The Ugly Renaissance (61 page)

“that bitch”:
Michelangelo,
Carteggio
, 1:88.

“much rarer and more precious”:
Petrarch,
Fam
. 7.11.4.

he was “another self”:
On Petrarch’s view of friendship, see A. Lee,
Petrarch and St. Augustine
, 229–75.

The ideal friend was chosen:
On Renaissance friendship in general, see Hyatte,
Arts of Friendship
.

Boccaccio was even able to imagine:
Boccaccio,
Decameron
, 10.8.

As the lively correspondence:
Origo,
Merchant of Prato
; Trexler,
Public Life in Renaissance Florence
, 131–58.

offered Datini extensive advice:
Mazzei,
Lettere di un notaro a un mercante del secolo XIV, con alter lettere e documenti
, 1:62, 67, 163, 169, 248, 393.

In return, Datini sent Mazzei:
Ibid., 1:7, 29, 148, 184.

Petrarch recommended his friend Laelius:
Petrarch,
Fam.
19.4. The nickname “Laelius” was a testimony to the closeness of the bond between Petrarch and Lello di Pietro Stefano Tosetti. The historical friendship between Scipio Africanus
(236–183 b.c.) and Gaius Laelius during the Second Punic War had long been held up as the paradigmatic example of the ideal, and had been celebrated most extensively in Cicero’s
De amicitia
(sometimes known as the
Laelius
). Petrarch made much of the relationship between the two in his verse epic, the
Africa
.

Fra Bartolomeo of San Marco taught Raphael:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:290.

“entertaining his many friends”:
Ibid., 1:276.

“deformed and dwarf-like”:
Boccaccio,
Decameron
, 6.5, trans. McWilliam, 457.

Although in later life he was to befriend:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:421.

Patrons not only habitually demanded sketches:
See Welch,
Art and Society in Italy
, 103–30.

chimney decorations or wickerwork chests:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:185.

bronze knife that Piero Aldobrandini was later to commission:
Wallace, “Manoeuvering for Patronage.” Michelangelo and Aldobrandini ultimately fell out over the knife.

In his autobiography, Cellini was scathing:
Cellini,
Autobiography
, 377.

Donatello smashed a bronze bust:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:180.

Francesco Filelfo was even forced to beg his friend:
It is worth quoting the passage in full: “Sweet hope nourished me: the hope that you, Cicco, always, bring me with kind words feeds my heart. For the aediles and the quaestor have tricked me so often that I cough up bile. You come at a good time, since now my anger has reached a boil and my mind stirred up by evil begins to rage. I can’t very well put up with what justice and piety forbid me from enduring. Starvation is not a thing to be tolerated. Why should I speak of the contagion of the deadly disease that a man without money can’t avoid? The prince issues worthy orders which the men he has placed in charge of his treasury refuse to carry out. ‘Go and come back again,’ they say. ‘Your money will be paid and a supplement worthy of your services will be paid you.’ And so I go away and again I return. And again, like a fool, I return again, three or four times a day.” Filelfo,
Odes
, IV.2, lines 1–16, pp. 229–31.

While painting some scenes from the lives:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:97–98.

“Now look at it”:
Ibid., 1:339.

he employed a minimum of twelve people:
Wallace,
Michelangelo
, 91.

“I should be glad if you would see”:
Michelangelo,
Carteggio
, 1:145, in Michelangelo,
Letters of Michelangelo
, 1:82.

“a stuck-up little turd”:
Wallace,
Michelangelo
, 46.

Michelangelo had to turn people away:
Michelangelo,
Carteggio
, 1:153; q.v. Wallace,
Michelangelo
, 46.

On one occasion, he and one of his apprentices:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:228.

Botticelli, for example, was enraged:
Ibid., 1:229.

as was the case with Raphael:
Ibid., 1:320.

“If we grant that men deserve praise”:
Boccaccio,
Famous Women
, pref., 9.

