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The Compagnia della Cazzuola as Locus of Opposition to Medici Rule ! In his life of Jacopo Rustici, Vasari gives us a poignant, though veiled, description of his position vis-à-vis the Medici rulers of Florence by whom he was employed, con-strained, for reasons of family obligations, to play the role of courtier/painter at the court of Cosimo deí Medici, to the detriment of his own artistic ambitions: ! Giovan Francesco, besides being of a noble family, had the means to live hon ourably, and therefore practiced art more for his own delight and from desire of glory than for gain. And, to tell the truth of the matter, those craftsmen who have as their ultimate and principal end gain and profit, and not honour and glory, rarely become very excellent, even although they may have good and beautiful genius; besides which, labouring for a livelihood, as very many do who are weighed down by poverty and their families, and working not by inclination, when the mind and the will are drawn to it, but by necessity from morning till night, is a life not for men who have honour and glory as their aim, but for hacks, as they are called, and manual labourers, for the reason that good works do not get done without first having been well considered for a long time.  1

! He has become, in service to his Medici masters, a mere coverer of walls, a deco-rator. Later on in his life of Rustici, Vasari gives us another poignant description, this time that of the return of Lorenzo Naldini ("Guazzetto"), Rustici's disciple, absent in France at the court of King Francis for many years, to his native city, from which he had been exiled by the Medici regime: ! That Lorenzo possessed some houses beyond the Porta a San Gallo, in the suburbs that were destroyed on account of the siege of Florence, which houses were thrown to the ground together with the rest by the people. That circumstance so grieved him, that, returning in the year 1540 to revisit his country, when he was within a quarter of a mile of Florence he put the hood of his cloak over his head,

! Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. by 1

Gaston de Vere (London: Macmillan, 1912-1915), vol. 8, 109-129.

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covering his eyes, in order that, in entering by that gate, he might not see the sub urb and his own houses all pulled down. Wherefore the guards at the gate, seeing him thus muffled up, asked him what that meant, and, having heard from him why he had so covered his face, they laughed at him. Lorenzo, after being a few months in Florence, returned to France, taking his mother with him; and there he still lives and labours. ! Why does Vasari end his life of Rustici, in a work intended to celebrate the glori-ous return of the past grandeur of the Italian arts under the far-sighted and benevolent pa-tronage of the Medici with a story of the return from exile of one of their opponents, his grief over his lost home, and his mocking and humiliation at the hands of the Medici guards? The answer, we suggest, lies in another story told by Vasari. Near the end of the Life of Rustici, he recounts a strange, and, at first sight, inconsequential, anecdote de-scribing the lost lucco of the artist: ! For Jacopo Salviati the elder, of whom he was much the friend, he made a most beautiful medallion of marble, containing a Madonna, for the chapel in his palace above the Ponte alla Badia, and, round the courtyard, many medallions filled with figures of terra-cotta, together with many other very beautiful ornaments, which were for the most part, nay, almost all, destroyed by the soldiers in the year of the siege, when the palace was set on fire by the party hostile to the Medici. And since Giovan Francesco had a great affection for that place, he would set out at times from Florence to go there just as he was, in his lucco; and once out of the city he would throw it over his shoulder and slowly wander all by himself, lost in con templation, until he was there. One day among others, being on that road, and the day being hot, he hid the lucco in a thicket of thorn-bushes, and, having reached the palace, had been there two days before he remembered it. In the end, sending his man to look for it, when he saw that he had found it he said: "The world is too good to last long.” ! Vasari seems to be hinting here that another meaning lies hidden beneath this ap-parently trivial anecdote, and discretely urging the reader to seek it out. What is this truth? The answer lies, we suggest, in the symbolic meaning of the lost lucco. The lucco

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was, for Florentines of the late 15th century, a symbol of the voluntary simplicity and self-abnegation in service of the state characteristic of the Florentine republic, which, as historians have noted, was adopted by the Medici as a sign of their allegiance to this tra-ditional set of values as they consolidated their hold over Florentine political life. Rustici's loss and recovery of it on his way out of the city to his villa in the hills can only, in our view, be a symbol of the loss and recovery of Florence's past as a repub-lic free of Medici rule. Vasari had already described Rustici at the beginning of the Life, where he re-counts his artistic training under Leonardo, as being, while no lover of the republican regime which replaced Medici rule after 1494, also "no friend of the Medici regime," choosing to live quietly in his house on a modest income sufficient for his needs, produc-ing the occasional work of art as it suited him. Taken together with Vasari's own veiled portrait of himself as a mere painter of walls for the Medici and the hints he leaves for the reader in the stories of Naldini's return home and the lost lucco, the conclusion seems inescapable that the entire Life of Rustici is an encoded expression of Vasari's own discontent with the Medici regime, and his wish for the return of an earlier, and freer, form of life to the city. Vasari had already pointedly remarked that the festivities he is about to describe no longer exist in the Florence of his day, but, for this very reason, are worthy of remem-brance. Describing the foundation-moment of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, Vasari re-marks: ! The Company of the Cazzuola, which was similar to the other [the Compagnia del Paiuolo], and to which Giovan Francesco belonged, had its origin in the following manner. One evening in the year 1512 there were at supper in the garden that Feo d’Agnelo the hunchback, a fife-player and a very merry fellow, had in the Cam paccio, with Feo himself, Ser Bastiano Sagginati, Ser Raffaello del Beccaio, Ser Cecchino dei Profumi, Girolamo del Giocondo, and Il Baia, and, while they were eating their ricotta, the eyes of Baia fell on a heap of lime with the trowel sticking in it, just as the mason had left it the day before, by the side of the table in a corner of the garden. Whereupon, taking some of the lime with that trowel, or rather, ma son's trowel, he dropped it all into the mouth of Feo, who was waiting with gaping

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jaws for a great mouthful of ricotta from another of the company. Which seeing, they all began to shout: "A Trowel, a Trowel!” ! Once again, Vasari seems to be hinting at another meaning hidden beneath the sur-face of his text. In this paper, we will take Vasari's hint and attempt to decipher the strange festivities of this association. !

Tyrants Punished, the Just Rewarded !

As Tromly has noted, the plays of Seneca were extremely popular in the Renais-sance, and exerted a powerful influence on Renaissance drama.  Tromly focuses his dis2 -cussion on the myth of Tantalus, tracing its influence particularly in the dramas of Mar-lowe, where the myth is used to symbolize the fraught relations between the Elizabethan court and its courtier/intellectuals, even expressing the frustrations of Marlowe himself and his friends, highly educated and ambitious, but eternally frustrated by their inability to find employment at court. Tromly cites Levin's important work, in which this entire phenomenon is called "over-reaching." He notes the profound influence this latter work has had on Marlowe studies, making readers aware of the great importance of classical myths, and the Tantalus myth in particular, to Renaissance dramatists desiring to convey moral truths in a symbolic manner. The myth was also very popular in the visual arts of the Renaissance, where Tanta-lus' expulsion from Heaven was taken as a symbol of the arrogance and pride of the rich and powerful, from which they will be eventually cast down. For Renaissance mythogra-phers, he was the symbol of greed: !!!!!!!! Fred Tromly, Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization 2

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).

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We will examine another meaning of the Tantalus myth, one hinted at in the works of the mythographers, but not directly expressed. This is Tantalus seen, not as a symbol of greed in a general sense, but more particularly, the greed and unbridled appetites of the tyrant. This myth will be seen to be of fundamental importance to understanding the po-litical meaning inherent in the feste of the Cazzuola, where the tyrant punished, symbol-ized by Tantalus, stands at the center of their feastings, and is made to reenact, over and over again, in a ritualistic manner, the sufferings vented on the tyrant for his tyrannical behaviour, opposed in stark contrast to the food given to the participants as reward for their politically righteous behaviour. To understand this latter, political, meaning of the myth of Tantalus, we must turn to Seneca's masterpiece, the Thyestes. We will focus on two specific aspects of the play which underlie the festivities of the Cazzuola: the infernal, satanic quality of their per-formances, and the contrast between the punishment of the tyrant, symbolized by the withholding of food, and the food given to the righteous as reward for their politically ethical behaviour. This is the fundamental dyad which underlies the festivities of the Caz-zuola, where the food of the gods is given to the just in Heaven, and food is withheld from the tyrant in Hell. Both the infernal, hellish quality of their performances, centered around the giving and withholding of food, and its political meaning, all derive, then, from the Thyestes of Seneca.

