Scaffolding Folengo: Sites, Artifacts, and the Rise of Macaronic Design in Print Culture

Folengo in Americaa cura di

Massimo Scalabrini

LONGO EDITORE RAVENNA

ISBN 978-88-8063-736-3

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Questo volume è stato parzialmente finanziato da un contributo del College Arts and Hu-manities Institute della Indiana University di Bloomington. Ringrazio, per il loro aiuto esostegno, Giorgio Bernardi Perini, Andrea Ciccarelli, Otello Fabris, Ann Mullaney, AnitaPark, Alessandro Polcri e Massimo Zaggia. Dedico Folengo in America a Paolo Valesio.

M.S.

STEFANO GULIZIA

SCAFFOLDING FOLENGO: SITES, ARTIFACTS,AND THE RISE OF MACARONIC DESIGN IN PRINT CULTURE

In the sixteenth-century bookshop it was unfashionable to enter just to buybooks. Perusing titles along the stalls was a way to satisfy personal curiosity asmuch as a form of social duty. While women and most noblemen preferred tostroll in gardens outside the cities or in wealthy thoroughfares, others lingeredover dingy areas of retailing, in that semi-private space just off the vestibule anddown a few steps. Of those who entered the cavernous store of the Milaneseprinter Gotardo da Ponte (ca. 1500-1535) – whose editorial output was more orless dependent upon a variety of sources such as music incunabula, humanistichistoriography, Latin proverbs in jests, and cosmographical works on the NewWorld1 – many circulated in the candelit corridors arranged for visits during theregular performance of the presses. Similarly in 1536 or 1537 the managementof one of the busiest families of printers Venice had ever known, the Nicolini daSabbio, could scarcely have been described without simultaneously referring tovernacular translations of Spanish best-sellers, chronicles of Eastern voyages,

1 A printer recognized as a crucial agent in the «popular sector» of the book trade, Gotardo wasapparently quite zealous in matters of astrology and prognostication, as it is attested by the au-thorized privilege secured by Cardano in 1534 during his efforts to capture a niche in what An-thony Grafton called «a sharply competitive prophetic ecology» (cf. A. GRAFTON, Cardano’sCosmos. The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer, Cambridge, Harvard University Press,1999, p. 50, and I. MACLEAN, Cardano and his Publishers, 1534-1663, in Girolamo Cardano.Philosoph, Naturforscher, Arzt, ed. E. Kessler, Wiesbaden, Verlag, 1994, pp. 309-338: 313). Whetheror not the reprint of the Peruvian chronicle by Francisco de Xerez in 1535 is ultimately an act ofpirating, typographically inferior to its Venetian model, a number of speculative enterprises sur-round Gotardo’s press. Among them was Cesariano’s important Vitruvian commentary, which hasbeen characterized by Pamela Long as a tract placing special stress on the ideal of ratiocinatio andfabrica, or the work of fabrication and reasoning, in a way that could be profitably extended, in itsgeneral advocacy of the open, written transmission of knowledge, to the printing house as a whole.See P.O. LONG, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship. Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge, Bal-timore, John Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 224-226. On the economic and social world ofprinting in Milan, see K.M. STEVENS, Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers in Counter-Reforma-tion Milan, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

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and a bundle of even more bizarre or ludicrous texts. As royal cosmographerspresented new territorial claims, the survey of either natural or potential resourcesbecame a distinctive branch of knowledge. In addition, a good dose of vanityand an early modern penchant for visual representations of power and prestigemotivated printers to organize their books as territories to be portrayed in mapsor, perhaps, into heraldic families2.

For the pragmatic Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503-1575), a systematicgathering of Venetian information about Spain and the New World was institu-tionalized under government control in the city’s principal sites engaged in print-ing and cosmographical knowledge production. As the Spanish ambassador inVenice, an appointment which he kept from 1539 to 1547, Mendoza had accessto a steady stream of oral and written sources of transnational communication.At the Rialto, he could have personally interviewed pilots arriving from the In-dies. From what he learned he may have then pieced together a geography ofthe coastlines and wrestled alongside his printed books with ways of mapping theforeign trajectory of the emperor Charles V3. Mendoza, however, was not only

2 It would be advantageous to consider heraldic features such as title-page borders, coats ofarms, and other graphic devices not merely as a form of distinctive decoration but rather as a sortof hallmark: a characteristic design for the buying public to discriminate a certain type of literaturethe readers were likely to enjoy. The value of layout has long been recognized by book historiansfor material reasons, although generally it is not connected to issues of marketing and, most im-portantly, to the printing history of specific genres. In this respect, I rely on the considerations pro-vided by D. EISENBERG, Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age, Newark, Juan de laCuesta, 1982, pp. 97-110, who documents the presence of «a limited group of aficionados with themeans to indulge this expensive taste» (p. 102), and on P.F. GRENDLER, Form and Function in Ital-ian Renaissance Popular Books, «Renaissance Quarterly», 46, 1993, pp. 451-485. If my metaphorof the ‘family’ does justice to an early modern idea of genealogy and textual filiation, evident es-pecially in the chivalric and epic field, my use of mapping points to a larger interference of mediain the printing house (see at least D. WOODWARD, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance. Mak-ers, Distributors, and Consumers, London, British Library, 1996).

3 Historical research in this area has recently considered the packaging and deployment of cos-mography as a way of constructing a public image of imperial power and control. Challenging thetraditional conclusions of patronage and science, for example, María Portuondo produced a con-vincing portrayal that focuses on bureaucratic environments and centralizing institutionalization(M.M. PORTUONDO, Secret Science. Spanish Cosmography and the New World, Chicago - London,University of Chicago Press, 2009). Here I simply argue that cosmography and natural sciencewere deeply embedded in the everyday life of the same Venetian presses which developed maca-ronic imprints, embracing representational as well as utilitarian problems; natural histories were partof what buyers of Folengo would have ‘seen’ and ‘known’ – a tool that could be used effectively,as I will show, to explicate macaronic itself. On these themes see Historia. Empiricism and Erudi-tion in Early Modern Europe, eds. G. Pomata and N.G. Siraisi, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 2005.For a discussion of Spanish cosmography cf. also A. BARRERA-OSORIO, Empire and Knowledge. Re-porting from the New World, «Colonial Latin American Review», 15, 2006, pp. 39-54, and R.PADRÓN, Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space, and Hispanic Modernity, «Representation»,79, 2002, pp. 28-60. Finally, it is worth remembering here how G. CATTIN, Canti, canzoni a balloe danze nelle Maccheronee di Teofilo Folengo, «Rivista italiana di musicologia», X, 1975, pp. 180-215, alerted us about Folengo’s high receptivity of geopolitical trends, mostly shifting betweenFrance and Spain, in the course of authorial corrections to his macaronic works.

Sites, Artifacts, and the Rise of Macaronic Design in Print Culture 155

conspicuous for eagerly submitting contributions in the form of relaciones (nar-rative accounts). His intellectual pendulum gingerly shifted between theologyand literature; by the 1540s Mendoza had recognized the value, shortcomingsand stylistic exigencies placed on their respective disciplines by writers likeSavonarola, Brucioli and Folengo4, of whom the diplomat possessed, respec-tively, several orations, the translation of the Bible in vernacular and the Arriva-bene edition of the Macaronee. His name has been insistently proposed to solvethe riddle of the anonymous authorship of Lazarillo de Tormes, a seventeenth-century attribution that came under increasing pressure and scrutiny once pica-resque established itself as a genre and needed to redefine its literary genealogy.If to the empire’s bureaucratic machinery in Madrid the only stars in the sky thatmattered were the ones that helped guide a ship at sea, Mendoza relied on tradi-tional Renaissance taxonomy to manage an ever-changing amount of geographic,ethnographic, natural, and historical data. The problem of the Council of Indieswas administration and oversight; for Mendoza it was style and methodology. Inthe hands of Venetian men like Mendoza, as we will see in the rest of this essay,cosmography became macaronic’s handmaiden.

A Spanish Tale in Venice

Inside bookstores of the lagoon or around movable stands in public squaresof Milan and Rome, the movement and low din of conversation never reallystopped. A glutinous whine and drone of the presses patrolled the soundscape ofprinting. In the crowded and often boisterous floor-level pit to which only menwere customarily admitted, first-row boxes of new books were highly visible; ofother titles clients chatted happily as their damp sheets of papers were hung todry, occasionally earning indecent shouts from the proof-editors in the parterreif the conversation turned too cordial5. In this environment, Mendoza’s human-istic tone – superior, omniscient, unimpeachably correct – in purchasing a copyof Folengo’s œuvre must have carried significant political implications while

4 I rely on the extensive catalogue of A. HOBSON, Renaissance Book Collecting. Jean Grolierand Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Their Books and Bindings, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999, who, however, does not draw enough parallels between the books in Mendoza’s li-brary, which should be seen as a spectacular crosscut of social history.

5 On the early modern shop as an outlet, an impressive case-study is offered by J.A. BERNSTEIN,Music Printing in Renaissance Venice. The Scotto Press (1539-1572), Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, 1998, esp. pp. 11-28, focusing on Venetian book trades and commercial routes. The neo-Burckhardtian view of R. GOLDTHWAITE, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600, Bal-timore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, who explains in sociological terms the rise of a newRenaissance consumer, has been more recently challenged by E. WELCH, Shopping in the Renais-sance, New Haven - London, Yale University Press, 2005, who argues for a longue durée of con-sumer culture in Italy: «although there was an increase in certain new types of sales, such as lotteriesand stage performances by charlatans during this period, most forms of retailing remained re-markably constant» (p. 14).

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also making it sound the most ordinary thing in the world6. In the sixteenth-cen-tury it was both, and for good reason.

What most impressed the Spanish ambassador when he arrived at the Arri-vabene bookstore, established by a Mantuan family of printers, during his anti-quarian tour of the Mercerie in Venice was the flirtatious, though somewhatformal, conversation ranging from theology to literature, pausing now and againto inhale a flavor of vernacular philology. Brucioli’s linguistic considerationsabout the optimal Tuscan approach to translation were a growing cause of dis-cussion for the Arrivabene clan in the opening decades of the century, theirpresses placing Brucioli’s version of the Bible in prominent view as well. Whenthe Inquisitorial curtain momentarily rose and flooded the store with a safermood for the discerned buyers, as Paul Grendler wrote, various items of contra-band and even the first Italian Koran occupied center-stage7. A dedicated bib-liophile, Mendoza examined this Venetian hall in the better light of Protestantsmuggling and Spanish book trades; he began to collect a dozen titles, but soonhomiletics filled his attention. Before long, all he could think of was Savonarola:a woodcut of Cesare Arrivabene had it that for the first time the preacher hadvanished from his pulpit and crowds of spectators were weeping, surely eager tocompensate their loss with a new printed volume8. Mendoza must have under-

6 Beyond the fiction of one particular copy of Folengo in the hands of an extraordinary readerlike Mendoza, macaronic discourse is here considered almost ecologically: as a form of mediaemerging in competition with other media surrounding it. An intimation to consider Folengo’s ca-reer in concert with other developments in Venetian print culture and ritual life is contained in thenow-classic research of M. CHIESA, Teofilo Folengo tra la cella e la piazza, Alessandria, Edizionidell’Orso, 1988. For a discussion of encyclopedism and plagiarism as visual, political and techni-cal currency in print culture (a dimension integral to the study of the printing press as a culturallocus), cf. G.W. MCCLURE, The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy, Toronto - London,University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 171-174, and M. FAINI, «Credite Pasquino schietto savioqueprophetae». L’impossibile verità di Pasquino nel Baldus di Teofilo Folengo, in Ex marmore.Pasquini, pasquinisti, pasquinate nell’Europa moderna (Atti del Colloquio Internazionale, Lecce-Otranto, 17-19 Novembre 2005), eds. C. Damianaki, P. Procaccioli and A. Romano, Manziana(Rome), Vecchiarelli, 2006, pp. 51-66.

