Tory. in Antiquity and in Petrarch's Day, History Itself Could Be Defined As An

2 The Three Graces, Siena, Duomo, Libreria Piccolomini

1 Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Lateran,” Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. 79.D.2, vol. 1, fol. 71v, c. 1532–7 ticular through studying “great deeds” of the ancient Republican past. In the 1330s, Pe- trarch began to write about these deeds in his On Illustrious Men. He conceived of the work as a homage to virtuous Romans from antiquity but later broadened the scope to include biographies of men and women of Biblical times, classical history, and “all ages.”4 In his approach to history, he followed the model of the ancient author Valerius tory. In antiquity and in Petrarch’s day, history itself could be deﬁned as an account of Maximus and his Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, a collection of anec- deeds that had taken place in the past (res gestae) and a collection of exempla drawn dotes meant to teach lessons about virtue and vice. Like the Memorable Deeds, Pe- from the real-life experiences of others. History was valuable because it contained pre- trarch’s Illustrious Men do not dwell on the causes and effects of historical change but cious nuggets of human wisdom that had withstood the test of time, because they had offer short biographical tales which aim to teach their readers by example. As Petrarch been passed down by generations of people who had learned something useful from wrote in the preface to the work, “this, unless I am mistaken, is the productive goal of them. historians, to lay out those things that readers should follow or avoid,” by putting at During the Trecento the exemplary lives of the ancients, especially the lives of Roman hand a copious number of positive and negative examples.5 Republican heroes, gained authority and began to appear more frequently in literature, Petrarch would have understood exempla to be useful lessons that seemed to provide oratory, and the visual arts. When mendicant preachers employed exemplary moral tales models and precedents for everyday moral decisions. In Petrarch’s day, the canonical in their sermons, they sometimes drew their subject matter directly from ancient his- deﬁnition of exempla could be found in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, an ancient trea- tory. New works of devotional literature appeared, such as the Fior di virtù or the Am- tise on rhetoric then attributed to Cicero. According to the Rhetorica, an exemplum is maestramenti degli antichi, which taught about virtue and vice with exemplary stories “something that was done or said in the past, with the explicit naming of the deed’s borrowed from the antique writers.7 Frescoed cycles of illustrious men in private palaces actor or author.” When “put before the eyes,” the exemplum brings an idea to life, ren- and town halls put the exemplary images of ancient Roman heroes (especially Republi- dering it so lucidly that it “can almost be touched by the hand.”6 Exempla were the can ones) before the eyes of their modern-day counterparts. In the Quattrocento, the vivid life lessons that ancient and medieval writers had considered the very essence of his-

2 3 4 Papal tiara, Vatican Museums, 16th century

3 Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, antique sarcophagus in the Porcari collection, Woburn Abbey, England

can ones) before the eyes of their modern-day counterparts. In the Quattrocento, the exemplary value of ancient history became an even more pervasive cultural phenome- non. It was an important impetus behind the “civic humanist” movement in Florence, when Coluccio Salutati and his pupil Leonardo Bruni prodded their fellow Florentines to look to ancient history, especially of their Republican ancestors, as a source of moral exempla.8 It became one of the cornerstones of humanist education, with the premise that those who read ancient texts at school and at home would collect many useful examples along the way. Despite the popularity of exempla in the Trecento and Quattrocento, the idea of dis- covering coherent messages from the distant past and applying them to one’s daily life was, of course, a problematic notion. Its simplicity would set up the “crisis” of exemplarity that Timothy Hampton discovered in the writings of Machiavelli and Guicciar- more re-surfaced, with important consequences for the reception of antiquities in Rome. dini: with an awareness of the contingency of human experience, these authors cast At the same time, the memory of antiquity began to take on a larger role in the con- doubt on the idea that the examples of the ancients could ever solve the moral dilemmas templative lives of laymen, who acquired collections of antique objects for their libraries of their own times.9 The question to be addressed here, however, is not whether exem- and studies and purported to use these as aids in the acquisition of lessons pla actually offered anything like a real moral education to viewers of the Tre and Quat- for life. trocento but how the rhetoric of exemplarity affected the early reception of antique The concept of exemplarity had particularly significant and long-lasting effects in the remains. My premise is that notions of exemplarity allowed the visual remains of an- history of collecting and antiquarianism in Rome. One finds a consistent interest in rep- tiquity to acquire positive, practical value in both civic and private life, allowing col- resenting historical figures from Rome’s past as exemplary heroes or even as the ances- lecting to become a permissible and even necessary aspect of elite Italian culture. In the tors of noble families living in the present. The literal way in which Romans identified Trecento, when the Roman comune looked back to the ancient Republic as a model for themselves with the illustri of ancient history, the desire to interpret antiquities as ex- their own government, an antique discussion about the exemplary value of statues once

