"Inventing the Renaissance", II

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The third section of the book is the biography of fifteen men and women around that time.

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• We’ve encountered several intersecting threads: scholarship, cash, politics, feuds, war, plague, dynastic crisis, high blood and low; but to get a better feel of this era I want to introduce fifteen new friends, drawn from a wide array of walks of life.


• * a powerful patron family, like the Montagues or the Medici, was the backbone of the social safety net. Patrons.. Patrons were also one’s legal guarantors for contracts or debts, even for one’s tabs at shops and restaurants... The client family, in return, not only worked for the patron—building furniture, tilling the farm, doing the paperwork, frescoing the palace—but did things the high-status patron couldn’t, such as haggling over market goods, hosting low-status guests, teaching their trades to fellow clients, or taking on missions of trust in lower social spaces.


• Florence’s tax system, for example, was more a wealth tax than an income tax, and for many years was based on officials interviewing your neighbors each year to ask them how rich they thought you were.. loyal clients could claim your resources were low this year,


• * Patronage networks had many layers, not just top and bottom. Master craftsmen like Brunelleschi or Michelangelo were clients of the great families or mighty guilds who commissioned work from them, but were also patrons to their own apprentices, workmen, and servants. When Michelangelo began painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the scaffolding that had been prepared for him was so inefficient that, when he redesigned it, it produced enough surplus rope that selling it provided dowry money for several of his workers,


• * Patronage was also integral to the legal system. We’ve all heard of the extreme severity of medieval and Renaissance laws... it isn’t until the eighteenth century that Europe developed the idea that justice systems should aim for equal enforcement, Renaissance courts focused instead on mercy, expecting the judge to almost always give a lighter punishment than what was on the books—a fine, for example, instead of death—so that the extreme sentences proclaimed by law were actually the exception, not the rule. This was tied to Christian ideas about sin and salvation


• It was the patron who secured the lesser sentence, the powerful family who vouched for you, who stood character witness,


• being a client was not fully freedom either, one of many fine grades of unfreedom reinforced by the coercive social structures of the age.


• In 1600, the Roman market square of Campo dei Fiori was the site of another burning at the stake, one of the most infamous in history, that of scientist-scholar Giordano Bruno... but Bruno’s case was not typical; in fact it was the only science-related execution the Inquisition ever carried out—tens of thousands for Lutheranism and witchcraft, one for science. Bruno’s execution happened because he had angered his patron, promising to teach memory skills that the patron found he couldn’t teach, so the patron denounced Bruno as a swindler


• Grace is our keyword here. The Latin gratias, often rendered as grace, also meant political influence, so, in fact, a perfectly valid translation of the Archangel Gabriel’s words at the Annunciation, Ave Maria gratia plena, is “Hail Mary full of political influence.”


• Catholic salvation wasn’t about being not guilty; it was about everyone being constantly guilty of sins but begging to be forgiven anyway. <> Patronage also went all the way up, beyond the king or city council, to the afterlife and patron saints... Divine patronage was deadly serious in this period, and heresy and sinful conduct were feared largely because of the anxiety that offending the saints would forfeit protection for the whole area.


• * a big goal of executions, as of all punishments at the time, was to give the guilty person’s soul the best shot at getting into Heaven. Christians in this period believed (from Plato, though few knew it was Plato) that the soul was like an eye and looked in a direction, and whether you were damned or saved depended on what direction your soul looked at the moment of death.


• * We see this in early Shakespeare plays where he kills off lots of characters (he had to give up large casts after plague outbreaks in the 1590s killed most of London’s actors): Shakespeare knows his audience is wondering where souls are going, so always indicates it in their last words, so virtuous types like Salisbury can get hit in the face with a cannon and still piously blurt out, “O Lord, have mercy on us, wretched sinners!” while complex characters like York mix up and down in their last words, “My soul to heaven, my blood upon your heads!” and villainous Richard III dies shouting of his kingdom and his horse.


• when the Reformation begins, this entangled understanding of Earthly hierarchy with Heavenly hierarchy will be much of how religious reform triggers social upheaval. When Luther and his peers say priests and saints are not needed as intermediaries, that even a peasant can pray directly to God Himself without needing the grace of a favored saint or living priest to endorse the suit, this translates quickly into mass rebellion against the aristocratic masters whose function as tools of political influence between peasant and king was the same as that of priests and saints between peasant and God. Eroding the belief that all things naturally work through chains of intermediary grace is one way that the Reformation will contribute, along with many other shifts, to the egalitarian movements of the Enlightenment, which required the breakdown of Europe’s belief—as old as Aristotle—that hierarchy was an inextricable part of Nature:


• *  In the implausibly interesting autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71), the Florentine goldsmith-sculptor-assassin-jailbreaker-necromancer (actually!), Cellini boasts in several passages about how he waits to get a big commission from a king or the pope and then brutally murders a rival, knowing his patron will pull strings to let him get away with it, rather than lose a precious artist and the unfinished art.