7 See P.F. GRENDLER, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605, Princeton,Princeton University Press, 1977, and G. FRAGNITO, Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Mod-ern Italy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

8 Edoardo Barbieri considers this image of the pulpit and the bonfire «conspicuously Northern»and attributes its design to Luca Panezio, who is a student of Giorgio Valla and vigorously assertshimself as the person responsible for both the editing and the financing of these Arrivabene prints:E. BARBIERI, Episodi della fortuna editoriale di Girolamo Savonarola (secc. XV-XVI), in GirolamoSavonarola da Ferrara all’Europa. Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Ferrara, 30 marzo - 3 aprile1998), eds. G. Fragnito e M. Miegge, Florence, Sismel, 2001, pp. 171-193. The woodblock’s sceneis divided in two sections: on the left, Savonarola is engulfed in flames, protesting his innocencewith a citation from St. Paul («verbum dei non est aligatum»); on the right, the empty pulpit infront of a crowd underneath signifies that the friar’s preaching must continue in print beyond hisdeath. Arrivabene’s other collaboration with Brucioli is at the same time more puzzling, given thelatter’s strongly anti-Savonarolan (and Lutheran) reputation in Florence. On this topic see also M.ZAGGIA, Tra Mantova e la Sicilia nel Cinquecento, Florence, Olschki, 2003, vol. II, pp. 487, 493-495.


stood the overall effect, and he observed more intently other visual clues.On first glance, the audience Mendoza observed in the Savonarola woodcut

might have looked substantially similar to the fictional public of the Arrivabeneimprint of Folengo’s Macaronee. In this edition, if one tries to describe theiconography of its woodcuts as a whole, shouts of derision pierced the air as thetrickster Cingar dominated the foreground with Falstaffian indifference. Es-tranged and chivalric old-timers, marine landscaping, puddles and bogs, villainscaught in a distressed frenzy, and infernal mansions filled with columns, marbles,and rare Stygian furniture – looked all so lively that they could even afford to mi-grate from woodcut to woodcut like patrons visiting from box to box in an imag-inary opera-house

Of course Savonarola’s pulpit was still a prime spot to see and be seen, butthe macaronic woodcuts and their high mobility pointed to a similar theatricalurge, to a growing interest in the elements of the spectacle. And the acoustics ofthe Baldus were better in the lower levels, as in the line «hicve colossaei gyra-mina larga tinazzi», ‘and see the bulging flab of a barrel-colosseum’ (XV 240)9,describing the hypothetical palace of Jupiter as a sagging, unshapely collage ofRoman architecture. In Florence, Savonarola brilliantly used the press to forgeeconomic ties and as an instrument for propaganda; in Venice, before the in-creasing rigor of the Clementine Index in the late 1550s, he was rememberedless as a political leader, let alone a prophet, than as a forerunner of an asceticexperience of spirituality. Anchored in an intense season of Benedictine scripturalstudies, if not into crypto-reformist territory, the Arrivabene editions ofSavonarola and Folengo emphasize homiletic and visual aspects; the printer’srough eloquence was less the isolated gesture of a ‘popular’ bookseller than thereflection on the book trade of a dominant Venetian cultural discourse.

Judging from the evidence of Hurtado de Mendoza’s books and files that wehave briefly mentioned here, it is not difficult to imagine a thriving Hispano-Italian trade in Venice. An elusive artifact in this catalogue of fiction is the Bal-dus in Castilian – a text-dominated Gothic folio in two columns, surreptitiouslyattached as an appendix to the chivalric cycle of Renaud de Montauban and oc-casionally interrupted by the central ‘window’ of some formulaic woodcut (fig.1) – that the printer Dominico de Robertis, an immigrant craftsman in Seville,published in 1542 making sure to advertise in his translation «las graciosas burlasde Cingar» (‘Cingar’s laughable pranks’)10. Crucial as the Macaronee are in sig-naling an early Spanish conjuncture in Folengo’s ‘foreign’ market, Mendoza’s ac-

9 Here and below all translations are mine.10 Cf. the studies of A. BLECUA, Libros de caballería, latín macarrónico y novela picaresca: la

adaptación castellana del Baldus (Sevilla, 1542), «Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letrasde Barcelona», XXXIV, 1971-1972, pp. 147-239, and F. MÁRQUEZ VILLANUEVA, Fuentes literariascervantinas, Madrid, Gredos, 1973, with the assessment of A. CAPATA, Semper truffare paratus.Genere e ideologia nel Baldus di Folengo, Rome, Bulzoni, 2000. A precious edition of the Sevil-lan macaronic incunabulum is offered by F. GERNERT, Baldo, Alcalá de Henares, Centro de Estu-dios Cervantinos, 2001.

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quisition is but a meager recollection compared with the hundreds of copies thatcould have been sold wholesale to chapmen (and for that matter shipped fromSeville to the New World).

In his detailed, 1972 analysis of this Sevillan translation, one of the ground-breaking essays in recent Hispanic studies, Alberto Blecua clarified the depend-ence of the Castilian translator from the preface of the fictional charlatanAcquario Lodola. The translador is at some pain to show mastery of Apuleiantechniques, and ends up paving the way, Blecua further suggests, to the Lazarillode Tormes, which in its expert blend of hunger epic, eucharistic themes, and au-tobiography raises Folengo’s breadly paradise onto the threshold of the modernnovel. Blecua’s recasting of the 1542 Baldo in Castilian as a crossroads of the in-ternational picaresque has not lost any of its provocative suggestion, but it shouldbe complemented at least by the 1553 translation of Leon Battista Alberti’sMomus, a witty philosophical novel ‘moralized’ by Agustín de Almazán, and byanother item of historical evidence that Blecua overlooked. Six years before theSpanish Baldo, in 1536, the printer Dominico de Robertis issued an edition ofCelestina that is almost unknown to contemporary scholars. As at several junc-tures in the annals of the Venetian press, Baldus and Celestina are co-travelers.Their overlapping experience did not offer book knowledge, but a mapping ofpresent-day possibilities of urban networks, trades, and publics – traced withmetaphorical goalposts, signposts, and resting-places of the journeys made andyet to make11.

Shoptalk

Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.(Hamlet III iii 79)

In the first section of this essay one of the things we did was to read maca-ronic narratives against the retailing of printed books. It is time now, briefly, toturn our attention directly to the overlapping between the two historical phe-nomena. This operated at a number of levels. To begin with we should probablyform an opinion about how both the Venetian press and the macaronic can beseen as equally, and in a parallel sense, ‘popular’ forms. Filippo De Vivo’s recentresearch on the social composition of the audiences at early modern shops orpharmacies suggests that access to printed media was available to relatively hum-

11 A suggestive early modern mapping of this sort is found in Fairs, Markets and the ItinerantBook Trade, eds. R. Myers, M. Harris and G. Mandelbrote, London, The British Library, 2007. Onthe Spanish tragicomedy in Venice see H. KALLENDORF, Celestina in Venice: Piety, Pornography,Poligrafi, «Celestinesca», XXVII, 2003, pp. 75-106; on transnational economies and their anxietythe observations of J.G. HARRIS, Sick Economies. Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shake-speare’s England, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, are very valuable, even ifthey are written from the perspective of early English drama.


ble citizens and that, much like for the type of drama experienced in outdoortheatres, retailing and shoptalk were socially mixed, containing both plebeianand elite elements12. Indeed, a commentator looking at the gut-churning faux-im-mediacy of the woodcuts in Baldus depicting the visit of the paladins to the un-derworld and the city of sins may even be moved to suggest that during the 1530sand 1540s in Venice the macaronic texts came closest to a commercial ‘mass au-dience’. From the standpoint of the Arrivabene store, it would appear that muchof the appeal of Savonarola’s own sermons, viewed either as printed perform-ances or as printed texts, ultimately extended its stylish passages of denunciatoryrant over the Grand Guignol of Folengo’s evocations, his coruscating verbal por-traits, and the panoramic sweep of his rhetoric (leveled sometimes at similar ideo-logical targets, whether because of misogyny, comic diversion, or simply withthe ostensibly edifying purpose of excoriating the dimly identifiable rich and pow-erful)13.

Something of a dialectical exchange took place in these texts between thepopular and commercial elements in the pamphlet press and the clerical admo-nitions and disquisitions regularly dispensed from Savonarola’s pulpit andFolengo’s macaronic pen. For if we started this essay remarking on the commonground shared in Mendoza’s library by theological sermons, the Baldus, andother picaresque fiction, we will end it by remarking on how many of the formsand formulas of the Venetian colportage could, in their turn, be appropriated byan author like Folengo, eager to market his epic accounts to as wide an audienceas possible, tracking back and forth between the providential and the admonitory,on the one hand, and the weirdly festive and tragicomic, on the other.

The point here is not to see either the pamphlet press or macaronic woodcutsas inherently popular, authentic expressions of the culture of the ‘people’, what-ever we might take that or them to have been. Rather, both were cultural con-structs and commodified products, designed to sell to broad audiences byauthors, editors, brokers, and printers with a developed sense of what sold andto whom. The 1521 series of macaronic woodcuts, in short, provides graphic orat times lurid stage directions for the acting-out of a sort of Venice literary un-derworld, a «proto-Grub street», as Peter Lake wrote, «where publication andproduction was for profit, and the market being aimed at was a large and sociallyheterogeneous one»14. Traditional research characterizes macaronic discourses as

12 F. DE VIVO, Information and Communication in Venice. Rethinking Early Modern Politics,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.

13 What follows here is, to a degree, a slightly revisionist but still indebted account on issues ofpopular culture and comedy in Folengo to be found in classic works such as Cultura letteraria etradizione popolare in Teofilo Folengo. Atti del Convegno di studi promosso dall’Accademia Vir-giliana e dal Comitato Mantova - Padania ’77 (Mantova 15-16-17 ottobre 1977), eds. E. Bonoraand M. Chiesa, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1979, and P. BURKE, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe,Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009 (first edition 1978).

