As we resist those who claim diversity distorts scholarship, let’s run through the acronym & show how easy it is to find the rainbow in every era. We don’t even need to look beyond the Renaissance celebrities that are household names today!
Portraits of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and the Raphael portrait of Duchess Elizabetta Gonzaga
LESBIAN: Lucrezia Borgia’s last husband Alfonso d’Este appears in a lot of big budget historical dramas about the period; I introduced him last week parading around Ferrara buck naked with his dick in his hand, & his sister Beatrice was part of Milan’s ruling polycule with Ludovico Visconti Sforza & Galeazzo Sanseverino. What dramas rarely mention is Alfonso’s first wife Anna Maria Visconti Sforza (sister of Duke Ludovico) who, documents tell us, preferentially wore men’s clothes, preferred exclusively female company, and slept with a female lover in her bed every night.
Black and white image of a drawing possibly of Anna Maria Sforza. She wears loose robes and is reading a book. She has a delicate facial expression and posture similar to many women depicted by Leonardo da Vinci.
GAY: Two out of four Ninja Turtles here: Michelangelo whose passionate relationships with men and lack of interest in women are much discussed in letters & poems (his and others’) & Donatello whose relationship with Brunelleschi was so public all Florence erupted in gossip the time it looked like they might break up! (Wondering about Leonardo too? I’ll get to him below…)
Portrait drawing of Michelangelo by Daniele a Volterra, showing the sculptor in middle age, with his long beard.
Portrait painting of Donatello from a set of paintings of famous European master artists in the Louvre. No actual period portraits of Donatello survive, but generations since have settled on a long beard and asymmetrical soft chaperon hat, typical of the period. Donatello was Florentine and, for those who read my earlier thread on the politics of Florentine fashion, yes the artist has him faithfully dressed like Merchant scum, as is a Florentine’s civic duty.
And while one must be very cautious about looking at an artist’s work (so many bad histories have done it badly) Donatello made the first nude sculpture produced since Antiquity, and it wasn’t a sexy Venus, it was a *way sexier* David.
Donatello’s David, made for Cosimo de Medici. The youth stands with one hand on his hip, the other on the hilt of slain Goliath’s broken sword, standing completely nude except for a military helmet crowned by a victory garland, and gorgeous fantastical boots. His asymmetric pose exaggerates the curve of his hips in a way which looks practically like the poses people put female comic book characters in, especially when viewed from behind.
Zoomed in detail of the thighs of Donatello’s David, viewed from 3/4 behind. The severed head of Goliath lies at David’s feet, and from this angle you can see that the feathers on his winged helmet curve and caress all the way up David’s inner thigh stopping about an inch from his crotch, making it impossible not to think about the ticklish sense of touch of feathers on extremely-sensitive skin.
Importantly, modern identity labels (gay, trans) didn’t exist in the 1400s so we don’t know what labels these people would’ve chosen if offered our feast of terms & concepts; likely they would’ve tried out many. One must not project modern gender constructions back on history without great care, but… as long as I keep getting undergrads in my classroom whose educations-so-far left them with the impression homosexuality didn’t exist between Socrates and Oscar Wilde (sigh) we need to do better to show all these identities have histories.
BISEXUAL: A feast of options here since men having lovers of both sexes was super common, but Machiavelli is as big as a name gets. He wrote erotic poetry to male beloveds in his teens, his letters talk freely of male & female lovers, and he give hetero- and homosexual sex advice to friends.
Portrait of Machiavelli.
TRANSGENDER: Please enjoy this portrait of the incomparable Lucrezia Borgia in male dress! Complete with sword! A very striking and deliberate choice for someone who wielded such complexly gendered power, but during her family’s wars she took on male kinds of power too, like governing Spoleto.
Portrait of what looks like a Renaissance young man. The figure has auburn hair pulled back in a masculine-for-the-time style. This is one of our best authenticated portraits of Lucrezia, and the one she herself might have chosen to go on book covers, but it isn’t what publishers pick! They like the sexy blonde one.
Also, there are SO MANY GREAT NEW BOOKS treating transgender and radical gender in the Renaissance! See:
Gordon “Glorious Bodies,” Manion “Female Husbands,” Goldberg “Queering the Renaissance,” Murray & Terpstra “Sex Gender & Sexuality in the Renaissance” so many more!
QUEER: I enjoyed picking this one: who in the Renaissance would’ve liked the project to embrace and subvert the pejorative sense of “Queer” and turn it into an identity celebrating the breadth of sexualities & being outside a narrow mainstream? My pick isn’t a household name now but was in the period. Floriano Dolfo (or Dolfi, c. 1445-1506) One of the most law professors & theologians of his day, a faculty star of the University of Bologna, also disabled so for most of his life he worked, taught, and lived in a single room. In his leisure time he wrote over-the-top fantastical porn, describing wonderlands of massive dicks etc. Sending much of it to his friend & patron Francesco Gonazaga Marquess of Mantua (Isabella d’Este’s husband). Dolfo wrote to Gonzaga he took great pride in what he himself called his perversion, especially liking *only* men without interest in women, so I think he would’ve loved the movement to Queer.
The other great choice for Queer would, of course, be Il Sodoma, the artist who deliberately chose to go by the nickname “Sodomite” despite the stigma in the period! Nor did his deliberate choice to make his taboo sexuality front and center of his identity stop him from being a major artist and getting big commissions, including from Church patrons like the Benedictine Monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore.
Self-portrait of Sodoma
Sodoma is also the painter of what I always call the “Bisexuality Visibility Fresco,” from the Alexander the Great cycle he did for the Villa Chigi in Rome, which has the big wall centered on Alexander the Great standing between his sexy wife Roxanne and his even sexier and more naked male lover Hephaestion. Even though Hephaestion is just as prominent as Roxanne here, and another whole wall is dedicated to a fresco of just Alexander and Hephaestion, the room is called the “Room of Roxanne” by art historians because the 19th century was super queer-erasing and decided to center the one heterosexual thing in the room, sigh.
Alexander the Great, proposing to his bride-to-be, with Hephaestion on the other side. Alexander arranged for Hephaestion and him to marry two sisters, saying it was as close to marriage as the two men could have.
INTERSEX: There’s great scholarship on period ideas of the hermaphrodite its entanglement with medical concepts of monstrosity, but I like to also recognize figures whose bodies didn’t conform to rigid period ideas of sex in ways that shaped their (inescapably gendered) careers. Two examples: Princess Jeanne de Valois was a daughter of Louis XI of France. Something about her body meant one could tell even in childhood *by inspecting her genitalia* that she couldn’t bear children. Her father used this, forcibly marrying her to his cousin the Duke d’Orleans to try to prevent the Orleans branch from having an heir. When Jeanne’s brother Charles VIII died without an heir & her husband suddenly became king, he demanded an annulment so he could marry his predecessor’s widow Anne of Brittany, & the pope sent Cesare Borgia all the way from Rome to inspect Joan’s body & confirm. A body whose atypicality literally reshaped a kingdom, enabling France’s annexation of Brittany.
Portrait of Jeanne de Valois later in life after her annulment, when she got to live as a nun. While documents surrounding such a woman are hard to trust, they suggest strongly that she’d always been excited by the idea of joining a nunnery with its welcoming all-women intellectual community.
Second example: After a string of daughters, Battista Sforza, beloved wife of the mercenary Federico da Montefeltro, died producing their youngest, Guidobaldo, who became their heir. When dad died on campaign, Guidobaldo took over commanding his military league at age *11*. He married Elizabetta Gonzaga, but
Painting showing Guidobaldo da Montefeltro as a little boy standing in grand ducal robes beside his father, the fearsome Federico who sits in a throne wearing a royal mantle over full plate armor while reading a massive manuscript book. Because that’s what real badass mercenaries do, they sit around in full armor reading Latin to their kids!
…no kids. When people to pressured Guidobaldo to divorce his barren wife, he shocked Europe with an announcement no one thought a prince would dare make: It’s not her, it’s me, I’m impotent, shut up, & if anyone wants to question my manhood over it, my armies are right here, so bring it.
Raphael’s portrait of Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro. He has honey-brown shoulder-length hear and wears luxurious black silks decorated with gold thread, demonstrating his extreme wealth and trade contacts with Persia (the source of such fabrics at the time). His expression is calm. To modern eyes he looks quite feminine, but that hairstyle and the lack of beard were fashionable for men at the time.
Men of the period went to huge lengths to hide emasculating characteristics, & perceived unmanliness could shatter power & careers; the pope even pressured Guidobaldo to renounce his duchy & military career to become a churchman, a fitter path for one seen as not-quite-fully-male. No Way!
ASEXUAL: After Guidobaldo’s announcement, Elizabetta was pressured to leave *him*, of course, but insisted she was very happy in her sexless marriage thank-you-very-much, & the pair remained one of the most celebrated of all Renaissance couples, immortalized in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.
Raphael’s portrait of Elizabetta Gonzaga. She wears a costly gown in striking asymmetric patterns of black and gold (her husband’s family colors), and wears a long fine gold chain and a headband with a scorpion-shaped jewel, one of her personal insignia. One fun thing about the two Raphael portraits of this couple is that, side-by-side, Elizabetta’s face looks more masculine than Guidobaldo’s.
As for PLUS: it’s useful to remind ourselves that sexual ideas of “normal” change with history too, so let’s finish with Titian & Raphael both of whose friends remarked on their (for the time) weird & unexpected *heterosexual monogamy* in an age that expected famous men to move through serial lovers. In the Renaissance it was considered bizarre for men to stay attracted to a woman for more than a decade; my friend Roisin Cossar has a great example where a monk accused of living with a mistress offered *as his legal defense in court* that no man could possibly be aroused by a woman over 30.
Book cover of Roisin Cossar’s brilliant book “Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy.” It’s packed with fantastic stories about efforts to enforce clerical celibacy, and the myriad people who flouted them!
Raphael died young but many friends described him as peculiar in his devotion to his partner Margherita Luti, while Titian’s friends repeatedly urged him to ditch his Flora for a younger mistress. Nope: he stayed with her for decades, painting her at many ages despite friends calling it queer.
Titian’s self-portraitOne of innumerable Titian paintings of his Flora. Raphael’s self portrait, when he was young with a beardless, youthful face. In contrast with the moody and dramatic Michelangelo, Raphael appears less in period dramas, I think not just because his life was shorter, but because everyone describes him as the sweetest sweetie pie who ever sweetie pied, so I think people think he wouldn’t make as good a drama. I disagree!Raphael’s portrait of his beloved Margherita Luti.
LGBTQIA+ complete. So many different kinds of loves, lives & bodies, all right there, front and center in the famous halls of history whenever and wherever you look; all we have to do is pause to point them out! (For this practice in action, Inventing the Renaissance coming soon!)
