25% over the cost of inventory—from which had to come all other expenses. No wonder Prato’s shops were open 365 days each year. Home delivery was not unknown, especially if the orders were large or bulky or if the customers were wealthy or powerful. Good service was one way to distinguish one’s shop. Most sales would have been cash or credit, and cash sales were not usually recorded. Credit played a huge role in retail sales, a practice that required recording amounts and terms of the debt; and each business was a kind of independent bank, which might hold cash, exchange currencies, or make cash loans. In addition to shops, markets gave ready access to retail goods. Large cities had regular markets that were open every day or most days. Florence distinguished the Old from the New Market, Rome had several, including its fish market near the Jewish Quarter, and in Venice freshly arrived spices could be had from the market at the Rialto. Sellers operated from booths or simple trestle tables, and market officials collected taxes on merchandise—not sales—and ensured honest prices

Mercanzia During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries northern Italian cities developed associations of merchants, bankers, brokers, and guild bosses known variously as Societies of Merchants, House of Merchants (Venice), or Mercanzia (Florence, Siena). These regulatory bodies oversaw and could direct almost any economic aspect of city life. They had jurisdiction over tolls, roads, fairs, currencies, weights and measures, and communities of foreign merchants; they could discipline guilds, businesses, and markets, and they consulted with communal governments on taxes, treaties, and trade deals. By appointing their own men, signori used these to direct local economies to their own purposes, from war to social control.

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and practices and transparency. Livestock, fish, freshly slaughtered and processed meats, dairy goods, and fresh vegetables from local truck gardens probably made up the bulk of daily market goods. Special markets were associated with certain festival days. Normally stall-less piazze were decked out and sellers from far and wide set up temporary shop. Local shopkeepers closed their doors and occupied open-air quarters for the day. Entertainment by jugglers, singers, mountebanks, and preachers and fragrant carts from which seasonal specialty foods were sold drew even the most reclusive into the streets. While villagers reveled on local market days, they most probably filled their day-to-day needs for manufactured goods from the carts of mobile sellers who visited their customers. Cookware and tableware, farming tools, sewing goods, and other commonly needed supplies would be traded for a few coins or food or other homemade goods that would be sold down the line. At the other end of the retail spectrum were the Italian fairs. Held for nine days or longer in summer or fall, licensed by the highest authority, and offering goods from far and wide, fairs drew buyers and sellers from as far as northern Europe and Spain. Venice and Padua held fairs lasting 15 days beginning, respectively, on Ascension Thursday (variable according to Easter’s date, from mid-May to mid-June) and St. Anthony’s Day on June 13. Though much selling was wholesale, visitors enjoyed a wealth of goods of all sorts. In 1488 at little Sinise in Umbria 78 stalls and 40 taverns catered to all comers. See also: Arts: Ceramics, Decorative; Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Painters and Their Workshops; Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Apprentices; Book Printing and Sales; Cloth Trade; Coins, Coinage, and Money; Credit and Loans; Guilds; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Cosmetics; Gems and Jewelry; Scents and Perfumes; Tailors and Seamstresses; Food and Drink: Bread; Drugs; Eating Out; Foodsellers and Markets; Foreign Foods; Fruits and Vegetables; Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Foreign Communities; Furnishing the House; Plague; Politics and Warfare: War and Civilians; Recreation and Social Customs: Taverns and Inns; Religion and Beliefs: Christian Art in the Home; Pilgrims and Shrines; Science and Technology: Glassmaking; Primary Document: The Merchant’s Inventory: Luca Pacioli. “What an Inventory Is and How to Make It.” The Rules of Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Particularis de computis et scripturis (1494) FURTHER READING Blondé, Bruno, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart, and Ilja Van Damme, eds. Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006.

Economics and Work: Sheep and Wool Economy in the South Marshall, Richard K. The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Romano, Dennis. Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, c. 1100-c. 1440. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Shaw, James, and Evelyn Welch. Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence: The “Speziale al giglio” in 1494. New York: Rodopi, 2011. Welch, Evelyn. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

Seaborne Trade. See Trade, Seaborne

SHEEP AND WOOL ECONOMY IN THE SOUTH Sheep and shepherds were found throughout Renaissance-era Italy and Sicily. Sheep provided not only yield after yield of raw wool—on average seven to nine years’ worth—but lambs, milk, cheese, and ultimately, meat. A single shepherd could oversee some 200 sheep, so raising them was quite labor-efficient. In the absence of a well-organized woolen cloth industry, local manufacturers could make do with locally grown wool. In major markets such as Milan, Florence, and Siena, however, manufacturers competed in international markets throughout Europe and demanded the best Europe had to offer. English wool, grown in a climate colder than Italy’s, was considered the premier product until the Hundred Years’ War interfered with supply. Spain bred its Castilian sheep with a prime North African breed to produce Merino wool, which captured England’s market share. When Alfonso of Aragon took over the Kingdom of Naples in the 1440s, he brought Merino sheep and upbred the local Italian stock, putting it on a par with imports. He also reorganized the structure within which sheep were raised and their wool sold. Soon, the tax on wool was the kingdom’s greatest single source of income. Sheep graze on land that can vary from very fertile to marginal. The Apennine Mountains provide fine marginal land during the summers, and owners of flocks owned or held extensive grazing land on both slopes. The problem was that during the inclement winters sheep needed to be led down to grazing lands closer to the coasts, a process called transhumance. Those who owned the sheep did not own this land, but had to rent it from landowners who otherwise grew cash crops on it. Since people needed the food crops, and the states needed the cash from sheep taxes, medieval authorities, such as the Papacy and Naples’ rulers stepped in to negotiate and maximize benefits. Before 1289 the popes had run the “customhouse (dogana) for pastures,” an authority that controlled private and papal winter grazing land from Rome to Umbria and Tuscany. It also oversaw several annual spring

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In his Summer: Sheep Shearing (ca. 1575, oil on canvas), Venetian painter Francesco Bassano (1549–1592) romanticizes the effort expended in harvesting the annual crop on which so many in eastern and southern Italy depended. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/ Getty Images)

fairs at which the raw wool, cheese, and other products were sold and sheep owners paid their taxes. After lurching through the papal absence in the fourteenth century, the dogana was revitalized by Pope Nicholas V in 1452. By the mid-1450s, about 100,000 sheep went through this process annually, returning to their upland summer pastures in April. Nicholas acted in part because his biggest rival in the wool trade, the Kingdom of Naples, had reorganized its procedures for transhumance and taxation. Alfonso took control of the private lowland grazing areas, even those privately owned, and made state authorities the middlemen between their owners and the wooly snowbirds who descended each fall. His was the Dogana of Foggia, a town in Capitanata in Puglia, at the center of the sheep-growing region of the eastern Apennine slope. Here the vice royal doganiero (customhouse administrator) managed a small army of officials who assigned appropriate grazing sites to each group of shepherds that arrived downslope each fall. He arbitrated disputes and handled complaints, and saw to the fair weighing of the freshly sheared wool each spring, and to its fair sale at the annual fair. His territory was a large arc around Foggia. Most—about 70%—of his business came from the north in the Abruzzi, with smaller percentages from the west and south. From early May through late September sheep owners had their shepherds—the only commoners allowed to carry guns—watch over their flocks on the owners’ own or rented land. According to doganal records, most owners had small flocks of

Economics and Work: Sheep and Wool Economy in the South

around 200 sheep, though large monasteries and land barons could have upwards of 2,000 animals, divided into 200-sheep flocks. Come late September, thousands of shepherds began the 200- to 700-kilometer trek along royally administered sheep-walks, led by panpipes and drums. The main lines were 111 meters wide and created a right-of-way across royal and private property alike. Secondary walks were 27 meters wide, and both had pasture areas for grazing at intervals all along. The initial terminus was a huge holding area at which the shepherd was interviewed and assigned an appropriate area and rental agreement by a state official. Here he would set up his hut and wait until late March. In a good year some 5,000 to 6,000 shepherds brought 1,000,000 or more sheep to winter pastures around Foggia, some ten times the volume handled by the papal dogana. Before Alfonso’s changes, the Angevin authorities in Naples counted some 200,000 taxed sheep. He doubled this to 425,000 by 1445; by 1449 there were 925,000 sheep processed; and in 1474 some 1,700,000. In that year, however, 700,000 died because of poor land management by the royal authorities, and numbers fell back. Contributions to the royal treasury also increased, from 38,500 ducats in 1445 to 103,000 ducats five years later. The royal investment certainly paid off. Those who owned the flocks and paid the taxes and their shepherds were organized into what was called the generalità, translated variously as commune, republic, or guild. It was a form of the Spanish mesta, and allowed the state to deal with the sheep owners as a group, and vice versa. They could flex their muscle when provoked, as in 1563, when 700 descended on Naples to complain, and in 1583 when they helped get all of the royal wool weighers jailed for corruption. Neither they nor their gun-toting employees were the stuff of Arcadian pastoral poetry. See also: Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Clothmaking; Taxes and Public Finance; Trade Routes, Overland; Fashion and Appearance: Fabrics, Domestic; Food and Drink: Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy; Politics and Warfare: Contado and Subject Towns; Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates; Science and Technology: Agriculture and Agronomy FURTHER READING Marino, John A. Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Naples. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988. Mozzato, Andrea. “The Production of Woolens in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Venice.” In Paola Lanaro, ed. At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800. Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2006, pp. 73–109. Origo, Iris. The Merchant of Prato. New York: Peregrine, 1957. Romano, Dennis. Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, c. 1100-c. 1440. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

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SLAVES AND SLAVERY Italians held slaves before the Renaissance era, but the heavy demographic blow of the Black Death beginning in 1348 created a new level of demand. In northern Italy aristocratic and merchant-class homes utilized the service of women brought by Genoese and Venetian slavers from their trading centers in the Black Sea and Aegean. By 1500, however, most of these outposts had been swept away by the Turks. Tatars, Circassians, Russians, Abkhazians, and Turks were replaced by Moorish and Berber women from North Africa, as well as black Africans sold through North African and Portuguese markets. Just as Genoese Christopher Columbus aided Spain’s royal authorities with enslaved Spanish Muslim captives after Granada’s fall in 1492, so Italian merchants such as Florentine Bartolomeo Marchionni conducted trade in Senegalese and Guinean slaves between Lisbon and Valencia and Lisbon and Livorno, Italy. Between 1493 and 1495 he handled a total of some 1,648 slaves; and from 1489 to 1503 he sent 1,866 to Valencia alone. By the later fifteenth century 83% of Aragonese Naples’ slaves were black Africans, and most male slaves imported into Sicily for agricultural labor were black. Between 1350 and 1460 Muslim North African slaves made up between 10% and 12% of the city’s population. At the same time a taste developed for black African slaves/servants of both sexes at northern Italian courts such as Milan, Ferrara, and Mantua. Black figures took their places in ducal frescoes and panel paintings in quite visible, if subservient, roles. Across Italy perhaps 1% to 3% of the population consisted of slaves, a bit more if the Genoese and Venetian colonies are included. Florence legalized the owning of slaves as property in 1364 in the wake of the Black Death and, two years later, began recording sales of non-Christian slaves. Between 1366 and 1397 merchants or owners sold 357, almost all of whom were women or girls. Females were more expensive than males, selling for about twice the price of a male. The Florentine census of 1427 listed 360 female slaves, about 1% of the total population; at the same time the 7,400 Pisans owned eight (5 women, 3 men) slaves. Genoese owned 4,000 to 5,000 slaves in the later 1300s, a figure that dropped to 2,000 within decades. This was still 4%–5% of its population, but the percentage dropped to 3% by 1458. Here the state reserved the right to borrow slaves for communal projects, and prohibited owners from manumitting (freeing) slaves through wills, lest slaves kill their masters to attain their freedom. Slaves resisted masters in numerous ways, from murder to running away. Laws throughout Italy forbade aiding runaways, who could be branded on the face in Venice and Genoa. More common offenses were disobedience, lying, damaging property, and stealing. Genoa in fact prohibited citizens from buying keys, clothing, gold, silver, jewelry, or gems from known slaves. For their part masters in the north were largely unfettered in how they could treat their slaves, though a master

Economics and Work: Slaves and Slavery

was banished from Venice for killing his slave. Physical abuse was expected, and even rape was tolerated. In northern Italian cities sexual abuse of female slaves was so common that a quarter to a third of identified infants left in homes for abandoned children were the offspring of slaves. Lactating women slaves were often rented to such institutions or to other families in need of wet nurses. Renters usually provided shelter, food, drink, clothes, and shoes as needed. In the south rules were different, stemming in part from the more humane legislation of thirteenth-century Emperor Frederick II. Slaves were closer to serfs in status, and enjoyed similar protections, at least in theory. Physical abuse was limited, rape forbidden, and male slaves could sue and even own property. The regional difference may also have been due to the fact that a much higher percentage of southern slaves were males delegated to agricultural labor. Northern households typically owned one to three female domestic slaves, with more at the courts of the powerful (though the Medici in Florence listed only four in 1457). Cardinal Luigi d’Este at his lavish estate of Tivoli south of Rome kept 80 slaves to maintain the extensive grounds and structures, until they rebelled in 1580. These he replaced with 50 new ones. As a whole, the Church supported slavery as a natural result of the fallen human condition. Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas supported it. Popes Nicholas V and Alexander VI stated that reducing “enemies of Christ” to servitude, with an eye to converting them, was wholly defensible. Popes Martin V and Paul II, on the other hand, excommunicated slave traders, while humanist Pius II called slavery a grave evil. In southern Italy, Jesuits strove to integrate specifically black African slaves and freed people into Italian Christian society not only by baptizing them but also by educating them in the faith. Adult baptisms were festive occasions accompanied by singing and pageantry. Slaves even joined their own confraternities, and some entered religious life once freed. One black friar in Palermo became St. Benedetto il Moro, recognized for his humility. The Church also addressed enslavement of Italians captured at sea or in coastal raids by Barbary pirates. Ongoing collections for ransoming these captives were established in Naples (1548), Rome (1581), Venice (1586), and Palermo (1596). See also: Arts: Non-Europeans in Art; Economics and Work: Trade, Seaborne; Family and Gender: Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing; Last Wills and Testaments; Servants, Household; Fashion and Appearance: Livery; Social Status and Clothing; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Villas FURTHER READING Angiolini, Franco. “Schiave.” In A. Groppi, ed. Il lavoro delle donne. Bari: Laterza, 1996, pp. 92–115.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Angiolini, Franco. “Slaves and Slavery in Early Modern Tuscany.” Italian History and Culture 3 (1997): 67–86. Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Earle, T. F. and K.J.P. Lowe, eds. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Epstein, Steven A. Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. McKee, Sally. “Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy.” Slavery and Abolition 29 (2008): 309–26. Origo, Iris. “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” Speculum 30 (1955): 321–66. Stuard, Susan Mosher. “Ancillary Evidence on the Decline of Medieval Slavery.” Past and Present 149 (1995): 1–28. Stuard, Susan Mosher. “Urban Domestic Slavery in Medieval Ragusa.” Journal of Medieval History 9 (1983): 155–71. Tognetti, Sergio. “The Trade in Black African Slaves in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by T. F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe, 213–24. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

SPICE TRADE The wealthy Italian’s table and medicine cabinet featured a wide range of spices grown in the tropics and shipped by boat and caravan from Arabia, India, and Indonesia. Until about 1500 all of it moved through Arabia or Persia to the eastern Mediterranean ports in Muslim nations or Constantinople/Istanbul. In their warehouses at Alexandria, Beirut, and Tripoli, Italian merchants from Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, and by 1400 Venice all but alone, awaited the seasonal cargoes. Laden with their precious aromatics and medicines, as well as luxury cloths and other fine goods, Christian oar-driven galleys, or increasingly wind-powered round ships, worked their way back to home port. Here wholesalers prepared the goods for land or sea trips to Germany, France, England, and Scandinavia, and local spice retailers—Venice had 122 in 1569—and apothecaries replenished their stores. This trade was shaped by several key events during the Renaissance. The mid-fourteenth-century overland silk road was cut off by the Mongol Tamerlane’s conquests; in 1453 Christian control of Constantinople came to an end with Turkish conquest; in 1498 Vasco da Gama linked Portugal directly to the trade’s source by rounding southern Africa; during the mid-1500s the Turks seized many Venetian eastern Mediterranean colonies; and later in the sixteenth century the Dutch wrested control of the ocean routes from Portugal. The potential rewards were

Economics and Work: Spice Trade

huge: an historian has estimated that in 1400 the 3 or 4 million well-off Christian Europeans consumed 2 million pounds of pepper and a million pounds of other imported spices every year. In Prato, near Florence, in the 1390s pepper sold for about a lira per pound, cloves for four and a half, and saffron for nearly 10 lire per pound. Despite high prices demand rose during the fifteenth century: mace by 500% and ginger between 200 and 300%. In 1496–1498 cloves garnered Venetian merchants a 72% profit and nutmeg up to 400%. Beyond the Alps, prices climbed another 50% to 75% with overland shipping costs. From the early 1400s Venice had an annual fleet serving England and the Netherlands. During the 1400s Venetians controlled nearly all of this. Their foreign warehouses, or fondachi, were large two-story structures built around a courtyard. Alessandro Magno wrote of his 1561 trip to Alexandria to sell Italian silk and purchase spices. The 1,500-mile voyage took 30 days. He stayed at the Venetian fondaco, which was locked by Egyptian police each night. He hated the months-long wait. The Arabian port of Jeddah received cargoes from India, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, and at 500 pounds per camel the caravan trip of scores of camels to Alexandria lasted two months. Cheaper spices arrived in 100-pound sacks; cinnamon in 50-pound boxes wrapped in canvas; and cloves in large sealed jars. After dickering and loading into round ships that carried some 250 tons each, and the slow, late fall sea voyage, Alessandro returned to Venice after an absence of nearly a year. From China came granulated sugar, a type of cinnamon, and so-called China wood, which was used to treat gout and syphilis in the sixteenth century. Northeastern India supplied long pepper, which grew wild, and India’s south black and white pepper, while Java, Sumatra, and Madagascar also contributed black pepper. India grew most of the five types of exported ginger, including the best from Malabar, but early on the West Indies also became a supplier. Grains of paradise, Benin pepper, and cubeb pepper, used against gonorrhea, originated in West Africa, and cinnamon or the similar cassia in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. The Spice Islands of Molucca in Indonesia produced mace, nutmeg, and cloves. Javanese and Malay boats moved the goods to Malaysia, and Indians to southern India’s “pepper coast,” where shippers from other production centers also gathered. Arab dhows took much by sea to Jeddah in Arabia for the trip north to Alexandria, while other shipments moved through India’s Gujarat to Baghdad and either the Black Sea or Damascus, or from Gujarat to the Persian Gulf. During the fifteenth century 1 kilogram of pepper cost 2 grams of silver in India and sold for 14 to 18 grams in Venice. In England prices rose to 20 to 30 grams. Here Venetian merchants were all but guaranteed a 40% profit. In 1496–1498 one ducat’s worth of cloves purchased in the Moluccas returned 100 ducats at the Rialto market in Venice. Everyone won.

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Edible spices were both foods and medicines in the West, and were accompanied by aromatic medicines such as balm costus from Kashmir, and from the Hindu-Kush spikenard, which was used in topical medicines and perfumes. From Arabia came balsam wood, resin, and seeds; from Borneo camphor; and from Malaysia sandalwood. Portugal’s end run around Africa hurt Venetians badly. By 1503 Portuguese were selling to Genoa, and the following year Venetians found no spices for sale in Alexandria or Beirut. Venice banned spice imports from Genoa, but in 1515 they caved in and purchased Portuguese imports. Although spices travel well, they did better crossing the dry deserts than on long damp sea voyages. As well, Portuguese ships were subject to pirates and shipwreck, and thieves reduced profits. By mid-century, however, Venice was again king of Mediterranean spice trade. In 1554 its fleets shipped 336 tons of spices from Alexandria alone, and the weight doubled to 672 tons annually between 1560 and 1564. By the 1580s some 4,000 resident merchant families lived in Arab entrepôts from Baghdad to Cairo, with 16 trading companies in Aleppo alone in the 1590s. In the 1570s, Florence tried to move in on Portuguese pepper in the Mediterranean but failed. After Spain absorbed Portugal in 1580 Philip II tried but failed to entice Venetian ships to Lisbon to buy their pepper. See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Retail Selling; Trade, Seaborne; Trade Routes, Overland; Family and Gender: Fertility, Conception, and Contraception; Fashion and Appearance: Dyes and Dyestuffs; Scents and Perfumes; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Drugs; Food Preservation; Galenic Health Regimens; Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Sugar and Confected Sweets; Housing and Community: Plague; Science and Technology: Pharmacopeias and Materia Medica; Plague Treatises and Consilia; Ships and Shipbuilding FURTHER READING Bulbeck, David, et al. Southeast Asian Exports since the Fourteenth Century: Cloves, Pepper, Coffee, and Sugar. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Tracy, James D. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

TAXES AND PUBLIC FINANCE No one wants to pay taxes, but civilization depends upon them. The real question is how the burden of taxation is distributed within a society and who decides how

Economics and Work: Taxes and Public Finance

much each person pays. If this system seems rational and fair, then most folk will accept it, if not without grumbling. If the system favors one group over others, or is open to blatant corruption or manipulation, then resistance can take the form of everything from avoidance to rebellion. In the Italian republics processes were rational because the ruling groups were taxing themselves as well as their neighbors. The decision makers owned property, business interests, government bonds like all other taxpayers, and sought to balance the incidence of the tax burden as reasonably as possible. How the decision makers in the major cities treated the people in subject towns, who had to support two tax bases, raises other issues. The sources of income for republican governments fall into four distinct categories: direct taxes on real and personal property or income; indirect taxes on imports, exports, goods in transit, or consumer goods such as food; rents, user

Siena named its tax-collecting agency the Biccherna for Constantinople’s Blachernae Palace, which housed the Byzantine Empire’s treasury. From the 14th century, Biccherna account book covers were decorated with painted images of the officials at work behind their counters, usually accompanied by heraldic shields of the men in charge and sometimes poetry. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

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fees, penalties, fines, and income from monopolies (especially salt); and loans to the government at interest. Civic governments were usually forced to borrow money during bad economic periods, wars, plagues, famines, and other disasters. Merchant-bankers and cash-rich institutions such as hospitals made such loans, and Jewish communities were often forced to make loans by their Christian host cities. Forced loans from the wealthy, known as preste or prestanze in Tuscany, paid the immediate bills for mercenary soldiers or grain shipments. In fourteenth-century Siena the value of wealthier people’s property was assessed (alliramento) and the loan rate set at 1 or 2 florins per thousand. These assessments occurred about every seven or eight years from 1355 to 1400. Between 1354 and 1399 the Sienese levied at least 92 loans on themselves, 14 in the year 1390 alone. Returns varied but were higher if the person voluntarily loaned the money. In Venice, neighborhood capi (leaders) appointed by the doge did the assessing, and about one in eight households was tapped. Early Venetian forced loans returned 2.5% per year interest, and in Florence, the Monte (“mountain”), as the public debt fund was known, paid 5% to 7% per year. Florentines’ wealth was estimated by a committee of men from each parish who based their judgments on reputation and gossip, making the estimo a less than rational process. By the 1370s this was the city’s main source of revenue, but great was the grumbling. Between 1427 and 1495 the government adopted a self-reporting system called a catasto. In his or her catasto return the head of the household recorded all assets, including real property, shares in businesses, household goods, cash, farm equipment, and so on. The householder then deducted all liabilities, from debts owed to business losses to children (literally “mouths”). The result was net taxable wealth, on which about 0.5% was paid in the form of a loan. The alliramento or catasto was also the basis for the direct taxation of real property or wealth. While the well-off were hit up for forced loans, all real property owners paid the Sienese dazio or the Florentine decima. In the sixteenth century the decima was Florence’s main source of revenue, and was graduated so that the larger landowners paid a higher rate. Another direct tax was that on salaries or wages, like the American income tax. Siena charged this, but Venice avoided direct taxes of all kinds until necessity forced them. By 1500 direct taxes accounted for about 15% of Venetian public revenue. Indirect taxes were usually tapped to pay off the interest on the public debt. These were often known as gabelles and were taxes of set rates on such things as notarial contracts, sales of consumer goods, goods in transit, imports and exports going through city gates, and food processing, such as slaughtering meat or grinding grain. In 1572 the tax collecting office in Brescia, a subject city of Venice, took in 95,000 ducats from indirect taxes: 38% came from taxes on grinding grain. High gabelles assessed by Venice on the components of firearms all but wrecked

Economics and Work: Trade, Seaborne

that industry in Brescia. The power to tax is the power to destroy. In a city such as Venice, however, even small percentages added up quickly when the volume of business was huge. Transactions at the Rialto market and the German Fondaco (business center) were taxed at a rate of less than 1%, yet in 1500 gabelles amounted to 230,000 ducats. The small town of Pescia about 30 miles from Florence was under its control from 1339. Pescia paid a steady stream of money to Florence in the form of taxes to support Florentine troops, gabelles on transactions and commodities, and direct taxes that included the ordinary tax, an annual levy whose amount was set in Florence. Collections were made by tax farmers, men who contracted to collect the amount expected by the dominant city and who were paid out of what surplus they could collect. A study based on the 1427 catasto, which included Pesciatini, determined that all things considered, while Florentines paid 8 to 9% of their total wealth in taxes, Pesciatini, though taxed by both cities, paid only 3.5%. Defaulters who could or would not pay their share had a few options. In 1447, of 126 delinquent Florentine patricians 45 emigrated, 40 hid out in the countryside, 40 were “fugitives”—perhaps skulking in their own palazzi—and 1 went to jail. See also: Economics and Work: Credit and Loans; Food and Drink: Foodsellers and Markets; Housing and Community: Villages and Village Life; Politics and Warfare: Armies; Citizenship; Contado and Subject Towns; Mercenaries; Rebellions and Revolts; Urban Councils and Assemblies; War and Civilians FURTHER READING Brown, Judith C. In the Shadow of Florence: Provincial Society in Renaissance Pescia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Ferraro, Joanne M. Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580–1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A  Maritime Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Molho, Anthony. Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance, 1400–1433. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

TRADE, SEABORNE As the next entry on overland trade points out, moving commercial goods by pack animals was expensive, dangerous, time consuming, and often necessary. Whenever they could, Italians shipped goods by water routes, whether down rivers on flat-bottomed barges or to the Baltic Sea in great roundships such as carracks. In

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terms of international trade, a great deal was seaborne, only the Alpine passes providing overland routes, and at that largely to the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, and Hungary. Italy’s position astride the Mediterranean, its long coastline, and several very good harbors—including Genoa, Pisa, Livorno, Civitavecchia, Naples, Palermo, Messina, Ancona, Bari, and Venice—made it a natural sea power. Of course, there was no “Italy” as a political entity, so competition among its city-states and larger powers could be as brutal as that with outsiders. At the beginning of the Renaissance era Venice and Genoa were the dominant merchant marine states in Italy. Pisa and Amalfi had earlier competed and been defeated, and Florence was landlocked. Naples could have been a major player, but its Angevin and Aragonese masters diverted its resources. Genoa and Venice had long exploited the weaknesses of the powers in the eastern Mediterranean, including the Mamluks in Egypt, the Turks, and the Byzantines. The Italians had carved out trading posts, colonies, emporia, and vaguer spheres of commercial influence in the Aegean and Black Seas. Early Renaissance-era Muslim ports such as Beirut, Tripoli, and Alexandria accepted the raw materials and few manufactured goods, such as Florentine light woolens and Venetian glass, that the Italian cogs and galleys delivered in exchange for spices, silks, and other high-value luxury goods. Four wars had settled Genoa’s fate. After the early 1380s, Venice had a near-monopoly in Near Eastern trade. Around 1400, Venice also started down the road to carving out a mainland empire (Terraferma), which provided it with goods its merchants could trade with their eastern partners. In the fifteenth century Venetians relied heavily on great galleys that could handle cargoes of over 300 tons. Galleys relied on both wind and rowers, which meant that they carried 200 to 300 men in addition to passengers. Most of the rowers were free men and given a weapon when the need arose, so few of the ever larger number of pirates dared attack. For some of the oarsmen the trips were a form of apprenticeship in foreign trade, an opportunity to see and experience the markets with which they would later be working. Also, they could make purchases of spices, silks, metal-ware, or other goods in small amounts for personal use or for resale back home. The Genoese relied on privately owned craft, space on which was purchased by merchants. The Venetian state built its galleys in the Arsenale shipyard, owned the vessels, and provided space to merchants who, after all, had paid taxes to help build galleys. Venetian international merchants were a noble and basically closed group, into which few new members were allowed. The state galleys operated as fleets or convoys, whose departure and return dates and routes were usually quite predictable. All Venetian ships traveled to Corfu and then to their various destinations, returning along the same routes. The Galleys of Alexandria visited Crete before landing at the Egyptian port. The Galleys of Beirut took a northern route to Rhodes, Cyprus, and Tripoli in Syria. The Galleys of Romania entered the Aegean

Economics and Work: Trade, Seaborne

and stopped at Constantinople on their way to Kaffa in the Crimea and Tana at the mouth of the Don River. Others in this fleet stopped at Sinope and Trebizond, the old end points of the Silk Road. Three fleets plied the western Mediterranean, thumbing their noses at the Genoese and prompting the Florentines to begin developing a merchant fleet in the 1420s after they had taken Livorno and Pisa and its port. One Venetian fleet coasted the western Italian coast, Marseilles, Barcelona, and Valencia. Another dropped south from Sicilian Syracuse to the Barbary coast of North Africa and west to southern Spain and Valencia. The most famous fleet was that of Flanders, which left Palermo for Majorca, sailed past Gibraltar, and headed north for Southampton, London, Bruges, and later Antwerp. This last fleet opened the door to maritime trade with ports as far from Italy as Danzig and Hamburg, and ultimately drew the Dutch and English into the Mediterranean. At the same time, the newly developed Turkish empire blocked much Venetian activity, and even gave the Genoese a plum position in Istanbul. Venetian colonies rapidly disappeared, but the fleets continued to sail. Galleys were not efficient for cheaper and large bulk commodities, such as grain or sheep’s raw wool, so the so-called roundships, such as cogs, later carracks and galleons, moved these goods around. Larger ships could double the payload of the typical great galley. Though nowhere near as interesting as English worsted woolens or exotic Indonesian spices, wheat was a major cargo on both coastal and seagoing ships. Italian cities needed grain to feed their growing populations, and ships were the only reasonable means of transport. War and famines made shortages acute in many cities, and Venice is said to have maintained 44 granaries to ward off shortages. See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Cloth Trade; Grain Trade; Imported Goods, Sources of; Sheep and Wool Economy in the South; Spice Trade; Trade Routes, Overland; Fashion and Appearance: Fabrics, Imported; Food and Drink: Grains and the Wheat Market; Politics and Warfare: Navies and Naval Warfare; Science and Technology: Navigational Tools; Ships and Shipbuilding FURTHER READING Bulbeck, David, et al. Southeast Asian Exports since the Fourteenth Century: Cloves, Pepper, Coffee, and Sugar. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A  New History of the Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A  Maritime Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Mack, Rosamond. Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Tracy, James D. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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TRADE ROUTES, OVERLAND Moving goods by land was far more expensive than by water. Whenever possible, Renaissance-era Italians utilized water routes, including rivers, lakes, coastal waters, and the open sea. Where these were not an option, with small cargoes short distances could be covered on foot leading pack animals or driving a cart pulled by oxen, mules, or horses. Longer distances and larger shipments generally required a pack train of mules. Would carts have been better conveyances? The problem was with Europe’s roadways. The ancient Romans had constructed and maintained an excellent system of surfaced roads, with better conditions the closer one got to the capital. Because trade and regular travel were not characteristics of the early medieval peoples, and because there was no effective central authority, Italy’s road system was left to decay. Its once-smooth surfaces became pitted and then cratered, and often impassible except on foot. And that went for animals as well. This is also a reason why medieval and Renaissance-era travelers never adopted the chariot. Wheeled vehicles were simply too susceptible to damage, especially if loaded with heavy goods. The problem was multiplied if the trip involved crossing mountains, whether the Apennines or Alps. Nonetheless, Classical Rome’s roadway system remained largely in place, and had been faithfully followed by pilgrims, soldiers, merchants, migrants, and others throughout the Middle Ages. Naturally, the major trunk lines ran north-south on both sides of the Apennines. Bridges had generally been maintained by local barons and then by city governments who understood the value of intact transportation routes. They brought food, raw materials, imported goods, immigrants, and cash into local economies, and provided the routes that exports took in the possession of customers or to make money for their makers. Pack animals could negotiate shallow streams effectively, but required sound bridges for crossing rivers. Along main routes where there were no bridges, there were usually ferrymen with sturdy flat-bottomed boats on which the animals crossed one at a time. A commercial trip of many days or even weeks presented dangers from accident, natural cause, and people. Accidents befell the drovers, but also their animals. Crossing streams with slippery beds was especially tricky, despite the sure-footedness of the animals. The carriers themselves became cranky, sick, and injured, and their handlers were bitten and kicked. Spring floods could make entire regions impossible to cross. Extremes of nature, from ice and snow to searing heat, provided dangers of their own. Crossing the Alps north into Germany, Switzerland, and Austria was fraught with threats, including unexpectedly early or late snows, frozen sources of water, and avalanches. Passage could be blocked for months, meaning added costs and late arrival. Warnings about the presence of plague, either ahead or from where the train had just come, could also block passage or cause

Economics and Work: Trade Routes, Overland

a major detour. Over time, border guards became increasingly proficient at intercepting potentially plague-carrying cargoes, and at keeping plague-free people and goods from entering stricken areas. And, of course, there were people to cause problems, beside the guards. Much of urban northern and central Italy had neutered its medieval rural nobility, who had enjoyed and profited from interfering with commercial traffic passing through or near its territories. Much of the south, Sicily, and extreme northwest and northeast Italy, however, remained home to predatory barons. These same areas, and parts of the northern Apennine Mountains, were also the lairs of banditi and other freebooting thugs who descended on the unsuspecting. At times, rebellious mountain folk and other normally law-abiding rural dwellers presented threats to traders, whose harassment they saw as resulting not only in booty but a blow against their oppressive urban masters. During wartime, undisciplined mercenaries and foreign soldiers posed threats. Many of these people were as likely to kill the drovers as not. Less life-threatening were corrupt officials collecting too much in tolls or other fees, or innkeepers or ferrymen who overcharged or stole from cargoes. The major land routes into and out of Italy flowed north-south through the Alpine passes. The network stretched out from Venice in the east along a trunk linking it with Verona and Milan. Due north from and to Venice came goods and merchants to and from Austria and Hungary through Treviso and Pontebba. From Treviso north was the route to the Brenner Pass through Belluno. Another route to the Brenner ran northwest from Treviso through Trent and Bolzano; Trent could also be approached from Verona, which was due south. The Brenner was the gateway to the south German cities, and a major conduit for books, spices, glassware, imported cloth, Protestantism, and technical expertise in many areas. From Milan and other points west, the route was through Brescia and Bergamo and north through the Valtellina Valley. From Sondrio one moved due north to Switzerland or east through the Stelvio Pass to the Brenner Pass and Germany. Basle and western Swiss cities were reached through the St. Gotthard Pass, from Milan through Como and Bellinzona. Finally, the westernmost pass was the Great St. Bernard. It was approached from Milan through Novara and Aosta, and took one to Geneva and ultimately France. Traveling through these routes added a large percentage to the final costs of goods, whether paid in Italy or northern Europe. That volumes and values of shipments continued to increase across the period is a testament to the wealth and taste that developed on both sides of the Alps. See also: Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Grain Trade; Trade, Seaborne; Housing and Community: Plague; Transportation, Local; Politics and Warfare: Contado and Subject Towns; Rebellions and Revolts; War and Civilians

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The World of Renaissance Italy FURTHER READING Hollingsworth, Mary. The Cardinal’s Hat: Money, Ambition, and Everyday Life in the Court of a Borgia Prince. New York: Overlook Press, 2004. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A  New History of the Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A  Maritime Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Tracy, James D. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

WAGES AND PRICES Untangling the snarl that is the current knowledge of comparative wages and prices for the 250 years of the Italian Renaissance era is no easy matter. While there is a good deal of data, it is often for one place and for a limited amount of time, or for a certain occupation. The use of multiple currencies adds a layer of complexity. While wages and prices for one place at one time use the same currency of value, these can differ significantly over time and among different places. Prices are usually expressed in terms of certain measures of wheat, though that measure can differ from place to place, and wheat differs in quality and therefore is not a stable commodity. Even a florin was not a florin, as its value in lire and soldi could fluctuate from one week to the next: contracts often specified the value of the florin at the time signed. Despite the problems with undertaking close economic analysis of standards of living, aggregate rough estimates can help paint pictures that are probably close to the truth. First, a few broad strokes. Wages were not the same as income. The wealthy made income from professional services and investments, including business ventures, interest on loans, rents, or sales of property. Salaries were paid for periods of service, monthly or annually. The specific services expected and the terms of payment were often laid out in a contract. Whether one worked hard or slacked off and put in 40 or 60 hours per week made no difference as the salary was set. A wage was usually paid for a day’s work, and this is what normally appears in modern studies. If one did not show up, he or she was not paid. During the winter, daylight hours were fewer so days were shorter than during the summer. Until clocks appeared and numbers of hours rather than “days” became the rule, a long day’s wage was no different from that of a short day. Adjusting for Sundays and religious festivals, an average year included 270 working days, so an annual wage was simply 270 times the daily wage rate.

Economics and Work: Wages and Prices

Wages and prices had traditionally been considered not according to market forces, but according to what theologians understood as “just.” In fact, if a skill was rare but needed, its owner was paid well; if a commodity was in great supply, it was cheaper than if it was scarce. Higher-quality products demanded higher prices than low-quality goods. The market worked, even if contemporaries did not see or acknowledge it. Our era opens with the Black Death, which eliminated 30% to 50% of wage and salary earners. It also reduced the number of people demanding goods and services, and the number harvesting and then planting food crops. Workers had to be drawn to depopulated cities, and higher wages were the best way to do so. In very general terms, wages rose faster than prices for necessary goods, including grain. Most rural agricultural workers—peasants—did not earn wages for their farm labor, so many migrated to the cities, while others moved to places that had the most favorable working and living conditions. Poor land was abandoned, and the normal flow of food remained high. In Florence, this was the pattern: higher wages and stable prices meant a good standard of living. Venice saw a larger jump in wages (up to 200%) after 1350 (the Black Death), so more people could buy more and better things. This gave typical Venetian wage earners the highest standard of living in a major Italian city. Milan, a huge city run by a signore (lord) and little affected by the initial plague outbreak, saw little increase in wages. By 1460, Milanese construction workers were making 30% to 50% less than their Venetian counterparts. Prices remained high, and tended to rise more quickly than wages did, making for a comparatively poor standard of living. The absence of the papacy, its court, and its business made Rome a backwater until almost the mid-1400s. The city was filled with foreigners from other parts of Italy and abroad, so unskilled locals worked as servants or made cloth or worked in construction. This was one sector that eventually boomed, as work on palazzi, villas, and churches satisfied the egos of barons, bankers, cardinals, and popes. By about 1470, despite recurring plague, populations in cities began to grow from natural increase and in-migration. Much of the increase in demand for luxury goods was met by skilled artisans and merchants, with little trickling down to the laboring classes. As a result, wages fell in value relative to food prices, which were rising at the time. Finding work was harder than it had been, and the incidence of begging and vagabondage increased across Italy. The sixteenth century saw the same pattern continue, and even if wages did not tend to fall, what we understand as inflation undermined their value in the marketplace. This pattern was found in cities across Europe, so workers in Italy were not alone. Goldthwaite (Economy of Renaissance Florence, 365) provides a graph of this decline for unskilled construction workers in Florence in terms of their daily wage’s ability to pay for a staio (24.7 dry liters) of wheat. In 1350, after the

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Black Death, a day’s wage could buy 0.3 of a staio, but wheat’s value was rising. By the mid-1360s it had risen steeply to 0.65. It fell again, dipping below 0.3 in the mid-1380s, but climbing and staying relatively high between 0.4 and 0.7 until about 1470. Thereafter, with occasional upticks and plateaus it fell steadily. During famine years around 1590 it reached its nadir at about 0.10. Another way of looking at wages is in 1527 unskilled Florentine workers made half of what skilled ones did (9 soldi to 18 soldi); 20 years later, Venetian laborers were making about two-thirds what skilled craftsmen did. Without price indexing, however, there is no way of telling which city’s laborers were really better off. See also: Economics and Work: Construction, Building; Grain Trade; Family and Gender: Families, Laboring Class; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Grains and the Wheat Market; Housing and Community: Plague; Villages and Village Life FURTHER READING Dyer, Christopher. Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

WOMEN IN THE LABOR FORCE Women played many roles in the Renaissance-era Italian economy. Elite women bore children, helped in raising them, directed servants and slaves, commissioned art, healed sick family members, entertained guests, and filled their husbands’ shoes when they were away or unable. Wives of merchants kept books and helped in shops, and lower down some adopted their husbands’ or fathers’ crafts. All of these ran their households and raised their children, both of which were financially uncompensated contributions to a city’s economy. In the countryside, women’s unpaid household and field labor was indispensable. They worked beside fathers, brothers, and husbands and helped bring goods to market and sell them. Wives and daughters in artisanal families also sold family products from behind the counter. Women played at least as many roles for which they were directly paid. Perhaps the largest sector was cloth-making. In wool manufacturing girls and women did all of the spinning and many simpler weaving and related tasks. Girls and

Economics and Work: Women in the Labor Force

women were vital to all early stages in silk production, from tending the worms to weaving simpler fabrics to wrapping silk thread with gold for rich brocades and cloth-of-gold. In Umbria and Le Marche women worked with cotton: picking, cleaning, spinning, washing, and weaving. In flax-growing regions women helped in the production of linen. Most of this work was put-out: left by contractors with women at their homes or institutional residences to work on as they could. In wealthier homes women acted as servants, slaves, nannies, and wet nurses. Many wet nurses worked in their own homes in town or in the countryside. Humbler homes might have a female servant or two—in 1427 almost half of Florentine households had at last one—who combined cooking, cleaning, shopping, fetching water, and doing other domestic tasks. Many household servants were little more than girls accumulating funds toward their dowries. Many of these were wards of institutions such as foundling homes or orphanages. Many women performed specific services on an as-needed basis. Some had accumulated herb-lore and therapeutic techniques that made them valuable healers, especially for those who could not afford or did not trust educated physicians or pharmacists. Iconic among these women were midwives, who participated in preparing women of all classes for the event, directing the presentation, and tending to the new mother. Though all mothers theoretically taught their daughters to sew, independent female seamstresses and tailors found work among unmarried males and others who could not handle desired repairs or alterations at home. When clothing and linens became soiled enough to launder, women took up the task. Lower-class housewives or daughters and servants in upper-class homes and institutions probably did most of this tiresome work, but larger cities also had women who did laundry for an income. No survey of women service workers would be complete without mention of women in the sex trade. These ranged from unattractive peasant prostitutes to educated and wealthy urban courtesans who served Venetian nobles, Roman cardinals, and French kings. Some were no doubt driven to the life by violence and poverty; some were born to mothers who traded; and others embraced the life, valuing its independence and rewards. Most Italian communities both reviled and considered these women necessary: without their sexual outlet citizens’ wives and unmarried daughters were at risk of molestation. Early fifteenth-century Florentine officials considered them a hedge against raging homosexuality and provided officially sanctioned whorehouses. Other cities followed suite. The most famous courtesans, however, were not simply sex partners but entertainers and intellectual partners to educated and powerful men. They played and sang music, danced, and recited poetry. By the mid-1500s women other than courtesans were beginning to entertain at courts and on stage. Poets sold books of their verses, female musicians

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and singers began to be paid for their efforts, and women even appeared on stage from the 1540s. Nuns in convents and monasteries supplemented their resources in numerous ways. Some taught girls from wealthy families; others specialized in taking in sewing, lacework, or embroidery; producing fine linens, ribbons, and altar vestments; creating high-end manuscripts (even after printing); and molding small devotional statues of terra-cotta or gesso or papier mâché. Some nunneries had reputations for producing quality herbs or medicinal potions, which they sold to apothecaries and physicians. Residents in some houses participated in stages of contracted-out cloth production. Church fathers at the Council of Trent found much of this commercial activity unbecoming of Brides of Christ and had bishops at least scale it back. See also Arts: Women and the Arts; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Clothmaking; Guilds; Putting-Out System; Retail Selling; Slaves and Slavery; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Education of Children; Families, Laboring Class; Fertility, Conception, and Contraception; Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing; Servants, Household; Widows; Fashion and Appearance: Laundry; Tailors and Seamstresses; Food and Drink: Eating Out; Housing and Community: Villages and Village Life; Recreation and Social Customs: Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Theater, Popular; Religion and Beliefs: Nuns and Nunneries FURTHER READING Angiolini, Franco. “Slaves and Slavery in Early Modern Tuscany.” Italian History and Culture 3 (1997): 67–86. Bowers, Jane, and Judith Tick, eds. Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Brown, Judith C., and Jordan Goodman. “Women and Industry in Florence.” Journal of Economic History 40 (1980): 73–80. Chojnacka, Monica. Working Women of Early Modern Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Ferraro, Joanne. “Representing Women in Early Modern Italian Economic History.” In J. Hartman and A. Seeff, eds. Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007, pp. 75–88. Groppi, A., ed. Il lavoro delle donne. Bari: Laterza, 1996. Henke, Robert. Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Parker, Deborah. “Women in the Book Trade in Italy, 1475–1620.” Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 509–41. Trexler, Richard C. The Women of Renaissance Florence. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998. Whaley, Leigh. Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.

FAMILY AND GENDER

INTRODUCTION The family was the heart and soul of Renaissance-era society. It was the matrix in which the young were raised to adulthood; its traditions defined each generation’s understanding of itself; it was the seat of honor for its members, and their source of sustenance, security, and social standing. One’s name spoke to ancestry: father, grandfather, cities left behind, occupations abandoned, noble estates vacated or seized. It was hardly surprising that a famous family of Florentine financiers had the name meaning “of the physicians.” Even at society’s lower end there were few quicker ways to bring on a fight than to insult another’s family, lowborn though it might have been. Families were very fluid organizations. For elites, the palazzo was the physical center of family life. Not merely one generation, but three or even four might occupy its rooms. The paterfamilias and wife might be joined by a mother-in-law, spinster aunts, or disabled uncles; his cousins or his wife’s siblings or cousins; his children young and old, orphaned nieces or nephews, and adopted children born to household servants; and his widowed daughter’s children. These folks got along with servants, slaves, fostered children, apprentices, friends, business associates, and distantly related visitors and their servants. This cast of characters ebbed and flowed from month to month or even week to week. Daughters and older women entered convents, sons left for university or on a political mission, widows remarried or their children were reclaimed by the father’s family, orphans were placed as apprentices, and older sons joined religious orders or left town to conduct family business. Amid the middle and lower classes family probably had a tighter definition. In fifteenth-century Tuscany their nuclear family sizes were smaller than those

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Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1556) here depicts the merchant Giovanni della Volta with his wife and children in 1547. The family’s wealth is signaled by the parents’ clothing, the rich Turkish carpet, and the expensive cherries that the parents offer the children, whose antics form the work’s center. Oil on canvas. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

of elites by about one-third, and typical housing was very limited in its ability to absorb many newcomers. As a couple’s family gained more children, they went in search of larger quarters. Older parents, especially fathers, were expected to leave their daughters dowered for marriage and their sons with a patrimony. Often, however, working men left little of value behind, and many needed to be cared for by their children. There was a good deal of social mobility among these classes, at least above the level of the indigent, and sons could outdo their parents in the world’s eyes. Even in a village, the well-off could marshal their resources and increase their and their children’s economic and social positions. Renaissance-era Italy was dominated by Catholic males. They ruled the political states and city governments, the Church, and the economy. The father in his family had virtual power of life and death. The women he oversaw were to obey him unquestioningly, and in return he was to seek their best interests—by his lights, of course. Younger males were to defer to and learn from their elders, so that when they held authority they would carry on in an effective and Christian manner. And

Family and Gender: Introduction

so tradition held. Those who did not fit into this paradigm created problems for the Church, families, and governments. Preachers railed against prostitutes, “sodomites,” independent widows, and daughters who eloped. For recalcitrant women, at least, there was always the nunnery. Today we learn from many types of sources of the families and gender issues of Renaissance-era Italy. While we are perhaps most comfortable with quantitative data that we can unpack and compare, there was precious little produced. The great Florentine Catasto of 1427 was the earliest in-depth look at the Italian (specifically Tuscan) family, and much has been done since its data was computerized. But this was essentially a snapshot. Renaissance-era governments would only go through the bother and expense of compiling finely grained detail for purposes of taxation, and this is just what the catasto and other population censuses were. And so we fall back on more anecdotal sources. A fine one is the ricordanze that survive from many heads of households, especially in Tuscany. In a well-kept ricordanza every event in the life of a family would have been recorded. Such matters included the steps leading to marriage, the details of the dowry, children born and passed away, major expenditures and business moves, servants hired and fired, civic events witnessed, great sermons heard, political offices held, and so on. Private letters, such as Alessandra Strozzi’s to her sons in exile or Margherita Datini’s to her husband, provide biographical and historical information as well as affective insights into people’s dreams, aspirations, and fears. Legal documents such as last wills tell us about relations within families as well. Testators could be quite candid in dividing up their possessions and planning for their family’s future. Civic laws and the court cases that followed their violation shed light on societal norms and the lengths authorities would go in reinforcing these. Some of this evidence has been used by historians of sex and gender, who have created studies of the contours of such topics as homosexuality, sexual violence, the sex trade, and the legal disabilities that women or sexual minorities faced. Fiction, in the form of novelle and popular theater, regularly poked at the family and its foibles. The seduced daughter, the old cuckold with his young wife, and the dense or too clever servant are stereotypes that drew readers and audiences because they spoke to the common person’s experiences. Finally, families occupied homes, some of which survive or were detailed at the time in plans, paintings, and inventories of possessions. Many of these riches remain untouched and we students, thankfully, have much to do.

Adoption. See Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption Annulment. See Divorce, Separation, and Annulment

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BIRTH AND MIDWIVES Women’s reproductive health was more often in the hands of female midwives than male practitioners such as physicians or surgeons. Midwives provided advice on conceiving, blocking conception, and ending pregnancies, and aided women with difficult pregnancies. They were experienced empirics who relied upon their hands-on training, previous cases, and veteran’s judgment, as well as collective knowledge of women of the neighborhood or village. Giving birth was a collective enterprise of up to a dozen women orchestrated by the midwife. It was also an all-female experience, unless extraordinary circumstances called for the physician, surgeon, or priest. The husband’s appearance was a sign of despair, unless it was after the baby’s first wails. As with other aspects of reproduction, authors of various sorts provided lots of manuals and advice books on giving birth. Recommendations ranged from the idiotic and dangerous to the useful. Italian male medical professionals differed widely in their opinions of midwives. To some they were little better than peasant women who helped calve cows, while to others they were skilled practitioners who would benefit from formal medical training. In 1596 the Roman Dominican friar and physician Girolamo Scipione Mercurio published his The Midwife, one of the earliest Italian texts on the subject. Midwives need not have been saints, but they required experience, availability, even temperament, strength along with grace and nimbleness, and good character, including humility and discretion.

“Monstrous” Births Children born with obvious defects were explained by numerous causes and categorized as less than human. Such infants were often exaggeratedly described as having grotesque deformities from glowing eyes to extra arms or legs. They were attributed to their mothers’ having copulated during menstruation, having had sex with a demon or beast, or having had nightmarish visions during pregnancy. Violent sex or certain astral constellations might also explain “monsters,” and people saw them as signs of divine anger or omens of coming disasters. Midwives were expected to smother them at birth, but some parents first put them on display for paying viewers.

When the mother felt the time had come, she hollered for her brigata of female friends, relatives, servants, and of course the midwife. Of course, labor could come on under any circumstances, so a woman might find herself in a field, along a road,

Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives

or driving a cart. If alone, she may have had to face the birth alone and in far less than sanitary conditions. Even when at home and enjoying the company of half a dozen women (all of whom, according to tradition, should have already given birth at some time), cleanliness was at best an afterthought. Her companions boiled water, gathered towels, whisked children away, informed the father, put the local surgeon and priest on notice, kept the room as warm as possible given the season, held the mother down, and prayed. After the event, they helped clean the mother, her laundry, her child, and the birthing room. A vomitive or laxative may have helped relieve pressure if the mother’s digestive tract was full. Oils or ointments were slathered along the baby’s path for lubrication, and the mother’s belly was rubbed and massaged. Between contractions the mother was encouraged to walk or stand—or, foolishly, to dance around or jump off a table—to help detach the placenta. To aid gravity and open the birth canal to its widest, the mother and midwife decided on a final stance or position. Crouching and kneeling were natural choices, but some chose standing, sitting, or on all fours: just about anything but laying on her back. Sturdy birthing chairs had been invented in Germany, finding their way south by about 1450. The seat and front were carved out to give open access to vagina and exiting baby, and to the hands of midwife and surgeon if needed. If the baby needed an inducement to exit, foul smells were placed near the mother’s nostrils and pleasant ones at her vagina. Some believed the father’s natural scent would draw the infant out, and his dirty laundry was placed at the mother’s crotch. Midwives directed breathing and exertions while encouraging screams. And many women did scream. Pain was a part of childbirth, whether terrible or mere discomfort. It was the curse of Eve. Midwives knew fungi and herbs that could lessen this, including henbane, hemlock, ground ivy, and mandrake root, which even looked like a little man. Of course, in the right doses these were toxins and, when ingested, could affect the baby if she were long in coming. After a successful birth, afterbirth was carefully studied and the full placenta accounted for. Any remaining inside could become toxic. Ancient traditions surrounded placentas, which might be consumed or buried under the house floor or in a garden for fertility. The newborn’s skin was carefully cleaned, as was each orifice, the eyes covered against light, and breathing induced. He or she was wrapped in long linen or wool strips of cloth known as swaddling from the feet up. This protective layer kept the child warm and padded against mild accidental blows, restricted random movements, and was believed to help straighten the spine. A bit of wine and theriac flushed the digestive tract. Believed to have lost much necessary bodily heat, the mother was fed chicken broth fortified with dried ham (prosciutto) and cinnamon.

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Born with the Caul The caul is the bit of amniotic sac that might adhere to a child’s head and shoulders during birth. Italians believed such adhesion was a mark of a specially gifted child. In Friuli, when old enough, males born with the caul—considered an “external soul”—became responsible for protecting villages at harvest time by leaving their bodies and spiritually battling sorcerers and others who would kill animals or wither crops. These benandanti (good-goers) wielded fennel stalks against the sorghum branches of their enemies. As they had been held suspect by the Church, Carlo Ginzburg studied Inquisition trial records in his Night Battles (1983).

Threats to success were many. The child might lay dead in the womb and need manual removal, which itself might easily tear delicate tissue and harm the mother. Afterbirth removal could lead to severe hemorrhaging and sepsis. If not aligned in the birth canal properly, the baby could become lodged and require manual rotation or other manipulations, and of course the umbilical cord might become entangled and prevent normal exit. In such emergencies the doctors arrived and the prayers to Saints Leonard and Margaret flew heavenward. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Health and Illness; Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing; Pregnancy; Wives and Husbands; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Bathing and Personal Hygiene; Food and Drink: Galenic Health Regimens; Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Physicians; Villages and Village Life; Science and Technology: Anatomy and Dissection FURTHER READING Alfani, Guido. “Family Rituals in Northern Italy.” In Samuel K. Cohn, ed. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013, pp. 139–60. Allerston, Patricia. “ ‘Contrary to the Truth and Also to the Semblance of Reality’? Entering the Venetian Lying in Chamber, 1605.” Renaissance Studies 20 (2006): 629–39. Bell, Rudolph. How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Benedek, Thomas. “Changing Relationship between Midwives and Physicians.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51 (1977): 550–64. Gélis, Jacques. History of Childbirth. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991.

Family and Gender: Childhood Musacchio, Jacqueline Maria. The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Rösslin, Eucharius. When Midwifery Became the Male Physician’s Province: The Sixteenth Century Handbook The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives. Translated by W. Arons. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1994.

Burial. See Death, Funerals, and Burial

CHILDHOOD In Tuscany, infancy (infantia) was reckoned to last from birth to age seven, childhood (pueritia) from 7 to 14, and adolescence (adolescentia, also called gioventù (joh-ven-too) or youth) from 15 to 28 or when married. Clearly the labels do not coincide with our twenty-first-century usage, and so the student of the period must adapt to the different social landscape. The Italian word fanciullo (fahn-chool-loh) as used in the fifteenth century might be translated as child, servant, boy, or assistant; the contemporary word for “boy,” ragazzo, had the narrower meaning of boys aged 16 to 20. Tuscan girls ended their childhood when they were married or took their vows as nuns, perhaps as early as age 13; boys marked theirs when their fathers died. Married men who lived with their parents in the family palazzo—or rural hovel—were still considered adolescents. Younger children in wealthier families might be raised by their parents, but were more likely to be under the care of older siblings or servants, perhaps a nurse or nanny given that specific job. Doctors recommended diets and regimens that maintained physical health, while preachers and religious writers stressed spiritual and moral development. Good parents should raise good children, reassured Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici. Provide pictures of Jesus and saints, and let children pretend to say Mass. The child’s will should be disciplined and bent into that of a good Christian, but not broken by abuse. At age 15 a Tuscan boy might be working on the family farm, helping his father with his trade, apprenticed to a master artisan, serving in a noble household, studying in grammar school, or beginning study at the university in Padua or Bologna; and he was subject to the rural head-tax in the Florentine contado. Girls in their early teens also helped at home: some are known to have been virtually apprenticed to their fathers. On farms they tended crops and animals and smaller children; in cities some attended grammar and arithmetic schools, or girls’ schools in nunneries. Prepubescent lower or working-class girls could traverse the streets to run errands, make deliveries, sell garden goods or other items, or tend market stalls if

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their parents felt they could be trusted. Once they hit puberty, social norms required girls be kept apart from the public to protect their chastity. Lower-class families often could not afford to isolate them. Some single mothers who were prostitutes began to pimp their own daughters at about this age. Whatever a young woman’s class and however she came by it, pregnancy outside of marriage brought both personal and familial dishonor. As the Renaissance era progressed, both civic and Church authorities established institutions to care for children who were at risk. Children, usually infants, whose mothers were unmarried, slaves, servants, nuns, prostitutes, or had died in childbirth, began to find shelter This Portrait of a Boy (dated 1480s to 1500) is variously attributed to Bernardino Pinturicchio in foundling homes in the early (1454–1513) of Perugia and Andrea di Aloigi fifteenth century. Residents (aka L’Ingegno; 1480–1521) of Assisi. The sitter tended to die in large numbers is unknown but was once thought to be young at young ages, but survivors Raphael. The artist captures none of the joy or playfulness of youth, turning the subject into an went on to tend younger resiadult without maturity. Tempera on panel. (Fine Art dents. Boys eventually found Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) apprenticeships and girls either jobs as servants or places in nunneries. When old enough, girls seeking marriage needed dowries, which might be accumulated by years of service or charitable donations. From the 1540s girls aged 10 to 12 might find a temporary home in a conservatory, such as Rome’s Santa Caterina della Rosa, designed to protect the chastity of daughters of prostitutes and other girls at risk as they entered and experienced puberty. They gained basic literacy and Christian doctrine, and skills such as weaving, sewing, lace-making, or silk thread production. Orphanages were also established to care for children both of whose parents had died or were missing. Orphaned children, however, often had resources such as property and a guardian listed in a will or family who would care for or adopt them.

Family and Gender: Childhood

Boys and young men, even those properly apprenticed or otherwise employed, often had the run of the streets. Their disruptive behavior could range from mischief and innocent pranks to criminal theft, assault, and male prostitution. Rival gangs mimicked their rowdier elders, staging street fights with fists, rocks, weapons, and collateral damage. Friars and adult confraternities responded by establishing child confraternities and then those for older boys. These provided adult models to channel youthful energies toward positive civic and religious ends, and added regularity to what was often a chaotic phase of life. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Portraits; Economics and Work: Apprentices; Putting-Out System; Sheep and Wool Economy in the South; Family and Gender: Espousal and Wedding; Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption; Health and Illness; Homosexuality and Sodomy; Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing; Pregnancy; Siblings; Virtù and Honor; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Jewish Communities; Poverty and the Poor; Villages and Village Life; Violence within the Household and Community; Politics and Warfare: Crime and Punishments; War and Civilians; Recreation and Social Customs: Children’s Toys and Games; Church Festivals and Processions; Religion and Beliefs: Christian Art in the Home; Confraternities; Nuns and Nunneries FURTHER READING Ajmar, Marta. “Toys for Girls: Objects, Women, and Memory in the Renaissance Household.” In Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley, eds. Material Memories. London: Bloomsbury, 1999, pp. 75–89. Brown, Patricia Fortini. “Children and Education.” In Marta Ajmar-Wolheim and Flora Dennis, eds. At Home in Renaissance Italy. London: V&A Museum, 2006, pp. 136–44. Evangelisti, Silvia, and Sandra Cavallo, eds. A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Period. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Gavitt, Philip. Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Haas, Louis. The Renaissance Man and His Children. New York: Macmillan, 1998. Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Polizzotto, Lorenzo. Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and Socialization of Youths in Florence, 1427–1785. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ross, James B. “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century.” In Lloyd de Mause, ed. The Child in History. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974, pp. 183–228.