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The Hellish quality appears near the beginning of the play, where Seneca gives a masterful description of the haunted glade which lies behind the royal palace.  3

Important to note here is the location of this place: directly behind the royal palace. So, from the beginning of the play, we are made aware of its political meaning: the royal palace is an infernal place, where horrible deeds are committed and ancient ha-treds avenged. This political meaning is reinforced by the philosophical intermezzi which punctu-ate the action of the play, and which express commonplaces from Stoic philosophy re-garding the proper ethical behaviour of kings, where he is abjured to forswear the pride which comes from his position, and adopt the humility and just behaviour of the simple man. Finally, the figure of Atreus himself is perhaps the most vivid image in all of clas-sical literature of the horrific and terrifying figure of the tyrant, consumed by hatred, and bent on revenge: ! When to this place maddened Atreus came, dragging his brother's sons, the altars were decked--but who could worthily describe the deed? Behind their backs he fetters the youths' princely hands and their sad brows he binds with purple fillets. Nothing is lacking, neither incense, nor sacrificial wine, the knife, the salted meal to sprinkle on the victims[. . .]Himself is priest; himself with baleful prayer chants the death-song with boisterous utterance; himself stands by the altar; himself han dles those doomed to death, sets them in order and lays hand on the knife; himself attends to all--no part of the sacred rite is left undone[. . .]As in the jungle by the Ganges river a hungry tigress wavers between two bulls, eager for each prey, but doubtful where first to set her fangs[. . .]so does cruel Atreus eye the victims doomed by his impious wrath.  4

! The reason for this is that he is haunted by the original sin of his distant forebear, Tantalus, guilty of the sin of carving up his son Pelops and serving his dismembered body

! Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, ed. and trans. John 3

Fitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 287-289.

! Ibid., Seneca’s Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer4 -sity Press, 1961), 149.

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to the gods at their feast as a stew. Tantalus' cannibalism is the reason he is thrown out of Heaven and denied the food of the gods, and, driven by the Furies, is compelled to repeat this sin over and over again, Tantalus having eaten his son Pelops, Pelops' progeny com-pelled to devour their own, their offspring compelled in turn to consume their children, in an unending cycle of violence and sacrilege destined to continue down the ages. What is important to note is that, although the mythographers hardly mention it, this original sin of cannibalism is actually, in the classical tradition, a symbol for the tyrant's devouring his own, that is, the citizens of the state. Perhaps the mythographers make scarce mention of this fact because this was the unmentionable sin of their civilization, beset as it was by tyrants of many kinds.  5

! Here it seems important to note that all four of the classical damned were, in fact, tyrants: In a patriar5 -chal and authoritarian culture, what these myths are communicating is that it is dangerous to strive too much (Icarus), to know too much (Prometheus), to want too much (Midas/Thyestes), or to try to see too far into the future (Phineas/Cassandra). The Hebrew equivalent is, of course, the story of Adam and Eve, who, as Prometheus, try to know too much, and, as Midas/Thyestes, to have too much. For this, the pun-ishing, patriarchal God banishes them from his presence. Perhaps this is the reason why myths which convey the punishment of the tyrant have to be veiled, as we have seen in our investigation of the classi-cal myth of Pelops and Thyestes, or the reason that even many modern scholars seem to be unaware of the anti-tyrannical subtext of the myths we have been discussing; they are, by their nature, subversive in that they challenge the right of absolute rulers to this absolute authority. Hence this challenge must be con-veyed in a highly oblique and encoded manner, whether in the authoritarian, patriarchal culture of Renais-sance Italy, especially in places like Florence, where one-man rule had usurped a more broad-based form of government, or the similarly authoritarian cultures of the classical Mediterranean world. To cite only one example of this extremely oblique encoding of challenges to authority in classical mythology, the hidden meaning of the myth of Jason’s stealing of the golden fleece is that it is a symbolic representation of the overthrow by a tyrant of a democratic form of government, as a reference in Seneca’s Thyestes makes clear, when the playwright describes the deepest and darkest part of the hidden grove, located im-mediately behind the royal palace described above, where the fleece was hung as a trophy of the con-quests of the House of Pelops, together with Pelops’ Phrygian hat, the latter being a common symbol of freedom in both classical times and the Renaissance (Thyestes, ed. Fitch, Act 2). The passage is worth quoting in full: “Behind these public rooms, where whole peoples pay court, the wealthy house goes back a great distance. At the farthest and lowest remove there lies a secret area that confines an age-old wood-land in a deep vale—the inner sanctum of the realm. There are no trees here such as stretch out healthy branches and are tended with the knife, but yews and cypresses and a darkly stirring thicket of black ilex, above which a towering oak looks down from its height and masters the grove. Tantalid kings regularly inaugurate their reigns here, and seek help here in disasters and dilemmas. Here votive gifts are fastened: hanging up are bruiting trumpets and wrecked chariots, spoils from the Myrtoan Sea, wheels defeated be-cause of rigged axles, and all the exploits of the clan” (Thyestes, ed. Fitch, Act 4). In regard to hidden meanings in works of classical literature, we might also cite Apuleius’ address to the reader at the begin-ning of his Golden Ass: “Lector intende; laetarberis,” which can be roughly translated as: “Reader, pay close attention: you’re going to enjoy this,” the textual equivalent of a wink and a nod, where the author seems to be saying: “there is something here which is delightful, but dangerous, and so I have to encode it in very oblique terms; to understand this delightful but dangerous message, you will have to pay very close attention.” Compare Strauss’ brilliant discussion of the recourse to highly cryptic modes of commu-nication on the part of writers in authoritarian societies cited above in Chapter 1.

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This image of cannibalism as symbol of tyrannical behaviour is also encountered in classical art and literature in the figure of Saturn, devourer of his own children, as Panofsky has pointed out.  It also appears in Dante's Inferno, where the tyrant Ugolino, 6

driven by hunger, is forced to eat his own children, "brancolando tre giorni sopra le loro corpi," and reaches its final, most horrifying visualization in the figure of Satan, placed under the traitors, frozen in Hell, bereft of the life-giving warmth of the most important of the Christian virtues, love, and eternally compelled to devour his own progeny, the tyrants, in a perverted inversion of the life-giving and generative power of Christian love. Once understood as the symbol of the tyrant, the hidden meaning of the festivities of the Cazzuola may be understood: they reenact, over and over, this deriving of food, the punishment of the tyrant for his cannibalistic devouring of his own children, as opposed to the rewarding of Heavenly food to the just for their faithful adherence to the political virtue of the republican cause. All the other festivities described by Vasari center also around the theme of the tyrant punished for his sins: Jupiter, who reveals the sinful embrace of Mars and Venus for all to see; the lustful and angry Pluto who carries off the chaste Prosperina (whose ab-duction was also tied to the Tantalus myth, since, distracted by grief over her missing daughter, Ceres ate the shoulder of Pelops, which was then replaced by an ivory prosthe-sis). Even the Harpies, God's avengers (whose name derives from the Greek word "to snatch" and who torment King Phineas for his sin of blinding his children) appear in the Renaissance dramas associated with the Cazzuola, where they have an explicitly political meaning. Given this fact, it seems very likely that we may imagine a scene of Phineas tormented by the Harpies, who snatch his food, followed by an enactment of the Tantalus story by the members of the Cazzuola, and after this scene, a heavenly feast given to the members as a reward for their politically virtuous behaviour. Vasari hints at this when he remarks that Francesco and Domenico Rucellai, in their turn as masters of the company, performed a play called “le Arpie di Fineo,” and that Giovanni Gaddi, with the help of Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea del Sarto and Rustici himself, presented a performance of a “Tantalus in Hell,” at which all the members of the company, attired in the dress of the gods, were given a lavish feast. He pointedly concludes his account of this festa by re-

! Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in 6

the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964).