Inventing the Renaissance isn’t *about* LGBTQIA+history, but it’s still a queer history because *any* history of *any topic* can contribute to fighting queer erasure, so long as we take the simple step of pausing to mention the diversity naturally present in the people/places we’re looking at.
As for finishing up our Ninja Turtles… a lot of people ask me about Leonardo da Vinci, especially since his status as a gay icon got re-celebrated recently in the Ken Burns documentary. While it’s 100% true that we have ample documentation about Leonardo’s homosexual relationship as discussed in that documentary and many places, Leonardo lived a long life, and we also have a lot of letters from friends commenting on how they find it odd that Leonardo had so little interest in sex, didn’t take lovers often as most artists did, and didn’t seem to have much interest in women or in men. While older scholarship is prone to jump at “He’s not interested in women, he must be gay!” better recent techniques show that people like this (like Donatello and Michelangelo etc.) were very open about their gay relationships at least in letters to friends, so “not interested in women, he must be hiding interest in men” isn’t actually a sound conclusion. My own interpretation from the documents is that Leonardo sounds more like what we would call a demisexual or asexual person, someone who tried out having a relationship as many asexual people do, and enjoyed the social and personal intimacy with a friend, but found he didn’t have much taste for the physical intimacy, and preferred to live most of his life without sexual activity. Compared to our two definitely-super-gay Ninja Turtles, I find it exciting that we’re at a point that we can celebrate more fine grain divisions of LGBTQIA+ and count off our famous four as two gay men, one demisexual/asexual, and one heterosexual and “peculiarly monogamous”, a truly great representation of how we find a broad rainbow of lives and loves in every group of people, famous or obscure!
Rags to Riches stories were popular long before modern iterations like the “American Dream” or “self-made man”, or even early modern ones like Jack the Giant-Killer or Cinderella. And they were also always used as propaganda.
Looking back at two Rags to Riches tales of cardinals in the Renaissance, one fake one real, can show us the perennial tricks of seeming self-made for strategic purposes, and the afterlife that propaganda can have over decades and centuries.
Our fake case first; a myth which (like so many others) became a family myth once the first successful member used his new-gained power to launch a dynasty.
Francesco della Rovere (1414-1484) rose to the very highest rank a Renaissance man could, elected Pope Sixtus IV in 1471 at the age of 57. Ascending Saint Peter’s throne at such a comparatively young age meant he didn’t just have the honors of being pope but over a decade to use and entrench his power. When you look him up in encyclopedias, or look up his several nephews and grandnephews who became major powers after him like Giuliano della Rovere (1443-1513; elected pope 1503) and Raffaele Riario (1461-1521, cardinal as a teenager, nearly elected pope in 1513) you often see phrases like “born in poverty” or “rose from obscurity” or “from humble commoner stock.”
These phrases come from early (authorized by him and his heirs) biographies of Sixtus which stressed his commoner birth and rise from poverty because they plugged in perfectly to his career path, beginning as a Franciscan monk, and rising to be the head of the order. The Franciscans were the order most dedicated to poverty, often celebrated in paintings like this one of their founder Saint Francis literally marrying the Angel of Poverty. Saint Francis had absolutely refused to receive property or donations, even insisting on begging on the street for his supper when he was famous and a houseguest of wealthy benefactors, and to this day legally Franciscans own no property, everything they have technically belongs to the pope and is lent to them by him; if the pope sees a beggar when a Franciscan is walking by he can literally say “This poor man needs shoes, give him those shoes you’re wearing,” and the Franciscan is supposed to hand them over at once answering, “Of course, Your Holiness, they’re yours–thank you for lending them to me.” This aspect of the Franciscans is awesome, and makes us smile.
Sixtus rose to prominence as a theologian and scholar of philosophy, gaining fame lecturing at many Italian universities, and anecdotes of his early career talk of him refusing pay for his work, confirming his dedication to poverty. He was elected to head the Franciscan Order at age 50, made a cardinal three years later, so was an option in 1471 when the cardinals gathered (not yet in the Sistine which he would build) to elect a successor to the incredibly unpopular Pope Paul II.
Pope Paul came from one of the extremely old, extremely elite founding families of Venice (a fact vital to the plot), and had campaigned for the papacy with a platform that he would buy everyone who voted for him a palace in the Alps. He offended everyone in Rome by spurning the Vatican palace and insisting on spending a mountain of Church money building a giant Venetian style Palazzo for himself in the heart of Rome (if you’ve been through Piazza Venezia you’ve seen it), and spent his papacy being reclusive and antisocial, wandering his palace wearing his 10-million-dollar diamond-covered tiara around the house and cavorting with his many homosexual lovers. He is supposed to have died either while sodomizing a lover, eating a melon, or courageously attempting to sodomize a lover and eat a melon at the same time.
Paul’s Venetian palace, nowhere near the Vatican, turning his back on all the cardinals and papal court to live his reclusive, diamond-hat-wearing, melon-filled life.
At Paul’s death, popular voices in Rome swore there would not be another Venetian pope for a thousand years! (a vow they’ve kept), and since Venice is the arch-enemy of Genoa, and Francesco della Rovere was born in Savona on the outskirts of Genoa, a selfless, philosophical, unworldly Franciscan poverty monk from a commoner family faithful to the enemy of Venice seemed like the perfect opposite. That Francesco, upon becoming pope, immediately dove into more nepotism, more graft, more entrenchment of family power, and more warmongering than Rome had seen in generations was a twist that jump-scared everyone. (If you know the Pazzi Conspiracy, this is that pope… yeah. The wild “Italian Wars” = these dudes.)
Now, since Sixtus rose to power on the charisma of Franciscan poverty, the propaganda cultivated by him and his heirs to legitimize their (extremely abrupt) power & sovereignty naturally dug deep into the rags-to-papal-riches myth, advertising Sixtus as the “son of a humble fisherman” invoking Christendom’s #1 fisherman Saint Peter, and biographers ever since have been eager to repeat this tale, so seeing commoner and fisherman elaborate that into 19th- and even 20th-century encyclopedia entries that say Sixtus was “born in poverty.”
Fact Check:
Francesco’s father Leonardo Beltramo di Savona della Rovere was indeed a commoner, in that he didn’t have any noble blood. But we must remind our eager biographers of a hundred years ago that, at the time, the Medici family were commoners too, and they were among the super-mega-rich banking families which made Florentine merchants the richest non-royals in Europe since Crassus of Rome.
Savona in the Sixteenth Century. You can see the many fishing vessels, whose owners were wealthy men.
Leonardo Beltramo della Rovere was not that rich, but he was powerful enough to be on Savona’s oligarchic city council and endow and decorate a family chapel in the city’s main church (something requiring multi-millionaire level wealth), and in his case “fisherman” actually meant he owned a fleet of fishing vessels, the capitalist owner of the means of production, not the man out on the boat with ropes and buckets. If Leonardo della Rovere was a fisherman then Cosimo de Medici was a bank clerk.
And following the rule that you should always look up everybody’s mom, Sixtus’s mother was Luchina Monteleoni, a fully noble-blooded daughter of an old and powerful noble family of Genoa, whose father had been exiled from the main city and settled in backwater Savona to bide his time and rebuild his fortune. Our commoner born in poverty turns out to actually be super rich commoner on dad’s side + temporarily semi-impoverished old family blood noble on mom’s, but propaganda let him exaggerate the halves of each side of his lineage that fit the Franciscan risen-from-nothing mythmaking.
Sixtus isn’t Rags to Riches, he’s a son of the 1% climbing to join the 0.01%.
Digging deeper into the della Rovere propaganda, one thing Sixtus’s dad’s commoner status meant is that he didn’t have a coat of arms, something bishops and cardinals always need so they can hang it over their titular churches and put it on their stuff (even to this day they meet with armorial experts to create them). So Sixtus reached out to a totally unrelated noble family that happened to also be called della Rovere, a name meaning “of the oak” which isn’t too uncommon. These della Rovere were completely unrelated to Sixtus, and were Counts of Vinovo on the outskirts of Turin in Savoy, minor nobles in the sense that their power was local only so they weren’t someone a major duke would consider a marriage alliance with, but important enough within Savoy to have the hereditary honor of carrying one of the posts of the canopy over the Duke of Savoy at coronations and processions, and this is the patch when the Duke of Savoy was a brother-in-law or first-cousin of every neighboring king including France’s. As he started rising to power in Rome (this is before his papal days), Sixtus wrote to these della Rovere calling them “cousins” and proposing “reuniting” the family, and pitched a deal in which he got to use the Turin family’s coat of arms and in exchange two sons of the Vinovo della Rovere family came to him in Rome as his “nephews” and foster-sons, joining the many actual blood-nephews that he skyrocketed to major careers in the Church. Good deal for all.
The della Rovere crest of a golden oak tree against blue, as papal arms used by Sixtus and his successor Julius.
While Sixtus was not yet Sixtus, still just a prominent Franciscan rising and jockeying for place in Rome, you find texts where he claims to be of the noble blood of the Counts of Vinovo, claiming fake nobility when he wanted to open the doors that nobility opens, while in other documents claiming poor commoner status in circumstances where that version of his backstory worked better. All this gave Sixtus the convenient chameleon ability to play the nobility card, the poverty card, and the commoner card in different hands.
Sixtus’s most prominent nephew was Giuliano della Rovere (1443-1513), later Pope Julius II, a son of Sixtus’s younger brother Raffaello who married (always look up everybody’s mom!) a woman named Teodora Manirola. It’s really hard to find anything on her–even full-length biographies of Julius just include her name and move on–but even for a woman for whom we have only her name we can learn a lot from name + context, since Teodora Manirola = definitely Greek, something we can confirm with the few surviving docs about her father. A Greek woman with a wealthy, rising husband in Genoa (a major port city) and having her first child there in the 1440s pretty-much always means she’s emigree nobility from the Byzantine Empire, which at that point was being devoured from all sides by the conquests which would lead to Constantinople’s fall in 1453, and had reduced the once-vast empire to a few remnants. Those Greek-speaking Byzantine elites who were wealthy enough to do so to were rapidly relocating (with their more portable wealth) to other port cities like Genoa and Ancona, where their webs of contacts in coastal centers around the Mediterranean could be leveraged toward new wealth and power. Even branch members of the imperial Palaiologos family had settled in Genoa, so the ambitious rising brother of an ambitious rising cleric taking a Greek emigree wife in Genoa at that moment was a synthesis of ambition, wealth, trade contacts, and many paths to power.