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Conception and Contraception. See Fertility, Conception, and ­Contraception

DEATH, FUNERALS, AND BURIAL Death arrived for everyone, but it came in different guises. If one survived to adulthood, he or she would have seen many instances, from a stillborn sibling to the succumbing of an aged grandparent to plague dead in the street. Catholic preachers warned that no one knew when or how one would die, and all one could do was pray and prepare for a good death. The Art of Dying laid out the spiritual preparation—sacramental last rites of communion and sincere confession, reconciliation with enemies, fighting off despair and putting on hope—while one’s notary made sure an up-to-date will was in place and the family could survive the member’s passing. Of course, death very often came without warning and time to prepare. If one were at or near home, or wealthy enough to be transported back, then at least the corpse could rejoin the family for a final send-off. When a son went off to university or war, or a husband left on business or into exile, family might never know their fate. A widow who was not sure she was a widow usually had to wait three years before remarrying, just in case her husband, or reliable news of his being alive, came to her. Dying as a process was one of life’s great mysteries. Theologians declared it occurred when the soul left the body; physicians did not argue and sought signs such as the smell of putrefaction, lack of movement, breathing, and body warmth. But even signs could mislead, and the culture circulated many tales of those who had awakened from false death, sometimes even as the dirt fell upon them. Except in time of plague, a corpse was carefully tended and washed by the deceased’s female relatives or the local midwife. In some places a special civic corps of corpse-bearers dressed and attended the body until it was buried. Deceased confraternity members received special attention from their brothers, who saw to it that the body was dressed in the group’s robe and laid on its own bier. Guilds, too, could play a role in preparing and burying members’ remains. Lay men and women who belonged to third-order affiliations with mendicant orders were entitled to be buried in a robe of the order. However prepared, the corpse was laid out publicly at least overnight for viewing and prayers, while preparations for the funeral and burial were carried out.

Family and Gender: Death, Funerals, and Burial

Sumptuary laws that regulated feasting and set dress codes for the living could do so for the dead as well. For a while in fifteenth-century Florence, apart from knights and judges, corpses of men and women had to be wrapped in simple all-white wool lined with linen. Men had to wear a simple white cap, while women could not wear a garland or false hair, and a limit was set on what was on her head. Also banned were silk, silver, and gold rings. In 1473 restrictions on dressing corpses were lifted. During serious epidemics, normal practices and customs were suspended. No one wanted contact with dead bodies, the very air around which was supposed to be poisoned. Collected by paid corpse-bearers, they were transported in two-wheeled tumbrels that could be tipped back so bodies could slide out into the pits that served as graves. If a death occurred under suspicious circumstances, an autopsy might have been required, which would have postponed formalities. Most cities had at least one confraternity whose mission was to find and bury the indigent dead. At least one confraternity in each city accompanied condemned criminals to their executions and buried their corpses. Some corpses of executed criminals wound up on dissection tables as demonstrations for medical students and other onlookers. At the funeral itself, women were expected to unleash a torrent of emotion, while men held their emotions in stoical reserve. At confraternity funerals the chanting of male voices was supposed to drown out those of wailing women. Women were often banned from funerals during plague time, as in fifteenth-century Bologna. Also banned were excessive mourning clothes, such as expensive black gowns or capes with long trains. Catholic burial was usually in blessed ground, especially in or around a church. Both old superstitions and Church teachings supported the idea, as it was believed this would keep demons away and better present the person at the Last Judgment.

Death Omnipresent Death surrounded the Renaissance-era Italian, even apart from the visitations of plague. In church one sat surrounded by corpses in floor and walls; one prayed before crucified Christ, prayed for the dead and for one’s own good death, and to those who had died and gone to heaven. Churches hosted funerals whose processions wended their ways through city streets. Neighborhood moms and wives died all too frequently in childbirth, and children were crushed beneath cartwheels and hooves. Animals were butchered, mournful bellows or screeches echoing down stone streets. Italians celebrated life so vigorously, perhaps because death was always so close.

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To die forgotten and without prayers for one’s soul was among the era’s greatest fears. Even with last rites the burden of sin anyone carried was enough to condemn the soul to the torments of purgatory. If one could afford it, the strategy was to leave a will with clear instructions for a chapel, memorial, altarpiece, or set of liturgical plate or vestments in one’s parish church or one of the great mendicant churches. Marked with the giver’s name or coat-of-arms, passersby would be prompted to add a prayer or two to God’s account. Even popes worried. Julius II had Old St. Peter’s Basilica torn down to be replaced with an enormous reminder to pray for him. The family, too, needed to be reminded of the deceased, of whom a death mask of wax or terra-cotta was sometimes made, from which a bust could be fashioned or a portrait painted. Of course, if one had been obscure and forgotten in life, he or she remained obscure and forgotten in death and after. See also: Arts: Art Patronage; Portraits; Economics and Work: Notaries; Family and Gender: Health and Illness; Inheritance; Last Wills and Testaments; Old Age; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Housing and Community: Death in the Community; Physicians; Plague; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Sacraments, Catholic FURTHER READING Banker, James. Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Ciapelli, Giovanni, and Patricia Rubin. Art, Memory and Family in Renaissance Florence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Strocchia, Sharon. Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Tetel, Marcel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen, eds. Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. Wray, Shona Kelly. Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

DIVORCE, SEPARATION, AND ANNULMENT Married life could be unexpectedly and intolerably unsatisfactory, a truism for any time period. Neither Roman nor Germanic law, bases for most secular law in Renaissance-era Italy, had any bars to dissolving an existing valid marriage. Roman Catholic canon law, which had authority throughout Italy, however, trumped secular law when it came to defining what constituted marriage, since the Church had long declared marriage a holy sacrament. Until 1563, Church canon

Family and Gender: Divorce, Separation, and Annulment

law only required mutual consent and sexual consummation for a valid marriage, leaving lots of room for local customs and laws. When considering validity, the Church often did take into account the persons’ legal ability to marry, as defined locally or by the Church itself. For example, priests and friars could not marry, nor could already-married persons, nor brothers and sisters, and infants could not give personal consent. Civil laws touching marriage were generally in line with Church teachings. Governments did, however, impose various restrictive civil laws: against abduction or bigamy; minimum number of wedding witnesses needed; maximum dowry amounts; minimum degrees of relational separation of the couple (no parent and child, siblings, first cousins, etc.); and the ages below which a child needed parental consent (ranging from 15 in Vercelli to 25 in Perugia and Piacenza). Violations of civil laws triggered fines, prison terms, or corporal punishment; but they did not affect the validity of a marriage. Importantly, the bond created in a valid wedding—legal ability to wed, consent, consummation—could not be dissolved until death. In short, divorce was not allowed by either Church or state. The Church, however, did hold out two options to the dissatisfied couple: separation and annulment. Separation could be temporary or permanent, voluntary and private, or officially imposed. Authorities became involved when either one party requested an intervention or the couple’s situation became public and scandalous. In any case separation—sometimes confusingly referred to as divortio—meant that the marriage remained intact, and that neither party could validly marry another person. If both parties chose to join a religious order, the Church would grant a formal voluntary separation. A couple might choose to divide up their goods and liabilities in a formal notarial agreement and simply go their own ways. A voluntary separation could mean little more than a wife rejoining her birth family for some time, perhaps as a cooling-off period. If this was prolonged with no clear end, the husband could sue for adhere, which would compel the wife to return to their home. Either the wife would return or she would provide a court her reasons for not returning. If she desired to remain apart, she would counter-sue for separatio. A study of sixteenth-century legal cases in Verona reveals that 83% of adhere cases were brought by husbands who wanted their absent wives back home. Conversely, 77% of separatio suits were filed by wives seeking permanent distance from their husbands. Grounds for a wife’s leaving her husband included violence against her, his failure to support her, and his committing adultery or heresy. Usually a man’s suit for separation was based on her adultery. Court records lay out patterns of male maltreatment: physical abuse or her fear of severe forms of it, cruel verbal insults and taunting loud enough to be heard by neighbors, verbal or other attacks on her honor, his bragging of adulterous sex with prostitutes, his

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misuse of her dowry and possessions, even his pimping of his wife and forcing her to commit adultery. A common theme was his inability to control himself, acting more animal than human. In declining a woman’s suit, a court could require the husband to post surety, a monetary pledge against committing future violence. A Venetian study has over half of women’s suits succeeding. This was especially important because the abusive husband had to return what he could of his wife’s dowry. With this, she could move to another town or city and start fresh, though she could not marry again. If the dowry was long gone or tied up in litigation, and she had no local family or funds, she might find shelter in one of the era’s hospitals or sixteenth-century asylums for “badly married” women, which supported women and, if needed, their young children. When a bishop’s court granted an annulment, it recognized that no valid marriage had existed in the first place. Evidence of this might be brought to the authority’s attention, or suits for annulment brought, usually by wives. Church courts needed real convincing that the marriage was a sham. For example, if a woman had unknowingly married a priest, she could seek an annulment. Grounds for annulment included one partner’s inability to have procreative sex despite three years of sincere effort. This meant male dysfunction or severe tightness affecting a woman’s vagina. Consummation meant that the sex act had occurred, not that it had resulted in pregnancy. Infertility or sterility was another matter and not grounds. Court cases involved testimony by priests, midwives, physicians, kin, neighbors, servants, and coworkers; unsuccessful remedies mentioned included prayer, Masses, magic, witchcraft, herbs, cubeb, large-winged ants, quail testicles, and sugar. An annulment based on faulty male performance was a blow against his honor, and he had to return the dowry. But she had court proof that she was still a virgin and was still eligible for marriage to another. Another basis for annulment was coercion, usually by the father on his daughter to marry his choice. Evidence here was less objective, but courts considered a wide range of statements, behaviors, and observations on her part and that of witnesses. Her age and her father’s personality were especially important. If she was very young and he a very forceful figure, then coercion was easy to picture. Threats and even violence were not enough, since willful and perverse daughters were far from unknown and the era accepted force as discipline. If, however, she was shown by witnesses to have opposed the union consistently, openly, and vehemently, then she might prevail. After Trent (1563), other grounds appeared for annulling a marriage: the presiding priest was not competent or no banns had announced the wedding beforehand. See also: Economics and Work: Notaries; Family and Gender: Dowries; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Inheritance; Virtù and Honor;

Family and Gender: Dowries

Wives and Husbands; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Violence within the Household and Community; Politics and Warfare: Civic Magistracies and Offices FURTHER READING Cohen, Sherrill. The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Guzzetti, Linda. “Separations and Separated Couples in Fourteenth-Century Venice.” In Trevor Dean and K.J.P. Lowe, eds. Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 249–74. Eisenach, Emlyn. Husbands, Wives, and Concubines: Marriage, Family and Social Order in Sixteenth-Century Verona. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2004. Ferraro, Joanne M. Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Ferraro, Joanne M. “The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern Florence.” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1985): 492–512.

DOWRIES A bride’s dowry was a sum of money or money and property paid by the father or guardian of the woman to her husband-to-be. The sum was a matter of negotiation, and was considered the woman’s share of her father’s estate. After its provision, the daughter had no further claims to family wealth or property, which would r­ emain in the control of the family’s males. A dowry’s purpose was to provide the couple ready cash with which to begin their family life together, and to return to the woman if and when widowed, usually in place of a share in her husband’s estate. Women who entered a nunnery usually provided a “spiritual dowry” to provide for the new nuns’ physical needs. These tended to be a fraction of a bride’s dowry, and differed with the prestige of the female community. Both brides and novices also brought trousseaux of personal property to their new homes: for the wealthy gowns, expensive cloth, dinnerware, small paintings, or jewelry, and expensively decorated chests in which to keep their treasures. The values of dowries tended to rise markedly over the Renaissance era, reflecting monetary inflation, a social interest in increased childbearing in the midst of plague, and changes in the “marriage market.” In Venice, for example, an average noble dowry in the 1380s was worth about 1,000 ducats. In 1420 the state set the maximum at 1,600 ducats, unless the wife was a plebeian, in which case it was 2,000 ducats, to compensate men for marrying outside their class. The

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maximum was reset in 1505 to 3,000, in 1535 to 4,000, and in 1551 to 5,000 ducats, all of which maxima were often violated by anxious fathers. Between 1394 and 1496 Venice’s Arborsani family spent 36,600 ducats on dowries, an average of over 2,815 per wedding, and the fifteenth-century Quartari family an average of 3,125 for eight daughters. Florence’s patricians averaged 1,010 florins per wedding around 1450, but a Medici daughter came with 2,000 florins plus a 500-florin trousseau in 1466. Italy’s nobility paid no attention to cost: in 1387 Valentina Visconti of Milan had a dowry of 450,000 florins, and Milan’s Anna Sforza was accompanied by 150,000 ducats in 1491. At such rates even well-off families could ill afford more than one or two dowries, so high-status daughters increasingly found themselves being pledged to nunneries even as children. Conversely, with fewer marriageable women of their own class, noble or patrician sons either postponed or foreswore marriage or sought women among the lower classes. In Venice, this last option resulted in one’s being stricken from the official list of nobles. Of course, the middle and working classes could hardly provide even respectable sums to marry off their daughters. One answer was charity: the rich merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, was asked by friends many times to contribute to a worthy but poor girl’s fund. He had married Margherita Bandini whose exiled family had provided her with no dowry, a fact of which he reminded her on several occasions. After the Black Death many wills included dowries or partial dowries for specific family members or neighbors or for orphaned or abandoned girls housed in an institution awaiting marriage. Florence’s government set up a dowry fund, the Monte delle dote, which ran from 1425 through the late 1570s. Fathers began investing money when the daughter was born and, assuming she lived to marry, her husband received the accumulated sum upon espousal. Over its life some 30,000 girls participated. Of the 19,000 enrolled to 1499 only 3.6% became nuns; of those enrolled after 1530, 28.2% entered a nunnery. Some, of course, died during enrollment, causing the father to lose his investment. Lower-class fathers could also provide a dowry by mortgaging property or borrowing the sum. In the later fifteenth century, poorer Sienese families provided dowries worth about 30 florins at a time when their social betters were paying out 800. Rules differed across Italy as to how dowries were to be used during marriage. In general the husband invested it for the family’s purposes, including in business or land. In Venice the custom was that the husband only controlled one-third its value, while the wife theoretically managed the other two-thirds on the family’s behalf. As these values rose, however, local governments shifted more control to husbands, while wives were protected by enhancing the trousseaux over which only she had control. Of course, a husband could be bankrupted by economic forces, bad investments, or exile, leaving his widow with no resources of her own. If she died before her husband, he absorbed the dowry into the family’s patrimony.

Family and Gender: Education of Children

At her husband’s death her family’s wealth, minus the original value of her dowry, was reserved to her sons and unmarried daughters. His will might provide a house and income to support her as long as she remained a chaste widow, or she might have to depend on her sons for room and board. If so, her dowry might be retained, to be passed on through her will. Sometimes bequests helped augment granddaughters’ or even daughters’ dowries. Many widows entered religious houses, donating part of their dowry for their support; the remainder would revert to her birth family. Others set up annuities for life to support them living independently in spinsterhood, with the remainder bequeathed to religious or even artistic purposes. If the widow was young enough and chose to remarry, she would carry her dowry, perhaps fattened with additional family funds, into a second marriage. See also: Arts: Women and the Arts; Economics and Work: Credit and Loans; Notaries; Family and Gender: Espousal and Wedding; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Inheritance; Last Wills and Testaments; Old Age; Widows; Wives and Husbands; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Sumptuary Laws; Recreation and Social Customs: Weddings FURTHER READING Dean, Trevor, and K.J.P. Lowe, eds. Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Kirshner, Julius. Marriage, Dowry, and Citizenship in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. “The Griselda Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento.” In Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 214–36. Molho, Anthony, and Julius Kirshner. “The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence.” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978): 403–38.

EDUCATION OF CHILDREN Whether popes or peasants, Italians valued education and the skills it imparted. The ability to make simple calculations and read a poster or basic contract or sign one’s name was necessary, at least for men, in the commercial world that northern and central Italy was becoming. In sophisticated Venice in 1450 about 40% of adult males were literate, somewhat more in 1500, and somewhat less (34%) by 1600. For most, the process of learning began in mid-childhood.

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Some children learned at home from a literate and numerate parent, older sibling, or willing neighbor. Well-off parents brought tutors into their homes, and institutionalized children had teachers provided by the administering charity. In many occupations masters taught their apprentices and servants, though many of these boys had had prior education at home or in school. Young girls entering nunneries were at least taught to read to participate in the group’s prayer and liturgical life. Apart from families or home tutors, there were few other educational opportunities for girls, as most schools were strictly male. Renaissance-era schools were single-teacher and of three types. Least utilized were Church-sponsored schools, whether in monasteries or parishes, at least until the later sixteenth century. City governments founded and supported communal schools, especially in smaller communities. The norm was education by independent teachers who ran their own classrooms and charged tuition. Sometimes parents established a school and hired its teacher, as in Bergamo in 1543, when 16 parents founded an “academy” that taught 20 students. Elementary literacy education began with the alphabet and syllables and then branched into either Latin or vernacular Italian. Abbaco was the study of simple computation—multiplying, dividing, fractions, and business applications including interest computation. Teachers, and therefore schools, specialized. In Venice in 1587 eight Church schools taught 322 pupils; five communal teachers had 188 students; 160 independent Latin teachers 1,650; and 72 independent teachers of Italian or abbaco 2,465. All told, 245 teachers taught 4,625 students in formal classrooms. Latin teachers were often clerics who taught in their own homes or rented rooms, averaging 23 students of varying levels at a time. Italian or abbaco teachers tended to be laymen whose classrooms held twice as many, one seating 120. In the 1390s even tiny Borgo San Sepolcro had several abbaco teachers and around 100 pupils ages 6 to 15. Teachers often had a ripetitore, an assistant who drilled and corrected students orally. Parents expected firm but fair levels of discipline, and educational commentators agreed that brutality had no place. Three Renaissance-era trends made deep impacts on elementary education. The advance of humanism, with its emphasis on Classical authors, led Latin teachers to replace most standard medieval texts, except the basic grammar known as Donatus, with Latin originals. Between about 1380 and 1450 humanist educators shifted typical curricula to an emphasis on poetry (Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Terence), history (Caesar, Cicero, and Sallust), and moral philosophy (drawn from all of these). Printing meant much cheaper editions of basic texts, many of which were made more interesting by including illustrative pictures. Finally, the Catholic Reformation movement stressed lay literacy and higher standards for education of clergy. Seminaries appeared and seminarians often taught local students; in Milan they were required to do so. Schools of Christian Doctrine began in fifteenth-century Bologna teaching literacy and Catholic fundamentals, but exploded in the sixteenth

Family and Gender: Education of Children

century. They were sponsored by clergy or confraternities and held classes for two hours only on Sunday and holiday afternoons—about 85 days per year. Boys went to one church, girls to another. In Christian Doctrine schools’ first decade (1530s–1540s), Milan’s archdiocese established 200 serving 2,000 students. By 1584 it claimed 740 schools with 40,000 students. In 1599, the city alone claimed 20,504 studying in all types of school. Jewish Italian families valued education at least as much as Christian families. Every Jewish male was expected to begin reading scripture in Hebrew (alongside an Italian translation) by age five, and many families began earlier. Because of the small sizes of communities, teaching was far more intimate, and study outside class setting expected. Wealthy families took in tutors, and the less well-off sent their sons to local or distant schools; or the local rabbi filled in. By tradition, communities were expected to support poverty-stricken students financially. Significantly, students learned writing by composing letters daily to all manner of people, thus combining grammar and rhetoric. See also: Arts: Painters and Their Workshops; Economics and Work: Apprentices; Book Printing and Sales; Putting-Out System; Family and Gender: Childhood; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Servants, Household; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Jewish Communities; Patronage; Recreation and Social Customs: Children’s Toys and Games; Reading; Religion and Beliefs: Confraternities; Council of Trent and Catholic Reform; Monks and Monasteries; Nuns and Nunneries; Science and Technology: Universities FURTHER READING Black, Robert. Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils, and Schools, c.1250–1450. Boston: Brill, 2007. Bonfil, Robert. Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Anthony Oldcorn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Carlsmith, Christopher. A Renaissance Education: Schooling in Bergamo and the Venetian Republic, 1500–1650. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Dominici, Giovanni (OP). On the Education of Children. Edited by Arthur B. Coté. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America 1927. Gehl, Paul F. A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in Trecento Florence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Goldthwaite, Richard A. “Schools and Teachers of Commercial Arithmetic in Renaissance Florence.” Journal of European Economic History 1 (1972): 418–33. Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Kallendorf, Craig, ed. and trans. Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

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ESPOUSAL AND WEDDING Decisions about marriage were probably the most vital ones that members of a family made. Marriage created family alliances, promised members of new generation, brought a new personality into the groom’s household, saw the dispersal of a significant portion of the bride’s family wealth, and, as a Catholic sacrament, was meant to be permanent.

This wedding portrait of the well-off Marsilio Cassotti and Faustina Assonica of Venice was painted by Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1556) in 1523. It commemorates the ring ceremony and features cupid, a wooden yoke that binds the couple symbolically, and the laurel of chastity and faithfulness. Oil on canvas. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Family and Gender: Espousal and Wedding

Boys and girls of a certain age, and men and marriageable women were not to experience one another’s company without careful safeguards. This was certainly the ideal among the urban upper classes, and was probably customary among laboring classes. No father of any class wanted his daughter to lose her honor or her virginity before marriage. Men seeking brides knew of marriageable women by reputation, on sight at church, or through social circles. When time came to marry, some families relied on professional marriage brokers who arranged meetings; one of the most famous informal brokers was Lorenzo de’Medici. Rulers and patrons such as Il Magnifico had wide circles of acquaintances and friends, and could be trusted to have the best interests of both parties in mind. Fathers of grooms-to-be played significant roles in directing their sons’ gaze toward appropriate women, as did mothers, such as Florentine widow Alessandra Strozzi. Contemporary advice books provided both serious and satirical views on choosing a wife and on women in general. Some were outright misogynistic. The more even-handed stressed the girl’s or woman’s moral qualities and lack of bad habits—such as throwing fits or spending lavishly. Cleric Sabba da Castiglione published a manual in the 1550s that saw three editions and 19 printings to 1597. He stated that she should be modest in food, drink, dress, speech, and what she looked at and listened to; she should avoid disreputable people; and she should be dedicated to whatever task is at hand. Fathers of potential brides were urged to choose grooms for their daughters who were sober, mature, of good repute, and likely to be faithful. It was not enough that he be noble or wealthy: one should not sell one’s daughter. Others stressed that partners should be from the same class and social status, not be too distant in age, and both welcome children. Girls of virtually any age could be promised or even married to a suitor (though not consummated until after menarche). Civil laws defined the age beneath which a girl had to have parental consent to marry: it varied from 15 to 25. The Church forbade marriages forced on girls, a situation that could prove grounds for an annulment. Because brides-to-be of all classes were expected to bring with them a dowry, however, cooperation of her family was vital. A girl could turn down a father-approved suitor, but she knew the alternative to marriage was the nunnery. Aristotle had said that 18 was the best age for a woman to marry, and 37 for a man; Plato had pegged the male at 25. In Italy a man could usually marry without parental consent at 18, though no commentators thought that old enough: he should be mature and have resources. Florence’s 1427 tax census reveals that on average women married at 18 and men at about 30. Virtually all Florentine men eventually married. In Venice, by contrast, studies show that among the upper classes only 50% to 60% did. This was in large part to keep family wealth concentrated in the married brothers’ hands.

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Wedding after Trent With only stated intent and consummation required for marriage, some couples followed their own instead of families’ wills, resulting in elopement and clandestine but valid marriages. In the 1563 decree Tametsi, Church leaders at Trent refused to require parental consent, as the French and Spanish desired, but they clearly altered wedding rituals. Announcements (banns) of upcoming weddings had to be made on three Sundays from her parish church; her parish priest had to officiate, with three witnesses; and weddings had to be registered to be valid. Participants’ free will and consummation ­remained requirements, but no longer sufficed.

Before the Council of Trent, the only requirement for a valid wedding ritual was a formal exchange of statements of intent by the couple, usually before a notary and witnesses, followed by sexual consummation. Catholic teaching treated the sacrament as one performed by the partners, and even a priest’s blessing was customary but not necessary. Among the lower classes, the time between agreement to marry and the ritual exchange could be a day or two. Among elites, for whom much was bound up with the dowry—negotiations, agreement, delivery—it could be months. According to his ricordanza, on March 31 Goro Dati signed a betrothal contract to marry Betta. On Easter Monday, April 7, he formally presented her with a ring. On Sunday, June 22, her cousins agreed to supply a dowry of 900 florins, the couple exchanged intentions before a notary and witnesses and they were married, and the marriage was consummated; on June 26, 800 florins were paid to Goro. Other cases reveal other details: the groom and bride’s father create a contract before witnesses and notary, followed by a feast and dancing at the bride’s father’s house, where bride and groom may meet for the first time; later in the month the groom presents a casket of jewels to his wife at her home; 11 months later the dowry is delivered, husband presents the ring, intentions are exchanged, a feast ensues, and she moves to her new home where there is more feasting and consummation of the marriage. See also: Arts: Portraits; Family and Gender: Dowries; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Virtù and Honor; Wives and Husbands; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community: Furnishing the House; Jewish Communities; Villages and Village Life; Politics and Warfare: Alliances and Treaties; Recreation and Social Customs: Civic Festivals; Weddings; Religion and Beliefs: Sacraments, Catholic

Family and Gender: Families, Laboring Class FURTHER READING Alfani, Guido. “Family Rituals in Northern Italy.” In Samuel K. Cohn, ed. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013, pp. 139–60. Barbaro, Francesco. The Wealth of Wives: A Fifteenth-Century Marriage Manual. Edited and translated by Margaret L. King. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015. Chojnacki, Stanley. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays in Patrician Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Crabb, Ann. The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. D’Elia, Anthony. The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Eisenach, Emlyn. Husbands, Wives, and Concubines: Marriage, Family and Social Order in Sixteenth-Century Verona. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2004. Kirshner, Julius. Marriage, Dowry, and Citizenship in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. “The First Female Nudes of the Quattrocento.” In Samuel K. Cohn, ed. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013, pp. 161–80. Kuehn, Thomas. “Contracting Marriage in Renaissance Florence.” In Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte, eds. To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 399–420. Weinstein, Roni. Marriage Rituals Italian Style: A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews. Leiden: Brill, 2004.

FAMILIES, LABORING CLASS Roughly 95% of Venetians belonged to the Citizen and Popular classes, while only 5% were listed as noble or patrician. This was probably a fairly typical spread between the elites—whether in terms of wealth, name, or political power—and the remainder of society at any time in any given city. Rural elites were likely to have been even a smaller percentage of the rural population. The lower classes, though here labeled “laboring,” included those who had few, if any, possessions and lived off charity. Indigence or destitution was usually the mark of the individual who lost the family ties that kept even poverty a controllable reality. For these classes, family had some of the same meanings that it did for the elites, but one could argue it was anchored in daily experience rather than symbolism or tradition.

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For one thing, non-elites often lacked family names, and were simply denoted as “John the shoemaker,” “Simon from Pisa,” or “Jane the wife of Simon from Pisa,” in Italian of course. A shoemaker was not likely to have had distinguished ancestors, and an immigrant may have severed all ties with family back home. A shoemaker’s father may have been a construction worker who had apprenticed his son and died early. In turn, the shoemaker’s son Francesco may become a notary, using the title and the rather generic name Ser Francesco di Giovanni. His son Roberto might have the name Roberto di Francesco. The point is that there were no working class equivalents of the Venetian Contarini, Roman Colonna, or Florentine Alberti. For another, few non-elites had a family seat such as a palazzo or castello. Families tended to be two-generation structures of parents and children with only the occasional non-nuclear family members living in the same residence. Rural families probably had more flexibility here, since the nature of agricultural labor meant that all but the utterly incapable could help with family labor, chores, or child-rearing. In cities, widowed parents might join a son’s household, some even handing over what patrimony or widow’s dowry there was to his control in return for food and shelter. Many non-elites rented their residences, but a study has shown that in later sixteenth-century Venice only about half owned them. Even so, these would have been rather humble abodes, often attached to or containing the family’s shops or workshops. Many more lived in rented tenements or apartments into which larger structures had been subdivided. Famiglie, of course, were enlarged by the addition of orphaned kin, apprentices, servants, widowed sisters, parents, and others, and family members were swept away by plague, accidents, death in childbirth, murders, and other tragedies. Couples separated, sons went off to war or apprenticeships, daughters found work as servants or got married, and wet-nursed children rejoined their birth families. Some newcomers brought incomes with them, as producers in the putting-out system, wet nurses, day laborers, needleworkers, or other skilled artisans. Many nuclear families, especially in the countryside, had multiple incomes, often seasonal in nature. Here a father might work the land, or serve as a carter and a mason. His wife also worked in the fields, but also in her garden growing produce for the local market. She might also work with her daughter at home in the early stages of silk or wool production. Younger boys might tend a wealthy landowner’s flock and, when older, work as day laborers. At some point both young men and women probably married, with dowry and festivities on a far reduced scale from those of their social betters. Since most non-elites by definition did not have the political or economic networks that elite marriages were arranged to enhance, or considerations of blood or family name, their nuptials probably joined people who were drawn to one another. Brides were probably from local families, neighbors, perhaps, or daughters of guild brothers or

Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician

other business associates. The neighborhoods and villages that served as backdrops to elite family life were the very matrices of the working classes. Even if a family had moved in from another town or the contado, the tendency was for its members to remain, at least in the first generation. If the men worked across town, the women shopped and gossiped locally, worshipped in the parish church, broke up fights, and drove out prostitutes. Men usually worked near home, joined the local confraternity, competed athletically with local men, and drank at the neighborhood tavern. When a family moved, it was usually within the old area. Neighborhood was also the theater of individual and familial honor. Family members shaped their reputations by their actions and attitudes, which were generally on display locally. Except to sleep, it might be said that non-elite Italians lived in the streets and alleys, where late afternoon air was fresher and the light better than inside. This meant that the alcoholic wife, the tantrum-prone daughter, or violent husband publicly displayed their weaknesses and earned the disdain—or conversely respect when merited—of their neighbors. See also: Economics and Work: Putting-Out System; Family and Gender: Childhood; Dowries; Inheritance; Names, Personal and Family; Siblings; Virtù and Honor; Wives and Husbands; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Furnishing the House; Villages and Village Life; Recreation and Social Customs: Weddings FURTHER READING Alfani, Guido. “Family Rituals in Northern Italy.” In Samuel K. Cohn, ed. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013, pp. 139–60. Benigno, Francesco. “The Southern Italian Family in the Early Modern Period.” Continuity and Change 4 (1989): 165–94. Cavallo, Sandra. “The Artisan’s Casa.” In Marta Ajmar-Wolheim and Flora Dennis, eds. At Home in Renaissance Italy. London: V&A Museum, 2006, pp. 66–75. Cohen, Elizabeth S., and Thomas V. Cohen. Daily Life in Renaissance Italy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

FAMILIES, NOBLE AND PATRICIAN Today their portraits look out from museum walls. It takes a conscious act of imagination to place oneself in the villa or palazzo or castello of the couple pictured.

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The painting itself may have celebrated a milestone in the family they led, a finished construction project or a business expansion. For the elite classes the palazzo— in Italian casa was the root of both house and lineage (casata)— was the symbolic center of the familial universe, and tokens such as the portrait, heraldic symbols, and an ancestor’s arms and armor on display personalized the space. Yet even in so class and family-conscious a society as that of Venice, in 1582 half of the city’s 1,230 patrician families lived in rented accommodations. This was the same percentage as the rest of society. Some were Young Lorenzo di Piero de’Medici, aged about ten, palazzi rented from other nobles appears as the Magus/King Kaspar from the biblical who had fallen on hard times or Nativity story. Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–1497) whose families had shrunk drasfrescoed the Chapel of the Palazzo Medici in tically. In Venice nobles were Florence between 1459 and 1461, inserting many portraits of the family and its courtiers. (Library patricians; elsewhere patricians of Congress) were wealthy and politically powerful non-nobles. In any case, the idea that the casa sat at the center of the famiglia often proved mythical. More than in any other state noble or patrician status was the property of a set few. In 1297, the Serrata, or Closing, listed all families whose members were noble, and about 30 more were added after the War of Chioggia (1380s). Noble families were equal among themselves and constituted about 4.5% of Venice’s population. Their men held the highest offices and seats in the Senate, and they alone wore ceremonial cloaks of crimson velvet lined with lynx fur. Though often international merchants, they were never to have worked with their hands for a living. Yet nobility was not an economic status, for there were poor nobles who never lost their status and political positions, and had to rent out their palazzi. With or without an ancestral palazzo—or armor—the elite Italian family consisted of a male head and his nuclear family, and all blood relations that had some dependence on him. The dominant side of the family was the male line, including

Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician

sons and grandsons, brothers, uncles, cousins, and nephews. A father who had grown too old or weak to be effective remained cared for and respected if not active. Of these relations, that of the head of the household and son, especially eldest son, was the most important. Some combination of wealth or profession, control of land, family name, tradition of office holding, length of residence, and reputation for honor defined urban elites. In Naples and Rome the tendencies were feudal, with ancestry, blood, and land at the forefront, while commercial Florence disenfranchised its old nobility in favor of a commercial and financial oligarchy of office holders. Conversely, Neapolitan nobles could not act as merchants. In Milan a wealthy family could buy land with vassals attached and claim the title of count or marquis. Under its dukes, such a title was needed to hold important offices, direct access to which could not be purchased. In fifteenth-century Udine, only members of 111 “noble” families in a population of about 14,000 could serve on the city’s Council. These included families who had previously held office, feudal vassals, and professionals such as physicians and lawyers. In all of these cases the status carried down the male lines, as women acquired the status of the men they married.

Ricordanze An important source for social life is this family record-book. Heads of families recorded, for their own family’s use, births, deaths, marriages, major acquisitions, and other events. But these diary-like books also contain reminiscences for future generations, advice for success in life, religious meditations, and remarks on the politics of the day. Some of the more useful ones for historians contain virtual chronologies of major and purely local events, such as plague, civic unrest, or war. Others outline household expenditures and resources. Unlike business accounts, these are neither comprehensive nor systematic, but they are fascinating. By their wealth and political power, elite families were different from those beneath them. In a responsible society they had what the French called noblesse oblige, or the nobility’s obligation to act on behalf of society as a whole. Their lives were risked on battlefields, their wealth went to support the Church and civic projects, and their time went to serve the public in offices and on decision-making councils. They married among themselves, brought a sense of magnificence to their city, and set an example for lesser folk. In reality, their status often led to arrogance, corruption, and even violence. Family members fought with and even killed one another over matters from slights to honor to rights to inheritance. By the later sixteenth century many jurisdictions allowed elite males to carry swords

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and daggers ostentatiously, as if to intimidate the denizens of the streets whose names recall their noble ancestors. Virtù, or excellence and effectiveness, often clashed with honor, which required prudence and good judgment, something many in society believed the elites naturally lacked. This was truer, perhaps, of rural aristocrats than of mercantile patricians in Florence or Venice. In Sicily and Naples feudal families literally lorded over their vassals and peasants, even combining to oppose and fight the royal government. Here castles remained intact and occupied and defended. Not every noble family had a palazzo. See also: Arts: Portraits; Family and Gender: Childhood; Dowries; Inheritance; Names, Personal and Family; Siblings; Virtù and Honor; Wives and Husbands; Fashion and Appearance: Social Status and Clothing; Housing and Community: Furnishing the House; Palazzi; Violence within the Household and Community; Recreation and Social Customs: Weddings; Primary Document: A Future Pope’s Letter to His Father on His Own Paternity: Letter of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini to Silvio Piccolomini (1443) FURTHER READING Alberti, Leon Battista. The Family in Renaissance Florence. Translated by Renée Neu Watkins. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969. Alfani, Guido. “Family Rituals in Northern Italy.” In Samuel K. Cohn, ed. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013, pp. 139–60. Benigno, Francesco. “The Southern Italian Family in the Early Modern Period.” Continuity and Change 4 (1989): 165–94. Ferraro, Joanne M. Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580–1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Grubb, James S. Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Kent, Francis W. Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Queller, Donald E. The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

FERTILITY, CONCEPTION, AND CONTRACEPTION When it came to sex, everyone had advice: relatives, friends, physicians, preachers, midwives, apothecaries, witches, herbalists, astrologers, one’s barber, and

Family and Gender: Fertility, Conception, and Contraception

traveling charlatans. For the literate there were medical textbooks, popular medical advice books, household advice books, pornography, and Books of Secrets. One early list included 116 fertility enhancers, aphrodisiacs, and contraceptives. Both interfering with conception and trying to remove the effects of a successful conception (abortion), however, were considered serious sins by the Church. Human procreation required the active participation of both man and woman. Although authoritative Classical Roman physician Galen taught that both contributed “seed” (semen) during sex, the popular notion was Aristotle’s: that only males did. The male was the active force and female passive recipient, a biological belief embedded in laws, culture, religion, and marital relationships. Yet the sex act brought physical pleasure and women admittedly had—often strong—sexual appetites. These were only “normally” and properly satisfied in the marital bed, however; other female responses, such as those of prostitutes, nuns, fornicators, adulteresses, lesbians, or self-pleasurers, were “abnormal” even when licit. As the Church taught, sexual intercourse was only for procreation. Some male physicians even suggested clitorectomies, since the clitoris was understood to be the seat of female sexual drive and pleasure, whose swelling during sex could interfere with conception. A woman could draw a man to her for sex by placing her menstrual blood or pubic hair in his food, by creating and praying over a waxen image of him, and by casting spells on certain types of leaves late at night. Cities such as Lucca, however, had the death penalty for inciting sexual attraction, and governments from Sicily to Savoy executed sorcerers. Some couples needed sexual stimulation or aid with female fertility. Female infertility was attributable to inappropriate age or weight, poor Galenic regimen of food and exercise, uneven temperament, problematic menstrual cycles, the evil eye, and even too strong a sex drive. Edible aphrodisiacs included “ant oil,” oysters and shrimp, “cicada oil,” pearl shavings, “Venus balm;” cocoa butter, maca root, catuaba, sarsaparilla, cat’s claw, possum tail, other New World substances; pistachios, pine-nuts, rocket, chick peas, coconuts, skink flesh, and sparrow brains; for males extract of satyrion erythronium (powder of an orchid bulb that looks like testicles) mixed with wine, a frog from Hormuz, or Spanish fly (cantharsis); foods that look like genitalia (long beans, carrots, eggplant); animal penises or testicles (especially bull, cock, wolf, or donkey); or meat of supposedly oversexed animals: pigeons, pigs, cocks. Apothecaries, charlatans, midwives, and others provided proprietary blends, such as Arab diasitirion: satyrion, chick peas, ginger, cinnamon, and sparrow brains (variants included musk, aniseed, parsnip, or rocket seeds). Ineffectiveness was attributed to factors such as inappropriate dosages, herbs being picked at wrong time, or stock too old and stale or that had not aged enough. For the alchemically leaning, practitioners recommended blends of materials such as gold,

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silver, mercury, pearls, coral, and emeralds. Curses, spells, and the evil eye could also interfere with one’s sex drive, and prophylactics against such magic included charms, talismans, amulets, pins, plaques, and counter-spells. Timing of conception was vital, especially for begetting males. Sex during menstruation produced monstrosities, lepers, or epileptics, or caused semen to be washed away. Semen needed to mix with menstrual blood for conception, people believed, but the build-up of blood before the woman’s period made it too plentiful and the uterus too humid, resulting in conception of a girl. Right after her period, the woman’s “seedbed” was just the right humidity for conception of a boy. Timing might also mean astrological time: when the planets were most propitious. It also meant time of day, since in the morning a woman was “dryer” and a man’s semen warmer and a boy more likely. The sex of a baby could also be influenced by the placement of semen in the uterus (the “warmer” right side for a boy) as aided by the sexual positions assumed (“missionary” was always preferred by doctors and moralists), and by the presence in the bedroom of images of little boys or heroic men that might imprint on the mother. But heroic could not be scary, since beauty imprinted and created a beautiful baby and adult, and vice versa. The introduction of musky, male scents—aloe wood, civet, ambergris—into the room could also have an impact. Of course, prayer was always an option. Avoiding or ending pregnancy was necessary for prostitutes, adulteresses, fornicators, widows, and sinful nuns. Both, however, were serious sins, and Church and state considered abortion murder. By listing activities or medicinals “to avoid” while trying to conceive, medical advisors back-handedly provided a list of potential contraceptives or abortifacients. Mechanical means of avoiding conception while having sex included coitus interruptus (probably the most popular), oral and anal intercourse (sinful and usually illegal), female sex toys, a sponge, the rhythm method, manual masturbation (sinful at best), and adopting sexual positions that enabled semen to drain out. Post-coital treatments included a range of abortifacient drugs and herbs, amulets, douches, suppositories, and uterine fumigants, as well as directions to reinduce menstruation: dance about right after sex, ride a horse or a jolting cart, sneeze violently, or even undergo a lower-abdominal beating. The idea was to detach the seed—or later fetus—from the uterine wall. Natural contraceptives included aloe, gentian root, peppermint, chamomile, linden blossom, wormwood, colt’s foot, pennyroyal, castoreum, scammony, blackberry, birthwort, pepper, sage, rosemary, and thyme; rue, ergot, and savin were popular abortifacients. See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Health and Illness; Homosexuality and Sodomy; Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing; Pregnancy; Wives and Husbands; Food and Drink: Drugs; Galenic

Family and Gender: Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption

Health Regimens; Housing and Community: Physicians; Politics and Warfare: Crime and Punishments; Recreation and Social Customs: Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Religion and Beliefs: Magic; Nuns and Nunneries; Witches and Sorcerers; Science and Technology: Anatomy and Dissection; Pharmacopeias and Materia Medica FURTHER READING Bell, Rudolph. How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Crawford, Katherine. European Sexualities, 1400–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gélis, Jacques. History of Childbirth. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Jütte, Robert. Contraception: A History. Translated by Vicky Russell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie. “Conception and Birth.” In Marta Ajmar-Wolheim and Flora Dennis, eds. At Home in Renaissance Italy. London: V&A Museum, 2006, pp. 124–36. Noonan, John T. Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

FOSTERING, STEP CHILDREN, AND ADOPTION All siblings were not created equal. Though they did not have a concept of genetics in the modern sense, Renaissance-era Italians did have a concept of blood. And blood mattered. Legitimate offspring of a husband and wife had pride of place for any purposes. Those who entered that circle through adoption, marriage, or fostering were not full siblings, whatever their new father’s love or concern for them, and whatever the laws said. And one did enter the father’s family. Father made the rules—within the bounds of statutory law—and he made the decisions for the family. Fostering was a form of community service and Christian charity. In fact, in Treviso papal indulgences were available for providing five years’ support. Fostering was an arrangement by which a child was formally taken in by a family until she left to get married or enter a convent, or he was taken in as an apprentice or otherwise struck out on his own. The child in question might have been orphaned,

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left as a foundling, or abandoned later in life by his or her mother or father. The child’s parents might have been relatives, neighbors, friends, or business associates. A childless family might “rescue” a child left at a monastery or church door by anonymous parents. In any case, fosterage was a legal status, and the new family had obligations to the child, however old. These differed among jurisdictions but typically were provision of food, clothing, shelter, health care and hygiene, some level of education appropriate to the class of the family, and church attendance. In some places, the parish priest had to attest to this last. Very often foster children received these considerations in return for service in the household or on the farm. Sometimes boys simply apprenticed with their foster fathers and followed the path of any apprentice. Girls were to be raised to become wives and mothers, and the training began young. If older girls and young women were not blood relations, they were susceptible to inappropriate attention from and molestation by any male household residents, including sons, visitors, servants, and even the household head. Such activity was at best immoral fornication and at worst felonious rape. Embarrassing pregnancies were terminated or babies left anonymously at foundling homes. Even in the case of rape, the father could be forced to marry the mother and acknowledge the child as his own, allowing her to exchange her foster home for his. If the pregnant woman was not kin, and the head of the household was the father, he could choose to acknowledge and adopt the child as his own. A person could be adopted at any age. Over a two-year period a Trevisan notary recorded 25 adoptions of children from 14 months of age to 18 years. Adults without natural heirs sometimes adopted adult servants or even slaves and made them their heirs. Such adoptions could take place through wills, and even priests could adopt in this manner. Here the point would be that a person without other strong or recognized familial ties not only received the estate, but also the familial identity and name of the testator. Adoption, unlike fosterage, made the adoptee a legally recognized member of the family. Though this was less important for girl children than for boys, who carried on the adoptive family name, a study in Treviso showed that males adopted from its hospital/foundling home did not significantly outnumber females. One of the stipulations for adopting here was that the family provide a dowry of £100 to £200, a not inconsiderable amount. The adopting father usually signed a contract with parents who relinquished their rights to their child or with the facility with whom the child had been left. The terms were similar to those for fostering, with adopted girls being provided some level of dowry. Unlike fostering, adoption meant that the newcomer shared the family name, traditions, and honor. Such a youth would probably not be made to join the rank of servants. Adopting one’s love child kept him or her from the stigma of illegitimacy, meaning, for example, that a boy could enter the clergy without

Family and Gender: Health and Illness

special favors. It also meant that the boy became a legitimate heir to the patrimony, obviously something the father desired. If there were other sons by blood, adoption would be a very real cause for resentment. Stepchildren, of course, came with blended families. These were probably rarer than foster or adopted children. The main reason was that the children of single mothers would usually be brought into the home of the father or into his birth home. Even in the case of an annulment, which made the children technically illegitimate and in need of adopting, fathers were more likely to choose adoption rather than abandonment. Widows often wrestled with their in-laws: they might have had her dowry but she had their heirs. In Tuscany, nubile female stepchildren were rare, it has been posited, because of the threats to their chastity, even from their stepfathers. And as for stepmothers, they were stock villains across the culture. See also: Economics and Work: Apprentices; Family and Gender: Childhood; Dowries; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Inheritance; Servants, Household; Siblings; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Neighborhood and Parish; Palazzi; Villages and Village Life FURTHER READING D’Andrea, David M. Civic Christianity in Renaissance Italy: The Hospital of Treviso, 1400–1530. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Gavitt, Philip. Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Johnson, Christopher, and David W. Sabean. Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1600. New York: Berghahn, 2011.

Funerals. See Death, Funerals, and Burial

HEALTH AND ILLNESS Daily life presented plenty of threats to people’s health. Being born and giving birth were dicey points; plague killed, war killed, and making love could bring painful disease; accidents, animal bites and kicks, human assaults, floods, and shipwrecks maimed and brought death. The person who fought or traveled for a living or simply brought a load by horse cart to the next town was a fool if he did not say a prayer

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to St. Christopher to protect him. Famines lowered nutritional intake and invited opportunistic disease. At home, one’s own family carried diseases, got drunk and became violent, accidently served spoiled or tainted food, or injured youngsters with well-meaning horseplay. Teeth were dislodged, bones broken, eyes poked, shoulders dislocated, and ankles sprained. The key to health was not simply following the venerable dietary and lifestyle advice of medical practitioners, but it may have included staying quietly in bed. Good health meant eating well, sleeping well, keeping clean (including purging), and exercising. It also meant avoiding many things: curses, plague, a mule’s hind legs, bad air, diseased sex partners, wild animals, over-exertion, and traveling alone. Good luck; common sense; and resources enough to eat and dress well, escape epidemics, and pursue relatively safe occupations kept most people relatively healthy most of the time. By modern standards, people tended to consume too little lean protein and were deficient in many vitamins. They ate far too many carbohydrates in omnipresent bread and other grain-based foods. This was especially true of the lower classes, whereas wealthier folk had access to larger varieties and steadier supplies of food. When people fell ill, they also had a variety of options that were dependent on their wealth, preference, and where they lived. Elites in cities could choose among university-trained physicians for relief from internal complaints, and among trained and certified surgeons for skeletal or surface issues such as wounds, rashes, or burns. Surgeons and physicians relied on apothecaries for the appropriate medicines, potions, ointments, and other materia medica considered useful at the time. By the sixteenth century most cities were hiring communal physicians and surgeons who served the medical needs of all comers. The sick in convents, monasteries, and charitable institutions were tended to by surgeons or physicians who worked on annual retainers, for some an important and steady part of their income. Many people trusted in the ministrations of quacks and charlatans who offered skills and medicines that often promised miracle cures, or at least provided a lot of opium or alcohol. Speaking of miracles, Italians from medical professors to Sicilian peasants believed in both spiritual causes and spiritual interventions for many conditions. Demons tormented the mentally afflicted and God sent the plague. Prayers to the Virgin Mary and healing saints such as Rocco (Roche) and Sebastian were deemed effective as prophylactics to keep diseases away and as cures for victims. Churches and shrines were literally filled with cheap—and sometimes expensive—memorials ex voto, thank-yous, and testaments to the timely intervention of one saint or another. Curses, demons, and the evil eye could bring on illness, and folk in the lower social strata could easily point to the human culprits, be they magicians, witches, sorcerers, or old women who simply “knew things.” Less threateningly, such people were often the sources of medicinal roots, herbs,

Family and Gender: Health and Illness

mushrooms, and other natural remedies. Though they were probably a lot cheaper, these ingredients were identical to some of those sold by trained apothecaries. Both apothecaries and naturopathic healers might also provide talismans and amulets whose power was somewhere between spiritual and physical. For example, a silver ring featuring a stone carved with the image of a poisonous scorpion—a zodiacal cooling water sign—was considered effective protection against fevers and poisons.

Treat-Them-Yourself Childhood Illnesses In The Midwife (1596), physician Friar Girolamo Mercurio listed infant complaints that he believed were caused by humoral imbalances and could be treated at home. Internal illnesses were worms, body aches, intestinal blockage, constipation, diarrhea, the stone, urine retention, bedwetting, vomiting, hiccups, teething pain, tongue ulceration, earaches, strep throat, coughs, breathing problems, convulsions, paralysis, epilepsy, shriveled body, swollen body, fevers, and chicken pox. External ones were cradle cap, lice, water on the brain, inflamed eyes, crossed eyes, scrofula, umbilical inflammation, and distended colon. For more serious conditions, parents should see a physician. Source: Bell, Rudolph. How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 151.

For most ailments people relied on family members for treatment. Mothers traditionally cared for their children and husbands through all but the most serious complaints. Mothers and fathers frequented apothecary shops to purchase both medicinal ingredients and prepared medications. They purchased “patent” medicines from traveling empirics and from barber shops and taverns that sold them on commission. Village life was maintained by folk techniques for extracting poisons, preventing infections, and setting broken or cracked bones. Even girls at court and patricians’ daughters learned valuable first aid and old family recipes for supposedly effective intervention. In literate households these were often written down; they even appear in merchants’ ricordanze. With the advent of printing vernacular collections of these were soon targeting Italy’s middle class. So-called Books of Secrets often contained numerous supposedly proven medicinal recipes, featuring readily available ingredients and simple preparations. Secrets of the Reverend don Alessio Piemonte (1555) was an early and successful version with remedies for conditions from hangovers and toothache to plague and paralysis. Fully one-third of its 350 entries were medical in nature. Other titles were specifically medical, such as Giovanni Battista Zapata’s Marvelous Secrets of Medicine and Surgery of 1586.

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See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Childhood; Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing; Old Age; Fashion and Appearance: Scents and Perfumes; Food and Drink: Drugs; Galenic Health Regimens; Nutrition: A Modern Assessment; Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons; Physicians; Plague; Villages and Village Life; Violence within the Household and Community; Religion and Beliefs: Memorials Ex Voto; Saints and Their Cults; Witches and Sorcerers; Science and Technology: Disease and Humoral Medicine; Secrets, Books of FURTHER READING Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Della Porta, Giambattista. Natural Magick. New York: Basic Books, 1957. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine, and Society, 1450–1800. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Leong, Elaine. “Making Medicine in the Early Modern Household.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (2008): 145–68. Park, Katharine. “Medicine and Magic: The Healing Arts.” In Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, eds. Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy. New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 129–49. Shaw, James, and Evelyn Welch. Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence: The “Speziale al giglio” in 1494. New York: Rodopi, 2011.

HERALDRY Knights in shining armor; fair damsels waving on their heroes; a lord waiting to reward the champion—but who was who on the field of honor? From the twelfth century, knights adopted colors and symbols that they displayed on their shields to distinguish them from others. At a tournament, the herald was the expert at identifying these, and his craft became known as heraldry. Nobility and knighthood fused, and by the fourteenth century the jurist Bartolus opined that nearly anyone—above a laborer or peasant—deserved to have a coat of arms. Since nobility was granted by kings, popes, or emperors, and had come to be passed down in families, however, there was in fact an order to the adoption and use of these displays. After his noble-born wife had on at least one occasion put down her bourgeois husband, fourteenth-century Tuscan merchant Francesco Datini bought a coat of arms from the emperor and had both hers and his prominently depicted in their Prato palazzo.

Family and Gender: Heraldry

Renaissance-era Italians of noble descent often displayed family symbols with or on their coats of arms. The Colonna of Rome used a column, the Della Rovere an oak, and the Della Scala a ladder, each of which was a translation of the family name. Perhaps most famously, the non-noble Medici of Florence adopted a set of balls, palle, as their symbol. When needed, pro-Medici mobs ran through Florence’s street crying “pah-leh, pah-leh” in support of the city’s controversial first family. They have also come to represent pawn shops. They appear in various ways on escutcheons (display shields) throughout Tuscany, and on monuments by or to Medici popes in Rome. Rulers The Young Knight (1510) by Venetian and northern and noble families marked what Italian painter Vittore Carpaccio (1460–1526) is they considered theirs with their probably a portrait of the youthful Duke Francesco arms. Churches displayed—and Maria I della Rovere of Urbino. Clad in the still do—donors’ or supporters’ fashionable armor of the day, the young man stands outside a castle gate and is surrounded by symbols escutcheons on façades, portals, of his nobility. Oil on canvas. (Fine Art Images/ bell towers, doors, windows, Heritage Images/Getty Images) tombstones, candles and candlesticks, altars, linen, vestments, Mass and choir books, instruments for Mass, organs, altarpieces, ex voto memorials, and tabernacles; and in sacristies and family chapels. The civic-minded marked loggias, bridges, gates, hospitals, orphanages, monasteries and convents, and fountains in whose construction or repair they played a part. Like Datini, the wealthy used family or personal arms or symbols profligately throughout and on the exterior of their palazzi. Doorways, windows, and prominent street corners featured carved and painted stone escutcheons; room and hall frescoes repeated the theme; and furniture and furnishings of any value sported the markings. Decorated shields hung on walls; marked harpsichords sat in corners; plates, glassware, and tableware bearing the insignias were displayed on credenzas that themselves identified their owners. Jewelry, plaquettes, medals,

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weapons, saddles, and anything that might be lent to a church or other group, or displayed on holidays, bore the owners’ arms. At Italian courts, the lord marked almost anything visible with his arms, including his servants’ livery. As favors to artists, musicians, and writers, he granted the right to use his arms and even personal emblem. When painter Andrea Mantegna joined Ludovico Gonzaga’s court at Mantua, the marchese provided moving expenses, a house, grain, firewood, cloth for court costume, and the privilege of displaying—publicly or privately—Ludovico’s arms and emblem of a radiant sun. Gonzaga was not only noting Mantegna’s new position but was also recognizing his skill and other virtues. As early as the thirteenth century, Venice, always in pursuit of civic stability, forbade the use of a family’s arms by any nonmember, lest it signal adherence to a family-led faction. Public servants could not even wear their own, being limited to the city’s logo of the city’s patron St. Mark. In 1384 Florentine cathedral authorities had all arms removed from tombs built around the great church, declaring that it was a communal center, not a place for personal aggrandizement. In 1451, in honor of a new military alliance, Florence’s priors had the arms of Milan’s Francesco Sforza painted on and above the doors to the Room of the Signoria in the civic Palazzo. Displaying the arms of allies or patrons, such as the pope or king of France, sent an important political message. Streets were filled with foreign arms and symbols when important visitors arrived, major alliances or victories were celebrated, or dynastic weddings took place. Use of the fleur-de-lys had been granted by the French and remains a symbol of Florence. During much of the Renaissance it also served as a reminder of the old Guelf axis of Papacy, France, and Florence, just as the eagle of the Hohenstauffen emperors appeared in Ghibelline cities such as Pisa. While such symbols were not strictly speaking heraldry, they served the same purposes. The she-wolf of Rome and Siena, the lion of Venice (San Marco) and Florence (Marzocco, “little Mars”), Perugia’s and Genoa’s griffin, even St. Peter’s crossed keys representing the Papacy (officially adopted in the fifteenth century) identified major cities or institutions and nodded to their histories and myths. By the fifteenth century corporate entities within cities also had “arms” that were displayed permanently or on special occasions. Neighborhoods (contrade), guilds, confraternities, notaries, political factions, universities, academies, even civic offices adopted arms-like logos that appeared on street corners, flags and banners, funeral paraphernalia, ceremonial costumes, and official documents. Just as jousting and tournaments survived into the sixteenth century, so did heralds in Italian cities and courts. For example, Florence appointed its head of heralds in 1350, and the office maintained records of major ceremonies and appropriate protocols and symbols, especially those involving foreign visitors or entries. Its holder was also the city’s poet laureate.

Family and Gender: Homosexuality and Sodomy

See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art Patronage; Ceramics, Decorative; Portraits; Sculpture; Economics and Work: Guilds; Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician; Fashion and Appearance: Livery; Food and Drink: Tools for Cooking and Eating; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Palazzi; Patronage; Politics and Warfare: Art, Civic; Guelfs, Ghibellines, and Other Political Factions; Recreation and Social Customs: Civic Festivals; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Churches FURTHER READING Boulton, D’A.J.D. “Insignia of Power: The Use of Heraldic and Paraheraldic Devices by Italian Princes.” In Charles M. Rosenberg, ed. Art and Politics in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, 1250–1500. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990, pp. 103–7. Caldwell, Dorigen. The Sixteenth-Century Italian Impresa in Theory and Practice. Brooklyn, NY: AMS, 2004. Cavalar, Oswaldo, Susanne Degenring, and Julius Kirschner. A Grammar of Signs: Bartolo da Sassaferrato’s Tract on Insignias and Coats of Arms. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Galbreath, Donald L. Papal Heraldry. 2nd revised ed. London: Heraldry Today, 1973. Rabil, Albert, Jr., ed. Knowledge, Goodness, and Power: The Debate over Nobility among Quattrocento Italian Humanists. Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 1991.

HOMOSEXUALITY AND SODOMY The term homosexual was unknown to the Renaissance era. The male who engaged in certain sexual activities committed what was called sodomy, and if he did so frequently he was labeled a sodomite. The term was taken from the Bible story of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which were supposedly destroyed by God for participating in and encouraging male-on-male sexual activity. St. Paul in the New Testament condemned such activity, as did Renaissance-era preachers and law codes. Sodomia was considered not only sinful but also detrimental to families and societies repopulating themselves, especially in the wake of plague epidemics. Although some men never married and were noted for their sexual attraction to young men or boys, there is no sign of there having been either a self- or societal recognition of a “gay identity” or “lifestyle.” The vast majority of those prosecuted for sodomy were either married men or men as yet unprepared for marriage. Popularly defined, sodomy included male anal sex, masturbation between another’s legs, and male oral sex. When legally defined it could include heterosexual anal sex, lesbian sexual stimulation, and even bestiality; essentially

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any non-reproductive sexual activity was included. In the popular imagination, the last led to births of half-human half-animal monsters. For its part, lesbian activity, though believed to have been a feature of convent life, left few traces in surviving records. Monks, being celibate, were imagined in popular culture as sodomites among themselves, and some saw celibate friars as threats to young boys. Artists such as Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and the aptly nicknamed Sodoma were associated with sodomy, though evidence remains scanty. A few philosophers distinguished homoeroticism—the sexual attraction to members of one’s own sex—from sodomy as an activity. They considered the attraction to male beauty an uplifting and higher order pleasure, whereas raw sex was considered an animal pursuit, less willed than instinctual. Best studied through Florentine records, sodomy seems to have been largely a matter of mature men performing the “male” role in sexual acts with willing younger men, though cases of rape were reported. Michael Rocke’s seminal study of Florentine activity concluded that 95% of those noted by official records as male “passive” partners were aged 12 to 19, where only 10% of active partners were over age 50. Some couples lasted over time, but far more typical were meetings at night or during festivals when prying eyes were absent or distracted. Certain neighborhoods, taverns (the Boco and the Del Lino), inns, alleys, pastry shops, and even workshops and church porches were noted meeting places. Evidence, too, points to certain private houses where young men were taught fencing or dancing. Sodomitical activity was also associated with female prostitution, gambling, and drinking. Networks of sodomites are identified in records. According to Ruggiero, fourteenth-century Venetians popularly viewed sodomy as part of growing up for a boy living in a city teeming with foreign and Italian merchants and sailors. After 1400 attitudes apparently changed, as the preference for other males seemed to have lasted too long in life. Nobles were first prosecuted for sodomy in 1406, and the Council of Sodomites was established under the Council of Ten in 1418. In Florence, clergy circulated broadsides against sodomy in 1415. The crime fell under the jurisdiction of several offices prior to 1432, when Florence set up the Office of the Night, in large part to combat sodomy. Fiery preaching by Franciscan St. Bernardino of Siena across central Italy in the 1420s and 1430s spawned anti-sodomite legislation; and in Florence that was reinforced in the 1490s during the reform movement under Dominican Girolamo Savonarola. Bernardino blamed parents, railing that fathers presented their sons to friends for sex, and mothers dressed their boys up as girls to entice the perverted. “Passive” youth, usually below age 18 (though in Venice age 14 from 1424), were usually not prosecuted, and their activity was often not even considered sodomy for legal purposes. “Active” males, on the other hand, could face very stiff penalties: in fourteenth-century Venice decapitation; Ferrara hanging; and burning at the stake

Family and Gender: Homosexuality and Sodomy

in most other places. Such harsh penalties were rarely applied, and commutations to fines, corporal punishments, prison sentences, and exile were common; in Lucca the death penalty applied only to men over age 50. Rocke’s study of Florence claims what some scholars consider exaggerated rates of sodomy. During the life of the Office of the Night (1432–1502) 15,000 people were implicated, of whom 3,000 were convicted. Yet Florence was indeed known as a place where sodomy was common. To Germans, Florenzer was synonymous with sodomite, and in Venice from 1392 to 1402, 80% of prosecutions for the act were of visiting or resident Florentines. Between 1432 and 1542 Florentines passed no fewer than 17 amendments to its laws against sodomy. In 1502 Florence’s post-Savonarola government disbanded the Office of the Night in part because it highlighted the prevalence of sodomy. See also: Arts: Novella; Family and Gender: Childhood; Virtù and Honor; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Recreation and Social Customs: Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Pornography and Erotica FURTHER READING Ferguson, Gary. Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Levy, Allison, ed. Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Performance, Perversion, Punishment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Mills, Robert. “Acts, Orientations, and the Sodomites of San Gimignano.” In Allison Levy, ed. Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 195–208. Mormando, Franco. The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pequigney, J. “Sodomy in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio.” Representations 36 (1991): 22–42. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Rocke, Michael J. The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. Edited by Kent Girard and Gert Hekma. New York: Haworth Press, 1989. Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Saslow, James M. Art Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.