• Up in England we’ve met Henry VI (1421–71) who was an infant when his father Henry V (1386–1422) died, creating a power vacuum in which the young king’s uncles Cardinal Beaufort (c.1375–1447) and Humphrey of Gloucester (1390–1447) raced to hire Italian secretaries like Bruni and Poggio. A long lifetime and many wars later we’ve also met Charles VIII of France (1470–98) who invaded Italy in 1494


• And we’ve briefly met Queen Beatrice’s niece and nephew from Ferrara, Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) with her big shopping spree who threatened to give her slow artist a tour of the dungeons, and her brother Cardinal Ippolito d’Este (1479–1520) who had his half-brother’s eyes gouged out over a love quarrel, and didn’t thank Ariosto for his epic Orlando Furioso.


• Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (c.1408–71) was a Florentine matron, who ran Florence’s end of the vast Strozzi banking empire while her sons were in exile


• Richard Goldthwaite’s numbers show that, in 1427, the top 1 percent of Florence’s families (famous for extreme wealth!) owned 27 percent of the wealth; in comparison in the US in 1995 the top 1 percent owned 38 percent of the wealth.


• Florence:  the super-rich instead gave forced loans to the state—loans which were gradually paid back, and generated state debt that could be traded as if today’s wealthiest were required to buy a certain quota of government bonds as their form of paying taxes. Since this generated a commodity (debt) which elites could buy, sell, and speculate with, they were more willing to pay than if the taxes were direct.


• Machiavelli himself observed in the Discourses when comparing ancient Roman religion with Christianity: that the different ways a culture incentivizes elite spending has a huge impact on whether or not the wealth that accumulates in elite hands still benefits society more broadly.


• most umanisti had friends who had spent time as galley captives before ransom, or had done so themselves, and encountered corresponding enslaved Muslim people in Rome and elsewhere.


• Alessandra’s letters show her forcefulness in business, her touching spirituality as she lost friends to plague, her careful navigation of the web of patronage, and her cold practicality as she discussed chilling questions, such as whether to take out life insurance on her daughters when they became pregnant... such methods could not touch a woman’s dowry, and Alessandra invested her untouchable 1,600 so successfully that it helped carry and stabilize the family fortunes.


• Fun fact: in the 1300s into the 1400s, Florence bought 100 percent of England’s wool exports.29 Processing wool to make fine, not-itchy cloth required, in the period, a lot of oil, and England’s only oil crop was walnuts, not an efficient choice. Olive oil was ideal, but England’s frequent wars with Spain made getting industrial levels of olive oil up to England so costly that it proved more profitable to sell all of England’s wool to oil-rich Florence, to turn into high-profit high-quality fabric.. the mineral alum, to make your dyes colorfast, which could only be acquired from three known mines, one in the Byzantine (later Ottoman) Empire, one (after the 1460s) belonging to the pope, and the third (after 1472) in Florentine-controlled Volterra.


• once the bride reached her new home, the pearls and other reusable materials would be resold to buy equipment for the newlyweds’ silk business... For the pearls, think stock market shares or savings bonds, high-value investments infinitely resalable. Indeed, the choice of pearls as a form of display was itself strategic: costly embroideries and cut gemstones were both unique and recognizable


• Manetto di Jacopo Amanatini (c.1388–c.1450/2), known as Grasso, or “the fat woodcarver” was a Florentine woodworker, best known for being the butt of a strange prank


• The prank which made Amanatini famous was masterminded by Brunelleschi (who was not yet working on the dome), along with Brunelleschi’s equally famous lover Donatello and several of their friends... Together, Brunelleschi and his friends conspired to convince Amanatini that he had gone mad and was actually someone else. Through their influence, one morning suddenly everyone in the entire city started addressing Amanatini as Matteo Mannini


• Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) was the longest-lived professional umanista of the early days of the classicizing movement... Filelfo frequently boasted about the fact that he had three testicles—for which he invented a Greek word τριόρχης (tresticular)


• Italy’s premier mercenary at the time was Cosimo’s friend Francesco I’m-Better-At-Using-Artillery-Than-Anyone Sforza. Sforza fought for both sides alternately, since a hired sword is content to switch when the other side bids higher, or (as often happened to him) when his current employer didn’t pay as much as was promised... he often took the same town four or five times for different sides,


• His annoyed father-in-law then made a will which he never intended to actually go into effect leaving the Duchy of Milan to… (any guesses?)… King Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon the humanist-loving conqueror of Naples. Why? As a stick to go with the carrot, that Sforza had better be loyal if he wanted his father-in-law to rescind that will and leave him the duchy... then dropped dead unexpectedly the very next day.


• Nineteenth-Century Historians: Thus the Visconti dynasty died out completely due to lack of heirs, and was replaced by the cunning conqueror Francesco Sforza.
  Bianca Maria Visconti: Excuse me, I’m right here!
  Nineteenth-Century Historians: Yes, but you’re a woman, and a bastard, so you don’t exist.
  Bianca Maria Visconti: I’m his battle partner! I led armies! I’m doing tons of diplomacy!


• Filelfo gets erased just like Bianca Maria, by another equally distorting bias of historians. Which bias? Well, Filelfo turned his back on Venice, Florence, and Siena (republics), seeking higher pay which he found at Milan’s ducal court


• Giovanni Battista da Montesecco (c.1450–78) was a mercenary used by Pope Sixtus IV in the infamous Pazzi Conspiracy.


