Posts Tagged ‘Inventing the Renaissance’

The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars

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Florence, History, Inventing the Renaissance, Italy
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Photo of a model of Bologna, with so many earthy pink tall skinny towers sticking up from every block of the terra-cotta-roofed town that it looks like plant seeds starting to come up in spring. Around the edge you can see the city's moat and battlemented walls, looking tiny compared to the towers which rise to six or seven times the height of the three-story buildings around them.

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.

A photo of a street in Florence. Many tourists walk along and the buildings are all shops and eateries. In the center, conspicuous between buildings of yellow or beige stucco, is one building made of crude-looking yellowish stone, very rough and undecorated, with few windows and all small compared to its neighbors. A couple doors down, a second conspicuous stone section like this sticks up, also strangely blank and rough amid its yellow neighbors. Both stop about half a story above the roofs of the three-story buildings on either side of them.

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:

A classic image of the skyline of the town of San Gimigniano, with many smaller houses three or four stories tall with the characteristic Italian yellow stucco walls and terra cotta tiled roofs, but with eleven stone towers sticking up far above them, towering twelve stories or more. The towers are very plain and blank, just squares of stone without decoration and with few windows, clearly utilitarian more than aesthetic.

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.

Photo of a street corner in San Gimigniano, with several plain-sided square stone towers sticking up above the roofline against a bright blue sky.
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).

Photograph of some buildings crammed very close together. Those on the left and right are yellow stucco with large windows. In the middle, touching both of them, is a circular section made of rough nubbly stone, that really looks like it could be the bottom part of a round castle tower, it just needs battlements or a pointy cone roof. Instead it's lopped off flat just above the roofs of the other buildings.

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!

Photo of a street of town buildings, all squeezed together sharing walls with no gaps between. The one on the left is yellow stucco, with an archway and a "Coin" grocery store. The one on the right is yellow stucco above with decorative faux rustic stone facing on the lower floor. In between them, about the width of one storefront, is a section where the wall is rough rubbley stone, with one small and one large arched door at the bottom, and very small windows above. The large arched door would have had a fortress gate large enough for horses to enter, but is now a tabacchi shop.

 

Photograph through a semicircular window, showing a roofline and the tower of Florence's famous Palazzo Vecchio sticking up above. This window was in the bathroom! I had this view from the toilet! It was incredible!

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…

Photograph of the Florence skyline from the south side of the river. Sticking up above the sea of fairly flat tiled roofs one can see a few distinctive buildings. To the left is the battlemented Palazzo Vecchio with its tall square battlemented tower. To the right and behind it (hard to see) is the city granary. Toward the center is the red dome of San Lorenzo, and in front of it the white hexagonal pointy roof of the Baptistery. Just to the right of the baptistery is the enormous cathedral with its stripey bell tower and massive dome. In front of the cathedral are two towers, one pointy, and one square; the square one is circled in yellow and we'll zoom in on it in a moment.

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.

A photograph taken from my tower apartment across the roofs of Florence. Two golden stone towers stick up above all the red tiled roofs. On the left is a pointy one with crosses on it, part of the Badia monastery. On the right is a square one with battlements and big open windows, connected to a fortress with more battlements.

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!).

Photograph of the inside of a Medieval fortress. The interior courtyard of pale stone is surrounded by a covered loggia with rounded arches, and the walls are covered with coats of arms of past noblemen who served as captains of the police. In the center is a well, to give it is own source of water. A woman in a brown shirt stands near the well, looking very tiny in the huge courtyard.

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.

In the foreground is a stone wall with battlements. Sticking up behind it, against a bright blue sky, is the top of a stone tower. The tower itself is the same yellowish stone as the wall, but on top of the tower is a balcony area with battlements clearly added in red brick, and lined on top with metal sheeting to protect against the weather. The golden weathercock on top is on edge at the moment, and barely visible.

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!

Photo of a model of Bologna, with so many earthy pink tall skinny towers sticking up from every block of the terra-cotta-roofed town that it looks like plant seeds starting to come up in spring. Around the edge you can see the city's moat and battlemented walls, looking tiny compared to the towers which rise to six or seven times the height of the three-story buildings around them.

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.”

View down a street in Florence. The buildings on both sides are yellow stucco with stone windowframes, but the one at the end is naked brownish stone all the way up, with small windows one of which has a balcony outside with flowers.

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!

 

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Cellini’s Perseus & the Violence of Renaissance Art

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Florence, History, Inventing the Renaissance
1

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!)

Left: A bronze statue of naked Perseus, beautifully muscular and youthful, holding aloft the severed head of Medusa from whose neck gore is dribbling in streams. He wears a beautiful classical helmet with wings on it, and holds a curved classical sword. In the background one can see the arched roof of the Renaissance loggia above him. Right: An orange book cover showing the same statue in much the same position, though one can also see Medusa's headless body at Perseus's triumphant feet, her neck streaming gore. The title "Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age" is superimposed over the statue, with the word "the" pierced by the sword.

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!

Photograph of the same bronze statue of Perseus from behind. To the lower right Michelangelo's David stands cattycorner to it, with the Medieval stone wall of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio behind it. A balcony above is crowned by the flags of the European Union, Italian Republic, and Florentine Republic.

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.

A detailed image of Perseus's torso as he holds up the severed head. You can see the name of the sculptor "Benvenuto Cellini" written on a strap which goes diagonally across Perseus's naked chest, holding his scabbard - the helmet and scabbard are the only clothes he wears. A pigeon sitting on the sword is humorously positioned just in the right spot to hide the penis.

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! Detail from Bronzino's painted portrait of Duke Cosimo I, his bold straight nose and face shape resembling the face of Perseus.

Detail of Perseus's face.

A zoomed-in shot of the severed head of Medusa. Her eyes are closed as if in sleep, and her face beautiful, her hair snakes curled up like the beautiful classical curls common on ancient statues. Bronze streams of gore come down from her neck as if she was just killed.

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!

A photograph of the same statue angled from below shows how the sword, severed head, and the body's neck streaming gore all stick out forward from the body, so they can be in the rain while the body is under the roof above.

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.

A photograph of the square bronze frieze described in the main text: in the middle Andromeda sits on a stack of stones which look conspicuously like the stones the Palazzo Vecchio itself is made of (the seat of government and symbol of the city). Above her, Perseus flies down with upraised sword to slay the sea dragon which threatens her from the bottom left. To the right, mourning citizens watch the dramatic scene, but above and behind them men on horses clash and the pikes and halberds of German-style soldiers of the era the statue was made stick up above the crowd.

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.”

Another angle of the same statue from below shows the elaborate white base covered with decorations, and at the center a niche with a small statue of Jupiter, holding lightning aloft to threaten the viewer.

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!

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"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.