Husbands. See Wives and Husbands Illness. See Health and Illness

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INFANCY, NURSING, AND WET NURSING The first few years of life were perilous for the young Italian. Having survived his or her entry into the world, the child faced new dangers of all sorts, from microbial to human. Pathogens assaulted the infant from the air, food and water, insects, and even small wounds. Siblings, pets, servants, caregivers, even parents presented inadvertent threats from dropping, biting, rough-housing, smothering, burning or scalding, scratching, and even crushing. Renaissance-era versions of cradle death or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) appear all too often in surviving homicide reports. Usually immobilized by swaddling clothes, young children had no real defenses apart from wailing in fear, pain, or hunger. The practice of having the newborn fed by a surrogate mother, or wet nurse, added a layer of uncertainty, since the parents’—especially the mother’s—natural concern and defensiveness were separated from their object. After giving birth, and assuming she was healthy, the mother was given space by the household to welcome her circle of women. From her bed, cleaned and decorated for the occasion, she assured them of her good fortune and condition and presented her new child to them. If they were of the upper classes, they brought gifts of candies and fruit, placed elegantly on specially decorated wooden or ceramic platters. Some of the earliest matters, however, directly concerned the father. The mother remained at home while the child was baptized at the local parish church or central baptistery. Naming the child’s godparents was also the father’s responsibility, as was naming the child. If he had decided to have the child nursed by another woman, he and the woman’s husband drew up and signed a contract to that effect. The old idea that Renaissance-era parents were at best indifferent to their young children has been under assault for decades. Paintings, letters, ricordanze, and other evidence depict parents as strongly attached to their offspring, even when they sent them away to be nursed. Mother’s milk was consistently held to be the best and, by most commentators, only food that a baby needed. Medical science held that the biological mother’s milk was made of her blood, the same blood that had fed the child in the womb. Though altered in the mother’s body, this specific milk had the same humoral balance as the mother and was thus best for the baby in the world. Milk from another woman was therefore inferior though not necessarily dangerous. When human milk was in short supply, as during plague and in certain institutions, goat’s milk was considered the best alternative. Preachers and published medical men emphasized the importance of mother and child bonding through breastfeeding. Also current was the notion that a woman’s personality traits and character were transferred through her milk, which reinforced arguments for women feeding their own children, for who can truly know the character of a rural wet nurse?

Family and Gender: Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing

As with pregnancy and birthing, caring for the infant was an important part of a woman’s world, whether that was poor and rural or wealthy and urban. Midwives often availed themselves to new mothers, especially if the child was her first or second, or was unhealthy. Female relatives, neighbors, friends, and specialists such as herbalists, apothecaries, charlatans, and surgeons stood ready to offer advice and help when needed. In the age of plague, a child’s survival was a communal concern. Advice books also provided suggestions on when and how much to feed, how to judge the child’s health from excrement and urine, and how to monitor one’s own or a nurse’s quality of milk. Nursing mothers also suffered ailments. What today is diagnosed as post-partum depression was not unknown, and some medical records point to cases of vascular blockages and problematic nipples that made suckling all but impossible. Published Books of Secrets and other sources of advice aimed at women are filled with recipes for salves, ointments, plasters, potions, and other remedies for nursing mothers. Since gynecological matters remained largely in other women’s hands, and pediatrics was in its infancy, professional medical literature had little to add. Children born to servants, slaves, or young single mothers were at the mercy of the father if he acknowledged his relationship and remained close by. Local laws might require that he marry the mother, especially in cases of rape. He might adopt the child and raise him or her as his, a move certain to alienate his legitimate children and probably his wife. The unfortunate child was abandoned to a foundling home or even infanticide. Wet nursing may not have been as widespread among upper-class families as once thought. It benefitted mothers, whose breasts were not distended with milk; couples did not have to wake to feed; and a mother could more readily become pregnant again. Wealthy families often housed and fed the wet nurse, ensuring she stayed healthy and overseeing her activities. This was considered preferable to placing the infant in the nurse’s household, where he or she was at the nurse’s—and her family’s—mercy. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Slaves and Slavery; Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Childhood; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Health and Illness; Names, Personal and Family; Servants, Household; Wives and Husbands; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Religion and Beliefs: Sacraments, Catholic; Science and Technology: Secrets, Books of FURTHER READING Alfani, Guido. Fathers and Godfathers: Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern Italy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Bell, Rudolph. How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Evangelisti, Silvia, and Sandra Cavallo, eds. A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Period. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Haas, Louis. The Renaissance Man and His Children. New York: Palgrave, 1998. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Musacchio, Jacqueline Maria. The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Sperling, Jutta Gisela. Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013.

INHERITANCE Families were not static structures. They expanded and contracted through birth, death, marriage, annulment, exile, relocation, adoption, emancipation, and other processes that were natural, social, or legal. The higher the status and greater the wealth of a family, the larger it was likely to be. A palazzo could house family members of four generations, and after a war or epidemic the stable center of the family had to absorb unfortunate refugee, dispossessed, or orphaned relatives. Italian legal systems descended from Germanic and/or Roman law, which privileged males and recognized the patriarchal family structure as the default. This directly affected the ways in which a family could handle property, goods, and land and structures. This became crucial at the point when property moved from one generation to another, especially with the death of the ruling household head. Within a given jurisdiction, local laws, custom, or tradition could also play roles in inheritance patterns. As Cohn has shown, families in Perugia, Florence, and Arezzo sought to keep wealth concentrated in the hands of legitimate male heirs. Cities influenced by religious considerations, such as Assisi, Pisa, and Siena, saw broader distributions of wealth through wills that enriched women and the Church as well as sons. The simple rule was that legitimate sons were the heirs of their father’s wealth. Legitimate daughters had two acceptable fates, the nunnery or marriage. In both cases she received a set portion of family wealth from her father in the form of a dowry, which included cash and goods and sometimes land. A study of fifteenth-century Florentines reveals that the value of a dowry was between 55% and 80% of what a son/heir would receive at that point. One’s widow had a right only to the return of her dowry. In the absence of legitimate sons, the next in line would not be a man’s daughters or wife, but his brothers and their sons, and then

Family and Gender: Inheritance

his cousins on his father’s side and their sons. Lacking any relatives sharing his last name, the man making his last will (testator) could divide his wealth in whatever way he saw fit. A well-known example was the very wealthy merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini. His wife had brought no dowry, so he set her up for as long as she did not remarry and remained honorable. They had had no children, and he had no relatives on his side. His illegitimate daughter he dowered and married off. He made many small gifts through his will, but the bulk went to found a charitable institution in Prato. Through his will, this became his “heir.” Had Francesco sired a son with his servant, instead of a daughter, he could have chosen to adopt him as his heir, or simply named him as heir had he chosen to do so. A father with legitimate sons who also had a male child with a woman other than his wife had some difficult choices. If he adopted the boy and put him on the same level as his own legitimate sons, then at least they had grounds for resentment and to challenge the adoption to protect their interests. If he did not adopt, then his and the boy’s honor remained stained and the boy’s future opportunities limited. When Francesco was a boy, both his parents died in the Black Death in 1348. The wills of his father, Marco, survive and reflect the changes in its terms as the people he mentioned as recipients of gifts, executors, or guardians for his two boys died. Francesco and his brother—who disappears from the record—received a modest inheritance and a good guardian. Many orphaned boys, however, did not receive selfless care. Though an infant or child could inherit even a vast estate, he could not protect or manage it. In Orvieto after the Black Death there was documented a real problem of children’s unscrupulous relatives and even named guardians essentially stealing their wards’ wealth. Laws tightened on who could be named guardian: it could not be someone who would benefit from the child’s death. Mothers were the default guardians, though in some cities they lacked the legal ability to sign contracts or make certain financial arrangements. From 1383 the Florentine Office of Wards had power over dependent children under 18 and insane people. Officers created detailed inventories of everything testators left behind and managed business and financial resources. Venice maintained a similar bureau. Because the head of the family, or paterfamilias, had complete authority over his children, he could do as he saw fit when it came to distributing his wealth. Many made large bequests to local churches or religious orders, or made lavish arrangements for their own memorialization. By the sixteenth century traditional partible inheritance, by which all sons received a more or less even share in the patrimony, was being replaced in fact by primogeniture. Literally “first born,” this pattern of inheritance privileged the eldest son with the bulk of the estate, including land and business interests. This served the old purpose of keeping wealth concentrated in a few hands rather than having it scattered. Rising expectations for dowry values led to a similar trend, in which only one daughter married with the rest relegated to convents.

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As for a mother’s heirs, there were no set expectations. She could have the resources returned to her family; have them assigned as part of daughters’ dowries; bequeath them directly to daughters or female relatives; or, as often happened, leave them to her husband. See also: Arts: Women and the Arts; Economics and Work: Notaries; Family and Gender: Dowries; Education of Children; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption; Last Wills and Testaments; Siblings; Widows; Wives and Husbands FURTHER READING Cohn, Samuel K. The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Kent, Francis W. Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Kuehn, Thomas. Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Wray, Shona Kelly. Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

LAST WILLS AND TESTAMENTS One’s last will and testament was a legal, officially registered document that transferred that person’s wealth to designated recipients after his or her death. It was drawn up by a notary who followed strict language derived from Roman law, thereby creating a contract with future administrators and heirs. The notary kept a record of the terms and filed these with the civic government, and the testator received a full copy of the legal Latin version if she or he wished. These records survive by the thousands and today provide invaluable pictures of people’s hopes, fears, piety, social ties, property, debts, and family structures. Because they usually follow strict formulas, their data is comparable across Italy and the Renaissance era. Following Roman precedent, wills were carefully dated; the recording notary and all witnesses identified; the place—church, home, hospital, office, convent—noted; and the testator’s identity, parish, and sometimes occupation listed. Anyone with property and heirs was expected to create a will, and surviving documents represent all but the indigent classes of society. Wills normally indicated whether the testator was well or ill, and sometimes the reason for recording

Family and Gender: Last Wills and Testaments

his or her wishes, or changing an existing document. With the Black Death of 1348 the father of merchant Francesco Datini had to alter his will several times as those he named executor or the guardians of his children died and had to be replaced. Heirs, too, died, and arrangements adjusted. Many documents state that the threat of plague induced the testator, though pregnancy, travel, illness, and old age and fear of death also appear. Big-ticket items included property and buildings and business assets. These usually fell to sons or eldest surviving sons, though business assets, especially, could land in the hands of the most competent of the brothers. Unmarried girls might have their dowries stipulated, or money to convents that received them as novices. Widows had a right to return of their dowries, remains of which they could later distribute to whom they pleased. A widow might also be provided with a house and additional resources, especially if her dowry had been small and her family had grown richer. Such largesse, however, was often limited: should she remarry she lost all except her dowry. All of these distributions are of interest to social historians who seek to understand better the nature of family relations. Economic historians study lists of debts owed by the testator, with the intention of “clearing the slate.” Seeing that all terms of the will were observed was the legal duty of the chosen executor or executors, some of whom might be heirs themselves. For many, however, greater interest lies in how people chose to share their bequests with those beyond the family. Some gifts were mandated: to Florence’s cathedral, or one’s parish or pastor. Many went to faithful servants, and slaves might be freed and provided with a stipend. Small bequests might also go to helpful neighbors, health care providers, and clergy who provided solace at the end of life. Belief in the afterlife included the idea that a soul that had not repented of all of its sins would end up in purgatory, a place of intense spiritual cleansing. The Church taught that one could avoid this by performing charitable acts during life and even through one’s will. Consequently, wills are filled with charitable bequests, many labeled “for the soul” or “for love of God.” Pittances went to poor mourners at the funeral; larger amounts helped dower poor young girls seeking husbands; gifts of cloth helped clothe poor families; and in southern Italy money helped ransom hostages held by Barbary pirates. Large bequests went to support religious orders: especially mendicants, whose voluntary poverty was believed to make their prayers especially powerful. This, too, was part of the “contract.” Recipients of charitable giving were expected to pray on behalf of the testator’s soul, hastening his or her entry into paradise. Many wills contain instructions for funerals and burial, as well as funds for black clothing, candles, Mass, and feasting after the event. These could be lavish affairs, and cities tended to curb them with sumptuary laws.

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Women and Wills In a society that limited women’s participation in legal and civic affairs due to their supposed “weakness,” matters surrounding wills proved empowering. Middle-class Venetian women shared their wealth with neighbor women, especially those with children, and women across Italy helped fund dowries for poor girls. Bequests to women provided them a measure of financial independence, leading some towns to restrict gifts outside families. Women served as executors and thus managed testators’ choices of property division, funerary arrangements, memorial art, artistic gifts to churches, and a host of other decisions normally left to male family members.

Bequests to religious institutions might be very specific. Many were vestments, artworks, and metalware used in services or to decorate the church. These directly associated the donor with the sacred space and the Mass, and were often marked with his or her name or family crest. Less self-serving were funds to repair leaking roofs or rotted doors; even more self-serving was the establishment within churches of chapels decorated and supported by bequests. Of course, only elites could afford such extravagance, though in the wake of the Black Death many did, including fancy tombs for themselves and space for future family burials. Much of the art that fills museums was produced as bequests and placed behind or around altars in churches and chapels. Many frescoes that grace Italian churches were donations by guilt-ridden or thankful testators. Finally, heirs had a right to an accounting of every coin, button, spoon, and piece of land that was being passed along. A notary and other trustworthy men would note and sometimes value everything the testator possessed in life, recording all in a probate inventory. To executors these were necessary to fulfill their roles; to modern historians these are invaluable windows into Renaissance-era life. See also: Arts: Art, Sacred; Women and the Arts; Economics and Work: Notaries; Family and Gender: Death, Funerals, and Burial; Dowries; Inheritance; Servants, Household; Widows; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Poor, Aid to; Religion and Beliefs: Chapels; Churches; Friars FURTHER READING Banker, James. Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Family and Gender: Names, Personal and Family Cohn, Samuel K. The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Cohn, Samuel K. Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Cohn, Samuel K. Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Malkiel, David. “Jews and Wills in Renaissance Italy: A Case Study in the Jewish-Christian Cultural Encounter.” Italia 12 (1996): 7–69. Ross, Sarah Gwenyth. Everyday Renaissances: The Quest for Cultural Legitimacy in Renaissance Venice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Marriage. See Espousal and Wedding Midwives. See Birth and Midwives

NAMES, PERSONAL AND FAMILY Italian names can be confusing at first glance. The Tuscan merchant Francesco di Marco Datini da Prato was in his own day often referred to merely as Francesco il Ricco, the Rich. His popular baptismal or Christian name, Francesco, was in honor of St. Francis (San Francesco) of Assisi, his patron saint. Francesco was itself a name derived from the Italian word for Frenchman, and the saint of Assisi made it acceptable as a Christian name. Francesco’s father was Marco, as indicated by the Italian di, one way of saying “of”; thus di Marco is a patronymic (father’s name). Another way he could have expressed this is to use the Latin genitive (possessive) form Francesco Marchi (Mahr’-kee). Marco’s father was Datino, and Marco may have used Datini as his patronymic; Francesco is generally known to history as Francesco Datini, a name that almost never appears in his own papers. If he had had legitimate sons, they would probably have used Datini as a cognomen or family name. Since Francesco, like Marco, was from and later lived in the town of Prato, and since both Francesco and Marco were quite common names in Florence where Francesco did business, he was known there as Francesco di Marco da (from) Prato, to distinguish him from, say, Francesco di Marco da Pisa or Francesco di Marco Romano. As the wealthiest man in Prato he deserved the nickname il Ricco, though he feared it caused his taxes to be high. Christian Italian men formally received their names at baptism. In Florence, Lucca, Bologna, and elsewhere two or even three names were chosen, usually by the father, and presented at the church. These could be a paternal grandfather’s

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name, so that eldest sons’ names recur every other generation. They might be other common family names or those of godparents, that of a family patron saint, or the saint celebrated on the day of birth: Lorenzo, Cosimo, Antonio, Domenico, or Girolamo (Jerome). Many names come from the New Testament—Taddeo, Pietro, Paolo, Bartolomeo, Simone—though few from the Old, except among Jews. Giovanni and its shortened forms Vanni or Nanni were popular; since the Gospels include two Johns, Battista (Baptist) often stood alone or in combination, as in Leonbattista. Many northern Italian male names were Germanic, perhaps dating from Lombard or Frankish times: Bernardo, Gualtiero, Guglielmo, Federigo, Alberto, or Ghiberto. Among upper classes and humanists old Roman names appeared: Cesare, Enea, Giulio, Ottavio, Orazio, Aurelio, and Costantino, as well as Greek or Trojan: Achille, Ettore, Omero, and Ercole. Feudal families sometimes gave chivalric names, including Galeazzo (Galahad), Arturo, Orlando (Roland), and Lancelotto. Shortened forms were often used—Meo for Bartolomeo, Cecco for Francesco, and Cola for Nicolò—as were diminutives such as Bernardino, Antonino, Masolino (Little Thomas), or Donatello. One could move in the other direction by adding—accio or—uccio, as in Masaccio (Big or Bad Thomas). Descriptive nicknames also appear: Sodoma the painter and Gattamelata (Honey-cat) the mercenary general. In southern Italy Greek and Spanish names or derivatives were common for both men and women. Since the common Latin masculine ending—us becomes—o in Italian, most male names end in o. Today any male is addressed as signore, but in the Renaissance era Signore was the title of a lord, including God. Notaries were usually identified with Ser, and knights (by rank if not profession) with Messer. Fra (short for frater, brother) indicated a friar and often a monk. A married woman was addressed as Monna or Mona, short for Madonna, or my lady, while Donna indicated a woman of rank; nuns went by Suor (Sister). Signora indicated a noblewoman, while “wife of” or “was wife of” equated to Mrs. or widow. Women’s given names appear infrequently in official records, so our knowledge of them is restricted. Often they were from the maternal side of the family, and many were recycled from older sisters who had died. Biblical names such as Anna, Maria, Elisabetta, Angela, Maddalena, and Marta, and saints’ names—Margherita, Felicità, Cecilia, Clara, and Caterina—probably predominated. Feminine forms of male saints’ names were also common: Antonia, Filippa, Martina, Nicola, Vittoria, Francesca, and Giovanna, whereas only Maria appears sometimes in male names, as Giangaleazzo Maria Visconti, Lord of Milan, or the masculine form Mario. Girls also received descriptive names such as Beatrice (blessed), Bianca (white), Bona (good), or Fiametta (little flame). Popularized by the poet Petrarch was Laura, which he deconstructed into images including gold (l’oro; Latin aurum), breeze (l’aura), dawn (aurora), and the evergreen laurel.

Family and Gender: Names, Personal and Family

Names from France or Germany appear as Ludovica, Alberta, Isabella, and Carla, and Classical Roman names with Lucrezia, Livia, Giulia, Faustina, Aurelia, and Adriana. Chivalric names such as Ginevra—Italian for both Geneva (Switzerland) and Arthur’s Queen Guinevere—are rarer. Italian endings such as -etta and -ina could feminize a male name (Antonina) or indicate a diminutive (Betta, Bettina for Elisabetta). In daily life nicknames often replaced given names, especially for little girls.

Godparents The newborn’s father chose his child’s godparents. Originally reliant on kin, by the Renaissance the choice had become strategic, especially for elite families. A godfather and godmother were the norm, but often several of each—or in the Veneto dozens—were tied to the family through this spiritual kinship. Godfathers outnumbered godmothers as important local men agreed to the honor; Lorenzo Il Magnifico presented the traditional white vest to dozens of children of his supporters. At baptism they represented the Christian community and bestowed the child’s name. The Council of Trent weakened their social role by allowing only two godparents. Family names might derive from an ancestor (Datini, Giovanetti), ancestor’s occupation (Medici, Cambi), ancient title (Visconti), family estate name, city or region of origin (Romano, Pisani, Fiorentino, Veronese), Italianized form of a foreign name (Acuto for the English “Hawkwood”), or even an ancient nickname: Pazzi (madmen), Carnesecchi (dried meat), or Sozzini (from sozzo, filthy). Nobles utilized family names earliest, to indicate membership in a clan of high status. By the 1200s wealthy city families began adopting last names, and most peasants had no family name beyond “son of” or “from,” if any. In 1427, 36.7% of Florentine families (9,821 total) claimed a family name (cognomen). Some old clans could have many offshoots: in the same 1427 tax census there were 60 distinct Bardi families, 53 Strozzi, 31 de’Medici, and 28 Peruzzi families. Dei means “of” or “from” something plural, when masculine usually spelled with an -i, and is often shortened to de’, as in de’Medici (“of the physicians”). Many families dropped the di or dei, as did the Morelli, originally dei Morelli. See also: Arts: Antiquity, Cult of; Portraits; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Heraldry; Housing and Community: Foreign Communities; Neighborhood and Parish; Religion and Beliefs: Bible; Chapels; Jews and Judaism; Sacraments, Catholic; Saints and Their Cults

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Nursing. See Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing

OLD AGE Dante judged the onset of old age to be at 47; senility came after 70, when one surpassed the biblical allotment of 70 years. Humanist Matteo Palmieri believed that a man’s virility ended at 57 and decrepitude set in at 70. Poetess Moderata Fonte adopted Cicero’s span of 45 to 50. The first medical book to deal with old age was Gerontocomia (1489), by Gabriele Zerbi, a physician of Padua, Rome, and Bologna. For Zerbi, the decline into old age began between the ages of 30 and 40. Just as one’s early years added size, strength, knowledge, skills, sexual potency, and fertility, so past some point—though probably not as early as one’s thirties— these things began to fade. For medical men such as Zerbi, however, women’s menopause was a major turning point. They viewed menstrual fluid as a poison that a healthy woman’s body eliminated. When the flow permanently ceased, the toxins built up and adversely affected her physically, mentally, and emotionally. Her warm and moist humoral qualities shifted to cold and dry. No longer fertile, a woman’s principal role in society ended and she became largely superfluous. In males, too, the humoral complexion turned colder as age drained strength, libido, and memory. Hair disappeared, as did teeth and muscle mass. Hearing lost its acuity, and sight its ability to focus. Illness became more common, joints ached, and eventually one could hardly get along by oneself. Yet Italian society did recognize the value of age. In Venice a man’s political life began at 40, and to serve on the Senate (senex = old man) he had to be at least 60. Doges were often elderly, as were most popes. Humanist Cassandra Fedele lived to age 93, Michelangelo to 89, and the painter Titian to 86 or beyond, and then he died of plague. Barring the ravages of time, which after all differed from person to person, age brought judgment, experience, knowledge, skill, and wisdom. The passions cooled, but this allowed reason to prevail. In The Temperate Life

Family and Gender: Old Age

(1558), humanist Alvise Cornaro reflected on the well-earned leisure that age could bring, if one continued to live a life of moderation with attention to the standard Galenic regimen for good health. As he read in the classics, old age should be the best period of one’s life. But for many, of course, it was far from it. Good health was indeed a major factor, and many had worked themselves to infirmity. From the ulcers of merchants to noblemen’s gout and laborers’ skeletal problems, it is not surprising that Italians regularly joined their several terms for old age with other such as sick, incapable, infirm, and decrepit. For the work- Under cottony white hair, sad but proud eyes look ing classes, one was expected out over gaunt cheeks and a wrinkly neck in this to work up to one’s death, undated and unidentified Portrait of an Old Man by thereby supporting himself or Florentine Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (1483–1561), son of the more famous Domenico. Oil on canvas. (Fine herself to the end. There were Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) no old-age pensions, though there were hospitals, nunneries, monasteries, homes for retired prostitutes, and other facilities to care for the poverty-stricken elderly. Of course, care of one’s parents was supposed to be the responsibility of adult children. In noble and patrician households this was generally honored. The care was in fact a matter of honor to the children and to the dynasty as a whole. The paterfamilias, whatever his age, retained full parental rights even over adult children in most jurisdictions. His widow, too, was to be respected and cared for, though women of this class sometimes retired to nunneries they had supported for the spiritual support and calm they provided. Among the middle and lower classes, children were also expected to care for their parents, though this was often difficult if not impossible. In these cases the strength of the family across generations was the key. Whether a spouse’s widowed mother came to live could be a contentious issue, and caring for a blind or disabled father could put a real strain on a working family’s resources. On the other hand, a grandmother could help with light chores

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and child care, and a grandfather could present a family’s male face when the father was away. Here, too, honor made its demands.

The Art of Dying Well Life was a preparation for death; but the hours immediately before were key to making the passage into the afterlife. The Ars moriendi, or Art of Dying Well, was a Renaissance-era (and later) genre of popular devotional literature. Stemming from earlier friars’ manuals for confession and often simply illustrated, the texts led the dying to resist demons and temptations, to make a will and otherwise provide for the family, and most of all to embrace the final sacrament—including making a last full and heartfelt confession. Such guides were later published by Jesuits and Protestant pastors alike, evidence of their spiritual value to Christians. Lacking familial support and an income, older Italians struggled as they could. Older widows still had the right to their dowries, and these funds—often difficult to recover—could support them and a servant adequately. Both men and women might find work as servants, especially if they had useful skills. Older women who had a residence could rent out rooms to transients, students, pilgrims, or laborers, providing a meal or two per day. Some women formed small religious sisterhoods with other widows or spinsters. Some of these established charitable facilities for girls or older women in need of support, and some worked for existing charities. For men and women, the ultimate option, usually thrust upon them, was to be reduced to begging. Fortunately, aiding the elderly poor was considered “good alms” and few donors questioned their worthiness. See also: Arts: Art Patronage; Portraits; Economics and Work: Woman in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Death, Funerals, and Burial; Dowries; Health and Illness; Last Wills and Testaments; Widows; Food and Drink: Galenic Health Regimens; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Poverty and the Poor; Recreation and Social Customs: Theater, Popular FURTHER READING Campbell, Erin J., ed. Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Campbell, Erin J. Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Chojnacka, Monica. “Women, Charity, and Community in Early Modern Venice: The Casa delle Zitelle.” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 68–91.

Family and Gender: Pregnancy Gilbert, Creighton. “When Did a Man in the Renaissance Grow Old?” Studies in the Renaissance 14 (1967): 7–32. Minois, Georges. History of Old Age from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Translated by Sarah Hanbury Tenison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Romano, Dennis. “Vecchi, Poveri e Impotenti: The Elderly in Renaissance Venice.” In Stephen J. Milner, ed. At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 249–71. Schäfer, Daniel. Old Age and Disease in Early Modern Medicine. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.

PREGNANCY The ability to carry a child in the womb was the badge of the married woman. The childless marriage was blamed on the wife, especially if the husband had sired out of wedlock, proving his fitness. Such a marriage was easily annulled on the legal fiction that it had not been consummated. The woman was often sent into a convent or monastery since no other man would want her. This was especially relevant in the wake of the Black Death and the desire to repopulate families. This underlined the importance of her fertility and doing whatever was necessary to deal with any marital problems. Once she was deemed pregnant, the couple had the obligation to protect her and her child so she could carry him or her to full term and successfully give birth to the new member of the family. Most of the time, in most urban neighborhoods or rural villages, most married women of child-bearing age were probably pregnant or trying to conceive. Those who were not were likely to be nursing or consciously avoiding pregnancy. Though potentially dangerous to the mother, pregnancy was natural and a gift from God. Nevertheless, the uncertainties of outcome could weigh heavily: born alive or stillborn, a boy or a girl, healthy or deformed or even monstrous. Would the mother survive and recover fully, survive but suffer or become sterile, live briefly only to die of hemorrhage or fever, or die in the act of giving birth to a new life? The mother’s life before birth, however, was filled with as many doubts. Modern understanding of embryology was unknown to the Renaissance era. Most medical authorities taught that the male sperm shaped the woman’s menstrual fluid into milk and what became the baby. Menstruation ceased as the fluid was retained for this purpose. This cessation was one of the seemingly definitive signs of pregnancy. Yet it might also be caused by illness, injury, age, poor nutrition, or excessive work. Other recognized signs included enlargement of the breasts and belly, morning sickness and general irritability caused by imbalances in the humors, discernible changes in the quality and quantity of urine, development of

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what women called “the eyes,” and a disinclination to sexual activity as the uterus closed up to secure the fetus. Movement was expected in the fourth month. The “science” of astrology also had its say, as in The Geniture of People by Candido Decembrio. Planets govern monthly fetal development, so that during month five Mars might influence hands, fingers, feet, toes, ears, nostrils, mouth, and genitals. The imperative during pregnancy was to protect the mother and child from physical and psychic harm, to ensure that the mother’s diet and lifestyle were healthy for the baby, and to create an atmosphere of tranquility that moderated her temperament and impressed a sense of well-being on the child. Most pregnant women had to work in addition to caring for children and her husband. Hormonal changes and imbalances caused by the growing child affected the mother’s ability to chase toddlers and carry out even simple tasks nimbly. The great threat was accident or assault and resulting miscarriage. Advice-givers provided plenty of ways to avoid these, including amulets, charms, carrying a bit of clay in the pocket, and a daily snack of breadcrumbs with shed snakeskin. Attendance at Mass and prayers to the Virgin Mary—especially the rosary—were powerful prophylactics that also helped protect from spells and curses. Exertion was hardly avoidable, but could be fatal. Dancing, sneezing, or deep laughter could affect the baby. Even so, moderate exercise was necessary to expel excess uterine humors. Many women wore special amulets and girdles meant to draw the child’s head upward and away from the birth canal lest he or she decide to exit early. Some manuals advise against certain body positions, especially as the child grew, and overly restrictive clothing. Physicians tapped Galenic medicine advising moderation in all aspects of life. “Hot” foods helped shape the male child, but needed to be balanced with cold. Humid and cold foods, such as fish or fruit, were best avoided for the same reason: they supported the female sex. Dr. Michele Savonarola also recommended avoiding foods that promoted menstruation, such as cabbage, lima beans, and well-known herbs. Physicians also recognized unusual food cravings as normal, but warned against giving into them too often. Nausea, flatulence, and constipation were also considered normal, and care had to be taken in administering purgatives whose violent action could result in miscarriage. All medicines should have no more than moderate effects on the body. Sex during pregnancy had to be only moderately vigorous, lest it dislodge the baby. Some believed the male presence during sex helped shape the fetus, especially in a male direction. For the mother’s sake and to help imprint positively on the baby, the atmosphere of the home was to be tranquil, pious, and touched by beautiful images and fragrant smells. The mother’s temperament helped shape the baby’s, and fear, anger, or frustration was considered unhealthy. A mother’s fears could become imprinted physically on the child: tiger stripes or wolf hair. The inability to obtain a desired object could lead to spontaneous abortion. Pictures and figurines of small

Family and Gender: Servants, Household

children, the Madonna and Child, the pregnant Mary visiting her pregnant cousin Elizabeth, or St. Ann protecting Mary and Jesus were considered to be both emotionally soothing and of spiritual significance. See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Fertility, Conception, and Contraception; Wives and Husbands; Food and Drink: Drugs; Galenic Health Regimens; Housing and Community: Villages and Village Life; Religion and Beliefs: Magic; Witches and Sorcerers FURTHER READING Bell, Rudolph. How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Cohen, Elizabeth S. “Miscarriages of Apothecary Justice: Un-Separate Spaces of Work and Family in Early Modern Rome.” Renaissance Studies 21 (2007): 480–504. Crawford, Katherine. European Sexualities, 1400–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gélis, Jacques. History of Childbirth. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991.

Separation. See Divorce, Separation, and Annulment

SERVANTS, HOUSEHOLD In a publication of 1543, Francesco Priscianese listed over 100 specific servant positions that could be found in a Roman household. Of course, this meant households of the rich and powerful, cardinals and nobility, even the papal household. Yet few needed all 100. Nonetheless, an estimated 265 served the papal court of Medici Pope Leo X. In 1384 Mantua’s Gonzaga lord’s household consisted of about 500 people, of whom around 200 could be designated servants, the remaining 300 being retainers, courtiers, ladies-in-waiting, astrologers, clients, administrators, secretaries, musicians, and other functionaries. As Dukes-to-be of Milan, the Sforza Counts of Pavia employed about 40 servants, a number that rose to over 200 once they attained the higher title. Isabella d’Este of Mantua traveled with 93 servants and 80 horses. Duke Cosimo I de’Medici’s Florentine court was served by some 280, but his successor required over 400. Clearly, servants were a symbol of status and power, and not only among the ruling class. A Florentine census of 1551 found that 45% of all households employed at least one servant and 25% paid two or more to carry out tasks that

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Northern Italian painter Girolamo Marchesi (ca. 1471–1550) captured this Young Woman at Her Toilet with Her Servant (ca. 1500). Whether a young socialite or a courtesan, the woman would have had a female servant to help with dress, hair, and makeup. The subject is the woman, and her servant is portrayed with a peasant’s tanned skin and simple clothing that contrasts with her mistress’s ivory skin and fancy dress. (Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo)

were either too disagreeable or too difficult for other members to do. One out of six enumerated Florentines was a servant, and that did not count slaves and probably many child-servants. In the 1390s, the wealthy merchant-class Datini husband and wife employed three female and two male servants, as well as five slaves in nearby Prato. In the Veneto, the sixteenth-century Moro family, a group (fraterna) of 17 including brothers, their wives, and children, employed 24 servants, while Count Muzio Gambara’s family of three paid 29. The 1563 Venetian census counted 7,597 nobles who employed 7,573 servants, of whom 62% were female, a ratio of one servant per noble. Among citizens of the next class, 13,604 employed only 5,335. The 12,908 servants, all of whom should have been registered with the

Family and Gender: Servants, Household

state, constituted 7.65% of the Venetian population of 168,627, less than half the Florentine percentage of 16.7% a decade earlier. In Verona, 7% of the population consisted of servants in 1425, but 12.3% in 1502. Servants came in all ages and both sexes. Otherwise-abandoned children eight years old and older, especially girls, were taken in as charity and put to work doing simple and increasingly difficult tasks. While boys were more often apprenticed to guild master craftsmen, domestic service was considered a type of apprenticeship for future wives and mothers. Elderly widows with few other choices often entered or re-entered the workforce as cooks, maids, laundresses, or governesses, while lactating young mothers were hired as wet nurses. Older boys and men performed heavy-lifting and strenuous tasks unsuited to women or girls. They might provide an entourage for their masters during the day and carry torches and swords to protect them at night. Males might be trusted to deliver goods and messages; make collections; and exercise skills such as gardening, carpentry, or gondoliering. Talented servants in noble or patrician households might sing, dance, play an instrument, or act in theatrical performances. When hosting a banquet, a family might use or hire the labor of up to two dozen employees. The scalco or manager orchestrated everything from the menu to disposing of garbage. The chef ran the kitchen, its crew, and equipment, and food from market to plate. Noble boys served the tables as pages, and apprenticed boys toiled in the kitchen. Specialists included the wine steward, chef of cold foods, carving masters, and the master’s cupbearer. Also on display were in-house or hired musicians. Middle-class families might employ a cook, scullery maid, and maid’s assistant to tend the fires, all of whom were female. Most servants lived where they worked, though quarters were often squalid, being located in basements or attics. Roman servants might reside in inns, taverns, or boarding houses run by widows. Turnover was frequent, especially among unskilled servants who had to be retaught duties by each new employer. In fifteenth-century Florence, an average of 60% of female servants left after less than a year. The better-prepared servants came from families of servants, though most hailed from the countryside—especially after plagues—or were emigrants from abroad or other parts of Italy. Married servants were often preferred due to assumptions that they would be more stable and dependable than unmarried ones of either sex. If a servant married while in service, his or her position might even be raised for the same reason. Studies of wills show that servants sometimes left legacies to fellow servants, and more often masters left money or special items to loyal, long-term help. This may have been considered in part “good alms” or charity, since some household manuals suggest that servants should pray for their masters and servants might have been considered among the poor.

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Servant’s Handbells Both visible and audible, the handbell was used to summon a servant or servants of a wealthy or high-status householder. It was both useful and served as a symbol of authority and power in the household. Examples appear today in museums and in painted portraits, often featuring cast or sculpted decorations, including the family name or crest, domestic mottoes, or Classical scenes. To be “rung for” may seem impersonal or even slavish, but modern doorbells and ringtones serve the same purpose by the same means. Imagine arriving at a party and shouting until the host answered the door.

Court records reveal a seamier side to relations. Servants drank, gambled, and committed crimes, shaming their masters. Servants lied to, stole from, defrauded, defamed, insulted, assaulted, seduced, and even killed members of masters’ families. Older male servants raped younger male and female servants, for which in some jurisdictions they had to marry the girls. For their part, family members abused servants. They broke contracts, sexually abused males and females, beat, swindled, and falsely accused them of misconduct or crime. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Apprentices; Slaves and Slavery; Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Education of Children; Families, Noble and Patrician; Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption; Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing; Old Age; Fashion and Appearance: Livery; Social Status and Clothing; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Politics and Warfare: Crime and Punishments; Primary Document: Early Fifteenth-Century Households, Housewives, and Servants: Francesco Barbaro. “On Running the Venetian Patrician Household.” On Wifely Duties (1416) FURTHER READING Cohn, Samuel K. The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1980. Hanawalt, Barbara. “Women Servants.” In Barbara Hanawalt, ed. Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 56–80. Ó Cuilleanáin, Cormac. “Master and Servant Roles in the Decameron.” In Gloria Allaire, ed. The Italian Novella. New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 49–68. Romano, Dennis. Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Family and Gender: Siblings

SIBLINGS Brothers and sisters took many forms in Renaissance-era Italy. Some had been born of the same parents and were close together in age. Half-siblings had different mothers and were scattered in ages. Because widowers often remarried, siblings could have been even decades apart in age. Then there were foster siblings, adopted siblings, and step-siblings from blended families, as when a widower with children married a widow who had custody of her children. Marriage introduced brothers and sisters-in-law, who were not really siblings, but might come to resemble them because of age or inclination. The usual rules in this patriarchal world were that while alive the male head of the household held the group together; the eldest legitimate son inherited his father’s position in the family (with exceptions for mental deficiency, disgrace, or moral issues); all relatives on the male side had precedence over any relatives on the female side of the family; and young women who married or entered a convent effectively left the family. But these rules were not always followed, and often even legal regulations were ignored for the benefit of family members. Siblings spent some of their youth, but usually not all, in the same home. Among upper classes, infants were often sent out to wet nurses, where they remained until weaned. They returned to a family whose older boys may have been sent out as apprentices, to a distant boarding school, or to be fostered at the household of a social better who needed companions for his own son. Among working classes, girls might disappear into other homes as servants even before age ten. For rural girls and young women this often meant moving into the nearest town or city to work until they had accumulated enough for a dowry. This could place them in precarious circumstances as they lost what should have been the protection by father and older brothers from molestation. The natural male inclination to be protective of one’s sister is in evidence in court documents regarding abusive husbands. If they lived near, the abused woman’s birth brothers were often the first to respond; and their responses were often not merely verbal in nature. Brothers, too, might offer to shelter their abused sibling during a cooling-off period. Like other relationships, those of brothers ran the gamut from love and respect to rage and murder. Resentments harked back to differences in parental treatment during childhood, and to opportunities received while maturing. The growing application of primogeniture in inheritance practice meant that a single brother, usually but not always the oldest, controlled the patrimony and usually business interests. Younger brothers worked for the oldest or set out on their own. In Venice the practice of establishing fraterne (frater = brother) developed. A fraterna consisted of one married man and his unmarried brothers who occupied the large

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family home. The brothers remained unmarried, in a sense sacrificing themselves for the economic good of the family. This arrangement ensured that the patrimony would remain in one blood line and not be divided among several. Similarly in Venice, wealthy families faced rapidly increasing dowry amounts as girls’ families competed for the most eligible men—already reduced in number by the fraterna system. The norm emerged that one sister would receive the dowry and husband, and any remaining lived with their parents or joined nunneries. Here, where the women were referred to as “sister,” the term took literal meaning as siblings tended to congregate in the same religious house, often with older relatives. One role of noble or patrician married women was to create linkages or alliances between families. As the common member of both her birth family and that into which she married, the wife was the linchpin between the two. Whether or not the families’ two leaders were of her generation, she was often in a position to channel influence from one to the other, especially through her own brothers and husband, though some brides quickly became isolated as members of their new families. Even when great distances separated siblings, ties could remain tight and functional. Letters, as from the Spinelli family women studied by Moran, communicated the desires and thanks for favors, interventions, influence, and other interactions between blood brothers and sisters. Even when a married woman lived near her brothers, her husband’s absence due to business, pilgrimage, official duties, imprisonment, or exile might require her to rely on their direct aid and support. Women who were forced or chose to abandon their husbands and return, with or without children in tow, to their birth homes were at the mercy of their fathers, but also the good graces of their brothers. Once it had dowered a daughter, a birth family had no financial obligation to her, and this could even mean housing her and any children, for however short a period. If her dowry was not readily returned, or was held up in litigation, then her remarriage was likewise held up unless the family re-dowered her. This cut into the patrimony, and would reduce the shares each male was to inherit. If her father had died, then she really had no one on whom to rely for a second or additional dowry. If she had no children, or the deceased father’s family took them in, then there was always the sisterhood, nunnery that is. See also: Arts: Portraits; Family and Gender: Childhood; Dowries; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption; Inheritance; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Neighborhood and Parish; Villages and Village Life FURTHER READING Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

Family and Gender: Virtù and Honor Johnson, Christopher, and David W. Sabean. Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1600. New York: Berghahn, 2011. Miller, Naomi J., and Naomi Yavneh. Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2006. Moran, Megan. “Brother-Sister Correspondence in the Spinelli Family and the Forming of Family Networks in Sixteenth-Century Italy.” Sixteenth Century Journal 44 (2013): 47–71.

Sodomy. See Homosexuality and Sodomy

VIRTÙ AND HONOR Several concepts shaped the public or social identity of the Renaissance-era Italian. Whether duke or peasant, one’s social self was of tremendous importance, and to assault or undermine that self was a very serious matter. Virtù derived from the Latin virtus, which meant “excellence,” and ultimately from vir, which meant a “man.” For the Italian, virtù essentially meant the ability of one to get the job done well. This entailed skill, knowledge, good judgment, persistence, and other personal traits that the culture believed any worthwhile adult male should possess. It was a masculine virtue, most famously discussed in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. But there was also a moral element: the man of virtù was a man of his word; he could be trusted and relied upon. Though an inner quality, one’s virtù was manifested in one’s actions. If cultivated, this ability grew and developed as a man’s familial and social responsibilities multiplied. The man who could not accomplish what he set out or needed to do was seen as not only lacking virtù but also as being weak and ultimately without honor. Honor was a major component of one’s social identity, whether a man or woman. Inwardly it was the satisfaction of knowing that one was respected, and outwardly it was the display of behaviors to which one’s social peers and betters responded positively. Honor meant different things to different classes, though even peasants had a sense of social worth that reflected their personal value to themselves and their communities. The relationship of honor to social class was a complex one. Both notions stemmed from the early medieval aristocracy of fighting men. Their warrior ethic as expressed in song and story set certain class expectations: bravery, strength, loyalty, and generosity among men and really the same among the women, though to be fulfilled exclusively in the home or hall. The poet, peasant, or merchant was almost expected to be cowardly, weak, vacillating, and greedy. By the Renaissance

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era, warrior values were tamed by chivalry, Christianity, and urban life, as well as by the noble courts. The concept of honor trickled down the social ladder, though expectations of the nobleman were quite different from those of the peasant. Each, however, took his honor very seriously. The higher on the social ladder one was, the bigger the social stage on which one’s honor was scrutinized. The honor of the nobleman or politician was bound up with matters on a civic or even territorial level. Virtù was essential for the ruler, general, or chancellor, if only because their An early expert on virtù, Niccolò Machiavelli success—or failure—affected so (1469–1527) was a classical scholar, political many. Down the ladder honor theorist, and Florentine historian and politician. was also a key to social success, In The Prince, written as a kind of résumé to get if only on a smaller stage. The the attention of the new Florentine ruler Lorenzo de’Medici (1513; first printed 1532), he emphasized man of unsullied honor could the ruler’s ability to accomplish his goals by be trusted to borrow and return whatever means rather than traditional Christian money or other goods, to pay a moral virtues, as necessary to effective rulership. promised dowry, to treat anoth(Library of Congress) er’s daughter well as a wife, to support a patron, to pay his taxes, to treat customers fairly, to be an honest politician, and to give accurate testimony. The man of honor was a good son, family man, neighbor, citizen, and Christian. Many comedies relied on low-class characters displaying honor while their betters shamed themselves. For women, honor was closely linked to their sexuality. An as-yet unmarried woman’s virginity lay at its center, and anything that called that into question, whether her actions or her reputation, sullied her honor and that of her family as well. A girl’s tarnished honor could result in a disadvantageous marriage or permanent residence in a nunnery. The married woman’s honor was bound up with her fidelity to her husband and family, and her service to both. A married woman’s infidelity directly assaulted her husband’s virtù, as it displayed his inability to control his household. A daughter’s sexual or social misbehavior did the same. Public modesty was thought to mirror inner morality.

Family and Gender: Virtù and Honor

Because honor was acquired, it could be lost. The cuckolded husband had no honor, nor did the prostitute or unchaste widow. If a woman assaulted her husband in public, both lost face, as neither was following assumed gender roles. Rumors ate away at honor and if exposed had to be proven false. In turn, declaring another a liar, even with a simple “You lie!” constituted a major attack that itself called for a challenge. To fail to respond to a blow against one’s honor was tacitly to admit not only its truth but also one’s weakness. Responses took various forms, some more acceptable than others. They had to be public, as did the provoking incident, or honor was not served. Shouted counter-charges or public counter-rumors could redress the imbalance, though these often ratcheted up the process. Following an insult with a physical attack was generally illegal, but if the insult was damaging enough, the penalty could be a fair price to pay. Suing another in court for defamation was a remedy, but the insult or action might be vindicated instead. Vendetta was a very serious reaction, though private vengeance was highly problematic as it could easily result in violent cycles of feuding.

Leonbattista Alberti on Familial Honor, c. 1440 “[Honor is] the most important thing in anyone’s life. It is one thing without which no enterprise deserves praise or has real value. It is the ultimate source of all the splendor our work may have, the most beautiful and shining part of our life now and our life hereafter, the most lasting and eternal part—I speak of honor. . . . Satisfying the standards of honor we shall grow rich and well praised, admired and esteemed among men. The man who scorns to hear or obey that sense of honor which seeks to advise and command him grows full of vice and will never be contented even if he is rich. Men will neither ­admire nor love him.” Source: Alberti, Leonbattista. The Family in Renaissance Florence. Translated by Renée Neu Watkins. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969, pp. 149–50.

The Italian practice of dueling with swords originated in sixteenth-century Naples among military men. It was a private rather than public response to a slight, but that suited the officer or aristocrat who believed honor came with social position. Success depended on one’s skill at fencing, a new sport that had spawned books, rules, and the rapier. Venice prohibited dueling in 1534 and 1541 as did the Council of Trent. See also: Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician; Heraldry; Housing and Community: Patronage; Recreation and Social Customs: Noble Pursuits; Sports, Contests, and Competitions

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Wedding. See Espousal and Wedding Wetnursing. See Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing

WIDOWS In 1427, 25% of adult women in Florence were widows. When a woman’s husband died, she entered a new phase of life. Whatever her class, she faced immediate tasks and longer-range decisions that would reshape her life. Some matters were in her hands, but other parties could open or close doors. A widow could be 18 or 58; be childless, have small children or grown children; live near her birth family or far away; and have unfettered access or no access to her dowry. She could be well-off or saddled with her husband’s debts. He may have had a detailed will leaving little to her judgment, or died suddenly and young leaving much to her discretion. Tending dead bodies was, by custom, women’s work, and in lower-class households the widow played a direct role in the funerary rituals. She purchased, borrowed, or rented a suitable black mourning dress and adopted an appropriately mournful demeanor, whatever her actual emotions. If local laws allowed, she

Family and Gender: Widows

openly wailed at the funeral, supported by her close female family members and friends. She might have to deal with family debts and bills, and with his business affairs if he had not made other arrangements. If he had a will and named her an executor, then she had to work with other executors in carrying out his last wishes, including arranging for his memorialization. She might also help carry out the probate inventory of everything he owned that would be considered part of his estate. If they had young children, this task was especially important as this would be a large portion of their patrimony. Her next steps were also largely directed by others. If the couple was well-off, and he made appropriate arrangements, as long as she remained in good repute and did not remarry, she would continue living in their home or she would inherit an appropriate residence. If she had older, independent children, she might be invited to live with one of their families. If she had younger children, issues became complicated. Though they were her offspring as well as his, they bore his name and were part of his birth family and not hers. His family might take them all in. Her family might take her in, reabsorbing the dowry they had provided her in return for a new home. His family, then, could seek to adopt the children, a move that might suit her well. If all of these doors were closed and she had young children, and if it was the sixteenth century, she might abandon them to a foundling home or take them with her to a home for widows such as Florence’s Orbatello. Overshadowing all was her right of access to her dowry (vadimonium). If her husband had received it all, had kept it liquid, and specified in his will that she should receive it, then all was well. If her family had not provided all of it, it was tied up in his business, loans, or his birth family’s affairs, or he had squandered or spent it, then it might take years to sort out or end up leaving her with nothing. Custom dictated at least a year’s mourning, a period during which most outstanding obligations were able to be met. In Tuscany the average was two years. Many men’s wills stipulated that if his widow remarried she would forfeit anything she received through the will apart from her dowry. If she remarried, her late husband’s birth family had firm claims to his young children, if they wished to press them, though courts often left children younger than three with their mothers. Of course, remarriage required a dowry for most women, something she could provide if she had recovered hers. If she had rejoined her birth family and recovered her dowry, she came under intense pressure to remarry, serving the family’s purposes in creating a new alliance. This was especially true if she was still reasonably young. Her family might also direct her to a nunnery, if she was childless, or she might make that choice on her own. Sometimes older widows pooled their resources and created a small community dedicated to religious or charitable activities. Destitute

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women might find shelter in new charitable asylums for battered or widowed women or ex-prostitutes. These usually arranged eventually to have male children apprenticed and girls enter trusted households as servants. In Venice, care of widows was vested in parishes; 61% of widows maintained their own households. Some widows were driven to become prostitutes or concubines because of their poverty; others became household or institutional servants; some exercised their skills as weavers or in other fields to support themselves, worked as midwives, or continued their late husband’s business. If she had a house, a widow might take in boarders and sell garden produce. Many were reduced to begging. Wealthy widows saw to their children’s success and served as benefactresses and patrons. Freed from marital obligations, some became noted in intellectual or cultural circles for their own accomplishments and support for other women. Sixteenth-century Neapolitan widow and poet Laura Terracina wrote the haunting “On All the Widowed Ladies of This Our City of Naples.” See also: Arts: Women and the Arts; Economics and Work: Putting-Out System; Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Death, Funerals, and Burial; Dowries; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption; Old Age; Servants, Household; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Religion and Beliefs: Nuns and Nunneries; Witches and Sorcerers; Science and Technology: Academies FURTHER READING Baernstein, P. Renée. “In Widow’s Habit: Women between Convent and Family in Sixteenth-Century Milan.” Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 787–807. Bell, Rudolph. How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Cavallo, Sandra, and Lyndan Warner. Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 1999. Chabot, Isabelle. “Widowhood and Poverty in Late Medieval Florence.” Continuity and Change 3 (1988): 291–311. Crabb, Ann. The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Dean, Trevor, and K.J.P. Lowe, eds. Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. McIver, Katherine A. Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Trexler, Richard C. “A Women’s Asylum of the Renaissance: The Orbatello of Florence.” In Richard C. Trexler, ed. The Women of Renaissance Florence. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 415–48.

Family and Gender: Wives and Husbands

WIVES AND HUSBANDS Renaissance-era Italian society was patriarchal at is core. Consequently marriage was a patriarchal institution. The bride joined the groom’s family, and her children became his family’s next generation. Aside from wealthy widows and courtesans, unattached women were generally supplied with few resources. In part for this reason, society disdained but accepted cohabitation, even as a priest’s concubine. At least she received food, shelter, clothing, and avoided begging and, hopefully, abuse. Given the social norms, the wife was fortunate to have been chosen, and whatever sort of emotional ties bound the couple, she owed her husband gratitude, respect, and obedience. Love was considered a poor basis for a marriage, though couples were expected to grow together over the years. Though patterns differed across regions and time, husbands tended to be older than their mates by several years. Men were the public face of the family, though women had their own tight circles of neighbors, families, and friends. Husbands had legal authority beyond that of their wives. They generally earned all or most of the family’s income, served in the civic militia, joined religious confraternities, were eligible for public political or bureaucratic service, owed family taxes and rent, and gained or lost personal honor according to their family’s behavior. The husband’s was the face known at the city hall, guild hall, tavern, book stall, work site, barber shop, cloth shop, and in the streets and piazze. Lower-status wives circulated among friends’ houses, neighborhood shops, the food market, and church, but her home was her domain. Even with a servant, she was responsible for food supplies, cooking, cleaning, laundry, sewing, tending the sick, and childcare. She was often pregnant or nursing, and was increasingly likely to be literate. In 1597, Giuseppe Falcone published A Work of Agriculture, in which he outlined the duties of country wives of all classes. He gave plenty of advice on matters from tending chickens, the house garden, and laborers, to making cheese and other edibles an urban wife would buy. In the country, both husbands and wives worked hard, often side-by-side in fields, orchards, or with flocks. Here, because the commercial economy was far less developed, her contributions to the very survival of the couple and their family were vital. Among these were often wages from completing put-out textile work or needle work, or wet-nursing the babies of upper-class urban families. And, of course, she was expected to meet her husband’s sexual needs. Her husband was to rule his wife and family, employing corporal punishment as he deemed necessary. He was to supply and oversee the family’s resources, financial and otherwise: appropriate shelter, clothing, tools, and furnishings. He was also to see that if his wife’s dowry was used for family business it was reconstituted in the event she left or he died. He should love his wife, and respect her, especially in public.

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Among the upper classes the casa walls were somewhat thicker and married women less likely to appear unescorted in public. Wives were far less likely to participate in their husbands’ work, though they could prove useful. A description of Caterina Sforza, whose husband ruled Forlì, simplified her duties: bear children annually, manage the household, advance her husband’s career, and serve as a diplomat between their families. Ruling wives sometimes filled their husbands’ shoes in their husbands’ absence on business, political service, war, or exile, or following their deaths. Elite households usually employed numerous servants, which allowed the wife to remain pregnant much of the time. In many ways, and perhaps for many high-status men, this was his wife’s only real purpose. Even sexual companionship for its sake came readily from a mistress, servant, or courtesan. Outwardly man and wife appeared as one, while levels of true affection are harder to discern. Divorce was never an option, and separation could be hidden or a matter of public shame. A study of wills demonstrates that over the fifteenth century Venetian men increased their trust in and affection for their wives. Chojnacki found this expressed in affectionate language, clear provisions for return of her dowry, and his choice of her as his executor or sole heir. Then there was the 1523 Bergamasque inventory that began “The first possession is my wife.” See also: Arts: Novella; Portraits; Economics and Work: Slaves and Slavery; Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Divorce, Separation, and Annulment; Espousal and Wedding; Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Inheritance; Widows; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Housing and Community: Furnishing the House; Jewish Communities; Villages and Village Life; Politics and Warfare: Citizenship; Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates; Recreation and Social Customs: Weddings; Women, Letters, and Letter Writing FURTHER READING Alberti, Leon Battista. The Family in Renaissance Florence. Translated by Renée Neu Watkins. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969. Barbaro, Francesco. The Wealth of Wives: A Fifteenth-Century Marriage Manual. Edited and translated by Margaret L. King. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015. Brucker, Gene. Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Chojnacki, Stanley. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Cohen, Thomas V. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Cowan, Alexander. Marriage, Manners, and Mobility in Early Modern Venice. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.

Family and Gender: Wives and Husbands Crabb, Ann. The Merchant of Prato’s Wife: Margherita Datini and Her World, 1360–1423. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Dean, Trevor, and K.J.P. Lowe, eds. Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. D’Elia, Anthony. The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Eisenach, Emlyn. Husbands, Wives, and Concubines: Marriage, Family and Social Order in Sixteenth-Century Verona. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2004. Ferraro, Joanne M. Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hacke, Daniela. Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. James, Carolyn, and Antonio Pagliaro, eds. and trans. Margherita Datini: Letters to Francesco Datini. Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2012. Kirkham, Victoria. “Creative Partners: The Marriage of Laura Battiferra degli Ammanati and Bartolomeo Ammanati.” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 498–558.

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FASHION AND APPEARANCE

INTRODUCTION An old and trite saying claimed that clothes make the man. Much truer for the ­Renaissance era was that one’s appearance spoke for the person. Appearance had a language that was commonly accepted within Italy. Today, a pair of jeans, T-shirt, and a scruffy beard might indicate a penniless college student or be the style of a billionaire tech mogul. No one in the fifteenth century would mistake a broke student for a wealthy banker, unless the banker was “slumming it” for Carnival. That time of reversal each year reinforced society’s norms by turning them upside down, as if releasing pressure. The norms surrounding appearance were bound up with appropriateness, respect, and ultimately honor. To dress below one’s station in life or to adopt the garb of a soldier or a monk or a prostitute was inappropriate, a sign of disrespect of oneself and the group whose garments were being appropriated, and brought dishonor on oneself. The monk, the soldier, and the prostitute donned clothing that identified them as members of their groups. So did the livery worn by members of a noble’s household, the widow’s veil and dark clothing, and rough breeches, short tunic, and sturdy boots of the peasant or construction worker. In a religious procession, the orders of monks and mendicants were grouped, and each was identifiable by their robes and hoods. Civic officials had their versions of ceremonial uniforms, with the highest sometimes marked by special colors or fur. Honor was due the office if not the officer. Sumptuary laws abounded during the Renaissance era to ensure that civic officials alone wore the clothing that spoke of their status. Sumptuary laws also regulated the wearing of very expensive fabrics or accessories, and of extravagant styles of clothing. To dress higher than one’s status in society was no more appropriate than to dress down. Sex workers had to be distinguishable from “honest”

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women, unmarried women from new brides, Jews from Christians, and the really wealthy from the not so wealthy. Some regulations stemmed, as in Venice, from an official bias against unreasonably high expenditures for “decorating” women with brocades, furs, gems, and jewelry. Owning such items was not really the issue: wearing them in public was, for these were actually forms of wealth in the Italian economy. Much of a woman’s dowry was in the form of her trousseau: cloth, clothing, and wearable gems and precious metals. We hear of Queen Isabella of Castile pawning her jewels to outfit Columbus’s expedition, in fact, there was nothing unusual in that. Families from nobility to A Young Lady of Fashion (1462–1465), a profile peasantry used their valuables as portrait typical of the mid-quattrocento, is attributed collateral for emergencies or as to Paolo Uccello (1397–1475). Dressed simply in a gold pomegranate on red brocade with a annual bridge loans until crops blue overdress, her choker and pendant speak of came in. There was a thriving wealth. Most striking is her golden hair and silk market in secondhand clothing, cap studded with pearls and pearl brooch. Hair as in much else, if it came to sellemerges at several points, and is veiled only by semi-transparent silk organza. Oil on panel. ing instead of pawning. This also (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) meant that middle-class women could purchase used high-end garments at discount prices, hence the need to avoid status confusion by banning the wearing of these in public by “inappropriate” women. Courtesans and prostitutes, too, were banned from wearing certain expensive clothing or accessories in public, even if they could afford it. The great concern for appearance was also due in part to the material wealth of the peninsula. Apart from indigent hill folk and those living at the margins of society, people had unprecedented and unequalled access to goods that shaped their appearances. Fabrics flowed in from northwestern Europe, North Africa, and the Near East;

Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in

Italian looms produced silks that vied with Chinese wares for quality; and Italian producers set the mark for the highest-quality woolen goods as well as more utilitarian linens and cottons. One mark of this embarrassment of riches was the male and female undergarment known as the camicia. Essentially a long, absorbent, and washable long-sleeved undershirt or shift, it was the principal means of maintaining bodily cleanliness. Changing it was the equivalent of showering. Even on working men bits of it showed at the neck and cuffs, or it alone was worn with breeches. If this item was soiled and dirty, so was the body beneath it, and so was the wearer’s honor. And so it was changed daily and laundered frequently. Pilgrims to the Holy Land were told to pack enough camicie so they could wear a fresh one each day of the three-week trip. How many did even the peasant farmer have and wear thin? But appearance was not just about clothing. Hairstyles came and went for men and women, but the golden tresses of the poet Petrarch’s beloved Laura remained the goal of many women throughout the era. Do-it-yourself Books of Secrets provided organic or chemical bleaches and dyes for dark, Mediterranean hair. Makers of wide-brimmed straw hats left the crowns off of some and sold them to women who wanted to let the sun—and chemicals—do the job. But pale skin went with pale hair, and products with horrible compounds appeared on women’s toilette shelves and faces. Teeth, too, were to be pale and clean, so ground coral and other abrasives were rubbed on them. When an unfriendly fist, too much sugar, or mercury treatments for syphilis made teeth fall out, new ones might be carved from walrus tusk and set in with gold wire. For most, the hole simply remained and others joined it. When Pope Clement VII began growing a beard to protest the Sack of Rome in 1527, he started a fad that lasted the century. Trends in facial fur fashion ran from the full and long bush to the goatee, as recorded in sixteenth-century paintings. Head hair, too, ran long and short. Portraits of Lorenzo de’Medici, Il Magnifico, show typical fifteenth-century shoulder-length locks. Half a century later men’s hair was cut short, as in the Medici grand dukes’ portraits. Longer hair may have been a mark of the upper classes, and of youth more than maturity. Short hair may have reflected military styles of the soldiers who flooded northern and central Italy, or Classical Roman portraits on ancient statues and coins. Or it may just have been easier to pick out the ubiquitous head lice. Explaining fashion can be a tricky thing.

