The Ugly Renaissance (16 page)

The
Buonarroti Family Home

Despite—or perhaps because of—the frequency with which Florence’s great families described their homes as palazzi, it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a relatively small palazzo and a large private house.
Although there was certainly a disparity of scale, the houses of the well-to-do were in many ways similar to palazzi, and it was with a conscious effort to ape the ways of the powerful that professional men like the accountant
Michele di Nofri di Michele di Mato (1387–1463)—whose description of his home is perhaps the only of its kind to survive—constructed their dwellings. Indeed, so strong are the similarities with regard to the character of rooms and the nature of furnishings that it has rightly been observed that “
viewing the material worlds of different social strata as discrete separate entities is misleading.”

It was this sort of house that the Buonarroti family had inhabited in Florence during Michelangelo’s childhood and that he probably returned to in the period 1501–4.
He was also to purchase three examples of this type of habitation for 1,050 large florins on March 9, 1508. In common with the palaces of his patrons, they were noisy buildings. Like the accountant Michele’s house—which was sandwiched between other residential properties and a silk workshop (
filatoio
)—the Buonarroti family home (and Michelangelo’s later properties) would have been nestled among a multitude of shops, inns, emporia, and worse. Only a few hundred meters away, on the site of today’s Teatro Verdi, was the
Stinche, the prison most famous for housing convicted murderers and traitors prior to execution. On still nights, you can imagine the distant cries of the condemned mingling in the air with the stench of horse dung and rotting vegetables trodden into the streets.

Above street level, Michele the accountant’s house contained nine rooms. On the first floor, there was a living/reception room, a master bedroom, a study, and a smaller bedroom. Given the Renaissance penchant for mezzanine levels and Michele’s own rather confused description, it is difficult to determine the arrangement of the remaining floors
with any precision. It is, however, clear that the second floor was dominated by a large kitchen (complete with imposing fireplace), a porch, and a terrace open to the elements. A third floor contained two or three rooms, including a servant’s room and a storeroom/pantry (
anticamera
). Their arrangement aside, the fact that Michele could distinguish between rooms on the basis of their function is telling. In earlier centuries, it had been uncommon to use any particular room for a fixed purpose, and any given area of a house of this variety could be devoted to a number of different tasks.
It was only by the time Michele purchased his house that rooms were being set aside specifically for cooking and eating and that interior spaces such as the
studio
were being clearly identified as such.

The most revealing feature of Michele’s house is, however, its contents. The increasing clarity with which rooms were being defined had led to a new attitude toward interior decoration. As bedrooms, kitchens, and studies became established as such, there was a need for more, increasingly specialized furniture appropriate to the function of each room. Chairs, tables, and chests became more common and, especially when placed on the
piano nobile
, more elaborate. Cupboards—so common now that we barely give them a thought—started to come into fashion, initially as a luxury item. Michele also lists a daybed (
lettuccio
) with a decorated backboard (
capellinaio
) and a large, possibly painted, chest (
cassone
). These testify not merely to the increasing “domestication” of interior space in the homes of the comfortably off, but also to the rise of comfort and decoration as major concerns.

Most telling of all, however, is the presence of weapons. In contrast to the impression of security and stability conveyed by the proliferation of furniture, it is clear from Michele’s description that the Renaissance home was still liable to be attacked by violent mobs or caught up in the midst of destructive riots. Like his patrician acquaintances, Michele made sure that there were a number of weapons—especially swords—in strategic locations. On a mezzanine level above his study, he kept a cache of arms. He was, however, particularly eager to stress that a stash of weapons was also stored right next to the front door.
It is an illustration of the brutality to which middle-class homes were vulnerable that many Renaissance treatises on ideal homes emphasize that this is the
best
place to keep arms. Comfort cost money; money carried risks; and risks demanded weapons.

The Artisan’s Home

Although Michele’s house provides a good indication of the nature of Michelangelo’s family home and his future properties, it gives little impression of how the majority of his friends and other artists actually lived between 1501 and 1504. While it may be reasonable to draw attention to continuities in certain features of material culture (tableware, devotional items, and so on), there was a world of difference between an accountant’s house and an artisan’s home. The people who were perhaps closest to Michelangelo—like
Topolino and
Michele di Piero Pippo—as well as a good many artists, would have lived in a much more modest way. Even so successful and renowned an artist as
Donatello lived in “
a poor little house which he had in the Via del Cocomero, near the nunnery of San Niccolò.”

Although naturally subject to even greater variation than palaces or larger
homes, the houses inhabited by the majority of artisans had a number of common characteristics and can be thought of primarily along the lines of the buildings Michelangelo would have encountered on his journey through Oltr’Arno en route to Santa Maria del Carmine. Of basic and frequently ramshackle design, these houses were perhaps easier on the eye (and the nose) from the outside than they were inside. Made of densely packed earth or broad wooden boards, the floors were simple and dirty. There were few windows, and even then they were, for many centuries, protected from the elements only by wooden shutters and secured against unwanted entry by the occasional use of crude iron bars or grilles.

With only a few small doorways and windows, such houses were invariably dark and dingy. For the same reason, ventilation was variable: while they were open, windows and doors could allow air to circulate tolerably well, but when closed, they offered very little protection against the elements. During the intense heat of summer, it was sometimes possible to keep a house relatively cool, but in winter it was extremely difficult to keep out the perishing cold. This was a serious problem. In most households, there was only one fire—normally set in the middle of the largest room on the ground floor—which served both for cooking and for heating. The need to focus the fire for cooking left many parts of the building unheated, and the fact that cloths hung across doors or windows constituted the only form of insulation left most of
the house freezing cold in winter months. But the more effort was made to conserve heat, the more unpleasant the atmosphere became.