4 5 5 Maarten van Heemskerck, “View from the Palazzo dei Conservatori,” Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. 6 Roman stele, Trier, Rheinisches Landesmusuem 79.D.2, vol. 1, fol. 61, c. 1532–7 emplary images of ancient virtue, and the need to conform to curial decorum gave the ino’s portrait, yet the image is also an attempt to resolve the sort of real-life confusion memory of the exemplum virtutis its particular relevance in Rome. Frequent compar- that inevitably arose when collectors shifted between these realms. Collecting became a isons were made between the antiquities shown in Roman palazzi and the display of an- difficult balancing act, requiring patrons to find a suitable place for the varied remains cestral portraits in ancient atria and, as if to associate their collections with the examples of ancient material culture while at the same time living up to the expectations of their of ancient res gestae, Roman collectors often decorated their palaces with cycles of il- own society. The question to be addressed here is how the sorts of divisions reflected in lustrious men and women or exemplary Roman histories, either on the facades of their Parmigianino’s portrait have their origins in the era of Petrarch. One sort of catego- palaces (*Buzi) or on the walls inside (*della Rovere, Giuliano; *Mellini).10 The rheto- rization seen in the portrait is the separation between life-sized, figural sculptures from ric of exemplarity continued to guide the way that collectors displayed their antique ob- other varieties of antique objects – small-scale gems and jewels, coins, or smaller mar- jects, as patrons often chose to distinguish between un-exemplary types of images (such ble objects kept in the inner chambers of the house – and it is worthwhile considering as life-sized nudes or erotic mythologies) and more obviously historical works.11 the reception of these types in turn. This distinction helped give shape to the ancestral collections centered on the memory of ancient heroes, discussed in Chapter 4. It also affected the development of statue gardens, which were set in opposition to the more regimented spaces of collecting inside the statue as exemplary monument the house. While the inner sanctum of the studiolo defined itself as a realm of morality, self-discipline, and intellectual labor in solitude, the garden developed as a more socia- In ancient Rome, the idea that images could be exemplary had its roots in the practice ble domain of poetry and pleasure. Such a scheme can be discerned, for example, in of displaying ancestral portraits in the home. As Sallust wrote, even heroes such as Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Man (Fig. 2), which puts the ideal collector in between the Fabius Maximus or Scipio would never have gone on to great achievements without study, filled with books and small antiquities, and the garden, occupied by larger, mar- first being inspired by the wax portraits of their ancestors in the courtyards of their ble sculptures of erotic subject matter. Although the collector has access to the poetic houses. When they saw these images, Sallust wrote, it was not the wax image or its form landscape behind him, he turns his pensive look toward the morally superior domain of but the memory of the deeds of the person portrayed that “kindled a flame in the breasts solitude and contemplation inside the house. The world seems in balance in Parmigian- of those great men, which could not be put out until their own virtue had equaled the