ART, FASHION IN The study of fashion of the Renaissance era presents some real challenges. The principal sources are documents such as inventories, letters, and accounts; surviving pieces of clothing; and pictorial evidence in images in many media. The value

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of documents is that they provide facts and figures and vocabulary. The problem with vocabulary is matching the terms for garments or their features to surviving or depicted clothing. The problem with pictures is always knowing what to call what one is seeing. Many items are readily identifiable and easily labeled, while others are more ambiguous. Additional difficulty stems from regional variations in names for garments, and changes in names over time. Luckily, the responsible artist sought to achieve realism in his treatment of people and their clothing, so modern viewers can usually rely on the accuracy of portrayal. By the fourteenth century, Italians had begun to embrace the idea that clothing was a second skin and not merely a curtain draped around the body. In fact, some scholars contend that “fashion” was invented during the early Renaissance by wealthy elites. In 1427, Florentine tax rolls listed 866 clothiers and 909 makers of hats and other headgear. The typical patrician at that time spent 40% of his income on clothing for his family. Being appropriately fashionable was of great concern to at least the upper classes across the peninsula. To dress appropriately and well was a matter of pride and even of honor. This role of clothing continued through the period for both men and women. The role of art in reinforcing these values was central. For the most part, members of the upper classes also commissioned art. Portraits present the cardinals, dukes, bankers, rich merchants, and celebrities of the era and their wives and children. These people stare out at or more typically past, viewers clad in carefully selected ensembles of clothing and accessories. These items spoke directly to the Renaissance-era viewers just as they spoke to the actual wearers and the people they met in streets and halls. Today, the hipster, goth, hip hop fan, Marine, and fast-food worker are easily discernable to Americans because we live within the culture that gives meaning to the distinctive clothes they wear. In the same way, Renaissance-era culture provided meaning to the depth of a neckline; the whiteness of an undershirt cuff; or the appearance of pearls, loose hair, or a sword. Learning the visual vocabulary helps us to meet the people of the past on their own terms. Italians in contemporary clothing also appear in many other art subject types. Commemorations of significant recent events, scenes from the lives or miracles of near-contemporary saints, and images of individual or group patrons worshipping the Christ Child in His mother’s arms provide important visual evidence. Venetian artists painted views of processions and other civic celebrations that recorded the city’s civic and religious groups dressed in their ritual or official finery. Onlookers and bystanders in their Sunday best create a fore- and background against which the serpentine parades proceed. Predellas are small pictures surrounding or beneath saints’ portraits or some altarpieces. They often include finely wrought miniature scenes of everyday life and people at their daily routines and in their everyday wardrobes. Worshippers may be dressed in their somber best, or they may be a

Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in

specific confraternal group clad in anonymity-ensuring hooded robes and grasping their short whips with which they did penance. Until the later sixteenth century, Italian artists, unlike the Dutch, did not revel in daily life nor deem it worth more than visual footnotes to more honorable subjects. Peasants toiling, nannies tending children, servants hanging laundry, construction or dock workers straining, beggars, charlatans, and girls selling trinkets appear often, and in the clothing appropriate to them, but almost always in the background. Female saints often exemplified the period’s fashionable woman. The culture assumed that Jesus probably did not wear This Portrait of an Unknown Woman (ca. 1490) is by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), one of the doublet and hose, but it had no era’s premier artists, while he was in Milan. The silk problem with dressing the Vir- ribbons at the shoulders indicate detachable sleeves, gin Mary and her holy sisters in a feature that makes the dress very flexible. Oil on panel. (Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images) the day’s finest. Female saints embodied the same moral values that contemporary women were expected to embrace and artists to reflect. Many of these saints were from the upper classes, so it was fitting to drape their figures in the finest brocades, velvets, satins, furs, and other materials. Italy had few queens to honor, so Mary on her throne was regaled, layered in clearly articulated garments constructed of exquisite fabrics. Male saints who were bishops, cardinals, or popes were outfitted in their ceremonial vestments, complete with characteristic miters, gloves, rings, and crozier. Of course, these were direct reflections of the Church leaders of the era clad in shimmering satin or shining cloth of gold. Because of the importance of the second skin, artists lavished attention on main characters’ clothing, and often they mastered even the very tactile nature of its fabrics. Early Sienese painters often featured plaid fabrics, as this was a local specialty. By the sixteenth century artists across Italy could capture the play of light across fine velvets, or the cool smooth flow of long fur, or the crisp rigor of a clean, white

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starched linen collar, whatever they called the garments. The art of the cloth-makers and tailors had been matched by that of the artists recording their work. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Art, Sacred; Daily Life in Art; Non-Europeans in Art; Portraits; Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Court, Fashion at; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Facial Hair; Gems and Jewelry; Headgear; Livery; Religious Habits and Vestments; Shoes and Footwear; Politics and Warfare: Arms and Armor; Civic Magistracies and Offices; Soldiers; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Civic Festivals; Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Weddings FURTHER READING Birbari, Elizabeth. Dress in Italian Painting, 1460–1500. London: John Murray, 1975. Duits, Rembrandt. Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting: A Study in Material Culture. New York: Pindar Press, 2008. Mirabella, Bela, ed. Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Welch, Evelyn. “Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Studies 23 (2008): 241–68.

ATTIRE, CHILDREN Whether boys or girls, youngsters portrayed in period paintings usually appear as little adults dressed in miniature. When children’s garments are mentioned in documents, they are similarly diminutives of adult clothing denoted by the word ending -etta, or -ina. Wardrobes changed and expanded as children matured, and the wealthy could afford a wider range of garments at any age than laborer or peasant families. For those children relegated to institutions, there were no options to the house uniform. Babies from birth wore swaddling bands that wrapped around the body and essentially immobilized it. A diaper collected waste, but both of these needed to be laundered rather frequently whatever the child’s class. In colder weather, a cloak or a blanket provided needed warmth. At about the time a child was weaned, he or she was provided a loosely fitting version of an adult undergarment, camicia, or gown. The bare buttocks of artists’ playful putti or Baby Jesus or young St. John suggest a lack of any undergarment, though continued use of a diaper was likely until the child could control himself or herself. At least some upper-class families who sent children away to wet nurses assembled a lavish Welcome Home wardrobe.

Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children

Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici moralized against the practice of providing infants elaborate and expensive embroidered caps, silvered capes, fancy gowns, colored little shoes, and fine stockings. Children should not be spoiled, and should thus receive simple, plainly colored clothing. Older children who sported extravagant attire also drew fire, though it was aimed at doting parents. Civic sumptuary laws sometimes targeted children’s clothes that featured cloth of gold or silk ribbons, or that were multicolored. Some warned that wearing gems or jewelry could attract muggers and put a child at risk. Franciscan preacher San Bernardino in the 1420s and 1430s thundered against boys dressed effeminately or provocatively by parents. He saw braided hair, see-through camicie, doublets that rode high over the navel, and hose open at the sides as attractions for males seeking to sodomize the boys, a widely held concern in fifteenth-century Florence. Once toilet-trained, boys donned short breeches and shoes appropriate to the environment. Depending on age and circumstance, a boy might wear over his breeches a camicia, short tunic, or vest-like doublet. When old enough for hose, usually a matter of local custom, a doublet was needed as an anchor to which to attach the top of the hose. The front of the hose might be sewn or laced shut, or capped with a codpiece, made more prominent as he became older and more sexualized. A belted tunic might cover the doublet and top of the hose, and a cap in coordinated color(s) his head. At night or in colder climes a cloak, perhaps lined with satin or fur, would cover all, even the head if the cloak had a hood. Colors of these ensembles might reflect no more than the boy’s own preference or indicate an affiliation with a neighborhood, confraternity, nobleman, or guild master, essentially becoming livery. Whatever their class, girls were considered more vulnerable to danger in public than boys. Just as their mothers did not live in the streets and shops as their men did, girls tended to be anchored to the home. They graduated from an infant’s gown or camicia, to larger and larger versions of the same. Considered an undergarment, the camicia could be worn by itself in private or around other girls or women. In colder weather or a more public setting it would be covered with a gown, with or without a bodice. In a formal setting, like her mother she would also wear an overgown of fine material, perhaps with detachable sleeves fashionable for the period. As they approached puberty, girls were kept closer to the hearth, but when they appeared in public for festivals, weddings, or other occasions, parents made sure that they put on a good show. Dress had to obey sumptuary laws regarding fabrics, furs, colors, and accessories, but had to be ostentatious enough to stand out in a crowd. Brocades, velvets, and silks, pearls in the hair, a low neckline, embroidery and lacework—preferably her own—and glimpses of very clean, white camicia at the neck and wrists became a kind of upper-class uniform for young, unmarried women. There needed to be a hint of sexuality, but more important were modesty

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and good taste. A mother or a 25-year-old man eying a 12-year-old girl were looking at the same thing: a wife in progress. When Cesare Vecellio compiled his visual catalogue of world costume, published in 1593, he included only a very few images of young people. Unique was the “maiden of Torino,” in northwestern Italy. Like others of her stage of life her long hair flowed loose but her face was covered with a dark veil with slits for her eyes, nose, and mouth. Children who were abandoned, orphaned, or otherwise found their ways to charitable institutions such as foundling homes or orphanages went through similar stages from swaddling bands to adult clothing. Fashion, however, was never a concern, and the cloth used for gowns, camicie, tunics, and breeches was a thin, coarse but sturdy linen or cotton, sometimes mixed with goat’s hair, in Florence known as guarnello. Most girls in institutions were expected to attract husbands and marry. Some enterprising administrators arranged religious processions on meaningful feast days, when the girls of marriageable age were especially smartly dressed and local men knew to view that years’ promising brides-to-be. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Portraits; Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Clothmaking; Family and Gender: Espousal and Wedding; Homosexuality and Sodomy; Fashion and Appearance: Court, Fashion at; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Headgear; Shoes and Footwear; Social Status and Clothing; Sumptuary Laws; Underclothing; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival FURTHER READING Buck, Anne. Clothes and the Child: A Handbook of Children’s Dress, from 1500–1900. Carlton: Ruth Bean, 1996. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Newton, Stella Mary. The Dress of the Venetians, 1494–1534. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1988. Sebregondi, Ludovica. “Clothes and Teenagers: What Young Men Wore in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” In Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650. Toronto: CRSS Publications, 2002, pp. 27–50.

ATTIRE, FEMALE The basic women’s ensemble consisted of an undergarment—the knee or ankle-length white camicia—and one or two layered gowns of appropriate richness. Fabric-covered shoes were slipped over silk stockings, a cape or cloak over

Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female

the whole, and hair and hat, if one, worked together on top. Typical accessories included a stole over the neck and shoulders; gloves of soft leather, silk, linen, or even fish skin; sashes, handkerchiefs, a fan; a belt of silk and gold or silver; and a silk purse hung from a belt. By herself at home or with only other women, a fancily embroidered or lace-trimmed shift-like camicia would suffice, or a slight variation called the schiavonetto after its supposed Dalmatian origins. Anywhere less intimate she would wear a camicia and some garments over it. Throughout the Renaissance era, women wore a sleeved top and skirt, and only courtesans donned pants. Rather than two pieces, these were usually either joined as a bodice and skirt or fell directly from the shoulders and neckline to the ankles, cinched with a low belt. The inner gown could be somewhat tight-fitting and covered the camicia almost completely. The outer one could be more voluminous, even sleeveless or open at the front. Fashion was literally in the details. The regions of the garments that could be altered or replaced included the collar, neckline, sleeves, cuffs, and hemline. Since the camicia was expected to be clean and spotlessly white, and was often trimmed with lace or embroidery, it could be exposed at the collar, neckline, and cuffs. Slashes or holes in the sleeves of outer garments also allowed the underlying sleeve material to show through. As the only white garment it is easily seen in many women’s portraits. By the later sixteenth century, this habit had developed into very elaborate false collars and the ruff or ruffle, familiar to us from Elizabethan-era paintings. Necklines moved like elevators. For courtesans and prostitutes they were billboards, and the lower the better; for a recent widow or nun a high neckline was essential. Florentine law set a depth limit in 1464. Women at court notoriously wore plunging necklines. With garments and accessories, layering the neckline could present a complex picture of three types of cloth and decorative embroidery, lace, lacing, and a pendant or necklace. Sleeves were always removable and often easily detachable. They could be of very different fabric from the dress to which they were attached. They could be extremely large and voluminous and cinched at the cuff, or not. They could be tightly fitted or pleated or slashed to reveal underlying fabric, or decorated with embroidery, lace, ribbons, or a row of buttons. They might be cut lengthwise and loosely laced back together to expose fabric beneath. Sixteenth-century Florentines had 14 words for distinctive sleeve types. A cuff could be no more than the end of a sleeve, or a florid display space. As for hems, some women did wear skirt hoops, which meant the fabric fell in a circle at a distance from their feet. The main question for the fashionable and the critics was whether to have a train and how long it should/could be.

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Attire for Pregnancy and Labor? Florentine household inventories contain clothing articles designated da parto, for childbirth. Nothing otherwise distinguishes these from other shirts, tunics, or vests, and one wonders how they were recognized in the woman’s wardrobe. A fornimento da parto (ensemble for childbirth) would have been a set of clothes or linen. One silk-lined cloak was trimmed in black fur. Presumably linen would have been for displaying the clean newborn to visitors, and while the pregnant and delivered mother may have worn nightgowns, vests, and dresses, they would have been preserved from the birthing event itself, messy as it was.

The time around a woman’s wedding was when her wardrobe was richest and fullest. Her wedding gown was of silken velvets and satin and white—a color banned to all except brides and nuns—and cloth of gold (as allowed by law). She was decorated with all sorts of jewelry, part of her dowry. Her family donated lots of clothing to her trousseau, which usually counted as part of her dowry. Her fiancé added a counter-dowry that also contained elaborate clothing and cloth for future ensembles. In 1447 Florentine Marco Parenti recorded the wardrobe portion of the trousseau of his new wife, Caterina Strozzi. It included 17 embroidered camicie, two gowns, three overgowns with linings of marten fur and embroidered sleeves, 42 veils, 27 caps, 31 handkerchiefs, 3 pairs of red stockings, and two collars. Additionally she brought 17 lengths of expensive fabric, and he provided 24 bolts of fine cloth in his counter-dowry, along with a lined red silk velvet overdress and a head-dress covered in 800 peacock feathers. Two final points: the counter-dowry actually belonged to him and he could pawn, rent out, or loan the gown and peacock garland as a favor to whomever he wished. Also, the inclusion of both bundles of cloth looked to future wardrobe needs; often brides were rather young, and their bodies were likely to change. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Portraits; Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Clothmaking; Women in the Labor Force; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Court, Fashion at; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Headgear; Religious Habits and Vestment; Shoes and Footwear; Social Status and Clothing; Sumptuary Laws; Underclothing; Recreation and Social Customs: Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Primary Document: Of Gowns, Housegowns, and Dirty Laundry: Letters of Margherita Datini to Her Husband, Francesco Datini (1397–1398)

Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Male FURTHER READING Allerston, Patricia. “Clothing and Early Modern Venetian Society.” Continuity and Change 15 (2000): 367–90. Bercuson, Sarah. “Giovanna d’Austria and the Art of Appearance: Textiles and Dress at the Florentine Court.” Renaissance Studies 29 (2015): 683–700. Campagnol, Isabella. Forbidden Fashions: Invisible Luxuries in Venetian Convents. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Herald, Jacqueline. Renaissance Dress in Italy, 1400–1500. London: Bell and Hyman, 1981. Hughes, Diane Owen. “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy.” In John Bossy, ed. Disputes and Settlements. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 69–99. Kovesi-Killerby, Catherine. “ ‘Heralds of a Well-Instructed Mind’: Nicolosa Sanutis’s ‘Defense of Women and their Clothes.’ ” Renaissance Studies 13 (1999): 255–82. Newton, Mary Stella. The Dress of the Venetians, 1494–1534. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1988. Rosenthal, Margaret F. “Clothing, Fashion, Dress, and Costume in Venice (c. 1450–1650).” In Eric R. Dursteler, ed. A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797. Boston: Brill, 2013, pp. 889–928. Rosenthal, Margaret F., and Ann Rosalind Jones. The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. Storey, Tessa. “Clothing Courtesans: Fabrics, Signals, and Experiences.” In Catherine Richardson, ed. Clothing Culture, 1350–1650. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 95–108. Vincent, Susan. The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.

ATTIRE, MALE We might be inclined to think that women had a wide range of fashion choices like they do today, and that, as today, there is rather less variety in male wardrobes. In fact, though there is a huge vocabulary for women’s garments, and many of these articles were made of fabulous fabrics adorned with works of outstanding craftsmanship, males had the wider range of clothing types and wore the same fabrics and colors as women. Of course, not every male wore all or even most of the types of clothing available at one time. The pope, the soldier, the merchant, the duke, the physician, the galley slave, and the male prostitute each had distinctive costuming that did not overlap with the others. And, of course, a given man might have several ensembles,

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changing them as needed. The pope wore a set of riding gear when hunting, vestments when saying Mass, his cassock and cope when relaxing or dining, and dress of state when presiding over a meeting of the Papal Curia. Even an artisan was likely to have his work clothes, dress clothes for Mass and festivals, rugged wear for street sports, and his confraternity’s robe, hat, and belt for their gatherings. If elected or appointed to a political or bureaucratic office he might have to acquire additional garments appropriate to his new office. As a man aged, not only did fashion trends move along, but his social status was also likely to change, and this might affect his wardrobe. Young men exhibiting their masculinity tended to display their hose-enclosed legs more often than older males did. Typical were soled or unsoled hose that were as tight as possible and held as tautly as possible by being fastened to the The otherwise-unidentified Knight in Black was doublet covering the torso. painted by G. B. Moroni (1520/24–1579), a northern Beneath the doublet was a clean, Italian artist in 1567. He dresses in all black, typical white undershirt called the of the Spanish-influenced later sixteenth century, with just a bit of clean white ruff showing at the camicia. The male version was collar. He sports a jaunty plumed black hat and long-sleeved, though shorter draws attention by placement of his hand on his than a woman’s and perhaps sword, a privilege of knighthood. Oil on canvas. decorated with needlework trim(Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) ming. The long-sleeved doublet worked something like a tight-fitting button-fronted jacket and was sold and tailored by specialists (known in Venice as the zuponerii). In 1427 Florence listed

Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Male

58 doublet-makers, 4 of whom were women. The fabric was usually quilted, filled with cotton batting and faced with rich cloth such as velvet, silk or brocade, or suede or even cotton if meant to be worn only under a tunic. The front often descended in a point to the groin, where it met either the sewn or laced front of the hose or the codpiece, a bag for the genitals that also served as a pocket. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries men covered both with a tunic that fell to some level between the groin and knees. This outer layer could be of very fine fabric and cut in any number of ways. One of the most variable areas was the sleeve. It could be tight or puffy, cuffed or not, slashed to show the doublet’s material beneath, low hanging like a giant pocket, or simply missing. The last was typical of men who worked manually. Fashion trends usually determined an acceptable tunic sleeve. Belted or not, and doublet permitting, the tunic could show strips of clean camicia at the cuffs, collars, and sleeves. Fashion could even overturn such a basic triad, as in later fifteenth-century Florence, when the tunic went out of style and the tops of hose had to become rather more presentable. This changed in the sixteenth century, when across Italy tight breeches or puffy trousers came into style to cover the hips and thighs. Older men of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries wore belted or unbelted woolen gowns or robes, often with great capes or cloaks that gave them the substantial profiles so evident in Florentine paintings. Sometimes the gown was collared, but more often a bit of camicia white peeked out from behind the black or deep red. Gowns and cape were often lined with squirrel or marten fur, which showed at the cuffs and collars. Underneath they wore breeches or trousers. In the sixteenth century, gowns remained to certain professions such as physicians, priests, and university professors, while even mature men took to wearing exposed breeches and trousers. Pants were traditionally associated with laborers, peasants, and soldiers. They also had to be worn while horseback riding. So the shift to these was somewhat radical. While Italians set many style trends and fads, they also absorbed much from neighboring cultures. Men sailed about the Mediterranean, traded with foreigners, welcomed visitors on state or commercial business, and watched as foreign soldiers marched across the peninsula. In the early sixteenth century the dagger became a male accessory for show as well as utility. Soon it was joined by elaborately crafted matching swords that also hung jauntily from specially designed belts. The adoption of pants may have been reinforced by the masculine image of the man of war. French, German, Hungarian, Turkish, and especially Spanish influences shaped male fashion at least as much as it did women’s fashions. Some of this was dampened by sumptuary laws, but then it was men who made the laws. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Portraits; Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Clothmaking; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Court, Fashion at; Fabrics,

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Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Headgear; Livery; Religious Habits and Vestment; Shoes and Footwear; Social Status and Clothing; Sumptuary Laws; Underclothing; Politics and Warfare: Soldiers; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Primary Document: Of Gowns, Housegowns, and Dirty Laundry: Letters of Margherita Datini to Her Husband, Francesco Datini (1397–1398) FURTHER READING Allerston, Patricia. “Clothing and Early Modern Venetian Society.” Continuity and Change 15 (2000): 367–90. Currie, Elizabeth. Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Herald, Jacqueline. Renaissance Dress in Italy, 1400–1500. London: Bell and Hyman, 1981. McCall, Timothy. “Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy’s Quattrocento Courts.” I Tatti Studies 16 (2013): 445–90. Newton, Mary Stella. The Dress of the Venetians, 1494–1534. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1988. Rosenthal, Margaret F. “Clothing, Fashion, Dress, and Costume in Venice (c. 1450–1650).” In Eric R. Dursteler, ed. A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797. Boston: Brill, 2013, pp. 889–928. Rosenthal, Margaret F., and Ann Rosalind Jones. The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. Sebregondi, Ludovica. “Clothes and Teenagers: What Young Men Wore in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” In Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650. Toronto: CRSS Publications, 2002, pp. 27–50. Vincent, Susan. The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.

BATHING AND PERSONAL HYGIENE Renaissance-era Italian culture highly valued personal cleanliness. One’s appearance and smell suggested social class, occupation, education, and even moral virtue. Offensive personal smells might indicate disease, or at least rudeness and lack of concern for others. Dirty clothing could mean poverty or carelessness, and dirty hands not only a dirty occupation but a countrified attitude toward urban norms. Cleanliness was a mark of respectability and self-esteem, of self-control and refinement, perhaps even of spiritual virtue. The Renaissance era cherished human beauty and disdained those factors that reduced it, whether by nature or choice. Women were probably held to a higher standard than men, and this may have been in both city and countryside.

Fashion and Appearance: Bathing and Personal Hygiene

To clean oneself in the course of a day generally meant to wash one’s hands, face, and perhaps head, and to change from clothes one was wearing, preferably into ones recently laundered. Full body baths in warm or hot water presented problems. In the age of plague and belief in poisoned air (miasma) as its cause, which meant the entire Renaissance era, physicians generally steered people away from an activity that opened one’s pores. This was considered especially dangerous during hot, dry summers. Warm and humid spring weather struck them as providing a safer period, and for those who indulged in an annual bath, it generally occurred in the Easter season. Nonetheless, Italy was covered with warm springs and around these grew up spas that offered water and mud from tepid to hot. The wealthy, the poor, and the diseased flocked to these, and residing physicians seemed to have cared little for the dangers of open pores. In cities, clean water was often hard to come by, and only the wealthy could really afford the amount necessary for even a single full tub. Heating water in such amounts also presented problems. The wealthy answered such limitations with servants and some nifty gadgets. Since cleans hands and faces were expected at table, villas and palazzi often featured decorated wall niches located at about elbow level and near rooms used for dining. Water was heated over a fire in a metal sphere, which was then hung over a drained basin in the niche. The sphere featured a tap near the bottom from which hot water was dispensed. Servants refilled the spheres and probably kept basins of warm water handy. Indoor plumbing was by no means common, but men like Pope Clement VII and Duke Federigo da Montefeltro, lord of Urbino, insisted on it. In his stufetta (bathroom) Clement installed a marble bath featuring hot and cold running faucets and had the walls heated internally by circulated hot air—essentially a sauna. Federigo’s palace featured both hot and tepid bathing rooms, an idea he probably derived from the far fancier public baths of ancient Roman cities. Whether for hygiene or therapy, bathing revived ancient custom, as explained in the 497 folio pages of Everything Extant on Baths (1553). Some barbers offered a bath along with a shave and bleeding, and some cities allowed public bathhouses, with alternating times for men and women. Many of these had been closed following the Black Death and fear of both contagion and open pores. This caution had largely subsided by the sixteenth century, and they made a comeback. The old fear was replaced, however, by public disgust with the stubborn presence of prostitutes and new fear of syphilis and other venereal diseases. Soap was more common than one might think. Unlike northern formulas that used animal fat, Mediterranean soaps were olive oil–based and included tree ash high in soda. It was imported from the Near East and Spain, and the finest Italian brands were Venetian. In small molded bars or other shapes it sold in mercers’ and

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apothecaries’ shops; Florence even had specialty soap stores. The problem was that the soap stank and needed to be scented. Giovanventura Rosetti in a 1555 Book of Secrets provided 18 recipes for hand soaps. In one, flaked raw white soap is soaked for 7 to 10 days in rosewater, dried, ground, and mixed with mahaleb cherry pit, balsam, musk, and spikenard. The mixture is molded in small forms, dried, and stored in a decorated wooden box. Barber soaps often used musk, or cloves, and other spices, many of whose scents were considered to have therapeutic properties. Especially soft or liquid soaps were used for sexual lubrication and even found their ways into poetry and stories. Hygiene also meant dealing with body parasites such as fleas, nits, and lice. The working poor who had few changes of clothing suffered especially during the winter, another reason for springtime baths. Barbers routinely checked scalps for insects, and mothers picked nits from their children’s heads as a matter of course. Barbers also handled sources of unpleasant bodily odors, such as rotting teeth and open sores.

Soap The ancients used olive oil to raise body dirt and a flat tool to scrape it away. Urban and rural households had their recipes for body soap, some later printed in Secrets books. Genoa developed commercial soap production, then Venice, which in 1303 forbade export of soap workers or alum. By the 1500s soap manufacturers were located all across Italy, marketing brands such as The Ball, The Chains, The Sun, and The Pinecone. Scent was optional. These were sold itinerantly or from retail stores, including Florence’s specialty soap shops. Valued for lubrication, soap was as much for sex as for cleansing.

Finally, hygiene meant disposing of human waste. Cities collected urine that could be used industrially, and some collected feces for manuring fields. Cesspits for collecting waste might be open or beneath a projecting closet with a hole in the floor. A close stool was a cubic box with a bucket inside and a hole on top over which one sat. One cleaned oneself with a (one hopes) frequently laundered toilet towel or natural sponge. See also: Family and Gender: Health and Illness; Virtù and Honor; Fashion and Appearance: Laundry; Scents and Perfumes; Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons; Health Commissions and Boards; Sewage, Sewerage, and Public Sanitation

Fashion and Appearance: Cosmetics FURTHER READING Biow, Douglas. The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hanke, Stephanie. “Bathing all’antica: Bathrooms in Genoese Villas and Palaces in the Sixteenth Century.” In Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, Flora Dennis, and Ann Machette, eds. Approaching the Italian Renaissance Interior: Sources, Methodologies, Debates. New York: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 52–78. Palmer, Richard. “In this our lightye and learned tyme”: Italian Baths in the Era of the Renaissance.” Medical History, Supplement No. 10 (1990): 14–22.

COSMETICS Feminine beauty was prized and praised by just about everyone in Renaissance-era Italian society, except certain male moralists, preachers, and proto-feminist women writers. Beauty was associated with goodness, truth, and godliness. It was a major attribute of God and His realm, as exemplified by Dante’s “Paradise.” Female beauty had been celebrated by the ancients, by medieval poets, especially ­Petrarch, and was considered a sign of female nobility. A woman’s beauty attracted a husband and kept him interested, and served courtesans and prostitutes to draw customers. Most women appreciated some or all of these points and encouraged beauty’s pursuit among their family members and peers. But despite beauty’s connection to truth, men and women alike recognized that artificial means were often necessary to correct nature’s deficiencies. Genetics, rashes and diseases, the sun, accidents, violence, and age could lessen a woman’s beauty. Cosmetics could counteract many of these effects. The ideal of beauty was supposedly based in humoral theory and was celebrated by Petrarchan poets. A woman was by nature cold and moist, which implied that her skin tone should be naturally pale and soft. Her hair, too, should be light in tone, and her cheeks tinged pink or reddish, but not ruddy. The poet Petrarch’s Laura possessed such noble beauty: her shining forehead was high, her hair golden, dark eyes lustrous, lips ruby, soft hands white, and her smile radiant. While some Italian women fit this pattern, most did not, as natural Mediterranean complexions tended to be dark. Pale skin also implied that a woman kept out of the sun, a mark of higher social class. Dark skin suggested long hours in the fields, and was less prized the further north in Italy one went. Real women’s faces had unbalanced features, and facial skin that was pocked, freckled, pimpled, scarred, wrinkled, and discolored. Cosmetics could help.

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Apothecaries and charlatans sold preparations from their shops or street corners. “Wise women” in both urban and rural areas might sell cosmetic creams or ointments along with medicines, amulets, and magical potions. In cities older Jewish women were noted as expert cosmeticians, since many had traveled extensively and supposedly tapped into ancient and esoteric traditions. One such was Anna the Jewess of Rome who even sold a black face cream to noblewoman Caterina Sforza. So-called Books of Secrets featured dozens of cosmetic recipes and tips. One of the most popular was Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese (1561, with seven more editions by 1599); others included Giovanni Marinello’s Ornaments of Women (1569), Eustachio Celebrino’s New Work . . . for Making Every Woman Beautiful (1551), and the Neapolitan Giambattista della Porta’s Natural Magic (1558). Della Porta’s Ninth Book—of 20—addresses How to Adorn Women and Make Them Beautiful. Recipes treat hair (bleaching), teeth, body odor, and skin quality. Several suggest means for whitening the face and hands, including white lead, and for removing pimples, warts, and wrinkles. The work attributed to Isabella Cortese is subtitled In Which Are Included Mineral, Man-Made, and Alchemical Things and Many Things Concerning the Art of Perfumery, Suitable for Any Lady. Its widely ranging contents have been characterized as a mixture of science, medicine, popular traditions, magic, and astrology. Ornaments of Women features no fewer than 26 recipes for dyeing dark hair lighter shades from red to dark blonde. Some ingredients were exotic imports available at an apothecary’s shop. Rouge could be prepared from expensive red dye materials brazilwood or vergino wood. The first was mixed with readily available alum and lime; the second with rosewater and oil. Either could be applied to a woman’s lips or cheeks or a courtesan’s nipples. Suet, wine, marjoram, and musk or civet were blended to make a lip balm, as were various combinations of olive oil, butter, fat, wax, rosewater, and musk or civet. A face cream consisted of rosewater, cinnamon, rock salt, and a virginal boy’s urine. The popularity of alchemy meant that organic ingredients were often replaced or mixed with metals, minerals, or salts, including silver sublimate, borax, alum, sulfur, and mercuric sulfide to redden the cheeks. A woman might apply various facial cosmetics herself or with the aid of a servant; in either case she would need a mirror. One or more were included in a woman’s toilette, and was often a component of her trousseau. Some were hung on the wall, often covered by curtains to protect them, while others were hand held or stood on a little stand. Made of highly polished steel or a glass plate silvered on the back, they could be flat or convex for magnifying. One’s reflection was rather dark, but this improved across the sixteenth century as mercury-coated tin foil replaced silver. As one wag put it, mirrors were meant to reflect the truth, even if cosmetics were attempts to hide it.

Fashion and Appearance: Court, Fashion at

Women also employed a range of other toilette items, including hair and powder brushes, combs, cloths, sponges, pointed sticks, tweezers, and a range of containers in which to keep cosmetics, hair dyes, and perfumes. These were often stored in small and ornate boxes, either imported or Near Eastern in style, and made of bone, ivory, silver, or painted wood. Critics warned against the physical damage done by many concoctions, and preachers against the spiritual damage done by surrendering to vanity and falsifying one’s appearance. Only whores and not honest women needed to lure men. Even 18-year-old widow Laura Cereta, in a letter of 1487, condemned exaggerated hair styles, makeup, and the vanity that was the “weakness of our sex.” See also: Arts: Portraits; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Fashion and Appearance: Hair and Hairstyles; Scents and Perfumes; Recreation and Social Customs: Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Religion and Beliefs: Preachers and Preaching; Science and Technology: Alchemy; Secrets, Books of FURTHER READING Della Porta, Giambattista. Natural Magick. New York: Basic Books, 1957. Mirabella, Bela, ed. Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Storey, Teresa. “Face Waters, Oils, Love Magic, and Poison: Making and Selling Secrets in Early Modern Rome.” In Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, eds. Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, pp. 143–66.

COURT, FASHION AT Italian noble courts were established in the later Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance era. The only royal court was at Naples, and it became a Spanish viceroyal court in the sixteenth century. The papacy had a kind of court that ruled the Papal States and was centered at the Vatican, but it literally lacked a woman’s touch. While there were nieces, daughters, concubines, and courtesans, these came and went with the change of pontiff, and none had a real effect on the culture. Though it had a duke, or doge, and dogaressa, Venice was a republic that also lacked a court altogether. Florence, too, was a republic, at least until the early sixteenth century. The fifteenth-century Medicis had treated the state like their estate but maintained the appearance of first among equals rather than signori. Sixteenth-century Medici were dukes and then grand dukes and left republican

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Florence far behind, establishing an Italian court with a culture second to none. Northern Italy had been studded with noble courts throughout the era, and the Medici borrowed from whomever they wished. The fifteenth century had been the heyday of Italian courts, the years before the wars descended on the peninsula and destroyed the old order. Montefeltro Urbino, Gonzaga Mantua, D’Este Ferrara, Savoyard Turin, and Milan of the Visconti and Sforzas truly set the tone. In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries Italian courts emerged or survived from the small-scale wars that moved across Italy like storm clouds. The lords, or signori, gained and held power by force, and several were mercenary leaders who served larger states. They tended to take their cultural cues from the French and Burgundian courts to the north. The papacy’s stay in Avignon placed it in their orbit as well, as did the large number of French cardinals and popes who carried northern cultural values back to Italy. Early Renaissance court fashions, then, were largely imitative of northern fashions, which are sometimes labeled late Gothic. Both men’s and women’s clothing tended to the fanciful, with emphases on fine but showy materials and accessories, and sometimes outlandish fads. Northern soldiers who descended into Italy during lulls in the Hundred Years’ War brought with them martial male fashions that tended to masculinize tendencies at the signori’s courts. The establishment and spread of Italian silk production in the fifteenth century and rising Italian disposable wealth shifted the direction of court fashions. The male doublet-tunic-hose ensemble lost some of its frippery and more sober colors replaced mixed or garish ones. Women’s garments continued to be made of the finest materials available, but their silhouettes were more naturalized by the later fifteenth century. This was, however, no turning away from fashion. Courts were consciously competing with one another culturally, seeking the grandest gardens, latest architecture, finest art and music; humanists taught boys and girls alike; ambassadors were the social media of the day and spread scorn or praise for the centers of regional power they visited. Dress, from that of the ruling couple to servants at table, had to be clean, expensive, tasteful, and new each time a banquet, hunt, or ball was held. Visitors from abroad wore new fashions that resonated and were copied, or brought news of novelties from distant courts. When a duke married a foreign wife, she brought trunks filled with the latest garments from her home as well as ones tailored to please her new husband. The taste for Spanish black of Lucrezia Borgia or Eleanora of Toledo sent courtiers running. Platoons of tailors and seamstresses stood by to rework or update older garments or fashion new ones. Subjects in Ferrara or Mantua and citizens in republican Florence or Siena only had to be concerned with the opinions of their neighbors for the sake of their honor. At court, however, the dynamic was more complicated. Servants, musicians, chefs, guards, gardeners, huntsmen, and other lower echelon court functionaries were

Fashion and Appearance: Court, Fashion at

clothed to please the ruling family and were expected to maintain their wardrobes. Courtiers, male and female, on the other hand, made their own choices. A fashion slip-up could cost a young champion or lady-in-waiting his or her position. Throughout Italy clothing was a kind of language, but at court even the accent had to be perfect. For their parts, the rulers were the face of the state, and as admittedly small players they could not afford to appear as country bumpkins to their royal or Imperial betters or their representatives. Honor was at stake. Across Italy the trend in the sixteenth century was toward a soberer, almost more mature expression through dress. Rulers and male subjects lost the skirting of tunics and adopted breeches; males grew beards; Spanish influence from Sicily to Milan turned Italians to darker colors, and perhaps a greater sense of dignity. This was especially true at court. Extravagance and expense were still the watchwords for dress, but the effect was to be understated: elegance rather than novelty or show. While nobles did not impose sumptuary laws on themselves, they effectively did so by choosing to emulate the pious Iberians and follow the spirit of the Catholic Reformation. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Dance, Courtly; Portraits; Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Bathing and Personal Hygiene; Cosmetics; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Fashion in Art; Gems and Jewelry; Headgear; Livery; Scents and Perfumes; Social Status and Clothing; Tailors and Seamstresses; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community: Death in the Community; Gardens; Palazzi; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates; Recreation and Social Customs: Noble Pursuits FURTHER READING Bercuson, Sarah. “Giovanna d’Austria and the Art of Appearance: Textiles and Dress at the Florentine Court.” Renaissance Studies 29 (2015): 683–700. Biow, Douglas. On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Buss, Chiara, ed. Silk, Gold, Crimson: Secrets and Technology at the Visconti and Sforza Courts. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2010. Currie, Elizabeth. Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. McCall, Timothy. “Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italian Quattrocento Courts.” I Tatti Studies 16 (2013): 445–90. Niccoli, Bruna. “Official Dress and Courtly Fashion in Genoese Entries.” In J. R. Mulrayne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring, eds. Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, Vol. 1. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 261–273.

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The World of Renaissance Italy Paulicelli, Eugenia. Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Rosenthal, Margaret F., and Ann Rosalind Jones, trans and ed. Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, the Clothing of the Renaissance World. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008.

DYES AND DYESTUFFS Fashion demanded color, and dyes provided it. Color as a marker of status ­depended on the expense of the dye producing the color, and top of the list was crimson. Civic laws, especially sumptuary laws, restricted the use of certain colors, adding layers to meaning that color gave clothing. Before chemical dyes, all had to be derived from organic animal or vegetable sources. Woad, a plant related to mustard, was the most commonly used dyestuff. It produced a range of blues from a sky-blue to turquoise to nearly black. It was grown in and exported from Lombardy, and often blended with other dyes to produce desired shades. Also grown in northern and central Italy, or imported through Venice, was a vine related to gardenia and coffee, robbia or madder. Its red root produced the most common red color. Orchil was a lichen-based dye that, when prepared with ammonia derived from urine, produced a range of violet to red shades. The name of the famous Rucellai family of Florence derives from that of the plant. Indigo is another vegetable blue to violet dye source that was imported into Italy from India and later the Americas. Mixed with woad it gave greens and blues, and with madder and orchil a very deep and prized blue, alessandrino. Other vegetable dyes included weld and saffron, which produced shades of yellow; brazilwood a red dyestuff imported from Asia and the Americas; sappan wood, which provided the red known as verzino; and logwood, which produced a tolerable black. Imported insects provided a second major source of dyes. The tiny, desiccated corpses were broken up into small grain-like particles for storing, shipping, and use, so some are often simply called grana. The prized source of crimson was the pregnant oak parasite the kermes lice, shipped from the Near East and Southwest Asia. Specifically labeled cherimisi or cremisi in Italy, it was very expensive. Grana was a less expensive Mediterranean shield louse product that was considered inferior to cherimisi. As a scarlet it tended to orange, but could produce ruby, rose, and deep blues to violet. A Mexican import eventually replaced the other insect-based dyes. Cochineal was derived from a scaled insect found on cacti, and had long been used by Meso-Americans as a dyestuff. It provided the same, if not a better, crimson than the kermes, and the dye matter was in a much greater concentration in these

Fashion and Appearance: Dyes and Dyestuffs

little corpses. As it happened, insect-based dyes did not work well on vegetable-fiber cloth such as cotton or linen. Given their cost, however, it really was fitting that they be used on fine woolens and silks, satins, velvets, and brocades. Dye could be applied to thread, yarn, or finished cloth. The material had to be thoroughly clean. A dyer first used a mordant (mordere, to bite into) to open up the fibers before applying the dye. There were several types of mordant, including oak gall-based tannin, cream of tartar, alum (a major source of which was discovered at Tolfa in the Papal States in 1461), and varieties using chromium or iron. The process usually had several steps. A solution of the appropriate mor- Eighteenth-century English painting of Isatis dant was prepared and the mate- tinctoria, or dyer’s woad. The leaves were dyed, rial soaked or boiled in it. After pulverized, and fermented to create a deep-blue pigment that was bested only when indigo became drying, the acidic or base solu- readily available in Europe. Woad grew well in tion of dyestuff(s) was prepared Tuscany and Piedmont, and is related to the cabbage and the cloth soaked or boiled in family. (Florilegius/SSPL/Getty Images) it for the predetermined time, the cloth being agitated with paddles to ensure an even saturation. After rinsing and drying to determine the actual color achieved, second or third trips to the dye vats took place if further darkening was required. The dyer’s yard had to be quite large to fit the various vats and accommodate all of the materials drying at their various stages. The stench was notorious, and the need for running water for rinsing meant the yard should be located along the river, out of town, and downstream. Dyers rarely owned the cloth they dyed; they were essentially subcontractors. Some, however, formed partnerships with cloth merchants, especially if these could import dyestuffs more cheaply than they could be purchased locally. Venice was the main port of entry for imported dyes, and from here they were sold wholesale to apothecaries and increasingly “colorsellers” who specialized in painters’ pigments and dyes.

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Like other workers in chemistry-based crafts, such as ceramics and glass, dyers had traditionally protected their secrets. In 1548 Giovan Rosetti, an officer at the Venetian shipyard, published Instructions in the Art of the Dyers, the first work to lay out many of the artisans’ techniques. Like his later book on perfumes, this was meant to spread the craft among Venetians. A recipe for dyeing a cloth scarlet begins with clean water in which ½ ounce of rock alum, one ounce of white tartar, and one pound of cloth has been stirred in. After boiling this, the cloth is removed, rinsed, and dried. Six ounces of the scarlet-producing grana and bran are mixed in water and the cloth boiled in it for an hour. The cloth is then placed twice in a rinse of bran, one pound of tartar, and one pound of alum. Finally it is given a bath in highly diluted arsenic. Some secrets were worth sharing. See also: Economics and Work: Clothmaking; Guilds; Trade, Seaborne; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Social Status and Clothing; Sumptuary Laws; Science and Technology: Alchemy; Secrets, Books of FURTHER READING Chencinier, Robert. Madder Red: A  History of Luxury and Trade. New York: Routledge, 2000. Edelstein, Sidney M., and Hector C. Rosetti. Plictho of Giovanventura Rosetti: Instructions in the Art of the Dyers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Feeser, Andrea, Maureen Goggin, and Beth Tobin, eds. The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800. New York: Routledge, 2012. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Greenfield, Amy Butler. A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire. New York: Harperbooks, 2008. Jenkins, David, ed. Cambridge History of Western Textiles. Vol. I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

FABRICS, DOMESTIC By the fifteenth century Italy was producing much of the raw material needed to produce the period’s fabrics. Italians also imported a good deal of cotton, silk, linen flax, and wool, but it was the transformation into finished cloth that made it a domestic product. Generally speaking, silks had pride of place. At the high end were satins, various velvets, damasks, and brocades. Satin was shiny on one side and matte finished on the other; specialists in Milan and Lucca produced the finest cloths. Velvets

Fashion and Appearance: Fabrics, Domestic

were produced by pulling threads up in little loops from the basic weave. Often this was done to create patterns on the fabric, such as the common pomegranate. The treated surface could be high or low, or the loops quite long resulting in a plush surface. A very rich velvet might be shot through with gold or silver threads. Milan, Genoa, and Venice produced some of Italy’s finest velvets. Damask weaves create a patterned surface from a single color by blending shiny and matte surfaces that also appear in reverse on the reverse side. Though the cloth’s name reveals its origin, Genoese and Venetian weavers appropriated the technique. Using gold or silver wire to create patterns is called brocading, and this technique was used to upgrade damasks (damaschino) and high-end satins. Velvets were the most expensive silk fabrics, though the addition of gold or silver thread or wire could multiply the price of even taffeta several times. At the lower end was taffeta, which featured a plain weave, a heavy version of which could be upgraded to tabi or tabina by creating patterns with gold or silver threads. Taffetas could also be made shinier by stretching the fabric uniformly and applying diluted gum Arabic to the surface. Bolognese craftsmen wove multicolored taffetas that gave the effect of changing colors as the wearer moved. Further down was the heavy utility silk known as ormesino, a Venetian specialty, and Florentine zendado, a light-weight taffeta that was used for the linings of clothing. Bologna and Modena specialized in a light open-weave cloth called veiling. Woolens came in many forms, from cheap, heavy garbo—named for a wool source in North Africa—to fine light tropical weaves popular in the eastern Mediterranean, and carefully finished heavier fabrics demanded in northern climates. Fine wool fabric was about the same price as a low-end velvet or a high-end damask. The quantity and quality of different woolens depended on the types of sheep supplying the wool, the weaves applied at the loom, and the treatment of the cloth once it left the loom. With silk, what left the loom was the finished product. Florence and Siena were traditional centers of wool cloth production, with competition from Milan. In the sixteenth century Venice stepped in and came to dominate the export market to the Near East for expensive products. Genoa also stepped up its production, as did Milan. One factor was the new merino wool that came from Spanish and later Neapolitan ports. This was behind the new cloth type of the later fifteenth century called rascia, which was a fine, light serge that was often dyed a dark color. It was perfect for mourners, who usually dressed in dark brown or black. It exported well, too, and was known in the north as serge of Florence. Italian cloth-making had always been in a dialogue with cloth imported from northern Europe or the Mediterranean. Often enough, the Italians mastered the foreign technique and made it their own. A good example was a stretchy wool called perpignano used for men’s hose. Knitted wool could do the job, but this fabric originally from Perpignan in southern France made for a better appearance. By around 1400 it was an Italian product.

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Northern sources for linen fabrics included Rheims in France, which originated rensa, and Cambrai in Flanders, from which cambric had been imported. Both of these became Italian varieties by the fifteenth century. Linen was made from the fibrous plant flax, which was commonly grown in Italy, especially around Naples. Lower-status households bought the fiber, spun and wove it, and made their own undergarments and other clothing from the durable material. Professional linen weavers in centers such as Florence, Siena, Perugia, and Cremona could create a number of special fabrics, from canvas to a blend with silk called brocatello used for wall hangings. Linen was treated with oil to make it translucent and used in window frames. Towels, table linens, bed linens, and high-end underwear were made of the relatively inexpensive fabric, in a form close to buckram. Cotton was grown in the Po Valley, but high-quality bolls came from Muslim markets, especially in Egypt. Soft and easily laundered, cotton undergarments were popular, as was a utilitarian cotton blend known as fustian. Cheap domestic cotton batting called bambagia was used to pad expensive furniture and in fine quilted doublets. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Clothmaking; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Dyes and Dyestuffs; Fabrics, Imported; Social Status and Clothing; Sumptuary Laws FURTHER READING Bercuson, Sarah. “Giovanna d’Austria and the Art of Appearance: Textiles and Dress at the Florentine Court.” Renaissance Studies 29 (2015): 683–700. Jenkins, David, ed. Cambridge History of Western Textiles. Vol. I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Lanaro, Paola, ed. At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland (1400–1800). Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2006. Mazzaoui, Maureen. The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Molà, Luca. The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Monnas, Lisa. Merchants, Princes and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300–1550. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

FABRICS, IMPORTED Though Italy was known for its fabrics, Italians imported a wide variety of raw materials for cloth-making, partially finished cloths, and even finished garments. While some of this was for re-export, much stayed in Italian shops and homes.

Fashion and Appearance: Fabrics, Imported

In the fourteenth century, Italians made many types of fabric for their own use, but imported expensive products from both the Near East and northern Europe. Silks from Mongol-controlled regions in Central Asia had distinctive and very popular patterns known as Tatar patterns. So-called tiny patterns remained in vogue until about 1400, but much larger images of birds, flowers, and fantastic beasts had a strong market until cut off by Turkish conquests. High demand for silks encouraged importation of silk-making technology and worms, and soon Italian looms were easily competing with those of Eastern countries. Nonetheless, fine velvets were shipped from and through Mamluk-controlled Alexandria to Venice and beyond, and when the Turks took Egypt in 1517 the flow continued. Turkey itself produced silks in Western Anatolia with raw silk obtained from Iran. Italian merchants from Venice, Florence, and Genoa brought Italian goods to Bursa to trade for Iranian raw silk as well as cloth such as brocaded velvets. As Venetian silk production grew, the city embargoed these imports. Despite Italian production of wool cloth, Italy’s merchants welcomed wool cloth and cloth products from its trading universe. Cloth of varying quality came from Turkey, North Africa, and Britain (worsteds). Weavers in Bruges produced so-called Norwich say (Italian saia), a fine twill with diagonal ribbing, and serge, a heavier version of say. These, too, found ready markets in Italy, where weavers developed their own version known as rascia. By 1500 Flanders was competing well for Italian demand, and with 600 looms, a city like Tournai was in a good position. Woolen velvets came from Northwestern Europe and North Africa and wool plush from Ireland and the Balkans. Wool cloth right off the loom had several steps left before it was considered finished. At these the Florentines and other Italians excelled, so merchants often bought woven but unfinished wool and had Italian craftsmen complete the process. France and Flanders created and exported fine upper-end linen cloth, and to a lesser extent, woolens. Rheims and Cambrai provided linen and Perpignan in southern France a perfect wool material for hosiery. The simple woolen cloth camlet was originally woven of goat or camel hair in the Near East, and North Africans blended linen and cotton into boccacino. Superior raw cotton came from or through the Muslim world, as did such cloth as Indian muslin, used as mosquito netting. Painted or printed cotton, or chint (chintz), arrived in Italian ports from dealers in the Near East or, by 1500, through Portuguese merchants in India. While furs are not, strictly speaking, fabrics, they were used in clothing for cuffs, collars, linings of cloaks, capes, slippers, hoods, and hats. South of the Alps Italy is warm, so animal furs are not as thick or long as those from northern Europe or Russia. Squirrel, sable, lynx, marten, snow weasel, polecat, and civet cat were common choices. Ermine, which came from Russia through Constantinople or Scandinavia, was the deluxe fur, often reserved by sumptuary laws to nobles or high office holders. Usually locally grown were dormouse, fox, wolf, wildcat,

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and rabbit. Depending on the size of the pelt, it could take scores of them to line a single garment. Two hundred ermine-like creatures were needed for Caterina Parenti’s day gown. Over the 250 years of the Renaissance era there were many trends that affected the importation of cloth. Some of these were wars, conquests, Italian adaptation of foreign techniques, economic competition within Italy and with non-Italian powers, and state policies regarding imports, especially in Venice. Issues included whose ships might bring goods to port, which foreign ports they could visit, and levels of tariffs or port taxes. Italians proved brilliant at copying others and even outdoing them. By the end of the era, however, Ottoman looms were again competing in the Mediterranean, and light Dutch and other northern European cloths were flying off Italian shelves. Guild regulations and relatively high wages often made Italian wares more expensive than comparable imports. Throughout the era imported fabrics found favor among Italians. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Clothmaking; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Dyes and Dyestuffs; Fabrics, Domestic; Social Status and Clothing; Sumptuary Laws FURTHER READING Bercuson, Sarah. “Giovanna d’Austria and the Art of Appearance: Textiles and Dress at the Florentine Court.” Renaissance Studies 29 (2015): 683–700. Faroqhi, Suriya. “Ottoman Textiles in European Markets.” In Anna Contadini, ed. The Renaissance and the Ottoman World. New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 231–44. Jenkins, David, ed. Cambridge History of Western Textiles. Vol. I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Mack, Rosamond. Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Molà, Luca. The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Rogers, Mary. “Evaluating Textiles in Renaissance Venice.” In Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd, eds. Revaluing Renaissance Art. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000, pp. 121–36.

FACIAL HAIR Jesus wore a beard; or so medieval and Renaissance-era artists invariably indicated. So did the Apostles—except young John—and many male saints; and even God the Father. Yet for the first century and a half of the Renaissance era Italian fashion left

Fashion and Appearance: Facial Hair

facial hair to peasants, pilgrims, southern barons, hermits, galley slaves, Jews, and foreigners. Fourteenth and fifteenth-century northern Europeans, Greeks, Turks, Arabs, “Hungarians,” and others sported facial manes of greater or lesser luxuriance, and it may be that urban northern Italians set themselves apart from these “others” by subjecting themselves to the razor’s edge. None but clean-shaven faces adorn northern Italian portraits before 1500, whether of pope, prince, patrician, or poet. Among southerners the picture is different, as the influences of rural feudalism and the Spanish in Naples set a hairier tone for their elites. Yet, around 1500 northern Italian men began letting their beards go, and by the 1530s few of those staring down from art gallery walls lack a manly growth. Horowitz speculates that this was due to Columbus’s discovery of beardless native men in the New World and the desire of Italian men to distinguish themselves from these new “others.” But a more immediate catalyst may well have been the series of wars begun when the French invaded the peninsula in 1494. Armies of variously bearded Spanish, French, German, and Swiss soldiers campaigned for decades across northern Italy seemingly immune to the forces mustered by city-state republics, duchies, or even the papacy. These virile—and often victorious—interlopers provided countless models of masculinity as a new generation of Italian men came of age in an Italy they did not control. Just as the slit sleeves of the German Landsknechts became fashionable among Italian young men, so too beards became the norm among Italy’s sixteenth-century urban males, whether pope, prince, patrician, or poet. Early in the century Pope Julius II vowed to grow his beard until he had recaptured all the lost Papal States; Pope Clement VII began his beard during the Sack of Rome by Imperial troops in 1527. A series of portraits of Tuscany’s young duke Cosimo I seem tinged with anticipation as his late-blooming beard progresses from teenage peach fuzz to a never-quite-respectable male ornament by age 40. The century’s men of letters let their beards tumble down their fronts as freely as the words flowed from their pens. Courtiers were warned in Della Casa’s Galateo to adapt their beards to local fashion, while Castiglione advised—typically—moderation in display, with the beard shorter rather than longer. And a display is just what the beard became. The trend may have begun in insecurity, but it quickly took its place among the tools of male self-fashioning. Beards can take many forms: short, medium, long, full and well-shaped or unkempt, bushy or tapered, trimmed around the edges or full-faced, long and forked. Mustaches by themselves were rare, perhaps associated with unsavory ethnic stereotypes. But when part of the beard, they could overflow the upper lip or be clipped high, and the ends might be blended downward or pulled out to the sides. The display was a particularly masculine one, conveying any of a wide range of characters, from fierce to philosophical. Being exclusively a feature of the mature male, the beard also signaled sexual potency. Of course the darker the color the more likely the

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signal was an accurate one. For the prematurely gray or white-bearded, barbers and apothecaries had tints and dyes in a wide range of shades. One might think that beard-wearing would dampen the profits of barbers. As Anton Doni’s ghost points out (see box that follows), however, barbers could play an even greater role than earlier. Any man could shave himself, but lacking decent mirrors he could hardly maintain a well-coiffed beard. And just as fashion magazines today suggest current fashions, so broadsheets, book author portraits, and prints of recently finished paintings provided ample examples of the day’s trends and trendsetters. Without a national court Italy’s many centers of power collected courtiers who wore a range of styles of beards. By mid-century, with Spain in control of Naples and Milan, and Tuscany’s Duchess a Spaniard, it was fairly safe to adopt the neatly trimmed Spanish fashions of the court of Philip II. The Italian virtue of sprezzatura—nonchalance—however, dictated that a courtier should sport a beard that appeared to have grown naturally, with little in the way of primping. To fuss over one’s looks was considered effeminate. Full beards were also a means of hiding men’s features and emotions, often very useful at court.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow The spirit of a dead Venetian barber in Anton Francesco Doni’s The Worlds (1552/53) says: “They all seem a caged gaggle of crazy people who live on the earth, because of the thousands that I have shaved washed, combed, and slapped together, I fixed up one just as I did the other. . . . Many want the long beard, many the beard cut half way, some in two parts, rounded, shorn, with the mustaches, without mustaches, one who shaved below, one who did so on top, on the scruff of the neck, beneath the throat, and other bizarre things. Young people all keen on having a beard shave themselves often. Old men have their beards dyed to look and feel young.” Source: Biow, Douglas. On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, p. 213.

A beard might also hide one’s gender, and Biow points to the case of a Venetian courtesan who had no fewer than five bearded masks. While these might have been useful in certain sex games, they may have played a less kinky role during Carnival. During this annual celebration of normality overturned, women could appear as men without breaking the typical laws forbidding cross-dressing. Transvestitism was also known in female convents, especially in Venice. Women performing in plays as male characters were known to have sported fake beards as well as men’s clothing, both of which were forbidden repeatedly by Church authorities.

Fashion and Appearance: Gems and Jewelry

See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Portraits; Economics and Work: Barbers and Surgeons; Family and Gender: Virtù and Honor; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Hair and Hairstyles; Politics and Warfare: Soldiers; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Religion and Beliefs: Nuns and Nunneries; Saints and Their Cults FURTHER READING Biow, Douglas. On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Horowitz, Elliott. “The New World and the Changing Face of Europe.” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 1181–1201. Oldstone-Moore, Christopher. Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Zucker, Mark J. “Raphael and the Beard of Pope Julius II.” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 524–33.

GEMS AND JEWELRY Gems and gold jewelry played important roles in Renaissance-era Italian society. They carried important symbolic, moral, and even supposed medicinal properties; they were a means of adornment that enhanced and signaled the status of a woman and her husband; and they were an important form of liquid wealth. From coral to diamonds, gemstones had long circulated in Italy. Trade through the Muslim world brought a steady supply of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, garnets, turquoise, and pearls from India and East Asia. Some stones made their way north from central Africa, and topaz, emeralds, jade, and pearls eastward from the Americas. The era saw new techniques of cutting and polishing stones that greatly increased their value to customers. Creating and applying traditional and unique gold settings, which turned stones into jewelry, also advanced as an art. Gemstones had long been associated with symbolism and had various sorts of power attributed to them. Some of these ideas were Classical (especially from Pliny’s Natural History), some biblical, and some from Islamic cultures. Worn as amulets, gems could absorb poisons, deflect curses or spells, prevent accidents, and block the evil eye. Because of their light catching and refracting qualities, gems were thought to have “sympathetic” ties to celestial bodies, especially stars. This meant that they could attract and absorb power from these bodies, and pass it on to the wearer or bearer. The hyacinth, for example, could block the plague, aid sleep, make one happier, and protect travelers. Topaz could help stop heavy

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bleeding, anger, and melancholy. Sapphires were considered spiritually powerful, enhancing marital fidelity and personal piety; rubies had bodily qualities aiding the blood and good health, and counteracting lust. Emeralds protected eyesight and enhanced wealth and faithfulness, while coral warded off evil and prevented hemorrhaging. As seen in paintings and found in inventories, infants were often presented with coral, and it often found its way into women’s trousseaux. Carving certain symbols into a gemstone could enhance its perceived power: an image of a serpent or scorpion made a stone even more effective against poisons. Some gems had come to be symbols of important virtues: the indestructability of the diamond or the purity of the white pearl. Counterfeiting gems could allow profitable fraud or provide the means for making what we would call costume jewelry. Alchemists had a hand in some of this. Spinel was a crystalized compound of magnesium oxide and aluminum oxides that mimicked ruby but was rather softer. Some experimented with snail slime and glass powder. Glass or a glass-like paste could be colored and molded to appear gemlike. Rock crystal could imitate diamond, or other gems, if the piece’s set sides were painted. Venetian and Milanese jewelers were known for enhancing small gems by gluing them to rock crystal, and small pearls could be dissolved and reconstituted as larger ones. The appearance of even real translucent gems could be made stronger by placing reflective foil behind the exposed face, or black behind a diamond. Gems, real and fake, were sewn onto hats and other garments, glued onto small boxes, and set into jewelry. Earrings, hairclips, necklaces, gold chains, pendants, tiaras, pins, brooches, bracelets, and finger rings graced women’s bodies, as countless period portraits attest. Rings, especially the wedding ring, probably carried the most symbolic value. Bishops wore rings, and the Doge of Venice annually tossed one into the Lagoon signifying the city’s “marriage” to the sea. As “brides of Christ,” nuns wore rings. A wealthy groom might present several rings to his young woman, some with stones, some without, some carved with a cupid, heart, or clasped hands similar to an Irish Claddagh ring. Some had inscriptions, such as Matthew 19:5 “and the two shall be one,” or the two family crests, or the bride and groom’s names. A wedding might be an occasion to recycle old family rings, as in 1496 when Maddalena Gualterotti received 13 rings, one from each of her new husband’s relatives. He estimated their value to be 144 florins. The value of gems and jewelry was important, as it was a significant part of many dowries, and thus of the woman’s independent wealth. The trousseau of Pope Alexander VI’s daughter Lucrezia Borgia contained 1,900 pearls and 300 gemstones, including diamonds and rubies. Husbands, when they died, were law and honor bound to return to their wives the full value of their trousseaux, or pass full value along to her designated heirs. These could be easily pawned when a family or widow needed cash, as even Spanish Queen Isabella is said to have done.