• Demonic possession is as plausible an explanation as any, since, upon becoming Pope Sixtus IV, della Rovere immediately abandoned his humble Franciscan ways, and became determined to reunite the Roman Empire by war (surprise, it’s Battle Pope!).


• Thus on April 25, 1478, under Brunelleschi’s dome, the assassins struck, killing the younger brother Giuliano de Medici, but the wounded Lorenzo escaped, ... Patronage webs overlap, so a moment of major strife puts many lives and livelihoods at risk as two webs rip apart, making palpable how even warm and intimate relationships, like a student and the tutor who raised him, retain the inescapable coercive power of master and dependant, and the ever-present threat of a fall from grace.


• Saint Julian, patron saint of repentant murderers, a very popular saint at the time


• Ippolita Maria Visconti Sforza (1445–88) was the eldest daughter of Milan’s conquering Power Couple: Francesco Sforza, and of his bride Bianca Maria Visconti.


• The power vacuum of a child duke triggered a power struggle between Ippolita Maria’s ambitious younger brothers and the boy’s mother Bona of Savoy (1449–1503), sister-in-law of the French King Louis XI (the same Bona who almost married Edward IV of England, but was spurned in favor of Elizabeth Woodville; thus, improbably, both Bona’s possible marriages would have led to her brother-in-law locking her princely son in a tower).


• The campaign in Otranto was in some ways successful, the small Ottoman fleet countered by a hastily mustered papal navy commanded by the implausible Archbishop of Genoa, twice ex-doge, ex-pirate Paolo Campofregoso (1430–98), a churchman with serious sea battle experience from his years leading a pirate fleet raiding his homeland’s shipping out of spite at being deposed as doge... The tattered Peace of Lodi endured, with Princess Ippolita Maria—the living link between Milan and Naples—as one of its lynchpins.


• (Pope) Innocent was seen so much as della Rovere tool that his election triggered my nominee for The Most Passive Aggressive Letter in Earth History, when Lorenzo de Medici... instructing Piero to tell the pope on his behalf, “I am aware it was my duty to prostrate myself in person at the feet of His Holiness, as I did at those of his Predecessor of saintly memory; but that I trust in his goodness to forgive me because at that time I had my brother who was well able to fill my duties,” [i.e. running Florence while Lorenzo went to Rome] the Predecessor of saintly memory being Sixtus, and the brother his victim, the murdered Giuliano.


• * It could be easy to feel that our brilliant, peacemaking princess’s life and efforts came to naught, since she herself suffered so much, and both the families she was supposed to link were overthrown not long after her death. But we get another sense when we zoom in. Years of peace—even one year of peace—is a precious thing within a lifetime. Ippolita Maria spent twenty-three years in Naples, a substantial diplomatic career, and during that time she was vital to the negotiations which shaped the Pazzi War, to the alliance that defended against the Ottoman invasion, and to keeping the friendship of Florence and Milan which saved her royal father-in-law from being overthrown by the Conspiracy of the Barons in 1486, extending her family’s reign by eight precious years. Through this and her Pazzi Conspiracy interventions, she helped extend the treaties of the Peace of Lodi by a full decade... The world does not stay saved, but to save it three times is no small achievement, and Ippolita Maria’s ten-year prolongation of semi-peace was no less precious to her generation than the peace between the First and Second World Wars.


• Josquin des Prez (c.1450/55–1521) was the most renowned composer of the decades around 1500... Music is an exception, one rare field in which a boy of genuine peasant roots blessed with the right combo of voice and ear could catch the notice of a choir director and be recruited, trained


• * extreme exceptions whose rare abilities—music, prophecy; one could also rise through genius skills at language, art, or memory, religious visions, or much-sought-after dwarfism—met the fancies of the super-rich, triggering rare moments when Fortune’s Wheel truly turned all the way, bottom to top.


• Ferrara was uniquely stable for an Italian city-state, ruled by just about the only genuinely blue-blooded old noble family in Italy (relatives of the House of Welf and the Hanoverians), and positioned as a kind of buffer zone between Venice’s land empire and the Papal States... Between its noble blood, strong allies, and serious investments in the best artillery works in Europe, members of the House d’Este were not just the most eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in Italy, but able to spend lavishly on luxuries like art and music.


• (Rodrigo Borgia) Pope Alexander IV unrolled his own war plans, aiming to turn the section of central Italy that Sixtus had destabilized into a permanent Borgia kingdom—not an extension of the Papal States that would continue to be passed from hand to hand by the ever-changing wheel of popes, but a permanent kingdom, split off from the Papal States and given to Alexander’s descendants to rule as kings.


• Duke Ludovico: his most trusted friend and long-time lover Galeazzo Sanseverino (c.1460–1525), whom period sources paint as the sexiest thing in pants in Italy. Sanseverino was so charming that even Duchess Beatrice had adored her husband’s male lover (while hating his female mistresses),


• King Charles of France died suddenly after banging his head on a doorframe (history, unlike fiction, doesn’t have to be plausible)


• Objects like the Portinari Altarpiece, brought from Bruges to Florence and influencing Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan, show how, the more we zoom in on real lives, the more the lines between our separate Renaissances vanish.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portinari_Altarpiece


• * Why then do we tend to talk about these Renaissances separately?... minimizing co-authorship or migration. There’s also a practicality factor: you need languages to study history, and most people who train to study Florence don’t have Hungarian, Breton, Catalan, Arabic, etc. We have a lot more scholars capable of studying the Renaissance of one place than we do scholars who can follow Manetto Amanatini the woodcarver from Italy to Hungary.


