Machiavelli in Love : Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance / Guido Ruggiero

Machiavelli in Love This page intentionally left blank Machiavelli in Love Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance guido ruggiero The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 246897531 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruggiero, Guido, 1944– Machiavelli in love : sex, self, and society in the Italian Renaissance / Guido Ruggiero. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8516-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8018-8516-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Sex customs–Italy–History. 2. Renaissance–Italy. 3. Sex–Social aspects–Italy–History. 4. Sex role–Italy–History. 5. Sex in literature. I. Title. HQ18.I8I834 2006 306.70945′09024–dc22 2006015555 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. For Laura “e come sare’ io sanza te corso? chi m’avria tratto su per la montagna?” (adapted from Purgatorio III:5– 6) This page intentionally left blank contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Of Birds, Figs, and Sexual Identity in the Renaissance, or The Marescalco’s Boy Bride 19 2 Playing with the Devil: The Pleasures and Dangers of Sex and Play 41 3 The Abbot’s Concubine: Renaissance Lies, Literature, and Power 71 4 Brunelleschi’s First Masterpiece, or Mean Streets, Familiar Streets, Masculine Spaces, and Identity in Renaissance Florence 85 5 Machiavelli in Love: The Self-Presentation of an Aging Lover 108 6 Death and Resurrection and the Regime of Virtù, or Of Princes, Lovers, and Prickly Pears 163 Afterword. How Machiavelli Put the Devil Back in Hell 212 Notes 223 Bibliography 261 Index 279 This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments Although this book is the product of a career of research, discussions with students, colleagues, and friends, and reading widely in the literature of the Re- naissance, it began to come together in a more serious way in the early 1990s thanks to fellowship support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Much-appreciated stays at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in that same period of time allowed me to make the most of those grants. But crucial for the project were my years as Josephine Berry Weiss Chair in the Hu- manities at the Pennsylvania State University from 1997 to 2003. That hand- somely endowed chair and the Weiss family’s generous support enabled me to read much more widely and make this book much more ambitious than would have otherwise been possible. Similar support from the University of Miami allowed me to finish writing the book even while serving as chair of a rapidly growing, exciting department of history there. I would also like to thank John Paoletti, Roger Crum, and Cambridge Uni- versity Press for allowing me to publish here in an expanded and revised form as Chapter 4 an essay published in 2006 as “Mean Streets, Familiar Streets, or The Fat Woodcarver and the Masculine Spaces of Florence” in Crum and Pao- letti’s coedited volume Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Similar thanks are in order to Ellen Kittell, Thomas Madden, and the University of Illinois Press for allowing me to publish as Chapter 3 a revised version of the essay “The Abbot’s Concubine: Lies, Literature and Power at the End of the Re- naissance” in Kittell and Madden’s coedited volume Medieval and Renaissance Venice (1999). As this book is truly the product of a career, however, I owe too many debts of gratitude to list here all the fine people who have helped along the way. Col- leagues, students, and staff at all the universities where I have taught over the x Acknowledgments years—whether as a visiting professor (the University of Tennessee and the University of Syracuse in Florence) or as a regular member of the faculty (the University of Cincinnati, the University of Connecticut, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Miami)—have been most helpful and generous of their time and friendship. Equally important have been the colleagues in the broader profession who have encouraged, stimulated, and sup- ported this project over the years. And although I cannot thank everyone, I would like to thank at least a few of the most important: Ed Muir, Claudio Po- volo, Jim Farr, John Martin, Geoffrey Symcox, Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Matthew Restall, Karen Kupperman, Richard Brown, Peter Burke, Joanne Ferraro, Londa Schiebinger, Robert Proctor, A. Gregg Roeber, Donald Spivey, Linda Woodbridge, Konrad Eisenbichler, Martin Elsky, Ian Frederick Moulton, Meg Gallucci, Deanna Shemek, Tita Rosenthal, Bette Talvacchia, Ann Rosalyn Jones, Peter Stallybrass, Valeria Finucci, and Albert Ascoli. Four