Fashion and Appearance: Gems and Jewelry

With This Ring. . . Weddings with rings long predate the Renaissance era. During the Renaissance era bestowing the single ring was the final act in the wedding process. Poorer folks might have a simple circlet of gold, and patricians a heftier one clasping a diamond. The groom’s “gift” obligated the bride’s father or guardian to pay the dowry: no ring, no obligation. Anatomy taught the “ring finger” was one end of a vein that ended in the heart, considered a source of life, though not quite yet symbolic of love. Alchemy taught diamonds drew down solar protection from sickness, including plague. Pearls were drilled and strung as necklaces or attached to gold hairnets. Being organic, they lose luster with age and were a poor long-term investment. Often a major component of a woman’s trousseau and associated with purity, Venice banned the wearing of pearls by prostitutes or courtesans, who were not considered pure. In 1562 Venice forbade even “honest” women to wear them in their hair or on their breasts, and limited strands to one that only came to the top of the woman’s skirt. A chain of sumptuary laws across Italy tried to restrict certain materials or jewelry types, though to little effect. See also: Arts: Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Portraits; Economics and Work: Trade, Seaborne; Family and Gender: Dowries; Espousal and Wedding; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Court, Fashion at; Hair and Hairstyles; Sumptuary Laws; Recreation and Social Customs: Civic Festivals; Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Weddings; Religion and Beliefs: Magic; Science and Technology: Alchemy; Collecting and Collections FURTHER READING Cherry, J. “Healing through Faith: The Continuation of Medieval Attitudes to Jewelry into the Renaissance.” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 154–71. Green, Annette, and Linday Dyett. Secrets of Aromatic Jewelry. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Hackenbroch, Yvonne, and Gonzague Saint Bris. Jewels of the Renaissance. New York: Assouline Publishing, 2015. Mirabella, Bela, ed. Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Storey, Tessa. “Fragments from the ‘Life Histories’ of Jewelry, Belonging to Prostitutes in Early-Modern Rome.” In Roberta Olson and Patricia Reilly, eds. The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2006, pp. 67–77. Stuard, Susan Mosher. Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

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HAIR AND HAIRSTYLES Washing hair was a hygienic necessity. Body dirt and oils, and environmental dirt and dust-coated hair shafts made hair flat and dull. Dandruff and scabs accumulated and caused embarrassment when they fell on the shoulders of garments, especially black ones. A bigger problem was scalp parasites, many of which washing tended to keep down. Harder to control were body louse nits, which had to be killed or removed with a very strong solution or with tweezers—hence “nit picking.” A French book of 1605, translated into Italian, directed the assigned servant to place a cloth over her mistress’s shoulders and rub her scalp vigorously. Using a boxwood comb, she would then comb the hair backward from the scalp, untangling knots or tangles with her fingers. Combing was to be firm but gentle to avoid scratching or pulling out hairs. Combs were run through a large horse-tail hair tassel to clean them and stored in it to protect the teeth. Nuns, who cut their hair short, washed their hair once a month in winter and twice each month during the warm weather. Changing the color of one’s hair was by no means universal, but demand for products and techniques for doing so was constant. As some men grayed, they sought darker dyes for their hair, brows, mustaches, and beards. Giovanni della Porta in his Natural Magic recommended a solution of silver froth, burnt brass, and lye, rinsing only after the solution had dried. Women with black hair also had it turn gray; for them Della Porta offered a dye of dead leeches left for 60 days in “the blackest wine.” Apparently this was a Classical recipe, since Pliny warned that unless a woman held olive oil in her mouth while dyeing her hair her teeth would also turn black. Many women with dark hair sought to lighten it, moving toward red, gold, or even silver. In Venice and Naples they would wash their hair, apply a dye, and put on a round, wide-brimmed, straw hat without a crown. As they sat outside, their hair would be spread out around the brim, which also served to keep sun off of their faces and shoulders, which they desired to keep pale. A recipe for red hair dye uses walnut oil, white honey, burnt white tartar, and white wine mixed in a glazed pot along with burnt cumin, which was cooked to powder. Physician Giovanni Marinello gave several recipes, including a simple mix of white wine dregs and olive oil combed in while sunning. An alchemical product called for the distillation of white alum, cinnabar, and sulfur. More complex was a special concoction for brides preparing for their wedding days or new novices at the monastery: turmeric, saffron, rock alum, lemon juice, white wine, gum Arabic, centaury, ammonia, and urine. Expressed fears of using such concoctions and sitting for hours in the sun were not of damaging the hair or scalp, but of overheating the brain. Marinello suggested the application of cloves, musk, or ambergris after washing or dyeing to cool it.

Fashion and Appearance: Hair and Hairstyles

Other products promised to remove hair (caustic lye) and to stiffen it for sculpting. Some fashions preferred a woman to display a high, hairless brow, which called for depilatories or equally painful plucking. On the other hand, some fashions demanded great towers of hair that required wigs or, more likely, hair extensions. As much as dyeing, addition of these was considered morally suspect for being deceptive and vain attempts to improve on what God gave one. Women, aside from nuns, grew their hair long. What they did with it depended on the time period, the region, their class, and the occasion. It also depended on their marital status. Girls wore their hair loose before marriage, and in Venice for a year into the marriage. Married women usually wore their hair up and covered. In Florence that meant tightly bound and covered with a close-fitting cap for normal wear. In many places widows wore a long, opaque veil, so it was difficult to see their hair. The title page of the 1658 English edition of Many braided their hair, so that Giovanni Della Porta’s Natural Magick—a fine example of a Book of Secrets—featured alchemical piling it on the top and sides of symbols and the Neapolitan author’s portrait (ca. the head was made easier. There 1535–1615). Available in reprint edition, it is a trove were many kinds of hair cover- of “tested and proved” recipes for hair and cloth ings, from full veils to delicate dyes, cosmetics, soaps and detergents, perfumes, mouthwashes, medicines, and other useful silk hairnets, and every imag- substances. (SSPL/Getty Images) inable combination was used. Many fashions left only the hair framing the face visible. As Cesare Vecellio shows in his great fashion catalogue from the 1590s, this hair was often curled or let fall

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in ringlets. A very distinctive sixteenth-century style was called “horns,” and consisted of pulling hair up over each temple and using adhesive or pomade to stiffen it into two gracefully curved peaks. In the 1480s some Venetian women imitated a mushroom-shaped style, called fongo, worn by men. Maintaining gender differences was so important that Venetian women were banned from wearing the style; violating the law constituted sodomy, in this case a form of cross-dressing.

Florentine Fashion Trends c. 1530 Apothecary Luca Landuccci died in 1516, but his diary was continued by an anonymous author: “In the year 1529 the custom of wearing hoods began to go out, and by 1532 not a single one was to be seen; caps or hats being worn instead. Also at this time, men began to cut their hair short, everyone having previously worn it long, onto their shoulders, without exception; and they now began to wear a beard, which formerly was only worn by two men in Florence, Corbizo and Martigli.” Source: A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516 by Luca Landucci. Translated by Alice de Rosen Jervis. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971, p. 294.

Men’s styles varied greatly with time period and region as well. Adults tended to wear their hair short, while youth might wear it to their shoulders. Florentine paintings from the first half of the fifteenth century often show younger males with flowing hair, a style that returned to Florence in the early sixteenth century. In the 1490s the zazzera was popular: a bowl cut in front leaving bangs with the back tapering long from the ears. Older Florentines sometimes cropped their hair very short, echoing Classical Romans. Monks, friars, and other clerics wore tonsures, or circles of hair on the crown. On Florentine war galleys, Christian slaves were shaven bald, volunteer oarsmen were allowed a mustache, and Turkish prisoners were bald with a long tail lock. For men and women alike, hair had a language of its own. See also: Arts: Portraits; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Fashion and Appearance: Cosmetics; Court, Fashion at; Facial Hair; Headgear; Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons; Religion and Beliefs: Monks and Monasteries; Nuns and Nunneries; Science and Technology: Secrets, Books of FURTHER READING Currie, Elizabeth. Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Fashion and Appearance: Headgear Della Porta, Giambattista. Natural Magick. New York: Basic Books, 1957. Rosenthal, Margaret F., and Ann Rosalind Jones. The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. Welch, Evelyn. “Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Studies 23 (2008): 241–68.

HEADGEAR A person’s face is the surest outward sign of his or her identity. Robbers covered their faces to hide their identity; maidens used face veils, lest men develop lust for them; widows shrouded their head and face in mourning and humility; and Carnival revelers disguised their faces to make a game of ascertaining one’s identity. While some did, most Renaissance-era headgear did not obscure the face; rather it added a layer to one’s identity. Many forms were a matter of fashion, others of idiosyncratic choice, and a few unique, such as the Venetian doge’s corno or the pope’s triple tiara. In battle, helmets protected the head from blows; in sun-drenched fields wide-brimmed straw hats protected peasants’ heads; fur-lined caps kept heads warm; and as part of livery, a color and style of men’s cap identified one’s employer and perhaps political faction. Distinctive hats identified foreigners, whether other Italians, Greeks, Turks, Germans, or others. Perhaps because during colder months or at night northern Italians often covered their equally status-declaring clothing with great capes or cloaks, hats often had to do the speaking. As with clothing, certain styles, colors, and materials could only be worn by specific civic or ducal officials or clergy. When greeting a social equal, a man raised his hat slightly in recognition or greeting. To indicate one appreciated a woman’s beauty one did likewise. In Florence, grabbing another’s headpiece in the street was a come-on for sex. Prostitutes did this to encourage customers as did older men seeking sex with boys. The disgrace of having one’s hat knocked off was only balanced by engaging in sex. In Milan the penalty was merely 5 lire. Within a given city at a given time there was on display a great variety of types of headgear and many kinds of craftspeople who made them. Women at home, in convents, or in charitable institutions knitted caps of rough wool yarn and sewed simple single-piece woolen caps (cuffie) for peasants and laborers. Sleeping caps were fashioned of light, easily washable, and inexpensive linen. Other women crafted woolen scarves for the heads and necks of men and women of all classes, and simple head cloths known as bende. Some women were noted as experts in crafting the latest fashions in women’s hats, working with whatever materials the customer brought with her. These could include silks, veils, feathers, gemstones, willow twigs, wire, cork, fur, cameos, garlanding materials, ribbons, and tinsel.

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Male hatmakers typically belonged to guilds. Verona had one for hatmakers from 1486. In 1502 it registered 77 members, but by 1545 it had grown to 291; in 1605 it counted only 75. Florentine guild members were differentiated by materials and whether they made or sold the products. There were wool beret and hatmakers; sellers of berets and hats of imported materials; straw and felt hatmakers; cap, cowl, and bonnet makers; used clothing dealers; and silk veil makers. Draper’s shops sold woolen and leather caps, and caps lined with silk. Florence’s Por Santa Maria silk guild imported fancier hats from Germany and France. Inexpensive caps and imported berets were sold by the dozen. Noble courts had hatmakers on retainer, and, like court tailors, if a trend changed they might have to create scores of a new design in a very short period. One may be certain that when Lucrezia Borgia arrived from Rome at her new home in 1502 with 22 headresses, the orders rolled in. Fads in both men’s and women’s headgear came and went. Many of these were recorded by the painters of the day, in portraits and especially in smaller, incidental figures. Foreign styles, such as larger hats with floppy brims from Burgundy and France, were popular in the fourteenth century. Mid-fifteenth-century Italian women sported “horns” from the same source. A tight cap kept two cones jutting from above the temples, and these were then carefully veiled in a light material. During the early Renaissance era women also took to wearing “crowns” of gold or gilded silver atop heads piled with hair. These could have high sides, like a queen’s, or be mere shining rings like duchesses wore. Sumptuary laws and fashion eventually banned these. Throughout the era women wore long hair put up on their heads, so many coverings were based on a net of silk or gold thread, often decorated with drilled pearls. From this they might build up further elements, including veils of light fabric in

The Impresa Imprese were small visual or textual/visual messages worn by elites in their headgear that, like modern bumper stickers, T-shirts, or lapel pins, revealed the wearer’s values, aspirations, ideals, or attitude to life. Descended from medieval heraldic symbols and popularized in the sixteenth century, they might feature animals, plants, lightning, fire, contemporary or Classical human figures accompanied by proverb-like texts in banners. Suggestions of overcoming adversity, having special insights, or noble character traits were common. The symbolism had to be decipherable but subtle, and several large collections of these appeared in print.

Fashion and Appearance: Headgear

part representing their marital status. Hair might also be piled up or sculpted with stiff wire forms or combs of ivory, bone, or expensive wood. Round garlands were made of wire mesh on a ring of cork, or just a donut of wire, covered in expensive cloth and decorated with all manner of chains, flowers, tinsel, and feathers. Garlands suited brides for a time, but it would have been difficult to outdo Caterina Strozzi’s 1447 bridal garland of 800 peacock feathers woven together. Men’s fashionable headgear went through just as many phases. Older men of means wore hats of fancier materials but simple cuts, while younger men, presumably unmarried, strutted about in more elaborate hats meant to get attention. Perhaps the quintessential male hat was popular during the first Medici period in Florence. The capuccio was a round heavy roll of expensive cloth that sat on the head like a crown. The top was covered, but one or two floor-length strips dropped down, to be tucked in, piled on top, or let hang as the fashion, or the owner, dictated. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Daily Life in Art; Non-Europeans in Art; Portraits; Economics and Work: Guilds; Women in the Labor Force; Family: Servants, Household; Widows; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Attire, Children; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Court, Fashion at; Gems and Jewelry; Hair and Hairstyles; Religious Habits and Vestments; Social Status and Clothing; Housing and Community: Foreign Communities; Politics and Warfare: Civic Magistracies and Offices; Soldiers; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade FURTHER READING Caldwell, Dorigen. The Sixteenth-Century Italian Impresa in Theory and Practice. New York: AMS Press, 2004. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Herald, Jacqueline. Renaissance Dress in Italy, 1400–1500. London: Bell and Hyman, 1981. Newton, Stella Mary. The Dress of the Venetians, 1494–1534. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1988. Paulicelli, Eugenia. “From the Sacred to the Secular: The Gendered Geography of Veils in Italian Cinquecento Fashion.” In Bella Mirabella, ed. Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011, pp. 40–58. Rosenthal, Margaret F., and Ann Rosalind Jones. The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008.

Hygiene. See Bathing and Personal Hygiene Jewelry. See Gems and Jewelry

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LAUNDRY Clothes got dirty: really dirty. External surfaces collected food, grease, beverage stains, manure, mud, dust, rust, soil, smoke, drool, blood, pollen, ink, paint, and whitewash. Internal surfaces picked up sweat, body oils, feces, parasites, urine, blood, semen, musk, mildew, bacteria, dander, medicinal creams, and other matter. Odors clung to clothing from smoke, animals, food and stains, incense, burning oil lamps, applied scents, human waste products, and other articles of clothing. Some clothes got dirtier than others. Those of peasants, butchers, soldiers, shepherds, fishermen and fishmongers, construction workers, ditch diggers, surgeons, and midwives were no doubt filthier than those of a lawyer, priest, or courtier. But, since no one bathed completely more than a few times per year, and never during winter, the toll on clothing was considerable. Other cloth objects also became soiled: curtains and other hangings, handkerchiefs, towels, table covers, bed linens, napkins, cleaning cloths, mattress sacks, diapers, soft shoes, altar linens, and dust rags. Even in well-off homes cloth was prized and recycled through laundering whenever possible, though whenever possible was usually not very often. The well-off valued personal cleanliness and usually had servants see that at least outer garments were soil and stain-free. Nuns were known to launder their habits only twice or three times in a year; while peasant and working class people had few clothes that they washed even less frequently. Laundry was women’s work. Among the religious, monks and priests sent theirs to a local nunnery, while soldiers might pay a prostitute or other female camp follower a few quattrini to freshen their clothing between battles. Among common folk, wives or daughters did the job, while servant girls, slaves, or fostered girls did so in wealthier houses. Poorer rural women also took in laundry from city folk who prized the cleaner water of the countryside. Cities did have women who routinely cleaned other people’s clothes and cloth goods. These laundresses could be otherwise unskilled nuns, widows in need of income, unmarried but independent girls, current or former prostitutes, and poorer wives who needed to supplement their families’ income. Rome’s 1527 census listed 70 among its population of 55,000. At its most basic, women carried the dirty materials in wicker baskets to the bank of the nearest creek or river. A suitable flat rock constituted the traditional workspace on which the rinsed laundry was squeezed, rubbed, and pounded to urge fibers to release their filth. Even the poorest woman might have a traditional remedy, such as soapwort for blood or wine stains. After a final rinse and hand-wringing the pieces were stretched out to dry in the sun. They would then be folded and carried back home. Women were wise not to work alone, as companions provided both company and some protection from predators.

Fashion and Appearance: Laundry

Where running water was not readily available, or in enclosed urban spaces such as palazzi or nunneries, a basin or tub was used. Water came from a well or was delivered by servants or paid water-carriers. Laundry was first soaked and then a detergent added. The mass was agitated with a wooden paddle since the lye-based soap was very hard on human flesh. More water was brought to rinse, after which hand-wringing and more rinsing and wringing followed. A period woodcut shows two women on opposite sides of a basin with a long board reaching between them. The board apparently substituted for the flat rock on the riverbank. The wet material was laid out or hung to dry before being folded and returned. A related technique used fire-heated water into which the laundry and an ash-based mixture were agitated. Each piece was then examined and scrubbed with a brush or treated with an ammonia-based spot-remover. A couple of rinses prepared it for drying. In Rome, for the “annual wash” women first boiled laundry in an ash or soda bath and then took the damp mass to the Tiber’s edge to be beaten and rinsed. Clearly the more fresh water one could use the better, so laundering streamside had the best effect. Aside from inconvenience, however, were dangers of molestation, slipping and drowning, trench-foot from routinely standing for hours in swampy water, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and kneeling or stooping on the flat stone. River or stream water was also notoriously filthy, especially downstream of sewer outlets, butchers, tanners, or water mills that churned the river bottom. Classical Rome and cities such as Perugia had had fresh water gushing into fountains and basins from aqueducts. With the rebuilding and reactivation of three of Rome’s aqueducts from the 1580s, fresh, clean water gushed into fountains and basins, a few of which were set aside specifically for use of laundresses. Early “wash-houses” used ground water, and were thus out of the way, underground,

The Happy Laundry In 1588, Pope Sixtus V established a public laundry facility atop Rome’s quiet and fairly exclusive Quirinal Hill. Fed by the Acqua Felice aqueduct and named for the pope—Felice (Happy) Peretti—“Happy” Laundry ­included a basin with running water, drain, and space within which to dry wet laundry, within a huge enclosed courtyard 65 x 56 meters in size. It was probably meant for the use of professional laundresses, for whom Sixtus had established a special confraternity and chapel. Nearby nuns soon complained that it had become a noisy and rowdy nuisance, and it was shut down.

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dirty, and dangerous, and without adequate open space to dry laundry. Some monasteries and nunneries rented or leased protected facilities, and civic wash-houses operated as businesses that professional laundresses utilized. Servants and housewives could now use open, aqueduct-fed basins dedicated to laundry. These are still distinguished by their low parapet, or steps or a platform on the side, which allowed easy access to the water. Paintings and prints, especially Venetian cityscapes, sometimes depict tiny washwomen along the riverbank in the distance, kneeling on the flat rock or knee-deep in water. More common are images of houses with horizontal drying poles on brackets beneath upper windows or supported by vertical poles on rooftops of distant palazzi. They either support or await the family’s damp laundry. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Widows; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Bathing and Personal Hygiene; Housing and Community: Water; Religion and Beliefs: Nuns and Nunneries FURTHER READING Biow, Douglas. The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Rinne, Katherine Wentworth. “The Landscape of Laundry in Late Cinquecento Rome.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 9 (2001–2002): 34–60. Rinne, Katherine Wentworth. The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

LITERATURE ON DRESS Throughout the Renaissance era people wrote about the clothing they saw, wore, and wanted. Domestic letters discussed laundry, the changing seasons, and children’s needs. Inventories listed items in shops and in people’s homes. Memoires mentioned fads or trends; trousseau inventories listed the garments accompanying the new bride; and accounts of weddings, state banquets, and jousting tournaments breathlessly recounted the ensembles that stood out or that the major characters had donned. Sixteenth-century prescriptive works, such as Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo or The Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione, include dress among other elements of socially acceptable behavior. But none of

Fashion and Appearance: Literature on Dress

these valuable sources deals specifically with clothing. Despite the importance of dress and appearance in general to Italians, literature on the subject was late in coming. The invention of the printing press made possible the publication of relatively inexpensive illustrated texts. The miniaturist, who decorated books with tiny, beautifully colored and detailed paintings, was only able to create one image at a time, and each at great expense. Though hand-painted manuscripts and some printed books were sold during the sixteenth century, the artistry of printmakers was moving from strength to strength. Their easily reproducible images could be placed adjacent to appropriate text, and these books sold at a fraction of what manually decorated texts cost. For a subject such as dress, this was a great advantage over mere pictures or mere text. Each form of communication enlightened the other, clarifying what one read and viewed. Most costume books fell into one of three categories. One was pattern books, which went heavy on the illustrations, some of which were life-sized. A  good example was the embroidery or lace patterns books. Someone using the name Zoppino (perhaps ironically from zoppo, “shaky”) published ten of these during the 1530s, and others followed. As with modern sewing patterns, his designs were meant to be perforated and then pounced with a dark or light powder that penetrated the holes and transferred the pattern to the surface. This was a technique of design transfer that had long been used by fresco painters. Women at home or commercial embroiderers or lace-makers would have found this very useful. From the earliest known Italian work in 1527 to 1600, 190 titles appeared, often dedicated to important women. Clearly this was a popular and well-selling product, and for two good reasons. One was the quickly moving face of Italian fashion that demanded periodic radical changes; the other was that neither man nor woman wanted to see his or her latest decoration or fringe on a neighbor or court rival. In 1554 a more text-oriented work appeared, compiled by Mathio Pagan of Venice. The title of The Glory and Honor of Bobbin and Needle Lace perhaps played to its readers’ vanity, as did Cesare Vecellio’s later lace book, Crown of the Noble and Virtuous Women. A second category was what might be called a tailor’s sample book. An example that has been recently printed—the original is a manuscript—is the anonymous Book of the Tailor. It was apparently compiled by two or three Milanese tailors during the 1580s and published in Venice. Fashions reflect the period from the 1540s to the 1570s. Illustrations were hand painted in watercolors and annotated as might be a modern catalogue. This seems to have been the purpose: a potential customer could choose the cut and assembly from the work’s pages. There is no doubt that tailors, whether in shops or at court, kept drawings of a great many works they

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had created or imagined or seen, but this put it all on one place. Other such works existed for the use of tailors, some depicting the full garment, and others details of sleeves or collars complete with stitches. The third type of work was the costume book, usually including foreign dress as well as Italian. From 1545 the Venetian engraver Enea Vico was at the forefront in creating reproducible images of familiar and exotic costumes. From 1563, numerous editions of these catalogues came off the presses to meet a demand fueled by European expansion, far-flung trade, and an interest in understanding humanity around the world. One problem with reproducibility, however, was that plates could be used and reused, even for different works. So, what is a Croatian matron in one work might be an Irish widow in another. The first Italian work was Ferdinando Bertelli’s Clothing of All Peoples of Our Time, published in Venice in 1563. His son Pietro extended the single-volume work to three volumes and provided a balance of male and female subjects. His Clothing of Diverse Peoples appeared in 1589. Meanwhile, Hans Weigel of Nuremberg in Germany published his famous Trachtenbuch in 1577, setting a new technical standard. From Rome, Bartolommeo Grassi responded with Some True Portraits of the Costume of All Parts of the World in 1585. The most famous of these was by Cesare Vecellio, a nephew of the Venetian painter Titian. His Ancient and Modern Costumes of the World was published in Venice in 1590 and expanded in 1598. A brisk text accompanies each image, fanciful as many of them are. See also: Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Family and Gender: Virtù and Honor; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Court, Fashion at; Social Status and Clothing; Tailors and Seamstresses FURTHER READING Currie, Elizabeth. “Diversity and Design in the Florentine Tailoring Trade, 1550–1620.” In Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, eds. The Material Renaissance. New York: Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 154–73. Currie, Elizabeth. “Prescribing Fashion: Dress, Politics, and Gender in Sixteenth-Century Conduct Literature.” Fashion Theory 4 (2000): 157–78. Il libro del sarto della Fondazione Querini Stampaglia di Venezia. Modena, Italy: Edizioni Panini, 1987. Paulicelli, Eugenia. Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzature to Satire. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Rosenthal, Margaret F., and Ann Rosalind Jones. The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. Vecellio, Cesare. Pattern Book of Renaissance Lace: A Reprint of the 1617 Edition of the “Corona delle Nobili et Virtuose Donne.” New York: Dover Books, 1988. Vinciolo, Federico. Renaissance Patterns for Lace, Embroidery and Needlepoint (1587). Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 1971.

Fashion and Appearance: Livery

LIVERY On the walls of the famous Camera degli Sposi in Mantua’s Palace one finds frescoes of life in the ducal court of the 1470s. The duke relaxes in a long gown with his family, a message in his hand, while servants come and go. The male help is all dressed similarly, though colors differ. Mid-thigh-length pleated long-sleeved tunics with white hems come in three colors, which are coordinated with hose of all white, all red, or one leg white and the other rose. Each wears soft shoes that match his hose, and several carry gloves that match their tunics. Tunics are belted, and a short sword or long knife hangs from that of one arrogant—watchful?—looking fellow. All—including the duke—wear fashionable red hats of cylindrical shape with larger flat tops, except the rather older-looking messenger who approaches the duke with his hat in hand to announce the approach of the duke’s son. On the adjoining wall the young cardinal arrives from Rome and is greeted by his father, who has exchanged his gown for caped short tunic of silver brocade and white hose and shoes. His hat matches his tunic, from the belt of which hangs a ceremonial short sword. The duke’s formal dress echoes that of his servants while outdoing it in

Between 1465 and 1474, Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) frescoed the so-called Camera degli Sposi for Mantua’s Duke Ludovico III Gonzaga (r. 1444–1478). Here, the duke and his wife, Barbara of Brandenburg, relax amid servants and courtiers in livery that both signals their Gonzaga connections and marks their status in the pecking order. (Fine Art Images/ Heritage Images/Getty Images)

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material richness. The painter, famed artist Andrea Mantegna, knew court uniforms well since he wore one every day of his 22 years of service to the Gonzaga duke. A similar artistic display of uniform servile dress is that of the entourages of the Three Kings (or Magi) in Benozzo Gozzoli’s famous depiction of the winding procession in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici in Florence, from about 1460. The elegant attire of each king sets the tone for the livery of his followers, perhaps reflecting actual fashions worn by the Medici household. Livery is coordinated clothing and accessories worn by members of a distinctive, usually servile, group of men. To ensure uniformity lords provided the tailors’ services and fabrics, which could be quite rich. Variations within a tight theme, as at Mantua, signaled differences in status or function. The adoption of livery at royal courts is usually dated to the 1380 accession of French king Charles VI. Each male at court from the king down wore the same colors and badges, which were changed once a year by the king in his council. Materials, cut, and other decorations depended on one’s rank. In Italy, as early as the fourteenth century, noble households furnished recognizable uniforms to servants or retainers, and these were mimicked further down the social ladder by young men associated with specific guilds, neighborhoods, or even gangs. For special events colored tunics distinguished the city’s quarters: Sant’Angelo’s youth wore red, San Sanne’s donned sky blue set off by silver chains, San Fiorenzo designated white with rose stripes, and Porta Borgne all green silk. These choices probably had their origins in the colors dominating the quarters’ identifying banners, or gonfaloni. On days dedicated to local religious festivals the quarters’ women sported similarly colored clothing. Even for a sport as brutal as Florentine calcio, a form of rugby, a match without the teams’ livery was considered just practice. Traditionally, Catholic religious orders, such as the Benedictines and Dominicans, wore distinctive dress—habits—that distinguished their members. Though never considered livery, these servants of God took their habits very seriously. Following suit, confraternity members often adopted uniform attire for processions and other formal events. In Rome the household members of cardinals, visiting dignitaries, and local nobility were recognizable by their costumes, which may have caused some liveried thugs to think twice before engaging in illegal or violent acts. Notables could be identified by their liveried entourages, and those of rival masters found willing opponents for displays of bravado in confrontations ranging from minor scuffles to bloody street battles. The famed papal force known as the Swiss Guard still wears an immediately recognizable sixteenth-century uniform or livery. Its design was long (and incorrectly) attributed to Michelangelo, who worked for the popes at about the time they adopted it. Such standardization of military attire led eventually to the development of military uniforms. The later sixteenth century, with rising costs of living and trends toward simplicity fueled

Fashion and Appearance: Livery

by Catholic Reformers and the Council of Trent, saw not only more Roman sumptuary laws demanding reductions in superfluous expenditures but real also reductions in luxuries and display. As early as 1565 a Venetian envoy to Rome noted the cardinals’ reductions in lavish banquets, parties, and fancy liveries.

Livery for Dance Bartolomeo Del Corazza describes a noble Florentine group’s livery for a Carnival dance in 1419: They wore “cloth the color of peach blossom, which reached down to just below the knee; with blown-up sleeves, the left sleeve embroidered with pearls, that is, an arm that came out of a little cloud and threw flowers down the left arm. The shoes were of the same cloth, except that the left was half red, and a branch of flowers of pearls was woven into it.” Source: Trexler, Richard. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 236.

Venetians, too, prized well-dressed servants and chafed under sumptuary laws. Private gondoliers wore household colors, and even licensed public gondoliers had a distinctive uniform: long-sleeved shirt beneath a long sleeveless jacket belted at the waist, baggy pants, hose from the knees down, and a brimmed hat. Female servants of the later sixteenth century also wore recognizable clothing prescribed by Venetian authorities. Chambermaids dressed in dark serge dresses with a silk kerchief over their heads and shoulders; maids wore a black outfit with a kerchief; those who cooked or cleaned could wear a colored skirt, white or tan smock, topped by a white kerchief. Wealthy householders flaunted their resources by providing livery made of silks, velvets, or even brocade. In 1541 the state banned the wearing of silk clothing or shoes by servants, and in 1562 expanded the list of forbidden materials. Laws did, however, make exceptions for new outfits for special occasions such as household weddings. And, of course, laws were made to be broken. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Guilds; Family and Gender: Servants, Household; Fashion and Appearance: Religious Habits and Vestments; Sumptuary Laws; Recreation and Social Customs: Sports, Contests, and Competitions FURTHER READING Currie, Elizabeth. Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Romano, Dennis. Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

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MOUTH AND TEETH Since the mouth was directly connected to the lungs and the anus, it was considered a major exiting point for exhalations from the stomach, brain, female genitals, and lungs. It is also the chief organ for communicating with others. At meals one eats with the mouth, in intimacy one kisses with it, and one expresses joy by smiling with it. Its health and hygiene were important to Renaissance-era Italians, who took pains to maintain sweet breath, white teeth, and strong gums, often unsuccessfully. Lack of certain vitamins led to scurvy and gum disease; the use of mercury in preparations for hair and syphilis and ever greater use of sugar undermined good oral health. Halitosis, or bad breath, has several causes, including stomach gases and unhealthy bacteria on the teeth, tongue, and oral cavity. It was an aesthetic problem, but also a sign of corruption and sickness. When not exhaled, the next stop was the brain. In the Decameron, the character Pasquino prepares himself for a bit of passion by rubbing his teeth and gums with a sage leaf. Hygiene manuals suggested the use of a coarse cloth on the teeth and gums each morning, or other aromatic leaves or woods. Of course, people used toothpicks to remove food from between teeth, and for a while they became a fetish item. Usually fashioned from bone or wood, gold toothpicks were decorated with pearls, hung around the neck on delicate gold chains, and used ostentatiously at table. By about 1550 the fad had died down and was declared low class; good oral hygiene returned to the shadows. Breath might be sweetened by swirling wine in the mouth, chewing mint or other aromatic leaves, or rinsing with a specially prepared alcohol-based wash. Dentifrices were tooth-polishing abrasives available from apothecaries, barbers, or charlatans, or made at home. Books of Secrets usually contained multiple recipes of varying reasonableness. Neapolitan Giovanni Battista della Porta in his Natural Magic deplored women with ragged, rusty, and spotted teeth. He blamed their use of mercury sublimate and exposure to the sun while bleaching their hair. He suggested tooth powders made of crushed shells, burned ivory, or pumice, rinsed with fresh spring water. He also recommended a mix of burned barley bread crumbs mixed with salt and honey; crushed coral, hart’s horn, “and the like;” or a solution of alum and salt, distilled. Barbers and barber-surgeons treated not only hair but also all aspects of head care, including the mouth. They scraped the tongue and rubbed the teeth, occasionally pulling out a particularly offensive one. They, and recipe books, recommended painkillers containing opium, willow tree bark, or alcohol for troublesome teeth. Besides being smelly and stained, teeth also grew in weird directions, chipped, rotted with cavities, abscessed, and eventually fell out. There were no dentists, but oral care was clearly a matter for surgeons or empirics and not physicians. Tooth-pullers

Fashion and Appearance: Religious Habits and Vestments

or tooth specialists were medical empirics who had trained as apprentices. They could extract rotten teeth, drain abscesses, carve or hand drill away decayed areas, sometimes reroot healthy teeth that had been knocked out, as well as clean and whiten teeth. High-quality artificial teeth appeared in the sixteenth century. They were carefully carved from animal bone, ivory, or agates and set in place with thin gold wires. Human teeth from uncertain sources were also wired together and in place. Jewelers and goldsmiths rather than empirics were more likely to create these objects and perform these services. Living took its toll on the mouth. It acquired sores, lost teeth, and had the soft tissue of the gums recede. For many, one of the worst ravages of old age was the lack of teeth. Not only was one severely limited in what one could eat, but simple speech became all but impossible. Aesthetically, the mouth puckered around the gums, unrestrained by teeth, and smiling became gruesome in the culture’s eyes rather than alluring or reassuring. Yet even mere self-consciousness about intact teeth may help explain why teeth so rarely appear in the era’s portraits. See also: Arts: Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Portraits; Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Family and Gender: Old Age; Fashion and Appearance: Bathing and Personal Hygiene; Cosmetics; Gems and Jewelry; Food and Drink: Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Sugar and Confected Sweets; Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons; Quacks, Charlatans, and Medical Empirics; Science and Technology: Secrets, Books of; Surgery FURTHER READING Byrne, Joseph P. Health and Wellness in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2013. Della Porta, Giambattista. Natural Magick. New York: Basic Books, 1957. Hargreaves, A.S. While as Whales Bone: Dental Services in Early Modern England. Leeds, UK: Northern Universities Press, 1998.

Perfumes. See Scents and Perfumes

RELIGIOUS HABITS AND VESTMENTS Catholic clergy (deacons, priests, bishops, cardinals, popes) and regular religious (monks, nuns, non-ordained friars) in Renaissance-era Italy wore distinctive clothing that distinguished them from the laity. Since there were many different groups of these people, everyday clothing, or habits, also provided a kind of uniform that was

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distinctive for each group. During official functions, such as processions or Mass, a priest and deacon wore vestments (vestire, “to dress”) particular to the occasion. With few exceptions, monastic orders in Italy derived from the sixth-century Order of St. Benedict (OSB). In his Rule, Benedict ordered his followers to adopt a simple hooded wool robe cinched with a leather belt. Sandals protected the feet and in cold weather or climate a rough cloak the body. Eventually robes were to be black, which required dyeing. Since there were both Benedictine monks and nuns, they wore essentially the same ensemble, though nuns kept their hair short and covered with a veil as did married women. Offshoots of the order sprang up occasionally, usually as reform movements seeking a return to purity of obedience to the Rule. Many of these chose the same hooded robe and belt, but adopted a different color. Cistercians chose the simplicity of unbleached and undyed wool, leaving their habits a range of shades from white to light gray. Carthusians, on the other hand, an order to which Petrarch’s brother belonged, wore bleached white wool with a distinctive scapular draped over the shoulder down front and back. Women’s orders that followed a male offshoot usually adopted the same color as their male counterparts. The thirteenth century spawned the mendicant orders. The two largest orders were those of St. Francis (Franciscans, Order of Little Brothers or OFM) and St. Dominic (Dominicans, Order of Preachers or OP). Because they worked actively among the people it was important that they be distinctive in dress, though they adopted the basic monastic garb. Francis himself lived a very ascetic life, and two of his robes remain on display in churches. Franciscan color was earthy, running between gray and brown with waist cinched with a rope belt. His preference was for bare feet, but sandals soon became typical among his followers. During the Renaissance era the order in Italy adopted a dark reddish-brown known as monachino. Dominic chose white, topped with a black cape or black veil for nuns. As with many things religious the difference between orders reflected a symbolic difference. Franciscans were to engage the simple people on their terms, validate nature by rugged simplicity, and shame the wealthy by their poverty. Dominicans’ gleaming white set them above the crowd like a beacon when they preached; physical cleanliness was a mark of spiritual purity. Dominicans became important tools of the Inquisition, rooting out heresy. Their black and white garb reminded people of black and white Dalmatian dogs, and Domini-cane translates “hound of the Lord.” Any monk or friar could be ordained a priest by a bishop, and many friars were. This was important to religious groups that worked in society because without ordination they could not say Mass, hear confessions, baptize, or give last rites to the dying. Most priests did not belong to an order, but were under the authority of the bishop who had ordained them. Most stayed in the diocese, or administrative district, in which they were ordained, and were thus diocesan priests. Church authorities in Rome had long dictated that the simple button up the front cassock (zimarra), or

Fashion and Appearance: Religious Habits and Vestments

long-sleeved black robe, be the basic habit. Higher Church officials such as bishops or cardinals added skull caps and distinctive colored piping and a shoulder-covering cope to the black cassock for daily wear. When saying Mass any priest was expected to don a number of special vestments. The amice was a short cape with two long cords that went around the body and tied in front. Over this came the white alb, a loose, long-sleeved tunic of silk or linen. A stole went over the shoulders and hung down both sides of the chest, held in place with a silk belt. Over everything went as ostentatious a chasuble as the local church or priest could afford. This was essentially a silk poncho that hung to about knee length in front and back. The color of the chasuble reflected the importance of the day on the Church calendar: green was a common day, red signified a martyr’s commemoration, and white a high feast such as Easter. Surviving examples are stunning works of brocade or velvet with embroidery or other fine needlework. A presiding bishop would add such pieces as a cope, or short cape, gloves, a ring, skull cap (zucchetto), and tall, pointed bishop’s miter. The pope, as a bishop, would be similarly outfitted. Each element of a priest’s vestments had a specific symbolism, and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas defended the elaborateness by stressing the nobility of the priest’s office and grandeur of the Mass. For rituals other than Mass an alb or a short white tunic known as a surplice would be topped with a stole. Deacons who served at Mass wore a dalmatic, a long, collarless tunic with square sleeves and a stole. These two might be made of silken materials. Bishops could be concerned with clothing. Florence’s fifteenth-century Dominican archbishop Antoninus legislated against habits that were too long, too short, worn open in front, made of silk, worn with secular clothing, or decorated with fur or jewels. Contrarily, Milan’s noble Archbishop Ippolito d’Este, who turned 26 in 1535, owned 400 clothing items, of which only 43 were clerical. Sixty-one related to hunting, Carnival, or jousting. See also: Arts: Art, Sacred; Daily Life in Art; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Hair and Hairstyles; Shoes and Footwear; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Religion and Beliefs: Clergy, Catholic; Friars; Monks and Monasteries; Nuns and Nunneries; Sacraments, Catholic FURTHER READING Campagnol, Isabella. Forbidden Fashions: Invisible Luxuries in Venetian Convents. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014. Johnstone, Pauline. High Fashion in the Church: The Place of Church Vestments in the History of Art from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2002. Kennedy, Trinita. Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy. London: I.B. Taurus, 2014.

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SCENTS AND PERFUMES Odors played many roles in Renaissance-era Italian culture. Frankincense granules placed on hot charcoal in a censer at church sent billowing clouds of sweet smoke heavenward, representing the prayers of the congregants. The priest took the same smoldering censer through the church as a kind of cleansing ritual, blessing those present. One sign of a dead person’s sanctity was that rather than the smell of rotting flesh, when the body was disturbed it gave off a sweet, flower-like smell. In a house, residents burned aromatic substances in perfume burners, which acted like small censers. For guests, flowers or herbs were strewn on the floor. To conceive a boy, the copulating couple were to burn “warm” substances; “cool” ones would help engender a girl. Unpleasant smells indicated the presence of something unpleasant. Human and animal waste and rotting organic materials gave off not only stench, but, it was believed, also poisoned the air in a way that caused plague. The connection among corruption, stench, and disease made some sense given the medical understanding of the period, and this sparked most of the earliest attempts at public sanitation for public health. Combatting disease-spawning stink meant removing the source in rotting corpses or open cesspits, but it also meant cleansing the affected air. Here opinions differed. Some insisted that only “good” and “sweet” odors should be used; others emphasized that like substances counteracted like, and that only nasty smells could counteract stink-spawned disease. Fumigation (fumare, to smoke) became common during epidemics. Bonfires burned in streets and braziers in rooms, incinerating any burnable aromatic material available, especially strong herbs and woods such as juniper and pine. Household goods, especially clothing and linens, were hung above fires, and even the smoke of discharged gunpowder was used to fumigate small objects. On a personal level, people smoked tobacco and sought to alter the air around them with sachets of herbs and flowers or scent balls of aromatic musk, civet, or ambergris worn around the neck or on belts in ventilated gold lockets. The use of personal scent probably entered medieval Europe with the Crusades. The human body’s odors are complex, including both sexually attracting pheromones and less pleasant bacterial byproducts. Clothes absorb these as well as environmental smells. Bathing and laundering were ways of removing odors and their sources, but neither was done frequently. Both processes could also introduce new and pleasant scents to skin, hair, and clothing, as soap, shampoo, and detergents do today. Media for scent were many. Animal byproducts included musk, civet, and ambergris, which is a waxy sperm-whale cast-off available from Spain and Portugal. Civet derived from scent glands of the civet cat, and musk deer from Tibet provided musk oil, which was shipped through Islamic lands. Water could be aromatized and produce a light effect, as with popular rosewater.

Fashion and Appearance: Scents and Perfumes

Botanical gums, such as Traganth and Arabic, and resins held scents well, and could be molded or shaped. In his Natural Magic, whose Chapter 11 deals with “Perfuming,” Neapolitan naturalist Giovanni della Porta wrote that all scents require a “greasy body,” and he suggested several types of oils, including almond and a Genoese mixture he calls oil of Ben or Benjamin. This included civet, musk, and amber set in the sun for 20 days to blend naturally. Because of the importance and widespread use of scents, many so-called Books of Secrets, like Della Porta’s, contained numerous odoriferous recipes; his book has 27. In 1555, an officer at the Venetian shipyard, Giovanventura Rosetti, published Most Notable Secrets of the Art of Perfume Making. This was the first book dedicated entirely to a branch of cosmetics. He had traveled widely, especially in the Near East, and collected recipes. He tells readers that he published the work to help establish the craft of scent-making in Venice. Scent was applied directly to the body in soap, powders, dabbed unguents and oils, or atomized waters. It was worn on the body as fresh flowers, herb-filled sachets, pomanders or molded scent balls, jewelry such as beaded necklaces and earrings, and peculiarly Italian glass casting bottles which were filled with essential floral oil and worn around one’s neck. These last were popular gifts, and their intimacy made them love tokens. But many other items received a sweet scent. Bed linens and towels were routinely sprinkled with rosewater or another floral water. The same was true of handkerchiefs, fans, underclothing, and other articles of clothing. Sachets went into storage chests, and small toilette boxes were decorated with scented moldings. New leather was especially foul smelling, and articles made from it, such as shoes, belts, purses, and gloves, were routinely treated. Della Porta recommended rubbing them with unscented oil, such as Oil of Ben or Oil of Eggs (which he described), and then laying fresh flowers on them for several days. The oil absorbs the flowers’ essence as it is taken into the leather.

Pomanders for Plague “Apples of ambergris” appeared in the thirteenth century as portable scent containers. By the sixteenth century these small metal spheres were composed of four to eight perforated, orange-slice shaped compartments that opened out from the core. Each carried an ambergris lump or other aromatic material such as civet or musk, or a small sponge soaked in pungent liquid. Men wore them from the belt, as did women, who also suspended them from the neck. Perfume vendors, apothecaries, and goldsmiths sold these as prophylactics against plague and other diseases, since belief was that the odor purified plague-tainted air.

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Materials for making one’s own scented materials were readily available from urban apothecaries. Some ingredients, such as ambergris, and musk and civet oil, were expensive imports. Some apothecaries made their own proprietary scents, while commercial perfumers and perfume shops appeared in Milan and Florence—at least—before the sixteenth century. In Venice, perfumers belonged to the mercer’s guild, and sought their own, the muschieri, in 1551. A branch of alchemical practice, especially prized by women, worked with scents through distillation and other experimental practices. Duchess Isabella d’Este was known for her laboratory-made perfumes, which she gave away as gifts. See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Imported Goods, Sources of; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Bathing and Personal Hygiene; Hair and Hairstyles; Laundry; Underclothing; Food and Drink: Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons; Furnishing the House; Plague; Sewage, Sewerage, and Public Sanitation; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Science and Technology: Alchemy; Botany and Botanical Illustration; Secrets, Books of FURTHER READING Della Porta, Giambattista. Natural Magick. New York: Basic Books, 1957. Dugan, Holly. The Ephemeral History of Perfume. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Green, Annette, and Linday Dyett. Secrets of Aromatic Jewelry. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Smith, Virginia. Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

SHOES AND FOOTWEAR As with all other elements of Renaissance-era fashion, footwear had utilitarian, aesthetic, and symbolic elements. In the Vatican’s audience room, the pope wore slippers, his guards wore heavy boots, his cardinals wore comfortable soft-soled cloth shoes, and the radical Franciscan preaching to them wore no shoes at all. Unlike many parts of the wardrobe, shoes were often covered by long gowns, robes, cassocks, dresses, or cloaks, and paintings rarely privilege the sitter’s feet. Shoes were one clothing item that was not likely to have been made at home or by local women. Florence had a shoemaker’s guild, which was among the minor ones. There were more shoemakers than any other guild clothier, and their shops were scattered across the city. In 1427, there were 264 shoemakers listed

Fashion and Appearance: Shoes and Footwear

in Florence’s tax rolls, and 7% of these were women. But shoemaking was only one footwear occupation. Other guild specialists included hosiers, sock makers, cobblers, slipper makers, clog makers, leather shoe uppers makers, and shoe or stocking sole makers who sold soles to other specialists. Stockings with soles were sold by the dozen, and drapers sold pre-made fabric shoes. In Venice, leather tanners sold material for boots, sandals, or shoes to customers who took it to boot-makers, sandal-makers, or shoemakers for custom footwear. Hose was both a form of undergarment and In the Hall of Peace in Siena’s civic Palazzo footwear, and might be fabri- Pubblico one finds The Allegory (or Effects) of Good cated by either guild profession- Government, frescoed by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (ca. 1290–1348) in 1338–1339. Here a peasant wearing als or skilled women. They had boots and leading a donkey stops at a shoemaker’s to be easily washable, and could shop, which displays pairs of shoes, tools, and hose be knitted or sewn of cloth that hanging from the bar behind. Like most shops of the originally came from Perpignan day it is open to the street with workmen visible. (Alinari Archives/Corbis/Getty Images) in southern France. By the fifteenth century Italian weavers were imitating the stretchy fabric. Hose could be made multicolored, or with each leg different, or dyed in colors to match particular outfits. This was especially important for livery, since a young man’s hose had to match his own garments and those of his comrades. For this reason livery was often produced in bulk and handed out by the master. Trends in over-the-counter hose moved about, but red, rose, blue, and “dark” were common. Laborers and agricultural workers, both men and women, tended to invest in good, strong, leather boots. These could be from ankle to shin in length with heavy leather or wooden soles. Soldiers, too, wore heavy leather boots that laced up or had an upper part that could be folded down around the ankle in warm, dry weather. These stivali were often of calfskin or suede, and used by friars whose missions took them long distances on foot. Cavalry, messengers, and other riders also required such sturdy boots. Tuscan peasants wore heavy shoes called peduli whose soles were of coiled rope.

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Higher-status men appear to have worn wooden clogs covered in leather— Spanish, Cordovan, or Moroccan—or fabric, or leather soled shoes. Laces were not common, and footwear was generally just pulled on. Many men’s and women’s styles simply had no back to them. What we might consider slippers were commonly worn at home by men and women, though these could be made of very expensive fabric or glove leather. Soles were of a sturdy fabric or soft leather, and these scarpe could be double-soled. Most upper-class women’s shoes were not made for outdoor wear, and could be light and covered in expensive cloth. A new gown could easily require new shoes in matching fabric or recovering an older pair for the occasion. One of the most infamous women’s styles was the platform shoe. Zoccoli were cork- or wood-based clogs or wedgies that could be worn at home or outside. Heavy socks or cloth slippers served as linings. Indoors they were decorated with expensive fabric such as velvet, or painted or even gilded. For outdoor use they might be covered in leather or less ostentatious fabric, and decorated with copper studs, mother of pearl, or silk ribbons. In later sixteenth-century Venice, very tall versions called, among other things, calcagnetti made of cork or wood could be as high as 18 inches. It was said that a woman who wore these needed an attendant on either side to walk down a street, lest she topple over. Platforms made sense in a city where standing water and filth often covered the sidewalk-less streets. Evidence suggests that women would wear these to church, where they would change into more practical footwear. Courtesans and prostitutes wore these under ground-length dresses literally to stand out and draw attention to themselves. Of course, accidents did happen and civic authorities included zoccoli in sumptuary legislation, regulating height or decoration or both. Siena and Genoa tried this as early as the 1300s. The use of sedan chairs, in which prominent women were carried about, largely replaced the need for the high platforms, but the Renaissance era ended before their use did. See also: Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Court, Fashion at; Religious Habits and Vestments; Politics and Warfare: Soldiers FURTHER READING Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Rosenthal, Margaret F., and Ann Rosalind Jones. The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. Shawcross, Rebecca. Shoes: An Illustrated History. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Fashion and Appearance: Social Status and Clothing

SOCIAL STATUS AND CLOTHING People’s clothing spoke volumes about who they were and how they wanted to be seen. No one might mistake a nobleman for a peasant, unless it was Carnival and the nobleman sought to be so mistaken. Or if the nobleman was seeking to disguise himself for nefarious purposes, he might adopt the peasant’s rough garb. Those meeting him might well be fooled, since his clothing belied his true identity: by adopting a different costume he assumed a different identity. He might also feign being a monk, a Jew, a soldier, a liveried servant, or a physician by adopting the clothing appropriate to one of these social groups. Usually, however, one’s clothing advertised his or her true place in society, satisfying wearer and viewer alike of the truthfulness of the message. Young did not dress like old, nor laborers like lawyers, widows like maidens, Dominicans like Franciscans. Finer social distinctions might be made by an ensemble’s fabrics, cut, colors, accessories, condition, or state of cleanliness. The compressed and hierarchical Italian courts were Italy’s best stages for subtle sartorial signals. A  lord might wear the same colors and even cut of tunic and breeches as his liveried servants, but his hat was of velvet and not wool, and his clothes of far finer and more expensive fabrics. Courtiers might very carefully adopt and adapt their hosts’ choices in attire, or display that of their home turf, emphasizing their otherness. Merchants, diplomats, clergy, extended family members, and others from French, Spanish, German, or Slavic regions chose or were directed to don Italian fashions to blend in or retain their native garb as a statement of their stance at court. The style of a hat or the cut of a cape on an ambassador could signal an impending political alliance or virtually declare war. Italy’s streets pulsed with rich and poor, locals and foreigners, workers and beggars, exotic visitors and familiar clergy. Most lacked the clothing to dress up or down, and only a laundered shirt might distinguish a workday from a holiday. For the well-off, stepping into the street was to immerse oneself in a highly critical social world of one’s inferiors, peers, and betters. Fabrics that were faded or worn, frayed cuffs, or soiled hems might indicate financial problems, family troubles, or personal tragedy. Novel fashions from Spain or France signaled success, possibly travel, and attentiveness to the pose one struck in public. Catholic clergy had their own hierarchy of costume. It was most obvious when they donned ceremonial clothing for public processions or other rituals. Popes, cardinals, bishops, and abbots stood out with elegant robes, capes, gloves, and headwear made of rich and embroidered brocades and silks shot with gold and silver threads. Monks, priests, and friars wore far simpler habits in the appropriate colors of their respective orders: the black and white of Dominicans, Franciscan brown

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or gray, Cistercian white, and diocesan black. Confraternities of pious laymen also adopted recognizable colors or accessories. Members processed as groups, sometimes jostling each other for precedence when protocols or traditions left the matter unsettled. A bit of clothing as fundamental as a sleeve could convey certain messages. Sleeves were often detachable, providing several looks to a given shirt or jacket. In sixteenth-century Venice, voluminous or puffy sleeves made of a yard or two of cloth of gold or silk were reserved to the city’s ruler, the doge. Less costly wide sleeves of crimson and of black were traditional for procurators and doctors, respectively, but wealthy women, too, adopted the fashion. The government reacted by limiting their use, citing the wasteful expense and impropriety. Sixteenth-century German soldiers in Italy called Landsknechts wore bright puffy sleeves that were slashed, revealing bright but tighter sleeves underneath. The colorful fighters themselves might be allies or enemies, but young Italian men adopted the fashion and made it their own, as seen in numerous portraits and city scenes.

Attire of Venetian Councilors In December 1536, the Venetian State Major Council declared the following: “The councilors of this our city used to go about clothed in scarlet and silk. That custom is very suitable to the position they occupy in this republic, being the principal members, and the persons who immediately represent our dominion. And the said good and laudable custom having been for some time broken through, it is convenient to restore it and establish it firmly by law, in order that it may be observed perpetually, as is fitting for the honor and dignity of our State.” Source: Newett, Mary Margaret. “The Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” In Mary Margaret Newett, T. F. Tout, and James Tait, eds. Historical Essays by Members of the Owens College, Manchester. London: Longmans, Green, and, Co., 1902.

Early fifteenth-century Florentine men of substance wore robes of crimson, while Venetian males generally sported black, with crimson being reserved to civic officials. A Venetian woman signaled her status as a widow by wearing a black dress with train and veil, and hinted that she sought a new match by adding a small but meaningful ornament. To signal their outsider status Jews were forced to wear badges shaped like an O, and prostitutes accessories from gloves to little bells, depending on the city. Just as American prison inmates traditionally wore striped clothing, in Renaissance Italy only children, buffoons, and heretics donned the “devil’s pattern.”

Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws

See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Portraits; Economics: Cloth Trade; Family and Gender: Pregnancy; Widows; Fashion and Appearance: Art, Fashion in; Fabrics, Imported; Headgear; Livery; Religious Habits and Vestments; Sumptuary Laws; Housing and Community: Foreign Communities; Jewish Communities; Politics and Warfare: Civic Magistracies and Offices; Soldiers; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade; Religion and Beliefs: Clergy, Catholic; Confraternities FURTHER READING Bercuson, Sarah. “Giovanna d’Austria and the Art of Appearance: Textiles and Dress at the Florentine Court.” Renaissance Studies 29 (2015): 683–700. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Hughes, Diane Owen. “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy.” In John Bossy, ed. Disputes and Settlements. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 69–99. Kovesi-Killerby, Catherine. “ ‘Heralds of a Well-Instructed Mind’: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defense of Women and Their Clothes.” Renaissance Studies 13 (1999): 255–82. Rogers, Mary. “Evaluating Textiles in Renaissance Venice.” In Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd, eds. Revaluing Renaissance Art. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000, pp. 121–36. Rublack, Ulinka. Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Storey, Tessa. “Clothing Courtesans: Fabrics, Signals, and Experiences.” In Catherine Richardson, ed. Clothing Culture, 1350–1650. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 95–108. Stuard, Susan Mosher. Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

SUMPTUARY LAWS Sumptuary laws were attempts by Renaissance-era governments or the Church to regulate or ban certain types of luxury items that residents owned, displayed, wore, or ate. Several, often overlapping, motives lay behind this kind of legislation: envy of the better-off by the less well-off; disdain for large, wasteful expenditures on frivolous purchases; moral outrage with blatant materialism; desire to prevent lower classes from aping their social betters by wearing their fashions; concern for reminding women and lower-class persons that high-status males controlled society. This last, unlike the others, was never articulated in preambles or recorded debates, but has been imputed by modern historians. The fact is that male-dominated

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governments, whether monarchies or republics, repeatedly imposed laws restricting women’s dress while that of males was generally untouched. But sumptuary laws also regulated other matters, from funerals and weddings to social banquets, dowries, and trousseaux, and even expensive furniture in Venetian palazzi. From 1200 to 1500 some 300 laws and codes were imposed across Italy. Genoa imposed the earliest known sumptuary laws in 1157, which satisfied them until 1402. Over the next century no fewer than 18 appeared and reappeared, a familiar pattern across northern Italy. The university town of Bologna passed four codes between 1233 and 1335; its code of 1389 was so specific that it forbade clothing made of figured velvet and velvet with different pile lengths. When Bologna’s cardinal imposed new laws against women’s fashions in 1453, Nicolosa Santi was prompted to pen the first statement of women’s natural rights in Italian. Siena’s oldest sumptuary laws date from 1249, Venice’s from 1299, and Florence began regulating funeral displays from 1281. Depending on the type of regulation, exemptions were quite common. Venice’s doge and usually the Senate and knights were unaffected; elsewhere the same was often true of families—or just men—with the status of knight; bans on fancy textiles usually exempted priestly vestments, and general bans on the wearing of fancy clothing and expensive jewelry were usually suspended during important holidays and political celebrations. Successful appeals, themselves a type of exemption, often went to the wealthy and politically powerful. Infractions of laws entailed a number of punishments, including flogging, fines, and confiscation of the offending items. In general, as the Renaissance era progressed, so did the frequency and scope of sumptuary legislation. The Venetian Senate imposed the 1299 laws against extravagant wedding ceremonies and women’s luxury clothing, ostensibly to keep the lower classes from becoming envious. These were revoked in 1307, but new ones appeared in 1333 and 1334, this time targeting expensive women’s and children’s clothing and jewelry (30 ducat limit) as a curb against wasteful expenditures. These were annulled five years later. In 1360, new laws limited expensive fabrics for woman’s dresses, expenditures for weddings, ornaments of jewels and precious metals, and men’s belts (25 ducats). In 1377 Venice first placed limitations on men’s clothing. In 1400, both men and women were forbidden to wear outerwear with large sleeves; tailors reacted by lining the shortened sleeves with fur, a dodge that was banned in 1403. In 1425, Venice limited the value of brides’ trousseaux; in 1442 women were banned from wearing gowns with cloth of gold or silver, and in 1456 this rule was extended to men’s attire. Tailors responded by lining acceptable garments with such materials, until forbidden to do so in 1473. Three years later women were limited to wearing a single strand of pearls worth no more than 50 ducats, and a decade after that women were restricted to wear no more than 10 lire worth

Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws

of gold; after 1497 people could own pearls but not wear them. In 1489 the Senate appointed a new three-man commission—the Wise Men (Savii) over the Finery (pompe) of Women—to oversee the application of all sumptuary laws. Among the first of new laws was the ban on ownership of expensive storage furniture: if a servant turned the master in, the servant was freed and given the piece or pieces (presumably to sell to someone outside Venice). In 1490 iridescent silk-lined women’s furs—sable, lynx, ermine—were banned as useless, contrary to tradition, and hateful to God. Wartime and high taxes meant ever more specific restrictions, and in 1514 the Savii were replaced by Overseers of Finery. By the 1560s this magistracy had full authority to investigate, legislate, and adjudicate without appeal.

