The Ugly Renaissance (18 page)

Is it any wonder, Marco, if, having but one eye,

you can’t keep adulterers away from your wife?

Once upon a time Junonian Argos had a hundred,

But still the nymph he guarded wasn’t guarded for long.

Even entrusting his rampant spouse to the care of the clergy offered little hope, for they would have been as willing to satisfy her pleasures as anyone else: as Landino put it, she was just “
a lamb entrusted to a wolf.”

A sense of just how endemic female adultery was in Renaissance Florence can be gauged from the extent to which it figures in contemporary literature. In the
Decameron
, for example,
Boccaccio titillates his reader with tales of passionate wives who are unsatisfied with their husbands and succeed in making their cuckolded husbands look foolish.

In one tale loosely derived from
Lucius Apuleius’s
Metamorphoses
, a charming, beautiful woman named Peronella is married to a poor bricklayer. While her husband is away at work, she catches the eye of the young Giannello Scrignario, and they quickly begin an affair. The pleasure seems unbelievable, but one day she is terrified when her husband returns home unexpectedly. Fearful that he will discover her secret, the quick-thinking Peronella hurriedly hides Giannello in a tub while she goes to open the door. No sooner has her husband stepped across the threshold than she begins berating him for their poverty and bursts into tears to emphasize her point. In an attempt to pacify his wife, the bricklayer tells her that he has solved their money problems: he has sold the very tub Giannello is hiding in for 5 silver ducats. In a flash, Peronella flies on the offensive. How could he accept so little? She has, she claims, found a man who would pay
7
! Pointing to the tub, she tells her husband that the client—Giannello—is busy inspecting
it from the inside as they speak. Catching on, Giannello climbs out and informs Peronella and her husband that he’d be happy to buy it on the condition that the dirt is removed from the inside. Delighted, the bricklayer immediately offers to scrape it clear and clambers inside to begin work. While her husband is busy scraping away, Peronella leans over the mouth of the tub, as if to direct his work, while Giannello “
in the manner of a hot-blooded stallion mounting a Parthian mare … satisfied his young man’s passion” from behind. Once they have finished, the cheeky Giannello gets the poor bricklayer to carry the tub all the way back to his house.

In another tale, one Madonna Filippa is actually discovered by her husband, Rinaldo de’ Pugliesi, in the arms of her handsome young lover, Lazzarino de’ Guazzagliotri. Restraining his desire to kill her on the spot, Rinaldo rushes to the city authorities to denounce his wife for adultery and is convinced that he has enough evidence to have her convicted and put to death. When the court is convened, however, Madonna Filippa plays a clever trick. Forcing her husband to admit that she had willingly granted him whatever he required in the way of sex, she then asks the magistrate a pointed question. “
If he has always taken as much of me as he needed and as much as he chose to take,” she inquires, “what am I to do with the surplus? Throw it to the dogs? Is it not far better that I should present it to a gentleman who loves me more dearly than himself, rather than allow it to turn bad or go to waste?” With the onlookers rocking with laughter, the magistrate is compelled to admit that she has a point and sets her free, much to her embarrassed husband’s chagrin. The question of what to do with the “surplus” was evidently much on the minds of many women in Michelangelo’s Florence.

Prostitution

Prostitution was a major feature of urban life, and however chaste Michelangelo may have been while he was carving the
David
, it is inconceivable that his sexual attitudes were not at least touched by the sheer number of prostitutes whom he would have encountered while walking through the streets of Florence. Indeed, prostitutes played a prominent role in the everyday lives of many of the most prominent literary and artistic figures of the period.
Beccadelli was apparently almost addicted
to frequenting brothels, and his
Hermaphrodite
is dominated with paeans to his favorite whores. Cellini, too, was an avid patron of prostitutes and evidently thought the practice of paying for sex so commonplace that he had no shame whatsoever about admitting to his adventures in his
Autobiography
. Similarly,
Boccaccio’s
Decameron
includes at least two stories dedicated explicitly to prostitution and one in which the manipulation of sex for profit is implicit.

