JOHN M. NAJEMY Between Friends Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513-1515 PRINCETON LEGACY LIBRARY c."Between friends DISCOURSES OF POWER AND DESIRE IN THE MACHIAVELLI-VETTORI LETTERS OF 1513-1515 John M. Najemy PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS • PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, Wesr Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Najemy, John M., 1943- Between friends : discourses of power and desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori letters of 1513-1515 / John M. Najemy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-03262-9 z. Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1469-1527-Correspondence. 2. Vettori, Francesco, 1474-1539-Correspondence. 3. Italy-Intellectual life-1268-1559. DG738.14.M2A4 1993 320.1'092-dc20 93-9737 CIP This book has been composed in Garamond typeface Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines fur permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Princeton Legacy Library edition 2019 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-65522-2 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-691-65664-9 To the memory of Hans Baron (1900-1988) and Edward P. Morris (1924-1989) ?f CONTENTS ?f Prefac e ix Abbreviations xiii INTRODUCTION : The Letters in Machiavelli Studies 3 CHAPTE R ONE : Renaissance Epistolarity 18 The Social Worlds of Florentin e Lette r Writing 19 Petrarc h and the Ancient s 25 Humanist s and Their Lette r Collection s 30 Letter s and Literatur e 33 Manual s and Theor y 42 CHAPTE R TWO: Contexts Personal and Political 58 The Secretary and His Letter s 58 Francesc o Vettori 71 Friendshi p and Politic s in the Republic' s Crisis 82 CHAPTE R THREE : "Formerly Secretary" 95 "Discorsi et concetti " in Exile 95 "A spirited maker of beginnings" 117 CHAPTE R FOUR : Speaking like Romans 136 "Some of it we just imagine" 136 "Natural e affection e ο passione" 152 The Swiss and "the sweetness of domination " 156 The Inventio n of Redemptiv e Virtu 167 CHAPTE R FIVE: The Princ e "Addressed" to Francesco Vettori 176 What Text Did Vettori See? 177 "Verita effettuale" and "Imaginazione " 185 Securit y and Power 197 Intelligibility , Power, Love 201 CHAPTE R SIX: Geta and the "Antiqui Huomini" (The Lette r of 10 Decembe r 1513) 215 "Sed fatis trahimur " 215 Maestr o Get a and His New "Scienza" 221 "Tucto mi transferisco in loro" 2 30 Vlll CONTENTS CHAPTER SEVEN: "A Ridiculous Metamorphosis" 241 "What kinds of writers could not be criticized?" 241 "As worthy of being recited to a prince as anything I have heard this year" 253 Desire in the Text 271 CHAPTER EIGHT: "After a Thousand Years" 277 "These princes are men like you and me" 277 "To me alone Troy remains" 287 "To enlist you again in the old game" 295 CHAPTER NINE: Poetry and Politics 313 Corydon in San Casciano 313 Metamorphosis in the Text 319 EPILOGUE: The Poets of the Discourses 335 Index 351 * PREFACE # HE ESSAY offered in these pages combines a reading of Machiavelli's correspondence with Francesco Vettori in 1513-15 with an at- tempt to set this famous epistolary dialogue in the context of Ma- chiavelli's emergence and transformation as a writer and political Ttheorist. Some potential readers may wonder about the decision to devote this much attention to several dozen reasonably well known and much- published letters, especially as I have no discoveries to report from the ar- chives or manuscripts. Machiavelli specialists have labored with skill and patience to improve the accuracy of the texts, to clarify the dating of the letters, and to identify the references or allusions to persons, events, and texts. And some of the letters, most notably that of 10 December 1513, have received a considerable amount of critical analysis and interpretation. \et, despite all this work and the illuminating treatments of specific pas- sages, individual letters, and particular themes, the correspondence as a whole has by and large eluded interpretation. The chief purposes of this essay will be, first, to show why and in what sense the Machiavelli-Vettori letters of 1513-15 can be thought of—indeed, how Machiavelli and Vettori themselves gradually came to think of them—as a whole that invites in- terpretation, and, second, to suggest how a reading of the letters can con- tribute to the larger project of interpreting Machiavelli's major works. Various reasons can be adduced to account for the lack of comprehensive treatments of this correspondence. First and perhaps most obvious is that these letters do not