6 7 18. galli (map 1) The Galli seem to have come to Rome from elsewhere, gaining prominence in the city only in the mid-Quattrocento. For their success they could thank Giuliano Galli (d. 1488), a wealthy banker and merchant who held offices in the municipal government and the confraternity of SS. Salvatore. Galli also bought property at a prestigious locale on the Via Papalis, between the church of S. Lorenzo in Damaso and the Piazza Pasquino. By the end of the Quattrocento, the Galli owned several houses grouped together in this area, as well as a family chapel in the basilica of S. Lorenzo next door. The most important antiquities collector in the family was Giuliano’s son Jacopo Galli, scriptor apostolicus.1 At Giuliano’s death in 1488, Jacopo inherited his father’s banking business and expanded it, building up a successful partnership with the Florentine Baldassare Balducci and an enviably close alliance with his next-door neighbor, Cardinal Raffaele Riario. The Galli- Balducci bank, one of the major real estate brokers in Rome, helped to finance the Cardinal’s 2 Falling Gaul, with restorations by Tiziano Aspetti, Venice, Museo Archeologico enormous new palazzo (later known as the Cancelleria). Galli is best known, however, for his enclosed garden encircled by fragmented from ancient fragments.8 Van Heemskerck’s role in bringing Michelangelo from Florence to antiquities (see Fig. 121). Among the antique drawing also shows a massive cuirassed statue Rome and for hosting the sculptor in his house works surrounding the figure are a recumbent male lying on the ground, a torso of Mars Ultor, which over two years, from the Summer of 1496 to figure (formerly a sarcophagus lid), torsos facing was identified in the Renaissance as a figure of September 1498.2 He backed up Michelangelo by backward and forward, a relief carved with a Pyrrhus.9 A recent study by Tatjana Bartsch has serving as a financial guarantor in several of his sphinx, and a sarcophagus decorated with garland pointed out that this sheet tricks the eye by contracts and also commissioned works from him, swags.6 A broken sarcophagus illustrating the presenting a composite view of two different sites: including a figure of an Apollo or Cupid, which Rape of Persephone looks as if it had fallen into rather than a realistic veduta of the Galli garden, Weil-Garris Brandt has identified with a statuette ruin on the crumbling wall where the Galli the page is an assemblage of two views, one on the in New York.3 The real camaraderie between the immured it, yet in the first years of the sixteenth left the Pyrrhus and the other the Galli collection. two can be sensed in Condivi’s generous century Aspertini had drawn this sarcophagus in a The caption on a drawing by Sallustio Peruzzi description of the banker (as a gentiluomo di bello whole, unfragmented state at SS. Cosma e relates that the statue was excavated in the Forum ingegno) and by the fact that Condivi falsely gave Damiano.7 of Nerva “for Angelo Massimo,” and thus went Galli credit for commissioning Michelangelo’s Another view by Van Heemskerck drawn from straight from the Forum to the Palazzo Massimo, Bacchus (see Fig. 120). a different vantage point (Fig. 211) reflects the not via the Casa Galli (*Massimo). Van Payment records show beyond a doubt that appearance of a second level of the Galli garden. Heemskerck’s drawing probably shows the Cardinal Riario, not Galli, was the patron of On a terrace up a short flight of steps and encircled Pyrrhus soon after its excavation, still lying on the the statue.4 Nevertheless, the first description by a low wall, Galli showed off more torsos and ground in the Forum of Nerva.10 of the Bacchus (in Raffaele Maffei’s Urban another figure of a sphinx. This was also where he Toward the end of the fifteenth century, Pietro Commentaries published in 1506, a year after displayed his sleeping nymph. Although the figure Sabino and Fra Giocondo noted dozens of ancient Galli’s death), locates the figure in the “courtyard” is statue of a woman reclining against an urn, Galli inscriptions, “in the house of Giovanni Galli, (atrium) of Galli’s house.5 This might be the same has not incorporated it into a fountain but scriptor of the [Apostolic] Penitentiary.” Since setting shown in a famous drawing by Van 1 Apollo Citharoedus, with restorations by Tiziano Aspetti, positioned it on a high pedestal pieced together archival research on the Galli by Baldini, Lodico, Venice, Museo Archeologico Heemskerck, where the statue stands in an