I’ve never seen any scholarship on Julius II discuss the fact that the man was half Greek, a fact which certainly affected the public identity and self-identity of the man known as the “Battle Pope” “Warrior Pope” or “Il Papa Terribile” i.e. Terrible in the sense of Ivan the Terrible (awesome, terrifying, warlord). Julius’s self-fashioning as an emperor and restorer of Rome’s military and imperial glory is constantly compared to propaganda of the Roman empire that fell in 475, but not the one that fell in 1453 when Julius was ten years old, so the grief and shock which hit his mother and Genoa’s Greek community (promptly flooded with arriving refugees) must have been one of his most formative childhood memories. Even biographies that speculate deeply about his thoughts and motives at different moments say nothing on this. Why? The same nineteenth-century biographers who formed the modern discipline of history that fell hook line and sinker for Sixtus’s “poor fisherman” propaganda did not look up people’s moms or think they had any influence, nor were the nationalist, race-purist, “history is about capturing the Spirit of a Nation!” historians of 1850 interested in mixed marriage (Italian + Greek) as a formative facet of the man who commissioned Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling.
Michelangelo’s tomb monument for Pope Julius II. This puppy was so vexed and lawsuit-surrounded it gets half a chapter in my “Inventing the Renaissance” book!
Fact checking has left us aware how complex the layers of propaganda are when we look at the tomb shown below, a gorgeous one in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, covered with crests of the della Rovere oak, built in one of Rome’s top churches (where princes of the Visconti-Sforza and noble lines are buried) for Cristoforo della Rovere (1434-78) one of the Vinovo della Rovere boys from Turin who were adopted by Sixtus in exchange for bringing their coat of arms and optional nobility as a propagandistic card Sixtus and his heirs could play.
Tomb of Cristoforo della Rovere, of Vinovo. The heart of his brother Domenico della Rovere is buried with him; Domenico died many years later in the family’s old seat of power in Turin (of which he became bishop) and is buried there but requested that his heart be buried with his brother in Rome.
Time for the tomb next door…
Buried one chapel over in the same church is our real Rags to Riches cardinal, Jorge da Costa of Portugal (1406-1508) the longest-lived cardinal in the history of the Church to this day, and the real Rags to Riches story to balance our propagandistic one… though not without his own propaganda.
Tomb of Cardinal Jorge da Costa.
Jorge was born in the tiny nothing village of Alpedrinha near… nothing really, but on the road east of Coimbra on a mountain pass where weary teams of muleteers hiked their weary way back-and-forth to the border with Castile. Jorge was one of fifteen children of Martim Vaz, himself one of these muleteers; the more aristocratic-sounding name “da Costa” which Jorge would later adopt came from the name of the farm where his hard-working father mucked out the donkey barns. His family is described in documents as dirt poor, and his father’s documented wife, the baker Catarina Gonçalves, was probably not Jorge’s mother who appears to have married him only later, so Jorge was either the product of a pre-marital fling or an earlier mother too obscure to leave even her name in the written record. While little is available on his parents, it’s worth noting that the prevalence of Moorish and north-African ancestry in Iberia’s poorest classes at this time means that da Costa was the only Roman cardinal in his century who may well have been a person of color, though the category is, of course, a modern one.
Portrait of Jorge da Costa, in his cardinal robes.
As a youth, Jorge ran away from home to better himself by becoming a swineherd, because swineherding was a step up! from the grueling world of mule caravans over the dangerous mountains, and was something he could do in a proper city, Santarém. He then went to Lisbon which had a university, to work as a servant and valet in a student hostel. This let him sneakily read his masters’ textbooks, and he managed to self-teach himself Latin, and started giving lessons as a Latin tutor. He started taking some classes with his profits, learning philosophy and theology, and when the hostel was bought out by a wealthy order of Augustinians, they gave him a chaplaincy in the monastery, a typical light-ish-work paycheck job of the kind those employed in the Church could gun for. Rags-to-middle-class-affluence achieved.
Da Costa’s next step came because he was a man who’d come from nothing. King Afonso V of Portugal wanted a personal chaplain and confessor, for himself and his sister Infanta Catarina, and when you’re a king and have to confess your sins, secrets, and fears to somebody, it’s ideal if that somebody is nobody, that is to say a man with no political ties, no allies, no powerful family, no allegiances, someone who can be the king’s man lifted from nothing and 100% dependent on and loyal to his royal patron. Recommended by the rich Augustinians he worked for, da Costa was the royal pick, a rare case of someone educated enough to fulfill the role of royal chaplain but risen from nothing so he could be fully the king’s man. As the king’s man he rapidly distinguished himself, and was trusted with diplomatic missions (time in Paris! bigtime!) and rewarded with high-paying benefices; donkey shed to Archbishop of Lisbon by age 58 is quite a rise! And when in 1476 the king managed to get our very same “poor fisherman” Pope Sixtus to give Portugal a cardinalship, he picked da Costa.
Da Costa’s crest on a plaque, with his cardinal hat above. I haven’t yet traced whether he adopted the wheel symbol from another family called “da Costa” or invented it.
Da Costa used his royal favor and the wealth it brought to promote and employ many of his fifteen siblings, so by the time King Afonso died there were many titled da Costas and other da Costa bishops, and young da Costas born of marriages between his freshly-ennobled brothers and noble-blooded wives, and between his lavishly-dowered sisters and old blood noblemen.
Like many who are the King’s man, the death of the King halted the meteor. When Afonso’s son King João II climbed to the throne, he wanted to centralize power and renew Portugal, and succeeded enough that his reign is still called a “golden age” (a phrase which should always make our alarm bells go off). João did it by… banishing all the nobles and favorites who’d been powerful in his father’s day and seizing their lands and power, so the same royal favor which meant da Costa was in until age 77, meant he was out! out! out!, banished to Rome to serve as the king’s voice at the Vatican with the vague promise that if he served well enough he might someday hope for a recall home. His ousted and disgruntled siblings participating in a noble plot against King João’s life made the dynamic worse. So from 1482 to 1508, da Costa’s final career was as the top Portuguese diplomat in the Eternal City, power-brokering alongside the heirs of Sixtus, whose deeply-entrenched Italian roots of power and flexible ability to sometimes play the commoner poverty propaganda card and sometimes the old nobility card made them a major power, da Costa a minor ally who fell in to their faction.
Da Costa could’ve become pope in 1503 (he got the votes!) but declined the honor… as anyone with self-preservation streak would do in 1503 at the death of Alexander VI with his son Cesare Borgia’s armies occupying half of Italy as the Borgia vs. della Rovere faction deadlock held Rome in its grip of dual terrors; da Costa had seen how wretchedly the Cybo family did two elections earlier when Giovanni Battista Cibo had agreed to be the della Rovere’s compromise puppet pope, Innocent VIII, and time-savvied da Costa noped right out. (The Piccolomini cardinal who did agree to being the puppet pope in 1503 was from a family with much more respect and power in Italy, someone who had assets enough in Italy to act as a life preserver as he tried to tread water in those stormy seas). Instead he remained a cardinal, advancing Portugal’s interests and his own, and dying with wealth enough to plan a tomb which, at a glance, looks just alike in dignity and grandeur as the della Rovere tomb beside it.
What do we learn from our two Rags to Riches cases, fake and real?
One conclusion is that, both in 1450 and today, starting with wealth and powerful contacts puts you on the fast track, while truly rising through merit is slow, hard work. Da Costa was already 70 when he became a cardinal through this mix of merit + royal self-interest, while Sixtus had been only 53 when he got the red hat. Da Costa’s meteoric merit rise wasn’t meteoric, it took him many decades of hard work to catch up to where Sixtus’s wealth and noble contacts landed him as a teenager (employed by a wealthy monastery, first job in the Church), and if da Costa had died at the same age Sixtus did (70) he may well have breathed his last as the letter telling him that he’d received the scarlet was still on the boat en route from Rome. Da Costa’s ability to complete the rags-to-riches path required living 30 years longer than everybody else and working hard the whole time, and we may have seen a few other such rises if others on da Costa’s path shared the good fortune of living to 102! Managing to be pope in one’s 50s was not a door open to a real poor commoner, only to a savvy propagandist who knew how to pick and choose when to deploy each subtle facet of his family tree.
An image of Julius II from early in his papacy (before he grew his Grief Beard at the loss of the city of Bologna). His papal crest is prominent on the front of his robes, a symbol of awe and power by his point since he was Battle Pope II, Sixtus had already made many in Italy fear the oak.
A second lesson I emphasized already: look up everybody’s mom! So many moments in history that make one say, “But why did X do Y?” or “Why did so-and-so suddenly show up?” are answered when you remember the nineteenth-century usually didn’t even bother to include daughters and moms on family trees unless they were royals. Take the example of what textbooks make always present as that weird branch family of Medici that seems to show up out of nowhere as fifth-cousins to suddenly be the dukes and successors to Medici power in the 1530s. Why them? Answer: look up everybody’s mom! If you do the tree with only the dads of course it’s gibberish!
(Footnote: if some parts of this essay seem like oblique references to the Musk-Trump situation in America right now in Feb. 2025, I don’t intend “look up his Mom!” specifically for them, I don’t think their moms are key to decoding politics today, I just think “look up his Mom!” is good historical practice, effective at decoding lots of stuff lots of the time).
Finally, both of these stories show the lasting power of propaganda. Sixtus played his cards cunningly to veil his privileged origin when it fit his mythmaking, and that propaganda is still being repeated by serious scholars here more than 500 years later. Da Costa, in contrast, didn’t want to be seen as coming from rags, and the faux nobility he adopted means you still to this day have to dig deep through his noble-sounding name, noble-looking crest, and noble-seeming tomb to find clues to the man beneath, who easily could have left us more information about his real mom and dad but didn’t want to.
If we want to write better histories, tell better narratives, understand better the real ways paths to power work and intersect with privilege, when Rags to Riches is real and when it’s propaganda, we have to evaluate the careers of the powerful by asking the questions which cut through their mythmaking. How much did his parents own? Where were they from? Were there immigrants in his family, refugees–what kind? If his dad was in Occupation X, was he a laborer or a bigwig owner of the means of production? Who did his siblings and aunts and uncles marry? How did he get launched in his first career? Did he, like Sixtus, start with connections which shot him past the early decades of hard work, straight to the foot-in-the-door-of-power job, or did he work for it coequally with others, as da Costa did? And how much of his path to power came from the mom’s side, so often totally erased?
History gives us the toolkit for such questions, critical to the critical thinking side of what the humanities and social sciences are supposed to do. It works.
This post is part of my ramp-up to the release of Inventing the Renaissance, which discusses both men in their broader contexts, and the larger lens on power we get from the period. If you enjoyed this, there are more posts in the sequence to enjoy!
Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.