14 P. LAKE and M. QUESTIER, The Anti-Christ Lewd Hat. Protestants, Papists and Players inPost-Reformation England, New Haven - London, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. XXVII-XXVIII.Cf. T. WATT, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,

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anticlassic, undoubtedly eccentric if not rebellious, experimentation; intensely fa-miliar is also the historical corollary to this vision, that a fertile and heterodoxseason – which seized the opportunity of introducing new and rather discon-certing solutions in the visual arts and in literature – was effectively stamped outby Pietro Bembo, as soon as the reformist paradigms contained in his Prose dellavolgar lingua gained wide currency and sanction15.

The crude and almost violent frescoes painted by Girolamo Romanino in S.Antonio at Breno (Valcamonica) in the late 1530s, including the harsh plonkingof two shawms (fig. 2), display the demonic illusion of a transfer in purely for-mal choices, of a rehearsal of themes from Folengo, or perhaps an instance ofStephen Greenblatt’s strategic notion of mimicry, understood as a social relationof production16. One could scarcely ask for a clearer illustration of the pointmade above, that we are dealing here with the ability to voice and ventriloquizeperspectives and sentiments that were quite at odds with the hegemonic ortho-doxies of the day.

This resistant template, however, fails to wholly satisfy as long as it resolvesitself either into provincial deferment or binary oppositions between classic andanti-classic, piety and pornography17. A simple outline of the printed afterlife ofBembo’s Prose would bare a history of tortured indecision and the unexpectedworkings of a market whose audiences were encouraged, delayed, frustrated,and then finally gratified in a way that defies the chorus-like epilogue placed bysome literary historians in their legitimating commentaries. Many polymaths inthe Venetian lagoon continued to practice ‘subversive’ editorial habits; maca-ronic design, too, was not a deserted phenomenon left to speak for itself throughpiles of books littering the stalls. From the point of view of print culture, we areleft wondering just how and when the classicizing blow is going to be struck. Andwhen, finally, the event does take place, it is supposed to do so as early as the1520s, with the nature of the transformation being collapsed into, or rendered vir-tually coterminous with, a new understanding of the relation between center andperiphery. Not by chance Alessandro Nova’s important essay on the Germanic

1991, A. JOHNS, Miscellaneous Methods: Authors, Societies and Journals in Early Modern England,«The British Journal for the History of Science», XXXIII, n. 2, 2000, pp. 159-186.

15 See at least I. PACCAGNELLA, Le macaronee padovane. Tradizione e lingua, Padua, Antenore,1979, and G. FOLENA, Il linguaggio del caos. Studi sul plurilinguismo rinascimentale, Turin, Bol-lati Boringhieri, 1991.

16 S. GREENBLATT, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World, Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press, 1991, p. 6 («representations are not only products but producers, capable of de-cisively altering the very forces that brought them into being»). For a fascinating discussion on thedynamics of mimetic performance and memory cf. H. BHABHA, Mimicry and Man. The Ambivalenceof Colonial Discourse, in ID., The Location of Culture, London, Routledge, 1994, p. 85, and B.FUCHS, Mimesis and Empire. The New World, Islam, and European Identities, Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press, 2001, pp. 6-15.

17 A perspective affecting both G.C. ARGAN, Classico Anticlassico. Il Rinascimento daBrunelleschi a Bruegel, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1984, who discusses the researches of Eugenio Battisti,and C. KALLENDORF, Virgil and the Myth of Venice. Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.


allure and other eccentric trends in the pictorial idiom of Northern Italian artistssignals how by 1540 perplexing activities of citational parody appear to havebeen drastically reduced, and culminates in the plea for an investigation thatcould celebrate the achievements of neglected artists (and their literary equiva-lents) and rewrite history from the margins in a renewed grid of publics andcounter-publics18.

A clever rewriting of this project of center vs. periphery was carried througha series of studies by Stephen J. Campbell, who rightly calls into some questionFolengo’s marginality or eccentricity, by observing how he was himself an oc-casional Gonzaga protégé. Evidently, the Duke Federico saw in the macaronicfiery resistance to Tuscanization and its heroic-comic structure a policy that hadsome bearings on his own construction of Mantua as a second Rome, especiallythrough the presence of a venerable master like Mantegna and the activity of aprodigious artist like Giulio Romano. Campbell downplays Nova’s parallelismbetween Gonzaga interventions on behalf of Folengo’s troublesome career (in-cluding his readmission to the Benedictine order in 1534) and courtly patronageof the ‘eccentric’ Romanino, preferring instead to pursue «analogies betweenthe enterprise of Folengo and Correggio himself»19.

The outbreak of this second line of inquiring is immediately more rewardingsince in contrast with Romanino’s formal asperity Correggio is deeply involvedin the collision of motifs ultimately deriving from Raphael and antiquity, rein-forcing a taste for comic juxtapositions with stronger points of correspondencein Folengo. A painter with an edge for sharpness in his brush, Romanino takesgrimaces as a cipher; conversely, Correggio is remarkable for his compoundingof humor and horror. Suitably resonant with Folengo’s observations of the cor-rect and incorrect demeanor of pathos, Correggio’s treatment of pictorial tópoiis a poetic argument capable of bombastic rhetoric but also subtle in thwartingor undoing the beholder’s expectations. His pictures admit no complacent rela-tions and encourage many levels of irony or ambivalence. Typical, in this re-spect, are the dissonances set up by figures such as the laughing child, Silenus,Marsyas, and Laocoön. In the so-called Allegory of Vices (ca. 1528-1530), Cor-reggio’s manipulation of genre – for the traumatic scene is neither a propereclogue, nor comedy, nor indeed fully a mythological tragedy – creates an at-mosphere of deep indeterminacy. An older, bearded man beneath a tree, possi-bly a bound satyr, «is gleefully tortured by two women who apply snakes to hisbare flesh and sound a wind instrument at his ear, while a third strips the skinfrom his left leg»20. A naked child turns toward the beholder eclipsing the satyr’sdisembodied limbs behind a ferocious, grinning monstrosity (fig. 3).

18 A. NOVA, Folengo and Romanino: The Questione della lingua and Its Eccentric Trends, «TheArt Bulletin», LXXVI/4, 1994, pp. 664-679.

19 S.J. CAMPBELL, The Cabinet of Eros. Renaissance Mythological Painting and The Studioloof Isabella d’Este, New Haven - London, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 235.

20 Ivi, p. 227.

162 Stefano Gulizia

These «difficult, strangely jarring images»21, produced for the studiolo of Isa-bella d’Este but rather incongruous, as a whole, in that humanistic context, so-licit comparison with Folengo’s Baldus in more than one way. At a sonic level,the woman’s blasting pipe translates one of the most persistent macaronic oc-currences: the term pifari, meaning ‘rustic flutes’, also found in its derivative pi-farizantes, referring to those who improvise on such instrument22. At a moreliteral level, the exemplum doloris portrayed by Correggio is a sickeningly vio-lent joke that would seem to do justice to many episodes of punishment in theBaldus, ranging in attitude and suffering from smiling through transgressivelycheerful, to cruel and vindictive in the extreme. Unrelenting Furies, unnervingand panic drunkenness, pastoral slumber, animal sprawling23, and above all thedemonic little boys dressed in rags unleashed by St. Peter to torment the Romaninnkeeper Pasquino in Book XXIII (354-369).

From the perspective of the hyper-Michelangelesque bodies of Giulio Ro-mano’s masonry at Palazzo Te, both Correggio and Folengo appear like artistswho brought to a threshold of critical assimilation and citational display the lan-guage of the «modern manner» as well as the lesson of Mantegna and Leonardo.While not afraid to engage themselves in monumental and grand scale, they alsoseem to have achieved an uncomfortable and ‘degenerate’ alternative, despitethe different choice of medium (tempera or hexameters), to the more statuesquesolutions of their predecessors. In ideological terms, moreover, this amorphousand buoyant colorism provided a kind of reassurance and absolution, howeverunlikely, for the Gonzaga regime, which had been deeply implicated in the cat-astrophic affliction of the Sack in 1527. A powerful Lombard alternative and therationale for a translatio imperii from Rome to Mantua are the ultimate templateand governing concept in Stephen Campbell’s reading of Mantegna’s Triumphsof Caesar and Correggio’s analogies with Folengo24.

21 Ivi, p. 228.22 Cf. Baldus I 534-535 («magno | cum strepitu pifari surgunt», ‘the bagpipes rise up with great

noise’) with Baldus XV 200-201 («cornua, cifoy, | gnacara, bussones, pifari pivaeque bitortae»,‘horns, pipes, recorders, castanets, fifes and double-reed bagpipes’). Mario Chiesa recalls the useof «pifarizante Ovidio» in the Letters of Andrea Calmo, implicitly pointing to a hybrid, Venetian‘genre of the street’ as reflected in sixteenth-century print culture – an aural web of transactions scor-ing an ever-slippery play between speech and scrawl. See E. WILSON, Plagues, Fairs, and StreetCries: Sounding out Society and Space in Early Modern London, «Modern Language Studies»,XXV, 1995, pp. 1-42. On musical aspects of Folengo, cf. G. CATTIN, Canti, canzoni a ballo e danze(cited in note 3), S. GULIZIA, La bucolica all’inferno, «Quaderni folenghiani», IV, 2003, pp. 13-47,and P. MERKLEY, Josquin Desprez in Ferrara, «The Journal of Musicology», XVIII, 2001, pp. 544-583.

23 On these themes see now M. SCALABRINI and D. STIMILLI, Pastoral Postures: Some Renais-sance Versions of Pastoral, «Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance», LXXI, 2009, pp. 35-60.

24 The historiographical trope of the translatio imperii is familiar at least in Petrarch’s studies;see J.B. TRAPP, The Poet Laureate: Rome, Renovatio, and Translatio Imperii, in Rome in the Re-naissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P.A. Ramsey, Binghamton, Medieval and Renaissance Textsand Studies, 1982, pp. 93-130. On Mantegna and Folengo see also M. ZAGGIA, Cingar astrologo,la maledetta progenie dei villani e Andrea Mantegna «pictor celeberrimus», ovvero il tredicesimo


Even this interpretation, useful and convincing as it is, presents the exegeti-cal disadvantage of considering Folengo’s macaronic works only at the junctureof their first and second printed editions, between 1517 and 1521, and the cor-related problem of persistently historicizing his intellectual trajectory only withinthe cultural framework of the Po Valley. The early steps of Folengo’s career inprint, a season that Massimo Zaggia termed the «flamboyant macaronic»25, arehardly the fruits of provincial labor, even if the physical shop and presses thatproduced them were those of Alessandro Paganino (fl. 1509-1538), a printer atToscolano on the shores of the Lake of Garda26. The Paganino prints of Folengointersect family, religious, and commercial ties that firmly establish the printer’soutput within the larger activity of Venetian marketplace. Paganino’s programcan be considered as an elaboration of Aldus Manutius’ enterprise; his elegantcharacters are midway between italic and roman. Through a system of individ-ual dedications, Paganino’s tentacles extend to the most prominent figures of thecourtly society in Terraferma and of the patricians of the lagoon. At the sametime, he is also closely connected with the Benedictine congregation of S.Giustina, while Padua, under Doge Gritti’s iron fist, is quite visibly in Venetianwaters. In spite of this evidence, the princeps of the Baldus has been regardedsimply as a Brescian product.