“Book learning” remained a man’s preserve:
In Venice in the period 1587–88, for example, four thousand six hundred boys and only thirty girls—mostly of high status—attended the city’s schools. Wiesner,
Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe
, 122–23.

“had some knowledge of drawing”:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:104.

Giovanni d’Amerigo Del Bene complained:
See Brucker,
Society of Renaissance Florence
, 32–33.

Although the poor girl’s mother was unhappy:
Ibid., 34–35.

“love for her husband”:
Francesco Barbaro,
On Wifely Duties
, in Kohl and Witt,
Earthly Republic
, 192.

women, being “by nature weak”:
Ibid., 215.

A noblewoman like Ginevra:
Ibid., 215–20.

“wear and esteem all those fine garments”:
Ibid., 208.

“he very often attired her”:
Vasari,
Lives
, 2:100.

“behavior, speech, dress, eating”:
Barbaro,
On Wifely Duties
, in Kohl and Witt,
Earthly Republic
, 202.

even the faintest hint of infidelity:
Palmieri,
Vita civile
, ed. Battaglia, 133.

“love her husband with such great delight”:
Barbaro,
On Wifely Duties
, in Kohl and Witt,
Earthly Republic
, 196.

“take great care that they do not entertain suspicion”:
Ibid., 194.

Boccaccio went to great lengths:
Boccaccio,
Decameron
, 10.10.

“good women and bad women”:
Sacchetti,
Il trecentonovelle
, 233.

the theory didn’t quite match the reality:
Perhaps the classic introduction to this subject remains Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy.”

Although subject to legal restrictions:
For useful overviews of this topic—which has been the subject of no small degree of academic debate—see Cohn, “Women and Work in Renaissance Italy”; J. C. Brown, “Woman’s Place Was in the Home.”

he warmly encouraged Sofonisba Anguissola:
Michelangelo,
Carteggio
, 5:92–93.

“A wife … wears out her husband’s ears”:
Filelfo,
Odes
, III.3, pp. 175–77.

“to restrain the barbarous”:
Brucker,
Society of Renaissance Florence
, 180–81.

Savonarola inveighed forcefully against female luxury:
See the account of Luca Landucci given in Baldassarri and Saiber,
Images of Quattrocento Florence
, 276–83, esp. 277.

“Me, congealed already by cold age”:
Pontano,
Baiae
, I.4, lines 3–10, p. 13.

“utterly non-productive as investments”:
Goldthwaite, “Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture,” 995.

as Leon Battista Alberti explained:
Leon Battista Alberti,
De re aedificatoria
, 9.1.

the Palazzo Strozzi, covers an area:
Goldthwaite, “Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture,” 1005,
fig. 8
.

“the luxurious inflation of private space”:
Ibid., 1004–5.

Pagolo di Baccuccio Vettori found that the structure:
ASF Carte Riccardi, no. 521, fol. 26r; Goldthwaite, “Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture,” 983n13.

Although there was certainly a disparity of scale:
The following is indebted to D. Kent, “ ‘Lodging House of All Memories.’ ”

“viewing the material worlds”:
See Cavallo, “Artisan’s
Casa
.”

He was also to purchase three examples:
Hatfield,
Wealth of Michelangelo
, 65ff.

Above street level, Michele the accountant’s house:
D. Kent, “ ‘Lodging House of All Memories,’ ” 451.

It was only by the time Michele purchased:
See Albala,
Eating Right in the Renaissance
.

It is an illustration of the brutality:
D. Kent, “ ‘Lodging House of All Memories,’ ” 453; Granato, “Location of the Armoury in the Italian Renaissance Palace.”

“a poor little house”:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:187.

Piero di Cosimo was living and working:
Fermor,
Piero di Cosimo
, 14. It is interesting
to note that in early 1504, Piero sat on the committee that met to determine a suitable location for Michelangelo’s
David
.

It was also shortly after completing the
David
:
Hirst, “Michelangelo in 1505,” 762.

