The Ugly Renaissance (15 page)

As with so much in the Renaissance, however,
the theory didn’t quite match the reality, and while women are absent from accounts of Michelangelo’s life between 1501 and 1504, there is every indication that they played a much more diverse range of roles in daily existence than the biographies of Vasari and Ascanio Condivi suggest.

Although subject to legal restrictions, women often performed a wide number of economic functions, especially if they were widowed. On occasion, married women could be found taking on some of the administrative work in their husband’s workshops, and many records in the Florentine archives testify to women being involved in hiring workers, paying wages, and keeping accounts. More than that, we find women conducting business in their own names. Taking advantage of offers of credit, they engaged in numerous, and quite sizable, purchases; they borrowed money, and they made wills as they saw fit. Similarly, there are instances of married women acting as midwives, moneylenders, and artisans in some trades. Michelangelo did a good deal of business with women during his time working on the
David,
and later in life praised
Cornelia Colonelli for managing the affairs of her deceased husband, Urbino, so well.

By the same token, women increasingly demonstrate a considerable degree of education and learning. Despite coming from humble stock and restricting herself predominantly to domestic subjects, Cornelia Colonelli was one of Michelangelo’s most devoted correspondents toward the end of his life. So, too, women often appear as independent cultural actors. Although scholars have paid increasing attention to
women as autonomous patrons of art and literature in recent years, it is vital to recognize that women also increasingly figured as creative agents. Some years later, Michelangelo’s love interest Vittoria Colonna was not only charming but also eloquent and extremely well-read, and noblewomen such as Isabella d’Este are beginning to be appreciated as original and often daring thinkers. There are even incidents of Michelangelo’s encouraging women to engage in his own profession. As an old
man,
he warmly encouraged Sofonisba Anguissola to continue with her painting and was thanked in fulsome terms by her father.

Nor was
marriage quite the bed of obedient roses that
Barbaro depicted.
Boccaccio’s tales are littered with examples of thoroughly independent brides giving their husbands what for, and it is not hard to find other examples from literature that testify to the same level of autonomy, especially in the management of domestic affairs. In a poetic letter to Iñigo d’Avalos and Lucrezia d’Alagno, for instance, the rather scabrous
Francesco Filelfo observed that

A wife … wears out her husband’s ears with quarrelsome words. She inveighs against her maidservants. She falsely accuses her serving men: the estate manager brings the plough to the ground too late; the barn is broken and the wine is going bad, she reports. Never is there a moment of peace. First she grumbles and then she complains about her servants’ sleeping. She condemns as bad those things she knows are good. Nor does she think anything is enough. A wife is greedy in every way. She wants to fill her home with money.

Forbidding though such a wife might sound, she certainly wasn’t meekly subservient to her husband. There is a hint that Michelangelo’s “bitch” aunt may have been of the same mold.

Similarly, in married life, the obligations of modesty and love were not always observed to the letter. Despite Perugino’s fondness for dressing his wife, women could and did act as major agents of fashion and often dressed in a daring, not to say provocative, manner.

At various points in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Florence—like many other Italian cities—introduced sumptuary legislation designed specifically to place limits on the daring and luxurious nature of women’s dress, and this is testimony as much to the irrepressible tastes of contemporary women as to the occasional bigotry of communal government. In 1433, for example, the priors established a magistracy “to restrain female ornaments and dress” and highlighted the perceived need to prevent women from overexciting the men of the city with their racy clothes. The new officials were “
to restrain the barbarous and irrepressible bestiality of women, who, not considering
the fragility of their nature, but rather with that reprobate and diabolical nature, they force their men, with their honeyed poison, to submit to them. But it is not in accordance with nature for women to be burdened with so many expensive ornaments.” So, too, in the 1490s,
Savonarola inveighed forcefully against female luxury, and at his bidding the
fanciulli
—marauding groups of young boys—would persecute women not wearing “decent” clothes. No end of “indecent” dresses, furs, and other accoutrements were thrown into the flames in Savonarola’s
“Bonfire of the Vanities” on February 27, 1498.

Savonarola and sumptuary legislation aside, there is no doubt that women dressed with an eye both to fashion and to flirtation. In one of his more charmingly piquant verses, the usually broad-minded
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano felt compelled jokingly to ask a certain Hermione to cover up:

Me, congealed already by cold age,

You’re heating up unpleasantly. And so

I’m telling you to clothe those shining breasts

And veil your bosom with a decent halter.

Those milky breasts, why carry them about,

Those very nipples, naked and exposed?

Are you really saying “Kiss these breasts,

Caress these glowing breasts.” Is that your meaning?

Such a verse conjures up images such as
Piero di Cosimo’s portrait of the Genoese noblewoman
Simonetta Vespucci (ca. 1453–76)—who was reputedly the most beautiful woman of the age and whom Michelangelo would certainly have heard of during his youth—in the guise of a virtually naked Cleopatra (
Fig. 7
).

While it may be true that Michelangelo had little romantic interest in women at this point in his life, therefore, his biographers’ silence about the fairer sex should be treated with some caution. This reticence appears to be more fully informed by constructions of the proper role of women than it is by Michelangelo’s actual social interactions with them.

As wives, mothers, and daughters, they were active and occasionally even dominant figures in the family life of artists like Michelangelo, enduring burdensome responsibilities and legal restrictions, it is true, but also giving shape to domestic life and assuming a powerful role as
sources of financial and creative inspiration. In some cases, they were independent economic actors in their own right and were encountered by male artists either as formidable tradespeople to be reckoned with or as “partners” in making ends meet. But more than that, they were also far from being modest and repressed: they were the engines of fashion and the dynamos of passion.