• We had these great studies showing that pre-modern Europeans moved very little, that travel was dangerous, and that most people married someone born less than a mile from their birthplace. But those early studies were mainly of the British Isles, and later, when we looked at other places, we realized people in the British Isles were super way more stationary than most Europeans.


• Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) is celebrated now, as in his lifetime, as one of the most elegant voices of the Renaissance, a master of Greek, Latin, Italian, poetry, and prose, who gained renown for translating Homer into beautiful Latin verse that finally captured both the sense and poetry... he was the first to realize Virgil was originally spelled Vergil, and why it changed. This made Poliziano exceptionally important as a scholar, not just as an author and courtier, one of the great progenitors of the modern discipline of classics.


• It’s worth setting Poliziano himself aside for a couple paragraphs to make clear how difficult it was getting Greek back to the level that allowed him to produce his gorgeous Latin Homer.


• Lorenzo’s Roman wife... wanted the boy to read the Psalms in Latin (in bad medieval Latin in Poliziano’s opinion) rather than reading Ovid as Poliziano planned. This is historically important because Leo will be pope when Luther releases the Ninety-Five Theses, so many Reformation histories will cast him as the villain. The most recent English-language biography of Pope Leo X, written in 1908, states as fact that if Clarice had won the argument and three-year-old Leo had read the Psalms instead of Ovid, the Reformation wouldn’t have happened.


• light of the whole world: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Count of Concordia (1463–94), author of the famous (not) Oration (not) on the Dignity of Man.69 For a long time, Pico was the first example in Wikipedia’s page on genius... there is a playful passion in the letters where Poliziano calls Pico “Prince of Muses,” saying “no mortal is more beautiful or preeminent in all kinds of learning!” while Pico says of Poliziano, “Who wouldn’t want to die on the receiving end of your sword?” meaning, in context, the sword of Poliziano’s brilliant literary criticism.


• Ficino believed that integrating Platonism into Christianity would complete God’s message, rehabilitate and renew the Church, reveal the true path to a golden age, and perhaps bring world peace by creating a religion in which God’s Truth would be so clear that everyone would instantly convert. This was a form of syncretism, an attempt to amalgamate different religions and philosophies into one. Pico loved Ficino, and became an even more expansive syncretist,


• Jacopo Antiquari (writing for the anxious Visconti Sforza in Milan) said God must be incensed against Italy, since Lorenzo’s death would—like snow melting on a mountaintop—pour down destruction on the land.


• Poliziano’s murder: There are four Renaissances in this paragraph. Villari’s nationalist revolutionary Renaissance with degenerate Lorenzo and his syphilitic cronies; the romantic Renaissance of poets crooning under balconies; Burckhardt’s Renaissance with true philosopher Lorenzo so beloved that kindred spirits follow him in death; and last the forensic Renaissance of plunging life expectancies and murder without consequences


• * Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98)... burned at the stake aged forty-five, not for heresy—the world is more complex than that—but for his political activities during the four years he helmed Florence as a theocratic republic, from the French invasion of 1494 to 1498.


• Preaching for Lent was a big deal, an oratory marathon composing and delivering a new multi-hour sermon every day for six weeks. Towns competed to hire star performers, crowd-drawing celebrities like Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), whose arrivals were anticipated like a major touring rock band.. In 1490, Lorenzo de Medici invited Savonarola to give Florence’s Lenten sermons


• Many things Savonarola criticized are things the Medici did, making it easy to read his sermons as anti-Medici, but they can equally be read as anti-elite in general


• Dominican headquarters church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva sports one of my favorite frescoes: Filippino Lippi’s Saint Thomas Aquinas Interrupts the Annunciation to Introduce the Virgin Mary to Cardinal Carafa who paid for the painting, while patient Archangel Gabriel just has to wait.  https://www.wga.hu/html_m/l/lippi/flippino/carafa/index.html


• The Florentine ambassadors went out to see King Charles, taking Savonarola with them. The firebrand preacher persuaded the king to spare the city, and Florence was saved. A miracle? Many hailed it as one. Other Florentines helped too: diplomats like former ambassador to France Piero Capponi (1447–96), and artists who raced to paint gold-and-blue French fleur-de-lis all over the Palazzo Vecchio reception room


• * So enthusiastic was the city about this expansion of participation that the Hall of the Five Hundred that was added to the Palazzo Vecchio to hold this huge council is the only public works project in the city’s history that was finished early and under-budget.79 At the time, Florentine day laborers earned enough to live on working three days in a week, so usually took off the other four to look at art or listen to people recite Dante (really!),


• the Bonfire of the Vanities: The scholar I know who’s worked most on Savonarola thinks that it was more like Burning Man... If we add the fact that many of those youths had been child prostitutes, whom Savonarola gave another means of life, how different does their devotion to him feel? We do know that it wasn’t a mass book burning, or a mass art burning, or an effort to plunge Europe back into the (mythical) Dark Ages. The bonfire aimed at virtue and renewal,


• * Warrior-matron Caterina Sforza: she knew that, if the next pope wasn’t a kinsman, he would appoint one of his own relatives to replace her husband as commander of the papal armies. So Caterina, seven months pregnant at the time, took over the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo (she just walked in and the men obeyed!) and aimed its cannons at the Sistine Chapel, threatening to blow up the cardinals inside unless they promised to secure her husband’s position... the famous moment when enemy troops threatened her children and she bared her genitals up on her fortress walls, declaring: Go ahead and kill them, I have the mold to make more!