Florence’s Medici had a family curse: an agonizing hereditary medical condition causing torturous joint pain and severe mobility restrictions, so it was agony to stand, walk, or even hold a pen. Yes, Renaissance Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, was run by disabled people from a sickbed. The famous Cosimo had to have servants carry him through his own home, and used to shout every time they neared doorway. When asked, “Why do you shout before we go through a doorway?” He answered “Because if I shout after you slam my head into the stone lintel it doesn’t help.”
Portrait of Cosimo de Medici by Bronzino. Pictured in his 60s, his face is very lined with age (and pain).
Photograph of the interior of a bedroom on the main floor Cosimo inhabited in Palazzo Medici. The “Piano Nobile” or “Noble Floor” meant the first floor above ground in the period, the one the nobles of a household lived on so they could avoid having to go up more than one flight of stairs (the ground floor, vulnerable to flooding and cold was used for storage of barrels and jars and goods, not habitation). In the room you see period furniture, and a large wooden door with a very, very hard solid stone door frame. Hitting your head on these really, really hurts! I hit my head hard on one in a castle in Wales one time, my head was hurting for days! Stone is hard, people! If you’ve ever hit your head on a doorframe multiply it by ten!
We have a visitor’s account of visiting Palazzo Medici in the days of Cosimo the elder (1440s) and meeting Cosimo and both his sons lying side-by-side three in a bed in pain “each as cranky as the last” using their sickroom as their office as they directed staff in running the republic. Most texts call the Medici condition “gout” a word with the stigma of being the “rich man’s disease” caused by gluttony—a reputation less borne out by modern science. Diet does affect it, mostly alcohol which *everyone drank all the time* and avoiding seafood and organ meat. It isn’t caused by overeating etc. Now, gout in the modern sense is an agonizing joint pain condition caused by buildup of uric acid in the joints, but when a period source says “gout” they could mean any condition that cause swelling, inflammation, and/or pain, from basic arthritis through coeliac to rarer things.
Photograph in the same room in Palazzo Medici, focusing on the large four-poster bed. Around it chairs are gathered, where secretaries could take dictation or visitors meet with the leaders who often used such a bed as their main office. Above the bed hangs a relief carving of the Virgin and Child with angels, and on the wall to the right a painting of Saint Jerome hard at work at his desk as an old man, with an angel helping him. Saint Jerome was a patron saint of scholars, translators, Latin-lovers, and was famous for turning his back on comforts and embracing pain and mortification of the flesh as a way of urging himself to focus on his work and service to the Lord and humanity. The angel helper makes me think of Angelo Poliziano, the famous Homeric poet and dear friend of Lorenzo who often took dictation for him in this room when Lorenzo couldn’t lift a pen.
I talked in my earlier thread [add link here] about Clarice Orsini’s EXTREMELY ILLEGAL hat about how important it was for Medici men like her husband Lorenzo to perform humility. Florence had killed/expelled its nobles, it was a merchant republic and demanded merchant dress & merchant comportment. One had to be seen in the city always walking (riding or being carried was too princely), greeting peers in the street, bowing to each other—are you wincing by now? Imagining walking those stone cobbles while every joint in your body feels like it’s on fire? And going up tall stone staircases?
Lorenzo de Medici did his civic duty volunteering for the city fire brigade, and was a member of the Confraternity of Buonomini, who did volunteer work as shown in frescoes including this one from their headquarters. A Florentine gentleman hands a chicken and a jug of wine to a poor woman as, in the background, another woman lies in a sick bed, being tended by a doctor and another of the wealthy gentleman-volunteers who sits beside her… knees tightly bent to squat on a low wooden stool up a very tall stone step on which the bed is placed. When Lorenzo did this, he’d likely be in as much agony as she was from the pain of stepping up that step and crouching on that stool, but he couldn’t dare show weakness and let people *know* it caused him so much pain.
Add the fact that Europe’s normal diplomatic class at the time were all nobles, so every envoy from anywhere is at least the son of a baron and must be greeted with obsequious bowing and scraping, and walking along beside his horse leading it to where he’ll be staying, as an act of symbolic servant-like humility. Ow.
The ceremony of holding the stirrup of an arriving high-status guest, illustrated here showing Emperor Frederick Barbarossa doing it for Pope Adrian, kneeling beside the horse and holding the stirrup as the pope mounts. This kind of thing casually for any arriving minor noble from anywhere was a brilliant way for Medici to perform non-princliness, since it’s usually a servant’s job (hence the pope humiliating the emperor by making him do it) but look at those harshly bent knees!
Mature Medici—Cosimo, Piero, Lorenzo, Lorenzo’s mom Lucrezia Tornabuoni had it to—all had to save their endurance for *performing fitness* in the streets, being seen walking to or from the cathedral or church or the Palazzo Vecchio where wary eyes judged them, collapsing back into their beds and servants’ arms (period wheelchairs) the instant the door closed. It was carefully stage-managed agony, and accounts from visitors describe Lorenzo walking alongside their horses, joining dances and parades—performance of fitness necessary to hide his increasing weakness.
Lorenzo’s pain was likely worst, since bone examination suggests that, on top of the family condition, he also had acromegaly, the growth hormone overproduction that makes your bones keep growing & swelling at the joints. 2x debilitating arthritis!
The famous terra cotta bust of Lorenzo. His flattened nose (broken in a brawl in his teen years) makes him look very different from his family, but its conspicuousness made it take a long time for us to notice he also has thickened bone development in his brows, cheekbones, and unusual jaw shape, and a tightened mouth consistent with muscle strain from overgrowth of the jawbone. Skeletal examination found evidence in his hands, his knees etc.
And if you remember my post about the very, very tall towers of the Renaissance, imagine with me the agony of answering the summons to visit the Priori (ruling council). A great honor! But a good floor higher than the tower I lived in that was up 111 steps!
A photograph of Florence’s beautiful Palazzo Vecchio. An arrow points out where the room to meet with the priori was located, on an upper floor above the skyline of the rest of the city, meaning a floor above being up 111 steps!
Diagram of one of the sets of stairs inside the Palazzo, burrowing like worm tunnels through the stone. These are the secret tunnel passage stairs for emergency evacuation and servant movements, but the main stairs, though harder to diagram so clearly, are just as numerous and just as stone!Tall, tall, tall stone staircases inside the Palazzo Vecchio, sloping intimidatingly down and up, made of slick, dark, unforgiving stone.A narrow twisty stone staircase in a different part of the Palazzo Vecchio, with no banister to help!
You couldn’t be carried (Princely! Ambitious!) you had to go on foot. Once Lorenzo’s father Piero on a really, really bad pain day when summoned asked if, for once, the priors could visit him. There were riots, and an assassination attempt. How dare he *summon* the senators like a duke his servants! Books where the Medici are the bad guys (tyrants who corrupted the republic!) will make this incident proof of Piero’s haughty decadence. But I know can’t do those stairs on a pain day, and we could equally call it a disability accommodation. He’s still called “Piero the Gouty” to this day.
Portrait of Piero the Gouty. We call him “Piero the Gouty” to differentiate him from his grandson “Piero the Unfortunate” but I think it’s pretty unfortunate going down in history named for your stigmatized disability!
Speaking of disability accommodations, eventually the Medici built a ramp. This ramp. It connects from the floor where the priori were, passes through the bureaucratic offices and all-important guild HQs, sloping at an easy grade down to the living-quarters level of the family palace.
Outside of the Palazzo Vecchio, directly above those many flights of twisty stairs. An elevated walkway supported by an arch comes out of the wall and connects to the next building.Long hallway interior, lined with portraits.Continuation of the ramp, you can see it bending and sloping downward in segments as it bends.
The long interior descends at a gentle grade with minimal turns and staircases, mostly stair that a horse can climb—horse ramps and riding horses or donkeys *indoors* at a walk was another proto-wheelchair disability tool, one architecture had to plan for with things like horse stairs.
Another interior section, showing two small sections of half-height shallow stairs. A horse or donkey could climb these, or one could dismount this close to one’s destination after taking the living disability aid this far. Even on foot these stairs are much gentler in grade and easier to climb, and separated into half-flight segments, making them much easier than those in the Palazzo Vecchio itself.A shallow sloping section of floor something between a ramp and a staircase, as each step itself slants but is about 2/5 feet deep, while the lips up from step to step are very shallow and slightly raised. This type of staircase is optimized for taking on horseback, and common in the Medici family’s Boboli gardens, which is where this specimen is located.
This is why the Vatican has so many weirdly shallow staircases—popes are old so the Vatican was a palace expecting to always host a disabled monarch, so it’s full of built-in accommodations, the most complex and fascinating accessible architecture case study in the world.
Swiss guards in uniform on duty at the Vatican. Above them is an elevated walkway above an arch, one of many elevated walkways optimizing passage without stairways throughout the maze of the Vatican, ideal for the old popes and cardinals constantly at work there. Even the modern elevators have a bench in the elevator! In the elevator! Because old guys need to sit down!Floorplan diagram of part of the Vatican palace, showing the many, many rooms and hallways slanting in odd angles that were added on century by century as new occupants expanded and modified the palace to suit their ever-cycling needs.
And it’s not chance that it was the first Medici pope, Lorenzo’s son Leo X, who finally installed a donkey-powered elevator in the papal fortress Castel Sant’Angelo. Leo was elected young, still fairly fit, but had memories of his parents’ condition getting worse, and knew his would.
Detail from Raphael’s portrait of Pope Leo X, that is Giovanni de Medici, Lorenzo’s second son.
So, Lorenzo’s descendants finally built Earth’s largest, most famous disability access ramp. It’s name is the Vasari Corridor, the elevated walkway I discussed last week as conquering Duke Cosimo I’s project of architectural domination, the tyrant’s assassin-proof walkway piercing the city’s heart. Diversity celebration or tyrant’s monument? It’s the same piece of architecture but feels completely different depending on what question we ask about it: Why was it built? For power? For chronic pain? Yes. Both.
Diagram of the full Vasari Corridor winding its length from the Palazzo Vecchio along the river, across the bridge, and above the houses until it ramps gently down to the Palazzo Pitti where the later Medici had moved. Thinking of it as a ramp it looks appealing! Thinking of it as an armored walkway to stop the outraged people from striking back at the tyrant, it feels like a gnawing worm in the heart of the ancient republic. It’s both!The Vasari corridor bending around the Mannelli tower, whose tall stone edifice blocks its otherwise gentle descent. Last week my story about this building made it a celebration of resistance against conquerors, as the bend in the corridor shows the citizens of the city defying the tyrant who wanted to blast his corridor through the ancient tower that was the birthright of an old respected family, and was forced to go around, leaving this bend which has stood ever since as a symbol of resistance against the tyrant. From the inside, it’s a super awkward narrow twisty space where you have to turn, and anyone with a walker or a scooter struggles to make the turns. Looks very different depending on your point of view, literally and figuratively!