Nicolosa Sanuti vs. the Cardinal Nicolosa Sanuti was a Bolognese notary’s daughter who married very well. Perhaps because she had moved higher on the social ladder, she took great offense at the 1453 sumptuary code imposed by Bologna’s Cardinal Bessarion, himself a Greek humanist. She addressed to him her Oration for the Restitution of Vain Ornaments, a plea in elegant Latin against the targeting of Bolognese women for such legislation. Why should Bologna’s women be singled out for greater modesty than other Italian women? she asked. Women were already forbidden to wear the garb of soldiers, magistrates, or priests, why the further, unjust restrictions? The cardinal made no response. By 1325, Florence was regulating display at weddings and funerals and of all women—which meant in practice wealthy women. Transvestitism was also banned, for both sexes. The commune changed its mind in 1354, revoking these laws, though in 1355 servant girls were forbidden to wear fur, gilded or silver buttons, or clothing covered in an early form of lace. At least some of this stemmed from the Black Death, which released piles of victims’ clothing onto the market, and led employers to lure scarce workers with non-cash perks. In 1356 the archbishop imposed a new set of sumptuary laws aimed clearly at women. Men, however, were targeted in 1377: belts were limited to 2 pounds of silver; tunics had to fall to at least the mid-thigh while standing; and long shoes had to be shortened. The state took the reins back in 1384, and established the Office on Women, which investigated and tried cases of infractions. Women could also buy licenses permitting them to wear otherwise-forbidden clothing or jewelry. That maintenance of social order was an ongoing concern is clear from the 1475 law against peasants wearing garments of silk or velvet or belts with gold, silver, or jewels. Under powerful pressures from the Spanish, in 1548 Siena limited to members of

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the governing class the wearing of cloth of gold or silver, expensive silks or linen, shoes of silk, gold chains, and silver or coral accessories unless attached to bracelets, necklaces, rings, or rosaries. See also: Arts: Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Dowries; Death, Funerals, and Burial; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Cosmetics; Fabrics, Domestic; Fabrics, Imported; Gems and Jewelry; Headgear; Shoes and Footwear; Social Status and Clothing; Tailors and Seamstresses; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community: Death in the Community; Politics and Warfare: Civic Magistracies and Offices; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Weddings; Primary Document: Venetian Sumptuary Laws (1304–1512) FURTHER READING Bridgeman, Jane. “ ‘Pagare le pompe:’ Why Quattrocento Sumptuary Laws Did Not Work.” In Letizia Panizza, ed. Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Oxford: Legenda, 2000, pp. 209–26. Brown, Patricia Fortini. “Behind the Walls: The Material Culture of the Venetian Elites.” In John Martin and Dennis Romano, eds. Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 295–338. Hughes, Diane Owen. “Regulating Women’s Fashion.” In Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed. A History of Women. Vol. 2. Silences of the Middle Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 136–58. Killerby, Catherine. Sumptuary Laws in Italy, 1200–1500. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Sebregondi, Ludovica. “The Sumptuary Laws.” In Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks, eds. Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities. Florence, Italy: Giunti, 2012, pp. 191–204. Stuard, Susan Mosher. Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

TAILORS AND SEAMSTRESSES The creation of clothing in Renaissance-era Italy involved a wide spectrum of people, from peasant wives to highly skilled urban specialists. If one could count all of the pieces of clothing created during the period, the vast majority would have been cut and sewn by women in their homes for members of their families. Very often these articles would have been made of home spun and woven cloth, especially in

Fashion and Appearance: Tailors and Seamstresses

isolated rural areas. Even here, though, inexpensive commercially produced fabrics became increasingly available through itinerant merchants and trips to country fairs or local towns. Though evidence is lacking, it is easy to assume that certain women became local artists with needle and thread and met the sartorial needs of neighbors, at least until blindness or arthritis set in. Even peasants took pride in specially made clothing for events such as weddings. From peasant girls to princesses to nuns in fancy convents, young Italian women were taught to sew, and often to do finer needlework such as embroidery or lace-making. Working-class urban families, like their country cousins, wore homemade undergarments, tunics, breeches, dresses, and probably even finery for civic and religious festivals. Every city had thriving secondhand shops that stocked used clothing, and many of the less expensive items must have found their way into the homes of laborers and lower-status artisans. Civic laws could regulate clothing: sumptuary laws forbade low-status people from wearing styles, fabrics, colors, or accessories associated with elites. The laws even punished those who made these items. Sixteenth-century Venetian guild officials raided tailors’ shops and seized inappropriately expensive fabrics. In 1415, Florence established set prices that tailors could charge for some 72 specific clothing types for men and women; they were the only occupational group so restricted. 120 years later, the duke established 78 prices; the Milanese lived with only 32. Men, and a few women, who made their livings as tailors were usually organized in guilds. In Florence they were connected to the silk guild, which originally welcomed female tailors. After the Black Death women were restricted and males’ numbers almost doubled by 1402 to 111. Guild tailors served the aristocracy as well as artisans. Whether banker or carpenter, the Florentine customer provided the fabrics and any trimming—threads, laces, buttons, fringes, ribbons, pearls, linings, or fur—and the two discussed the nature of the outfit. Tailors had shops outfitted with a large, clean table, chairs, needles, threads, scissors, mannequins, chests, and pattern books. Printed pattern books for clothing and embroidery grew in number as fashions changed. Between 1527 and 1600 some 190 titles appeared in Italy. Some shops may have had a curtained-off area for measurements, fitting, and final trying on, but elites were usually serviced at home. Certainly women and girls were. Tailors routinely provided other services, such as cleaning, mending, dyeing, starching, and altering expensive items to reflect changes in fashion. No doubt some craftsmen were known for specialty work of high quality, and some, such as doublet-makers and hosiers, were recognized as specialists. Decorative embroidery and lace-making were women’s specialties, and guilds developed in Florence, Milan, Venice, and Genoa. For commercial work, Florence was the early capital, but Milan eclipsed it. In addition to clothing, bed linens, table cloths, towels, and church linens used at Mass received these often-intricate

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additions. Nuns and elite young women had long been taught these arts, and some convents were well known for their products. All that was needed was a set of frames, threads in many colors, needles, thimbles, spools, a special pillow, and patterns. Someone named “Zoppino” published ten embroidery pattern books in the 1530s, the later ones including lace. These patterns were perforated by the embroiderer, laid on the surface, and “pounced” with charcoal or pumice dust, creating a temporary outline. This was similar to what fresco painters did with life-size paper cartoons. For any garment the cost of labor was minor compared with that of the fabric. Tailors could do very well, but in Florence in 1457 almost one in five was considered “miserable,” or very poor. One big problem was producing work on credit. Needing an expensive new suit probably meant other related expenses, such as gifts, dowry, or provisions for a banquet. Guildsmen’s probate inventories and tax records show dozens or scores of debtors. Florentine brothers Giovanni and Agnolo’s 1457 tax list ran to 232 names, including some of the city’s richest families. Unlike other creditors, however, they were only out their time and fixed costs, since the customer provided all of the materials. The key was volume. Giovanni and Agnolo’s father utilized an apprentice and two or three assistants and put out certain work to individual seamstresses. Over a ten-year period his shop created over 800 garments for 168 customers. At the Italian courts tailors and related craftspeople were treated with the same respect—and disdain—as other suppliers. On the streets of Florence or Venice clothing was the “first face” of an individual and an immediate marker of his or her status and honor. In the pressure-cooker that was the court, all of this was amplified. A rip or a stain or an unfashionable accessory could doom one’s career as a courtier. A foreign visitor’s dress might cause a “viral” shift in necklines or tunic lengths. And there to confront the challenge was a small army wielding scissors, needle, and thread. See also: Arts: Art, Courtly; Economics and Work: Cloth Trade; Credit and Loan; Guilds; Putting-Out System; Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Espousal and Wedding; Virtù and Honor; Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Court, Fashion at; Sumptuary Laws FURTHER READING Arnold, Janet. Patterns and Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women, Circa 1560–1620. London: Macmillan, 1985. Buss, Chiara, ed. Silk, Gold, Crimson: Secrets and Technology at the Visconti and Sforza Courts. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2010. Currie, Elizabeth. “Diversity and Design in the Florentine Tailoring Trade, 1550–1620.” In Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, eds. The Material Renaissance. New York: Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 154–73.

Fashion and Appearance: Underclothing Currie, Elizabeth. Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Newton, Mary Stella. The Dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1988. Rosenthal, Margaret F., and Ann Rosalind Jones, trans and ed. Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, the Clothing of the Renaissance World. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. Vecellio, Cesare. Pattern Book of Renaissance Lace: A Reprint of the 1617 Edition of the “Corona delle Nobili et Virtuose Donne.” New York: Dover Books, 1988. Vinciolo, Federico. Renaissance Patterns for Lace, Embroidery and Needlepoint (1587). Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 1971.

UNDERCLOTHING Underclothing may be defined as that worn next to the skin on the torso and pelvic region. A few items such as women’s camicie appear in inventories, and women such as the Graces in Botticelli’s Primavera are dressed in flowing, diaphanous examples and nothing else. Paintings display men’s hose on the young and the liveried rather liberally, and many male figures dress only in their opaque camicie. Certain fashion trends encouraged glimpses of the clean, white camicia at an ensemble’s cuffs, neckline, or beneath slashed sleeves, but for the most part undergarments were to be worn but not seen. Women seem to have worn nothing between their legs unless cross-dressing, though there is evidence from trousseaux that they did. They did wear a camicia (chemise) that was long sleeved and reached the ankles. It had to be washable, and was made of silk, linen, or cotton that was undyed and could be bleached or not. Costlier items, especially during the sixteenth century, were trimmed at the hem, neck, and cuffs with cutwork, needlework, or lace. Sleeves could be quite wide, to be gathered in pleats and worn beneath loosely laced outergarment sleeves. If a gown had a plunging neckline, modesty could be preserved with a throat-high, gleaming white camicia. Trousseaux of prominent women might include dozens of camicie, which were products of seamstresses or female shirt-makers rather than guild tailors, and could be purchased readymade. Nuns produced these as gifts and for sale; and household women, including servants and slaves, might also meet the family’s needs. A female tavern-keeper owned 16 and a carter’s daughter 15. Inventories show that even nuns had a dozen or more, which were laundered twice a year. A woman of means probably had camicie of several grades and types of

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fabric. Unbleached silk was probably reserved for special occasions or worn with gowns that would have exposed the neckline and wrists. Cotton, or the cheaper linen, would have made cleaning them of body oils, dirt, stains, and odors rather easy. It was important to protect over-clothing made of expensive fabrics such as velvets or satins since these were difficult to launder. Removable washable linings served the same function. Corsets seem to have appeared in the sixteenth century, when Venice banned them as dangerous to women’s reproductive organs. If they were “long and pointed,” and less constricting, they could be tolerated. Corsets were worn over the camicia and under the outer garments, and were made of wooden or metal frames laced together and lined with linen or hemp and covered with fancier material. Men also wore camicie, though theirs were shorter and flared less at the waist. Still, a single shirt for Duke Lorenzo of Florence used 3 ½ yards of linen fabric. These were loose rather than tight-fitting garments, and on average of coarser fabrics than women’s. Some male fashions allowed much exposure of the garment, so cleanliness was a matter of honor. Like modern T-shirts, they could be worn alone with breeches or hose, especially during exertion. Gussets sewn into the armpits allowed a greater range of arm movement. For men and women, being “clean” meant having on fresh linen. Pilgrims departing Venice were advised to take enough camicie to allow a change every day. In a letter to her merchant husband, Margherita Datini wrote that she had received the expected linen cloth and was having eight shirts made for her and a dozen for his use. Two neighbor women were doing the work. A half-century later Florentine aristocratic widow and mother Alessandra Strozzi was looking after her exiled—and unmarried—sons’ needs. She mentions sending camicie in “their style,” suggesting that there were both differences and preferences. This could have been a matter of fabric, cut, neckline, length or width of sleeves, or decoration. Apparently bought in pairs with camicie were mutande, or underpants of cotton or linen. These sometimes appear in paintings from the back as transparent and only crotch length. Men’s hose made of especially flexible knitted or perpignan cloth could be worn under a gown or nearly fully exposed beneath a hip-length tunic. They could be in a pair or with the legs joined like tights. They were laced to the doublet to keep them up. This restricted movement, so laboring men are sometimes depicted with their hose unlaced. Exposed legs were associated with laborers, soldiers, athletes, and liveried servants, and generally avoided by elite males. According to a fresco in the palace in Mantua, when he went to greet his son the cardinal, the duke was dressed in a short tunic and hose the color of his servants, which would have been fitting if he had been riding a horse to meet him. Hose could be multicolored or worn with legs of different colors. Usually, though, liveried retainers, servants, or slaves had to match or show recognized gradations in color to match their differing statuses.

Fashion and Appearance: Underclothing

Men also wore codpieces, which were padded bags that held the genitalia, not unlike a jockstrap. Normally the codpiece was worn discreetly under the doublet or tunic, but the more daring displayed it openly. Apparently they also were used as pockets for items such as coins and handkerchiefs. To sleep, Florentine men, women, and children in Florence wore long nightshirts called guardacuori. These used from 4 ½ to 6 yards of cotton or linen, were often lined, and could feature fur trimming or be made of fur. Nightcaps were also common for both sexes. Finally, those who were hospitalized wore a light fabric gown called in Florence a gabbanella. It was about knee-length, had no collar, and buttoned down the front. See also: Fashion and Appearance: Attire, Children; Attire, Female; Attire, Male; Bathing and Personal Hygiene; Fabrics, Domestic; Laundry FURTHER READING Belfanti, Carlo M. “Hosiery Manufacturing in the Venetian Republic (16th–18th Centuries).” In Paola Lanaro, ed. At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800. Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2006, pp. 245–70. Biow, Douglas. The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Birbari, Elizabeth. Dress in Italian Painting, 1460–1500. London: John Murray, 1975. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Newton, Stella Mary. The Dress of the Venetians, 1494–1534. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1988. Smith, Virginia. Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Vestments. See Religious Habits and Vestments

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FOOD AND DRINK

INTRODUCTION Unlike any of the other topics covered in this work, food and drink were necessities of life. The very word in Italian for foodstuff was also the word for “to live.” Food could also be a pleasure, a form of medicine, a symbol of status, and a marker of one’s religious affiliation. The appearance or disappearance of certain foods marked the chronological and religious seasons of the year. Since most food was grown and consumed locally, cuisine was also regionally determined, as noted by travelers such as the sixteenth-century Frenchman Michel de Montaigne. Far from being isolated, Italy was a crossroads at the center of the Mediterranean Sea and its cuisine was long affected by the traditions of three continents. Thanks to Renaissance-era European contact with the Americas, the number rose to five. In turn, by the sixteenth century Europe looked to Italy for food choices and preparation, and dining etiquette. This was especially true at the top of the social ladder, as northern courts and republican patricians raised the culinary arts to a very high level. On the bottom rungs of the ladder, the indigent lived in the constant fear of hunger and its consequences. Cities, towns, monasteries, fortresses, and even villages were generally well stocked with a wide variety of foodstuffs, but Italy’s was a commercial economy, and acquiring food usually meant having cash. Charitable and religious institutions might provide simple fare, but growing distrust of the penniless hurt both the shamefaced poor (who received sympathy and food) and the dishonest poor (who did not). Above this level Italians generally ate well, both in terms of calories and in terms of nutritional variety. Though lacking a modern understanding of nutrition and food chemistry, Italians shared an ancient Mediterranean tradition of healthy living through healthy eating. This was encompassed in Classical works whose revival in the Renaissance era made for a better understanding of Greek and Roman medicine. Though some of their conclusions have been proven false, their impulses were generally sound. Moderation in food and drink, variety in food and drink types, ease of digestibility, avoidance of spoiled food, and an emphasis on good taste were 281

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Though The Peasants’ Meal is by the Baroque German artist working in Italy under the name Giacomo Francesco Cipper (1664–1736), its simplicity is shared with earlier such genre works. The meal is basic, heavily reliant on bread and the wine in the jug, while the few cherries would have been a real treat. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Image)

universal watchwords. Their notion that good taste leads to good health is behind the popularity of Italian cuisines both now and half a millennium ago. Whether food was abundant or in short supply due to drought, war, or other causes, it remained at the center of Italian culture. Most Italians were Catholic, a religion that has the Eucharistic meal (Communion) as its vital ritual. Within traditional Mediterranean cultures food was an essential part of hospitality, the provision of which was key to one’s honor. At a birth women brought the new mother nutritious sweets; at a death neighbors fed the grieving survivors. Celebrations from a royal entry into a city to a peasant wedding involved the provision of food and drink to the public. By contrast, voluntary abstinence from food or certain foods was a sign of remorse and penitence. Each year the Church season of Lent imposed fasting and abstinence from meat on Catholics as a sign of the world’s sinfulness and collective sorrow for it. To clear the cupboards of meat and meat products all celebrated Carnevale (Carnival, carne = meat), which had become a huge civic celebration. At the far end of Lent was Easter, the joyous—and food-centered— celebration of the Resurrection.

Food and Drink: Bread

But food was also ubiquitous. On a stroll down a street one would have met smells of salted fish, hard cheeses, baked breads, smoked meats, and spices from apothecaries’ shops. Street vendors offered all manner of fresh and prepared foods of varying qualities for a snack or meal. Markets held in piazze welcomed gardeners, butchers, fishmongers, and sellers of fresh eggs and other farm produce. From the city walls one looked out over the fields, orchards, flocks, vineyards, groves, farms, ponds, and rivers that stocked urban shops, kiosks, carts, stalls, and pantries. The docks of port cities such as Naples, Messina, Genoa, and Venice were piled high with imported edibles from grain to fruits and spices. How people consumed food was a matter of tradition and situation. An early breakfast was followed around noon or one with dinner and supper near nightfall. But such regularity was no more the case in fact than it is in modern America. It seemed that families did not eat at one table, but were segregated by sex. Unmarried young people could only dine together if chaperoned, though among the upper classes this seems to have been a rule to be broken. An intimate supper would take place late at night, while business would be conducted over a late breakfast. Table manners and table settings saw real changes across the Renaissance era, at least for the upper classes. Gone were shared cups and implements and slices of hard bread for plates. Books of manners such as the Galateo guided potential courtiers on how to impress; and wiping one’s mouth with one’s sleeve was not a way. For students of the Renaissance era, primary sources for food, its preparation, and its consumption are surprisingly broad. Household records, including ricordanze, inventories, personal letters and accounts, memoirs, and recipe books, get one close to the habits of the literate middle and upper classes. Military, shipboard, ducal court, and institutional accounts shed light on how large numbers were provided for and general levels of nutrition. Poetry, novelle, and proverbs encapsulate popular and anecdotal attitudes, understandings, and uses of food in the broad culture. Courtesy books, cookbooks, Books of Secrets, legal regulations, and medical and dietary manuals provide prescriptive advice. Paintings and other pictorial sources show us what and how people ate, from a peasant with his bowl of beans to a splendid courtly feast. Material remains including cooking tools and dining implements confirm the pictorial record. Finally, human skeletal remains allow specialists to draw some conclusions about human health and levels of nutrition.

BREAD Bread, wine, and something to eat with them have always been at the heart of Mediterranean food cultures. But bread must be understood as something other

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In this detail from the biblical Dinner at the House of Simon Pharisee (1544) by Moretto da Brescia (1498–1554) we see the meal’s remains: a fish head, bread and what seem to be bits of cheese on or around a silver plate, along with a knife, wine glass, and a cloth napkin. The white table cloth was rather new to the Italian table in 1544. Oil on canvas. (Sergio Anelli/ Electa/MONDADORI PORTFOLIO via Getty Images)

than the soft, wheat-based, pre-sliced, plastic-wrapped, loaf found in American supermarkets. Bread was essentially anything edible made with cooked dough or batter from any milled grain flour or blends of flour. It might be leavened or flat; sweet, salty, or bland; eaten plain, filled, or smothered with other foodstuffs; baked, fried, or boiled. The lower in the social classes one went, the greater the reliance on grain products for nutrition. For peasants and poorer urban folk bread might account for 75% of one’s daily calories. Symbolically bread was at the heart of Christian ritual in the Eucharist, and its availability meant that local economic conditions were good. For historians, too, its known price levels remain indicators of economic stability and health in Renaissance societies, and Italian folklore and proverbs were filled with references to bread. At table, before plates became common, thick slices of bread served as trenchers—individual or shared plates on which other foods were served. The gold standard for bread was dough made with pure wheat flour, white with darker impurities sifted out. The baker’s oven left the crust crunchy and inside soft and chewy, like today’s “Tuscan” bread, or crumbly like cake, in today’s Sicilian-type commercial bread. Darker whole-wheat flour was considered a step

Food and Drink: Bread

down in quality, and inclusion of other grains a matter of adultery, worthy of the poor. The wealthy and powerful had their own bakers and ovens, and the urban well-off counted on guild bakers. These sold pre-baked loaves of purity and size determined by law (prices per loaf generally remained constant while grain price fluctuations were reflected in changing sizes of loaves). Bakers also provided flour and baked loaves specifically for a customer, or a customer would bring in her own flour or dough and have the baker cook it. The last option was especially useful when customers desired unusual blends or types of bread, such as sweet breads with dried fruit bits. Guild regulations dictated how clients paid bakers, but some portion of flour or dough left to be baked was often customary payment. Ovens were the preserve of wealthy families and commercial bakers no less because of the price of fuel as the danger of fire. The baker’s oven was dome-shaped inside and heated with a wood fire. Once the embers were removed, the interior slowly moved through three levels of temperature: high for certain pastries and rolls of dough; medium for longer-cooking large bread loaves; and lower for pies, biscuits, and other types of baked goods. Peasants traditionally cooked their bread in home cooking fire embers. Their wheat, when it was grown locally, went to the landlord or the market, so their bread was usually composed of one or more lesser grain flours. Rye in the Piedmont and in northern Tuscany white millet were preferred lesser bread grains, and elsewhere spelt, barley, and even rice flours were blended into dough and baked. In isolated environs or during famine even chestnuts and lentils were ground to make a kind of bread. Whatever its components, bread never went to waste. Even in grand houses cooks recycled bread slices by frying them like French toast or crumbling them into soups, sauces, and meat puddings to thicken them. Renaissance-era tables held shortened pastries that ranged from small, open-shelled tarts filled with meats, cheeses, or fruits to inedible deer-sized pie shells for a duke’s banquet. Food historian Ken Albala calls the sixteenth century the “age of pies,” which included just about anything wrapped in dough. These could then be baked in the coolest oven, pan-fried, deep fried, or boiled like ravioli. Flat breads also appeared as mold-fried waffles, sometimes served with grated cheese; pan-fried pancakes or crepes served flat or as wraps for a wide variety of fillings; and deep-fried fritters or frittatas. The many Italian festivals and feast-days spawned widely varying treats. Sweet doughs made with cows’ milk or cream, almond milk, eggs, sugar, and fruits or nuts were baked as cookies or cakes or fried like doughnuts and were sold from bakers’ shops or special stalls. Simple doughs of flour, water, and eggs were pan fried and dusted with sugar or drizzled with honey. The spring-time Lenten season, during which consumption of meat was forbidden, spawned the use of lighter flour and egg-based batters for coating or binding fried early vegetables, herbs, cheeses, and even some flowers, not unlike Japanese tempura.

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Food for Thought Sixteenth-century Jewish physician and natural historian Abraham Portaleone of Mantua was asked the difference between “lotus bread” and “aquatic bread.” Both appeared in Classical sources among 50 bread types. True to the age, he consulted bakers and Classical and Muslim authors. Lotus bread was said to be soft, easily digested, and of little nutritional value. After reading Talmud Passover guidelines, he concluded that it was essentially a Jewish bread that was scalded and then fried. Ancient Pliny described aquatic bread as from Parthia, soft, and spongy due to water-drawn dough. Portaleone eventually recognized it as common buffetto bread, available at a local bakery.

In a variation on couscous the Sardinians invented soccu, for which small pellets of dough were dropped into boiling soup. The practice migrated to Genoa and eventually emerged as the substantial pasta e fagioli (pasta and bean) and minestrone soups. Biscuits, like other bread products, retained moisture and had a short shelf life. Rebaking biscuit in a cooler oven removed the remaining moisture and created two important, long-lasting products. One was biscotti used at sea and in supplying soldiers in the field. Called hardtack in England, ship’s biscuit tended to get wormy or maggot infested but it satisfied hungry sailors. Unlike English and Spanish seamen, however, most Italians sailed close enough to friendly ports to resupply frequently, so the biscotti was generally served only to galley oarsmen. Military suppliers in Italy also provided soldiers with bagel-like rings of the hard, twice-baked dough that they carried on cords when on campaign. When sweetened with honey or sugar one got the biscotti of which moderns tend to think: the hard, cookie-like Italian accompaniment to coffee. The sixteenth-century Italian wars were attended by direct infusions of food preferences from Spain, France, Germany, and Switzerland. Italian cookery books reflect these new influences that augmented the native Italian genius for making dough interesting. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Novella; Economics and Work: Grain Trade; Guilds; Family and Gender: Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Feasting and Fasting; Grains and the Wheat Market; Hunger and Famine; Nutrition: A Modern Assessment; Housing and Community: Poor, Aid to; Politics and Warfare: War and Civilians; Religion and Beliefs: Sacraments, Catholic; Science and Technology: Agriculture and Agronomy

Food and Drink: Civic Fountains and Potable Water FURTHER READING Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari. Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, and Massimo Montanari, eds. Food: A Culinary History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Jacob, H. E., and Peter Reinhart. Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2014.

CIVIC FOUNTAINS AND POTABLE WATER In 1916, Italian composer Ottorino Respighi premiered his orchestral suite “The Fountains of Rome.” In it, he attempted to capture in music the stately statuary and varied liquid motions of Rome’s watery monuments. Classical Rome boasted some 1,200 fountains, fed by a dozen aqueducts and hundreds of miles of lead pipes that delivered millions of gallons of drinkable water daily to its densely packed population. As the city decayed during the early Middle Ages, aqueducts filled up with silt or crumbled away; pipes were crushed or unearthed for other purposes; and fountains were put to other uses or burnt for lime. Only the Acqua Vergine, with its outlet the old Trevi Fountain and service to the malarial Campus Martius, served the city’s shrunken population. At least, it did so when cared for. In the 1450s Pope Nicholas V had architect and polymath Leonbattista Alberti repair the works, and in 1570 Sixtus V had them refurbished anew. The burgeoning city’s thirst was addressed again in 1587 when the Acqua Felice (at twice the length of the Vergine), with its triumphal arch framing Moses, was reactivated with service to the Quirinal Hill. From 1612 the powerful Acqua Paola brought water to the Janiculum Hill and the Vatican. So strong its flow, it was harnessed primarily for early Baroque show fountains, such as those in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. By 1581 at least 130 institutions and private palazzi were receiving water, and by 1630 more than 80 fountains and spigots distributed the popes’ water to the public. Water that flowed from new or reactivated fountain jets was far less contaminated than that sourced in wells, urban streams, or rainwater-fed cisterns. Nonetheless, unless the aqueduct was covered along its entire length, its contents collected debris and bird droppings. Precipitation at the reservoir and aeration at the fountain solved some pollution problems, but not all. Relatively few Renaissance-era households, only the wealthiest and most powerful in any city, would have water piped to their property. Lesser folk who could afford it bought potable water from water-sellers who carried or carted their product in casks the long city blocks from source to customers’ kitchens. The late sixteenth-century Fontana del Facchino in

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Rome features a period relief sculpture of just such a tradesman. The figure was so well known that the fountain became a literal bulletin board for political and social criticism and satire known as pasquinades. Children, slaves, or servants in families further down the ladder delivered their households’ casks, buckets, or pitchers-full of water. Only in the poorest families would wives or mothers do the heavy lifting. Even though fountain-sourced water was considered potable, often marked with the symbolic unicorn of purity, households were far more likely to cook or wash with it than drink it. The situation was similar in other cities. Hilltop Perugia obtained both political liberty and a working aqueduct in the 1270s. Citizens immediately celebrated with the grand, 25-sided Fontana Maggiore. Its panels, featuring both Classical and Christian subjects, were sculpted by Nicola Pisano. It remains in the city’s main piazza, between the cathedral and the center of political life. A similar monument is hilly Siena’s Fonte Gaia, directly facing Siena’s city hall and activated in 1346. Its sides were sculpted between 1408 and 1419 by Jacopo della Quercia with Classical Roman (civic) and Christian subjects, dominated by Siena’s spiritual protector the Virgin Mary and her Child. Like other such urban water sources, one side of the wall—today a nineteenth-century copy—is lower so that people might approach and scoop up its precious contents or refresh themselves. The Sienese commune sold rights to dig shafts to those hopeful of tapping into the mythical underground river Diana. Not mythical were bottini, human-sized tunnels excavated over channels through which Sienese ground water flowed. Users dropped buckets on ropes through shafts to access the potable water. Siena’s easternmost fountain, Fonte Ovile, had been reactivated in 1246 for animal use, while Fontebranda was set aside for tanners, horses, and laundresses and Fonte Nuova for animal slaughter and butchers. By 1600 Siena could boast a dozen large and several smaller gravity-fed fountains. The Baroque era was the heyday of the grand fountain, but Renaissance-era monuments could be eye-catching as well. Messina constructed one featuring a huge statue of Neptune (1554–1557), and Florence responded with its hulking sea god that still marks Piazza Signoria (1560–1574). Ancient sarcophagi were retrofitted to serve as troughs for use of animals and workers, and simple low basins accommodated laundry and industrial uses. In the later fifteenth century, architect and engineer Francesco di Giorgio Martini designed Naples’s vast and complex system of underground water channels, while the Milanese gathered alpine water in their surface canals and reservoirs. Deep wells could tap subsurface water, but wells had to be well lined to keep out filthy seepage of water closer to the surface. An entire guild was devoted to bargemen who shipped supplies of reasonably fresh water from up the Brenta River. Rural potable water was collected in rainwater cisterns, from wells, and along watercourses whose water had not been polluted by upstream use. Well heads were

Food and Drink: Conduct at Table

usually built up with square or cylindrical structures that were covered to prevent pollution and accidents. Users might drape their rope over a sturdy bar above the opening or through a pulley that hung from the bar to make recovery of their filled bucket a bit easier. See also: Arts: Sculpture; Family and Gender: Health and Illness; Fashion and Appearance: Bathing and Personal Hygiene; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Patronage; Sewage, Sewerage, and Public Sanitation; Villages and Village Life; Water; Politics and Warfare: City Halls FURTHER READING Kucher, Michael P. The Water Supply System of Siena, Italy: The Medieval Roots of the Modern Networked City. New York: Routledge, 2004. Rinne, Katherine Wentworth. The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Symmes, Marilyn, ed. Fountains, Splash and Spectacle: Water and Design from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

CONDUCT AT TABLE While everyone consumed food alone occasionally, one only dined in company (literally “with bread”). Eating was a group experience, one that was familial or communal, and sharing a meal with visitors, guests, or even strangers only heightened the activity. The Tuscan, for example, lived “with one bread and one wine,” and dozens of proverbs embed the dining experience at the heart of familial and, by extension, social life. What one ate was more a matter of social class than of personal taste, as was how one behaved while eating. How one ate was a social act. Part of this was economic, as the better off could afford to dine in special spaces, on dedicated furniture, off a number of high-quality dishes, and with a variety of utensils that were unavailable to the rural or urban poor. An equally important factor, however, was the intention of the upper class to differentiate itself clearly from rural folk, urban poor, and those beneath them in general. While an aristocrat might be willing to admit that at one time his family was little better off than those working his estate, he took great pride in the notion that his ancestors had transcended the limitations of their origins. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries maintaining social order required that the elite share a set of behaviors that demonstrated their social superiority and identified them apart from the lower classes. Like other social customs, dining traditions also differed regionally, and changed at different

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rates, so that in 1550 a traveling noble couple from a northern Italian court might well be embarrassed at the manners of a less sophisticated southern host. Whether in a peasant hovel or at a ducal banquet, physical arrangements for eating reflected traditional hierarchies. In general, adults ranked ahead of children, men before women, and family before servants. Guests of equal status, however, came before all except the host and, among the elite, hostess. Differences in status were often more obvious in peasant settings than among the upper class, if only due to the scarcity of dishes, utensils, and even chairs or benches. Traditionally, adult males received the finest treatment, however lowly that might be. Women, including the mistress of the house, might be relegated to the kitchen or worse, along with children and servants if any. To the Tuscan proverb above, one might add “one bowl, one cup, one knife, one spoon, one napkin.” The communal or family spoon would be passed around to be dipped into the common soup bowl, or fingers would fish around for bits of meat in the stewpot. A thick slice of bread might serve as a spongy individual plate (trencher), but for the most part food went directly from serving dish into mouth via fingers or a serving implement. Wine and water poured from pitchers would likewise be shared from a single cup, each diner waiting his or her turn until the previous user had emptied it. A tablecloth meant that diners used their corner of it on their hands after dipping, fishing, grasping, and licking. If no tablecloth, then a towel (from tavola, “table”) made the rounds, or one’s sleeve sufficed. Surely the upper classes did better. For much of the early Renaissance era, however, they followed customs little different from those of their country cousins. They had bigger rooms and more tables, and distance from the host marked one’s status. It seems that shared dishes and utensils at table were also common among the aristocrats and patricians, though these might be glass drinking vessels, ceramic instead of wooden bowls, and a shared wooden or ceramic plate instead of a trencher. Perhaps a major difference was that pairs of diners shared these instead of the entire table. Large portions of meat were eaten by hand, and whole fowl were torn apart at table. Evidence for evolution in eating habits is scattered, but by the late 1400s the sharing of tableware was considered low class. Whereas the foods commonly consumed had differentiated rich and poorer (the rich: meat, fruit, and wheat bread; the poor: vegetables and black bread), the use of more or less expensive—and more rather than fewer—bowls, plates, glasses, napkins, and implements—including newly acceptable individual forks—would more fully identify the well-off. As guests the elite could distinguish themselves by their knowledge and appreciation of the new customs at table. By the early 1500s Italians also sought to distinguish themselves from the French, Swiss, Germans, and Spaniards who were ranging about the peninsula conducting armies, diplomacy, and business. Books of manners such as Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558) were intended to inform the otherwise-ignorant aristocrat of the new rules, and

Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status

sixteenth-century Italian literature is filled with cautionary tales of boorish nobles bumbling about in a changing world. Italy’s high society was coming to expect a higher level of behavior from its members, just as it expected fancy clothing, graceful dancing, and the ability to converse knowledgeably and in an elevated style. While this attention to acceptable conduct by the upper classes was not exactly new, the disquieting events and trends of the 1500s may have given attention to one’s deportment a new sense of urgency. The definition of nobility itself was becoming individualized as older determinants such as family and landed wealth gave way to character and personal qualities signaled by good manners. The importance of good manners at table was bolstered by the importance of dining to Italian culture in general. Yet, as the Galateo points out, acceptability of behavior while dining was and is a relative matter, we would say culturally determined. Propriety was learned and taught, whether while growing up peasant or patrician, or uncomfortably as an adult in the demanding world of the late Renaissance. See also: Arts: Ceramics, Decorative; Daily Life in Art; Family and Gender: Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Literature of Food and Cooking; Tools for Cooking and Eating; Housing and Community: Furnishing the House; Palazzi; Villas; Recreation and Social Customs: Drunkenness; Taverns and Inns; Weddings FURTHER READING Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance. Translated by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Montanari, Massimo. Food Is Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Sarti, Raffaella. Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture 1500–1800. Translated by Allan Cameron. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Confections. See Sugar and Confected Sweets Dairy. See Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy

DIET AND SOCIAL STATUS Renaissance-era Italian society had three broadly defined social classes. The aristocracy of blood and wealth was based in both city and countryside; the largely urban entrepreneurial, skilled craft, or professional class was sometimes referred

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to as borghese (bourgeois); and the lower class, by far the largest, was made up of rural peasants and farmers and the urban working and begging poor, often themselves of rural origins. Social mobility was a mark of the age, as skilled peasants could move into town and bankers’ sons could marry into the nobility. As important as having an upper status based on wealth, family, or occupation was appearing to belong to that class. Clothing, housing, and reputation were obvious class markers, but so were manners at table and the foods one served and consumed. In general, the well-off ate fresh meat and the poor salted meat if at all; peasants ate vegetables, and fruit was reserved for the elite; expensive spices flavored upper-class dishes, while salt and some herbs sufficed for the lower; the wealthy cooked in olive oil, and the poor ate the cured ripe olives; the bread of the rich was made of wheat, soft, and white, but that of the poor consisted of flour from every grain but wheat, and was hard and gritty. In large part the discrepancy in every case was a matter of price: for example, even though the peasants grew and harvested the wheat its value was such that it had to be sold, even if the farmers owned and disposed of their own crop. In other cases food economics joined with simple anti-rural bigotry meant to keep the peasant in his or her “place” in the world. Social order reflected cosmic order, and social order was sustained by clear patterns of differentiation, as in clothing, housing, or diet. God made a man a peasant or a pope, and popes no more chewed on garlic than peasants drank fine spiced wine. In the Renaissance mind, both would have been simply unnatural. Aristotle in his Politics (I.2.7) wrote that the “difference between servants and masters is established by nature.” Renaissance-era medicine, based on Galen’s humors, reinforced these social prejudices. Aristocrats were by nature and by humoral complexion best fed refined and delicate foods, adjusted for their palates and constitutions with spices and other accompaniments. Meat, spices, fruit, and the best olive oil were reserved for the higher classes because these people needed these niceties in their diets. By the later sixteenth century this was “proven” by the aesthetic theory of taste, in our terms of appreciation for high-quality items. The highest orders of people were born with good taste, for everything from music to caviar. An attentive middling class could acquire some elements of good taste by exposure and habit. The peasant by nature had a cruder constitution, incapable of enjoying finer things. His or her body was suited to hard work, pain, and plain foods, and would literally suffer from a higher-class diet. Or so said the elite members of the professional medical community. Dr. Baldassare Pisanelli of Bologna wrote in 1585 of the dietetic regimens appropriate respectively to the rich and poor: the rich man’s proper diet will sicken the poor man just as quickly as the poor man’s diet will cripple the noble. When peasants dine on birds, they get sick.

Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status

One socio-medicinal aspect of food quality was directly related to another aspect of the natural order. The peasant diet should consist of those foods that naturally grew closest to the ground, while the noble diet should be built around those foods that were literally higher in the natural order. The highest are the birds and fowl, whose flesh would sicken the peasant. Fruits from trees trump lower-growing berries, and both beat out most vegetables. To the banqueter, root vegetables were less acceptable than leafy ones, and beef or venison from long-legged cows or deer was preferable to pork from wallowing swine. Fish and seafood might have been considered the lowest of all, but life in the water meant a high level of motility, and this made them more like birds and nothing like plant products. One way of integrating tasty but lower order foods was the notion of ennobling a foodstuff by association with ingredients of a higher order. Using lowly garlic in goose stuffing ennobled that quintessential peasant’s food, and preparing vegetables with oil, spices, wine, and a bit of good meat or fat made them an acceptable side dish.

Venetian Sumptuary Regulations Though sumptuary laws usually regulated clothing, from the first in 1299 the Venetian Senate also set limitations on expenditures for patrician wedding banquets. These were revoked in 1307 and reinstated in 1334. In the 1460s a maximum of ½ ducat per guest was imposed on wedding and social club banquets. The year 1472 saw laws forbidding the serving of certain expensive fowl, gilded food, more than three dishes—not counting confections—and banqueting outside of a house. New laws passed in 1483 and 1489 (maximum of two banquets with 40 guests each), renewed in 1509 as guest lists were topping 300. Sixteenth-century regulations were even more intrusive and futile. Peasants and the poor were said to have dreamed of Bengodi, the Italian equivalent of The Land of Cockaigne, where everything was made of food and it rained ravioli and roasted pigeon. And of course it remained a dream. Economics, medicine, culture, and laws—like sumptuary legislation that restricted apparel and even food choices—conspired to keep the classes distinguished and the lowest in its place. Folktales embodied the elite position: in one a peach tree owner scolds a poor thief, “leave my fruit alone, and eat your own: turnips, garlic, leeks, onions, and shallots, along with sorghum bread.” Poet Francesco Berni in 1522 prayed somewhat ambiguously: “May God not let you know, peasant, that which you cannot enjoy: cardoons, artichokes, peaches, eels, and pears.” The poet’s “cannot enjoy” was probably meant more as a dig at the rustic’s supposed natural inability to appreciate the delicacies than at the economic and cultural bars to his doing so.

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See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Novella; Family and Gender: Families, Laboring Class; Families, Noble and Patrician; Infancy, Nursing, and Wetnursing; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Food and Drink: Bread; Conduct at Table; Feasting and Fasting; Fruits and Vegetables; Galenic Health Regimens; Hunger and Famine; Literature of Food and Cooking; Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy; Nutrition: A Modern Assessment; Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Sugar and Confected Sweets; Wines; Housing and Community: Foreign Communities; Recreation and Social Customs: Weddings FURTHER READING Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Camporesi, Piero. Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Cohen, Elizabeth S., and Thomas V. Cohen. Daily Life in Renaissance Italy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine, and Society, 1450–1800. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Dining Out. See Eating Out

DRUGS The line between food and drugs was rather thin. Most Renaissance-era Italians were firm believers in the Galenic model of human health. Accordingly, the body was regulated by four humors or fluid-like substances whose levels had to be maintained at optimal levels for best results. Good diet and wise habits of living supported good health, but when not enough the body required supplements. Illness resulted from a deficiency of one or more of the humors. Each humor had a character that mixed the supposed “qualities” of either hot and cold with either wet and dry in an intensity level of one to four. Everything one consumed shared some combination of these qualities, and the goal was to match the deficient humor with the appropriate powerful supplements to effect a rebalance. Because of their strong scent and flavor, many herbs were considered good supplements, and each had an agreed-upon set of qualities. Foreign spices with even more flavor intensity had to have even more healing power, and this belief fueled demand for often high-priced peppers, turmeric, and cinnamon, among many other exotic imports.

Food and Drink: Drugs

Further intensification could be effected by distilling or pressing out essential oils, the work of apothecaries. A second function of drugs was to help rid the body of defective humors or of the products they create. Purgatives aided the body in purging all sorts of matter. Vermifuges such as coralline drove out digestive tract worms through the anus; carminatives made the anus “sing” with expelled gas; laxatives used the same orifice for excrement. Diuretics rid the body of urine; sudorifics of sweat; and expectorants of phlegm in the lungs. Emetics aided vomiting. Results could be malodorous and messy. High-end purgatives included China root, medicinal rhubarb, and manna, derived from Calabrian ash tree sap. At the sixteenth-century Florentine apothecary shop Gigli, six of ten top-selling drugs were purgatives. A third function was to protect the body against poison or the effects of poison once ingested or developed internally. Purgatives might help expel poison, depending on where in the body it was located, but prevention was, of course, to be preferred. Drugs with this quality were in high demand since plague was understood to be caused by poisoned air that penetrated and poisoned the heart. Medicinal simples were individual ingredients characterized by a single set of qualities (hot/cold, wet/dry) and perhaps some purgative ability. The most popular simple was cassia solutiva, an inexpensive purgative imported in pods from Egypt. Compounding these with other simples or with vehicles such as rosewater, honey, or sugar could enhance the desired effects, reduce unwanted side effects, or make the simple easier to swallow or digest. The “queen” of compounds was theriac, a drug mentioned by Galen in the second century AD. His version included 64 simples and other ingredients, while the Renaissance Venetian recipe required at least 81. Each of these was necessary since it affected a particular humor, organ, or bodily function. This cure-all, or panacea, contained fresh female viper meat aimed at counteracting poison and opium that dulled pain. During its heyday, some 40 Venetian pharmacists produced thousands of pounds annually, most in a grand public show that took place over several days in late June each year. It had to age for years, according to tradition and law, before being sold as a prophylactic and remedy for just about any ill including plague: a printed list of uses from 1596 is 15 pages long. Apothecaries carried out physicians’ orders for specific compounds and carried standard and secret proprietary recipes for remedies. A fresh, as opposed to aged, decoction from Florence included prunes, tamarinds, violets, barley, and seeds of cucumber, pumpkin, watermelon, and other melons. “Dieradon Abbatis” contained sandalwood, red rose petals, and candied sugar, all pulverized and added to various spices, seeds, sugar, camphor, and natural gums to hold it together. Nasty tasting pills were coated with wax or sugar, and some expensive ones were lightly

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gilded; it was believed gold enhanced the effect in the body. Foul-tasting blends were suspended in syrups, honey, rosewater, or wine. Many recipes were handed down from medieval Arab or Persian physicians or even, like theriac, from earlier authorities. Renaissance apothecaries, however, also developed their own. Early ones were contained in collections such as the Florentine Recipe-book (1499), published by the guild and containing 489 recipes. Some two-thirds were taken directly from a medieval work of c. 1200. Florence’s Medici duke reissued the work in 1550 and in 1567, reducing it to 262 recipes of mostly ancient Greek and modern origin and requiring its use by all apothecaries.

Theriac Theriac was a complex compound of 60 to 70 ingredients—including viper flesh and opium—prepared and sold by apothecaries. A favorite of Galen in the second century AD, it had had a long history as a supposed antidote to poison, a powerful purgative and panacea, and a prophylactic against diseases such as plague. Renaissance-era apothecaries in Venice and other cities prepared their batches in an annual open-air ritual overseen by medical authorities and the public. Preparation took 40 days to complete, after which the mixture was left to age for 12 years before being reduced to pills.

Sixteenth-century German physician Paracelsus, and his followers, rejected Galenic humoralism and understood human health in terms of chemical rather than organic imbalances. Mercury had already been used against syphilis—with some success but terrible side effects—and alchemically trained empirics experimented with and sold inorganic drugs, especially as purgatives, and sought to make drinkable gold. Medical authorities rejected this form of alternative medicine, however, and practitioner Leonardo Fioravanti was harassed and jailed in Milan, Rome, and Venice for his efforts. Among his nostrums were Calomel (mercurous chloride), Roman Vitriol (copper sulfate), and Precipitato (mercuric oxide), each to be suspended in tasty rosewater. See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Spice Trade; Family and Gender: Fertility, Conception, and Contraception; Health and Illness; Pregnancy; Food and Drink: Galenic Health Regimens; Literature of Food and Cooking; Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Housing and Community: Physicians; Plague; Quacks, Charlatans, and Medical Empirics; Science and Technology: Alchemy; Botany and Botanical Illustration; Diseases and Humoral Medicine; Medical Education; Pharmacopeias and Materia Medica

Food and Drink: Eating Out FURTHER READING Amar, Zohar, and Efraim Lev. Arabian Drugs in Medieval Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Estes, J. Worth. “The Reception of American Drugs in Europe, 1500–1650.” In SimonVarey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora Weiner, eds. Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernandez. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, pp. 111–21. Flood, Bruce. “History of Drug Commerce in Late Medieval Europe.” Pharmacy in History 7 (1975): 101–5. Shaw, James, and Evelyn Welch. Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence: The “Speziale al giglio” in 1494. New York: Rodopi, 2011.

EATING OUT Visitors to Pompeii today can walk into what was an ancient Roman fast-food restaurant and see the holes in countertops that held basins of hot or cold prepared food to be taken away. During the Renaissance era the consumption of food pre-prepared by someone other than family members or servants or in a place other than one’s residence was very common in urban areas and even villages. A family dining at the same table at the same time out of the same pot was probably far from normal. In lower-class families, men, including neighbors, relatives, and friends, generally ate together, served by women or servants who ate in the kitchen area with any children. Upper-class families probably followed a similar pattern, with family women and children being served in their portion of the house and adult males in the camera or an outdoor space. Eating at home meant that one knew exactly what one was consuming: how fresh the eggs were, where the bread had been baked, and how long the roast had been cooked. Eating away from home had little appeal for the family man, and for the woman it was probably not an option. One major exception was when friends, relatives, patrons, the ruler, or city government was paying the bill. Weddings, funerals, dynastic births, military victories, major religious feast days, or dignitaries’ visits could present opportunities to dine and drink socially at others’ expense. When the bounty of the wealthy spilled out onto public tables in streets and loggias, it could mean dishes rarely dreamt of by laborers or artisans. Humbler occasions, such as parish celebrations or a neighbor’s daughter’s wedding would often mean free—if not fancy—food in abundance. Many Italian civic authorities, however, sought to curb excesses in such practices with sumptuary laws whose purpose was to curb excessive display and expense.

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People who lived alone—students, bachelors without a cook, widows without cooking facilities—could easily make do with “store-bought” edibles such as bread from a bakery, hard cheese from a cheese shop, dried meat such as salami, and hard boiled eggs. Street vendors hawked all of these and a great many more foods: vegetables and fruits, beans, olives, seeds, cooked meats, soft cheeses, sweet breads, roasted nuts. Until recently Florentine street vendors still sold hot roasted chestnuts and tripe (not together) during the cold winter season. Public markets also sold ready-to-eat foods prepared and sold by country women or widows with cooking facilities. Genoese shops specialized in meat and vegetable pies that could be bought, taken to a local oven such as a bakery, cooked, and then eaten. Men who worked too far from home to return for a midday meal could find plenty of options. Travelers could find hospitality—including very basic meals—at rural monasteries or convents, especially if they were pilgrims or could leave a donation. Many carried their own prepared food on the road, and others purchased food such as poultry or polenta that was later cooked by their hosts. Taverns and inns provided food and drink to locals and travelers alike. For many it was little more than wine, bread, and cheese—heavy on the wine. Pistoia had several laws regulating eating prepared foods: customers had to stay within the space where it was purchased, and if towels covered cooked food for sale, the towels had to be freshly cleaned. Also, it was illegal to throw water on displayed food to freshen it up or increase its weight. In the later fourteenth century the Stella Inn in Prato sold bottled wines and served meals that varied in price from 10 soldi for a fixed price meal to ala carte feasts costing several lire. Even Prato’s mayor dined here. To protect the interests and safety of pilgrims, Rome’s authorities set maximum prices for foods at osterie (hostelries or inns). Roman fraschette took their name from the wreath of dried branches and vines that hung as advertisement outside their often rural doors. These were essentially wine bars selling their own vintages. Unlike many inns or taverns these were family friendly. Local families brought entire meals to eat in or outside, along with pitchers of the house’s best wine. Small rural and urban public houses with a couple of rooms to rent usually shared whatever the family was eating with those seeking to lodge or only stay for a meal. There was no such thing as high-end dining out. Well-off visitors to a city could usually find hospitality from their peers, including fine meals. Honor being what it was, it would have been dishonorable not to provide it. Locals who could afford to eat well did so in their own homes on fine foods supplied and prepared by their servants. See also: Economics and Work: Retail Selling; Women in the Labor Force; Family and Gender: Widows; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Foodsellers and Markets; Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze; Recreation and

Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting

Social Customs: Carnival; Civic Festivals; Taverns and Inns; Religion and Beliefs: Monks and Monasteries FURTHER READING Marshall, Richard K. The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. McIver, Katherine A. Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy: From Kitchen to Table. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Zanini di Vita, O. Encyclopedia of Pasta. Translated by M. B. Fant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Eggs. See Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy Etiquette. See Conduct at Table Famine. See Hunger and Famine

FEASTING AND FASTING Food is as necessary to the human spirit as it is to the human body, to paraphrase a number of Italian proverbs. It was an important symbol that crossed the sacred and secular aspects of Italian culture. Christian worship centered on the Eucharistic meal celebrated at the Mass, at which believers consumed God’s own flesh and blood under the appearance of bread and wine. Yet studies show that at any given Mass few of the laity actually partook of the communion meal. Seeing the spiritual and physical food sufficed. Conversely, the Church and most communities ­insisted on refraining from all food or from specific foods at certain times as a sign of membership in the community. Rural, urban, religious, and court communities also feasted at certain times as a sign of joy and solidarity. Although hunger was a part of many people’s lives, accepting it voluntarily was a requirement for all good Catholic Christians. The Church taught that all people were sinners and that God required penance, acts of self-sacrifice, that were outward signs of inner sorrow for one’s sins. Fasting was one type of penance. Ignoring the body’s desire for food was an ancient way of disciplining it, of transcending earthly demands and pleasures to strengthen the spirit. The good Christian was also to abstain from eating meat, eggs, and poultry during the 40-day period (minus Sundays) that led up to Easter, known as Lent. Just as one prepared for the Eucharist by

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fasting (and later having breakfast), one celebrated the taking away of meat—carne levare, or Carnival—during the few days leading up to the beginning of Lent. All meat and meat products were to be consumed before Ash Wednesday, the memorial of human mortality and a day of fasting. Though fasting and abstinence were to be undertaken for spiritual reasons, very secular laws with punishments imposed it on certain days of the year. Breaking a fast or restrictions on meat consumption was a sure sign one was a Jew or heretic, or from the 1520s a Protestant. Just as refraining from food was symbolic of sorrow for sin, so overindulging in it symbolized joy. It also suggested wealth, satisfaction, and generosity, especially when a host supplied the food. Church holidays including Easter, Ascension, All Saints’ Day, and Christmas often meant special foods, just as Thanksgiving means turkey for many Americans. Other religious feast days included those dedicated to specific saints, especially if the community’s churches were dedicated to him or her. During the Middle Ages cities had dedicated themselves to certain saints, such as St. Mark in Venice, St. John in Florence, and the Virgin Mary in Siena, and their feast days were celebrated locally. Food always marked festivals, often served or sold publicly. In Orvieto near Rome, lamb signaled Easter, Ascension meant eggs and cheese, goose and duck All Saints’ Day (November 1), lasagna marked Christmas, pork St. Anthony’s Day, and macaroni “Fat Thursday,” the second day of meatless Lent. Tradition also dictated that spelt rather than other grains be consumed during Lent. Special occasions in a family or community also meant feasting with the best and most food available. Weddings, deaths, military victories, the birth of an heir to the local lord, or the election of a new pope brought the tables into the streets and wine from the cellars. The wealthy and powerful normally ate well and far more often suffered from gluttony than hunger. Nonetheless, feasts also punctuated their annual religious cycles and marked special occasions in their community or court. For the rich and nobles “special occasion” might well mean a visit from the king of France or emperor, or a son being raised to cardinal. From about the middle of the fifteenth century the Aristotelian idea of “magnificence” began to shape behaviors of the elite. Clothes became more elaborate, elegant palaces were preferred to sturdy castles, and feasting was done on a scale that could only be called Roman. The plenty of a medieval feast was replaced by extravagance and ostentation. During the sixteenth century a crew of cooks and servers were charged with outdoing the neighbors—whether bankers or dukes. Entire plays replaced jugglers or skits, orchestras the lute-playing poet, and class-defining table manners a spectrum of behaviors from oafish to genteel. Books on proper conduct such as Neapolitan Giovanni Pontano’s On Banquets (1518) and Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558) shaped what both guests and host did, and numerous published cookbooks both suggested and recorded what hosts served.

Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting

The acute angle of view of the diners in this detail from the Wedding Feast at Cana (1563) by Venetian Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) allows us to see the sumptuously dressed guests as well as the tastefully laid-out table. This includes plates for each place, though only the two men seem to be drinking. Note the woman in the back picking her teeth. Oil on canvas. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Cristoforo Messisbugo administered food service at the d’Este court in Ferrara. In 1549 he published Banquets, in which he described, among other things, the truly obscene court feasts. In 1529 Cardinal Ippolito d’Este visited his relatives. This visit was celebrated by a play, a concert, and seven hours of eating. There were 17 courses consisting of 140 different dishes, an average of eight per course. For example, the first consisted of trout, eggs, fish guts, sturgeon, soup, bream, and small fried fish. All told Messisbugo listed 30 varieties of fish. In his book papal cook Bartolomeo Scappi included 17 ways to prepare sturgeon. A single course at court could consist of 20 dishes. No one expected everyone to eat everything, and some of the “food” was only interesting decoration. Rather, as at a modern buffet diners picked and chose among the offerings. Between 1450 and 1550 a host of innovations changed the landscape of the dining table. Diners now had their own chairs as well as plates, drinking vessels, silverware, and folded napkins in place of one’s sleeve. The Venetians pioneered covered serving dishes from which servants deposited food on plates, and sugar became an artistic medium for edible sculptures. A wine steward chose varieties to suit courses and poured them into Venetian glassware, and the meat carver served as master of ceremonies, as we learn from Vincenzo Cervio’s The Carver (1580).

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Fasting and Feasting in Art Hundreds of emaciated saints from Anthony to Francis vividly depicted penitential fasting. Feasting provided a more upbeat theme. In Botticelli’s Wedding Banquet of Nastagio degli Onesti (1483) banqueters sit facing one another at two long, receding tables under an outdoor loggia, while liveried servers gracefully prepare to present the first course. Veronese’s Venetian Dinner in the House of Levi was originally a Last Supper, but the Inquisition objected to the presence of many richly clad diners, dogs, dwarves, servants, German soldiers, and elaborate table settings. The artist simply changed the title thus quieting the tribunal.

See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Food and Drink: Conduct at Table; Diet and Social Status; Hunger and Famine; Literature of Food and Cooking; Tools for Cooking and Eating; Recreation and Social Customs: Calendars: Sacred and Profane; Carnival; Church Festivals and Processions; Weddings; Religion and Beliefs: Jews and Judaism; Monks and Monasteries; Nuns and Nunneries; Science and Technology: Glassmaking FURTHER READING Albala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Grieco, Allen T., and Marta Ajmar-Wollheim. “Meals; Sociability.” In Marta AjmarWolheim and Flora Dennis, eds. At Home in Renaissance Italy. London: V&A Museum, 2006, pp. 206–21, 244–53. Verdon, Timothy G. Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990.