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marking "with all the rest of the fable, to recount which would make our story too long," hinting, just as he did earlier in the life of Rustici, that the reader should consider very carefully what has been left out. What has been left out, as we know from classical mythology, is the punishment of Tantalus for his sins.  7

We see just this scenario of punishment followed by reward in another of the feste described by Vasari, where, after being forced to eat the horrific food of Pluto (the classi-cal symbol of the tyrant, as noted above) and listen to the screams of the damned, the ta-bles are removed, beautiful music is heard, there is a short pause (one may imagine here Orpheus strumming his lyre, which had the power to soothe the sufferings of the damned), a play is performed, and the members are led to an upstairs room to enjoy a de-licious feast. Once again, as in the enactment of the Tantalus myth, we observe the contrast of infernal feasting with heavenly banqueting. In the feste of the Cazzuola, this heavenly feasting of the just is accompanied, sig-nificantly, with pageants associated with the religious traditions of republican Florence, which Vasari calls "nuvole" and describes in detail in his life of Aristotile da San Gallo. Many of the members of the Cazzuola were from the working or middle classes, a group whose exclusion from any participation in the political life of the new regime was an ex-plicit feature of Medici policy, whose roots date back to the Revolt of the Ciompi in 1378, which left a profound fear and distrust of these classes in the minds of the ottimati, leading to profound changes in the structure and functioning of the Florentine republic, and beginning its gradual conversion into an oligarchy run by a few powerful families, and, later, the Medici with their system of clientage and patronage, "friends" and favors. Under the new regime these members would have enjoyed this return of Savonarolan and republican pageantry, now forbidden in the Medici-controlled world above, where, as Shearman has pointed out, they replaced the ceremonial carri of the guilds with chariots designed to celebrate Medicean hegemony over Tuscany; Leo burned the carri dei mercatanti upon his election to the Papacy on 24 April, 1513, replacing them

! One classical source which provides a vivid depiction of the punishment of the tyrant 7

for his sins which would have been well-known to educated Florentines of the early 1500s is Lucian’s , which went through many editions, starting with the first in

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with new ones; significantly, these Medicean chariots were themselves burned upon the brief restoration of the republic in 1527.  8

This conversion of the carts of the guilds into chariots celebrating Medici power parallels the gradual infiltration, neutralization, and conversion of the academies de-scribed above into organs of the Medicean state.  9

Vasari alludes to these popular Florentine religious traditions in several veiled al-lusions to earlier celebrations of Florentine religious life, particularly those festivals asso-ciated with the followers of Savonarola. He notes that, following the festa of , the cele-bration was brought to a sudden close by a shower of rain. We noted above the presence of spectacles called nuvole in Vasari’s Life of Aristotle di San Gallo. The shower of rain which brings to a sudden conclusion the described by Vasari might also be, we would suggest, a reference to this same tradition, here also intended to symbolize divine inter-vention. Brucker reproduces an image of this spectacle in his book on Florentine public life, where, as we see in FIG. X, an azure cloth which was along the to symbolize Heaven has pointed out. Cummings, in his book on Medici festivals, also mentions this feature of Florentine popular religious festivities. What makes these specifically Savonarolan references is that the trial by fire of Savonarola and his followers on , intended to settle the question of the the Friar’s authori-ty over Florentine religious life, was interrupted, as noted by a contemporary chronicler, by a sudden shower of rain. This was interpreted by contemporary Florentines as a sign of divine intervention, as Gareffi has pointed out, for the followers of Savonarola, a pro-pitious one, for his opponents, an example of a canny use of religion to evade a public spectacle which would have been damaging to the reputation of the Friar. Hence we would suggest Vasari might have included this detail as a clue, analogous to his passing reference to the Gates of Paradise and the Threshing Floor mentioned below, to the essen-tially Savonarolan nature of this festa, in which, as we suggested above, the punishment

! John Shearman, Andrea del Sarto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 316-317.8

! For a fascinating account of the conversion of the non-conforming Accademia degli 9

Umidi into the Accademia Fiorentina, see Inge Werner, “The Heritage of the Umidi: Per-formative Poetry in the Early Accademia Fiorentina,” in The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Arjan van Dixhoorn, Susie Speakman Sutch, (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 257-284.

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of Pluto for his rape of Proserpina is meant to allude to the Christian equivalent, the pun-ishment of the tyrant in Hell. In a remarkable passage describing one of the feste of the Compagnia del Paiuolo (a more restricted version of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, with which it shared several members, founded, as noted above, along with the Cazzuola in the fall of 1512), Vasari describes the ceremonial presentation of a replica of San Giovanni, made entirely of ma-terials to be eaten: ! Andrea del Sarto presented an octagonal temple similar to that of S. Giovanni, but raised upon columns. The pavement was a vast plate of jelly, with a pattern of mo saic in various colours; the columns, which had the appearance of porphyry, were sausages, long and thick; the socles and capitals were of Parmesan cheese; the cornices of sugar, and the tribune was made of sections of marchpane. In the cen ter was a choir-desk made of cold veal, with a book of lasagne that had the letters and notes of the music made of pepper- corns; and the singers at the desk were cooked thrushes standing with their beaks open and with certain little shirts after the manner of surplices, made of fine cauls of pigs, and behind them, for the bass es, were two fat young pigeons, with six ortolans that sang the soprano. ! This raising of the old San Giovanni—cherished symbol of communal Florence, dating to the eleventh century—on columns of porphyry would seem to be a symbol of its refoundation, or re-elevation by the members of the company, who recall and cherish its sacred character as a symbol of a free Florentine republic. In this interpretation, the con-sumption of this holy edifice by the members of the company would take on the quality of an almost sacred rite. Later in the Life of Rustici, Vasari notes that the first meeting of the Cazzuola took place at Santa Maria Nuova at a place called the Aia, “where the gates of S. Giovanni were cast in bronze,” Aia meaning threshing-floor, the place of God’s final judgment, where the good are separated from the damned forever, the ones destined for Heaven, the others for Hell. In our view, these details, just as the columns which support del Sarto’s

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San Giovanni, are not merely gratuitous, but represent another of those hints to the reader to look beneath the surface of the text for its hidden religious and political meaning.  10

! We would also suggest that even the games with which the members of the Compagnia della 10

