Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society

Letizia Panizza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351199056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

"An impressive collection of 29 essays by British, American and Italian scholars on important historical, artistic, cultural, social, legal, literary and theatrical aspects of women's contributions to the Italian Renaissance, in its broadest sense. Many contributions are the result of first-hand archival research and are illustrated with numerous unpublished or little-known reproductions or original material. The subjects include: women and the court ( Dilwyn Knox, Evelyn S Welch, Francine Daenens and Diego Zancani ); women and the church ( Gabriella Zarri, Victoria Primhak, Kate Lowe, Francesca Medioli and Ruth Chavasse ); legal constraints and ethical precepts ( Marina Graziosi, Christine Meek, Brian Richardson, Jane Bridgeman and Daniela De Bellis ); female models of comportment ( Marta Ajmarm Paola Tinagli and Sara F Matthews Grieco ); women and the stage ( Richard Andrews, Maggie Guensbergberg, Rosemary E Bancroft-Marcus ); women and letters ( Diana Robin, Virginia Cox, Pamela J Benson, Judy Rawson, Conor Fahy, Giovanni Aquilecchia, Adriana Chemello, Giovanna Rabitti and Nadia Cannata Salamone )."

Part I
❖
Women and the court

Chapter 1
❖
Civility, courtesy and women in the Italian Renaissance

Dilwyn Knox

In the third book of Il libro del cortegiano Giuliano de’ Medici opens his defence of women by challenging Gaspar Pallavicino’s assumption that the courtier and the donna di palazzo should observe the same standards of conduct. This, argues Giuliano, held true in some, but not all, respects. The courtier and donna di palazzo should differ, for example, in their gesture and deportment. A courtier should display ‘a certain robust and resolute manliness in such matters’. The donna di palazzo, by contrast, should retain ‘a gentle, delicate charm, with a tender, feminine, manner in every movement that shows her to be a lady in her going and staying and in her saying whatever she needs to say’.¹

Giuliano’s distinction was not the stereotype that it might appear. A far more prevalent standard of comportment for women was mode-stia. A passage in Leon Battista Alberti’s Della famiglia, written originally sometime shortly before June 1434 and revised about 1437,² illustrates what modestia entailed and why a woman should observe it scrupulously.³ The speaker is the elderly Giannozzo di Tommaso degli Alberti (c.1357-c.1446), a distant relation of Leon Battista; and the setting is Padua, May 1421, that is, a few years before the Alberti were readmitted into Florence in 1428 following the banishment of all male Alberti aged sixteen or more, Giannozzo included, in January 1401. Giannozzo explains that he was always ‘manly and manlike’ in his dealings with his wife and in return demanded from her obedience, decorum and restraint. A wife, he insists, should remain modestissima and costumatissima in her every action, word and deed, where modestia required two things above all, namely, ‘the ability to temper every gesture with a certain gravity and maturity, and the ability to temper every word with reason and judgement’. A composed demeanour ensured not only that man and wife would live together harmoniously, but also that the household remained modesta and costumata. It lent a wife dignity, earned the respect of those in her charge and set them an appropriate example. ‘Good manners alone bestow dignity. Those who know how to maintain dignity, know how to earn respect, and those who know how to earn respect, know how to demand obedience.’ By contrast, a restless, ill-composed manner provokes disobedience and disrespect. Hence a wife should at all costs:

abhor those flighty gestures, that habit of throwing one’s hands about here and there while jabbering about this and that in the way that busybodies are wont to do all day long wherever they are, inside the home, by their front door or elsewhere, as they talk with this, that or the other, asking and nattering on alike about things that they know and don’t know.⁴

How should we account for the difference between Giuliano and Giannozzo’s expectations? The circumstances of the dialogues and their speakers partly explain the discrepancy. On 10 March 1507, the fictitious date of the dialogue reported in the third book of Il libro del cortegiano, Giuliano de’ Medici (12.3.1479-17.3.1516), the affable youngest son of Lorenzo il Magnifico and creature of the court at Urbino, was just approaching his twenty-eighth birthday. The women whom he addressed were his social peers or superiors and, as a Florentine exile, the hospitality that he enjoyed at the court of Urbino partly depended on their good will. Accordingly he presented the courtier and the donna di palazzo as equals, subject alike to their lord. Their qualities complemented each other and together formed an aesthetic whole—la cortegiania—fashioned to meet their lord’s or lady’s approval.⁵ This held as true for comportment as for other matters. Giannozzo, on the other hand, espouses the traditional, Trecento, standards that merchant families demanded of wives who were subordinate to, and considerably younger than, their husbands. Indeed, by contemporary standards, Giannozzo wedded late.⁶ When he married in 1389, he was about thirty-two, whereas his bride Niccolosa di Simone di Accorri de’ Pazzi was probably no more than seventeen or eighteen, about half his age.⁷ The most pressing task, Giannozzo believed, facing the young Niccolosa was to establish authority in her allotted domain, the household. Gravity and restraint in her gestures and deportment were essential. In this respect Niccolosa’s position and her means of maintaining it were analogous to her husband’s. He, too, should remain composed—modestus⁸—and thereby assert authority in his domain, the public world of a practical man of affairs, in town and villa.