• San Pier Maggiore’s signature ritual, that every new bishop of Florence had to ceremonially marry its abbess, and that negotiating this ceremony involved the abbess setting conditions, establishing the line between her (local) authority and the (usually foreign, papal-appointed) bishop’s, and even a wedding feast held by the abbess-bride’s relatives which helped establish the relations between Florence’s old families and the churchman suddenly entrusted with 1/5 of the power in the city.


• Alessandra Scala is what we’ve been looking for, the Renaissance Woman of our dreams, of every era’s dreams from Poliziano’s to today’s. She’s brilliant, articulate, powerful, embodying ideals of scholarship and self-fashioning, and she’s nearly a blank slate... In 1491 she can be Sappho; in 1925 she can be Juliet; in 1985 she can be a proto-feminist proving the brilliance of womankind... The nunnery has to be glossed over because (like Savonarola) our modernizing Renaissance can’t take Alessandra Scala’s years of Greek and Latin being overshadowed by years of so medieval-feeling a setting as a nunnery. The possibility of Alessandra Scala enjoying the convent grates against our X-Factors: self-fashioning, nationalism, secularization... Alessandra Scala is the ideal Renaissance Woman for another, sadder reason too: her death at thirty-one doesn’t make us face how much she couldn’t do.


• Raffaello Maffei (1451–1522), called Volterrano, was a prolific scholar, translator, biographer, and author of a staggeringly ambitious and popular Latin encyclopedia of everything,99 who worked at the Vatican through the wild papacies of Paul II (reclusive Venetian), Sixtus IV (Battle Pope!), Innocent VIII (King Log), Alexander VI (the very, very, very…), and Julius II (Battle Pope 2: the Wars Get Weirder!).


• Pius II (awesome umanista, scholar, and pornographer who left an epic tell-all papal memoir)


• Pope Alexander’s children were different from selfish and irresponsible Cybo. Juan/Giovanni (made a duke and a commander of the papal armies), Cèsar/Cesare (made a cardinal), and Lucrezia (married to powerful husbands) were all ambitious, active political minds in themselves, partners of Alexander’s plans as Sixtus’s nephews had been to his.


• Post Juan Borgia's death: Cesare renounced his cardinalship (the first ever to do so), married a French princess, received the title Duke of Valentinois


• Post Pope Alexander's death: The Roman mob traditionally celebrated the turnover of popes with rioting and looting, especially emptying the former residence of the newly elected pope who would no longer need his earthly goods, but this time was different. The whole Vatican Palace was ransacked, the papal treasures carried off by Borgia forces, palace staff, and general riot. So thorough was the sack that Pope Alexander’s corpse was later found wrapped in a carpet, without a stick of furniture remaining


• Julius II feels one way if we study Rome first, seeing all his splendid art (the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Raphael’s School of Athens), but feels very different if we read Raffaello’s later account.104 Julius spent lavishly on construction, antiquities, and hired many umanisti, but when Michelangelo asked what book His Holiness wanted to be holding in his portrait statue, Julius answered, “Give me a sword, I’m no scholar.”


• The Medici had remained in exile since Savonarola’s rise, leaving Florence a republic, but now they aided Pope Julius (old enemies united by the chance of wartime gain) in return for papal troops, which in 1512 seized Florence, restoring Medici rule over the city and her dominions, including Volterra.


• * Erasmus’s influence is an order of magnitude above other Renaissance figures: a staggeringly prolific author, editor, and stylist, loved for his wit, his piety, his humaneness, his handbooks of eloquence, his encyclopedic knowledge of the classics, whose publications in the later 1500s comprised as much as 30 percent of all books being printed! Even when Erasmus’s efforts to reconcile Luther with the papacy made both sides feel obliged to formally condemn him, both sides still loved this frenemy, and the Inquisition still let Catholics teach and read his works, all you had to do was ritually cross out his name on the title page... suddenly one of the prefaces was clear, smooth, easy to read, neither simple nor ornate, just lovely, elegant, and inviting, like stepping out into a breezy courtyard after a stuffy room. I cried aloud, “This is gorgeous! Who… oh, it’s Erasmus.”


• * A huge portion of the innovative work of umanisti happened in formats we today find difficult or alien: in funeral orations, exchanges of letters, Socratic dialogs, aphorism collections, classroom works composed for princes and princesses, encyclopedias, and especially in commentaries on classics, which claim on the front page that they’re just elaborating Vergil yet hide radical new ideas within... Machiavelli’s utilitarian ethics disseminated via footnotes in Spanish editions of Seneca, debates over Aristotle vs. Galileo raged in the marginal notes of Lucretius editions, and (I’m not kidding) the roots of deism and atheism spread in those tedious editors’ prefaces to Epictetus that I was slogging through.107 This age cared more about ancients than moderns, so a scholar got more attention pointing out something in Vergil than saying something new—this is why Machiavelli’s book of republican government is Discourses on Livy,


• Renaissance authors bent over backwards to pretend their innovations weren’t new, ... repopulate a Renaissance we didn’t realize had been thinned down to atypical works—thinned both by how X-Factor hunting shaped inclusions and exclusions, and by the fact that umanisti actively lie about what their books are about!