The ambitious self-fashioning of a Mantua as an imperial city becomes an-other simplistic device, if one tries to telescope the totality of Folengo’s careeragainst it. The 1517 volume, it is true, begins with two ‘peasant pastorals’ and in-vites the reader to progress, as if in the footprints of Virgil’s own trajectory fromthe Bucolics to the Aeneid, beyond the reclining posture towards the Baldus, seenas an experimental epic. But after the inaugural municipal section, one of threekernels in which the poem’s plot is neatly divided, a Lucianic voyage and a de-scent to Hell directly connect the scope of the macaronic enterprise to the avail-able media in a sixteenth-century capital of print culture like Venice. The Pasquinoepisode, for example, does not need to be read only in the key of anti-Roman in-vective, but also, and perhaps more interestingly, as a survey of early modern‘public making’ similar in spirit to Aretino’s comedies (which after the 1530s, forthe most part, also emigrated to Venice and its presses) or to dialogues on print-ing written by polymaths like Antonfrancesco Doni and Niccolò Franco27.

libro del Baldus nella redazione Toscolanense, «Strumenti critici», X, n. 1, 1995, pp. 65-104, andG. AGOSTI, Su Mantegna I, Milan, Feltrinelli, 2005.

25 M. ZAGGIA, Breve percorso attraverso le quattro redazioni delle Macaronee folenghiane, inTeofilo Folengo nel quinto centenario della nascita (1491-1991). Atti del Convegno. Mantova-Bres-cia-Padova, 26-29 settembre 1991, eds. G. Bernardi Perini and C. Marangoni, Florence, Olschki,1993, pp. 85-101: 91 («alla fase giovanile della Paganini, acerba e sperimentale, per quanto am-biziosa, succede con la Toscolanense una fase estremistica, di macaronico per così dire fiammeg-giante»).

26 Cf. A. NUOVO, Alessandro Paganino (1509-1538), Padua, Antenore, 1990.27 On Aretino in print see F.M. BERTOLO, Aretino e la stampa. Strategie di autopromozione a

Venezia nel Cinquecento, Rome, Salerno, 2003, esp. pp. 7-39. For a discussion of Doni’s anti-Are-tinian production cf. also P. PROCACCIOLI, Anton Francesco Doni contra Aretinum, Manziana

164 Stefano Gulizia

After all, it was not Paganino’s Manutian elegance – a line of products iden-tified primarily by their physical layout, a very compact 24mo, recently cred-ited by book historians with the invention of one of the earliest editorial series –but rather the ‘popular’ repackaging by bookmen such as Cesare Arrivabene,Gregorio Gregori, Nicolini da Sabbio, and Aurelio Pincio that effectively chan-neled Folengo throughout the city networks of Venice. It was in stores like Ar-rivabene’s at the Mercerie where readers from all walks of life, patrons, brokers,collectors, and woodcutters, a category of specialized artisans who had to prac-tice hands-on experiments, all learned about the macaronic innovation. It wasprecisely the Arrivabene store which gave Mendoza a copy of the Baldus to beshelved along with nautical maps and other printed cosmography, theologicaltracts, letters and more ephemeral media. During the 1540s and 1550s, at a muchlater juncture than during the season of religious heterodoxy and fascination withNorthern prints that characterized both the 1520s and traditional scholarship onthe subject, Folengo’s macaronic works finally became part of a vast, motleyrepertoire of print culture: a ‘textbook’ with an influential if idiosyncratic de-sign. As a canonized classic, Folengo’s Baldus could transcend its own linguis-tic diversity and the geopolitics of the Po Valley and dialogue with Titian, at thetime in which the painter is engaging in radical Ovidian readings, or with Ja-copo Tintoretto, at the time in which he rose to fame through an impressive se-ries of swiftly-delivered, aggressively citational canvases, and his allegianceswith confraternities and citizens, willing to patronize works deeply influenced bythe writings of Venetian polymaths28.

The shores of the Garda, the masonry at Palazzo Te, the Benedictine monas-teries affiliated with S. Giustina, Rome ravaged during the Sack, or the slopesnear Bergamo –these are all macaronic sites with an often illustrious if at timesponderous scholarly tradition. But a rather neglected site, where a macaronicdiscourse radiates in the form of printed artifacts and Folengo ended up acquir-ing a truly European stature, was the sixteenth-century bookstore. Deliberatelydistorted between their presence as physical edifices and their function as rooms

(Rome), Vecchiarelli, 1998, and G. AQUILECCHIA, Aretino e altri poligrafi a Venezia, in Storia dellacultura veneta, eds. G. Arnaldi and M. Pastore Stocchi, vol. 3, t. II, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 1981, pp.61-98, ora in ID., Nuove schede di italianistica, Rome, Salerno, 1994, pp. 77-138.

28 In a frame of Venetian historiography, citizen patrons and collectors should be seen less asfollowers of patricians than as cultural innovators. Members of this ‘second elite’ might have con-tributed more than it has previously been thought to the development of Venetian art and literature;thanks to Monika Schmitter’s studies, we may gain access to the metaphorical bricolage of theiridentities. The forefront of new developments would also include a special interest in macaronictexts, remarkable for its deep vernacular design, if not an independent pulse of sixteenth-centuryVenetian sounds. Cf. M. SCHMITTER, «Virtuous Riches»: The Bricolage of Cittadini Identities inEarly-Sixteenth-Century Venice, «Renaissance Quarterly», LVII, n. 3, 2004, pp. 908-969. On Ti-tian’s corporeality see Titian: Materiality, Likeness, Istoria, eds. J. Woods-Marsden and D. Rosand,Begijnof, Brepols, 2007; on Tintoretto’s ideal of prontezza and his relations with the Venetian poly-maths see T. NICHOLS, Tintoretto. Tradition and Identity, London, Reaktion Books, 1999, esp. pp.69-99.


for armchair travel, the early modern Venetian presses offer unique opportunitiesto study the archeological and anthropological contexts in which Folengo’s writ-ings reached their most enduring pitch of brilliance. Paradoxically, even aprovocative offspring like Baldus could somehow yield the bleaker modernity ofthe printing press. The cosmos of Folengo’s poem seems far less volatile, farless despairingly chivalric than its interpreters reported – a quixotic fantasy, per-haps, but with a firm handle on the venture capital featured by a public of skills.Mapmaking and travel writing, and the discursive ties they both shared with theneighboring genres of Spanish cosmography and the libros de caballerías, seemto hold dominion over all. At the time in which Cesare Arrivabene analyzed thechilling gambling of Folengo’s satire, to print it, the tones of Savonarola’spreaching and the compilation of the Castilian Celestina, acclimated in Italian forthe first time, suffused the style also of his macaronic remake.

By the 1520s, the Arrivabene store displayed a kind of cultural heteroglossia,technologically induced by the press: a vernacular dialogics where, as MarthaFeldman notes, «authors could often slip freely between styles that were other-wise strictly separated»29. Into the rich editorial environment of this shop theItalian translation of Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae in 1519 brought further ma-terials in conformance with Arrivabene’s vernacular views. A complete transla-tion of the witty jokes written by the Florentine humanist was not unusual inVenice30. Between the late fifteenth-century and the mid sixteenth-century nineeditions appeared, some of which, like in the case of Marchiò Sessa (1527) andthe Bindoni firm (1531, 1547 and 1553), are from printers who also worked onother titles in Arrivabene’s catalogue, especially Celestina. Bracciolini’s diffu-sion, however, was mostly through Latin anthologies that intersected new ideasof humanistic comedy with a more traditional Aesopic discourse. Customarywas a tendency to select only the facezie which could be considered less provoca-tive or vulgar.

Functional to a trend of recreational rhetoric within his bookshop, the Face-tiae prepared by Arrivabene stretched the narrative line into a motley territory ofmunicipal tales but, unlike the Decameron, the geographical location is explic-itly marked and any discursive amplification is dried out to let the story conveyits humor through a proverbial sting. Poggio explicitly suggested the title of ‘con-versations’ for his anthology; this protestation of rusticity is reflected by thefrontispiece chosen for the 1519 edition (fig. 4). The woodcut illustrates jokeno. 203 of the collection, in which a doctor randomly fishes a recipe out of aheavy sack, while the patient is handing him a bag with his urine to be inspected.A scroll cynically wishes «Dio te la mandi bona» (‘may God assist you’), in

29 M. FELDMAN, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice, Chicago, University of Chicago Press,1995, p. 58.

30 Cf. L. SOZZI, Le Facezie di Poggio nel Quattrocento francese, in Miscellanea di studi sulQuattrocento francese, ed. F. Simone, Turin, Giappichelli, 1967, pp. 416 ss., and B.C. BOWEN, Hu-mour and Humanism in the Renaissance, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004.

166 Stefano Gulizia

what appears to be a Tuscan rendition of the adjective «buona» in Poggio’s orig-inal, which is equally in vernacular. By organizing his otherwise ‘gothic’ wood-block around a medical scene, Arrivabene capitalized on the popularity of aVenetian cityscape, glimpsed through retails shops at the street-level. This printedmedia spectacularized a story of medical desecration made familiar by urbannetworks such as barber shops.

The combined action of these printed works on Folengo is quite extraordinaryfor students of the Venetian marketplace. Moreover, the different transforma-tions I noted in Arrivabene’s vernacular activity – Boccaccio settings, Celestina’sribald humour, Folengo’s irreverent plays on Virgilian poetics – are a far cryfrom Cesare’s reputation as a cheap, ‘popular’ printer. The macaronic designsuggests a deeper connection with Venetian pseudo-virgilian issues and the largerpanoply of vernacular drama. This may be sustained by another specific exam-ple. A page of the Baldus shows a series of glosses locking Cipada, the smalltown where the poem’s plot begins articulating, within a spatial matrix of re-gional exchanges (fig. 5). It is a kaleidoscopic mapping, measured by local com-modities and standards. Folengo’s parody of erudite marginalia is mirrored in thetypographical layout chosen by the printer. In Paganino’s conception, born outof his fellowship in the first season of Aldus Manutius’ incunabula, two mater-ial clues distinguished the Macaronee from any other book in the catalogue: theformat, exactly half of the traditional classics in quarto commented in academia,and the special italic font prepared for the occasion and never reused. If Paganinothought of backing Folengo’s literary innovations with the smallest size available,a real pocket book avant la lettre, Arrivabene reorganizes his imprint in octavo,while still reproducing most of the glosses and the preface. In this important text,the imaginary figure of Acquario Lodola31 introduces the macaronic arts and theventurous salvage of Merlin Cocai’s manuscripts, found in a tomb off the coastof Armenia. A bookman and medical practitioner, Lodola insists that the reasonfor that trip had been a search for ‘roots, herbs, stones and little worms’32. Atthis juncture, Folengo’s Venetian journey is a comedy of errors, and Cipada’sdomestic geopolitics is conflated to a larger Mediterranean scenario.