Years ago I attended a conference on “The Medici: Citizens or Tyrants?” Dozens of scholars presented evidence for the family’s sincere, humble service to the republic, or for their princely power-hungry cunning. ALL the presentations had GREAT evidence, and, in the end, they came out exactly fifty-fifty: half showing evidence for humble servants of the state, half scheming tyrants. You can read the papers in this incredible book. We always worry about bias in history, but one part of bias is: What question were you asking in the first place?
Was Piero the Gouty demanding the obsequious submission of the priori (like summoning the Senate to the White House) or a disability accommodation just this once? Both, is the answer, but the same questions won’t get to both, it takes different historians asking different questions then comparing.
“Inventing the Renaissance” is a history of histories of this supposed golden age, and much of the process of making history lies in adding new questions to the braid as historians ask new and more diverse questions with each generation.
Time to share my current historical obsession: Clarice Orsini de Medici’s EXTREMELY ILLEGAL HAT! A cool reflection on performing social class (and part of my release countdown to the release of Inventing the Renaissance.
Portrait of Clarice Orsini de Medici by Ghirlandaio (1490s). Her face has the barely-visible eyebrows and very high forehead fashionable in the period.
Clarice Orsini, wife of Lorenzo de Medici “the Magnificent” came from the great Roman Orsini family, massively powerful nobles who traced their ancestry back through popes, knights and dukes to ancient Roman senators & peers the Caesars; one of her elder cousins was Queen of Naples.
The Orsini family coat of arms, with a heraldic red rose at the top on white, then a horizontal yellow stripe with a blue eel (probably representing speed/quickness/audacity) above red and white diagonal stripes.A battlemented tower, looking very imposing and Medieval, part of the Orsini castle at Odescalchi, one of many, many castles owned by Clarice’s kin.
Clarice’s hat is an escoffion, a type of hennin, tall, cone-like hats made from thick, starched cloth. Princess cone hats and Meleficent’s hat are forms of hennin. Clarice’s is covered with costly brocade, embroidery, and pearls.
Illumination showing Christine de Pisan before Queen Isabeau, all the ladies wearing hennin hats like Clarice’s, with pearl-covered horn-like protuberances sticking up high above the head. Some have white veils over them, others just oodles of pearls sewn onto costly cloth.Photograph of a modern woman modeling such a hat. One can see the felt cap holds the head tightly covering the hair, but arching up high above the top of the forehead then low over the ears to make the face seem taller. The maker is SPES Medieval Market, a wonderful shop, they’ve made many of my best costumes for demoing to students! For this exact hat follow this link to their Etsy shop.Wicked cast member dressed as the Disney character Maleficent, wearing a horned headdress whose debt to the historical Hennin is more visible when it’s rendered in real cloth.
Okay. Lorenzo de Medici, Clarice’s husband, was merchant scum. All Florentines had to be merchant scum, it was mandatory. After many civil wars & watching neighbors fall to conquerors, the Florentine Republic decided to secure its liberties by *massacring all the nobles and putting their heads on pikes!*.
Lorenzo de Medici, dressed like merchant scum. He’s wearing a very expensive red wool chaperon hat (whose dangling red tip drapes around his shoulders like a scarf). These are very expensive clothes made of costly vividly bright fabrics, but they’re what merchants wear, *not* what nobles wear.
A few peaceful/beloved nobles were spared on condition of effectively renouncing their nobility & being very, very careful to avoid any noble trappings; Lorenzo’s mom came from one of these, Lucrezia “we’re definitely not the noble Tornaquinti family anymore” Tornabuoni. Florence thus became a merchant republic. Normal republics at the time (Venice, Genoa, Siena, the Swiss) were *noble* republics, led by senates drawn from noble families, as Rome had been before the Caesars. Florence’s was wildly different, its ruling council selected by putting the names of the merchant guild members (business owners, the owner of the building full of looms, not the men who works them) in a bag and drawing names at random, and making them share power in a complex rotation. In the 1400s, to be fully part of Florence’s government you had to be merchant scum, especially if rich. All eyes watched top families for warning signs of “princely ambition” making it vital to performmerchant humility, in language, behavior, especially clothing. Florentines wore long wool robes (advertising Florence’s top industry Big Wool) especially in Lorenzo’s day the lucco or “Florentine toga” an open-front, open-sided sleeveless mantle whose looseness was less hot in summer and supposed to invoke the Roman republican toga. (On the lucco check out Elizabeth Curie’s wonderful little book, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence).
Detail from a Ghirlandaio fresco showing four of the famous scholars from the circle around Lorenzo in Florence wearing the typical Florentine garments of long red cloaks down past the knee (various shades of red) open down the front and at the sides, over sleeved under-robes. They also wear the acorn-shaped red felt caps common at the period, especially for a scholar (slightly less costly than Lorenzo’s chaperon.)Fresco from a cycle in a confraternity house in Florence, a club whose members were men of good families and did charitable deeds, in this case fiving drink to the thirsty, as poor people gather with jugs which the volunteers are filling with wine. The wealthier men giving out the wine wear more intensely dyed fabrics, and the ones on the right and at center wear the lucco.Another fresco showing four younger Florentine men wearing the long lucco over their light summer doublets (less hot than tunics).
Now, young Lorenzo’s dad & grandpa had made the family *very* powerful, unofficially but-everyone-knew-it helming the state, and foreign contacts helped make that happen. Grandpa Cosimo was close with Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan, and when considering Lorenzo’s marriage.
Lorenzo’s dad Piero de Medici wears a very expensive variant on this style of garment, with gold edging.Francsco Sforza wearing a very very very expensive outfit, with gold brocaded silk,
His parents looked to forge a tie to the City-Where-it-Happens papal Rome. The Medici were as rich as dukes, and as powerful, but to bring a noble princess to the city as a bride was very risky in a city that feared nobility and anyone who seemed to want it. They chose carefully. The Orsini family weren’t monarchs of a region or city-state, they had scattered castles and land in Rome, republican nobility, heroes of the (gone but never forgotten!) Roman Republic and often leaders of the city’s resistance against unpopular or overstepping popes (SPQR!).
They were also heads of the mighty Guelph Party, one of the two great factions whose feud split the Italian peninsula in what Guido Ruggiero aptly calls Italy’s 300 Years’ War. The Guelphs were the papal, anti-imperial side (mnemonic: Pope & Guelph are 1 syllable, Emperor & Ghibelline 3). Florence was a passionately Guelph city. It had massacred its Ghibellines & put their heads on pikes not long after it did so to its nobles, and had the Guelph coat of arms & Guelph war flag on every civic building. The Orsini were the noble leaders of their party, a very strategic ally. Had Lorenzo married a Sforza princess from Milan there’d likely have been immediate riots. A Guelph Orsini republican noble was… *warily* accepted. (Machiavelli’s comment: “When you don’t feel you must marry your neighbors it means you think they’re your servants.”) In 1469 when Clarice married Lorenzo, every worried eye was on them seeking telltale signs of princely ambition (for those familiar with the Pazzi conspiracy assassination attempt against Lorenzo 9 years later, Clarice was one of the named motives!) Which brings us to…
Sumptuary Laws were normal in Renaissance Europe, clothing restrictions justified as preventing overspending on vanity. They restricted expense (gold, pearls, velvet) & enforced social status. People of X rank could only wear X amount of gold, Y fanciness of cloth, Z cut of garment. They also flagged identity. Florentine law required office-holders like Lorenzo to wear the lucco; non-Florentines couldn’t unless granted it as a privilege, a step toward citizenship. Foreigners & nobles were immune to these laws, so were recognizable at a glance, especially for their costly fashions.
Galeazzo Maria Sforza Duke of Milan, wearing a very expensive doublet with gold fleur-de-lis on blue. Lorenzo owned this portrait, but would never, ever have owned this outfit!Giulia Farnese, wearing what young Clarice Orsini would’ve worn in Rome, a costly rose-colored gown embroidered with tons of gold and pearls. Her hair is in a pearl-studded snood.
Like most laws regulating the body, sumptuary laws focused their moralistic side more on women’s bodies than men’s, decrying the wasteful, vain expense of women’s clothes, and in Florence (among other things) banning gold & pearls on women’s hats…
Portrait of Mary Duchess of Burgundy, wearing a tall cone-shaped Hennin hat with a gold jewel on the side.Isabella d’Este wearing a large turban like hat covered with ribbons, gold, and pearls. This is when she is Marquess of Mantua, married to Francesco Gonzaga.
…so naturally Florentine women stopped wearing hats to put the gold & pearls directly in their hair, which much of is why Renaissance paintings of women look so beautiful to us, the only Renaissance portraits who don’t have cone hats or look like their heads are jammed in a Monopoly hotel.
Botticelli portrait made for the Medici family, with an elaborate hairstyle woven through with pearls.Filippo Lippi Madonna, with her hair covered with a light veil and strands of pearls. This is one of the earliest paintings we look at and think “She looks beautiful!” in part because she finally doesn’t have a hat or totally-covering veil!Portrait of Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand & Isabella of Spain and wife of Henry VIII, with a hat that looks like her head was jammed inside a Monopoly hotel, then covered with gold.
Now you see it. This is a BANNED hat. Clarice’s Florentine neighbors COULD NOT wear it. But she noble. She was immune. She *could* wear it, but it would signal princeliness sparking outrage as she strode beside her husband who still dressed like merchant scum.
Clarice Orsini’s Hennin hat again, covered with HIGHLY ILLEGAL gold and pearls.Her husband Lorenzo dressed as merchant scum, in a red chaperon and black lucco over a red tunic.
Did she wear this hat? Likely not in public. The two other portraits of Clarice are in frescoes of Medici friends and associates, portraits in public places (churches) where Clarice carefully wears fashionable, expensive, but merchant class apparel, including a modest white veil.
Fresco detail showing two of whom the left is Clarice Orsini. Her head is covered by a translucent veil, looking very modest and almost like the poor women in the image of the men doing charity except for the detail of gold edging on her gown.Similar fresco in which Clarice, on the right, is dressed much the same, in pink over pale lavender with her hair covered with a plain white veil.
Her illegal hat portrait is posthumous, commissioned by widower Lorenzo to remember his late wife. It hung *inside* Palazzo Medici, in private view. This was Lorenzo’s choice, his memento, Clarice looking as royal & un-Florentine as her Orsini kin. Why?
Clarice in her hennin again.Portrait by Botticelli thought to possibly be a Medici woman, perhaps Clarice’s daughter Maddalena, dressed as she should in Florence, in a very modest brown gown with a simple veil.