Other Quattrocento sources confirm that modestia—unlike conduct at court, as described by Giuliano—was the same for male and female. An example is Francesco Barbaro’s De re uxoria liber, written during late 1415 and early 1416 in Barbaro’s native Venice following a short visit to Florence in the summer of 1415. Facial features and manner, comments Barbaro, reveal the disposition of the mind. Hence husband and wife should at all times and in all circumstances observe modestia to ensure that they lived together harmoniously.⁹ They should maintain ‘poise and control in their look, their manner of going about and in every bodily movement’.¹⁰ If they rushed here and there, constantly looked around, gesticulated wildly or otherwise moved about too much they would appear frivolous and lack decorum. A woman should keep a gentle look on her face, observe a ‘graceful gravity’ in her comportment and avoid ‘uncontrolled bodily movement’.¹¹ To this end she should follow Demosthenes’ example and practise her deportment in the mirror.¹² Not that a wife should become an orator and master pronuntiatio, the rhetorical skills of voice and gesture. Barbaro, like other humanists,¹³ would have denied such public performance to a woman, however well-read. Nevertheless, within the household a wife, like an orator reciting before his audience, could, mutatis mutandis, command attention and respect through her composure.

What were the origins of modestia and why did Alberti, Barbaro and many other Italian Renaissance authors attach such importance to it, especially in women?¹⁴ Alberti and Barbaro’s references to gravity and decorum point, in the first instance, to ancient Greek and Roman ethics.¹⁵ Cicero’s De officiis is the most obvious source. A man should govern his every word and deed, including his comportment, according to reason, the characteristic that distinguished him from the beasts.¹⁶ Like Alberti and Barbaro, Cicero too emphasized that a controlled demeanour lent authority and dignity.¹⁷ Antiquity, however, is only part of the explanation. Giannozzo, in Alberti’s characterization of him, had little patience with book-learning, classical or otherwise, and would have scorned suggestions that he had dredged up some long-forgotten ancient Greek or Roman ethical ideal for his young wife.¹⁸ He had done no more than reaffirm a time-honoured, proven standard of decent behaviour. If Cicero had advocated something similar, so much the better for him.

Giannozzo’s reaction would have been justified. By his day modestia was not so much a classical as a Christian virtue.¹⁹ Cicero had included modestia, together with continentia, and clementia, as species of the rational virtue temperance, and temperance, like the other rational virtues of classical ethics, had become one of the cardinal virtues of Christian theology and philosophy.²⁰ Hence, to mention just one of many sources, St Antoninus (1389–1459), archbishop of Florence and an almost exact contemporary of Alberti, discussed modestia in his Summa, written between 1440 and 1459, in terms wholly compatible with Giannozzo’s description. Modestia was a species of the cardinal virtue temperance, one that revealed that reason mastered the passions and thereby lent a person dignity and authority.²¹ Hence, too, medieval authors had elaborated detailed rules of comportment—disciplina corporis, as they usually called it—for those who dedicated themselves to the Christian life, notably clerics and religious.²² These rules applied to male and female alike.²³ Indeed, they applied to women in particular. The latter succumbed more easily than men to lust, gluttony and similar temptations of the flesh. Hence, they should cling tenaciously to the cardinal virtue of temperance, the rational control of the body, especially the two species, chastity and modestia.²⁴ ‘How well composed disciplina renders the whole bearing of a girl’s body, not to speak of the disposition of her mind’, wrote St Bernard of Clairvaux in a letter to a young lady or girl of noble birth, possibly a religious, whom he addresses as the ‘Virgin Sophia’.

It bows her head, smooths her brow, composes the features of her face, stops her eyes from wandering, suppresses laughter, tempers her tongue, checks her greed, tames her anger, and composes the way that she moves about. The garb of chastity is fittingly embellished with such pearls [i.e. spiritual pearls rather than the physical pearls with which ladies at court like to bedeck themselves]. What earthly splendour should be exalted above virginity girded thus so copiously?²⁵

These notions remained unchanged throughout the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. Giannozzo in the fifteenth century could praise modestia in a young woman or, for that matter, in an aged priest,²⁶ with the same conviction and intent as St Bernard in the twelfth. But when Giannozzo admonished Niccolosa, he did not have the niceties of religious or clerical deportment in mind. He was appealing instead to what he assumed was a lay standard of conduct. Again, he was quite warranted in doing so. Clerics and religious had long encouraged laity of all stations,²⁷ prince and artisan, rich and poor, husband and wife,²⁸ to observe Christian morality, including modestia. Two manuals of Christian doctrine and conduct published at Venice in April 1471 by Nicolaus Jenson will serve as illustrations. The author of both manuals was a Carthusian—very possibly the prior Francesco Trevisan (†1471)—from the charterhouse of Sant’ Andrea in Lido then occupying the small Venetian island named after it La Certosa. The first manual is Palma virtutum, a manual in the vernacular for literate laity of middling social station.²⁹ The second, companion, volume is the Decor puellarum, addressed to Venetian women, married or widowed, and especially to marriageable young girls.³⁰ Both manuals include the traditional rules of good comportment that clerics and religious prescribed for their own kind and for the laity.³¹ The Decor puellarum, as if to underscore that good comportment was indispensable in a woman, does so at length. Good comportment disclosed ‘the dignity of a virtuous and devout soul’. Hence a girl or young woman should observe modestia, avoid pomp and ostentation in her gestures and deportment, keep her eyes down at all times, hold her head still and avoid shaking it repeatedly like a goose. She should sit upright at table, refrain from looking around at her companions during meals, eat with her mouth closed and as far as possible without showing her teeth, avoid opening her mouth wide ‘like an oven’ when taking a mouthful of food. She should speak seldom a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Table of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• PART I Women and the court
• PART II Women and the Church
• PART III Legal constraints and ethical precepts
• PART IV Female models of comportment
• PART V Women and the stage
• PART VI Women and letters
• Index of Historical Names