2 3 and Piras has yielded no record of a “Giovanni” miraculoque et santa priscae aetatis di esso Quirino che si trova conservata dall’antiche in the family,11 it must be that the syllogists antiquitate nobilior, vel immortalium operum rovine in casa de Galli gentiluomini Romani,” cit. misread an abbreviation of Jacopo Galli’s name vera aestimatione praestantior, vel demum Lodico and Piras 2007, 132–3. (interpreting “Io.” as “Iohannes” rather than tanti oris atque habitus dignitate augustior in 14 “Sotto la casa dei Galli . . . nella via de Leutari di fianco “Iacopo”). One of the epigraphic curiosities Urbe extat, ut ex marmorea statua, quae alla Cancelleria . . . mi ricordo vedervi cavare . . . Vi furono trovati certi capitelli scolpiti con targhe, trofei e displayed somewhere in the house or garden of the iuxta Laurentianam Damasi aedem, in fronte cimieri, che davano segno vi fosse qualche tempio Galli include a “false” inscription recorded Gallorum civium domus, posita est, collato dedicato a Marte,” Vacca 1790, no. 30. in the Epigrammata antiquae urbis of 1521. The veteri numismate, ab eruditis praeclare epitaph bore the same paraphrase from Seneca deprehenditur.” displayed in the villa of Cardinal Carafa on the (2) Aldrovandi 1556, 167–8. Quirinal (see Fig. 190): “Virtue excludes no one, it (3) Boissard 1597–1602, pars 1: 34–5. 19. goritz (küritz), johann is open to all, to it noble house or wealth do not (corycius, d. 1527) (map 1) matter, but instead contents itself with the naked Later history: Massimo (Pyrrhus); della Valle individual.”12 (relief with a sphinx). Johann Goritz came from Treviri, a city in what is Soon after Van Heemskerck sketched at the now Luxembourg. His origins were not noble yet Casa Galli, the family seems to have sold most 1 “In domo D. Ioannis Galli scriptoris penitentiariae,” he had the help of a wealthy German sponsor who of their antique sculptures. In the mid-sixteenth sylloges of Pietro Sabino, cit. Magister 1999, 166; 2001, brought him to Rome after recognizing his century, Aldrovandi and Boissard named only a 125. intelligence and literary talents. A rapid rise up few works which were still left, including a portrait 2 Lodico and Piras 2007, 126. the Curial ranks brought him the office of 3 Weil-Garris Brandt 1996; 1997; Lodico and Piras 2007, bust of Romulus visible above the principle protonotaro apostolico, a modest fortune, 126–7. doorway (D2 and 3).13 After viewing the lower and a wide circle of literary friends. He became a 4 Hirst 1981; Lodico and Piras 2007. As Condivi wrote, garden and Michelangelo’s Bacchus, Aldrovandi patron of arts and letters, contributing to “messer Jacopo Galli, gentiluomo romano et di bello the construction of the German church of Sta described a camera più su presso la sala, where he ingegno, gli fece fare in casa sua un Bacco di marmo, di Maria dell’Anima. His palazzo stood near the spotted the Apollo or Cupid sculpted by palmi dieci, la cui forma e aspetto corrisponde in ogni Cancelleria in the heart of Parione, at the center of Michelangelo, a “beautiful antique head,” and parte all’intenzione delli scrittori antichi,” Condivi other unidentifiable fragments (D2). The Galli may 1998, 19. the Roman printing industry and near the Studium have obtained these and other works from one of 5 “Item quamquam profanum, attamen operosum Bacchi Urbis. His villa, on the other hand, stood near the their many vigne and Flaminio Vacca recalls that signum in atrio domus Jacobi Galli civis,” Maffei 1506, Forum of Trajan and was