As with marital sex, views of prostitution were replete with double standards. Officially, of course, the Church strictly proscribed prostitution, and the cities of Renaissance Italy had begun by acknowledging that the sale of sex was an affront to public morality.
Prostitutes were expelled from
Venice in 1266 and 1314 and from
Modena in 1327. But despite this, there was a strong tradition of viewing the practice as a necessary evil. Both
Saint Augustine and
Saint Thomas Aquinas had recognized that since the cup of male desire would always run over, prostitution was necessary to prevent the spread of fornication or sodomy in a sexually frustrated society. Renaissance legislators were inclined to agree, and Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino; ca. 1400–ca. 1469) even included a vast public brothel in his plan for an ideal city (Sforzinda).

Florence, in particular, moved relatively quickly toward the acceptance and then the regulation of the sex trade. Initially, tolerance was grudging.
By 1384, the priors had acknowledged the presence of prostitutes but had obliged them to wear clothing (bells, high heels, and gloves) that marked them out both as a distinct group and as a source of the “contagion” of lust.
Though prosecutions were not irregular, the integration of prostitution into the body social had become even more pronounced by around 1400. Sex workers were still forbidden to ply their trade in certain areas, but control—rather than stigmatization—became the watchword.
On April 30, 1403, the city established a magistracy known as the Onestà (Office of Decency) that was explicitly charged with overseeing the affairs of prostitutes. Initially housed in the church of San Cristofano, at the corner of the via Calzaiuoli and the Piazza del Duomo, the Onestà was, by Michelangelo’s time, established a little farther south, in the alley now known as the vicolo dell’Onestà, near Orsanmichele. From here, the eight-man magistracy provided for the establishment of at least three public brothels (in 1403 and 1415) and presided over the “registration” of prostitutes.
Barely thirty years later, seventy-six women had enrolled as state-sanctioned whores (most of
them of foreign origin), and prostitutes were taxed at a special rate to help pay for Florence’s growing expenses. Moreover, prostitutes provided a valuable legal service. In situations in which a woman petitioned the courts for an annulment of her marriage on the grounds of non-consummation, a prostitute could be brought in to testify to the impotence of her unfortunate husband.

By 1566, the acceptance of prostitution had become so widespread that the great public brothel in the Mercato Vecchio was deemed a good investment and was purchased by three exceptionally respectable citizens:
Chiarissimo de’ Medici,
Alessandro della Tosa, and
Albiera Strozzi. The year before, a complete catalog of the names and addresses of the best prostitutes had even been published in Venice (
Catalogo di tutte le principale e più honorate cortigiane di Venezia
).

The scale of the sex industry in Michelangelo’s Florence is, however, belied by the rather hopeful actions of the Onestà. The numbers of prostitutes working in the city by 1501 massively exceeded the “official” figures, and there is no doubt that unlicensed private brothels abounded, as is suggested by the art of the period. In
Francesco del Cossa’s
April
in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, for example, scantily clad prostitutes are shown running quite publicly in the Palio, under the gaze of a young gentleman and a child (
Fig. 12
).
Prosecutions for “unofficial” prostitution continued at a rapid pace, and there are ample records of men quite openly selling their wives and daughters into prostitution. As
Beccadelli’s enthusiasm for the prostitute Ursa demonstrates, these women became not just sexual intimates but also friends and sources of inspiration.

Homosexuality

The apparently rampant heterosexual sex in Michelangelo’s Florence should not obscure the widespread incidence of homosexual relations in the period, and despite his comparative indifference at this point, it is worth noting that more than a few questions have been raised about
Michelangelo’s own sexual orientation later in his life.

Like premarital and extramarital sex, homosexuality was commonly regarded as a heinous sin to be spoken of in tones of awe and horror.
Normally grouped together with masturbation and bestiality, homosexual intercourse was frequently attacked by laymen like Poggio
Bracciolini—who compared it to heterosexual fornication—as well as by churchmen of the day. The irascible
Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) was particularly vehement in his condemnation.
In a series of Lenten sermons delivered at Santa Croce in 1424, Bernardino cataloged the sins to which Florence was most prone and devoted no fewer than three of his nine sermons exclusively to
sodomy. He began comparatively gently, by tracing the origins of Florentine homosexuality to the population decline of the mid-fourteenth century. But by the time he reached his final sermon, Bernardino had whipped himself up into a foaming frenzy of hatred. Condemning both the sin of sodomy and those who attempted to have convicted sodomites released from prison, he cried, “
To the fire! They are all sodomites! And you are in mortal sin if you seek to help them.” So powerful was his rhetoric that the congregation immediately rushed outside and started building a bonfire on which to roast the city’s homosexuals.