In spite of a lack of conclusive evidence in favor of specific printers, to whichone should presumably add the action of brokers and middlemen of Zoppino’stype, the physical characteristics of the ‘silent’ edition of Folengo’s Baldus, thethird of the poem (ca. 1534-1535) fit more closely with the collection in quartoof the Pincio house. Self-described as a Venetian but son of a Filippo the Elderfrom Mantua, Aurelio Pincio (fl. ca. 1530-1557) operates a family-owned ty-pography in Campo dei due pozzi, not far from the printing clustering at San Fan-tin. Pincio divides his interests between geography and vernacular letters, with a

31 G. BERNARDI PERINI, Identikit di Acquario Lodola, in Studi in onore di Pier Vincenzo Men-galdo per i suoi settant’anni, Florence, Sismel, 2007, vol. I, pp. 465-469.

32 The original text, a typically macaronic catalogue, reads «causa retrovandi radices, herbas,lapides, vermiculos» (Opus Merlini Cocaii, 1521, A iiii).


penchant for the epic genre attested by Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1532),and by Folengo’s own poem La humanità del figliuolo di Dio (1533).

In the course of the 1530s Pincio’s press was contracted to publish a seriesof geographic collections, possibly through the mediation of Giovanbattista Ra-musio, who at the time worked on behalf of Pietro Bembo and authored an earlyDiscorso sopra il viaggio fatto dagli Spagnuoli intorno al mondo in 1536; forPincio, the issuing of ‘grandes voyages’ to the West Indies often complementedthe ‘petites voyages’ to the East. For a while, in the 1540s, Pincio employed An-tonfrancesco Doni as editor, evidently before the polymath found a stable occu-pation in Marcolini’s printing house. Doni’s first task was to prepare an editionof Lando’s important translation of Thomas More’s Utopia, printed in 154833.This translation, the first to enjoy success in Italy, traces the point of arrival in asuggestive itinerary from Venice to Spain, through Baldus, as from Mantua toUtopia. The overarching narrative here is simple. An impulse toward regionalculture, represented by Folengo’s Baldus, is broadcast to and from larger spacesof publicity, and a local, ‘heavily’ macaronic poem is transformed into some-thing more malleable and ultimately antipodean: a Lucianic fiction that shareswith the travel accounts of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Peter Martyr (asthey were famously revisited in Venice) more than their list of ‘barbarian terms’34.

The Bassano Effect

While historians have noticed the partnership between Tuscan philology invernacular and the Venetian press of the sixteenth-century, less attention has beenpaid to the pedagogical focus of some more technical works, to their emphasison the value of hands-on experiments. Pincio’s promotion of charts and mea-suring devices received even lesser attention, even though his public was clearlynot the humanistic audience of Aldus Manutius but a skillful crowd of travelers,gunners, men of war, diplomacy and trade, builders, merchants, foreignSpaniards, and humble seamen. Such public clusters were sufficiently large tohave made an impression on any resident or visitor to the area adjacent to the Ri-alto, as well as on any reader of Baldus around 153535. Folengo found his way

33 The extent to which Pincio’s shop is indebted to the Giuntine press in Florence (already doc-umented for an edition of Virgil subcontracted to the Venetian in 1534) may be greater than it hasbeen previously thought: the text of Utopia is known through the merchant and banker AntonioBuonvisi of Lucca, one of More’s more significant friends. After a visit to England, Buonvisi showssome papers to Filippo Giunti who prints in 1519 a collection centered on More’s translations fromLucian.

34 A circumstance inviting comparison with the seminal anthropological essay of S. MULLANEY,Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renais-sance, «Representations», III, 1983, pp. 40-67.

35 In this respect, my view of the materiality of social agency surrounding the macaronic textis closer to Taylor’s recent assessment of dispersed or ‘fragmentary discussions’ (C. TAYLOR, A Sec-ular Age, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 186), to Warner’s definition of con-

168 Stefano Gulizia

into Venice much like Jacopo Bassano did, only a generation later. In both casesthe Venetian urban setting, with its busy alleys and crowd-scenes, was inevitablyformative in many essential ways. For the former author it was the relentlessreissue of classical epic and chivalric narratives to have left the marketplace in-exorably saturated; the latter artist was rather cut out by the prolific triumvirateof Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto36. The inventors of a new peasant genre inpainting and poetry, Bassano and Folengo could find a niche of Venetian buyersonly through a performance of the peripheral: by offering a journey, however di-agonal and apocryphal, to the province.

The emergence of a mimetic portrayal of the countryside – the harsher factsof the life of the borders or the oversimplified rubrics of ‘western’ speech, suchas one may suppose to be current in the Alps and in the Po valley – signaled anasymmetry between absolutist state and artisanal mob, and invited comparisonswith the routine of rusticity typical of the Renaissance stage. To track this nexusof labor and performance, it is appropriate to discover in Bassano a formativemoment determined by a diffusion of media from the typographical room.

In the self-imposed exile of his native village, Bassano ended up being in-fluenced by the language of Roman mannerism through the study of a well-stocked portfolio of prints. Among them was a woodcut designed by FrancescoSalviati for Pietro Aretino’s Life of St. Catherine37. The life of the Dominican pa-tron revealed a transregional network based on print technology, connecting six-teenth-century artists and writers in search of a poor or low style. Aretino’s work

tact zones and counter-publics (M. WARNER, Publics and Counterpublics, New York, Zone Books,2002, pp. 51-65), and to the shuffling of shapes and associations implicit in the ANT developed byLatour (B. LATOUR, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 64-65). The necessity to critique the uniformity of the Haber-masian public sphere is a perspective of reform, which appears now to have reached a certain crit-ical mass, as is documented, among other examples, by the survey of Harold Mah (H. MAH,Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians, «Journal of Modern His-tory», LXXII, 2000, pp. 153-82) and the collection of Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (B. WIL-SON and P. YACHNIN, Making Publics in Early Modern Europe, London, Routledge, 2010, esp. pp.1-21). A. HALASZ, The Marketplace of Print. Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early ModernEngland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, advocated with exemplarity the inextri-cability between public making and the printing press, since «discourse in the form of textual prop-erty is the means by which discourse-as-a-commodity is produced and the capital of the book tradeaccumulated» (p. 167).

36 P. HUMFREY, Painting in Renaissance Venice, New Haven - London, Yale University Press,1995, perceptively noted that Jacopo Bassano «occupies a somewhat anomalous position in the his-tory of painting in Renaissance Venice», while also adding that «from an early date he establisheda foothold in the Venetian market for pictures for the home» (p. 218). On Bassano’s social networksin the lagoon see P. COTTRELL, Corporate Colors: Bonifacio and Tintoretto at the Palazzo deiCamerlenghi in Venice, «The Art Bulletin», LXXXII, 2000, pp. 658-678.

37 This frontispiece received little to no attention, although it would connect Mannerist exper-imentalism and Spanish patronage at a rather early date; Aretino gave a statuette of St. Catherinemade by Sansovino (and now lost) as a gift to his dedicatee Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto.See B. BOUCHER, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, New Haven - London, Yale University Press,1991, p. 357.


was printed by Francesco Marcolini in 1540, in the midst of a spectacular col-laboration mainly centered on comedy. Salviati’s design, moreover, would con-tinue to be crucial for Marcolini, at the time in which the printer issued Le sorti,a singular combination between fortune-telling book and board-game. A partic-ular volume, which represented a capital of financial expertise and artistic con-nections, Le sorti was the only volume that Marcolini wrote directly. It waspublished for the first time in 1540, with lush and spacious folio leaves. Notmuch different from other expensive objects of trade like a clock, or an orna-mented box, Marcolini’s exploit of riddles and woodcuts marked the late 1530sand early 1540s as a period of absorption of new figurative solutions. In this re-spect, Folengo’s constant preoccupation with peasant figures found parallels inBassano’s early hesitancy about the body and its insertion into architecturalspaces (their repertory of sources included Mantegna from a distant past)38.

In Bassano’s remarkable Beheading of the Baptist (fig. 6), now at Copen-hagen and probably executed in the mid 1540s39, patterns of volatile instabilityslide nervously along rapid bushes of raspberry, emerald and cinnamon. The can-vas’ idiom is that of an expressionism of private import, marginally Venetian inits tonalism but still unfashionable and uninhabitable given its disjunctive andoblique perspectival system. The later Pastoral scene, now in Madrid (ca. 1560),modeled after a famous print by Titian, shows a different evolution towards vol-umetric insistence, with an anti-theatrical representation of labor as self-ab-sorption (fig. 7)40. This lexicon and its effect of anonymity will be a key factorin establishing a Bassanesque mode of painting and collecting in Venice. Thesimilarities with Folengo are very explicit and well known. An earlier phase offlamboyant iridescence, with a jeweled gleam of dialectal patches carefully dis-tributed over unwinding and interlacing curves, typical of his sophomore maca-ronic attempt in 1521, is progressively absorbed a decade later into the lapidarypolish of the so-called Cipadense edition, or the ‘silent’ 1535 imprint, whichlends the Macaronee the tangible physical presence of a classic41.

38 On Marcolini see A. QUONDAM, Nel giardino del Marcolini. Un editore veneziano tra Aretinoe Doni, «Giornale storico della letteratura italiana», XCVII, 1980, pp. 75-116. The equivalence be-tween Bassanesque pictures and georgic intent, centered on Virgil’s language of labor, is analogousto Folengo’s macaronic design; here I am interested in this nexus less as an illustration of biblicalpastoral than for its tendency to create a trademark in the Venetian marketplace. A surprisinghermeneutic backpedaling on the iconography of pastoral paintings is offered by W.R. REARICK, Ja-copo Bassano’s Later Genre Paintings, «Burlington Magazine», CX, 1968, pp. 241-249.

39 I accept the chronology defended by W.R. REARICK, op. cit.40 With this formulation I am referring to a suggestive opposition introduced by M. FRIED, Ab-

sorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley, University of Cal-ifornia Press, 1980, who argues that whenever a consciousness of viewing exists, absorption issacrificed, and theatricality results, but adding the obvious caveat of conflating an assessment ofpost-1945 American painting and sculpture to an early modern context.

41 Here I disagree both with the chronology and the interpretation of A. NOVA, op. cit. On silentprinting see D.E. RHODES, Silent Printers. Anonymous Printing at Venice in the Sixteenth Century,London, The British Library, 1995.

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Compiling Knowledge, Packaging Colportage

New products do not automatically find a market. A first task for those whointroduced the new macaronic design was to configure it for the consumer in away that made it both comprehensible and attractive. In a crowded arena likeVenice, this was partly a matter of price and partly a matter of marketing, asMario Chiesa has already shown for the Orlandino, but fundamentally an issueof product innovation. A new product needed to take a form that could be soldsuccessfully. In the early modern period, the need to confront product definitionwas especially pressing in the case of exotic imports from non-European trades.Even if a printed good like Folengo’s Baldus represented a fairly direct substi-tute for Virgilian epic and chivalric commodities, it was first introduced into thelagoon in forms largely determined by the established consumer preferences oftheir cultures of origin, which were often far removed from peninsular tastes. Inthis guise, ‘macaronic’ goods might fascinate Venetians as curiosities, but theydid not necessarily command a large or sustained Venetian market. Hence a fre-quent need to redefine the product by changing some of its material characteris-tics. The importance of this process of redefinition is graphically illustrated bythe development of the cycle of fifty-four woodcuts decorating the printed edi-tions of Baldus and variously reused at the time of its dissemination in sixteenth-century Venice.