Cazzuola entertained themselves may have encoded political messages directed against the Medici regime. For example, Vasari describes the first entertainment given by the company as a kind of “dress party,” in which participants were required to don costumes representative of vari-ous professions, and to sit at a table. This would seem to be an allusion to a popular Renaissance game, often played at banquets or other convivial gatherings, called “mestieri,” or professions. What is significant for a political interpretation of the festive entertainments of the Compagnia della Cazzuola is that Vasari explicitly mentions that the costumes donned by the members of the company on this occasion represented various social classes of Renaissance Florence: Perhaps the soci of the anti-authoritarian and anti-medicean Compagnia della Cazzuola, before enjoying the meal set before them, played a kind of “musical chairs,” in which, in a kind of competition for the best place at the table, members reenacted an overturning of social roles, and those cos-tumed as beggars and minstrels (not to mention those members of the working and middle class-es who made up the majority of the company) were able to usurp the seats traditionally reserved for the privileged at the head of the table. Vasari’s (in our view, deliberately allusive and obscure) description of the animals kept by Rustici as pets, and which he used to entertain his guests (a porcupine, a raven, an eagle and a fishpond of snakes), and whose meaning we describe below, would represent, then,a game called enigma, in which the members challenged each other to guess the meaning of an emblem. For a fascinating recent study of the use of games to express, in an allusive way, opposition to contemporary political events, see Rosaria Iounes-Vona, “Le Carnaval des énigmes dans Le piacevoli notti de Giovan Francesco Straparola (Venise, 1550-1553),” in Le Verger: La fête à la Renaissance, ed. Marie Goupil-Lucas-Fontaine, Nahéma Khattabi et Adeline Lionetto (Fall 2014) available online at: http://cornucopia16.com/blog/2014/11/30/rosaria-iounes-vona-le-carnaval-des-enigmes-dans-le-piacevoli-notti-de-giovan-francesco-straparola-venise-1550-1553/. For games containing hidden political meanings in Re-naissance Italy, see also Le tredici piaceuolissime notti di M. Gio. Francesco Straparola da Car-avaggio: diuise in due libri: nuouamente di bellissime figure adornate& appropriate a ciascheduna fauola: con la tauola di tutto quello, che in esse si contengono (Venice: Zanetti, 1608), Andrea Calmo, I piacevoli et ingeniosi discorsi in piv lettere compresi, è ne la lingua an-tica uolgari dechiariti. Ne i qvali se contengono varij cherebizzi, e fantastiche fantasie philo-sophiche in uarie materie, pur sempre à le uertu accostate, per messer Andrea Calmo (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1547), Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell'imprese militari et amorose, di monsignor Giovio vescouo di Nocera. Con vn ragionamento di messer Lodouico Domenichi, nel medesimo soggetto (Lyon: Roviglio, 1559), and Marcus Marulus (Marko Marulić), Quinquaginta Parabole. G.L., (Venice: Industria francisci lucensis ... in edib. Petri Liechtenstein, 1517; Publisher: Idem, per Laurentiū de Rosis Teruisinum, [ca. 1520]). Interestingly, the Croatian humanist wrote two plays, a Susana and a Iudit, both of which take as their subject the same abuse of a heroic woman

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Another of the spectacles enacted by members of the Compagnia del Paiuolo also dealt with this same theme of renewal, this time, taken not from the Christian, but rather the classical tradition. For his contribution to one of their feste, Rustici presented a caul-dron in the form of a pie, in which Ulysses was dipping his father to make him young again, the figures being fashioned of boiled capons, with various other good things to eat. In this creation, we note again the presence of a cauldron, this time a place of rebirth and renewal, in stark contrast to the infernal cauldron in which Tantalus boiled his son Pelops and served his body to the gods as a test of their omniscience, a sin for which he was thrown out of Heaven. We would suggest that the canzone della Cazzuola, sung, perhaps, at the Carnival festivities of X of 1513 to celebrate the restoration of the Medici to rule in the city, also contains an encrypted message directed against the Medici: ! The reference to a certain “Casa,” full of “pecchie e calabroni,” in urgent need of restoration by certain “valenti muratori,” the which task is impossible, owing to the im-possibility of putting new bricks next to old mortar, is, we would suggest, a reference to the House of Medici (note the capitalization of the initial letter of the word), full of “scorpions and spiders,” and thus uninhabitable, a reference to the Biblical phrase “my House has become the habitation of scorpions and spiders” from the Book of Jeremiah, used often by Savonarola in his sermons to denounce the rule of the Medici as incapable of salvation and in imminent danger of Divine Judgment. The phrase “valenti muratori,” in this interpretation, would be the members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola themselves, who will construct, upon the ruins of the old house of Medici, a new and splendid edifice, constructed, unlike the ugly “bricks and mortar” of the palace on the via Larga, rather of shining marble, akin to that of the new Temple of Jerusalem which will replace it. To those who might argue that the rule of the Medici in Florence is still capable of modification (a view perhaps best embodied in the numerous proposals elicited from various individuals (deliberately, according to Varchi) by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici upon his imminent election as pope, in a highly astute ma-neuver to throw a sop to those more moderate opponents of the Medici among the middle and upper classes who might, should the new rule be too harsh, be tempted to oppose it, thus enacting a brilliant example of the classic move of “dividing the opposition,” as well as a means of “smoking out” those potential opponents of the upcoming new regime) this

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cryptic phrase would provide an answer, in its allusion to the impossibility of “putting new stone against old bricks,” that is, of making any compromise with the old Medici regime. The only alternative is to destroy the old edifice completely before embarking upon the task of constructing a new and better one upon its foundations. Such a task the new generation of patriots (the “forti e valenti muratori”) are more than willing and capa-ble of accomplishing. As Mozzati has noted, every element of this song finds an exact parallel in the elaborate ceremony of the feast of : first, the constructing and then the pulling down of an old edifice, followed by the carrying in and eating of a column, built, not of brick, but rather of shining new marble, symbol, we would suggest, of the old Bap-tistry, cherished symbol of communal Florence, in front of which stood precisely such a column. In this interpretation, the eating of such a column by members of the company would take on the quality of an almost sacred act. Just as in the feste of the Cazzuola, in those of the Paiuolo, we observe the same combination of religious themes and celebratory feasting; the only element missing from Vasari’s description of the feste of the Paiuolo present at the feasts of the Cazzuola being the infernal, nocturnal aspect of suffering and punishment. However, in the last section of this chapter, we will see that there is a hint of this subject also in the feasts of this compa-ny. The prehistory of the strange celebrations of the Cazzuola would be those popular associations associated with specific neighborhoods and trades described by Villani, in which religious and purely festive activities were combined, particularly active at the Feast of San Giovanni, and which Gori, in his study of Florentine popular feste, says were called potenze. Another feature of these early associations which finds a later expression in the ceremonies of the Cazzuola was the free mixing of popular and upper classes in their celebrations.  11

It is also interesting to note that many of Machiavelli's canti carnascialeschi may have served as the texts to the music which accompanied the feste of the Cazzuola, and that the founding "charter" of the Compagnia may have been Machiavelli's Capitoli per

! Pietro Gori, Chapter XXII, “Le potenze, o signorie, festeggianti,” in Le feste fiorentine 11

attraverso i secoli: Le Feste per San Giovanni (Florence: Bemporad, 1926), 287-323. In his edition of the Thyestes, Fitch notes several other plays performed on the same theme in imperial Rome, each intended as an oblique critique of imperial power, for which sev-eral of their authors met either exile or death.

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una compagnia di piacere, in which all the rigid rules and elaborate hierarchies of the Medicean academies are completely overturned, and a kind of happy chaos rules, where women dominate men, members hurl scabrous insults at each other, and a kind of bacchic and Rabelesian chaos rules. Machiavelli's Canzone degli amanti disperati may have been the text for the music of the infernal feast of Pluto just described, where the screams of the damned, suffering the torments of illicit love, are heard, together with his canto of Pluto and Proserpina; his canto of Marte e Venere possibly the text accompanying the un-veiling and punishment of Mars described by Vasari; and his Canzone dei romiti recited or sung at the last meeting of the Cazzuola before the reduction of their activities into an annual event, where, according to Vasari's account, Saint Andrew himself appears and rebukes the members for their profligacy, warning them that they were going to end up in the hospital if they continued in this manner, which, taken together with its warning that the citizens of Florence flee the coming conflagration by fleeing into the hills, would seem to be an encoded warning to the members that their activities had been found out,

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and that they had better get out of town if they didn't want to wind up in the hospital, that is, subject to Medici reprisals.  12