senior sup- porters and intellectual role models also deserve special mention and thanks: Natalie Zemon Davis, Gene Brucker, the late Gaetano Cozzi, and most espe- cially Lauro Martines; all four have written more letters for me and given more good advice than any scholar could rightly expect. Special thanks are in order to my Miami colleagues Mary Lindemann and Richard Godbeer, who read and commented on early drafts of the book, as well as the readers for the Johns Hopkins University Press and my most supportive and helpful editor there, Henry Tom. But I am most indebted to Laura Gian- netti, who truly was a Virgil to this project, even if I regularly fell far short of playing a Dante in return; nonetheless, her thoughtful readings, comments, and critiques have made this a stronger book and undoubtedly would have made it stronger yet if I had taken them all. Thus I dedicate this book to her— friend, teacher, guide, and partner. Machiavelli in Love This page intentionally left blank introduction “Given that el Machia [Machiavelli] is a relative of yours and a very good friend of mine, I cannot refrain from taking this occasion that you have given me to write to you and to commiserate with you about the things that I am hearing daily about him.... And if it were not for the great, virtually terrible events that are happening in this poor region [of Modena] which have given people other things to talk about than gossip, I am certain that no one would be talking about anything else besides him [Machiavelli].”1 Thus did Filippo de’ Nerli write his friend Francesco del Nero during carnival season in 1525 about the gossip that was making the rounds in Modena concerning Niccolò Machiavelli. The “great, virtually terrible” events to which Filippo referred were the famous Battle of Pavia of 24 February 1525 and its aftermath. At nearby Pavia the French army had suffered a major defeat, and the French king Francis I had been captured by the emperor Charles V and carried off to Madrid as his prisoner. For the moment the battle seemed to mark the final demise of French pretensions in Italy and a future dominance of the peninsula by Charles V. Af- ter a generation of war that had disrupted the hegemony and relative peace that had allowed five powers to dominate Italy following the Peace of Lodi in 1454—the city-states of Venice, Milan, and Florence; the kingdom of Naples; and territories of Italy ruled by the pope, the Papal States—a Spanish-German domination of the peninsula seemed assured. Things would not be that sim- ple, however. The famous Sack of Rome by Charles’s troops in 1527 was just around the corner, and the sixteenth century would continue to be a century of turmoil in both political and religious terms which would effectively close the most brilliant days of the Italian Renaissance. Yet in the days following Pavia the fate of the city-states of Italy seemed sealed, and it is no wonder that 2 Machiavelli in Love gossip in Modena about Machiavelli was limited by discussion of that im- pending fate and that battle. But still one is moved to wonder what the Florentine politician and political thinker Machiavelli could have done even to begin to compete with discussions in relatively distant Modena about the Battle of Pavia and the dark future that seemed to loom for the Italian peninsula. At the time, his fame (or infamy) was already established and growing as the controversial author of The Prince, and he was also busy corresponding with friends and the powerful about the travails of Italy and the best strategies to adopt in the face of the foreign armies that had overrun the peninsula. He was even beginning to regain some weight after his fall from power in 1512 in Florence as a friend of and correspondent with several of the key leaders and thinkers of the day (men like the noted Florentine ambassador and political thinker Francesco Guic- cardini). Thus it would be easy to assume that the gossip about el Machia had something to do with his political or military ideas or advice on how to defend Italy from foreign invaders. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nerli completed his thought “I am certain that no one would be talking about anything else besides him” by adding: “considering that a patriarch of that fame has fallen head over heals [andare alla staffa] for someone who I don’t want to name.”2 The gossip that had reached Modena was that in his mid-fifties Machiavelli, long married (1501) to Marietta di Luigi Corsini, had developed yet another adulterous pas- sion for a much younger and reportedly beautiful woman, Barbara Raffacani Salutati, a noted singer, poet, and personality who shared her favors at times with the rich and powerful.

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