If an assessment of paratextual material as markers in the evolving stages ofa text is a strategy that has reached scholarly consensus and increasing practice,critical editing in general has lost sight of what a telling indicator a woodblockis. In the case of Folengo’s Baldus, the woodcuts are not only sure signs of theprinter’s craftsmanship but also of an investor’s commercial calculations in themanufacture and distribution of the book. Alessandro Nova did embark on amore exhaustive recensio by physically examining all known illustrations ofearly Folengo editions up to 1521, the year of the so-called Toscolanense im-print, to imply that the eccentric figurative trends in the Po Valley must have hadsome input on their printing. Regrettably, the results of his study, which eitheravoids or marginalizes the Venetian book trade in favor of Lombard heterodoxy,ends up misreading some of the geopolitical complexities underwritten in thegenesis of this macaronic design.

It is a misfortune that deprives us of a combative interlocutor in debating thenumerous visual issues that arise from the Folengo woodcuts themselves, andforces us to sketch a different overview. My argument contrasts, above all, twoof Nova’s assumptions: first that the «bizarre drawings were poorly translated bythe woodcutter» and second that they were likely designed in Brescia42. If by1561, with Varisco’s reprint of Folengo, a second-hand market for disposing theold 1521 woodcuts existed in Venice, the enlisting of these unique prints as anact of reluctant rebellion or hesitant approximation, something in between the

42 A. NOVA, op. cit., p. 676.


squeamish and the grubby, is only an affectionate illusion. Carefully constructedand executed, the original blocks exhibited a range and quality that is likely tohave been great in the perception of vendors and buyers, even if the actual de-signers were minor craftsmen. Hardly characterized by more than some residualstanding because of half a century of degradation, the woodcuts continued to bevery successful until the Venetian reprint by De Imbertis in 1585. The illustratedBaldus must have served principally as a retailing vehicle for artists without suchreputations or for whom the location or arrangement of their shop tended not tofacilitate marketing. At a time in which the book trade also functioned as an out-let for printers doubling as dealers, macaronic refers broadly to all poetical mat-ter, presumably including fine-art woodcuts and engravings. Folengo’s use ofthe term ars macaronica, in fact, alludes to either language or painting and sculp-ture, and includes music43.

From Angela Nuovo’s account of how the illustrations of the Baldus werereused in the poem’s subsequent editions at the beginning of each canto, ac-cording to a practice established by Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, comes anotherconfirmation that Folengo’s macaronic design was still chiefly an outlet for thecanonization of a new form of epic. With four imprints at the peak of its after-life, between 1564 and 1585, the Toscolanense edition itself becomes the objectof renewed interest in Venice, if not exactly a fetishised commodity. Sometimeshortly after 1540, Folengo’s works shifted to year-round selling, in response toa sustained competition from the epic marketplace in print newly opened in theVenetian book trade. Far from signaling a failed integration or from hiding a sty-listic radicalism, the 1521 woodcuts were quickly subsumed as a function of thatgravitation toward epic permanency underway in the Most Serene Republic sincethe early 1520s44.

In its immediate formal context, the cycle of woodcuts illustrating Folengo’sOpus Macaronicorum formed part of a conversation within the contemporarycriticism of the epic poem. It also placed its vignettes in a non-antagonistic re-lation with the classicizing values that had been an underlying feature in Carpac-cio’s wall paintings and will return in the work of artists such as Titian andVeronese. Reference to these values is more than an occasion for ironic inver-sions, once a viewer moves beyond the superficial appeal of pagan, sinful rus-ticity. On the one hand, the scenes in which Tognazzo restrains Zambello from

43 For different interpretations of Folengo’s ars macaronica, ranging from a sustained empha-sis on Roman satire as a genre, through an attention to the ‘segmented’ machinery of parody, to evan-gelic Utopia – readings that occupy an ideal gradient from prudent to daring hermeneutics – cf. A.CAVARZERE, «Ars ista poetica macaronica nuncupatur», «Quaderni folenghiani», I, 1995/96, pp. 55-61, A. CAPATA, op. cit., pp. 47-53, and M. SCALABRINI, L’incarnazione del macaronico. Percorsi nelcomico folenghiano, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003, pp. 92-98.

44 On Folengo in print see A. NUOVO, Alessandro Paganino e Teofilo Folengo, in Edizione«Toscolanense» delle opere macaroniche di Teofilo Folengo, ed. G. Bernardi Perini, Mantua, Asso-ciazione Amici di Merlin Cocai, 1994, pp. 1-13. On Ariosto as a model see D. JAVITCH, Proclaiminga Classic. The Canonization of Orlando furioso, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991.

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the women at the window (fig. 8, left), almost a by-product of the local stage in-dustry, and that in which Baldo faces off the tyrannical mayor Gaioffo, his namemeaning ‘scoundrel’, in a city hall crowded by a throng of armed townspeople(fig. 8, right) offer little more than conventional stage-directions – allowing asingle grand dramatic gesture to dominate the murky foreground. The twoepisodes of Baldo and Cingar in the jailhouse (fig. 9, left) and their encounterwith Manto (fig. 9, right), on the other hand, taken from within and without themunicipal section of the poem, are notably portrayed with such realistic effort inthe household furniture to remind the viewer of the saint’s dream (fig. 9, center),alone in her nuptial bed, in Carpaccio’s Dream of St. Ursula (ca. 1495). The de-sign of a town dance (fig. 10), moreover, is executed with an attentive eye to theritual that would be performed in it, and in turn, the ritual adapted itself to theenclosed designated areas, according to a classicizing architectonic scenario pro-gressively perfected by Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave (ca. 1548) and byVeronese’s The Family of Darius before Alexander (1565-1567).

By accompanying both the Baldus itself and the prefatory Epistola Acquariiwith the image of the poet fed by his muses, the 1521 edition of Folengo couldlead the viewer’s eye quickly to the image of Merlin Cocai, his crouching pos-ture, a laurel wreath upon his bowing head, as the fictional protagonist of themacaronic enterprise. But despite this obvious banquet, so often emphasized inRenaissance art and literature, it is fair to say that the scene retains something ofa visual understatement, as if the woodcut artist sought to relatively suppress aconflation between basic earthy tones and lofty metapoetical speculations. Theshepherd block (fig. 11), offering the possibility to rehearse the visual conven-tions of pastoral – a point reiterated by an insistence on the concept of humileslibros by the proem – while presenting the Zanitonella, is perhaps more signif-icant in the printed book’s overall economy.

Images like this may have been produced cheaply in many printing houses,as it was the case for the firm of Eucario and Marcello Silber in Rome, whichsupported with technical reduction of husbandry and numerology a developingconviction in the Roman curia that displays of outward pastoral and astrologicalthemes was very compatible with inward Christian virtue45. As viewers, thosewho saw or perused the 1521 edition of Folengo entered the macaronic edificefrom below, their position indicated by the shepherd’s stick and the foreshortenedinstruments, seeming to share the amorphous forward ground occupied by thepeasants and their animals. The free roaming of the sheep in the picture invitesiconographic concordances among available pockets inside the ‘green’ frame,while space is effectively compartmentalized by the depiction of a castle in themiddle section. Closely tied to the central figure of the shepherd, the presence

45 In this respect, I would argue, the image of Serafo in Folengo could be profitably comparedwith that of the shepherd/astrologer in Antonio Tebaldeo’s edition printed by Silber in Rome in thefirst decade of the sixteenth-century. Cf. A. TINTO, Gli annali tipografici di Eucario e Marcello Sil-ber (1501-1527), Florence, Olschki, 1968.


of this castle reveals the pull of a narrative dialectic between the city and thecountryside. The compositional scansion continuously frees the upper back-ground from the lower foreground, and viceversa. This movement provides alink to the first line of the Zanitonella’s Sonolegia prima, which juxtaposes in itsclosing gambit the terms «citadina vilanum».

This also has a technical dimension. Fiery pigment-based effects and didac-tic chiaroscuro appear to have been the hallmark in the design of the woodcutcycle, often engulfing and converging into the gloom gathered around squares,geometric floors or crowd-scenes. During the infernal descent, the landscape istypically shown only in its bare essentials: the irregular edge of an undefinedrock dividing perspectival planes. As if in a traditional scene upon the banks ofthe River Jordan, where anonymous semi-nude figures are seen drying them-selves after Baptism, complex forms are only glimpsed beneath the prevalentveil of shadow. Folengo’s revival of the Dantesque notion of light as a kind ofrevelatory moral value gives the Baldus an intimate apocalyptic quality that willbe integrated by Tintoretto’s Last Judgement painted on pale gesso in theMadonna dell’Orto of Venice46. For the general development of vertical solu-tions the artist of the woodcut cycle, or its brokers and investors, had to look be-yond Venetian monumental painting altogether to the prints of Albrecht Dürer,and in particular to his engraving of the Nativity (fig. 12), which features a rus-tic two-story dwelling seen in cross-section. And yet, despite the dispensation ofapocryphal traditions and the communal ethos of the stable so carefully under-lined by Massimo Scalabrini in Folengo47, the 1521 woodcuts can hardly be saidto have been inspired by the equation of poverty with holiness. The change intone from the municipal naturalism to the heroic supernatural drama of the sec-ond half of Baldus is very marked. The woodcut artist recognized the possibili-ties of permutation that architectural constraint afforded him, and he chose togenerate lateral sequences progressing book by book. One such matrix, as wewill shortly see, has to do with the repetition of beating-scenes. Their placementin perspectival and geometric spaces established for the sixteenth-century viewerthe incipient transfer into the macaronic world of a Serlian design approachedfrom various angles in the Venetian book trade.

Despite the playfulness of the composition, the beating of Tognazzo by Baldoin the town hall (fig. 13, right) already possesses an oddly cooling effect that ispossibly amplified in the later scene in which an apothecary whacks Zambellofor selling an entire barrel of poop masked by honey (fig. 13, left). The premed-itated setting of this joke against an unreal and idealized backdrop of arcadesgenerates a conflicting message: one struggling, to some degree, with the comic

46 Cf. M. DOUGLAS-SCOTT, Jacopo Tintoretto’s Altarpiece of St Agnes at the Madonna dell’Ortoin Venice and the Memorialisation of Cardinal Contarini, «Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes», LX, 1997, pp. 130-163; Tintoretto’s work at the Madonna dell’Orto has long been rec-ognized as heavily influenced by Venetian poligrafi like Doni, Aretino and Folengo himself.

47 M. SCALABRINI, L’incarnazione del macaronico, cit.

174 Stefano Gulizia

realism of the episode. If the woodcut artist drew directly on Sebastiano Serlio’sstage-set architecture for the background, his noble application seems more be-fitting the Vitruvian dream-like tragic scene, I would argue, than its correspon-dent bourgeois comic scene (fig. 14). A former pupil of Baldassarre Peruzzi inRome, Serlio settled in Venice in 1527, during Folengo’s vernacular experiencein the lagoon and in the wake of Andrea Gritti’s renovatio urbis48. Folengo’s un-derstanding of classical theatrical categories is clear, but the unnerving implica-tions of these juxtapositions were brought to high levels of solvency by thepeople who discussed, financed, and executed the repackaging of his macaronicprinted edition.