! An interesting side-note to Machiavelli’s Canzone dei romiti is that it was very likely 12

intended as a response to the use on the part of the Medici of news of impending disas-ters, whether natural or man-made (in this case, an upcoming flood due to a particular as-trological conjunction in the sign of Pisces) by the religious and secular authorities of Renaissance Italy to provoke fear in the common people, and thus make them more likely to rely on the security of established institutions, and to forgo any potentially destabiliz-ing challenges to authority in uncertain times. Niccoli gives several fascinating examples of this process, and also describes the resistance to this fear-mongering on the part of op-ponents of the Medici and the Empire in the middle decades of the cinquecento. She also notes that the Medici Popes Leo and Clement in particular employed astrologers in this way, and recounts a hilarious anecdote in which the governor of Modena, Luigi Guicciar-dini and its podestà, Paulo di Brunori were accosted on the street by two masked “as-trologers,” are forced to observe the “astrologization” of the posterior of one of these in-dividuals by the other, an example, as Niccoli notes, of popular and local resistance to perceived Medici meddling in the city’s internal affairs ((Niccoli 165). These prognostici of doom were spread among the common people by means of small, inexpensive pam-phlets called fogli volanti, an important documentary source often overlooked by histori-ans, and described in detail below. A recent article, cited below, also discusses Ariosto’s use of the character of an astrologer in his Negromante, intended as an oblique reference to Leo and his manipulation of gullible citizens to achieve his ends. Agostino Nifo’s De falsa diluvii prognosticatione: quæ ex conventu o[mn]i[u]m planetar[um], qui in piscibus continget anno 1524 divulgata est, published in Gemany in 1520 without date or name of publisher, is also, presumably, a response to this same use by Leo of astrology to manipu-late public opinion. The fact that the work was published in Germany, and, even then, without date or publisher’s name is undoubtedly an indication of the highly controversial nature of the work, and the dangers inherent in “calling out” a sitting Pope on his use of devious means to manipulate public opinion, thus, in Gentile’s words “laying bare his se-cret counsels,” similar to the risk undertaken by Ariosto in his Negromante, leading to the non-performance of the play described by Portner. Nifo was a Neapolitan scholar and one of the foremost authorities on the work of Aristotle of the cinquecento. For an excellent general discussion of the use of prophecies for political ends in cinquecento Italy, see Ot-tavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, tr. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 140-167). For the non-performance of the Negromante, see I. A. Portner, “A Non-Performance of Il Negromante,” Italica, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter1982), 316-329.

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Hence, in all the various of their festivities, the members would have been treated to an image of the tyrant punished and the just (themselves) rewarded for their virtuous behaviour, which, because it is in contrast to that of the tyrant, can only be political in na-ture. This is the meaning encoded in what at first sight appear to be the merely bizarre and eccentric festivities of the Compagnia, whose description by Vasari is, we suggest, deliberately obscure, intended to conceal but also simultaneously to hint at the artist's own sympathies with the activities of this group as a locus of secret opposition to Medici rule, constrained as he was by family obligations to play the part of faithful servant to his Medici masters, all the while harbouring a secret, but profound, sympathy and nostalgia for the values and institutions of the vanished Florentine republic.  13

The bizarre, highly symbolic, anti-medicean feste of the Cazzuola should be placed in the context of other similar entertainments in Renaissance Florence. Mozzati cites a feast given by the Soderini family at the end of the quattrocento, in which banners with the word "Libertas" were prominently displayed, and birds (perhaps also symbolic of Florentine freedom) flew out of a cake.  Domenico Zanré, in his study of the non- 14

conformist Accademia del Piano describes a bizarre nighttime ritual in the house of the Panciatichi family in which the pro-medicean archbishop of Pisa received a kind of posthumus exorcism and a bat flew out of his head.  Butters describes a nighttime feast 15

given by one of the families of anti-medicean ottimati in early 1519 in which the room was draped in black, the arms of the city were displayed upside-down, and weeping

! Further support for our hypothesis that the Compagnia della Cazzuola represented a 13

locus of covert opposition to Medici rule comes from another source. If we examine the list of members given by Vasari, a striking pattern emerges: the vast majority of the ones which can be identified represent individuals opposed, in one way or another, to the Medici regime:

! Tommaso Mozzati, Gianfrancesco Rustici: le compagnie del Paiuolo e della Cazzuola; arte, 14

letteratura, festa nell’età della maniera (Florence: Olschki, 2008). Mozzati offers an entirely dif-ferent interpretation of the activities of the Cazzuola, where the compagnia is seen as furthering the consolidation of the newly-restored Medici regime in Florence.

! Domenico Zanré, “Ritual and Parody in Mid-Cinquecento Florence: Cosimo de’ Medici and 15

the Accademia del Piano,” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 189-204 (pp. 193-194).

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women were painted above the motto "Liberty ground under foot." The organizer of this festa was arrested, tortured, and consigned to the galleys.  16

Phyllis Pray Bober has traced these strange festivities, in which the guests are treated to an infernal meal, and which she terms “black banquets,” to a banquet given by the Emperor Domitian in 89 AD as part of the public celebrations at the conclusion of the Dacian war, at which the senators in attendance were greeted, in a darkened room, draped in black, with skulls and skeletons prominently displayed on the walls, by the sight, at each place setting, of silver tombstones with their names inscribed on them.  17

Here we might note a very close resemblance to the infernal banquet of Pluto as described by Vasari, in which, we may recall, the room was also draped in black, and the guests “enjoyed” a meal of scorpions and spiders, served by Devils with pitchforks in their hands, and drank wine out of beakers in the shape of cauldrons, before being led up-stairs to a splendid room to enjoy a splendid feast, and to witness a light-hearted comedy derived from the classical tradition. Another close resemblance between Domitian’s banquet and the Cazzuola’s Feast of Pluto is the marked sadistic element. One can only imagine the thoughts which went through the minds of the senators as they were served a feast which was, in effect, their own funeral supper. Their terror would have only been increased by their awareness of Domitian’s intent to first terrorize, and then gradually eliminate, their entire political class. In the case of Rustici’s feast, the purpose of this sadistic element is less clear. If we take Vasari at his word, some of the guests present at this feast were genuinely terrified at the sudden appearance of Il Baia, the bombardiere, in the middle of a darkened room, his face lit by the light of a single candle. It does seem possible, however, that these individ-uals might have represented outsiders invited to the feast, whereas the original members of the company, familiar with its rituals and customs, might have found the discomfit of the invited guests genuinely amusing.

! Humphrey Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence 16

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 305-6.

! Jane Levi, “Melancholy and Mourning: Black Banquets and Funerary Feasts,” in Gas17 -tronomia 12 (Winter 2012), 96-103, citing Bober, “The Black or Hell Banquet,” in Pro-ceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery: Feasting and Fasting, ed. Har-lan Walker (London: Prospect Books, 1991.

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Support for this hypothesis comes from yet another “black banquet” given by Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi in Rome in March of 1519 and described in detail by Gareffi in his book on the influence of popular feste on Italian Renaissance theatre.  At this 18

feast, the guests enter the banqueting hall through a black door, only to see the hall itself draped in black, lit by a single candle, by the light of which they can see, suspended on the walls, an array of skulls and bones. They are seated at a table draped also in black, where they see a wooden bowl also containing skulls and bones; inside the skulls are cooked beans, and inside the bones are sausages. Their host bids them to eat this “co-lazione,” and then to follow him into another room to enjoy their “cena.” Just as they are about to enjoy their meal, they are deafened by a huge clap of thunder, and the stars which decorate the walls of this room begin to spin around. Then the plates upon which their salad is served begin to fly off the table, and the goblets of wine, upset by a rumbling from beneath the floor, jump off the table. Understandably enough, having already partaken of wine and food, the cardinals and the other guests at the banquet begin to vomit, and, according to the chronicler’s account, rush from the room in terror, invituperati, with the exception of the three prostitutes and two buffoni seated with them at the table, who take advantage of their sudden departure to gorge themselves on the remaining food. In this humorous and vivid account, which Gareffi derives from the diaries of the Venetian observer of Florentine life, Marin Sanudo, in his turn citing a letter of X, we are immediately struck by the close resemblance of Strozzi’s feast to the Feast of Pluto as de-scribed by Vasari: the darkened room, the skulls and bones, the fiero pasto concealed within the bones on the table, the mixing of social classes, the change of rooms, the sud-den termination of the feast by a burst of thunder. Perhaps most important, we also ob-serve a dramatic contrast between an infernal feast and a celestial one, although the latter is interrupted by celestial events beyond the guests’ control. And here yet again we encounter the same sadistic element we observed in the banquets of Domitian and Rustici: after having consumed abundant servings of wine and food, and seen the celestial spheres rotating around the table, the cardinals present, ac-cording to the account of the Venetian envoy present at the feast, became very ill and