Although Bernardino’s sermons were remarkable for the sheer intensity of his grievance, he was nevertheless broadly representative of the Church’s position and of the Florentine government’s attitude toward the “pestiferous vice.” The city’s magistrates took a very dim view of homosexuality.
Having established a special magistracy to root out homosexuality in 1432 (the
Office of the Night), the city imposed harsh penalties on those convicted of homosexual practices, and a variety of punishments—including the death penalty—were permitted. A little before the magistracy came into existence, a certain
Jacopo di Cristofano was found guilty of sodomizing two young boys: he was fined 750 lire, sentenced to be whipped through the streets of the city, and ordered to have his house burned down (if he owned it). Prosecutions were avidly pursued. During the seventy years the Office of the Night was active, it has been estimated that around seventeen thousand men were accused of sodomy, and it is not without reason that Florence has been described as having “
carried out the most extensive and systematic persecution of homosexual activity in any premodern city.”

But, as with other areas of sexual activity, the severity of legal and moral strictures is perhaps more reflective of the sheer prevalence of homosexual activity than of anything else. Indeed, the Florentine authorities were prepared to indulge in a certain degree of official hypocrisy and a good deal of double standards.

While those who practiced homosexual acts were arrested and prosecuted
with relentless zeal during the fifteenth and very early sixteenth centuries, their treatment was not quite as harsh as the letter of the law might lead us to expect. Although seventeen thousand men were accused of sodomy while the
Office of the Night was in existence—including
Leonardo da Vinci—fewer than three thousand were actually convicted, and those who were received punishments that were lenient in comparison with the sentences that could have been imposed.

In part, this is related to the fact that the majority of “homosexual” activity was actually practiced by men who either were married or would—in today’s language—self-identify as “straight.” It was not so much a matter of preference as of urges. A lot of men were simply too randy to limit themselves to one gender. In
Domenico Sabino’s dialogue on wives, for example, the character Emilia observes that “
men are not satisfied with servant girls, mistresses, or prostitutes, but resort to boys in order to relieve their wild and mad lust.” By the same token,
Beccadelli’s
Hermaphrodite
discusses heterosexual and homosexual sex without any sense that a married man should limit himself to one or the other.

In part, however, it is also related to the variation that was perceived to exist
within
homosexuality itself.
As a reflection of the moral distinction that contemporaries were wont to draw between active and passive partners, and between old and young lovers, by 1564, dominant older men were normally fined 50
scudi d’oro
and imprisoned for two years, while the younger, passive partner was usually given fifty lashes. If they could find a reason to be more lenient, it seems that judges seized it with some enthusiasm.

But to a considerable extent, the Florentine magistrates’ willingness to turn the occasional blind eye to the homosexual practices they so forcibly condemned was a function of the Renaissance enthusiasm for the notion of
platonic
friendship. Through his commentary on Plato’s
Symposium
,
Marsilio Ficino—Michelangelo’s youthful friend—gave new life to the idea of a close intellectual and spiritual friendship between men, a notion that rapidly became common currency among the circle of Florentine humanists known, somewhat misleadingly, as the
Platonic Academy. While this intimate bond was defined primarily by the proximity of two souls in pursuit of the ideal, it was not unusual for it to be invested with a distinctly physical dimension. In the
De amore
(1484), for example,
Ficino suggested that homoerotic attraction was an integral part of a true
Platonic friendship and went so far as to suggest
that love between men was almost more natural than love between men and women. Homoeroticism and male same-sex relations were thus given a form of intellectual justification that could facilitate and even excuse homosexual practice in a social environment that was officially opposed to such activity. Ficino himself was often suspected of being a homosexual, and there is more than a passing hint that Michelangelo absorbed some of his friend’s thought on the subject.