• You are Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519). You had the best of educations: the studia humanitatis, Latin, Greek, music; you’re fluent in Italian, Spanish, Catalan/Valencian, and French. You can compose poetry in multiple languages, and by age twelve you knew the histories, leaders, and dynastic tangles of all European and Mediterranean powers inside out.


• strong and experienced Ludovico had seized Milan from his nephew Gian Galeazzo, angering Gian Galeazzo’s Neapolitan wife, so Naples was threatening to attack Milan. The threat of the pope endorsing a French claim to Naples was the perfect stick to get obstreperous King Ferrante to leave Ludovico and Milan in peace, and to make him stop resisting Borgia power... But King Charles actually came.


• Certainly Cèsar had a taste for politics and conquest which, as Machiavelli would soon observe, made him an outstanding warlord, even in this age of warlords.


• Ferrara’s heir, Prince Alfonso d’Este was Italy’s most eligible bachelor, having just lost his first wife in childbirth (the fascinating Anna Visconti Sforza (1476–97), who had dressed in men’s clothes and openly preferred female lovers).


• Rome is the Eternal Problem City, and Sixtus and Innocent had proved no power stood secure in central Italy while the volatile papacy constantly changed hands. Regulatory capture was likely the real goal, not to overthrow the papacy but to permanently control it. Cèsar and his heirs, ruling the lands surrounding Rome, would control the selection of cardinals and popes, as France had done back in Petrarch’s day by dragging the papacy to Avignon. History has other examples of regulatory capture: the closest comparison (though you have never heard of it) being the Tokugawa Shogunate’s control over the Emperors of Japan,


• when wonderful Ariosto started sharing the first chapters of Orlando Furioso (you love that poem so much! How could ungrateful Ippolito not be overjoyed to be its dedicatee?!). Isabella and her sister Beatrice had quarreled so fiercely about which of their favorite characters was best (Isabella championing Rinaldo and Beatrice the titular Orlando) that Isabella tried to bully poor Pietro Bembo—such a dear man and brilliant scholar—into fighting a duel against Beatrice’s champion (her husband Ludovico’s lover Galeazzo Sanseverino) for the honor of her favorite character in a book!


• Here’s the Isabella d’Este moment—the very day Isabella heard that Cèsar had looted the ducal palace of Urbino, she had her brother Cardinal Ippolito write to Cèsar to say she always liked a particular pair of antique statues in that palace, a Venus and a Cupid, asking if he would send them to her.120 Cèsar did so (the Borgia-d’Este alliance was important), but for Isabella to profit so callously from the sacking of her husband’s sister’s home!


• When Isabella d’Este learned of Cèsar’s clever maneuvers, she sent him a gift of a hundred masks in many colors representing his many deceptions121—not quite as biting a gift as King Louis’s Mary Magdalene shield, but hardly sisterly.


• the Venetian scholar Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) became… more than a friend... Bembo had the innovative idea that the different marks we use to break up written words should have specific meanings, that . should be used exclusively for the end of a sentence while; should combine two complete clauses and, should mark a minor pause. So great was the influence of these Aldine editions that this practice spread across Europe, making Bembo the father of modern punctuation.


• Julius II imposed damnatio memoriae upon your family, commanding that your crest be effaced everywhere in the city, the Borgia name crossed out of documents, paintings you commissioned blacked out, your father’s tomb opened and desecrated, and his reign never spoken of on pain of excommunication.


• * For a strange period in 1510–11, the war which had begun with Julius calling France, Ferrara, and other powers to attack Venice turned into Venice, now reconciled with Rome, defending the pope from France and Ferrara. Frightened Julius called for what became the Holy League, assembled to drive the French from Italy, asking for help from Spain, the Empire, England (always eager to fight France), Venice (eager to retake its lands), and Swiss mercenaries. France called in its allies Scotland and Florence (the republic was still grateful for Charles’s mercy in 1494, and angry at Julius’s part in the Pazzi Conspiracy), and Ferrara joined them, since the pope had betrayed you. This mess is how we got Englishmen fighting Scotsmen in the hills of Italy, a war in which every single participant changed sides, some several times.


• You used your dowry and personal treasures cunningly (as the brilliant historian Diane Yvonne Ghirardo will show), working out an innovative way to amass agricultural wealth without selling your jewels or even buying land outright.125 Ferrara was surrounded by swamps, and whenever you heard of a village or local lord disrupted by the wars and struggling to pay taxes, you would offer to pay the tax debt in return for a permanent lease on the useless swamp land next door. You would then drain the swamp to create new farmland, paying for the ambitious engineering by pawning jewels from your dowry, which you could then buy back with the profits of the farms.