! Andrea Gareffi, “La festa macabra di Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi,” in La scrittura e la 18

festa: teatro, festa e letteratura nella Firenze del Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990),

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rushed from the table, in the words of the chronicler, invituperati. The latter word pre-sumably refers not only to their physical state of discomfort, but also to the feelings of humiliation and stizza engendered in them by the spectacle to which they had just been treated. Given the abundance of homosexuals at the papal court, a familiar topos in Re-naissance Italy, their close proximity to members of Rome’s demimonde seated next to them at the table would presumably have increased the discomfit of these men of God considerably. We suggested above that the infernal feasts described by Vasari in his Life of Gio-vanfrancesco Rustici were intended to encode a covert critique of Medici rule in Florence after the restoration of the family to power in the fall of 1512, in which the nature of this rule, and its deserved reward, are conveyed by a highly sophisticated and symbolic use of classical myths in which the punishment of the tyrant, taking the form of a withholding or a debasement of food and the act of feasting, is vividly portrayed. And as with the feasts of Domitian, Soderini and Rustici just described, it seems very possible that there was a political subtext to Strozzi’s feast as well: Strozzi was a member of a family known as staunch opponents of the Medici regime, and those cardi-nals present (Cybo, Rossi, Salviati and Ridolfi) were all closely associated with Pope Leo. As Gareffi also notes, all four of these cardinals were also cousins of the Medici Pope. Hence it seems entirely possible that, just as in the feste of the Cazzuola, a mes-sage was being sent to those in power: there still remained places in the cultural, if not the political, space of Renaissance Italy where these individuals did not dictate to others, but were themselves subject to the whims of others, and were forced to witness a spectacle which, to the most perceptive of them, would have represented, in a highly symbolic and recondite way, the just punishment meted out to those who would tyrannize others. We also noted above the possibility that the shower of rain which terminated the Feast of Pluto described by Vasari might be an allusive reference to the shower of rain which brought to a sudden halt the trial by fire of Savonarola, as well as to those Floren-tine popular religious feste described by Brucker and Cummings, in which a sudden shower of rain (together with the nuvole and the cielo consisting of blue cloth, symbols of Heaven) also played a prominent role, presumably as a symbol of Divine Judgment. What is significant, then, about all these banquets, in which (with the exception of Domitian’s), themes of heaven and Hell are mixed together with classical and (in the case

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of the Compagnia della Cazzuola) medieval religious elements, is that they all contain a political subtext, more or less clearly expressed. In the case of Domitian’s banquet, this message, directed at the terrified senators in attendance, is that the Emperor is in total control of their fates, and can have them killed at any moment, part, according to Bober, of his systematic campaign of intimidation, and then final elimination, of the senatorial class. In the case of Soderini’s banquet, as well, we suggest, as those of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, this message is that the Medici rulers of Florence are, in effect, tyrants, who share the same rapaciousness as their classical forerunners, and will share the same fate. When we consider the strange feste of the Cazzuola described by Vasari against the background of these other anti-medicean celebrations, with which they share many common elements, our interpretation of the feste of the Cazzuola as expressing, albeit in a

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highly coded and oblique way, opposition to Medici rule in Florence, becomes more plausible.  19

We have been discussing how the elaborate celebrations of the Compagnia della Cazzuola described—albeit in a fragmentary and allusive way—by Vasari would seem to

! As testimony to the fondness of members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola for highly encoded 19

and oblique forms of expression, the scholar of Italian emblems Sonia Maffei gives a partial transcription of a manuscript now in Florence (Antonfrancesco Doni’s Una Nuova Opinione), in which this tendency is clearly expressed: “Bernardino di Giordano fu un bel ingegno a Firenze, il quale oltre al bellissimo casamento che egli fabricò et giardino che ei fece raro, e’ levò una com-pagnia che Academia hoggi se gli direbbe, et nel farvi recitare le commedie fu unico intelletto [. . .] Costui adunati molti belli ingegni pose nome loro per sopranomi di quei che i Lombardi mura-tori si ritrovano per la maggiore parte, Zannin, Tognetto, mastro Luchin, e tali sì fatti, et si chia-mava la Compagnia della Cazzuola, portando per insegna della loro Accademia un trofeo di martellina, archipenzolo, squadra et cazzuola da murare, strumenti tutti che sempre smurano et murano e tanto son buoni all’una come all’altra manifattura, et un breve che gli legava diceva in quel modo medesimo apunto che quello del Marchese Del Vasto Fiuniunt [sic] pariter renovan-tuque [sic] labores [. . .]Tutti gli huomini fanno qualche dimostratione dell’animo loro o in fatti o in parole, per parabola, per figura, in enigma, in cifra, con saviezza o con pazzia, ma uno meglio dell’altro la registra, per che bisogna aiutarsi come la va par pari, et veder di vincerla o alman-co inpattarla che ‘l perderla è sempre in ordine [italics added],” In this passage we also note the presence of a garden (presumably behind) Bernardino di Giordano’s casamento, which would make the gatherings of the Cazzuola those of a real Academy proper, rather than the occasional and informal festive association we glean from Vasari’s account, similar in this respect to the gatherings in the gardens of Cosimo Rucellai, where serious discussion of political matters was combined with lighthearted and jocund repartee. We may also note the agonistic quality of the gatherings of the Cazzuola as they are described by Doni, the members competing with each oth-er to see who could be most obscure. In this respect, they would then be very similar to the meet-ings of the other Italian academies, such as that which met in the gardens of Angelo Colocci, lo-cated near the spot of today’s Fontana di Trevi, where discussion of serious political matters was leavened by light-hearted and teasing banter, the members reciting (often scurrilous) composi-tions directed at each other, an example of which Rowlands gives in one of the members’ mock invectives directed at Erasmus, in which the Dutch scholar is described as too timid to confront the fearsome and terrifying “genius loci,” Colocci’s pet cat Selurus. (The transcription of Doni is from Sonia Maffei, “Giovio’s Dialogo delle imprese militari e amorose and the Museum,” in The Italian Emblem: A Collection of Essays, ed. Donato Mansueto, in collaboration with Elena Calogero (Glagow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2007), 33-63. Maffei reproduces a drawing of the impresa of the Compagnia della Cazzuola from the same manuscript on p. 47. The reference to Colocci’s garden is from Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: An-cients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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allude to contemporary Florentine religious festivities in which the themes of the pun-ishment of the powerful, including the kings of this world, and the rewards given to the righteous play a prominent role. But there is one spectacle well-known to the Medieval tradition which allows us to consolidate and incorporate all the scattered details provided by Vasari into one coherent picture. This is the “guided tour through Heaven and Hell” provided by a trusted guide to a soul caught up in the things of this world, and intended to remind him of the risks he runs by his insufficient attention to his spiritual state. We en-counter this theme, which clearly forms the inspiration for Dante’s Divine Comedy, and which one scholar has proposed finds its ultimate derivation from the Arabic tradition, in many works of Medieval art and literature.  One example which might be cited here 20

which forms an especially close parallel with the strange festivities described by Vasari in his life of Rustici is the popular mid-12th-century The Vision of Tundale, where a knight, having suffered a seizure at supper, is led through the three realms, where he encounters, at an infernal banquet, “furnaces crammed with the bodies of sinners and demons, cook-ing, breaking down and reconstituting.”  21

Here we observe the same combination of punishment and the theme of cannibal-istic devouring we observed in the feste of the Compagnia della Cazzuola and its classical and Medieval antecedents we have been discussing. Significant for our interpretation of the elaborate festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as a covert critique of Medici

� Professor James Monroe has kindly informed me that the topos of the guided tour 20

through Hell, with a final vision of Heaven, intended to warn the traveler of the impor-tance of living righteously, derives ultimately, via Arabic intermediaries, from the ancient Zoroastrians of Persia. This group also, interestingly enough, conceived of Hell, not as a place of fire, but rather as a place of icy coldness. This would be the ultimate derivation of Dante’s striking image of the bat-like Lucifer, fanning his wings over the damned frozen in the ice, a representation of Satan almost unheard of in the Middle Ages. Profes-sor Monroe also notes that Dante’s teacher, Brunetto Latini, had access to Arabic sources via their translation into Provençal, a language he knew well and in which he also wrote poetry. For this entire subject, see Miguel Asin Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, trans. Harold Sunderland (London: Cass, 1968) and Monroe’s own Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Sixteenth Century to the Present) (Leiden: Brill, 1970).