Fish. See Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy

FOOD PRESERVATION No food remains edible forever, and most foodstuffs become rather inedible quickly: meat turns rancid, fruits get moldy, vegetables dry up or rot, bread gets stale then dries up or gets moldy. Much, perhaps most, Renaissance-era food was

Food and Drink: Food Preservation

consumed before these physical or chemical changes took place. But when there was a bumper crop, great catch, extraordinary slaughter, or large shipment of edibles, it was foolish to let nature take its course. Keeping food from spoiling over long winter months and when being shipped some distance also inspired the preservation of foods of all sorts, from meat and fish to herbs, fruits, and bread. The basic trick was to prevent the food from undergoing attack from bacteria, yeasts, molds, and fungi in the air. The food needed to be either directly sealed from the air or chemically changed so that germs found the new substance unappealing. Renaissance-era Italians had quite an arsenal of native and borrowed means of preserving foods. In general these involved cold temperature, drying or smoking, using salt or salt brine, fermenting, packing in oil, cooking or boiling, and packing in honey or sugar. That very cold temperatures retard spoilage should surprise no one with a refrigerator and freezer. Italians had long used ice, snow, and ice-cold well, spring, and stream water whenever and wherever possible to preserve a wide range of foods. Very cool temperatures were also available underground in root cellars, where vegetables especially could be kept cool and dry but above freezing. Drying removed the moisture that was necessary for most harmful microbes to thrive. Beans and some grains, such as rice, were dried for storage and later use, as were other vegetables and herbs. Bunches of basil or rosemary or bulbs of garlic were routinely hung in kitchens from special strings and hooks, and certain meat products hung drying in cool, dry attics. Grapes dried in the sun became raisins and small plums prunes. Twice-cooking biscuits dried them out and made soldiers’ and sailors’ hard and salty biscotti or the desirable sweet cookie with the same name. Once pasta made its appearance, it was either eaten fresh or dried for later use or for sale in special shops. Smoking dried out meats, cheeses, and fish (anchovies, sardines, sturgeon, eel, tuna, mackerel, and skate), usually in special rooms or small smokehouses. Smoking added distinctive flavors that became associated with the foods. Italians also developed a wide variety of long-lasting smoked and nonsmoked dry sausages using ground meat and herbs or spices. Salami, mortadella, and other processed meat products were high in salt and fat content and often developed into regional specialties. Over the course of the Renaissance they became acceptable at elite tables. Packing in salt or salt brine also tended to dry foods by drawing out or replacing the natural moisture with salt. Beef, pork, venison, boar, mutton, and gooseflesh were routinely salted, as were numerous types of fish, including eel, herring, cod, trout, salmon, dolphin, shad, whiting mackerel, mullet, and pike. In Christian Italy the market for salted or dried fish heightened each year during the spring Lenten season that led up to Easter: the good Christian abstained from meat and fowl throughout the period, but was allowed fish of any kind. Pickling usually involved

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salt brine mixed with vinegar and other flavors, and some vegetables were preserved in vinegar alone. Italians pickled a wide range of vegetables and even hard fruits: cucumbers, cabbage, asparagus, green beans, peas, root vegetables, and even lettuce appear in the records, as do fruits such as apples, pears, and plums. From the medical standpoint of the day, the salt helped to correct the patently cold and moist qualities of the fruits and made them less dangerous to eat. Fermentation was another means of correcting the moist nature of grapes, pears, and apples, while preserving the fruit. Fermenting these produced wine, cider, and perry, and fermenting barley, wheat, and other grains produced beer of varying qualities. These were best kept in cool and dry locations, which is why beer and wine cellars, both private and commercial, became popular. Before pasteurization milk soured and then fermented quite rapidly. By controlling the process farmers and landowners produced excellent regional cheeses from the milk of cows, sheep, goats, and water buffalo. Some was left soft and eaten quickly, like mozzarella, and other varieties such as romano, pecorino, and parmesan were dried and used over months. Sealing air out by submerging food in olive oil was an ancient means of preserving certain delicate foods. As today, tuna fish was stored in oil, a method that had little effect on the flavor of the flesh. Oddly, this was applied to other types of fish only late in the sixteenth century. In Genoa’s region of Liguria porcini mushrooms were packed in olive oil when not dried. Ripe olives, too, though considered a peasant food, were stored in their own oil after the November harvest when not packed in brine or vinegar. Some fish were boiled first in myrtle broth and then packed for shipping in barrels with the broth. The same basic theory of sealing the air out applied to preserving fruits in honey or sugar syrups. Such jams, jellies, preserves, compotes, and marmalades had their origins among the Arabs. In Italy apothecaries first marketed medicinal electuaries and syrops, and it was a short step to using the same basic techniques for preserving fruit or its juice or peel. Customarily fruit was reserved for the upper classes, so the market prices of such products were high. Thus, they were confected on the landlord’s estate, where they were used medicinally and otherwise reserved for his table. Preserving foods was not just an option; it provided some of Italy’s most characteristic foods, from salamis and wines to pasta and parmesan cheese. See also: Economics and Work: Retail Selling; Spice Trade; Food and Drink: Bread; Fruits and Vegetables; Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy FURTHER READING Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari. Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, and Massimo Montanari, eds. Food: A Culinary History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Food and Drink: Foodsellers and Markets

FOODSELLERS AND MARKETS Most of the food that landed on the tables of peasants, urban artisans, and Italian aristocrats had its origins in the local countryside. Many of the wealthy consumed the produce and livestock of their own estates, and some of what they ate they imported, such as regional wines, salamis, and cheeses, or exotic fruits or nuts. The poorest peasants might eat nothing more than what they could grow for themselves, while those who were better off could trade with neighbors or even buy a wider variety with proceeds from their sales at a local market. Though some farmers sold their wares to rural convents, inns, or fortresses, or at shrines, fairs, or military camps, retail food sales was largely an urban economic sector. Every town worthy of the name had a variety of shops (botteghe) that sold staples; one or more markets that sold fresh produce and livestock, or that specialized in a product such as fish; and numerous itinerant foodsellers who hawked their goods from carts or baskets wherever people gathered. In 1288 poet and teacher Bonvesin de la Riva boasted that Milan had 300 bakers, 440 butchers, and 500 fishmongers for its population of about 80,000. Around 1500 Genoa had about 70,000 people and 70 cheese shops, in addition to less specialized food shops and cart-sellers that also sold cheese. Soft cheeses, like cottage cheese, would be sold from a cart or at the market as a fresh food, while shops would carry these and older, drier, and even aged cheese such as parmesan. A salumeria might sell cheeses along with dried, salted, and smoked meats, organ meats (brains, tripe, livers), hams, sausages, olive oil, and of course, salami. Fresh meats were purchased from the macellarie, which tended to be located near a waterway or gate outside the city. The butchers would have fresh veal and older, salted meat on hand for sale to households, and would slaughter meat bought on the hoof by customers from the city’s livestock market. Without refrigeration most fresh meat had to be eaten on the day slaughtered, so its freshness was a matter of guild and civic laws. Most cities had regulations mandating that meat, like fish, be sold in the morning only. Older meats could be salted or pickled in brine, like corned beef, or otherwise spiced and processed for sale by the salumeria or macellaria. Fresh fish were sold in the market or by fishmongers with their own shops (pescarii). Italy’s major cities were on a river or the sea or had a lake nearby, which could provide fresh daily catches of at least some edible fish. Freshwater fish were also grown in ponds and taken to market. Like butchers, fishmongers had to locate near the water or city gates for easy disposal of fishguts and old stock. Other pescherie specialized in salted, smoked, or otherwise-preserved fish. During the meatless season of Lent dried and salted cod came from as far away as Norway and by the later 1500s Newfoundland. Finally, bakers sold bread from their panetterii or forni (names for bread shops) and would also prepare and bake the flour—or just bake

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the dough—brought by customers. Bread prices per loaf were usually set by the government, so as grain prices fluctuated, so did the size of the baker’s standard loaf. Talented bakers also made and sold pastries and other sweets year-round and especially at festival times. Markets were open-air affairs where buyers purchased grain or flour, processed and fresh meats, livestock, live and dead fish, fruits, vegetables, wine, oil, dairy products, and even prepared foods ready to eat. Whereas most shop owners were regulated by their respective guilds, almost anyone could hawk his wares at the market. Civic officials had to keep close watch over the sellers of all sorts of food to ensure that the quality of goods was high, that the prices charged were in line with governmentally set prices, and that the sellers paid their taxes. In Milan and Bologna, tax farmers paid the government a set amount and then collected it back from the sellers as taxes and fines, at a profit they hoped. Traditionally market prices floated with supply and demand and the quality of goods presented. By the sixteenth century inflation led to market price regulation enforced by the state. At regular intervals Mantua, Venice, Piacenza, Rome, Bologna, and Milan posted “just” prices on walls and gates, and at shops and stalls for foods such as meat—live and by the cut—bread, wine, fish, and flour. Market officials were also responsible for enforcing regulations and laws on the wholesomeness of food being sold and basic cleanliness of the market itself. Many of these were medieval in origin, and sanitation became a major issue after the Black Death. The fear that stench and putrefaction caused plague was a clear incentive. Officials also sought to curb fraud, such as employing false weights or measures, coloring stock to make it look fresh, and soaking dried fish in water to sell it as fresh.

Fraud For medieval scholastic philosophers surrounded by the flower of chivalry, pride was worst of the seven deadly sins. In early Renaissance-era cities populated by buyers and merchants, greed—and its accomplice, fraud—was worst. Every seller from the peasant girl peddling eggs to the international cloth merchant was suspect. Products defective in materials, workmanship, condition, age, size/volume/weight, stated source, or 100 other qualities were sold as high quality and at a greater profit than “good and true” merchandise. Fraud consisted of false statements and intentional deceit; was immoral, sinful, and illegal; and landed perpetrators in the lowest level of Dante’s “Inferno.” People also peddled food from wheeled pushcarts or baskets, though regulating them was next to impossible. Many peddlers were shop boys or apprentices

Food and Drink: Foreign Foods

to food shop owners. Their wares were probably inferior or old; otherwise they would be sold at the bottega. Women with gardens sometimes sold their vegetables and herbs, or other edibles such as homemade cheeses, from baskets they carried through the streets. While some cities allowed them to sell in markets, these treccole competed with the established produce sellers. In Bologna the treccole were banned until the market was about to close down, at which time the prices for everything perishable dropped significantly. These itinerant sellers, however, played an important role in providing food to people at prices that did not have to reflect guild regulations or market taxes. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Grain Trade; Guilds; Retail Selling; Spice Trade; Food and Drink: Bread; Eating Out; Fruits and Vegetables; Grains and the Wheat Market; Hunger and Famine; Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy; Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Sugar and Confected Sweets; Recreation and Social Customs: Church Festivals and Processions; Taverns and Inns; Religion and Beliefs: Jews and Judaism FURTHER READING Marshall, Richard K. The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Romano, Dennis. Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, c. 1100–c. 1440. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Welch, Evelyn. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

FOREIGN FOODS Renaissance-era Italy was a crossroads of trade and cultures. It was also a highly divided region with strong traditions of German and French influences in the northern and central reaches, Spanish, Greek, and Arab influences in the south, and Greek and Slavic in Venice. Before Italian unification in the 1860s, “foreign” could mean “from China” or “from the next village over.” A Trebbiano wine from the Veneto was a foreign import in Rome, and rice from the Po Valley was foreign to a Neapolitan. Breads, wines, cheeses, and sausages were distinctly regional. Even in the United States, Americans buy artisanal Tuscan bread, Genoa salami, bologna sausage, Chianti wine, and Parmesan cheese. Of interest here, however, are foods that did not have their origins in Italy but found their way to Italian tables. While it may seem that only the wealthy could afford to consume imported foodstuffs, in fact during droughts and famines Italian cities routinely imported the most basic of staples, grains. Authorities understood that desperate and hungry

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people were a tinderbox that could catch fire any time. As early as the 1340s Florentine officials imported grain to a public warehouse for distribution to the poor. At the end of our period, all of Italy suffered and grain was shipped from as far away as Poland. Wine, another staple, seems never to have been in short supply. Despite producing excellent varieties, Italian merchants routinely imported French vintages for those with refined palates. Greeks in Venice and Sicily preferred their own, as did Spaniards in Naples and Palermo. Cheeses reflected the animals from which the milk came, and the diet of the buffalo, cows, sheep, or goats. Even this staple was imported from the Netherlands as well as Venetian-controlled Dalmatia and Candia. Markets for such basics may have begun with foreign communities that sought to bring some of their home culture with them. Greek, German, Catalan, Spanish, Jewish, and other foreign cooks ran boarding houses and cooked what they could for their countrymen. Northern Italians highly regarded German cooks and cuisine. With printing came cookbooks and recipes for Catalan, French, English, and notably German dishes. Italy derived a great deal from the Islamic world in what some consider a first wave of foreign imports. Some products could be grown in Italy, and others, such as spices and sugar, had to be continually imported. Rice, citrus fruits, melons, eggplants, artichokes, and other fruits and vegetables came initially from the eastern Mediterranean or its ports and found homes in Italian soil. Rice, originally from Asia, was grown in the Po Valley from the fifteenth century. Pasta, made from hard or durum wheat, also came to Italy from the Far East. Special pasta makers could charge up to three times the price of bread, so it was by no means the staple it is today. It was treated almost as a kind of confection, consumed by the wealthy or on special occasions. Though herbs were grown locally, spices by definition had to be imported. The medicinal properties imputed to a wide range of spices gave them a very high value, and northern European demand repaid whatever prices Venetian and Genoese merchants had to pay in Alexandria or Damascus. The second round of importation began with European contact with the Americas. The so-called Columbian Exchange brought a wide range of new foodstuffs into Italy via Spanish and Portuguese shippers. Most American products could be transplanted to Italy, and some became regular features of Italian cooking. Maize or corn found a ready home in the Veneto region. Grown from the 1540s, it proved a useful grain, but its use in polenta had not really caught on by 1600. American peppers seemed to be obviously related to known spices, and physicians assumed they had the same medicinal properties. The tomato was readily grown, but it took a while for it to find a niche in the Italian diet. Some considered it poison, others an aphrodisiac. Was it a fruit or vegetable; what were its qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry); was it a medicine, and if so, what did it cure? It came to be used in salads, but the iconic Italian red sauce was still centuries away. The only American animal to

Food and Drink: Foreign Foods

find its way to the Italian table early on was the turkey, which was seen to be related to the peacock and treated accordingly. Italy’s coasts, rivers, ponds, and lakes teemed with edible fish. Demand rose on Fridays and during the season of Lent, however, when authorities required abstinence from meat as a form of religious penance. French and Catalan fishermen regularly deposited fish in Genoa. English fishermen caught cod by the boatload off Newfoundland, salted it, and Italian merchants sold it as baccalà. From the Baltic came salted or smoked herring, and from Russian waters caviar. A final category of imported food and drink was hot drinks: coffee, tea, and chocolate. Neither tea nor chocolate had any traction before 1600, but coffee had made some inroads by then. Adventurous Venetians were the first to embrace the juice of the bean and have been doing so ever since.

Annibale Carracci (1560–1646) was a pioneer in studies of simple people performing simple tasks. His Pasta Vendor (printed in 1646) is just such a genre work from either Bologna or Rome. The pasta is soft and wound around a spindle for convenience. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo)

See also: Economics and Work: Imported Goods, Sources of; Spice Trade; Trade, Seaborne; Family and Gender: Health and Illness; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Feasting and Fasting; Fruits and Vegetables; Grains and the Wheat Market; Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy; Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Wines FURTHER READING Foster, Nelson, and Linda S. Cordell, eds. From Chiles to Chocolate: Foods the Americas Gave to the World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992.

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Fowl. See Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy

FRUITS AND VEGETABLES Renaissance Italians cultivated a wide range of fruits and vegetables, and cooks prepared them in myriad ways. In 1419, Florentine patrician Buonaccorso Pitti listed Tuscan fruit-bearing trees as follows: figs, peaches, plums, cherries, almonds, apples, pears, pomegranates, quince, nuts, and olives. In general, fruit was destined for wealthy people’s tables, while vegetables graced those of all classes. In 1596, English traveler Robert ­Dallington wrote that vegetables were “the most general food of the Tuscan . . . all sorts of persons, and at all times of the year.” A mid-fifteenth-century law in Alessandria required all farmers to cultivate fruit trees but reserved The Milanese Trivulzio Tapestries (ca. 1503–1509 their products for the landowners. by il Bramantino [ca. 1480–1530] and Benedetto At market, different fruits could da Milano) allegorize the months of the year, command widely varying prices; surrounding the central figure with appropriate in the mid-1390s in Prato near agricultural produce. October features baskets of fruits and vegetables, including the pears clearly Florence, apples commanded 2 shown here. (Sergio Anelli/Electa/Mondadori soldi per unit, while the far more Portfolio via Getty Images) fragile peaches fetched 28 soldi. To Galenic physicians, fruit was naturally cold and moist and presented potential health problems if not served in or with warming wine, or salted, cooked, or

Food and Drink: Fruits and Vegetables

otherwise processed. Fruits appeared at healthy tables as preserves, jams, pies and tarts, fritters, and jellies, and in sauces or mixed with all sorts of meat, fish, and other dishes. Of course, raw fruit could be medicinal—a corrective to an otherwise hot and dry meal or diet. Some fruits, such as watermelon, apples, pears, or chestnuts, made a fine after-meal purgative. Apricots, peaches, plums, figs, cherries, and melons that supposedly aided digestion preceded a meal, and cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto remains a classic Italian appetizer. Serving it without the ham, however, was dangerous because melons were considered the most poisonous of fruits; they were believed to be responsible for the death of Pope Paul II in 1471. Drying juicy fruits also reduced the moistness in, and increased the shelf life of, citrus peels, figs, grapes, plums, apricots, and cherries. The olive was nearly as iconic a Mediterranean food as bread and wine. Fourteenth-century Genoa shipped Calabrian and Campanian olive oil, and Venice that from Puglia, around Italy and to northern Europe. By 1400, mature olive groves dotted the peninsula, and local fruit was available nearly everywhere. Since young oil is lighter and fruitier tasting, oil for cooking and consumption was pressed from unripe olives. The practices of producing and storing oil developed as a matter of local c­ ustom, and not until 1574 was a reliable and first-rate process published. Farmers grew many varieties of black, green, and beige-colored olives, but as food they were considered fit only for peasants. After the harvest and pressing in mid-November, farmers, to preserve them, salt-cured ripened black olives and soaked others in brine or lye. Oranges were a specialty and an often-imported fruit, although before the fifteenth century Italy only knew bitter oranges. These needed to be cooked or candied in honey or sugar like marmalade. Naturally sweet oranges arrived in the 1400s, including the red-pulped blood oranges of Sicily, and Italy’s first indoor orangery appeared at the Tuscan Villa Palmieri about 1450. Southern Italy also produced and exported naturally sour lemons, limes, and citrons. Few fruits had as many varieties as Renaissance-era pears; in a seventeenth-century Tuscan painting, 115 recognizable varieties appear. In a fourteenth-century poem, Piero Cantarini mentioned sementine, carvelle, spinose, rogie, rubuiole, sanichole, zuchaje, cianpoline, and durelle pears; and other Italian varieties included bergamot, muscat, medlar, gnocchi, ghiacciuoli, and garzagnuolo. Inventories, recipes, and menus mention many more fruits, including strawberries, figs, grapes and raisins, apricots, gooseberries, jujube, and cornel berries. Other countries contributed dried fruits, such as dates, almonds, pistachios, and dried prunes. Tomatoes arrived in Italy from Mexico via Spain and the earliest surviving mention is dated October 31, 1548. The Medici Grand Duke had grown some red and yellow tomatoes at his villa. Although named pomodori, golden apples, people thought them a type of eggplant, an unhealthful fruit. Doctors considered them moist and cold, easily putrefying in the body and

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causing disease. Renaissance Italians only thought of frying slices in oil with corrective salt, as with eggplant, until tomato sauce appeared much later. By 1614, Italian expatriate Giacomo Castelvetro could mention 84 varieties of vegetables for his English readers. Among them were roots and a variety of leafy bunches, legumes, zucchini, artichokes, asparagus, cucumbers, fennel, cauliflower, celery, kohlrabi, broccoli, gourds and pumpkins, truffles, and seven types of mushrooms. Roots such as radishes, horseradish, onions, purple-red or vermilion carrots, turnips, or parsnips were sliced or chopped and boiled, mashed, pan-fried, grilled whole in embers by peasants, or stuffed in fowl for the lord’s table. For a source of cheap and easily stored protein, peasants ate a variety of broad beans, peas, chickpeas, lima beans, pulses, fava beans, and lentils, often in soups. Sixteenth-century upper classes developed a taste for beans, which were fried in oil and flavored with onions, herbs, or meat strips. Field greens and various types of lettuce grew quickly and were readily available to country-dwellers or those with gardens, and brought high prices in urban markets because of their easy spoilage. At day’s end, a city’s poor would buy up the day’s remainder cheap. Spinach migrated to Italy from its Andalusian and Persian roots in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and cabbage gained respectability somewhat later. In 1519, Isabella d’Este of Mantua sent a number of heads of cabbage to her brother the duke of Ferrara, including instructions on how to prepare them.

The Olive off the Table Cultivation began in the Fertile Crescent, arrived in Italy with the Etruscans, flourished among the Romans, and all but disappeared after the barbarians flooded across the Alps in the early Middle Ages. Monasteries preserved small groves, and by the fourteenth century trade in olive oil had revived. Heavy and foul-tasting oil from ripe fruit, such as olives fallen from branches, was used in oil lamps and for chrism (for ritual anointing) by the Church. The versatile product was also used in making soap, lubricating wool before carding, and as a base for medicinal unguents. Salads drizzled in oil and flavored with medicinally valuable herbs appeared on Renaissance tables high and low, especially during the meat-free season of Lent. Cookbooks featured many variations, such as those of Castelvetro: nasturtium, basil, salad burnet, tarragon, borage flowers, flowers of buckhorn, plantain, and young fennel shoots; or rocket, sorrel leaves, lemon balm and tender lettuce leaves, rosemary flowers, and sweet violets dressed with salt, oil and vinegar. For a special occasion, one might include white endive, blanched chicory shoots, raisins,

Food and Drink: Galenic Health Regimens

angelica, unpitted olives, capers, thin slices of ox tongue, candied citron and lemon peel, green onions, radishes, horseradish, and/or alexander shoot. In his c.1570 “Letter on salad greens and plants,” sixteenth-century botanist and chef Costanzo Felici of Le Marche also recommended flavoring mixed salad with honey, syrup, or sugar. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Imported Goods, Sources of; Retail Selling; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Feasting and Fasting; Foodsellers and Markets; Galenic Health Regimens; Hunger and Famine; Sugar and Confected Sweets; Housing and Community: Gardens; Science and Technology: Agriculture and Agronomy; Botany and Botanical Illustration FURTHER READING Attlee, Helena. The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit. Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2015. Bloch-Dano, Evelyne. Vegetables: A  Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Castelvetro, Giacomo. The Fruit, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy (1614). Translated by Gillian Riley. New York: Viking, 1989. Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine, and Society, 1450–1800. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

GALENIC HEALTH REGIMENS Galen was a second-century AD physician trained in the Greek traditions of Hippocrates and Aristotle. His writings on most aspects of medicine heavily influenced both Byzantine and Arabic medieval medical systems. These, in turn, had a profound impact on the formal, learned medical education, writing, and practice in Italy from the twelfth century. Late medieval and early Renaissance-era medical schools at Salerno, Naples, Bologna, Pavia, Padua, and Pisa trained physicians in Galenic medicine as transmitted by Arab scholars. In the early 1500s humanists who read Greek printed all of Galen’s original works, which gave even more force to his teachings. At heart was the Hippocratic idea that human health depended on both “natural” bodily conditions and certain “non-natural” things that the body did or that were done to it. Keeping all of these “balanced,” given the age, gender, occupation, and other aspects of the person, was the physician’s job. A regimen was a set of recommendations that a doctor provided when asked, usually to address some health issue. This was often laid out in a formal, personal report called a consilium (see the document “A Fifteenth-Century Physician’s Dietary and Medical Regimen, (1482)”) or more generically in book form.

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A body’s naturals began with the “elements” earth, air, fire, and water; each element had a corresponding “quality” of warmth and humidity (see chart of humoral qualities). How these were balanced in the body constituted its “complexion.” The body also possessed a certain mix of four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—often imagined as fluids that, along with specific organs, also corresponded to the qualities and contributed to the body’s overall complexion and health. Other naturals included additional body parts (members), an animating principle that flowed through arteries called spiritus, and the body’s functions and activities (virtues and operations). Age, gender, and even social class could affect complexion—older folks were dryer, women were more moist, and scholars cold and dry—and therefore affect health. The six “non-naturals,” however, could be directly adjusted to help keep humors and elements in balance, and therefore complexion healthy, or to rebalance and restore health. These were air, bodily exertion, sleep, food and drink, evacuation of waste, and emotional state or passions, including sexual activity. Balance, regularity, and moderation of these were the goals. Regimens would be quite different for a young boy with breathing problems, a mature pregnant woman, or an older but healthy woman. As the accompanying chart shows, planets and seasons also had their place in this scheme, and the calendar, almanac, and patient’s horoscope might provide important information: for example, when to begin a treatment or harvest needed ingredients. As our example consilium demonstrates (see document “A Fifteenth-Century Physician’s Dietary and Medical Regimen, (1482)”), a physician had many tools to affect complexion: pills, syrops, clysters, and a topical wash; others included alternative types of enemas and controlled bleeding (phlebotomy) to reduce excess blood. The dietary regimen, here—and often—the longest section of the consilium, was especially powerful. If followed it supposedly removed harmful foods, increased helpful ones, and had an effect several times every day. Food and drink, like every other physical object, were believed to be made of earth, air, fire, and/ or water. As such, each food type had certain qualities of warmth and humidity. A regimen sought to avoid foods that were generally incompatible with any human body, and those that added to an imbalance in a particular instance. For example, many fish and some fruits were considered too moist to be digested properly, and instead putrefied in the stomach. Vegetables were not easily digested by the nobleman’s sensitive digestive tract and were thus to be avoided. Were he a peasant, they would present no problems. The opposite was true of fowl and young animal flesh. Other food recommendations would be made according to age, gender, and signs of humoral imbalances, such as fevers or indigestion. One problem with this system was that physicians did not always agree on the quality of a given food, and this was especially the case as new ones entered the menu from Asia or the Americas.

Food and Drink: Galenic Health Regimens

Spices played a role as both powerful food flavorings and humor-balancing medicine. Originally imported as medicinal ingredients and sold through apothecary shops, spices eventually found their way into Italian cuisine, always to be used with caution. Michele Savonarola was physician to Ferrara’s Marquis Borso d’Este in the mid-1450s. He wrote a small book-length regimen for Borso but also a specialized one for Ferrara’s pregnant women and younger children. In both cases these regimens, like many others that were published, were meant as preventive and prescriptive: what one should eat (and do) to maintain good health. Whether they were followed is, of course, another story. The same is true of the personalized consilia, usually drawn up specifically for one with impaired health. Collections of these, even from the fourteenth century, were printed well into the sixteenth century. New regimens continued to appear, such as that by Ravenna’s Tommaso Rangone, whose 1550 manual was advertised as “How to live to 120.” Cooks at Italy’s major courts also displayed knowledge of humoral considerations in their cookbooks, making health claims for dishes and menus. By the later sixteenth century, though, such considerations were largely dropped. Galen, if not humoralism, had come under attack from about 1550, and whereas the Galenic advice was for each to eat according to his or her complexion (if moist/warm eat moist/warm), after 1550 advice often contradicted this (if moist/warm eat dry/cold).

The Humors From the fifth century BC, physicians developed the set of relationships among people and their cosmic environment displayed below. Each set of ­supernatural planets, natural elements and seasons, and human humors, ­organs, life stages, and dominant character or moods were all linked or distinguished by the four basic qualities. These supposed relationships formed the basis of Renaissance understandings of health and internal medicine. HUMOR   CHARACTER

ORGAN

AGE

QUALITIES

ELEMENT

SEASON   PLANET

Blood  sanguine

Liver

child

warm/moist

Air

Spring

Jupiter

Yellow Bile*  choleric

Spleen

youth

warm/dry

Fire

Summer

Mars

Black Bile*   melancholic

Gall Bladder

mature

cold/dry

Earth

Fall

Saturn

Phlegm  phlegmatic

Brain/Lungs

old

cold/moist

Water

Winter

Moon

*Latin “choler.”

But books and physicians—not to say chefs—were stuff of elite classes. It may be safe to say that certain pieces of the learned model of medicine, such as humors, trickled down to the masses. But it is safer to say that among the lower

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classes foods that were available and affordable were consumed, and when one was sick one consulted the healer on whom the community depended. For these folks, experience rather than book learning counted. See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Fruits and Vegetables; Literature of Food and Cooking; Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy; Nutrition: A Modern Assessment; Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Wine; Housing and Community: Gardens; Physicians; Science and Technology: Botany and Botanical Illustration; Diseases and Humoral Medicine; Plague Treatises and Consilia; Primary Document: A Fifteenth-Century Physician’s Dietary and Medical Regimen: Ugo Benzi. Physician’s Consilium #91 (1482) FURTHER READING Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Arikha, Noga. Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine, and Society, 1450–1800. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

GRAINS AND THE WHEAT MARKET For most Renaissance-era Italians grains of various kinds provided the bulk of calories and nutrition. Modern scholars estimate that for the adult male requiring 3,000 calories daily, grains provided between 50% and 75%. Though wheat bread may come immediately to our modern minds, only the era’s well-off dined on it. Bread and other dishes made of spelt, millet, rice, barley, buckwheat, rye, oats, and even chestnuts and a variety of legumes took their place on tables of the peasant and urban laborer. Though wheat was often imported, most grains, including wheat, were consumed very close to where they were grown. Generally cheap, bulky, and susceptible to rot, wheat arrived by packhorse, cart, or ship only when the price was relatively high. To make bread, the lower classes extended expensive wheat flour, when they could get it, with flour ground from any combination of several grains: spelt and rye were most common, but barley, oats and even chestnut

Food and Drink: Grains and the Wheat Market

flour—especially in mountainous areas—often appeared. Boiling whole grains in soups, polenta, gruels, and porridges was far easier and saved the cost and effort of milling grains into flour. When local prices of wheat rose to exorbitant levels or wheat disappeared from markets altogether, even the cheaper grains were shipped in as replacement. Rice was an import from Asia and, in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, could be purchased through Majorca. In the fifteenth century the wetlands of the Po River valley in Lombardy proved ideal for cultivating the crop. Similarly irrigated areas all the way to Sicily also began growing rice, usually on large estates. Peasants ate it locally, but as a commercial product it was exported and found its way to the kitchens of the wealthy. Cooked in broth it became risotto, but ground into flour it was an extender for other grain flours in bread for the famine-stricken or poor. Buckwheat was another imported grain, though it never appeared on fancy tables. Originating north of the Alps, its fine performance in poor soils recommended it to many peasants. Never a cash crop, peasants learned to make “gray polenta” of buckwheat, to boil it into gruel or porridge, and to use it with other grain flours to make a kind of pancake. Peasants throughout Italy grew millet. The hardy grain could be stored safely for up to ten years. A versatile foodstuff, it could be mixed with other grains to make non-wheat bread. During the War of Chioggia (1378–81) all Venetian classes relied on millet, as did Vicenza’s population when wheat disappeared in 1564–1565. Blended with legumes such as lentils, chickpeas, and peas, millet was the original base for polenta. Peasants and urban poor also used it in porridge and gruel. Columbus brought corn (maize) to Spain in 1493, and by the later 1530s peasants in the Veneto were the first Italians to adopt it. They grew it in gardens for themselves, calling it “fat millet.” Like millet it also served as poultry feed and eventually replaced the older, native grain in polenta. If one considers how many grains a single seed produces, its advantage over most other grains is clear. Eventually it became Italy’s chief grain only after wheat. Italian wheat production centered on Sicily and Apulia, with smaller local production spread across the peninsula. Because wheat took so much from the soil, each year of production was followed by a fallow year for manuring; so only half of that available was actually used in any given year. Unlike modern strains, a later fifteenth-century seed produced on average only five more; this was up to 6.3 a century later. And all wheat was not equal. Florence’s markets recognized three grades: local or Sicilian grani forti or cima was finest; mixed (mezzano) came next in quality and price; and deboli was an inferior grade of smaller grains from the Middle East, Abruzzi, Urbino, or Spain. Indeed, Sienese preacher San Bernardino warned that “there are those who sell grain and show a sample that is clean and of quality, but it is not that which they give them.” Fourteenth-century Florence

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was importing 5,000 to 10,000 tons of Sicilian wheat annually even in non-famine years and despite population decline due to plague. Locally, wars and raids, floods, droughts, and epidemics that swept away workers necessitated imported wheat. Sixteenth-century population growth, urbanization, and the Italian wars fed commercial wheat. Much swampy land was reclaimed or taken from pasturage or other crops and planted with wheat as speculators and peasants alike counted on high prices. Cities stockpiled the grain against siege or natural disaster. By 1602, Venice had 44 grain warehouses storing millet as well as wheat. Much came from the Levant and Istanbul in ships carrying 300- to 600-ton cargoes. One study suggests that Genoa and Venice together imported 28,000 tons of eastern wheat in 1551 in ships averaging 300 tons, requiring some 94 shiploads. In the mid-1500s Egypt alone was exporting 40,320 tons of wheat, barley, and beans to Italian ports despite official (Turkish) restrictions. During hard times northern grain ships arrived from Antwerp and England, and both Hamburg and Danzig sent wheat to Tuscany during the cold and rain-soaked 1580s and 1590s, when even Sicilian production suffered. In Florence, Venice, and Genoa profits of 300% to 400% could be obtained. Even the well-supplied markets of Modena saw annual price averages fly from 150 soldi per staro in 1588 to 360 four years later.

Pasta Pasta (“dough”) was ancient but the Renaissance updated it. Arabs used hard (durum) wheat and dried it for export, but it took forever to cook until late medieval Italians began boiling it; Italians prepared it fresh, stuffing it with cheap meats, cheeses, and herbs, like little pies. Layering flat sheets between cheese layers (lasagna) was another early use, and pushing it through holes in a bronze disk to create strings came later. Commercial production required a large machine to knead 110-pound dough balls, and pasta-maker guilds appeared only in late sixteenth-century: Naples (1571), Genoa (1574), and Savona (1577). Across the sixteenth century Sicily annually provided Genoa some 20 shiploads totaling 8,000 tons of wheat. Palermo was Sicily’s business center, but grain flowed regularly from 11 depots located along the northern Sicilian coastline. The Apulian ports of Manfredonia, Foggia, and Trani exported grain regularly to Venice, Naples, and Ragusa. As with any product, when production was high the price dropped as did producers’ incomes. As wheat production was increasingly commercialized, poorer growers who depended on credit for seed, expansion, or even food for their families found themselves trapped in good years when foreign demand and local grain prices fell.

Food and Drink: Hunger and Famine

See also: Economics and Work: Mezzadria; Retail Selling; Trade, Seaborne; Trade Routes, Overland; Food and Drink: Bread; Food Preservation; Foodsellers and Markets; Hunger and Famine; Housing and Community: Transportation, Local; Villas; Politics and Warfare: War and Civilians; Science and Technology: Ships and Shipbuilding FURTHER READING Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Vol 1: The Structures of Everyday Life. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 vols. Translated by Sian Reynolds. New York: HarperCollins, 1972. Muendel, J. “Medieval Urban Renewal: The Communal Mills of the City of Florence, 1351–1382.” Journal of Urban History 17 (1991): 363–89.

Herbs. See Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices

HUNGER AND FAMINE Some individuals suffered from hunger at all times and in all places in Italy during the Renaissance era. Hunger did not mean that one had no food, which would be a matter of starvation, but that one had too little food to satisfy the body’s basic requirements. The peasant family that relied entirely on local food production and storage routinely had to marshal its supply very carefully as late winter and early spring months unfolded. No one needed the culture’s many proverbs and folk tales to remember the seasons’ cycles. Urban poor who had to beg for sustenance or working poor fallen on seasonal or economic downturns in employment or crippling injuries had to rely on the generosity of others for either money with which to buy food or gifts of bread. During war or an epidemic rural people poured into nearby cities for protection or charitable aid. These both disrupted the production and supply of food from the countryside and put great strains on stored supplies. An attacker’s best weapon against a city was to block food supplies and starve the defenders into submission. Giovanni Battista Segni wrote in 1591, in the early stage of a peninsula-wide, decade-long famine, “Hunger is crueller than the plague, because man is in need for much longer.” The need, or failure to satisfy the body’s needs, had profound physical and psychological effects on people. Malnourishment deprived the body of nutrients necessary to fight off sickness and disease, and to recover from illness. Energy levels dropped, so that sustained physical labor was impossible, and people ignored even basic hygiene. Hunger thus had a dehumanizing effect. The hungry looked, acted, even smelled different from other people, and they were more

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than willing to eat food normally reserved for animals. Children raised in deprivation were often stunted physically, intellectually, and psychologically. Adults, too, suffered psychologically and emotionally, as senses dulled and mental acuity dropped. Some turned in desperation to deception, violence, or thievery, as their morals decayed. Despite the norm of Christian pity and love for the hungry, many in society reacted with revulsion, blaming the hungry themselves for their plight. Because of the Christian norms, however, others sought to fulfill the Gospel injunction to feed to the hungry, one of the seven acts of mercy. Traditionally monastic houses, friars, and bishops provided food for those needing it, and many monasteries, convents, and bishops’ palaces continued to be centers of charity. From the fourteenth century on wealthy laypeople and both urban and rural lay organizations such as confraternities provided for the hungry, at least those deemed worthy of their gifts. They screened out the lazy but able-bodied, the criminal, immoral, and frauds, and targeted “shamefaced” (vergognosi) needy, help for whom was considered “good charity.” Because people faced with hunger became desperate and violent, cities such as Florence kept large supplies of grain to satisfy the needs of the hungry in emergencies. The true food emergency occurred when famine swept the land, as it did in the 1590s. Famines were rare up to about 1500 as plague kept populations relatively stable. Sixteenth-century population growth put pressures on food supplies, as did the flow of war: Pavia, for example, suffered famines in 1476, 1503–1504, 1518–1519, 1525–1526, 1528–1529, 1531, 1539–1540, 1544–1545, 1562, and 1590–1593. Crop-threatening cold, lack of rain, flooding, or infestations could ruin crops of all types, from hearty grains and roots to delicate fruits. One growing season’s disaster reduced or eliminated the seed needed for the next. Animals suffered from lack of fodder or feed. Imported food, when available, was expensive relative to local offerings. Prices in towns and cities rose, which drew what produce—even “low” grains and vegetables—there was in the country into the urban markets and away from rural areas. The well-off hoarded what they could, and the rural hungry sought charity in towns, taxing whatever remained of clerical or lay resources. Opportunistic diseases often accompanied famines, which put even heavier demands on communities and reduced the rural workforce when good conditions returned. Renaissance-era Italy had normally reliable food supplies, due in part to very good transportation networks and a commercial infrastructure that made buying and selling foodstuffs, especially grain, an easy matter. This is until all of Italy suffered from famine-inducing environmental problems. In fall 1589 Tuscany, Campania, and the area around Rome suffered serious flooding. Spring brought heavy rains to Emilia, the Veneto, and Lombardy, with all of Italy suffering from lower temperatures: the early stage of the “Little Ice Age.” The failures of grain and grapes, which were both cash and subsistence

Food and Drink: Literature of Food and Cooking

crops, meant that farmers lacked both food and the money to buy it. Dire conditions continued into 1591 and 1592, with only spotty recovery in 1593. Across northern Italy burial rates doubled, while births dropped by 44% due to mothers’ deaths and miscarriages. Between 1587 and 1595 Bologna’s population fell by 18%, while that in its suburbs lost 21%. Some of this was a matter of policy, as the city expelled its poor in 1590, at the same time that Naples drove out its students and “foreigners.” Merchants scoured the Mediterranean for wheat and other inferior grains; they purchased wheat from as far away as Poland and the Black Sea, and at prices that reflected the costs of such long-distance transportation. Local bakers faced with small supplies and/or very high costs for flour became the focus of popular distrust, anger, and violence. More generally, desperate people turned to theft or banded together to commit crimes and find food any way they could. Peasants often abandoned their land, taking animals with them, and small owners sold out to wealthy or “foreign” investors who consolidated their new holdings. See also: Economics and Work: Trade, Seaborne; Food and Drink: Bread; Diet and Social Status; Food Preservation; Foodsellers and Markets; Galenic Health Regimens; Grains and the Wheat Market; Nutrition: A Modern Assessment; Housing and Community: Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Poor, Aid to; Poverty and the Poor; Violence within the Household and Community; Politics and Warfare: Civic Magistracies and Offices; Crime and Punishments; Mercenaries; Soldiers; War and Civilians; Science and Technology: Agriculture and Agronomy; Diseases and Humoral Medicine FURTHER READING Alfani, Guido. Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy: The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Ó Grada, Cormac. Famine: A  Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Liquor. See Wines

LITERATURE OF FOOD AND COOKING Renaissance-era Italy provides us with a wide range of sources for understanding what people ate and why, and how they prepared and served it. Records of ships’ cargoes, market prices, banquet menus, travelers’ accounts of meals, sumptuary laws, folktales and proverbs, estate inventories, letters, paintings, even sermons

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against gluttony contain explicit information or vital clues about their culinary state. When famine struck, court and urban chroniclers related the shifts in eating habits that affected rich and poor alike. From the invention of printing in 1454 another set of sources slowly emerged. This was a literature of food and cookery written by the literate for the literate (read upper classes). It included books on medical aspects of foods and diet (discussed elsewhere in this volume), on agriculture and related fields of food processing (e.g., wine, cheeses, olive oil pressing), recipe books and menus by chefs at Italy’s courts, and descriptions of courses served at wedding or other festival banquets. Much of this material has been published in modern editions, some of these have been translated into English. Great food began with carefully produced ingredients. Renaissance-era writers on cultivation, villa management, and crop processing were vindicated since Classical Romans such as Columella and Pliny had written about similar “low” subjects. Such works constituted a new type of literature, and were meant as practical manuals. They were published by amateur botanists and estate owners and managers. In 1564 Agostino Gallo of Brescia produced Ten Days of Agriculture and the Pleasure of the Villa that blended both noble and economic rural pursuits. Contemporarily the Florentine Giovanni Vettorio Soderini wrote his Treatise on Trees, discussing all aspects of arboriculture, from successful varieties of fruits to proper soil and effective planting. Also in the 1560s Venetian Pier Vettori wrote a short book on the proper way to press unripe olives for oil, and medical professor and physician to the Duke of Savoy Pantaleone da Confienza composed a “summa” or encyclopedia in Latin on all things dairy, the Summa lacticiniorum. Thirty-two of his 40 chapters deal with cheese, and he provided the first comprehensive list of Italy’s regional cheese types as well as notes on how to produce them. The cooks who penned the era’s many recipes included information on cooking tools and techniques, supposed medicinal qualities of ingredients, considerations of presentation at table, or menu-planning principles, and some notes on distinguishing qualities of meat and produce. Italian recipe (ricetta; derived from recipe in Latin, “to choose or take”) collections (ricettarii) date from around 1300 and depended on French models. The early fourteenth-century Libro di cucina (cook book) originated in Naples, and opened with essentially peasant recipes for vegetable dishes and the means of “ennobling” them with expensive spices. A much later printed edition ran to 72 pages and contained 135 recipes, usually for “XII” people. The next major work was Master Martino de Rossi’s Book on the Art of Cooking, published in Rome in 1465 and reprinted 15 times in the 1500s. The Master was a Lombard chef who had worked at Milan’s Sforza court and for high clergy in Rome. He knew and influenced Roman humanist and courtier Platina, whose On Honest Pleasure and Good Health appeared in 1469. Platina borrowed 95% of Master Martino’s content, which comprised 40% of Platina’s. His “Honest”

Food and Drink: Literature of Food and Cooking

and “Good” were justified by the humanist’s extended sermon on moderation in dining and other stoic virtues. Before 1517 eight Latin editions were published in Italy, and by 1600, 15 were printed in French, seven in German, and five in Italian. Sixteenth-century authors included the administrators who oversaw the production and presentation of dozens of dishes at Italy’s aristocratic courts. Cristoforo Messisbugo had just such a position at the Ferrara court of Ercole II d’Este, and he produced a cookbook, The New Book in which one learns to make every sort of dish according to the changes of the seasons, both meat and fish, and the broader Banquets in 1549. The 300-plus recipes and dishes in Banquets are typical of the Ferrara region, but, like the papal chef Bartolomeo Scappi, Messisbugo piles them into menus, while reflecting on how a proper banquet should unfold, from tools and personnel to the proper ordering of courses. Domenico Romoli’s The Singular Doctrine of the Office of the Scalco [Steward] (1560) is an 800-page compendium of all things food for a great household; it was followed by the somewhat-shorter The Steward of Giovanni Battista Rosetti in 1584. The captain of the table at any feast was Il Triciante, the Carver. In 1581 Vincenzo Cervio wrote the ultimate manual for carvers, Il triciante, covering every aspect of knives and the carving and serving of every possible cut of meat.

Bartolomeo Scappi Born perhaps near Lake Maggiore around 1500, Scappi no doubt cooked for nobles and cardinals before becoming a papal chef in 1536. Until 1566 he served five popes, dedicating his Works on the Art of Cooking to Pius V in 1570. Writing as and for “ourselves, the cooks of Rome,” he created an encyclopedic work that includes discourses on the cook as judicious architect and artist; proper stocking of the kitchen (stoves, ovens, tools); selection of the best fresh ingredients; over 100 banquet menus; and 1,022 recipes using foods and terms from Rome, Naples, Lombardy, Venice, Genoa, and Emilia. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries recipe books appeared that specialized in regional dishes, while others used terms such as “alla Milanese” or “Bolognese.” But none of these reflects a clear sense of the features of regional specialization that so naturally come to the modern traveler’s mind. In 1548 Ortensio Lando published his Commentary on the Most Famous and Prodigious Things about Italy and Other Places. He provided a fictive itinerary from Sicily to the north within which he discussed the best wines and characteristic fine dishes to be encountered in each place. Finally, in major cities such as Florence, Venice, and Rome, major festivals of state, especially unusual ones such as weddings or state visits

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by royalty, included lavish banquets. These were often commemorated by printed pamphlets called livrets, of which menus of the feasts were often a part, and some of these have survived. See also: Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Food and Drink: Conduct at Table; Feasting and Fasting; Fruits and Vegetables; Galenic Health Regimens; Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy; Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices; Sugar and Confected Sweets; Tools for Cooking and Eating; Wines; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Villas FURTHER READING Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. McIver, Katherine A. Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy: From Kitchen to Table. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Pisani, Rosanna Caterina Proto. An Invitation to the Table of a Merchant of the Trecento: Customs, Utensils and Recipes in the Medieval Kitchen. Translated by Josephine Rogers Mariotti. Florence: Polistampa, 2009. Scappi, Bartolomeo (1570). The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi: L’arte et prudenza d’un maestro cuoco / The Art and Craft of a Master Cook. Translated and edited by Terence Scully. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. [See bibliography for more translated sources.]

Markets. See Foodsellers and Markets

MEAT, FOWL, FISH, EGGS, AND DAIRY Animal protein played an important role in the Italian diet, but its presence was proportional to a person’s wealth. Fresh meat, fowl, and fish were generally too expensive for the lower urban classes, and growing commercial markets meant that most meat sources were taken to slaughter in town. Fish and fowl also went to town or were eaten at the landlord’s table, unless poached by cheeky peasants. Unlike flesh, eggs and dairy products appeared for the eating every day, assuming one had a cow and chickens, and these complemented the bread and vegetables typical of peasant fare. Meat may be divided into old and young, fresh and processed, wild (boar, deer, hare, porcupine, hedgehog) and domesticated (beef, pork, mutton, goat, rabbit). In general, meat was reserved for the tables of the wealthy. It was usually eaten the

Food and Drink: Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy

same day as slaughtered, especially in towns, whose butchers’ guilds were required to market only freshly killed and butchered meats. Even so, the papal chef Bartolomeo Scappi recommended one to two days aging for beef, a bit more if it were winter. Older meat could be kept or sold as salted or dried (jerky) or processed into sausages and other products. Elites preferred fresh young animal meat such as veal—though lamb was still something of a novelty—while the meat of older animals grown to breed or for wool or milk was either processed or left to institutions or the working or poor classes. Cities consumed Between 1503 and 1509, Bartolomeo Suardi whole herds of cattle daily. (aka Il Bramantino; ca. 1480–1530) designed and Sixteenth-century Neapolitan Benedetto da Milano wove a set of 12 wool and silken tapestries representing the months. Known as butchers slaughtered 30,000 the Trivulzio Tapestries, they feature the agricultural cattle annually for its popula- produce of the Trivulzio homeland. December tion of about 210,000, and ship- features a huge cauldron in which sausages are loads of cattle were offloaded on being boiled to be served in the waiting bowl, while two hogs feed on acorns while awaiting slaughter. Venice’s Lido Island, where at (Electa/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images) other times plague victims were housed and artillery tested. Venice’s poor dined on organ meats. Poorer rural folk also consumed old horse, mule, oxen, and donkey flesh. Fish and fowl, too, could be wild or domesticated. From the barnyards of rich and poor came geese, ducks, pigeons, and chickens, while free-flying birds (water fowl, stork, pheasant, quail, dove) were considered the finest of foods because they lived furthest from the ground. Turkey arrived very late, appearing in Genoese shops only in the 1580s. Though some fish were “farmed” in ponds (crayfish, eels, lamprey, carp, tench), most were caught from rivers or at sea. When sold, big fleshy fish such as tuna and eels could bring prices 10 to 20 times that of meat. Freshwater carp, tench, sturgeon, pike, eels, and river shrimp were sold fresh at market, while most salt-water varieties (octopi, oysters, sardines, cod, tuna, skate) had to be consumed very close to where they were caught unless salted or otherwise

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preserved. Except in seaside villages, most fish and fowl ended up on the tables of the well-off, whether in the city or country: the best always went to market or the master’s table. Elite cookbooks are filled with recipes for meat, fish, and fowl, and many combine them in ways we would find bizarre. Most meats, however, were probably grilled on a spit over an open fire until the juices stopped running. Some visitors to Italy complained of the practice of first boiling then roasting, and some cookbooks suggest inserting lard before grilling to enhance moistness. Eggs, including those of chicken, ducks, geese, and other fowl, were a cheap and ready form of protein. They were nutritious, easily prepared, and quite versatile. Like dairy products and fish, eggs were legal to eat during the Christian season of Lent in place of meat. The earliest Renaissance-era cookbook recommends eggs soft- and hard-boiled, fried, scrambled, grilled, in a torte, and with spinach. A typical treatment was in a frittata of beaten eggs and grated cheese, fried in lard or oil. Traditionally a peasant food, eggs made a Renaissance comeback in elite recipes for soups, sauces, custards, pastry, and omelets. Physicians approved eggs, as they considered them to be the humorally perfect food. Dairy may be a misnomer here, for Renaissance-era Italians consumed the milk products of several mammals, including cows, sheep, goats, and water buffalo. As an ingredient, papal courtier Platina in his 1470 cookbook ranked goat milk highest in quality, then ewe’s, and cow’s last. In the countryside all manner of milk was drunk fresh, but in the absence of refrigeration or pasteurization milk was usually processed. Human milk was, of course, consumed directly by infants, but it was also considered appropriate for the elderly—when properly served. Churned butter, which also required cool temperatures, was far more typical north rather than south of the Alps, where olive oil served many of the same high-fat content culinary purposes. Butter made inroads during the later 1500s, though, as cattle herds became larger and more ubiquitous.

Processed Meats Some of Italy’s quintessential foods are the preserved meats that date at least to the Renaissance era. Fatty pork was essential to salsiccia (sausage), salami, pancetta (unsmoked bacon), and prosciutto (ham). More finely ground and dotted with globs of fat was mortadella, of which modern bologna is a sad descendant. Beef, wild game, and even old mule meat was salted, ground with pork, and flavored with local herbs. Sausage was the most varied product, and every region had its own variety, such as Milan’s cervelati, which featured pig’s brain and blood, which were far from unusual ingredients.

Food and Drink: Nutrition: A Modern Assessment

Cheese (formaggio) is essentially soured milk whose solid curds are usually drained of their liquid whey. It can be as soft and fresh as cottage cheese or as aged, dry, and hard as parmesan. It was a traditional peasant food, but chefs and travelers ennobled it, so mid-fifteenth-century poet Antonio Beccadeli could write “In Praise of Cheese” in the voice of a peasant-made pecorino (sheep cheese). A century later Count Guidolandi wrote “La Formaggiata” in a pastoral vein, depicting gentle, beautiful shepherdesses using “caressing movements” to shape the cow cheese known as parmesan (of Parma). In fact, cheese-making was as close to a science and business as wine-making was. The animals’ milk was affected by soil and diet, as well as the additives used for coagulating the curds, the treatment of both curds and whey, and the salting, drying, and aging processes if any. As a result, Italians made a multitude of varieties of cheeses, with parmesan considered the best by French and Italians alike, followed by the Florentine ewe’s cheese marzolino, while southern Italy’s cow’s milk-based caciocavallo and Sicily’s salso found markets across the Mediterranean. See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Mezzadria; Retail Selling; Sheep and Wool Economy in the South; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Feasting and Fasting; Food Preservation; Foodsellers and Markets; Galenic Health Regimens; Tools for Cooking and Eating; Housing and Community: Sewage, Sewerage, and Public Sanitation; Villages and Village Life; Villas; Politics and Warfare: Firearms and Artillery; Recreation and Social Customs: Calendars: Sacred and Profane; Carnival; Noble Pursuits; Taverns and Inns; Religion and Beliefs: Jews and Judaism FURTHER READING Montanari, Massimo. Cheese, Pears and History in a Proverb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie. “Pregnancy and Poultry in Renaissance Italy.” Source 16 (1997): 3–9. Platina (Bartolomeo Sacchi, 1472). On Right Pleasure and Good Health. Edited and translated by Mary Ella Milham. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998.

NUTRITION: A MODERN ASSESSMENT The modern American is bombarded with messages regarding the relative value and dangers of the food he or she eats. Contemporary science weighs the positives and negatives of calories, vitamins, pesticides, growth hormones, organic growing

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conditions, genetic modification, fiber and fat content. Researchers, bureaucrats, and interest groups warn of the dangers of specific additives or of consuming too much or too little of certain nutrients. Some people follow every directive, while many simply ignore it all, chowing down on whatever they like or can afford. Renaissance-era men and women who could afford medical advice heard all about the relative values of their foods as well. Unfortunately the advice was in terms of Aristotelian food qualities and a body’s Galenic humors: avoid “cold and wet” foods; consume “hot and dry” ones; eat fruits and fish in moderation; and always keep the humors balanced. But from a modern perspective what were the advantages and dangers of Renaissance-era diets? In this brief overview we will outline caloric intake, balance of basic nutritional elements, vitamin availability and deficiency, and issues regarding food preparation and storage. The largest single factor in constructing a diet was the availability of various foods. In turn, this depended on other factors: income or wealth—the rich having access to much more and a much greater variety of foods than the poor; region—coastal zones were well provided with protein-rich fish, while folks at high altitudes substituted less nutritious acorn flour for wheat or other grain flour; season—late summer and fall usually saw the harvest of the widest range of fruits, vegetables, and grains, while late winter was starving time; and shortages of certain crops or of food in general due to weather, war, or other extraordinary events. Daily caloric intake provides a rough measure of a diet’s adequacy. Laborers need more and sedentary people need fewer calories to meet their bodies’ needs; other factors include age, sex, body size, pregnancy, and local climate. The tables of the wealthy probably provided daily calorie counts as high as 7,000 or 8,000, while the poverty-stricken may have gotten by with as few as 1,000. A study of Tuscany in 1427 concluded that across age groups and occupations the typical diets ran between 2,100 and 2,325 calories per day. Students in Padua around 1600 were provided with about 4,000 daily calories. As we are well aware, however, the sources of those calories are also important. Given Italy’s climate and soil conditions, Renaissance-era Italians under normal conditions had access to a variety of animal products, grains, vegetables, and some fruits. One rough estimate of nineteenth-century Italian diets, which were comparable to earlier ones, has 2,600-calories/day divided among animal products (10%) and plant products (90%); or carbohydrates (65%), fats (22%), and protein (13%). Another estimate of the Renaissance period’s “Mediterranean diet” divides 2,500–2,900 daily calories as follows: ½ kilogram of bread or cereals (1,250–1,600 cals), 100 grams of black olives (250 cals), 100 grams of cheese (400 cals), some locally available vegetables and wine (250–600 cals). While fruits played an important role in the diets of the wealthy, both custom and medical theory claimed they should be avoided by the physically cruder working classes, even those who grew them.

Food and Drink: Nutrition: A Modern Assessment

Clearly the majority of calories in the Italian diet came in the form of carbohydrates from cereals and bread. Detailed analyses of urban diets show daily consumption of these in the range of 700 to 800 kilograms. By comparison, the price for calories derived from meat products was quite high, and thus the accessibility of meat to laboring classes and the poor was low. Around 1600, when compared with prices of cereal products, Florentine prices for the same caloric value of hard cheese, eggs, or mutton were about 7 times as high, for beef 5 times, for lamb 13 times, and for 1,000 calories worth of veal one paid 17 times as much as for 1,000 calories of wheat or beans. Even so, in Palermo in the 1450s Sicilians consumed between 16 and 26 kilograms of meat per head per year and in “Bologna the Fat” in 1593 a whopping 46 kilograms. Undernutrition, especially in the provision of protein and vitamins, may cause many types of serious problems. Undernourished pregnant women put themselves and their babies at risk; undernourished infants and children may suffer stunted growth and a wide variety of developmental issues; and inadequate protein intake can lead to wasting and edema. Deficiencies in vitamin A (from meat products and beans) may cause vision problems, rickets, and anemia; in vitamin C (citrus and green vegetables) to scurvy and gum disease; and in vitamin B3 (animal products, whole wheat) can induce pellagra, digestive tract problems, and dementia. Lack of calcium from meat, dairy, or beans affects bone density; lack of iron from animal products and some vegetables can lead to anemia; and in women lack of folate from eggs, vegetables, or whole wheat may cause birth defects. Since most nutrients have more than one effective source, the poor person’s lack of meat or fruits could be balanced by other foods’ contributions, while the avoidance of vegetables by the wealthy was probably made up for with fruits and meat. The potential for poisoning or disease from poor preparation or storage of food also needs mentioning. Most, though not all, risks were to the digestive tract. Mishandling of chicken or eggs can foster salmonella; undercooked pork may cause trichinosis; rye stored in damp conditions can spawn ergot resulting in ergotism in people; and tainted water may carry many types of more or less dangerous microorganisms. Poorly cleaned vegetables could be affected by human or animal waste; and attempts to preserve fish or meats resulted in the growth of unhealthy bacteria, fungi, or parasites. See also: Family and Gender: Health and Illness; Food and Drink: Bread; Diet and Social Status; Drugs; Feasting and Fasting; Food Preservation; Fruits and Vegetables; Galenic Health Regimens; Hunger and Famine; Meats, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy; Wines; Housing and Community: Poverty and the Poor; Science and Technology: Agriculture and Agronomy; Diseases and Humoral Medicine

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The World of Renaissance Italy FURTHER READING Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine, and Society, 1450–1800. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Livi-Bacci, Massimo. Population and Nutrition: An Essay on European Demographic History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Poultry. See Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy

SALT AND PEPPER, HERBS AND SPICES Of the four terms in this article’s title only salt had anything to do with preserving Renaissance-era foods. It was used to cure, pickle, corn, and salt a variety of fish, meats, and vegetables, and in making cheese. The resulting sardines, brine-soaked pickles and olives, pork and beef products were considered low-class foods, and salty, in general a peasant flavor. Galenic medicine declared salt to be hot and dry, and therefore a corrective to fruit and an aid to digesting cold and moist meats and fish. Along with oil and vinegar salt was a standard ingredient in dressing a mixed salad whether one was pope or pauper. So important to the ancient Roman legions, salt (sal) was the basis of their salary. Where missing from the common diet people suffered from goiter and fluid balance diseases. Throughout Renaissance Italy governments controlled and taxed—the gabelle—salt and its importation. It was obtained from mines or by evaporating seawater in wide and shallow pans, a business that Venetians took to early on. By the 1350s they controlled the Adriatic sources and trade and actively fought against competitors. By retaining a near-monopoly as late as 1570 they could get an 80% profit on Adriatic sea salt in Italian markets. Pepper was the oldest and most generously used spice throughout most of the Renaissance era. By definition spices had to be imported—herbs were locally grown—and the ships of the seafaring republics of medieval Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice began the flow of the tropical product and its cousins from Constantinople and the Muslim ports of Egypt and the Arab Levant. They, in turn, had received their supplies, via caravans, from sources of origin in Indonesia, India, China, and the East coast of Africa. Spices had long been considered rich in medicinal properties, and this along with their contribution to culinary tastes gave them their very high value and ultimate price in Italian food markets and apothecary

Food and Drink: Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices

shops. They would never be used to cover the taste of spoiled or rancid foods, as some myths assert. Like salt, most spices were supposed to be hot and dry, and inclusion of them at the table helped balance some people’s “cold and moist” humoral natures as well as diets rich in cold and moist foods. Sophisticated cooks (and apothecaries) knew that spices fell along a four-step hotness grading scale (developed by the equally Galenic Arabs), and blended them accordingly: pepper was a four, cloves and cardamom a three, cinnamon, cumin, and nutmeg a two, and so on. Whether as a medicinal simple (single ingredient) or a culinary flavoring, spices were an expensive luxury and limited to the wealthy, or at least well-off, in city and country. Published cookbooks and menus provide some clues as to how cooks blended and used spices. Fourteenth-century Venetian patricians favored distinctive mixes such as the sweet—one part each bay leaf, cinnamon flowers, and ginger, and one-quarter part cloves—and the strong—one-eighth part cloves to one long pepper and two parts each nutmeg and black pepper. Ships’ cargo and market records are scarce but testify to a decline across the fifteenth century in certain very hot spices such as spikenard, cubebs, long pepper, galangal, grains of paradise, and mace, in favor of spices with a sweeter and more aromatic effect, such as ginger, cloves, and cinnamon. In fact, pepper gave way to ginger as a fundamental flavor, only to return in the later sixteenth century. In general, recipes show that the open-handed use of spices of the early Renaissance era declined in the sixteenth century, from about the 1520s. In Cristoforo Messisbugo’s 1549 collection of over 300 Lombard regional recipes from the Ferrara court, 82% used spices, including cinnamon, saffron, pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and coriander. A bit later, of Giovanni del Turco’s recipes, 72% utilized spices, and these were predominantly pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and saffron. The heavy use of spices had always been an ostentatious display of wealth, and as the relative price of spices dropped, their social value may have as well. Some historians also credit a decline in Galenism and its influence on humoral considerations, and others a shift in taste toward the foundational foods and away from flavorings, as among the contemporary French. Herbs for both medicinal and culinary use were readily available in local wild patches, gardens, and at urban markets and apothecaries. During the Renaissance, and perhaps earlier, cooks and apothecaries found that garden-grown varieties generally had both finer and more consistent qualities than wild ones, and urban window boxes and even peasant plots often gave space to a few of the basics. Leaves, seeds, flowers, and some roots were used for subtle flavors in cooked and raw dishes. Cookbooks regularly mention mint, marjoram, parsley, sage, rosemary, and dill, and less frequently basil, bay, catnip, thyme, and, oddly, oregano. Certain wild flowers served the same purpose: borage, violets, fennel, and elder, among

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others. In the early 1600s Ludovico Castelvetro categorized herbs by their savor: for example “sweet” herbs included parsley, Swiss chard, mint, borage, marjoram, basil, and thyme. Garlic shoots and especially the bulb itself, like onions and leeks, were widely considered peasant food, in part because of their strong, acrid flavor and aroma, but also because the edible bulbs grew underground. Professional chefs, however, found that they could “ennoble” the lowborn plants. By pairing them with “noble” meat both were enhanced. While human taste buds may not have changed much over the past 500 years, the acceptability of certain combinations of flavors has. Modern editors or translators of medieval and Renaissance-era cookbooks routinely warn American cooks against replicating the original program of spices. Indeed, as some contemporary accounts attest, chefs prepared some dishes to be smelled and seen, not eaten, especially at their extravagant banquets. See also: Economics and Work: Apothecaries; Spice Trade; Trade, Seaborne; Fashion and Appearance: Scents and Perfumes; Food and Drink: Diet and Social Status; Feasting and Fasting; Galenic Health Regimens; Literature of Food and Cooking; Housing and Community: Gardens; Villas; Religion and Beliefs: Witches and Sorcerers FURTHER READING Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine, and Society, 1450–1800. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Montanari, Massimo. Food Is Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Stannard, Jerry. Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1999. Van Wyck, Ben-Erik. Culinary Herbs and Spices of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Spices. See Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices

SUGAR AND CONFECTED SWEETS Until the later Middle Ages Europe’s sweet tooth was to be satisfied solely with honey, certain naturally sweet fruits, and combinations of both. From the fourteenth century that all changed with the stable importation of cane sugar. As cookbooks

Food and Drink: Sugar and Confected Sweets

demonstrate, sugar became one of the era’s most versatile flavorings and artistic media. Sugarcane had its origins in the Bengal region of India. Ships and caravans brought it to the Muslim ports of the eastern Mediterranean, from which Italian galleys imported it through Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. It was long considered a medicinal spice rather than food, and was a staple ingredient in viscous or liquid compounds known as electuaries and syrops. The Arabs considered sugar to be humorally hot and moist, good for the blood, and excellent at disguising the taste of other less pleasant medicines. Italian apothecaries alone first sold sugar and its medicinal derivatives. By 1350 Arabs were growing cane in Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus (which became Venetian in 1479), and they had begun cultivating it in Sicily. Already in 1379 Venice’s wealthiest family, the Corner brothers, had extensive sugar estates in Cyprus that were irrigated by canals and worked by Arab serfs and slaves. By the mid-1400s one plantation alone had 400 laborers. The Corners developed a model vertical enterprise, in which they controlled all of the steps in growing, refining, and marketing sugar. The cane’s sweet fluid had to be drained by crushing. The fluid was boiled and poured into conical forms for drying, and was shipped as cone-shaped “loaves.” These were then broken into granulated crystals, and if demanded, pulverized into fine whitish powder. Soon, other Venetian and Genoese companies were cultivating cane on Cyprus, Rhodes, Malta, and Crete. Sugar cultivation utilizing slave labor soon appeared in Madeira (1430s) and the Canary Islands, and from there Spaniards took it to the Caribbean and Portuguese to Brazil in Columbus’s wake. The market repaid the higher costs of importing tropical sugar from India and American colonies because it was sweeter. This was due to a growing season that was longer than the Mediterranean’s. Up to the 1470s sugar sold at about ten times the price of wheat, which made all of this expansion economical. Inevitably, from roughly 1470 to the 1520s the market price fell by half, even as demand rose. Between the 1520s and 1600, however, exploding demand and the loss of Italian Mediterranean sugar colonies to the Turks drove the price back up some 300%. By the mid-1400s sugar had emerged as a foodstuff, and by 1500 it had replaced honey as a sweetener in Italian cookbooks. In his cookbook of 1470 papal courtier Platina wrote, “There is no food that rejects sugar.” In general, honey descended to become the “sugar” of the poor and peasant. Two-thirds of recorded fifteenth-century southern Italian recipes required sugar, and the trend moved northward. Renaissance-era cooks combined basic tastes such as sweet, sour, hot, and savory in the same dish. Cookbooks for the nobility—the lower classes had none—routinely combined sugar or sweet fruit products with dishes such as vegetable soups or fish, as well as meat and fowl, in sauces and thickened puddings, and

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with leafy vegetables. Recipes often paired cinnamon and sugar, making these two of the most common flavors in elite sixteenth-century cooking. The well-dressed table also held a bowl of granulated sugar to cater to individual tastes. “Confection” at root merely means “something made,” but as confetti in Italian, it came to mean “made with sugar.” Certain spices, nuts, and fruits, especially less naturally sweet fruits, were coated in granulated sugar. Sugar was used in preserving fruits as jams, marmalades, and compotes, and in almond paste-based marzipan and many types of nougat. Countless varieties of sweet pastries and cookies resulted from adding sugar to dough, especially when enriched with eggs, nuts, dried fruit bits, and other ingredients. Many of these became regional specialties, often reserved for special seasons such as Christmas or Lent. During a banquet, however, diners had a constant supply of confections, which were only limited by custom (dessert) during the seventeenth century. In descriptions of banquets from the later fifteenth century the sugary treats that stand out were not the cloying sauces or even clever confections, but the sculptures in sugar that became all but mandatory. Banquet administrators discovered that sugar paste could be molded and dried like clay or gesso, but had the advantage of a sparkling crystalline surface. Literally any three-dimensional shape could be created by molding or sculpting, and these figures could be painted, clothed, or even gilded. The earliest detailed description (1475) is from the Malatesta court of Rimini and mentions a Petrarch-inspired “triumph” or pageant float drawn by sugary horses and elephants and carrying cupids to the Tempio Malatestiana, the dynasty’s church. A banquet in 1529 at Ercole (Hercules) d’Este’s court featured two-foot high painted and gilded figures depicting all Twelve Labors of Hercules. A scene in a sixteenth-century novel by Celio Malaspini reflected an actual banquet at which every bit of the table setting—tablecloth, napkins, plates, silver—was molded sugar, to be consumed when the meal was over. The Medici rulers of Florence employed Mannerist sculptor Giambologna to create the figures for their wedding of 1600, and his assistant Pietro Tacca for that of 1608. The latter featured counterfeits of 40 of Tuscany’s most famous statues (whether life-size or not was not indicated). The Venetians, not to be outdone when it came to sugar, had the architect Sansovino design 300 gilded figures for the celebration of the state visit of French king Henri III in 1574. They were accompanied by 1,200 confections of almond paste and pistachios. See also: Family and Gender: Families, Noble and Patrician; Fashion and Appearance: Sumptuary Laws; Food and Drink: Conduct at Table; Diet and Social Status; Feasting and Fasting; Fruits and Vegetables; Galenic Health Regimens; Housing and Community: Palazzi; Villas; Recreation and Social Customs: Weddings

Food and Drink: Tools for Cooking and Eating FURTHER READING Albala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Cohen, Elizabeth S. “Miscarriages of Apothecary Justice: Un-Separate Spaces of Work and Family in Early Modern Rome.” Renaissance Studies 21 (2007): 480–504. Krondl, Michael. Sweet Invention: A  History of Dessert. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011. Watson, Katharine. “Sugar Sculpture for Grand Ducal Weddings from the Giambologna Workshop.” Connoisseur 199 (1978): 20–26.

