Renaissance Heraldry by Jennifer Kathleen Mackenzie a Dissertation
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Renaissance Heraldry by Jennifer Kathleen Mackenzie A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Albert Russell Ascoli, Chair Professor Frank Bezner Professor Beate Fricke Professor Diego Pirillo Summer 2017 Renaissance Heraldry ã 2017 by Jennifer Kathleen Mackenzie Abstract Renaissance Heraldry by Jennifer Kathleen Mackenzie Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Albert Russell Ascoli, Chair Heraldry is well-defined and, almost by definition, a narrow subject; a “feudal language” with codified rules, attributes, and a history that in its broad strokes has been told many times. Originating in medieval Europe around the invention of full-body armor, the culture of jousting and tournaments, notions of heredity, strong corporate institutions, and the practice of genealogy, it was common throughout the so-called ancien régime. Its fortunes are widely thought to have declined in the Italian Renaissance because of its incompatibility with some of the very features that have characterized the Renaissance as a distinctive cultural configuration and revolution, including the rise of the humanism, the emergence of the individual, the emancipation of the artist, and the return to classical antiquity. Renaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy; and with evidence that the definition and history of heraldry as we know them today are constructions of certain strands of Renaissance culture. This was tied to the humanists’ construction of the very concept of the Middle Ages. Our oblique point of entry into the subject is a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca.-1495). Through Boiardo, we approach the subject also from one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where Boiardo was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty. Specifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its Renaissance reception are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a whole gamut of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The words these images were called by, the attributes they were said to possess, their histories, meanings, and the protocols governing their use, were actively questioned and contested. The technologies that eventually became known as philology and antiquarianism shaped the answers, and the means of arriving at them, that we are most familiar with today; our “grammars of signs,” as I call them. However, the Este dynasty nourished a humanism that brought different resources to the task of responding to signs from the past. This dissertation is invested in studying these resources, and in bringing them to light as essential contributions to the humanist tradition in the broadest sense. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Introduction. Between Arma and Imprese: Sign Language and the Romance Epics from the 1 Este States I. Wayward Images and Legible Signs of the Inamoramento de Orlando and Orlando furioso 23 i. Boiardo’s New Beginnings 24 ii. An Image Lost: The Story of Orlando 32 iii. New Characters, New Insegne: Brunello, Rodomonte, Marphisa 39 iv. An Image Found: The Invention of Ruggiero 47 v. A Tale of Two “Signs” and Two Editions 53 vi. The Fortune and Misfortune of Boiardo and Ariosto in the Imprese Treatises 59 II. Humanist Philology and the Grammar of Signs 73 i. Lorenzo Valla and the De insigniis et armis of Bartolus of Saxoferrato 74 ii. Valla’s Philology of Images: Philosophy, Textual Criticism, Historiography 94 iii. Between the ars historiae, the antiquitates, and the discovery of Medieval Studies 103 iv. The Philological Tradition and the Imprese Treatises 113 III. Humanist Philology and the Genealogies of Images at the School of Guarino da Verona 119 i. Intimations: Guarino’s “Priase” of Valla 120 ii. Leonello d’Este and Guarino on equestris insignia from the Emperor in 1433 124 iii. Modeling a Philology of Images: Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria 133 iv. Signa reliquerunt Troes: Ekphrasis, the Trojan Genealogy, and the Este Signa 142 between Tito Strozzi and Matteo Maria Boiardo Figures 152 Bibliography 154 i List of Figures 1. Diploma of Frederick III, 1452. Archivio di Stato di Modena, Archivium Segretum Estense, Casa e Stato, Serie generale, membranacei, cassa 15, numero 31. 