! Aleks Pluskowski, Apocalyptic Monsters: Animal Inspirations for the Iconography of 21

Medieval North European Devourers in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bild-hauer and Robert Mills (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 155-176.

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rule is the fact that it is a knight, an individual high on the Medieval hierarchy, who is led on this journey intended to rebuke him for his sins and encourage him to lead a better life. Perhaps one of the forestieri, that is, guests not members of the Company present at the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola—where, as we have been suggesting, their elaborate stagings of classical myths conveyed, in a highly allusive manner, a criticism of the tyrannical nature of Medici rule in Florence, presented in stark contrast to themes of Christian, and specifically Savonarolan, renewal—would have recalled the tradition just discussed and emerged from the lower rooms of the Compagnia into the squares of Flo-rence bearing in mind not only the specific features of the spectacles to which he had just been treated, but also their medieval precursors, the vivid images of punishment followed by heavenly reward embodied, as we have seen, in these Medieval images and later in-corporated into the elaborate public spectacles of the Florentine popular religious tradi-tion. But perhaps the most convincing evidence that the Compagnia della Cazzuola rep-resented a clandestine locus of opposition to Medici rule in Florence, where, in a festive, carnivalesque atmosphere, the members enacted, in a highly encoded and symbolic way, their opposition to Medici rule, and where long-suppressed Savonarolan and popular el-ements were allowed, in the safety of the hidden rooms of its members, to re-emerge, comes from the historical record itself. Trexler cites what would seem to represent the original inspiration for the bizarre banquet of Pluto described above, where, as we may recall, the members of the Cazzuola “enjoyed” an infernal feast, amid the screams of the damned and the lamentations of Proserpina, captive to the angry and lustful Pluto, symbol of the tyrant, before being led upstairs to enjoy their true feast and enjoy a performance of Correr’s Philogenia, a hu-manist comedy from the early 1400s and, as noted above, the original inspiration for Machiavelli’s Mandragola. Trexler cites a description by Antonio Pucci of an elaborate spectacle which took place on the Arno on May Day, 1304: ! Ed in sull’Arno aveva piatte, e navi, Con palchi d’assi; or udirai bel giuoco, E come que’, che ‘l facieno eran savii. Dall’una parte avea caldaie a fuoco,

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Dall’altra avea graticole, e schedoni, Ed un gran Diavol quivi era per cuoco. Nella sentina avea molti Dimonii, I qua’ recavan l’anime a’ tormenti, Ch’ordinati eran, di molte ragioni. Qual si ponia sopra carbon cocenti, E qual nella caldaia, che bolliva, E di sentina uscivano i lamenti. La gente, che d’intorno il pianto udiva, E poi vedea a sì fatto governo Co’ rassi, e con gli uncin gente cattiva, Che parean tutti Diavoli d’inferno Ispaventevoli a chi li vedea, Immaginando que’ del luogo eterno. Sette tormenti v’eran per ragione, Punendo i sette peccati mortali, E sovra ognuno scritto in un pennone: In questo luogo son puniti i tali. Alcuna volta v’avresti veduti Serpenti, e draghi feroci con ali, E contraffatti Diavoli cornuti, Che forcon da letame avieno in mano, Di più ragione, tutti neri, e sannuti.  22

! Here we encounter, in an earlier version, all the elements of the infernal feast of Pluto described by Vasari: a Devil as cook (in Vasari’s account, Pluto as host), boiling cauldrons, the screams of the damned, demons, serpents (in Vasari’s account, the scorpi-ons and spiders which serve as “dessert”), devils with pitchforks in hand (in Vasari’s ac-count, a shovel with which he loads the food onto the guests’ plates).

! Antonio Pucci, Centiloquio, in Delizie degli eruditi toscani, ed. Idelfonso di San Luigi. 22

(Florence: Cambiagi, 1770-1789), IV, 195ff.

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Trexler notes that this festival was the first popular festival on record, an expres-sion of the public exuberance of the various artisan festive groups who, in the 1330s and 1340s, elected a “signore,” and, on May Day, “marched through the streets in festive gai-ety.”  Hence, we would suggest, in their adaptation of this festa, or others similar to it, in 23

their own celebrations, the members of the Cazzuola were making a deliberate, if allu-sive, reference to these earlier displays, manifestations of the popular power and festive spirit of the neighborhoods and trades of a Florence of an earlier time, now, in the Flo-rence of their time, subject, as we have noted, to Medici censorship and repression.  24

Illustrations in the margins of Medieval manuscripts also make clear how, in the Medieval tradition, the punishment of sinners and the theme of cannibalistic eating were inextricably linked. Sinners were routinely devoured by the demons in Hell, and were routinely roasted on spits, flayed alive, and even boiled in cauldrons:  25

!

! Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 23

Press, 1991), 220.

! For the rise of popular confraternities, which played a prominent role in the festivities 24

of San Giovanni under the Medici in the quattrocento, see Trexler 252-58. For the coopta-tion of these groups by the Medici in support of their rule in the late 1400s, see, in addi-tion to Najemy, Trexler 512-3.

! These reproductions are taken from Alixe Bovey, Monsters and Grotesques in Me25 -dieval Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

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Among these sinners were kings and the prideful of the earth, while the just were admitted into Heaven, in this manuscript represented, appropriately enough, by a cloister:

We also noted the presence of a cauldron in both the Thyestes of Seneca discussed above, and, as we shall see, a cauldron plays a prominent part in the one of the feste of the Compagnia of the Paiuolo.

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And the entrance to Hell is commonly represented by a huge devouring mouth, as in the following illustration:

In the Feast of Pluto described by Vasari, we encountered the classical equivalent of this powerful image in the jaws of Cerberus through which the guests descended to the Underworld. Hence, we would suggest, the elaborate productions of the Compagnia della Caz-zuola draw upon both classical and Medieval traditions in which the themes of eating, especially the cannibalistic devouring of one individual by another, and the punishment

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of the wicked, prominent among whom are the kings and powerful of the world, are inex-tricably linked. In one striking illustration, the demons are even seen devouring themselves: !