constitute a single text in the ordinary sense of the term. Machiavelli and Vettori had almost certainly exchanged letters on occasion before 1513 (as a 1510 letter from Vettori suggests), and in the 1520s they again wrote to each other fairly regularly. In a correspondence whose limits extend to almost two decades, there is at first glance nothing self-evident about why a particular two-year phase can or should be treated as a discrete unit. Another reason has to do not merely with the fact of two authors, but with the (understandably) very different assumptions and expectations with which almost all readers approach them. Everyone knows Machiavelli (in one fashion or another), while only specialists in Italian Renaissance history and literature have even heard of Francesco Vettori, and even many of these know him only as Machiavelli's friend and correspondent. To many this has seemed a joint authorship of such obvious inequality that there has been little incentive to take Vettori and his letters seriously, or even to consider the possibility that Machiavelli did so. A further purpose of these pages will be to show how insufficient attention to Vettori's letters severely restricts χ PREFACE the understandin g not only of Machiavelli' s letters but of certain crucia l aspects of The Prince as well. Still anothe r reason for the persistenc e of limited and fragmente d readings of the letters lies in one of their most frequentl y acknowledge d but least- studied features: the curiou s unpredictabilit y with which they alternat e be- tween "serious" discussions of politica l and diplomati c issues and "frivolous" bante r on love and the foibles of eros. Machiavell i and Vettori did not explain or justify these disruption s and change s of direction , and the resultin g range of moods , themes , and language has left man y reader s with the uncom - fortable feeling that the two discorsi have little or nothin g to do with each other . Despit e a few noteworth y attempt s to uncove r possible connection s between the letters on politics and those on love, the general tendenc y has been to prefer one them e to the other . Predictabl y enough , historian s have devoted most of their attentio n to the politica l letters, while literary critics have explored the connection s between the letters on love and Machiavelli' s plays. Each set of letters has been used to illuminat e different major works, and this too has inhibite d the inclinatio n to ask why Machiavell i and Vettori interrupte d their discussions of politics to engage in an apparentl y whim- sical exchange on love, then returne d to politics and yet again to love. The dynami c of this alternatio n and the ways in which Machiavell i and Vettori contribute d to it will be a principa l focus of my analysis of the letters. It may also be the case that , with one or two notabl e exceptions , even Machiavelli' s letters have suffered, by assumed or implicit compariso n with the "major" works, from a certain tendenc y to relegate letters to a secondar y (and sometime s lower) status in the hierarch y of literary genres.' As the first chapte r will attemp t to show, one form of this attitud e of condescensio n toward letters, particularl y influentia l in the Renaissanc e itself, derives from a classical topo s accordin g to which letters are and should be nothin g more 1 Recently , however, the history of letter writing and the study of epistolarit y have emerged as fields of significant critical inquiry. For an introductio n to epistolarit y in the cultur e of the Middl e Ages and the Renaissance , see Giles Constable , Letters and Letter Col- lections, fasc. 17 of Typologie des sources du moyen age occidental (Turnhout : Brepols, 1976). On epistolarit y in early moder n and moder n literature , see Janet Gurki n Altman, Epistolarity, Approaches to a Form (Columbus , Ohio: Ohio Universit y Press, 1982); also the volume L'epistolarite a travers les siecles: Geste de communication etlou d'ecriture, papers of the 1987 con- ference at the Centr e Culture l Internationa l de Cerisy La Salle organized by Mireille Bossis and Charle s A. Porte r (Stuttgart : Fran z Steiner Verlag, 1990); and, for epistolarit y in Italian culture , La correspondence [edition, functions, significations], vol. 1, Actes du colloque franco- italien, Aix-en-Provence , Octobe r 1983 (Aix-en-Provence : Centr e Aixois de Recherche s Italiennes , 1984), and vol. 2, Actes du colloque international , Aix-en-Provence , Octobe r 1984 (Aix-en-Provence : Centr e Aixois de Recherche s Italiennes , 1985).