When he ultimately left Florence:
Michelangelo,
Carteggio
, 1:19.

“Live carefully and wisely”:
Ibid., 1:9, trans. in Wallace,
Michelangelo
, 26.

As a child he was somewhat sickly:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:430.

While painting the Sistine Chapel:
Michelangelo, verse 5, lines 1–4, in
Poems and Letters
, 3:

I’ve got a goitre from this job I’m in—

bad water does it up in Lombardy

to peasants, there or in some other country—

because my belly’s shoved up against my chin.

by 1516 was lamenting that sickness:
Michelangelo,
Carteggio
, 2:7–8.

“a sack for gristle”:
Michelangelo, verse 267, lines 34–45, in
Poems and Letters
, 57.

“Urine! How well I know it”:
Michelangelo, verse, 267, lines 10–12, trans. in Wallace,
Michelangelo
, 175.

friends began to fear for his life:
Hirst,
Achievement of Fame
, 252–53.

“went blind through an attack of catarrh”:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:197.

Similarly, dropsy (edema), caused by malnutrition:
Ibid., 2:271.

It hardly needs saying that tooth decay:
Cellini,
Autobiography
, 217.

As Alessandra Strozzi recorded in her correspondence:
Brucker,
Society of Renaissance Florence
, 47–49.

One of its more prominent sufferers:
Cellini,
Autobiography
, 16–17.

Subsequent attacks left him “raving”:
Ibid., 71–72.

Finding himself unable to work:
Ibid., 147–54, 347–48.

“In the majority of cases, small ulcers”:
Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French,
Great Pox
, 205–6.

Historians estimate that 30 percent:
For a useful survey of the impact of the plague—and other diseases—on the lives of the lowest socioeconomic groups of the period, see Carmichael,
Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence
.

the outbreak of 1400:
Cohn, “Black Death,” 725.

Giorgione fell victim to the pestilence:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:276.

After sleeping with the adolescent maid:
Cellini,
Autobiography
, 45–46.

Never one to contemplate marriage, Raphael:
Vasari,
Lives
, 1:320.

“so lustful that he would give anything”:
Ibid., 1:216.

“His lust was so violent”:
Ibid.

So rampant was the sexual experimentation:
Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” 157; Brundage,
Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
, 492.

“over one-third of the forty-nine documented victims”:
Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” 163.

advocated celibacy even within wedlock:
Mario Filelfo,
Epithalamion pro domino Francisco Ferrario et Constantia Cimisella
, MS Vat. Apost., Chig. I VII 241, fols. 140v–143r, here fol. 141v, trans. in D’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides,” 411.

“Wife, your elderly husband’s delight”:
Pontano,
Baiae
, I.13, lines 1–10, p. 39.

Oral sex was definitely taboo:
Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” 161; Rocke,
Forbidden Friendships
, 118–20.

Not only was he a cautious enthusiast:
Beccadelli,
Hermaphrodite
, 1.5, esp. lines 1–2, p. 11: “When my Ursa wants to be fucked, she climbs on top of my Priapus. / I play her role, she plays mine.” Unfortunately, Beccadelli feared that his penis was not up to the strain of Ursa’s apparently insatiable sexual appetite in this position.

“Why,” the character Lepidinus asked:
Ibid., 1.14, lines 1–2, p. 21.

Even a devoted husband like Pontano:
See especially Pontano,
Baiae
, II.29, pp. 166–67.

“a man can use a young woman”:
Wallace,
Michelangelo
, 110.

“powerful yearning for semen”:
Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” 151.

“It is much easier to defend”:
Domenico Sabino,
De uxorum commodis et incommodis
, MS Vat. Apost., Chis. H IV 111, fols. 108v–117v, here, fol. 110v, trans. in D’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides,” 407.

“Is it any wonder, Marco”:
Cristoforo Landino,
Xandra
, II.13, in
Poems
, 105.

“a lamb entrusted to a wolf”:
Landino,
Xandra
, II.24, line 2, in
Poems
, 125.