Did Clarice own this hat? Had she worn it in Rome? Secretly at home? On trips? Had she hated the commoner clothes her marriage forced on her? She certainly grew up dressing like the princess she was. So much high-stakes politics & personal mystery behind one not-so-simple hat!
I hope you enjoyed joining me in my fascination with the complex meaning of Lorenzo’s choice to remember Clarice (and encourage their kids to remember their mom) wearing her extremely illegal hat. For more tales like this, of Clarice, Lorenzo, their kids etc. Inventing the Renaissance coming soon!
Buckle up, friends, it’s time for the real life “I fart in your general direction”: Marquis Francesco Gonzaga’s unforgettable reply to the 1503 duel challenge from Galeazzo Sanseverino. (Part of my countdown to “Inventing the Renaissance.”)
I posted last time introducing Galeazzo Sanseverino “Son of Fortune”, the famously handsome mercenary captain and lover of Duke Ludovico Visconti-Sforza who held such sway in his beloved’s city that the Milanese called him “the Second Duke.” Everyone doted on Galeazzo, even the French generals he fought wars against! And also the nearly-impossible-to-please Isabella d’Este, sister of the Duke of Ferrara, the famous art lover, patroness of Leonardo da Vinci, and the most easily affronted woman in the Renaissance.
Titian’s portrait of Isabella d’Este. Isabella frowns disapprovingly at the viewer.
The only people who did *not* love the dashing and fortunate Galeazzo were rival mercenary commanders who lost out on valuable commissions leading Milan’s armies as Ludovico started promoting his beloved over all others.
Detail portrait of Ludovico Sforza from the “Pala Sforzesca.”Portrait possibly of Galeazzo Sanseverino.
Trusting one’s lover with one’s armies was (not a bad tactic, since your true love *will not* change sides for cash mid-war, like mercenaries so often did) – for a sample of strategic side-changing see William Caferro’s fabulous book on John Hawkwood.
One rival who lost out through Galeazzo’s promotion was Francesco Gonzaga Marquess of Mantua, a formidable military commander and ruler of a very militarily important city-state strategically positioned in the intersection of Milan’s territory, Venice’s, and Ferrara’s.
Portrait of Francesco Gonzaga.
Francesco Gonzaga came from *extremely* noble stock: his mother and grandmother were kinswomen of the Holy Roman Emperors, his sister Elizabetta the Duke of Urbino, and he himself married the splendid Isabella d’Este (sister of Galeazzo’s lover Ludovico’s wife Beatrice, who also *loved* Galeazzo).
Painting of Isabella and Beatrice d’Este together as girls, from a fresco in the family palace.
When tensions mounted until Galeazzo challenged Francesco Gonzaga to a duel (by letter), Francesco began his unforgettable reply with: “Prù—this is a fart sound I make with my mouth with the addition of a fuck-you gesture (manichetto) and a fig sign.”
Photograph of a stone statue, probably depicting Galeazzo Sanseverino as the model for Saint Victor the Martyr (statue in Milan cathedral museum). He has his arms bound behind him much like images of Saint Sebastian but more military, a pose with strong homoerotic associations in the period (as now).
Print portrait of Francesco Gonzaga. His coat of arms, with imperial eagle imagery, appears in the top left corner.
Gonzaga, the letter continues, was lord of the great city of Mantua, Galeazzo a born vagabond who lived “like dogs do at the expense of others,” a prostitute famous only for his “ass favors,” adding “I have my parties at the door of others, not at mine,” i.e. when I have gay sex I’m on the top, you’re on the bottom! Such ferocious sexual language was not unusual from Gonzaga, a man who often sealed his letters, not with a signet ring with his coat of arms, but an image from an ancient Roman token depicting a couple having anal sex.
We aren’t 100% sure how these tokens were used in antiquity, but many thousands exist depicting different sex acts. One theory is that they were tokens used at brothels; one bought them at the central cashier and redeemed inside, like ordering off a menu with tokens with a photo of the food, and Gonzaga was a collector of antiquities, especially *crude* antiquities.
Ancient Rome left us *thousands* of phalluses: phallus-shaped lamps, ceramic good luck phalluses displayed by the doors of shops to bring abundance, the many phalluses broken off of ancient statues by accidents or deliberate art censorship, and Gonazaga was one of many collectors.
Four ancient Roman clay oil lamps in the shape of satyrs with enormous penises, from the Secret Cabinet of the Archaeological Museum in Naples which collects a huge number of the kinds of sexually explicit antiquities that fascinated Gonzaga and his contemporaries.
From the same museum collection, an ancient Roman bronze flying phallus, with additional phalluses coming off of it, with bells hanging from it, designed to hang like a wind chime or a bell on a store’s front door.
For those wondering, Gonzaga *did not* use the anal sex image to seal letters to his wife Isabella d’Este, he had a more formal seal for such letters– there are fascinating collections of their letters, showing their negotiated co-rule of Mantua and almost good-cop-bad-cop balancing of performance of power.
Gonzaga also had a love-affair with his sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia, wife of Isabella’s brother Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara. Lucrezia’s more famous affair was with the poet-scholar Pietro Bembo, whose exchange poetic romantic letters Byron called “The Prettiest love letters in the world.”
The Lucrezia-Gonzaga letters are *not like that*, and much more along the lines of “Let me describe my enormous penis.” “I love when you describe your enormous penis!” Their contrast with the Lucrezia-Bembo letters reveal Lucrezia as who enjoyed many different genres of love & relationship. Francesco Gonzaga’s refusal to duel Galeazzo Sanseverino, though hilariously dramatic, was also strategic, magnifying the differences between the two of them in order to avoid risking losing face if he lost the duel against Galeazzo. Given that this is 1503, many are surprised to see gay sex be so overt, both in Gonzaga’s letter and Galezzo’s relationship with Duke Ludovico, a gay relationship fully public in the face of all Italy. Didn’t the Inquisition police such things with an iron fist? Yes *and* no.
The answer is that Renaissance justice was extremely malleable if one had *political influence* meaning in the period *patronage*. If you were powerful (duke, marquis, cardinal) you *and those in your favor* could get away with anything, and not just local enforcement but even the Inquisition didn’t dare interfere. There’s a letter from a friend in Rome to Machiavelli saying Rome is cracking down on homosexuality, and all their gay friends *who don’t work for cardinals* are scared & doing things like hiring female prostitutes to hang around & make them look straight. Those who work for cardinals are safe. Elite favor created bubbles of liberty beyond the law. We even have letters of inquisitors complaining to each other about dukes insisting their courtiers and favorite scholars be allowed to have and read banned books, and that they can do nothing. The Inquisition needed local authorities to cooperate with them, lend them troops, jail cells etc., and the popes were from political families and needed allies, and would rather let the Duke of Milan parade his boyfriend around than piss him off in the middle of a French invasion.
Map of central and northern Italy circa 1450, showing the Papal States surrounded by a complex colorful array of other powers, clearly a messy political situation.
This applied high & low: in Florence, a carpenter who works for a middlingly-important family gets in trouble, he writes to his employer, they write to a bigger family they serve, & a letter from Lorenzo de Medici or Palla Strozzi gets the sentence on the books (death!) reduced to a small fine.
Goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini’s unreasonably interesting autobiography describes how he would wait until he had a major commission from a pope or a king & *then* murder someone he hated, knowing the patron will get him off in order to still get the art they commissioned. Cellini *boasts of this* expecting the audience to be impressed with his cleverness in manipulating the system to get away with murder, maiming, vandalism, necromancy (really!), and a variety of sexual exploits. Cellini’s idol & role model, famously gay Michelangelo, was similarly never in danger since his boss was always a pope or duke. Even a pope authorized a crackdown on the general populace, it didn’t apply to the man painting His Holiness’s ceiling.
This is why those goons at the start of Romeo & Juliet are willing to risk their lives for the Montagues & Capulets: Lord Capulet is their social safety net, who’ll care for them if they’re disabled, raise their orphans if they’re killed, get them off if they commit crimes, and protect them if they’re queer.
This flexible judicial system—one sentence on the books, a much lighter one if someone important writes a letter—is how homosexuality, radical heterodoxy etc. could be illegal yet *not* covert, and how the ferocious sentence in the law (Off with his head! Off with his hands!) was so rarely enforced that it’s the aberration, not the norm. My friend Michael Roche’s brilliant book “Forbidden Friendships” shows how 40% to 60% of Florence’s male population was indicted for sodomy (a capital offense!) at some point in their lives, yet practically all indictments ended with a fine.
I cannot recommend this book enough!!!!
The exception was if you fell out of the patronage system. If you pissed off your patron, suddenly you face a ferocious justice system which will happily dismember you in the town square make an example. The message: don’t commit crimes *and anger the duke* or this will happen. This is one more way the Renaissance judicial system (then as now) operated as a tool to keep elites in power, and to keep populations obedient to elites. It’s a big part of why Enlightenment thinkers thought that making standardized sentences (one crime = one punishment) would be equalizing. Elites abuse post-Enlightenment judicial systems in many ways too, but it’s neat to be reminded what the principle of “Equality under the law” hoped to end, a world in which the desire to live and love as one wished in safety (or read and think as one wished) was another chain binding you to obedience.
I treat the entanglement of patronage and law at much greater length in “Inventing the Renaissance,” how it bound every layer of society together in a system whose coercive power is a cheering reminder that, while today’s society has many flaws, we have taken some real steps toward equality.
Time to meet one of my favorite Renaissance friends: Galeazzo Sanseverino, a mercenary whom contemporary sources describe as the sexiest thing in pants in Italy, part of the badass polycule threesome that ruled Milan in the early 1490s.
Photograph of a stone statue, probably depicting Galeazzo Sanseverino as the model for Saint Victor the Martyr (statue in Milan cathedral museum).
Galeazzo was the third son of Roberto Sanseverino d’Aragona, one of the most celebrated mercenary generals of the 1400s, who had fathered 25 children before dying heroically in the Battle of Calliano at the age of 69!
Relief sculpture, tomb slab of Roberto Sanseverino.
The armor Roberto died in (captured as a trophy) still survives.Roberto’s eldest son Gianfrancesco became a general in the French king’s armies, the second Fracasso the most famous jouster in Europe and a favorite of Emperor Maximilian, and practically all his sons were soldiers, so as #3 Galeazzo had to do a *lot* to stand out. Boy did he succeed!
Miniature painting of Galeazzo Sanseverino in the midst of a procession in Milan.
Galeazzo became the favorite lover of Ludovico Visconti-Sforza, who ruled Milan, first as regent then as duke, until his capture by the French in 1499. He made Galeazzo leader of his armies, and trusted him with so much power & sway in the city that people called him “The Second Duke”.