conceived of as a literary antiquities had been excavated directly out of their xxvi, 495. See Frommel 1992, 453 and Baldini, Lodico, retreat; it was here that he hosted one of Rome’s 1 garden on the Via Papalis.14 and Piras 1999, 156. most popular and lively sodalities. Among his 6 For these pieces see Hülsen and Egger 1913–16, 1: 39– academic friends Goritz went by the alias 40; Filieri 1985, 26, no. 26; Lodico and Piras 2007, Family, palace, and collection: Domenico Jac- Corycius, in reference to an old shepherd 135–8. ovacci, “Repertorio di famiglie,” BAV, Ottob. lat. (Corycius senex) named in Virgil’s Georgics 7 Schweikhart 1986, 90–91 (fols 36v–37); Bober and (4.127) and to the Greek nymph Corycia, the 2550, part 3, fols 77–91; Michaelis 1891a, 153– Rubinstein 1986, 57–8, no. 9 (“other sarcophagus goddess of a grotto on Mount Parnassus and the 4; Reinach 1902, 134; Amayden 1906–14, 1: 420– reliefs”); Lodico and Piras 2007, 134–5. figure who inspired Goritz’s poetic circle. 21; Hübner 1912, 100; Hülsen and Egger 8 Hülsen and Egger 1913–16, 1: 16–17 (fol. 27); Bober 1913–16, 1: 16–17 and 39–40; Wind 1958, 147– and Rubinstein 1986, 98, no. 62; Lodico and Piras Every year on the feast day of St Anne (July 26), 3 The Tyrannicides, Naples, Archeological Museum 57; Schiavo 1964, 92; Bober 1977, 229–30; Lee 2007, 133–4. The statue is untraced. Goritz held a literary banquet to celebrate a 1981; Bober and Rubinstein 1986, 474; Lanciani 9 Bober and Rubinstein 1986, 66–7, no. 24; Lodico and statue he had commissioned for his own tomb: Palladio edited a printed version, of the Coryciana, 1989–2002, 1: 137–40; Frommel 1992; Miglio Piras 2007, 137–8. Sansovino’s St Anne, the Virgin, and Child. The publishing hundreds of verses about Sansovino’s and Modigliani 1995, 104*; Baldini, Lodico, and 10 Bartsch 2007. sculpture was housed in a pier in the nave of S. 11 Lodico and Piras 2007, 140–42. sculpture by Bembo, Sadoleto, Castiglione, Piras 1999; Frommel 1999; Magister 1999, 166; Agostino, above the spot where Goritz planned to 12 CIL VI, 5, 4*f; Mazzocchi 1521, fol. 97; *Carafa, D8. Navagero, Colocci, and others.3 He recalled the Bober 2000; Magister 2001, 125; Lodico and Piras be buried and beneath a fresco of the prophet See Chapter 7, note ••. lively atmosphere of the feast in his introduction 2007. Isaiah by Raphael (see Fig. 145). Goritz’s annual 13 Aldrovandi 1556, 167, “prima che s’entri in casa, si festival began with a mass at the church, and then to the book (D1): “on that day it seems you vede su la porta una bella testa di Romolo, che edificò turned into a literary contest, as the sodales placed [Goritz] have brought the center of Athens and a Descriptions: Roma;” Boissard 1597–1602, pars 1: 35, “super porta epigrams about Sansovino’s statue onto boards hub of learning into your gardens, transferring the prima repositum est caput Romuli in Nischio 2 Muses of Helicon and Parnassus to the Tarpeian (1) Giovio 1972, 237 (Elogia virorum bellica marmoreo;” Ligorio, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ital. set up against the pier. The group then retired [Rock] and the Quirinal. Your admiring poets virtute illustrium), “Nulla enim cuiusquam 1129, fols 325 and 329, “A Quirino facevano la corona to Goritz’s sculpture garden for a banquet attach various compositions randomly here and mortalis vel stupendae originis eventu di brocconi de arboro, come è in quella testa di marmo and further literary entertainments. In 1524, Blosio

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