2. Diploma of Sixtus IV, 1472. Archivio di Stato di Modena, Archivium Segretum Estense, Casa e Stato, Serie generale, membranacei, cassa 25, numero 68. ii Acknowledgements I have been blessed with a committee of four brilliant professors who each contributed to this project in very different ways. My first thanks are due to Albert Ascoli for his unfailing support and rigor throughout the doctoral program. His way reading and of teaching early modern literature has enriched me tremendously and left unmistakable marks on this dissertation’s subject and its strengths. Frank Bezner’s uncommon attentiveness clarified and expanded its horizons, and gave me the courage to develop many of its boldest hypotheses. Conversations with Beate Fricke about allegory and perspective, Warburg and Baxandall, nourished its early seeds; as did her invitations to new communities both on campus and off. Diego Pirillo’s bibliographic suggestions and readings of the chapters are continuing to help me organize the research and present it effectively. I would additionally like to thank Victoria Kahn for the scholarship she models in her seminars and her dedicated advising; and Henrike Lange for her collegiality and high example. The Italian Studies Department at UC Berkeley has supported me, alongside the Wang Family Fellowship, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and several other scholarship programs for graduate research. Thanks to my friends in the department, especially Emily Rabiner, Chiara Cecchelli, Brenda Rosado, and outside of it, who have brought me comfort, insight, and joy in these years; Siva Darbha, Kfir & Milos, Zach Johnson, Andrzej Kozlowski, Chris Rowan from a distance, and many others. Italian and European institutions, scholars, and friends have helped me to achieve this goal too: Emanuele Salerno and Francesca Carletti; the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; Felix Jäger and Stefan Huygebaert in the “Nomos of Images” research group, and Carolin Behrmannn our director, at the Max Planck Institute for Art History in Florence; Valerie Hayaert and the Society for Emblem Studies; Alessandro Gulinati, my inimitable guide to the Ferrarese; Marco Repetti; Porto Recanati, Jesi, Feltre, and the people who have connected me there; Jane Tylus and the NYU community at Villa la Pietra; and the librarians, archivists, and curators who worked patiently with a curious student, especially at the Archivio di Stato di Modena, Biblioteca Ariostea, and Archiginnasio of Bologna. From before this graduate program, I have Peter MacKenzie, Dennis Danielson, Kathrine Sirluck, Mark Vessey, and Giuseppe Mazzotta to thank for lessons I could not forget. Daniela Boccassini and Carlo Testa opened the deepest vistas and the goal of uniting scholarship and spirit, of which this project is something like a first test. Final thanks are due to my future colleagues at Franklin & Marshall College, whose expression of confidence in my work lent serenity and optimism to the final months of writing. This dissertation is dedicated to my first teacher of literature, my mother Alida, and to our family – my father Dave, my sister Alanna, and grandparents – in gratitude. iii Introduction Between Arma and Imprese: Sign Language and the Romance Epics from the Este States Nel regno nostro è legie manifesta Che chiunque porta scudo over cimero D’un altro campion o d’altra giesta, È disfamato con gran vitupero E se non ha perdon, perde la testa. Ben che ‘l statuto sia crudel e fero, Ché la pena è magior che la falanza, Pur è servata per antica usanza. - Matteo Maria Boiardo, Inamoramento de Orlando1 It makes a great difference which side one approaches a science or a branch of knowledge from; which gate one enters. – Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Theory of Colors2 Matteo Maria Boiardo came from a family of feudatories, allies, and administrators to the Este of Ferrara, the first-established and longest-enduring seigniorial dynasty of the Italian peninsula.3 Born between 1440 and 1442, he inherited the relationships that most critically shaped his life. His castle at Scandiano was near the foothills of the Apennines, a few miles south-east of the city of Reggio.4 Today in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, it was then a part of the shifting 1 Inamoramento I.xxix.31 (Trans. mine): “In our realm it is a manifest law that whomever wears a shield or crest of another champion or clan will be dishonored with great insult; and if he is not pardoned he will lose his head. Although the statute is fierce and cruel, since the punishment is greater than the crime, nevertheless it is applied as an ancient custom.” I use throughout this study the most recent critical edition of Boiardo’s Inamoramento edited by Tissoni Benvenuti and Montagnani (1999). One of its most important achievements is to have disclosed the poem in a “local” idiom closer to the one in which Boiardo had written it, and which had been virtually suppressed since the sixteenth-century editorial “reforms.” Because of this history, which is discussed within, the Inamoramento is the only text for which I do not provide English translations in the main text or in the notes except when it appears as an epigraph, as it does here.