Detail portrait of Ludovico Sforza from the “Pala Sforzesca.Portrait possibly of Galeazzo Sanseverino.
Galeazzo was *also* a beloved favorite of Ludovico’s young wife, Beatrice d’Este–one of the noblest princesses in Italy, sister of the Duke of Ferrara–whom sources say gave Galeazzo access to her private rooms at all hours, reveled in his company, and played croquet with him every afternoon.
Sketch of Beatrice d’Este by someone in the circle of Leonardo da Vinci.
Beatrice had *loathed* her husband’s female lovers, like Cecilia Gallerani immortalized in Leonardo’s famous painting “Lady with an Ermine” but loved Galeazzo, and happily welcomed him as family.
Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani known as “Lady with an Ermine.”
While contemporary sources are very explicit about the openly sexual relationship between Ludovico and Galahad, no sources (even written by enemies) ever suggested any sexual relationship between Galahad and Beatrice despite their intimate friendship and close contact.
Portrait probably of Beatrice d’Este by Bernardino de’ Conti called “The Rothschild Lady.”
The young duchess *was* very close with her husband’s illegitimate daughter Bianca Giovanna Visconti-Sforza, who was nine when the sixteen-year-old duchess came to Milan in 1491, & became her dear companion/playmate.
Probable portrait drawing of Bianca Giovanna by Leonardo da Vinci.
To tie the family together, Ludovico had Galeazzo marry young Bianca Giovanna, making his lover his son-in-law (which is what most histories call him). Accounts describe the very young princess enjoying playing chastely with the husband who treated her more as a stepdaughter than a wife.
Portrait of Beatrice d’Este, a detail from the same painting as the earlier portrait of Ludovico.
Two sons born to the ducal couple (and doted on by Galeazzo & Bianca) seemed to secure the family’s future, and even when the French invaded in 1494 Duchess Beatrice (shown here as a girl with her sister Isabella d’Este) visited and charmed the French king, securing a (brief) alliance.
Painting detail of two teenaged girls in Renaissance gowns, leaning near each other as if one is embracing the other.Portrait of Massimiliano Sforza, eldest son of Beatrice and Ludovico.Portrait of the ducal couple’s second son Francesco as an infant.
Alas, the joy was not to last. Relations with the French soured, and Bianca died of illness in 1496 (age 14), then Beatrice in childbed the year after (age 22). Ludovico’s mourning was so extreme he locked himself away for 2 weeks, shaved his head, & started wearing only black & a ragged cloak.
Beatrice d’Este’s tomb.Detail of her face in profile in the carved tomb.
Soon after, amid the wars egged on by many including the ambitious Borgias, the French seized Milan and captured Ludovico, keeping him in an iron cage in which he used to display his high-status prisoners. For a great account of this see John Gangé’s book “Milan Undone“.
Galeazzo too was captured but charmed the French who let his brothers ransom him be. He went to emperor’s court where, not to be outdone in drama, he wore all black and *dyed his hair black* letting it grow unkempt down to his waist as a token of his grief for Ludovico’s continued imprisonment. It was in this phase that he challenged the ferocious Francesco Gonzaga to a duel (a story that’s now a new post!), but eventually he entered the service of the French King Louis and was still so charming he became the only non-Frenchman to ever receive the title of Royal Chamberlain of France. Ludovico died in his imprisonment in 1508. Galeazzo, long outliving all his dear ones from Milan, died heroically in battle defending France’s next king Francis I in the Battle of Pavia 1525, aged 65.
Tapestry probably showing Galeazzo Sanseverino as a mature man in his final battle.
Queer & complex families like this usually get erased in histories, but I love to remember them through this painting by pre-Raphaelite artist Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, imagining a happy alternate Milan where Beatrice survives & hosts visiting Leonardo da Vinci and (inexplicably) Savonarola.
An imaginative 19th century painting of the court at Milan by the fantastic Pre-Raphaelite artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Leonardo da Vinci shows a model of his flying machine to thoughtful Duke Ludovico and his son Massimiliano, who appears to be six or seven years old (older than he was when his mother died and his father was captured, making this painting alternate history!). To the left, the boy’s mother Duchess Beatrice sits in one of a pair of fancy red chairs, while the other stands empty but a man who could easily be Galeazzo Sanseverino stands behind it, leaning close to the duchess whispering in her ear. Standing behind them are Cecilia Galerani, Elizabetta Gonzaga, and (inexplicably?!) Savonarola, all recognizable from their famous portraits. A page boy behind holds a pet monkey. To the right, behind the Duke, three gentleman courtiers in gorgeous court finery watch, two looking at the model while one veils his mouth with his hat as he whispers to his companions. So fantastic to see actual alternate history represented, yet another proof how linked the Pre-Raphaelite art movement was to the roots of modern fantastic, historical, and speculative fiction!
Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors.
In a post last week, I talked about how Renaissance towns used to be full of tall stone towers, built by rich families as mini-fortresses, & Florence got sick of people hiding in their fireproof towers while setting fire to rivals’ houses & letting things burn, so they made everyone knock the tops off.
Centuries later, the stubs of former towers were still conspicuous, and owning one was a mark of prestige, that you were rich & powerful *before* the tower ban. Tower nubs symbolized patrimony and stability. With which we can now recognize our yellow thing going around one of these nubs. Why?
The stone building at center above is one of the distinctive rough stone tower nubs, originally much, much taller.Our yellow architectural feature wrapping around another such tower nub.
The iconic Vasari Corridor was built by a conqueror who feared his people. This lovely yellow walkway over the bridge connected the old seat of government (which he symbolically had to occupy) to the new palace where he lived, keeping him from assassination behind solid walls.
It was an architectural show of force, as all the families with property in the way were pressured to submit to the new duke’s demand to let him build his walkway over their roofs or even through their homes. It was also a show of fear, perhaps best personified by the fact that
around the same time that Duke Cosimo built this fortified commuter lane to avoid his people, his neighbor Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara used to walk around his city buck naked (with his dick in one hand & a sword in the other) to show off his confidence that no one dared touch a d’Este.
Duke Cosimo I de Medici
Duke Alfonso d’Este
The d’Este were a *very* blue blooded old family, stably in power for generations, propped up by Venice, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the papacy who all wanted stability in the duchy that was the buffer zone between their three empires, minimizing direct war.
In contrast, the Medici were mere merchant scum, commoner equals of their neighbors who, back when everyone important in Florence had a tower, hadn’t had an impressive one. Bowing before a noble-blooded prince made sense to people at the time, before that family down the street?
Machiavelli said if people are deeply invested in an institution they fight for it, so places used to monarchy (like Milan) if they became republics yield to new conquerors easily (Milan did in 1450) but peoples who truly love their would never stop fighting for their ancient liberty.
Florence did fight the ducal takeover. Cellini’s Perseus statue, the topic of my first thread in this series, commemorated Duke Cosimo crushing of one violent uprising, & his desire to cast the severed heads of his enemies in eternal bronze was a show of force, but also fear.
When Duke Cosimo wanted to build his elevated private commuter tunnel, those heads on pikes were fresh memories. Most neighbors yielded to his architectural conquest, but there in his way was one old tower nub, cramped, unfashionable, cold, but patrimony of the Mannelli family who… were descended from the Roman Manlii family who’d had a consul as early as 480 BC, peers of Cicero and Caesar, who’d already owned the tower a century when Boccaccio’s friend Francesco Mannelli lived in it during the Black Death, 200 years before Duke Cosimo took power.
So when the duke unveiled his plans to blast a hole through it, the Mannelli told the young conqueror to get stuffed. Cosimo knew if he violated this symbol of ancient patrimony, every *other* propertied family would turn on him. The conqueror didn’t dare cross that line.
This wasn’t idealistic resistance; it came from one of the most oligarchic and entrenched of social forces: property rights. But it was resistance, and it worked. Around the tower the corridor went. Every generation thereafter pointed to it as a place the people drew the line, and won.
This is not a story of the kind of resistance that groundswells and overthrows the tyrants. The Medici stayed in power until the family died out, they were never overthrown. But they were *kept in check.* A line the conqueror doesn’t dare cross is a powerful line, that protects much behind it.
Stories of revolution are dramatic and cathartic, but we also need stories like this, of resistance *under tyranny* that drew a line, *reducing harm* even while tyrant stayed. Nor was this the only time Florence drew such a line.
Rewinding a century, the Medici rose to power around 1430 through a combination of cunning, cash & cultural soft power under Cosimo the Elder the great-great-great-grandfather of the Duke Cosimo. Many times in that century Florence drew the line.
Portrait of the original Cosimo de Medici the elder, dressed in merchant-appropriate red robes, lined with fur which shows they were extremely expensive, but very much not what a duke would wear.
Portrait of Duke Cosimo I, wearing very warlike and splendid armor, looking very ducal exactly as his merchant-class descendants didn’t dare look in portraits. (Despite Cosimo’s grandsons in fact owning armor and jousting, but what you choose to look like in a *portrait* is different.
They drew it violently with uprisings or assassination attempts in 1433, 1466, 1478, 1494, 1430, 1437 etc., and more quietly many times between through moments of resistance like the Mannelli telling the conqueror he and his corridor to (literally) get bent (around their tower).
The tale of resistance told by the Mannelli Tower isn’t one of revolution, it’s one of slowing down the shifting baseline. The baseline did keep shifting, less liberty for all and more power for the conquerors, but it shifted * slowly*, and many lives and rights sheltered behind that line. If we define victory as preserving the republic, there’s no happy ending, the Medici won. But if their conquest started in 1430 and they still didn’t dare pierce a symbolic tower 130 years later, that is a lot of slowing the baseline compared to what Florence’s conquered neighbors endured. Slowing the baseline shift meant many generations of Medici being careful, respecting core rights, while Alfonso d’Este didn’t just parade around Ferrara buck naked, he had his artists thrown in the dungeon if he thought they weren’t painting fast enough.
Machiavelli said peoples who treasure their liberties can preserve them even through long stretches of tyranny. That it’s peoples like 1450 Milan who yield quickly to the tyrant and don’t try to hold the line who lose their liberty completely. He wasn’t wrong.
We don’t like resistance stories without a cathartic revolution, they don’t feel like blowing up the Death Star. They feel like loss. They’re not. We need to revisit these worst case scenarios to see that, even when resistance didn’t *win* it did *work*. It saved lives & livelihoods.
Florence’s republic didn’t fall to the Medici only once, it kicked them out in 1433, in 1494, in 1512, in 1530, it took many conquests. But even when it *was* the worst case, the final fall, resistance kept Florence a place that with noticeably more liberty than its neighbors.