For many artisans, such as weavers or spinners, a small and limited home was also a workshop. In some cases, guild-based workshops could make up the ground floor of a building, while the upper stories were given over to living quarters along much the same lines. But more commonly, there was often nothing to distinguish the workshop from the home at all. At the time Michelangelo returned to Florence, for example, his contemporary
Piero di Cosimo was living and working in a house that his late father (a toolmaker of very modest means) had bought in the via della Scala, not far from Santa Maria Novella.
It was also shortly after completing the
David
that the
Opera del Duomo actually constructed a house for Michelangelo to provide him with somewhere to carve statues of the twelve apostles for the cathedral, and it is conceivable that he took up residence there.

When he ultimately left Florence for work in
Bologna, Michelangelo told his younger brother Giovansimone that he was living in the most awful surroundings and had been forced to share his bed (the only bed in the house) with his three assistants. As this suggests, the houses that many artists—especially those less affluent than Michelangelo—lived in were very much like sardine cans, albeit with fractionally less privacy and order.

But most of all, the artisan’s home would have been a smelly and unpleasantly dirty place. With the stench of cooking, sweaty bodies, and animals filling the house, cleanliness was a natural concern. Although many accounts show housework to have been absolutely backbreaking, especially in houses with earth floors and rudimentary bedding, washing would have been a particularly troublesome chore. For the most part, the fact that the nearest source of water was often a well serving dozens of houses in the quarter made washing clothes a social activity. Wives and housekeepers would gather to rinse the dirt out of their simple clothes, swapping gossip, arranging marriages, and trading insults all the while. The “clean” washing was laid out to dry on the grass or, more likely in the center of Florence, hung on makeshift lines stretched between the ramshackle houses. In such a densely populated, dirty, and dusty city as Florence, it’s not hard to imagine that clothes would have been only very slightly cleaner after washing than they were to begin with.

In general, simple pragmatism meant that bodily cleanliness was
not a major priority for ordinary folk, and a hot bath was a rare luxury. On the rare occasions when contemporary accounts speak of bathing, it is depicted as an activity limited to the upper classes (for whom it was often a ritual or social practice) or as confined to the bathhouses scattered around the larger towns, until their reputation for being harbors for
disease and prostitution caused the majority of them to be shut down in the early seventeenth century. At most, Florentine men and women of modest means would have washed their hands occasionally, and splashed their faces with a little water if they wanted to impress. It is perhaps no surprise that body odor became a major indicator of social standing in Renaissance Florence. But it is arresting to note that until very late, most people actually had a horror of keeping clean, even in the face of abject poverty. After having been told of the straitened circumstances in which Michelangelo was living in Rome in 1500, for example, his father wrote to offer advice that testified to contemporary attitudes. “
Live carefully and wisely,” he urged, “stay moderately warm, and never wash; give yourself rubdowns and don’t wash yourself.”

H
EALTH AND
S
ICKNESS

Given the cramped and unhygienic nature of many of Florence’s residential areas, it is no surprise that sickness and disease were permanent parts of everyday life, and it was entirely representative of ambient conditions that Lodovico should have drawn attention to Michelangelo’s poor health in urging him to return home.

Despite his longevity (he would live to be eighty-eight), Michelangelo suffered from a host of illnesses throughout his life, most of which were brought on by living conditions and diet.
As a child he was somewhat sickly, and as an adult he frequently complained of illness. The painful swelling in his side that Lodovico had mentioned in 1500 was a taste of things to come.
While painting the Sistine Chapel, he developed a goiter (usually caused, as he noted, by bad water in Lombardy) and
by 1516 was lamenting that sickness had made him unable to work. By the time he was an old man in Rome, his condition really did begin to deteriorate. His face was “
a sack for gristle and old bones,” a “ghastly” sight, and he couldn’t even sleep for his catarrh. What was worse, he developed a painful urinary problem that made going to the lavatory difficult and woke him up at awkward hours:

Urine! How well I know it—drippy duct

compelling me awake too early, when

dawn plays at peekaboo.

Around the time he wrote this self-mocking verse, he became so sick that
friends began to fear for his life for the first time.

Michelangelo was certainly not untypical of his times. The high incidence of illness is visible in surviving portraiture and in a general fascination with the grotesque during the Renaissance. Leonardo’s sketch of a grotesque woman—later worked into a full portrait by the Dutch artist
Quentin Matsys—is probably a depiction of a sufferer of
Paget’s disease (a condition that causes the enlargement and deformation of the bones), while it has been speculated that the sitter’s peculiar hand gesture in Botticelli’s
Portrait of a Youth
(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) points to early-onset arthritis (
Fig. 11
).
Similarly,
Masaccio’s fresco
Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow
in the Brancacci Chapel depicts a kneeling figure severely disabled by a congenital disorder that has left his legs painfully withered.

While it is true that not all illness was quite as severe or as disfiguring, diseases and sickness were nevertheless rampant in Renaissance Florence, and Michelangelo’s own experiences were a testimony to the extent to which poor living conditions could wreak havoc with people’s lives, even among socioeconomic elites. In April 1476, for example, the noted beauty
Simonetta Vespucci died from pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-two, an illness that was perhaps exacerbated—if not brought on—by damp conditions. Inadequate diet frequently caused urinary or kidney problems comparable to those experienced by Michelangelo, and eye infections were especially common. Catarrh—from which Michelangelo complained of suffering—was prevalent and most commonly affected the elderly, sometimes with unexpectedly severe effects. According to Vasari,
Piero della Francesca “
went blind through an attack of catarrh at the age of sixty.” Similarly,
dropsy (edema), caused by malnutrition, claimed the life of Michelangelo’s friend
Jacopo Pontormo.
It hardly needs saying that tooth decay—while clearly not fatal—was a serious problem and tormented Cellini severely.