TOOLS FOR COOKING AND EATING As in other aspects of life, the tools available to a cook depended on his or her wealth, status, and occupation. Though a discussion of this sort carves out large categories of urban and rural or rich and poor, it is important to note that households and families lived along a scale of material wealth. Though well-off Renaissance-era Italians had many implements for preparing and cooking foods of all kinds, the majority at the poorer end made do with a few necessities. It was the same at table, though among the upper classes changes over time in customs and tableware influenced one another, eventually creating new demands for dishes and utensils. Despite such changes these things were passed along in wills, whose household inventories provide excellent sources regarding what people had and how many of each. Of course, those who sold their prepared foods used whatever tools were necessary and available. In the countryside, even the poorest households were counted for tax purposes as fuochi, fires or hearths. A pot or covered kettle made of iron or another metal hung suspended over the fire by a hook. This served many cooking purposes, though even the embers themselves were used as a kind of crude oven. A second piece of cookware might be a flat griddle, skillet, or saucepan held by its long handle over the fire. A family with access to meat would have a metal spit braced by two supports on either side of the fire. One or two knives for skinning, cutting, slicing, and chopping would be highly prized, kept sharp by itinerant grinders or the local blacksmith. A few bowls or basins and simple versions of strainers, colanders, graters, and a mortar and pestle would further serve in preparing foods. The mortar was the Renaissance-era food processor, used for grinding or mashing all manner of ingredients. Food was served with a large fork and spoon or ladle into communal dishes—flat platters and bowls—made of wood or inexpensive terra-cotta. Most foods were consumed directly from the serving dishes, though a slice of older bread

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could serve as a trencher onto which portions were served. A pitcher and one or two communal drinking vessels made of wood, tin, or baked clay served the family and guests alike. Food storage was a matter of wicker baskets or bins, wooden boxes or casks, covered pottery jars, and skin bags for fluids such as vinegar or olive oil. The aim was much less to keep foods fresh than to keep pests out. As families rose in wealth their cooking space became more specialized (the kitchen), the wall-inset fireplace replaced the firepit, and the spit was fancier and used more frequently. They could afford a greater variety of pots and pans, some made of copper, and more useful tools such as a whisk and tongs. Their mortar and pestle might have been of brass instead of wood or soapstone, and their knives and bowls more numerous and varied. Customs changed across Italy at varying rates, faster in northern cities and more slowly in the south, but by the later fifteenth century or so an acceptable table had individual place settings of a plate (tin, pewter, or ceramic), drinking vessel (increasingly of mass-produced Altara glass from Liguria), spoon, and iron knife (often with the tip rounded to discourage jabbing food or people). The plate and knife at each place meant diners could now cut up portions of meat at the table. A pointed knifepoint could skewer the morsel; if not, fingers had to do until forks became popular. These have a unique history. Long acceptable as carving and serving utensils, as aids to eating they first appeared in Italy among the Byzantines and became associated with the Greeks and their religious schism with the Catholic Church. For some it was even sinful to eat with one: composer Claudio Monteverdi is said to have paid for three Masses to be said after each occasion he used a schismatic fork in company. Even so, Renaissance-era Italians took to them, especially for pasta, so that a sixteenth-century French traveler remarked that unlike the Germans and French, upper-class Italians insisted on individual forks at table. In the grand household, food presentation to visitors was a matter of honor or even tool of state and not just a matter of hospitality. Cooking and serving at this level was not the wife or servant’s job, but the professional responsibility of a crew of male specialists. Papal chef Bartolomeo Scappi spent a good deal of his cookbook and many of its illustrations on the layout and organization of the papal kitchen and the long list of the finest implements and cooking vessels a pope could buy. Cauldrons over fires still contained the menus’ soups and stews, but multiple cooking surfaces and ovens added to the kitchen’s potential output. Tastes and sheer number of mouths made new demands for extended surfaces and more specialized tools for preparing pastries, containers for storing ingredients—including expensive spices—and both prep and cooking spaces for dishes as large as a horse. As for the dining room (or rooms) ostentation was not for banquets alone. Murano glassware, polished silver platters, and ceramic tureens from China gleamed from sideboards, and guests used the most up-to-date dinnerware and utensils anywhere

Food and Drink: Wines

in Europe. Not to be outdone by princes or cardinals, Roman banker Agostino Chigi famously served a banquet on silver dishes, which he had his guests toss into the Tiber River at meal’s end. Unseen but well-placed nets caught the treasure, which he no doubt used another day. Or so the story goes. See also: Arts: Ceramics, Decorative; Daily Life in Art; Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork; Economics and Work: Retail Selling; Family and Gender: Heraldry; Food and Drink: Conduct at Table; Feasting and Fasting; Literature of Food and Cooking; Housing and Community: Furnishing the House; Palazzi; Villages and Village Life; Villas; Science and Technology: Glassmaking FURTHER READING Cohen, Elizabeth S., and Thomas V. Cohen. Daily Life in Renaissance Italy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Liefkes, Reino. “Tableware.” In Marta Ajmar-Wolheim and Flora Dennis, eds. At Home in Renaissance Italy. London: V&A Museum, 2006, pp. 254–66. Scappi, Bartolomeo. The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi: L’arte et prudenza d’un maestro cuoco / The Art and Craft of a Master Cook (1570). Translated and edited by Terence Scully. Toronto: University of Toronto University Press, 2011. [See bibliography for additional translated sources.] Taylor, Valerie. “Banquet Plate and Renaissance Culture: A Day in the Life.” In Roberta Olson and Patricia Reilly, eds. The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2006, pp. 41–53.

Vegetables. See Fruits and Vegetables

WINES Along with bread and perhaps olive oil, wine (vino) was and is the quintessential Mediterranean staple. It was as fundamental to the Eucharist at a papal Mass as it was to an Italian peasant’s table. Grape vines grew nearly everywhere on the peninsula, and even peasants could squeeze them into nooks and crannies. Making wine from the grapes was as basic as crushing the fruit, allowing the juice—and possibly the skins and some of the pulp—to ferment under more or less controlled conditions, and straining the resulting fluid when finished. The fermenting was a form of preservation of the grape harvest, as was drying grapes into raisins. The wine was stored in barrels large and small until being decanted into pitchers (boccali) and drunk, or it turned to vinegar with age and was used in cooking and on salads. Wine that was beginning to turn

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might have its unpleasant musty or acrid flavor covered with added spices such as cloves, nutmeg, or cinnamon, or honey or sugar. Wine was bulky and generally did not travel well, and the vast majority of Italian wine was consumed locally, the best being sold to the nearest market or retained by the landlord. The best of the best, however, might be shipped to distant customers (dukes, popes, doges, Neapolitan viceroys), or as gifts or bribes. Certain northern regions, such as Friuli, Istria, Brescia, and Vicenza routinely exported their finer vintages to Germany, and the best Neapolitan wines were often found in Spain. Conversely, Italians imported Spanish and Aegean reds, and whites from the Rhineland. Renaissance-era Italian writers recognized five principal qualities of unaltered wine: red or white (a matter of including the skin during fermentation); sweet or dry (depending on how much of the natural sugar was turned to alcohol); and smoothness, or what a modern connoisseur would call finish. The same batch of grapes might produce a red or white, sweet or dry wine, depending on how the crushed fruit was handled. But the same variety of grape treated the same way was subject to other factors as well, including the nature of the soil, elevation, and the weather conditions during the growing season. Soils might be sandy or heavy with clay, terraced on hillsides or flat, high in mountains or near sea level, rich with nutrients or lacking these, acidic or alkali, and so on. The growing season might be cold and wet or hot and dry. Also, the vines themselves might be young, mature, or quite old. All of these factors affected the flavors of the grapes and the resulting varieties and vintages of wines. The age of a batch of wine (younger was better), whether it had been watered down, and its level of alcohol also affected quality and value. The fourteenth-century Spanish Book of Wines, which went through 21 editions in several languages, listed 49 varieties of medicinal wines. During the same century a Bolognese specialist catalogued over 20 varieties of local Italian wines. In the 1550s the popes’ “bottle master” classified and discussed 55 Italian varieties in the papal cellars, evaluating them on color, texture, taste, and aroma. He ranked the Tuscan red Montepulciano highest. In general, white wines tended to be associated with the upper classes, while reds satisfied the rest. In Genoa, an official inspected all incoming wines at the gate and segregated them into the best, which were reserved for the patricians’ choice, and the rest, which went to market. Cookbooks routinely suggest cooking with wine, especially to help soften tough meats in stews, but also as a flavoring in sauces and even pastries. Physicians argued about wine’s humoral qualities, but all agreed it had two sides. It was excellent for dissolving and flavoring medicines and itself had medicinal properties: for example, sweet wines best treated melancholics. It also, however, led to diseases such as dropsy, gout, and vertigo, and behavioral problems such as laziness, dishonesty, and anger when consumed regularly in large quantities. Drunkenness,

Food and Drink: Wines

especially in public, was associated with members of the higher classes, as was drinking as entertainment, and both laws and Christian culture fought against it. Nonetheless, perhaps inspired by Platonic academies, in the sixteenth century elite drinking clubs such as Milan’s Accademia della Valle di Bregno or Rome’s Accademia dei Vignaiuoli (vine-dressers) emerged, at which the boozy poetry of Naple’s Giovanni Pontano and the Venetian Jacopo Sannazaro was celebrated. Poet Giovanni Battista Scarlino wrote of sixteenth-century Rome’s many offerings, borrowing Dante’s terza rima and even suggesting some appropriate food pairings. It seems that wealthy Romans especially favored Cretan Malvolgia, sweet Moscatello, Trebbiano, and Neapolitan Greco.

Aperitifs and Cordials Altering wines for medicinal or digestive purposes originated with monastic cellarers and apothecaries. This usually meant reducing the amount of water and thereby raising the alcohol level per unit. Distilling wine and capturing the alcohol, as was done in northern Europe with brandy (“burnt wine”), produced the strong Italian aquavit (water of life), considered both medicine and beverage. Other typical Italian products were ros solis (sun dew), vin santo (holy wine), grappa, and defrutum, which was wine cooked down to half its volume, resulting in a heavy, dark, strong “fortified” wine. Usually these were—and are—drunk before meals to aid digestion.

At table everyone consumed wine, children included. At Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in the fourteenth century 20% of the food budget went to wine. Studies have shown consumption levels of ½ to 2 liters per day, or annual average levels of 260–270 liters per adult in Renaissance Italy’s major cities. Rome imported 7,000,000 liters annually in the sixteenth century through its port alone, while millions more arrived by cart. Hundreds of Roman wine shops and bars served locals and visitors by the cup, glass, or pitcher, as did inns and taverns that also sold food. In every Italian town household wine was bought by the cask or barrel; bottling was yet to come. Wine tended to be diluted at the table or drunk with water or ice, and even good wines were often flavored with all sorts of things, from fruits (like Spanish sangria) to honey, spices, sandalwood, and licorice. It might be chilled in a stream, or heated with a red-hot iron poker from the fire. While other beverages such as beer and fruit-based cider and perry were available, especially in rural areas, wine was always the default drink, for both daily consumption and on special occasions.

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See also: Arts: Daily Life in Art; Economics and Work: Mezzadria; Food and Drink: Conduct at Table; Food Preservation; Fruits and Vegetables; Galenic Health Regimens; Literature of Food and Cooking; Housing and Community: Villa; Villages and Village Life; Recreation and Social Customs: Drunkenness; Weddings; Religion and Beliefs: Sacraments, Catholic; Science and Technology: Agriculture and Agronomy; Alchemy; Glassmaking; Primary Document: Wine and Patronage: Giovanni Boccaccio. “Cisti’s Wine.” Decameron (1349) FURTHER READING Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine, and Society, 1450–1800. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Jaboulet-Vercherre, Azélina. The Physician, the Drinker, and the Drunk: Wine’s Uses and Abuses in Late Medieval Natural Philosophy. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014. Varriano, John. Wine: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2010.

The World of Renaissance Italy

Recent Titles in Daily Life Encyclopedias The World of Ancient Rome: A Daily Life Encyclopedia James W. Ermatinger The World of the Civil War: A Daily Life Encyclopedia Lisa Tendrich Frank, Editor The World of the American Revolution: A Daily Life Encyclopedia Merril D. Smith, Editor The World of Ancient Egypt: A Daily Life Encyclopedia Peter Lacovara The World of the American West: A Daily Life Encyclopedia, Two Volumes Gordon Morris Bakken, Editor

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HOUSING AND COMMUNITY TO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The World of Renaissance Italy A Daily Life Encyclopedia

Joseph P. Byrne

Copyright © 2017 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The editors and publishers will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Byrne, Joseph Patrick, editor Title: The world of renaissance Italy / Joseph P. Byrne. Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO,   2017. | Series: Daily life encyclopedia | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016048380 | ISBN 9781440829598 (hardcover: alk. paper) |   ISBN 9781440829604 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440846311 (volume 1) |   ISBN 9781440846328 (volume 2) Subjects: LCSH: Renaissance—Italy. | Italy—Civilization—1268–1559. Classification: LCC DG445 .B96 2017 | DDC 945/.05—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048380 ISBN: 978-1-4408-2959-8 (Set) ISBN: 978-1-4408-4631-1 (Volume 1) ISBN: 978-1-4408-4632-8 (Volume 2) EISBN: 978-1-4408-2960-4 21 20 19 18 17   1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. Greenwood An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

VOLUME 1 Preface, xv Introduction, xvii Chronology, xxiii Acknowledgments, xxvii Arts, 1 Introduction, 1 Antiquity, Cult of, 3 Art, Courtly, 6 Art, Sacred, 9 Art Patronage, 12 Ceramics, Decorative, 15 Daily Life in Art, 18 Dance, Courtly, 20 Dante in Popular Culture, 22 Goldsmithing and Fine Metalwork, 25 Music at Church, 28 Music at Court, 31 Musical Instruments, 33 Non-Europeans in Art, 36 Novella, 39 Painters and Their Workshops, 42 Painting: Media and Techniques, 45 Perspective in the Visual Arts, 48 Pietre Dure and Intarsia, 50 Portraits, 53 v

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Prints: Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings, 56 Sculpture, 59 Theater for the Elite, 61 Women and the Arts, 64 Women Poets and Their Poetry, 67 Economics and Work, 71 Introduction, 71 Accounting, 73 Apothecaries, 76 Apprentices, 79 Banks and Banking, 81 Book Printing and Sales, 84 Cloth Trade, 87 Clothmaking, 89 Coins, Coinage, and Money, 92 Construction, Building, 95 Credit and Loans, 98 Grain Trade, 100 Guilds, 102 Imported Goods, Sources of, 106 Manufacturing, 108 Mezzadria, 110 Notaries, 113 Putting-Out System, 115 Retail Selling, 118 Sheep and Wool Economy in the South, 121 Slaves and Slavery, 124 Spice Trade, 126 Taxes and Public Finance, 128 Trade, Seaborne, 131 Trade Routes, Overland, 134 Wages and Prices, 136 Women in the Labor Force, 138 Family and Gender, 141 Introduction, 141 Birth and Midwives, 144 Childhood, 147 Death, Funerals, and Burial, 150 Divorce, Separation, and Annulment, 152

Contents

Dowries, 155 Education of Children, 157 Espousal and Wedding, 160 Families, Laboring Class, 163 Families, Noble and Patrician, 165 Fertility, Conception, and Contraception, 168 Fostering, Step Children, and Adoption, 171 Health and Illness, 173 Heraldry, 176 Homosexuality and Sodomy, 179 Infancy, Nursing, and Wet Nursing, 182 Inheritance, 184 Last Wills and Testaments, 186 Names, Personal and Family, 189 Old Age, 192 Pregnancy, 195 Servants, Household, 197 Siblings, 201 Virtù and Honor, 203 Widows, 206 Wives and Husbands, 209 Fashion and Appearance, 213 Introduction, 213 Art, Fashion in, 215 Attire, Children, 218 Attire, Female, 220 Attire, Male, 223 Bathing and Personal Hygiene, 226 Cosmetics, 229 Court, Fashion at, 231 Dyes and Dyestuffs, 234 Fabrics, Domestic, 236 Fabrics, Imported, 238 Facial Hair, 240 Gems and Jewelry, 243 Hair and Hairstyles, 246 Headgear, 249 Laundry, 252 Literature on Dress, 254 Livery, 257

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Mouth and Teeth, 260 Religious Habits and Vestments, 261 Scents and Perfumes, 264 Shoes and Footwear, 266 Social Status and Clothing, 269 Sumptuary Laws, 271 Tailors and Seamstresses, 274 Underclothing, 277 Food and Drink, 281 Introduction, 281 Bread, 283 Civic Fountains and Potable Water, 287 Conduct at Table, 289 Diet and Social Status, 291 Drugs, 294 Eating Out, 297 Feasting and Fasting, 299 Food Preservation, 302 Foodsellers and Markets, 305 Foreign Foods, 307 Fruits and Vegetables, 310 Galenic Health Regimens, 313 Grains and the Wheat Market, 316 Hunger and Famine, 319 Literature of Food and Cooking, 321 Meat, Fowl, Fish, Eggs, and Dairy, 324 Nutrition: A Modern Assessment, 327 Salt and Pepper, Herbs and Spices, 330 Sugar and Confected Sweets, 332 Tools for Cooking and Eating, 335 Wines, 337 VOLUME 2 Contents, v Housing and Community, 341 Introduction, 341 Barbers and Surgeons, 343 City Streets and Piazze, 346

Contents

Death in the Community, 349 Foreign Communities, 352 Furnishing the House, 355 Gardens, 358 Health Commissions and Boards, 361 Hospitals and Orphanages, 363 Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes, 366 Jewish Communities, 369 Neighborhood and Parish, 372 Palazzi, 375 Patronage, 379 Physicians, 381 Plague, 384 Poor, Aid to, 387 Poverty and the Poor, 390 Prisons, 392 Quacks, Charlatans, and Medical Empirics, 394 Sewage, Sewerage, and Public Sanitation, 397 Transportation, Local, 399 Villages and Village Life, 402 Villas, 404 Violence within the Household and Community, 407 Water, 410 Politics and Warfare, 413 Introduction, 413 Alliances and Treaties, 416 Ambassadors and Diplomacy, 418 Armies, 421 Arms and Armor, 423 Art, Civic, 426 Citizenship, 428 City Halls, 430 Civic Magistracies and Offices, 434 Contado and Subject Towns, 436 Crime and Punishments, 439 Exile and Exiles, 442 Firearms and Artillery, 445 Fortresses and Fortifications, 448 Guelfs and Ghibellines and Other Political Factions, 450 Mercenaries, 452

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Monarchies, Duchies, and Marquisates, 456 Navies and Naval Warfare, 458 Rebellions and Revolts, 460 Republics, 463 Soldiers, 466 Urban Councils and Assemblies, 469 Urban Public Safety, 472 War and Civilians, 474 War in Italy, 1494–1559, 477 War in Italy to 1494, 479 Recreation and Social Customs, 483 Introduction, 483 Calendars: Sacred and Profane, 485 Carnival, 488 Children’s Toys and Games, 491 Church Festivals and Processions, 493 Civic Festivals, 496 Courtesans, Prostitutes, and the Sex Trade, 499 Drunkenness, 502 Executions, 504 Gambling, 507 Games and Pastimes, 509 Madness, 512 Music and Dance in Popular Culture, 514 News, 517 Noble Pursuits, 520 Pets, 523 Pornography and Erotica, 525 Reading, 528 Songs and Singing, Popular, 531 Sports, Contests, and Competitions, 534 Street Entertainment, 537 Taverns and Inns, 539 Theater, Popular, 542 Theater, Religious, 545 Weddings, 548 Women, Letters, and Letter Writing, 551

Contents

Religion and Beliefs, 555 Introduction, 555 Bible, 558 Chapels, 561 Christian Art in the Home, 563 Churches, 566 Clergy, Catholic, 570 Confraternities, 573 Council of Trent and Catholic Reform, 575 Crucifix, 578 Demons, the Devil, and Exorcisms, 580 Friars, 583 Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, 586 Inquisitions, 588 Jews and Judaism, 590 Magic, 593 Mary, Cult of, 596 Memorials Ex Voto, 599 Monks and Monasteries, 601 Nuns and Nunneries, 603 Pilgrims and Shrines, 606 Preachers and Preaching, 609 Prophecy and Apocalypticism, 612 Protestantism, 615 Sacramentals, 617 Sacraments, Catholic, 620 Saints and Their Cults, 623 Witches and Sorcerers, 626 Women Mystics, 629 Science and Technology, 633 Introduction, 633 Academies, 636 Agriculture and Agronomy, 639 Alchemy, 641 Anatomy and Dissection, 644 Astrology, 647 Astronomy before Copernicus, 649

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Botany and Botanical Illustration, 652 Collecting and Collections, 655 Disease and Humoral Medicine, 657 Glassmaking, 660 Libraries, 663 Machines and Engines, 666 Maps and Mapmaking, 668 Medical Education, 671 Metallurgy, 674 Navigational Tools, 676 Pharmacopeias and Materia Medica, 679 Plague Treatises and Consilia, 681 Printing, 683 Secrets, Books of, 687 Ships and Shipbuilding, 689 Surgery, 691 Technical Illustration, 694 Timekeeping, 697 Tools, 699 Universities, 702 Primary Documents Arts, 707 The Artist as a Young Man: Cennino Cennini. “Vocational Advice to a Budding Painter.” Craftsman’s Handbook [Il Libro dell’arte] (c. 1410), 707 The Renaissance Stage: Sebastiano Serlio. “A Venetian Architect on Designing Stage Scenery.” Second Book of Architecture (1545), 709 Economics and Work, 711 Tuscan Landlords and Peasants: A Mezzadria Contract from Lucca (c. 1350) and a Landowner’s Memorandum (c. 1410), 711 The Merchant’s Inventory: Luca Pacioli. “What an Inventory Is and How to Make It.” The Rules of Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Particularis de computis et scripturis (1494), 713 Family and Gender, 717 Early Fifteenth-Century Households, Housewives, and Servants: Francesco Barbaro. “On Running the Venetian Patrician Household.” On Wifely Duties (1416), 717 A Future Pope’s Letter to His Father on His Own Paternity: Letter of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini to Silvio Piccolomini (1443), 719 Fashion and Appearance, 721 Venetian Sumptuary Laws (1304–1512), 721 Of Gowns, Housegowns, and Dirty Laundry: Letters of Margherita Datini to Her Husband, Francesco Datini (1397–1398), 723

Contents

Food and Drink, 725 Wine and Patronage: Giovanni Boccaccio. “Cisti’s Wine.” Decameron (1353), 725 A Fifteenth-Century Physician’s Dietary and Medical Regimen: Ugo Benzi. Physician’s Consilium #91 (1482), 727 Housing and Community, 730 Florence’s Old Market in the Later Fourteenth Century: Antonio Pucci. “The Character of the Mercato Vecchio in Florence” (c. 1380s), 730 Awaiting the Executioner: Florentine Writer Luca della Robbia on the Death Vigil and Death of His Friend Pietro Pagolo Boscoli (1513), 733 Politics and Warfare, 735 Crime and Punishment in Florence: Luca Landucci’s Diary (1465–1497), 735 The Attempted Assassination of Florentine Leader Lorenzo de’Medici: Niccolò Machiavelli. “The Failed Conspiracy of 1478” (1526), 737 Recreation and Social Customs, 740 The Festival of St. John in Florence: Gregorio (Goro) Dati. History of Florence (c. 1410), 740 The Wedding of Lorenzo il Magnifico: Letter of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici to Filippo Strozzi the Elder (1469), 742 Religion and Beliefs, 744 A Fifteenth-Century Venetian Merchant’s Understanding of the Mass: Zibaldone da Canal, a Venetian Merchant’s Manual (1422), 744 Testimony before the Inquisition against a Witch: Costanza’s “Diabolical Works” as Recounted before the Inquisition in Modena (1518), 746 Science and Technology, 748 A Metallurgist on Alchemy: Vannoccio Biringuccio. Pirotechnia (1540), 748 The Popes’ Book Collection: Michel du Montaigne. Visit to the Papal Library. Travel Journal (1581), 750

Appendix: Popes and European Rulers (1350–1600), 753 General Bibliography, 759 Index, 767

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HOUSING AND COMMUNITY

INTRODUCTION Community meant many things in Renaissance-era Italy. It could consist of the folks in a village, one’s fellow Franciscans or cloistered nuns, worshippers at the parish church, brothers in its confraternity; members of the same guild, fellow Hungarians; neighbors in the same quarter, or political allies. Community had a spatial element, too: the rural village, monastery, parish, neighborhood, ethnic ­enclave, or the area bounded by the city’s walls. Few, perhaps only nuns, belonged to but one community; most belonged to several. These were sources of identity, honor, income, security, and safety and good health. Second only to one’s family, communities defined and shaped the individual. Just as modern America presents a full spectrum of residential arrangements from obscenely lavish mansions to cardboard boxes under overpasses, so too Italians inhabited a wide range of quarters, from grand villas and palazzi to a bed in a charity hospital. The Renaissance era was a time of complicated and often conflicting social norms. On the one hand, humanist and even chivalric influences emphasized magnificence in lifestyle. This spread beyond oneself to benefit the honor and reputation of the community at large. Cosimo de’Medici the Elder could hardly deny his rival the right to construct a palazzo grander than his own since imposing structures added to the city’s greatness. On the other hand, Christian charity insisted that God’s less fortunate be cared for by the Christian community, and so foundling homes, orphanages, hospitals, and charitable residences of all types were founded and run with the gifts of the same wealthy whose palazzi graced the city. Italian communities were dedicated to both secular magnificence and to the fruits of spiritually induced charity. Honor was bound up with how one spent money and how one gave it away.

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In his View of an Ideal City (1477), Sienese architect, engineer, and painter Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501) imagines a Platonically perfect cityscape. It is clean and clear, spatially marked by the perspectival grid ground pattern, and seamlessly joining the docks beyond. Tempera on panel. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

For the people in the middle, a residence could mean a nasty room in a boarding house, a set of rooms attached to one’s workshop, a sturdy house in the countryside, or a suite in one’s family’s palazzo. As much as clothing did, residences reflected social status, and a personal history of residences spoke to one’s desire to succeed in the eyes of society. If the elite were born at society’s apex and the destitute had few exit strategies from poverty, the middling class of artisans, young professionals, skilled laborers, well-off peasants, and second and third sons could often rise within the status group to achieve comfortable lodging, reasonable incomes, moderate wealth, and honor in their peers’ eyes. Community also meant preservation of health. Community and Church organizations provided food, shelter, and medical care to the living, and burial of the dead. Cities provided community physicians who treated all comers at no cost. During epidemics cities hired physicians and surgeons to treat victims. Colleges (professional organizations) of physicians came to oversee medical practitioners of all kinds and advised rulers and civic authorities on medical matters. Dukes and city councils appointed health commissions during plague time to advise them of needed measures and laws. Eventually these took on lives of their own, controlling health legislation and policing across Italy. Sixteenth-century cities and their subcommunities built more hospitals, regulated more health care providers, and provided more food than ever before. It was also the century that saw the poor gathered up and Jews locked away in ghettos. Maintaining public health came to mean many things, and became a community’s responsibility. Perhaps this should read: “the state’s responsibility.”

Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons

The study of housing and communities in Italy during the Italian Renaissance era involves an extremely broad range of sources, at least for the larger cities. Many of the major public buildings are still standing, as are palaces and villas from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even a few later fourteenth-century private palazzi remain in something like their original condition, such as the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence or Prato’s Palazzo Datini. Tuscan and Umbrian hill towns retain many of their Renaissance-era features, so that a visit or even a set of photographs can place one in the urban environment of 500 years ago. Contemporary images, too, play their part in explaining how furnished rooms, a piazza filled with revelers, or the gardens of a villa looked at the time. The age of technical drawing was just beginning, so house plans and maps on various scales provide details and overviews that one may trust for accuracy. Travel guides and city prints introduce us to Venice’s six sestieri (quarters), 72 contrade (neighborhoods), 44 monasteries, and 450 public and private bridges. Printed books on architecture show and discuss what was and what some dreamed there would be. Documentary evidence abounds, from probate inventories that list and sometimes value every possession that filled a house or shop to personal diaries and memoires that add the dynamism of change over time. Laws of all sorts helped shape the built and social environments, from banning architectural overhangs to relocating smelly tanneries. Personal letters and other descriptions gush over villa gardens and public spectacles, while quantitative records, still in their infancy, provide data on an increasingly wide range of demographic matters from plague deaths to communal livestock. An audit made in 1542 by investigators for Cosimo I de’Medici would introduce historians to some 300 Tuscan charitable establishments run by monks, nuns, friars, confraternities, cities, village councils, parishes, and the inmates themselves. Literary works such as poetry, novelle, and prescriptive works also shed light on community life and its environment. The student of the Renaissance era’s communities truly has an embarrassment of riches.

BARBERS AND SURGEONS Barbers groomed and cared for the surface of human bodies. Surgeons and barber-surgeons treated the body for any needs not met by changes in diet, lifestyle, or the prescription of medicines, which were reserved to physicians. What training they received was empirical, under direction of a practitioner, himself—sometimes herself—supervised by the city’s barber and surgeon’s guild and often health board. Because Italian medical schools eventually included courses in surgery, some surgeons had this education as well.

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Given the nature of their business, barbers and surgeons required well-maintained toolkits and shops, though many also made house calls. A large city had dozens of shops scattered about, and in 1446 moderate-sized Treviso’s guild enrolled at least 39 barbers. The toolkit included towels, razors, basins, lancets for opening veins, a scalpel for opening abscesses, forceps for removing teeth, scissors and combs for grooming hair, a burner with charcoal, tweezers for grasping nits, lice, ticks, and other parasites, and a variety of soaps, astringents, ointments, and oils for healthy and diseased skin. During the sixteenth century, many cities’ surgeons sought status closer to that of university-educated physicians than groomers. Some obtained their own guilds, often accompanied by greater official scrutiny and oversight. Roman barber-surgeon Paolo Magni wrote that the practitioner should appear professional, clean, and appropriately dressed; should be discrete, modest, and well spoken; and should avoid strong odors since he worked so closely with others. While wealthy men had servants who were trusted to shave and groom them, others relied on barbers. They cut hair, trimmed beards and moustaches, and shaved faces; washed hair and beards when in style; checked for and removed scalp and ear parasites; and might have treated scalp or facial skin problems. Because they were skilled with razors, they were also entrusted with performing medicinal bleedings or bloodlettings. Removing supposedly excess blood was a form of internal cleansing, often performed routinely twice a year. A vein in the arm was opened using a small lancet, and blood was allowed to flow into a basin. This procedure required skill, since there were at least four regional styles of cutting, and where one cut and how much one drained depended on such factors as the phase of the moon or dominant astrological house. Other techniques included using leeches to suck out blood, cupping—using heated cups whose suction drew blood to the surface—or scarification. Bloodletting was also a treatment for certain conditions, such as fevers and pus-producing infections. Because such procedures took time, a customer might spend an hour or more in a barber’s shop. Others came in to await service, and still others remained until they could walk straight again. Barber shop conversations were verbal free-for-alls in what one wag called “the shop of truth”: hence Magni’s insistence on discretion. Neighborhood gossip, political opinions, religious notions, news from abroad, business rumors, personal secrets: all flowed like the blood from a lanced vein. To pass time, sixteenth-century shops in major cities carried avvisi (newsletters) and other news sheets. Some hated to see their shop space wasted each evening and hosted gambling or rented space to prostitutes. Many also sold early patent medicines marketed to the home healer. Surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti created several such brands, including Wound Powder, Grand Liquor, Mighty Elixir, and Blessed Oil.

Housing and Community: Barbers and Surgeons

Gossip, News, and Spies It is cliché that the barber shop or hairdresser’s is a fount of local information. This was true in Renaissance-era cities as well. Men exchanged news, rumors, lies, boasts, and secrets while having faces shaved, hair cut, or beards trimmed. Venetian authorities understood and found that foreign spies frequented these establishments to gain intelligence and gauge local opinion. In turn, officials planted their own informants among customers to root out the overly curious as well as the too talkative. State secrets, economic news, the identification of heretics, or word of crimes past or under consideration were too important to let slip away.

The well-dressed physician remained well dressed because he could afford clean clothes and because his only threats came from street mud and the occasional spewed vomit when a purgative worked especially well. Whether shipboard, on a battlefield, in a plague hospital, bedside, or at his shop, the surgeon’s iconic stained apron spoke volumes of the healer whose job was to get dirty with the misfortunes of humanity. Beside bleedings, surgeons regularly treated injuries that broke bones or teeth and seriously damaged the skin. Life, whether rural or urban, was dangerous. Children suffered abuse and accidents, farmers were injured by animals and got hernias from exertions. Violence resulted in wounds of all types, as did the brutal sports in which men participated. Lack of hygiene led to all manner of skin conditions, and punctures could easily lead to tetanus. Bleeding had to be stopped, wounds cleansed, and torn flesh sewn together. Bandages protected healing wounds but needed changing, and plasters and clysters needed application. When a pregnant woman’s delivery became complicated, the midwife called for a physician, but the physician summoned the surgeon whose hands and tools rotated the baby or removed the deceased infant’s remains. During plague outbreaks surgeons tended victims as readily as physicians. Surgeons accompanied armies, ready to set broken bones, sew up sword slashes, salve burns, and cauterize and bandage gunshot wounds. Ships’ crews included surgeons who tended the diseased, undernourished, and dehydrated, as well as accident victims and those wounded in sea battles. Some surgeons competed with skilled itinerant empirics who treated hernias, removed kidney stones, and cleaned and pulled teeth. Still others developed techniques in rhinoplasty and other forms of plastic surgery, a valuable skill in the age of the deformations of syphilis. Surgeons also supervised certain types of torture that were meant to cause pain but not kill.

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See also: Economics and Work: Apprentices; Guilds; Family and Gender: Birth and Midwives; Health and Illness; Fashion and Appearance: Bathing and Personal Hygiene; Facial Hair; Hair and Hairstyles; Mouth and Teeth; Housing and Community: Health Commissions and Boards; Hospitals and Orphanages; Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes; Physicians; Plague; Prisons; Quacks, Charlatans, and Medical Empirics; Politics and Warfare: Armies; Soldiers; Recreation and Social Customs: Executions; Science and Technology: Anatomy and Dissection; Medical Education; Surgery FURTHER READING Eamon, William. Professor of Secrets. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2008. Gentilcore, David. Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Park, Katherine. Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Park, Katherine. “Stones, Bones, and Hernias: Surgical Specialists in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century Italy.” In Roger French and Jon Arrizabalaga, eds. Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998, pp. 110–30. Vivo, Filippo de. Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

CITY STREETS AND PIAZZE Streets were the circulatory systems of Renaissance-era cities. They were straight or meandering; paved with brick or ribbons of foul mud; narrow, dark, and built over with rickety extensions of flanking houses or recently broadened to accommodate processions and the crowds they drew. They were drains, dumps, and sewers. Streets carried the people, goods, news, ceremonies, battalions, plague rats, and all the rest that made up life in urban Renaissance-era Italy. But a street has height as well as length and breadth. The houses, shops, palazzo façades, church fronts, and long blank walls of religious or charitable institutions served as a screen that hemmed in the pedestrian and that was punctuated by the byways and alleys intersecting his route. The screen presented much to behold: half-open doors, iron rings to which horses were hitched, shops and shop signs, tabernacles with sculpted or painted images of patron or plague saints, and carved and painted heraldic arms identifying a noble family’s residence, church, or object of charity. A  palazzo might feature stone benches, a loggia, a public water spigot, and a fine view of its atrium. Noises, voices, and smells wafted down streets, from the pleasant to the distasteful and disgusting.

Housing and Community: City Streets and Piazze

Woodcut of “Pisa” is from the 1493 edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle illustrated by the workshop of Michael Wohlgemut. It typifies the naïve and utterly inaccurate nature of early city portraits. In such a work the same image might be used several times and given several labels. (Historical Picture Archive/Corbis/Getty Image)

Members of a Mediterranean society, Renaissance-era Italians lived much of their lives outdoors, the adjoining street serving as an extension of the house. Weather permitting, meals were eaten there, gossip was exchanged, arguments were staged, deals were made, wine was consumed, and wagers were won and lost. Upper-class women tended to avoid the streets, however, which were left to working-class women, servant girls on errands, widows, women shopping, visiting, or going to church, beggars, and prostitutes. In general, open spaces seem to have been male spaces. The Italian piazza (French place, Spanish plaza) is a destination that a pedestrian may treat as a wide street. It may be little more than a broad place in the street on which fronts a large townhouse or small church. Or it may be an enormous ceremonial area dedicated to Church functions, as the Piazza of St. Peter’s in Rome, or to state functions as the Piazza San Marco in Venice or the Piazza Signoria

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in Florence. The cramped and twisting streets and byways of late medieval Italy needed open areas suited to neighborhood gatherings; where dancers could move freely and musicians perform; where the sun shone on the pavement—when there was pavement—or dried the mud; where old women selling daily necessities and edibles from small kiosks or carts could find a niche yet still be found. Early Christian churches often featured walled forecourts in which processions gathered, preachers preached, and the weary found a bench and some shade. Some still exist, as at San Giovanni in Ravenna or San Clemente in Rome. Usually, though, these spaces were eventually opened up to the street, on which the church now opened directly. The space was no longer an appendage of the church, but a feature of the neighborhood. Larger piazze were ancient Roman footprints of forums or arenas. Meeting places of several streets created natural open spaces, and some developed around water sources. City halls invariably opened into gathering places in which crowds would gather for news, edicts, calls to arms, demonstrations of discontent, executions, or political rallies. Piazza San Marco was Venice’s singular large gathering space for all state and religious ceremonial purposes. The Venetian equivalent of local piazze were campi, or fields, which were originally just that: large garden plots where animals grazed, wells were sunk, and garbage dumped. Cities had space dedicated for markets, but these were often not designated piazze, though many large piazze featured regular or holiday markets. Part of the distinction was jurisdictional. Who could tax the trade taking place and who regulated the sellers: bishop, market authorities, or civic government? In major Italian cities, rulers and communal governments applied the Renaissance-era ideal of magnificence to city streets and piazze. Civic building projects included street widening and expansion of open spaces. Paving began in 1298 with Siena’s brick dressing of major streets and the Piazza Pubblico and continued throughout Italy across the period. Public health required some level of sanitation, and civic governments complied. Magistrates of the Streets or similar officials monitored and regulated construction, paving, and street cleaning. In 1432 the administrators of Florence’s Cathedral bought 92 brooms to sweep its piazza. Church and palazzo construction sometimes opened opportunities to unify street fronts and provide minor amenities such as loggias or benches. Nevertheless, even wealthy Florence failed to apply finished façades to several of its major churches, including Santa Croce, San Lorenzo, and the Cathedral. Streets and piazze were stages across which Renaissance-era Italian society and its guests conducted themselves daily. Locals recognized each other, stopping to chat or argue; strangers often gave away their identity by their clothes. There were priests, monks, friars, and nuns in a dozen distinctive habits; Jews marked by distinctive yellow badges; nobles in high fashion on horseback; prostitutes with bells, kerchiefs, or other telling accessories; physicians in their gowns and berets;

Housing and Community: Death in the Community

and pilgrims with their cloaks or wide-brimmed hats pinned with cheap tin souvenirs. Funeral processions met wedding groups; and shoeless beggars approached the wealthy in litters. Criminals as well as street entertainers plied their trades, while dogs, cats, rats, horses, mules, goats, and pigs often roamed at will. Laws against loitering, fighting, robbery, gambling, ball-playing, erecting structures, or blocking streets were fruitless, if well-meaning, attempts to regulate a city’s very life force. See also: Economics and Work: Retail Selling; Housing and Community: Neighborhood and Parish; Palazzi; Quacks, Charlatans, and Medical Empirics; Sewage, Sewerage, and Public Sanitation; Transportation, Local; Politics and Warfare: City Halls; Crime and Punishments; Urban Public Safety; Recreation and Social Customs: Carnival; Church Festivals and Processions; Civic Festivals; Music and Dance in Popular Culture; News; Songs and Singing, Popular; Sports, Contests, and Competitions; Street Entertainment; Theater, Popular; Religion and Beliefs: Churches; Preachers and Preaching; Primary Document: Florence’s Old Market in the Later Fourteenth Century: Antonio Pucci. “The Character of the Mercato Vecchio in Florence” (c. 1380s) FURTHER READING Bell, Rudolph M. Street Life in Renaissance Rome. A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. Burroughs, Charles. The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade: Structures of Authority, Surfaces of Sense. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Byrne, Joseph P. Daily Life during the Black Death. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. Calabi, Donatella. The Market and the City: Square, Street, and Architecture in Early Modern Europe. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Cohen, Elizabeth S., and Thomas V. Cohen. Daily Life in Renaissance Italy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Wolfthal, Diane. “The Woman in the Window: Licit and Illicit Sexual Desire in Renaissance Italy.” In Allison Levy, ed. Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 57–76.

DEATH IN THE COMMUNITY Dealing with the dead was usually a community event. Some were swept up in shipwrecks, Alpine avalanches, or battles far from home. But for those who died in or near their communities, society marked the event with ritual. Society might mean one’s fellow monks or nuns, one’s friends and neighbors, or an entire state

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that mourned the loss of its leader. Rituals reassured the living, but they also reinforced the civil or village fabric. Some rituals, such as prayers and Masses, were believed to have spiritual power to help the deceased’s soul avoid time in purgatory. These reinforced the Church’s position and its role in shaping and maintaining its control of culture. Some deaths were more important than others. The passing of a duke, pope, or wealthy patrician warranted society-wide recognition and action; that of a laborer or peasant woman, while devastating to friends and family, made few ripples beyond the sound of the parish church bell. Yet in an honor-conscious world such as Renaissance-era Italy, the poor and the powerful alike deserved society’s recognition and prayers. Burial typically took place within three days of death. During epidemics, corpses were quickly and often unceremoniously disposed of, though they might putrefy for days before being discovered. Some bodies were crudely embalmed if they had to be transported or lie in state for public viewing and prayers. Though customs differed, the urban guildsman could expect to have his corpse quickly washed and oiled by the women of his family or confraternity brothers. He might be clad in a shroud or a religious order’s garb, even if a layman. He was more likely to be dressed in his best, however. His body prepared and laid out, the deceased’s house was opened to those who would pay respects and pray for his soul. Female friends and relatives loudly mourned, while clergy or confraternity brothers ritually prayed the Seven Penitential Psalms over and over. Meanwhile, the church of his choice was prepared for a Mass for the Dead, or Requiem. News of the death spread among those likely to mourn, including neighbors, fellow guildsmen, confraternity brothers, relatives, local officials, and male clergy and religious. Professional mourners might also be hired for the procession. As well, food and drink were gathered for the meal after the Mass and burial. Mourning clothing was quickly purchased, rented, borrowed, or aired out for family members. When all was ready, the church bell tolled and the procession from home to church gathered. Customs varied across Italy, but a common model seems to have put the clergy and officials at the head of the line, the corpse and any personal, guild, church, or other symbols in the middle, and the family followed by other mourners at the end. This procession is often referred to as the funeral. The more socially significant the deceased, the longer was this cortege. When the mother of a well-off Florentine weaver died in 1521, her corpse was preceded by almost 100 Franciscans, 40 confraternity members, on whose bier she lay, and 9 priests. For high-status figures, community members preceding the corpse could be in the thousands. Signs of what the deceased meant to the community were carried directly around the corpse. Venice liked to honor dead physicians with large medical books,

Housing and Community: Death in the Community

lawyers with the Civil Law Code, and humanist authors with copies of their own works. Prominent families would display their coats of arms on banners, shields, and the drapery on which the corpse lay. Civil officials might have the flags of towns they had served or other civic symbols around them. If the parade preceding the body declared that the person was important, this element explained why. Mourners, beginning with immediate family, followed the bier. Women, whose function in these rituals was to express their sorrow outwardly, were often banned from the group of processing mourners, whatever their relation. The trail of mourners also reflected the deceased’s social status, and could range from a few to hundreds of participants. While a commoner’s cortege was likely to move directly from house to church, Church or political leaders’ processions could cover miles. For these, routes were often symbolic of places in and outside of town related to the individual or family, or to the person’s Church or civic office. The 1516 funeral procession of Giuliano de’Medici, ruler of Florence and brother of Pope Leo X, lasted five hours and included 15 horses. His body was dressed in gold brocade and armor, accompanied by a sword and spurs, and topped by a cap that looked like a papal triple tiara. At the church of San Lorenzo it was placed atop a structure 63 feet tall for display. The Mass for the Dead, or Requiem, was attended by all. This differed regionally until standardized in 1570, and could be simple or very elaborate, with or without music, text sung or merely spoken. For the truly elite, candles filled the church, creating what the French called a “burning chapel.” One hopes this was not indicative of where the soul of the deceased had ended up. See also: Economics and Work: Guilds; Family and Gender: Death, Funerals, and Burial; Fashion and Appearance: Religious Habits and Vestments; Social Status and Clothing; Food and Drink: Feasting and Fasting; Housing and Community : Foreign Communities; Jewish Communities; Plague; Villages and Village Life; Recreation and Social Customs: Civic Festivals; News; Religion and Beliefs: Confraternities; Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory FURTHER READING Banker, James. Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Borsook, Eva. “Art and Politics at the Medici Court: The Funeral of Cosimo I de’Medici.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 12 (1966): 30–54, 366–71. Cohn, Samuel K. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013. Jackson, Philippa. “Pomp or Piety: The Funeral of Pandolfo Petrucci.” Renaissance Studies 20 (2006): 240–52. Schraven, Minou. Festive Funerals in Early Modern Italy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.

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FOREIGN COMMUNITIES Renaissance-era Italy’s cities hosted communities from throughout Europe and the Mediterranean basin. People came as refugees, students, diplomats, churchmen, merchants, skilled émigré craftsmen, scholars, physicians, and musicians. As newcomers do, they formed quick ties with those from their homelands, whether few or many. Some communities were very fluid, with people coming and going, never really settling down. Others were of long-standing. Some fellow countrymen did not get along, such as Catholic and Protestant Germans or Frenchmen. Creating community was important for several reasons. As a group, residents could present a united front against unreasonable authorities, or to gain certain objectives, such as a church designated to the group or acceptance into guilds. They could easily disseminate among themselves news from abroad, celebrate native festivities not shared by Italians, protect one another if religious or political animosity was stirred up against them, and integrate newcomers quickly. They might reside closely ­together, as the English in Rome or ghettoized Jews, or they may have been scattered through a city’s neighborhoods like Venice’s Turks. Naples and Sicilian cities such as Palermo and Syracuse had large populations of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as Muslims and Jews. Muslims formed nervous communities only in mainland port cities such as Naples, Livorno, Genoa, Bari, Taranto, and of course Venice. These consisted predominantly of merchants, and probably had a high turnover rate. Economic competition and continuous harassment of Italian ports by Barbary and other Muslim pirates made these communities especially fragile. Venice had the most diverse set of foreign communities. In the thirteenth century, resident Armenians, Germans, Turks, and Italians from Lucca each formed a sort of consortium called an albergaria (alberghiero = hotel), around which they formed communities. During the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, five nationalities came to be housed in large residential and commercial compounds modeled on the Arab version or funduk. Germans, Persians, Greeks, Arabs, and Turks each had a fondaco. The state owned the properties and rented them to the communities. For convenience they were located in commercially accessible spots, unlike the Jewish Ghetto. The Persians and Turks sat along the Grand Canal and the Germans

Housing and Community: Foreign Communities

very near the Rialto. Built in two or three stories around a courtyard, the fondaco kept goods and short-time residents on the ground floor, while maintaining permanent residents and offices upstairs. From the 1560s to the 1580s about 700 German Protestants lived in Venice. About 200 lived by their own lights in their fondaco, and 500 scatted about, at least appearing to conform to Catholic religious practice. Greeks in Venice constituted one of the largest foreign communities in Italy. A common pattern was for the national group to petition for a confraternity, or lay religious brotherhood. This was followed by requests for its own church, and around this grew an ethnic neighborhood or district. In 1500, the Greek population in Venice was perhaps 5,000 strong, growing to around 14,000 by 1606, some 10% of the population. Since Venice controlled many Greek territories, some Greeks migrated from colonies to the metropolis. Others fled Turkish advances, from the Fall of Constantinople (1453) to the aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto (1571). They congregated in the Castello district and worshipped from the 1440s in the church of San Biagio, and from a century later in San Giorgio dei Greci. Venice hosted the only Greek Orthodox bishop in Renaissance-era Italy. Greek merchants had a fondaco; Greek shipbuilders lived in a small ghetto near the Arsenale; and others were scholars, teachers, printers, and publishers. Greeks had their own hospital, library (from 1597), monastery (from 1599), and the Collegio dei Flangini, a preparatory academy for the University of Padua. Confraternities created a proto-congregation of foreign-speaking folk with their own language and Christian traditions. Venice hosted confraternities for Nurembergers, Germans generally, Greeks, Albanians, Florentines, and Milanese. One form this took was the Confraternity of the Rosary, founded in Germany in 1474. Transplanted Regensburger Leonhard Wild founded Venice’s branch among its Germans in 1504. In Genoa, the Consortium of Foreigners of the Madonna of Mercy from the fourteenth century had a combined membership of Lombards, Romans, Germans, and Frenchmen. They worshipped at Mass on Sundays and Church feasts at the mendicant Servite church of Santa Maria. Members aided sick or impoverished brothers and sisters, ran hostels for the sick, and aided in member funeral services. Unlike other Italian confraternities, there were no officers, low membership fees, and women were welcome to participate. Perugia’s foreign confraternity organized non-Umbrian university students, and Treviso’s Germans had their own brotherhood based at the church of San Francesco. Rome hosted 9 foreign confraternities in 1500 and had 12 more a century later. As elsewhere, foreign meant non-Roman, not non-Italian, so Venetians and Florentines also counted. Rome drew foreigners for many reasons. Some came as pilgrims and stayed; others came on Church, commercial, or diplomatic business. Perhaps 75% of Rome’s total population in the sixteenth century consisted of Florentines, Lombards, English, Germans, French, and Iberians. The Florentines

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Turks in Venice Ottoman subjects lived in Venice as merchants, spies, and diplomats. Their residences were originally scattered across the city, but sixteenth-century officials sought to locate all or most in one place. Since Venice and the Ottoman Empire often fought, a secure site protected Turks from mob violence, and if attacked Venice could seal the foreigners in. One site was considered in 1579, another in 1589. In 1604 a palazzo on the Grand Canal was finally chosen and adapted for the Muslims. Men were kept from women, Albanians from Turks, and a Christian porter guarded the single public entrance.

centered in the Ponte district, not far from the Vatican, were the strongest community, with their church of San Giovanni Decollato. Spanish national churches included San Pietro in Montorio, San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, and Santa Maria in Monserrato; and the French frequented San Luigi dei Francesi. Beside regular worship, these groups sponsored hospices for national pilgrims and celebrated grandly in their churches when their national monarchs died. See also: Arts: Art Patronage; Non-Europeans in Art; Economics and Work: Book Printing and Sales; Slaves and Slavery; Fashion and Appearance: Social Status and Clothing; Food and Drink: Foreign Foods; Housing and Community: Jewish Communities; Politics and Warfare: Citizenship; Religion and Beliefs: Churches; Confraternities; Protestantism FURTHER READING Calabi, Donatella, ed. La città italiana e i luoghi degli stranieri: XIV–XVII secolo. Rome: Laterza, 1998. Cohn, Samuel K. The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1980. Dandelet, Thomas James. Spanish Rome, 1500–1700. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. De Maria, Blake. Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Harvey, Margaret. The English in Rome, 1362–1420. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Maas, Clifford W. The German Community in Renaissance Rome, 1378–1523. Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 1982.

Housing and Community: Furnishing the House Woolfson, Jonathan. Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603. Cambridge: James Clarke and Co. Ltd, 1998.

Foundling Homes. See Infant Mortality and Foundling Homes

FURNISHING THE HOUSE Residences differed wildly in size and complexity among Italy’s many regions, cities, and classes. Some were rented, others owned; the villas and palazzi of the wealthy contrasted with urban laborers’ tiny sets of rooms or peasants’ hovels. Even among country folk, living quarters could vary widely, increasing in size and quality with growing prosperity of regions and families. Poverty or limited income certainly restricted the amount of stuff a family could accumulate, even as the Renaissance era provided a fairly steady trend of improvement in the amount, quality, and variety of goods available and affordable. Of course, the size of a family also determined the quantity and nature of furnishings and other goods one might find in a casa (house). A “family” could vary from a single bachelor or widow to the 50 “mouths” that Florentine Gianfrancesco Strozzi reported in his household. Essential furniture was probably restricted to one or more beds (lower-class families often slept all together), a table and benches or chairs, and one or more storage chests or trunks. A bed might be no more than a woven mat on the floor or a lumpy sack filled with straw. Student lodgings, servant quarters, friars’ rooms, and peasant housing often had little more. Students or friars, however, might have a writing desk and shelf for books, and a country house a fireplace equipped for cooking. Families with children added a cradle and possibly more beds as they grew older. Lighting could be rather expensive. In rooms so equipped, fireplaces or braziers cast some light. Olive oil-burning lamps were fairly inexpensive, if sooty and smoky. Candles made of tallow were more expensive, and could be burned in holders, lanterns, or sconces, or grouped in a chandelier or candelabrum. In both simple and elaborate Renaissance-era residences, specialized spaces were only just beginning to appear. Even in palazzi, cooking, eating, storage, entertaining, sex, and sleep might all take place in a single room, often identified as the chamber or camera. Among the wealthier, a residence was often occupied by several generations and family branch members. It was also the major symbol of the family’s success and honor, and a place where friends, family, neighbors, clients, patrons, political allies, and dignitaries gathered to enjoy the host’s hospitality. Even by the

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The World of Renaissance Italy

later sixteenth century houses of the elite were not crowded with furniture, as the emphasis was on quality. A palazzo’s heart was the camera, which was foremost the master bedroom. Often furnished by the groom or his family, it centered on the large platform bed that was often surrounded by flat-topped chests. Chests of drawers appeared late only in the sixteenth century, so trunks served as storage for clothing, books, small weapons, women’s toiletries, linens, and all manner of personal and household goods. Special gilded and carved or painted chests known today as cassoni arrived in pairs with the bride and her trousseau. These contained her treasures, from handkerchiefs to gemstones and jewelry. A carved and painted Tuscan daybed called a lettuccio was often purchased as a set with the bed. Its seat was a hinged chest, providing yet more storage, and its high back was painted or covered with intarsia and framed with heavily carved woodwork. On the bed itself a large, coarse sack filled with straw acted as the springs, and was covered by an equally large sack of softer but durable fabric filled with feathers or wool flock. Pillows and cushions filled with down or feathers, a heavier bed spread or cotton batting-filled quilt, and two or three imported linens covered the mattress while matching fabric formed a curtain around the bed for warmth and privacy. A couple of benches and stools, a writing desk, small table, some shelves, religious images, a wall mirror, a bit of art, and rich fabric wall hangings and window curtains completed the suite. Children would usually sleep apart with a servant or nanny, though one imagines they sometimes shared their parents’ bed.

Scholar Francesco Sansovino on Venetian “Houses,” 1581 “In the past, though our ancestors were frugal they were lavish in the decoration of their houses. There are countless buildings with ceilings of bedrooms and other rooms decorated in gold and other colors and with histories painted by celebrated artists. Almost everyone has his house adorned with noble tapestries, silk drapes and gilded leather, wall hangings, and other things according to the time and season, and most of the bedrooms are furnished with bedsteads and chests, gilded and painted, so the cornices are loaded with gold. The dressers displaying silverware, porcelain, pewter and brass or damascene bronze are innumerable. In the reception rooms of great families there are racks of arms with the shields and standards of their ancestors who fought for Venice on land and sea.” Source: Chambers, David, and Brian Pullan, eds. Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992, p. 25.

Housing and Community: Furnishing the House

More public was the hall, which went by various names in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples. It was sparsely furnished with a trestle table, benches and perhaps chairs, and a multi-shelved credenza on which the family’s fine silver and ceramic ware were displayed. In Venice the floor was covered in terrazzo, a smooth mix of marble chips that gleamed when highly polished. Vene