No one in Florence knew which republic was the last republic, not in 1430, 1478, 1494, 1512, or 1530, but they did know *all* resistance held the line and preserved liberties. Partial victory is powerful. We must remember that.
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over Italy.
Often when in Florence one sees buildings like this, where one section is rough stone standing out amid stucco neighbors.
These are actually the bottom nubs of Medieval stone towers. The town of San Gimigniano (below) is famous for having several still intact. Wealthy families built these as mini-fortresses within the city, where they could defend against riots, enemy families (think Montagues and Capulets) and invasion:
Signs of wealth and prestige, these all-stone buildings were also fireproof, leading to a terrible but effective tactic: take your family, treasures & goods up into your tower then set fire to enemies’ homes and let the city burn around you while you sit safe above. This was VERY BAD for cities.
street corner in San Gimigniano
After many disasters, Florence’s solution was to BAN private buildings over a certain height, forcing everyone who had a tower to knock the top off down to regulation height, leaving these recognizable stone nubs all around the city. This round one below is the oldest (now a restaurant).
My favorite tower stub is this one, in Via dei Cerchi. I lived on the top floor for a year as a grad student, up 111 steps! I had calves of steel by spring, but the views from the top looked like someone had put a poster of Florence on the wall except it was a window!
Only city buildings were allowed to exceed the mandated height, which is why Florence’s skyline is now all special buildings: monastery bell towers, the cathedral & baptistery, Orsanmichele the city’s granary (tall to keep grain away from water & mice), the seat of government, and one special guy…
The tower on the right here is part of Bargello, the prison & police fortress, but it didn’t start that way. It was built by a private family, who sold it to the city when the law banning towers was passed, and the city incorporated it into their prison fort.
The city jail had to be a fortress in case someone from a powerful family was arrested and the family sent goons to break them out (those guys who bite their thumbs in the opening scene of Romeo & Juliet would *totally* have stormed the jail to bust Romeo out!).
In this photo you can see how the brick battlements are a later addition, added to the tower as part of its transformation from private fortress to public.
What did Florence look like back when it had all its towers? Its long-time ally across the mountains Bologna is famous for still having two intact towers, but in the Middle Ages Bologna was known as the City of 100 Towers because so many families built them. The reconstructions look absolutely incredible. Florence didn’t have so many but did have dozens, so the richest part of the city center would have looked much like this. Much to the despair of the city fire brigade!
So, whether in a film or on the street, if you ever see a historic Italian city and walk along a block where for some reason one chunk of wall is stone and all the others smooth, you’re probably looking at a relic of the faction feuds that Guido Ruggiero aptly calls “The Italian 300 Years’ War.”
I talk about this long war in “Inventing the Renaissance,” one of many points of continuity which show how the supposed difference between a bad “Dark Ages” and Renaissance “golden age” is 100% propaganda, but fascinating propaganda with a deep history.
And I’ll share more tidbits like over the coming days as we countdown to the book’s release!
Inventing the Renaissance comes out in one month in the UK (2 months USA), so I’m going to try to post daily this month on social media to share cool pictures and stories of things related to the book. I thought I would also gather them here, posting them sometimes as individual posts, sometimes gathering a few together when they’re shorter. So to start here are some notes on Benvenuto Cellini’s stunning Perseus, my pick for a cover illustration (thank you, editors!)
For me, this statue personifies the Renaissance because, by standing opposite Michelangelo’s David by the Palazzo Vecchio, it’s part of a suite of famous statues every one of which commemorates some big & often violent tumult. When we meet famous Renaissance art we often hear about the artist but not the context. The severed head is there for a reason!
Cellini lived in the rocky decades when (after the death of the famous Lorenzo de Medici) the Medici family had been kicked out and strove to return and seize control of the city by force. Duke Cosimo I took over in the 1530s, and commissioned the Perseus in the 1540s right after a bloody revolt.
Perseus’s face deliberately resembled the then-teenaged duke, and Florence had long displayed corpses of traitors that square, often hung from battlements, sometimes as heads on pikes. When the statue was unveiled Medusa’s head in the duke’s hand represented very real & recent rebel heads!
To increase the gore factor, the statue is positioned at the edge of a roof, so when it rains Perseus remains dry, but water drips down the gore streaming from her head, from the sword point, and from her severed neck!
To hammer the message home, a relief at the bottom shows Perseus rescuing Andromeda (a personified Florence). In the top right corner a cavalry battle (which does not appear in the Perseus story!) shows the defeat of the rebels, as Perseus “rescues” Florence from the “dragon” of republican rule.
In the base, Jupiter, Perseus’s father, threatens to strike anyone who harms his son, a warning of reprisals from Cosimo’s allies, especially the Emperor whose Landsknecht knights Cosimo quartered under the very roof where the statue stood! Giving it its current name “Loggia dei Lanzi.”
When we celebrate Renaissance art w/o acknowledging the terror & violence that shaped it, we repeat the myth of a bad “Dark Ages” & Renaissance “golden age” a very potent piece of propaganda, which is what Inventing the Renaissance is about, and it has plenty more Cellini anecdotes, he was a wild man who lived a wild life, documented by his book which I will always call “The Implausibly Interesting Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.”
I hope you’ll enjoy more tidbits like this in coming days!
It’s time at last. If you’ve enjoyed my ExUrbe blog posts and stories about history over the years, here’s the book-length version on its way! Inventing the Renaissance: the Myth of a Golden Age, coming out February 13th 2025 in the UK (pre-order through Amazon.co.uk in hardcover, Kindle e-book or Audiobook) and March 21st in the USA (pre-order from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or for Nook or Kindle), or it’s always best to order from your favorite independent bookshop!
Combining updated versions of some of my most popular blog series (including those on Machiavelli, the Black Death & Renaissance, the history of Progress, and history of atheism) with tons of new material , this fat and playful whopper of a book (how is it 768 pages?!) is packed with fun anecdotes and intimate details, weaving together the lives of fifteen different Renaissance figures, some famous, some obscure (entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, heretics, princesses, assassins, prophets) to look at where the myth of a bad Middle Ages and golden Renaissance came from, a story partly about the period and equally about the centuries since, and the many political movements that have found it useful to claim a supposed golden age.
OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK (more of my own comments below):
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled to describe what makes this famous golden age unique.
In Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating. Her witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the period show how its legend derives more from later centuries’ mythmaking than from the often-grim reality of the period itself. She examines its defining figures and movements: the enduring legacy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the rediscovery of the classics, the rise of the Medici and fall of the Borgias, the astonishing artistic achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Cellini, the impact of the Inquisition, and the expansion of secular Humanism. Palmer also explores the ties between culture and money: books, for example, could cost as much as grand houses, so the period’s innovative thinkers could only thrive with the help of the super-rich. She offers fifteen provocative and entertaining character portraits of Renaissance men and women, some famous, some obscure, whose intersecting lives show how the real Renaissance was more unexpected, more international, and above all more desperate than its golden reputation suggests.
Drawing on her popular blogs and writing with her characteristic energy and wit, Palmer presents the Renaissance as we have never seen it before. Colloquial, funny and brilliant, this is a work of deep scholarship that will make you alternately laugh and cry.
I love the paperback cover too, it really gets across what the book is about!
I started writing Inventing the Renaissance in summer 2020, as a response to how constantly reporters were asking “If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID cause an economic boom?” It’s a question founded on such profoundly distorted assumptions, I realized I couldn’t give it a short answer, a real answer required pulling back the curtain on the great and terrible Renaissance and exposing the awkward, often scared and desperate truth behind the curtain. And it took three parts:
Establishing that there is no such thing as a golden age or dark age, but why the myth of dark and golden ages has been hard to wipe out because it’s so convenient for later generations, who want to use it to claim that their policy/party/movement/etc. will bring about a golden age (and to paint their rivals as the corresponding dark age).
What actually caused the production of all the shiny art and architecture which makes us think the Renaissance was a golden age, but was actually born from a desperate reality.
How historical change actually works, and how examining the past shows us we can never sit back and think “Well, X has happened, it will cause a golden age,” since good outcomes in history are real, but are only caused by one thing: people working hard to make it so.
The project took a long time, and ended up incorporating a ton of new material, centering on a set of fifteen mini-biographies of Renaissance figures whose paths crossed in this fascinating but desperate time, many kinds of people: a banker, a musician, an assassin, a poet, two prophets, two princesses, some heretics, ending up with our friend Machiavelli and his hard work to protect Florence during this desperate age. It’s a unique structure for a history, often retelling the same set of events several times but from different points of view, drawing on my skills as a novelist to tell stories full of passion and bias, and then to upend and invert them by suddenly switching to another point of view on the opposite side of the conflict, or zooming out to look at the different historians who have told contradictory versions of the tale.
When I sent the (very fat, very long!) manuscript off to the press I kept expecting them to tell me to cut it, separate it into different things, but my editors said they just love the way the whole thing flows, weaving together many stories, not just of the Renaissance but later eras, and drawing back the veil on historians and the work we do in inventing history, showing, with more candor than books usually do, the messy underbelly of the historian’s craft, “how the sausage gets made” so to speak. It’s a big book but a surprisingly fast read for its length, full of warmth and intimacy as well as humor and adventure, treating historical figures as friends we meet across the diaspora of time, and history-making as a long, multigenerational collaboration where even the errors are often a fruitful and vital part of getting to better truths beyond. It doesn’t read like most histories, but it does a lot, and, as my editors said, it ended up making them feel hopeful for our present in a way that can be rare in our desperate times.
So I hope you’ll give it a try, and enjoy sharing this taste of the Renaissance world that I’ve been living with so intimately with over my years getting to know our friends in the past, who worked so hard, and left us – not the world they wanted to make – but a world very worth having.
But remember, it’s always best to order from your favorite independent bookshop! If you pre-order a book they’ll notice, and they might order an extra one; that makes the biggest difference of all!
"Warm, generous, and inviting," Inventing the Renaissance provides a witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the supposed Dark Ages and golden Renaissance, and exposes the terrible yet often tender reality beneath.
Rags to Riches stories were popular long before modern iterations like the “American Dream” or “self-made man”, or even early modern ones like Jack the Giant-Killer or Cinderella. And they were also always used as propaganda.
And following the rule that you should always look up everybody’s mom, Sixtus’s mother was Luchina Monteleoni, a fully noble-blooded daughter of an old and powerful noble family of Genoa, whose father had been exiled from the main city and settled in backwater Savona to bide his time and rebuild his fortune. Our commoner born in poverty turns out to actually be super rich commoner on dad’s side + temporarily semi-impoverished old family blood noble on mom’s, but propaganda let him exaggerate the halves of each side of his lineage that fit the Franciscan risen-from-nothing mythmaking.
Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.