Although
Giorgione’s
Old Woman
represents one feature of female life experiences, the diverse roles played by women in Michelangelo’s Florence are also reflected in the multifarious ways in which they appear in art. Indeed, some works are unintelligible without recognizing that a woman’s place in Renaissance society went beyond the harsh restrictions of law and social convention. As many artists recognized, women were to be seen not merely as stereotyped sexual objects or matronly drudges but also as strong-minded, assertive beings in command of themselves.

The work of one of Michelangelo’s contemporaries illustrates this amply. Although
Sandro Botticelli’s
Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli
(V&A, London) shows the demure, respectable matron described by
Barbaro, his
Return of Judith
(Uffizi, Florence) and
Portrait of a Young Woman
(Städel, Frankfurt) reveal the complexity of the social picture. In the
Portrait of a Young Woman
, the subject—possibly Si- monetta Vespucci—is ravishingly beautiful and elaborately and inventively arrayed in the most fashionable clothing (
Fig. 8
). There is a hint of exoticism in the feather in her hair: few traces can be seen of conventional Florentine
sumptuary laws. Similarly, her learning and humanistic tastes are revealed by the “seal of Nero” she wears on a pendant around her neck, while the “necklace” formed by her braided hair seems to suggest that she is the only person capable of binding herself to anything. She’s a woman in control of herself, a cultural agent in her own right, and a pioneer of daring fashion. So, too, in the
Return of Judith
, the same characteristics are seen even more clearly (
Fig. 9
). Although the biblical figure of Judith was often held up as a symbol of chastity, justice, and fortitude as a consequence of her having beheaded the lustful and proud Assyrian general Holofernes, Botticelli invests his rendering of her return to the Israelites with a sense of female independence and perhaps even of sexual autonomy. Accompanied by a serving girl bearing Holofernes’s head, Botticelli’s Judith is strikingly beautiful yet also fully in control of her own femininity. Though a member of the “weaker
sex,” she carries an inescapably “masculine” and empowering sword and strides with the assurance of one who is more than able to manage herself no matter how salacious or overbearing the male attention. She is her own mistress and clearly takes no messing around from anyone.

H
OUSE AND
H
OME

In the same way as Michelangelo consorted with people from a wide range of social groups—from patricians to paupers—the homes that he and his acquaintances inhabited reveal multiple, rich layers of variation in patterns of domestic life, embracing everything from the sublime to the sordid, and testify to only one point of consistency—a reality quite distinct from familiar images.

Palazzi

To be sure, Michelangelo was no stranger to the palatial residences of Florence’s greatest families. Having lived in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi ten years before, he resumed his acquaintance with such grand buildings on his return to the city in 1501. Courting the favor of influential patrons and enjoying the companionship of powerful friends, he would have spent a good deal of time around palazzi, whether sitting outside on the
banchi
(wood or stone benches) that were erected around the sides of such homes for clients to await their patrons, or strolling around in the comparative intimacy of inner courtyards. He would, for example, certainly have visited
Taddeo Taddei’s “most commodious and beautiful” palace in what is now the via de’ Ginori (just behind the Palazzo Medici Riccardi) to discuss a commission for a sculpted tondo depicting the Virgin and Child with the infant John the Baptist, and
Bartolomeo Pitti’s rather unfashionable palazzo in Oltr’Arno—later to be purchased and enlarged by the Medici—to finalize the arrangements for a similar project.

The sole function of palazzi was to impress. Impossibly expensive to build, palazzi were “
utterly non-productive as investments” and served only to glorify the wealth of the owner, as
Leon Battista Alberti explained in his treatise on architecture. As such, even the most modest palazzo tended to be enormously large. A typical Florentine palace of the mid-fifteenth century had three main floors but stood as high as a
modern ten-story building. Similarly, one of the finest examples of palatial architecture,
the Palazzo Strozzi, covers an area more than twice that of the White House and utterly dwarfs the presidential residence.

But palazzi were not all that they seemed. The harmoniously proportioned buildings that can be seen in Florence today are generally the product of much later, post-Renaissance remodeling and belie the realities of the hundred or so “palaces” scattered around Renaissance Florence.

The exterior size of palazzi is particularly misleading. Although they were colossal in scale, they were actually built to house a relatively limited number of people and contained only a small number of rooms designed for living. In the majority of cases, each palazzo was intended to house only a single, nucleated family. Thus, the average palace comprised roughly a dozen habitable rooms, most of which were on the
piano nobile
(first floor). Each of these rooms was, however, on a monumental scale. In the words of one historian, the Renaissance palace was characterized principally by “
the luxurious inflation of private space around the nucleus of a relatively modest-sized apartment.” The size of such rooms—including the bedroom—can be glimpsed in works such as
Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco
Birth of Mary
in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella (
Fig. 10
).

Most misleading of all is the impression of order conveyed by some of the better-known palaces surviving today. Palazzi were hopelessly confused buildings until at least the middle of the sixteenth century. Even at the simplest level, the chaotic nature of Florentine building practices meant that it could often prove difficult to establish where a palace began and ended. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, for instance,
Pagolo di Baccuccio Vettori found that the structure of his palazzo was so intertwined with that of his neighbors that he couldn’t say exactly where his property began and another’s ended.

Even at the level of functionality, Florentine palaces were quite confused places. Although the apartments on the
piano nobile
and above were almost exclusively residential, much of the ground floor could often be given over to different uses, and it was only by the time of Michelangelo’s death that palazzi became consolidated into cohesive residential structures. For much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was common—even normal—for palaces to have a series of archways giving onto the street that served as the entrances to shops housed within
the building itself. For even the greatest men, home life was always accompanied by the sounds and smells of the trade conducted within their own walls, and the grand palace effectively blurred into the street.