A similarly disjunctive effect is present in Jacopo Tintoretto’s non infrequentinstances of ‘low humor’ in the mid-1540s. In the Christ Washing His Disciples’Feet (fig. 14), Tintoretto seems to suggest «the simultaneous existence», as TomNichols put it, «of different levels of reality, never allowing the viewer to settlecomfortably on a single mode of apprehension»49. The painter’s inclusive ap-proach with the Venetian poligrafi and the relocation of biblical scenes into clut-tered artisan basements reflected his popularizing orientation in a way that wasat the same time ostentatious, assertive, and roughly analogous to those in thecontemporary writings of Doni, Calmo, or Aretino himself. It was these circles– whether centered around Spanish trades, crypto-Lutheran booksellers like Vin-cenzo Valgrisi, the mapmaking anchored in Pincio’s shop, or the egalitarianutopian fantasies of the goldsmith Alessandro Caravia – that provided a naturalpretext for the promotion of Folengo as well. His macaronic design was neitherexclusively a linguistic matter, nor a question of religious sentiments, but also theoutpouring of a learned conversation in the fine arts.

In the cycle of woodcuts, the use of violently recessional architecture can beassociated with the enduring myth of Mantegna as a printmaker. The scene inwhich Cingar beats Muselina (fig. 15, bottom left) relocates a graphic Flagella-tion (fig. 15, center) by the Mantuan master into an uncertain terrain of banter,mockery, and corporeal punishment. The original print is clearly evoked throughthe representation of the geometric pavement in various woodcuts and Folengo’spropensity to parody the instrument of torture, the verzella. Later on, during theattack of the paladins on the palace of the witch Gelfora (fig. 15, bottom right),Mantegna’s noble versatility is further projected to a slightly different groundof chivalric antics, and within a common framework of cruel misogyny. Thetwisted columns of Mantegna fall apart in Folengo’s hell. Indeed, the woodcutstake quite a partisan interest in Mantegna, whose figurative outcome, within andaround Folengo’s hexameters, is yet to be fully studied. At the outset of the nar-

48 In the vast bibliography on Serlio, cf. at least M. TAFURI, Venice and the Renaissance, Cam-bridge (MA), MIT Press, 1995, and M. CARPO, Architecture in the Age of Printing. Orality, Writ-ing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory, Cambridge (MA),MIT Press, 2001.

49 T. NICHOLS, op. cit., p. 82.


ration, it seems immediately evident that the block with Guidone on a horse is arecast into a stupefied warrior of the Roman soldier in the predella panel of Man-tegna’s illustrious Crucifixion at San Zeno. Pictorial attentiveness, however,comes at a price, as each iteration of graphic heroism brings into sharper reliefthe unanswered and unanswerable question of a disruptive degradation fromMantegna’s biblical postures to Folengo’s violent thugs50.

A reasonable, if contentiously revisionist, conclusion to these remarks wouldbe to admit that the rise of a macaronic design is not related to artifacts betray-ing eccentricities but is rather like an archeological site locked at the very heartof the sixteenth-century pictorial workshop. Folengo’s case is typical and clear-cut in regards to how the performance of a written text was to some extent dis-torted; it is almost a perfect case-study of the Janus-faced discourse of printeddissemination. This observation explains why the kinship among genres such asthe Spanish picaresque, macaronic, and Celestina was not bound to the annalsof the Venetian press, but it involved, for example, the environmental perspec-tive channeled by the bombastic disruptures of street mongers. Mingled withproto-voyeurism, the manufacture of celestinesque drama is the ambivalent con-struction of a cultural elaboration in the restrictively Jewish converso sense ofsubordination, fracturing, and diffusing. A Serlian woodcut in the 1531 editionof Celestina printed by Marchiò Sessa rushed to offer a functionalist, Vitruvianreading of the Spanish tragicomedy, in a problematic attempt to enclose its tex-tuality into the historical continuity of the narrative of an emerging Plautinedrama in Italy51. So discontinuous and interruptive is the articulation of how theSerlian architecture has been reused by traders and woodcutters that it seems tobe a forerunner of what Geoffrey Bennington wittily calls the «postal politics»of national frontiers52.

At its mercantile height, macaronic design, teeming with Lucianic satire andapocryphal rendition, is redolent of its own nature as a migratory and transna-tional commodity. Many printers, working side by side with Venice’s merchantand diplomatic nation, often themselves immigrant, stamped onto it a dimen-sion of urban paranoia, stageable spatiality, and epic anxiety – an original andself-disclosing ‘public sphere’ whose contact zones may be best described as

50 K. CHRISTIANSEN, The Case for Mantegna as Printmaker, «The Burlington Magazine»,CXXXV, 1993, pp. 604-612, defends the importance of Alberti’s De pictura for Mantegna’s in-ventions and describes an early market of aficionados seeking to possess his prints. On this issuesee P. PARSHALL, Art and the Theater of Knowledge: The Origins of Print Collecting in NorthernEurope, «Harvard University Art Museum Bulletin», II, 1994, pp. 7-36; in general, on the laws ofvision, cf. M. KEMP, The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seu-rat, New Haven - London, Yale University Press, 1990.

51 Cf. J.T. SNOW, Historia de la Recepción de Celestina, «Celestinesca», XXV, 2001, pp. 199-282, and N. RIZZI, La Veniexiana: un nuovo esempio di letteratura celestinesca?, «Italica», LXXX,2003, pp. 147-165.

52 G. BENNINGTON, Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation, in Nation and Narration,ed. H. Bhabha, New York, Routledge, 1990, p. 129.

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colportage noir53. A shipment of books, made by Luis de Padilla, an entrepreneurof Seville, to New Spain in 1600 showed one significant entry on a smaller listof neo-Latin literature, including Petrarch, Alciato, Erasmus, and Poliziano: «Lasmacarroneas de Marlin Cocay [sic]»54. If the clerks who prepared this inventory,as Otis Green and Irving Leonard observed, «show unusual intelligence, gen-uine culture, and something of the interests of the bibliophile»55, a sixteenth-century reading of Folengo in the Indies deepens the geopolitics of furthermacaronic allusions within the Spanish empire by the playwright Lope de Vega.

Lope refers to Folengo in a letter to Francisco Herrera Maldonado, a trans-lator of Lucian, and displays a more extensive reworking of a Lucianic episodein the Baldus in his mock-epic Gatomaquia (VII 130-144). Lope’s satiricalcoinage, in his Laurel de Apolo, of the term merlinizar, or ‘to be like MerlinCocai’, is echoed by Francisco de Quevedo’s use of merlincocaizar, intended asa send-up of the hyperbolic lexicon of the Cultismo of Spain56. The Iberian blendof satire and Erasmian polemics that I briefly mentioned here, to which oneshould at least add the sulphuric description of the college of San Miguel as abrothel penned by Francisco Pacheco, follows Folengo’s Baldus, both in the out-line of events and in the particulars of style, as a true specimen of Lucian’s comicfiction. This emphasis is not foreign to the Venetian press. The Lucianic charac-ter, in fact, is carefully signaled throughout the 1521 cycle of woodcuts. A fail-ure to recognize it stands at a grave disadvantage for a correct historicizing of thepicaresque roots in Folengo, who is, at his most flamboyant, a ‘Menippean’ au-

53 The situation I am describing is informed by the anti-essentialist views of early modern iden-tity by scholars such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, who see nations as socially con-structed, or «imagined communities»; cf. the survey of amphibian merchant nations in the East byE. DURSTELER, Venetians in Constantinople. Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early ModernMediterranean, Baltimore - London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. The figure of the ped-dler/musician variously fictionalized in Folengo’s Baldus through the characters of Serafo, Giu-berto, Zoppino, and Cingar himself mobilizes an urban underworld of charlatans, mountebanks,medicine men, and salesmen whose very existence is tipping over into the ‘timeless’ discourse ofthe wares. In Michel de Certeau’s distinction between place and space, a book peddler would carrysomething surprising or attractive compared with the usual choices. This way, macaronic design isassociated with a certain degree of cultural diaspora (an observation implicit in the anthropologi-cal coupling of exile, blame, and errance in M. SCALABRINI, L’incarnazione del macaronico, cit.,pp. 64-82). This extrication of submerged habits and somatic content eerily resonates with Braudel’svision of a «marine fishing» as an apt metaphor to describe the white noise of early modern capi-talism (F. BRAUDEL, La dinamica del capitalismo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1977). By looking at indus-trial clusters and the submerged hubbub of printing, we could find a key to access the ephemeralitythat would have surrounded Folengo’s macaronic design as one of the celebrated monuments of theVenetian press.

54 See O.H. GREEN and I. LEONARD, On the Mexican Booktrade in 1600: A Chapter in CulturalHistory, «Hispanic Review», IX, 1941, pp. 1-40: 20.

55 Ivi, p. 2.56 Cf. E. MELE, Lope de Vega, Merlin Cocai e Luciano, «Giornale storico della letteratura ital-

iana», CXII, 1938, pp. 323-332, and J.P. WICKERSHAM CRAWFORD, Teofilo Folengo’s Moschaea andJosé de Villaviciosa’s La Mosquea, «PMLA», XXVII, 1912, pp. 76-97.


1. Teofilo Folengo, frontispiece of the Baldus in Castilian (Seville, Dominico de Rober-tis, 1542), The Newberry Library, Chicago (Photo of the author).

178 Stefano Gulizia

2. Girolamo Romanino (ca. 1485-ca. 1566), Two Soldiers (detail of fresco cycle), 1536-1537, Breno, S. Antonio (Photo: © Musei Civici di Brescia).


3. Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489-1534), Allegory of Vices, ca. 1528-1530, oil oncanvas, 89 x 142 in, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France (Photo: © The Trustees of the Lou-vre).

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4. Poggio Bracciolini, frontispiece of the Facetiae (Venice, Cesare Arrivabene, 1519),The Newberry Library, Chicago (Photo of the author).


5. Folengo, page with marginalia from the Paganini edition of the Baldus (Photo of theauthor).

182 Stefano Gulizia

6. Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1510-1592), Beheading of St. John the Baptist, ca. 1550, oil oncanvas, 132 x 127 cm, State Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (Photo: © Alinari/Art Re-source, NY).


7. Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1510-1592), Pastoral Scene, ca. 1560, oil on canvas, 139 x 129cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain (Photo: © Alinari/Art Resource, NY).

184 Stefano Gulizia

8. Folengo, two woodcuts of the Toscolanense edition of the Baldus (= T) (Photo of theauthor).


9. Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1465-1525), Dream of St. Ursula, ca. 1495, tempera on canvas,274 x 267 cm, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy (Photo: © Scala/Art Resource,NY), with two woodcuts T (Photo of the author).