• And with his wealth—partly the fruits of your investments—your son Ippolito will erect a palace far grander than any Rome could fit, with sprawling gardens and 3,000 fountains, built in Tivoli near the ruins of the Emperor Hadrian’s villa


• These female mystics had a complex relationship with Savonarola and his piagnoni.129 Female mystics were extremely influential at the time, drawing enormous crowds and wealth to cities, often called “living saints” (sante vive).


• In monastic life, the first order means monks (or friars), and the second order nuns, both living in closed monastic institutions separate from the secular world. Mendicant friars of the first order might leave their monastery daily to work or preach out in the city, but still lived in a monk-only space. The third order (i.e. tertiaries) means lay brothers and sisters, who take less strict vows and lead more public lives, dwelling either in group communities open to secular visitors, or in secular homes


• monk means a member of a more traditional monastic order like the Benedictines, whose members’ vows include a vow of stability tying them for life to a specific monastery in a specific place, while the Dominicans (as well as the Franciscans, Augustinians, and Carmelites) are mendicant i.e. itinerant orders, whose friars take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience (to the hierarchy of their order) but circulate from monastery to monastery within the order


• The nuns of Santa Caterina lived by illuminating manuscripts, painting (nearly a third of known female painters of the 1500s were Dominican nuns), and by printing books with their own printing press.


• 1528 the new Great Council held a formal vote electing Jesus Christ to be King of Florence in perpetuity, with only twenty votes against. <> One must wonder about those twenty votes (anti-theocratic republicans? Medici partisans? curmudgeons? not-so-closet atheists?), but while there were dissenters in the city, the fact remains that liberated Florence—cradle of the Renaissance, of republican democracy, individualism, capitalism, secularization, of all the thrilling X-Factors—chose to welcome elements of mystical theocracy. Again. Savonarola’s years weren’t a lone blip; Florence chose it again.


• Camilla’s power was not wealth and savvy investment (proto-capitalism), or the classicism of the umanisti (the learned Renaissance woman), nor was she breaking into male-dominated spheres like our virago Caterina Sforza, or even excelling in the female-dominated spheres of motherhood and charity that both eras (past and present) respect. Camilla turned her back on all those paths, and wielded spirituality at its most mystical. That makes us—in our new millennium as we look to the Renaissance to find the roots of our modernity—uncomfortable.


• since ancient sites contained chunks of buildings built centuries apart all jumbled together, Renaissance people using these as models when designing a tomb, palace, etc. mixed elements of many eras of ancient architecture together, in a way that looked ancient to Renaissance people, but to an ancient Roman would look as improbable as a glassy skyscraper with art nouveau trim sitting on a Victorian red brick base—improbable but beautiful.156 Renaissance monuments are the fruits of this antiquarianism shared among learned and artisan cultures,


• It was in January 1504, early in Julius’s reign, as the city waited to learn just how warlike this second Battle Pope would prove, that Michelangelo’s innovative David was unveiled, depicting the young king, not in the tranquility of victory with Goliath’s severed head at his feet, but before the battle, his tense expression inviting the viewer to imagine his thoughts as he planned for the crisis to come... One of the most epic committees in Earth history—including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Filipino Lippi, Ghirlandaio’s surviving brother Davide, and Giovanni Cellini (father of the implausibly interesting Benvenuto Cellini)—was tasked with choosing a fitting spot for the statue.


• Another odd thing about the Sistine Chapel ceiling is that the creation story skips straight from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden to Noah and the flood, skipping Cain and Abel and other well-known stories, and culminating with the episode (rather obscure today but considered important in the Renaissance) of the Drunkenness of Noah. In this story, old Noah got drunk and fell asleep, and his sons pulled the blanket off him and laughed at his naked aging body... Noah’s sons’ laughter shattered that respect, requiring Noah to create law and government to bind human behavior.


• * for an average ratio of twenty naked men to each bible scene (most of which also contain naked men)... Part of the reason for this is that Michelangelo would rather be sculpting, so, condemned to paint, he filled the surface with imagined sculptures: some marble, some bronze, some in the round, some in relief, all in poses ideal for the limitations of each medium (stone, metal); Michelangelo’s wistfully imagined forty sculptures that will never be... The other reason is Michelangelo’s deep, passionate love of naked men.


• To call Michelangelo gay is like calling a Renaissance market a “shopping mall”—the facts are right, but the valences (suburbia, teenagers, consumerism) all wrong. Renaissance ideas about homosexuality were articulated differently, and taboos enforced differently and disobeyed differently, from today.


• sexuality were articulated differently, and taboos enforced differently and disobeyed differently, from today... In this dual-attraction culture, men were expected to be attracted to men in the same spirit as to women, that is to younger, more feminine men. So entrenched was this expectation that Michael Rocke found Florentine courts even levied heavier sodomy fines on homosexual couples who violated the norm by having the elder partner be the penetrated partner in the sex act.


• The grace of powerful patrons kept clients safe. Michelangelo’s contemporary Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (who was around the corner frescoing another room while Michelangelo was in the Sistine), was such an infamous sodomite he happily adopted Il Sodoma (the Sodomite) as his name (as our Angelo adopted Poliziano).