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10. Folengo, woodcut T (Photo of the author).


11. Folengo, woodcut T (Photo of the author).

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12. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Nativity, 1504, engraving, 183 x 120 mm, State Mu-seum, Berlin, Germany (Photo: © Alinari/Art Resource, NY).


13. Folengo, two woodcuts T (Photo of the author).

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14. Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594), Christ Washing His Disciples’ Feet, ca. 1547-1549,oil on canvas, 210 x 533 cm, Museo del Prado (on loan from El Escorial), Madrid, Spain(Photo: © The Trustees of the Prado), with a woodcut from Sebastiano Serlio, I settelibri dell’architettura (Paris, 1545), f. 69, The Newberry Library, Chicago (Photo of theauthor).


15. Andrea Mantegna (ca. 1431-1506), The Flagellation, ca. 1465-1470, engraving, 44x 34 cm, The Courtauld Gallery, London, England (Photo: © The Samuel CourtauldTrust), with two woodcuts T (Photo of the author).

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16. Colportage of the sixteenth-century: a. Lucian, La vera historia, s.d., Biblioteca Mar-ciana, Venice, Italy (Photo of the author); b. An., La lozana andaluza, 1531, s.n., Biblio-teca Marciana, Venice, Italy (Photo of the author).


thor and is emphatically understood as such in Venice’s book trade57. To limit my-self to only one conspicuous example, it is worth noting that the black illustratedcaravel put in motion in various woodcuts of the second half of Baldus is verysimilar to a vessel accompanying some printed Venetian editions of Lucian, andparticularly the frontispiece of Nicolò da Lonigo’s Italian translation of Lucian’sVera Historia (fig. 16a), which also shares with the macaronic blocks the depic-tion of a strange sea monster58.

Available in the forms or perhaps technologies of the fictitious colportage,with the comic knight-errant of the romance or the pastoral shepherdess, as wellas through the gestures of the pamphleteers fetishising the mundane and the cu-rious, Lucianic distance became an attribute of elite audiences. Preambulatorymatters also became most ambulatory. These bearings fit, in important respects,the extraordinary journey of both Folengo and Francisco Delicado, a wanderingJewish converso who fled Rome after the Sack of 1527 and settled in Veniceworking as a peddler and proof-editor. Delicado’s Retrato de la Loçana An-daluza, an underground proto-picaresque novel, was first published anonymouslyin 153059.

Loçana was dealing with the secondhand, the argot of a passing but lamentedmoment in history, the ‘always already’. Verisimilitude lent itself to parody andmanipulation; utopias and dystopias to colportage. At issue here is not only thetransnationality of romance, but the possibility of constructing a cultural poet-ics of woodcutting no less than a cultural poetics of gender, sexuality, and na-tionhood. Hand and woodcut, that is to say, are both conspicuous parts of thewhole of actions in the printing house that involve sets of muscles and blocks.The literal building block in Loçana is what Delicado calls mamotreto, an ob-scure sixteenth-century Castilian word referring either to a hefty object, like aprinted volume, or to a disproportioned child. Such uneven origin, for folklorictraditions at least, would be the ‘bastard’ parenting of old grandmothers: a fittingproposition for a novel that is said to have been conflated with leftovers of Ce-lestina. As Carla Perugini showed, the illustrations of the 1530 Loçana are also,for the most part, leftovers of the existing book trade. It just so happens that thefiguration of a marine monster in the novel (fig. 16b) would coincide with the

57 On Menippean satire in early modern Europe see the detailed survey of M.O. ZAPPALA, Lu-cian of Samosata in the Two Hesperias, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1990; for an in-terdisciplinary and theoretical approach see also R. BRACHT BRANHAM, Bakhtin and the Classics,Chicago, Northwestern University Press, 2002.

58 Cf. E. MATTIOLI, Luciano e l’Umanesimo, Rome, Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, 1980,and D. MARSH, Lucian and the Latins. Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance, Ann Arbor,University of Michigan Press, 1998.

59 While C. WOLFENZON, La Lozana Andaluza: judaísmo, sífilis, exilio y creación, «Hispanic Re-search Journal», VIII, 2007, pp. 107-122, presents updated assessments of this fascinating novel,the researches of L. BEBERFALL, Some Italian Influence in Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza, «His-pania», XLIX, 1966, pp. 828-830, and A. PALLOTTA, Venetian Printers and Spanish Literature inSixteenth-Century Italy, «Comparative Literature», XLIII, 1991, pp. 20-42, offer a first introduc-tion to the city networks surrounding its composition and dissemination.

194 Stefano Gulizia

matrix of the same creature that we saw at play in Lucian’s Vera Historia and inthe cycle of woodcuts for Baldus60.

Delicado and Folengo are altogether typical of early modern authorities in ac-cepting not only a synonymy of writing and graphic marks on a planar surfacebut the phenomenological relationship both enjoy with the somatic experience.The Loçana of 1530 is a particular print turning into a public text, attending tothe supposed brutalities of two early modern regimes incisively underlined byJonathan Goldberg: the demands of «reason» and «custom», the muting of themarketplace61. Less his philosophy of writing than a manual on the practicalitiesof penmanship, Loçana was, perhaps, Delicado’s earnest and most analytical as-semblage of techniques and specimens he encountered as a proof-editor amongfellow bookmen in his sojourn in Venice. As Bruce Smith noted, Erasmus’ Latinrhetoric set voice and hand into eloquent alignment: «habet enim singulorum utvox, ita manus quoque quiddam suum ac peculiare» (De recta pronuntiatione I4, 34)62. The printing house prized something unique as a criterion of good edi-torial policy as much as neatness or correctness. Woodcutting, moreover, is thehandwriting of the press room. Once Delicado himself supervised the metonymyof voice and mere sound for the ‘word’ in Loçana, he also attended to a slippageof dystopia and colportage in its edition. Speech was (re)printed as a wonder vil-ified. Sound registered by the woodcutter’s hand is not just a selection from therepertory of sounds that made up book trading in the lagoon but a selection fromthe repertory of sounds that distinguish the underground market from all otherreading markets. Hands and woodcuts can also function as sites of recalling, asa way to remember.

An important aspect of my survey of Folengo’s sixteenth-century afterlifehas to do with the promotion of macaronic culture as a comprehensive discoursethat is not limited to the strictly linguistic or to the eccentric connotations of itsexperimenting. The material features of Venice as a physical space, a sense ofcontinuum of its closely-knit communities, allowing few gaps among houses andembankments, have been a privileged form of social experience mirrored byFolengo’s career in print. In Venice, editorial policies reflect the reality of socialconversations unfolding in specific urban areas or neighborhoods. In its capital-istic iteration, the Venetian ragionamento, meaning ‘talk’ but also referring to agenre of dialogue in print, works both as a finished commodity and as a meansof production. Another, more ecological or environmental aspect of my researchhinges on the identification of urban areas and clusters that stratify both maca-ronic performance in print and its public making, problematizing from the per-

60 C. PERUGINI, Le fonti iconografiche della editio princeps de La Lozana Andaluza, «AISPI -Centro Virtual Cervantes», s.n., 2000, pp. 31-44.

61 J. GOLDBERG, Writing Matters. From the Hands of the English Renaissance, Stanford, Stan-ford University Press, 1990.

62 B.R. SMITH, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Attending to the O-Factor,Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 116-117.


spective of design, retailing, and architectural history the Habermasian premiseof free, rational conditions of abstract and formal equality. As Filippo De Vivoreminds us, commercial transactions such as the ones conducted over a bookstore«unfolded in semipublic conditions, at the entrances to shops and professionals’studios which were too small for many people to enter»63.

If early modern fiction is often the embodiment of a given environment, theimmortality of Baldus is directly proportioned to its boundlessly inclusive nature.The trend deriving from the macaronic masterpiece, extending to an area of mul-tilingual experimentation in close proximity with the historical rise of a Venetiancommedia dell’arte, could be reformulated as so many social and semiotic units.In performance as in print, it is distinctively detachable, transportable, and easyto recombine across a wide spectrum of centrifugal regionalism or, conversely,within Venice’s centripetal meandering, in that fusion of ritualistic revival andrenovatio urbis which is so typical of Andrea Gritti’s years. Following the leadof scholars like Lena Orlin, who studied doorsteps, windows, or other thresholdsas preambles of cognitive framework in drama64, my goal was partly to reor-ganize the macaronic lore by implicitly comparing a salient part of its afterlifeto a stroll in a vieux quartier, whose intransitivity is interminable enough to ac-tually make you consumptive.

Folengo’s rustic juxtapositions, ranging from Ruzante’s pastoral radiations toCalmo’s urban ‘crackling’ tales, walked a thin line between interior and exte-rior, and signaled a shift in architectural, plotting and acoustic devices that wasalso well-captured by Pietro Aretino’s comedy La Talanta in 1541. This playwas internally divided or rematerialized (that is, given a local habitation) along-side the borders of the stage and the page. Robert Weimann and Douglas Brusterhave persuasively shown how historical splits between different modes of dis-course can also be constructed as negotiation between longstanding conventionsof performance and developing ones of print and authorship65. In this light, Itried to implicitly use throughout this essay the idea of ‘macaronic traffic’, bothin relation to the marketplace and in its purely (re)presentational meaning, andto employ figures of design and de-textualization as a way to access and fore-ground this elusive subsoil of early modern culture. I would further argue that arecalibration of non-textual aspects in Folengo could reveal a great somatic con-tent and help discuss issues of gender, the footprints of voice, and the role ofembodiment in a larger anthropological framework.

63 DE VIVO, Information and Communication in Venice, cit., pp. 92-95.64 L.C. ORLIN, Women on the Threshold, «Shakespeare Studies», XXV, 2002, pp. 50-58.65 D. BRUSTER and R. WEIMANN, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre. Performance and Limi-

nality in Early Modern Drama, London, Routledge, 2004, pp. 112-114.

INDICE

MASSIMO SCALABRINI, Introduzione p. 7

ALESSANDRO POLCRI

La corada platonica di Tonello, Cupido bendato e l’uguaglianza: per la Zanitonella di Teofilo Folengo » 17

MASSIMO SCALABRINI

Contadini e mostri tra Zanitonella e Baldus » 47

ANN MULLANEY

Proposal for an Allegorical Reading of Folengo’s Baldusand Chaos del Triperuno » 59

MARCO FAINI

Il palpabile parlare: linguaggio, profezia e alchimia tra Folengo, Leonardo e Ariosto » 77

FRANCESCO MARCO ARESU

Pratiche metatestuali nel Baldus » 97

ANGELA MATILDE CAPODIVACCA

The Witch as Muse: Macaronic Fantasy and Skepticism in Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus » 121

STEFANO GULIZIA

Scaffolding Folengo: Sites, Artifacts, and the Rise of Macaronic Design in Print Culture » 153

BARBARA C. BOWEN

‘Fabulous’ Heroes: Baldus, Pantagruel, Alector » 197

Nota sugli autori » 205

Indice dei nomi » 207

Scaffolding Folengo: Sites, Artifacts, and the Rise of Macaronic Design in Print Culture

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