• Pope Andrian: He also considered destroying that most beloved center of Roman street life, Pasquino, a broken old statue set up in a square in 1501 by Cardinal Carafa; on holidays umanisti would dress Pasquino up as various gods in whimsical procession, while year-round poets posted verses on its base satirizing the pope and other notables,172 and still do to this day.


• Michelangelo was tasked with building fortifications to prepare the city for siege. One of the defensive structures he built is now Piazzale Michelangelo, the famous square above the city where visitors enjoy panoramic views of Florence’s skyline—even that is a desperate remnant of our desperate Renaissance.


• the sculptor spent the next years traveling between Florence and Rome, alternately not finishing the tomb of Julius and not finishing the San Lorenzo façade, library, and tombs (unfinished projects #4, #5, and #6, not counting other smaller tasks along the way).


• The artist wrote thirty sonnets and other poems to Tommaso (fully a third of all his poetry), tutored him in drawing and architecture, and gifted him a set of mythological drawings including an extremely erotic version of Renaissance Europe’s most prominent homosexual narrative: Zeus abducting Ganymede... when Michelangelo’s grand-nephew published the artist’s poetry in 1623, he changed the male pronouns in the Tommaso poems to female, to erase the homoerotic content


• Cellini includes many sketchy episodes in his autobiography... the time he got sodomy charges dismissed by demanding that the accuser clearly describe what they were accusing him of, and they were too prudish to name the body parts—but Cellini is absolutely dead silent about the change-overs of power in Florence in 1512–37...  (I love that any choose-your-own-adventure book set in Florence can have “killed by young Cellini on the roof throwing rocks at people” as an ending option).


• Cellini's The Perseus is so cunningly positioned, just under the eaves, that when it rains (and the wind is right) the naked hero remains dry, while the water drips like blood from the gore that streams from Medusa’s head, from the neck of the headless body at the hero’s feet, and from his sword.


• Pope Paul III lived long enough to see the Last Judgment completed in 1541, and to call the Council of Trent, which tried to organize a response to the Reformation, including grudging steps to address some of the corruption on Luther’s grievance list.


• Tombs are records of the next generation, not one’s own. Visitors to Florence are often confused why the two grand Michelangelo tombs in Florence are of two of the least important Medici...


• Pius IV was Michelangelo’s last pope. The artist had seen thirteen popes, from Sixtus who began the string of wars clear to the Counter-Reformation. He kept sculpting until just days before his death in 1564, less than a week before what would have been his eighty-ninth birthday.


• But in this story where almost no one gets the tomb they wanted, Michelangelo may be the only one who got the thing he wanted most: given the position of the windows, if he rises as he planned on Judgment Day, he will have to take about four paces to the left to see the Duomo one last time.

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• So let’s imagine ourselves as Michelangelo in the 1520s or 1530s, straining under the stress of della Rovere lawsuits and unfinished Medici projects, thinking back, and make him equivalent to us in the 2020s or 2030s looking back an equal distance at our past. For Michelangelo, Dante’s Commedia is as old as Pride and Prejudice or Frankenstein, and he looks back on the Black Death and Petrarch as remotely as we do on 1848,


• If you learn some dates, remember 1348 Black Death, 1450 printing press, and 1517 Reformation, plus optionally 1492, for Europe’s contact with the Americas, Lorenzo’s death, and Borgia’s election. The point is not the dates, it’s to get a sense of lived time, how many years it took for Petrarch’s friends to assemble their libraries, and get Michelangelo’s Delphic sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.


• In the 1430s = 1930s (Great Depression, Hitler on the rise), Cosimo de Medici lost then recovered power, banishing the Strozzi men and Filelfo from Florence, and the main structure of Brunelleschi’s dome was complete by 1436 = 1936 (parallel to when Jesse Owens triumphed at the Nazi Germany-hosted Olympic Games).


• If there was a Baby Boom equivalent, births in the 1440s and 1450s (1940s and 1950s) included Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici, our assassin Montesecco, pious Raffaello Maffei Volterrano, Savonarola, Poliziano, Cardinal Ascanio Visconti Sforza with his bunny and his parrot, Queen Isabella of Castile, and Beatrice of Naples Twice Queen of Hungary.


• Julia (born ~1665?). She served as a lady-in-waiting, clairvoyant, and sibyl to King Kristina of Sweden, the most celebrated learned lady of her century.


• Kristina (1626–89) ascended the Swedish throne aged five... usually wore partial or complete male dress.. Traveling through Denmark and the Netherlands in men’s clothing with the pseudonym “Count Dohna,” she converted secretly to Catholicism


• * “Age of Reason” with a list of famous figures who discovered scientific truths, our cherry-picking of successes disguises the hundreds of other figures who thought that the character of one’s soul was mystically present in one’s facial features (Thomas Browne), that magnetism was made of tiny flying screws (Descartes! Descartes thought that!), or that gold could be condensed out of sunlight (looking at you Newton)... I like to call the seventeenth century the Try Everything Age


• My PhD adviser said you should choose your dissertation topic based on the cuisine of the region you must visit for research.


• *  the old “Help, this is the right street number but my hostel doesn’t exist?!!” (Answer: Florence has two sets of street numbers, the red numbers (rossi) sometimes written in black, and the black numbers (neri) often written in blue—this is not reasonable but it is hilarious, and based on which doors were commercial and which residential 300 years ago.)