! We noted at the beginning of this chapter the self-consuming nature of tyranny, in which the tyrant’s rule is characterized by the consumption of the most vital asset of the state, its citizens, thus leading to his final demise, an image we also encountered in the Inferno of Dante, where both the tyrant Ugolino and Satan himself, the ultimate tyrant (since he rules the souls of the sinful, having usurped God’s place there as its intended ruler) are seen in the act of cannibalistic consumption. Just as Ugolino consumes his own sons (as did also the Thyestes of Seneca’s play), so also is he to be consumed in turn by

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the Mouth of Hell, where he will be consumed by the demons, until, in an infernal ver-sion of the Last Judgment, both the demons and the sinners inside them will themselves be devoured by Satan, who then will presumably devour himself, finally bringing to an end the cycles of violence and tyranny which have characterized human history. Once again, we may note the mixing of classical and Medieval imagery around the theme of the consumption of food in the elaborate performances of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, which reflect and recreate not only the highly theatrical and rhetorical aspects of Senecan drama, but also its Medieval successors in the elaborate festivities and cele-brations of the Medieval Christian tradition, the sacre rappresentazioni and the proces-sions in which the same themes played a prominent role. In addition, the cry which in Vasari’s account greeted the “spontaneous” birth of the Cazzuola (“Cazzuola, Cazzuola”) may itself be a deliberate evocation of the popular cry of the early woolworkers or Ciompi. Citing Stefani, Trexler describes a drinking bout among artisans and workers and Walter of Brienne’s men at arms: ! The latter [the artisans] had italianized the French word ‘compar’ (‘co-father’ or ‘ally’) as ciompo, Stefani tells us, so that when the French said to them, ‘Compar, let’s go drinking,’ the Florentine artisans responded, ‘ciompo, let’s go drink. And thus they said: “Ciompo, Ciompo” as if everyone was a ciompo, that is, a compar.’  26

! In our view, these two pieces of evidence provide further support for our hypothe-sis that the Compagnia della Cazzuola represented a locus of covert opposition to Medici rule, and that Vasari, in giving such a full, but, in our view, deliberately evasive descrip-tion of their activities, intended to allude to these earlier groups which, just as the Caz-zuola, expressed their resistance to the hegemony of the popolo grasso, that is, the pros-perous merchant class who stood above them on the social scale, through elaborate, sym-bolic celebrations in which (as was the norm in such late medieval feste), the rulers of the earth and the rich and powerful were among the primary recipients of divine wrath. Trexler also notes that these earlier festivities, which took place during May Day, Carnival, and the Feast of San Giovanni, were associated with particular religious confra-

! Trexler 221.26

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ternities, often tied to a neighborhood church.  He cites the 1451/2 capitoli of the Com27 -pagnia of San Andrea de’ Purgatori, which met in Borgo La Croce. Could the Compagnia della Cazzuola, where, as we have seen, the members were immersed in a Hellish envi-ronment before being transported to an upper region, where they enjoyed their celestial banquet, have taken inspiration for the name of their patron Saint, and perhaps even its place of meeting, from this earlier company? In this regard, Trexler also mentions a hospital by the name of “societas hospitalis S. Johannis Baptiste de via S. Gallo de Florentia.”  Vasari describes an elaborate feast set 28

in an imitation hospital “outside the Porta di San Gallo,” where the members are warned to curb their expenses, lest they wind up in the hospital. Might this “feast” also have been inspired by this earlier organization? As noted above, the theme of the latter banquet was poverty, since the guests were dressed as paupers, which, besides the obvious humorous reference to the impending state of impoverishment of the members if they continue in their profligate ways, would also accord with one of the functions of such small confra-ternal organizations, namely, to assist their needier members with basic expenses. As we note in the following chapter, the theme of a voluntary and also comically-exaggerated form of poverty, placed in stark opposition to a heedless wasting of re-sources, formed the fundamental dyad which underlay the feasts of another festive com-pany of later in the century, where this theme was also used as a symbol of the miserli-ness and mean-spiritedness, or the conspicuous wasting of civic resources, which charac-terized the Medici regime in Florence under Duke Cosimo. Michel Plaisance has noted the presence of several informal companies in the mid-1550s which bear a very close resemblance—in the festive informality of their meetings, in the semi-secret nature of their gatherings, in their locations far from the centers of power in Florence and in their staging of elaborate spectacles which included music and elaborate sets—to the Compagnia della Cazzuola.  29

The fact that these companies arose at precisely the time that Cosimo was trying to assert his control over the Florentine Academy, itself the result of the infiltration and conversion of the more informal and anti-authoritarian Academia degli Umidi into the

! Trexler 404.27

! Trexler 405.28

! Plaisance, cited below, 148-57.29

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former academy, tends to suggest that the activities of these informal compagnie di pi-acere described by Plaisance may also have represented loci of opposition to Medici rule in the city, where, as we noted above, Cosimo’s assertion of control over all productions of culture resulted in the highly hierarchical, programmatic and formal organization of the Florentine Academy, with strict rules and regulations as to its mode of operation and members tasked with the duty of reporting all its activities to the Duke.  30

This hypothesis would also tend to be support the possibility that these latter fes-tive organizations represented a continuation of sorts of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, both in the nature of their meetings, their membership, and the activities in which they engaged. While up to this point, we have been able to find only one individual who be-longed to both companies, it seems possible that others might emerge, their identities in one or the other of the groups concealed under a pseudonym. One of the names given by Vasari in his account of the Compagnia della Cazzuola is clearly a pseudonym: Barbagrigia. The editors of Annibal Caro’s Gli straccioni, dis-cussed below, identify this latter individual as the Roman printer Antonio Blado, printer to the popes and also the printer of the first edition of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. We noted above the presence of Machiavelli himself as one of the primary participants in the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola; such a connection between the author and the printer of his most controversial work as members of the same company suggest that others, perhaps hinted at or disguised by Vasari by various means, might have be-longed not only to the Cazzuola, but to one or more of these later festive organizations which shared both its ethos and format. As we note below, one of the members of the Compagnia della Cazzuola—Barlacchi, himself, along with Giovan Battista Ottonaio, discussed below, herald of the Florentine Signoria, close friend of Machiavelli and the author, apparently, of a work sometimes attributed to the latter—was an active participant in the performance of Cardinal Bibbiena’s Calandria at the court of Francis I of France in Lyon in 1548.  31

These details suggest the possibility of an important connection between the Com-pagnia della Cazzuola and later organizations which managed to express opposition to

! On this aspect of the Florentine Academy, see below. On the infiltration and conversion 30

of the Academia degli Umidi into the Florentine Academy, see Werner, cited above.

! We discuss this performance below.31

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Medici rule in Florence by indirect means, in particular, by a highly astute and clever use of the stock plots and characters of Renaissance drama (particularly Plautine comedy) as a means of expressing their reservations and discontent with the nature of Medici rule in Florence. This seems to be a highly promising area of future investigation. We discuss the connections between the Compagnia della Cazzuola and Renaissance drama below. In our view, however, the most convincing support for our interpretation of the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as encoding a message critical of Medici rule in Florence comes from the feasts given by another festive company, the Academia della Virtù (Virtuosi), active in Rome for only a few years in the middle of the fourth decade of the century. One scholar has described the nighttime activities of this company in the fol-lowing words: ! On 10 March 1538 Caro wrote to Benedetto Varchi (1503–65) in Padua, explain ing that every week during their “Game of Virtue” they enthroned a king, held a banquet, and presented “an extravaganza and a composition” relevant to their theme, “kings and vassals” competing to outdo each other. This academy was chiefly a drinking and dining club that gave mock orations at banquets, celebrating indulgence before the austerity of Lent. While the evening's king hosted a feast, his beneficence was rewarded by the presentation of a tribute from one of his vas sals. The small, usually satirically inconsequential gift was accompanied by an af ter-dinner speech, written in either prose or poetry and explicating the presented item. The “Sacred Majesty,” or “Glorious Prince,” received such tokens as a pas try, a raven, a ring, a frying pan, two sprigs, a little box, or a vase. At least some of the authors played with double meanings and paradoxes, usually parodic and sometimes obscene. It was common for these literati to praise Petrarch, for in stance, but at least three surviving speeches offer an exaggerated, even parodic, encomium to the canonical author. Several surviving texts satirize overweening ambition and vanity on the part of mock-royals, for one king was crowned with a

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circlet of dog-grass, another given a mere drinking glass that had many sexually suggestive connotations.  32

! Not only do the activities of this association recall those festive companies de-scribed by Gori, which included the election of a“King” who oversaw the organization of their festivities, and, in an imitation of Medieval courts, relied upon a coterie of servants and vassals to help him in the preparation of their public celebrations, but it is striking how closely the activities of this organization also recall those of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as described by Vasari: a master of the feast, whose responsibilities lasted for only a short time; the delight the members took in games with obscure meanings (the enigmas, parables, emblems and ciphers described by Maffei), the carnivalesque, irrever-ent aspect of their festivities, which recalls the kind of Rabelesian excess so vividly de-scribed by Machiavelli in his Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere; and the recitations of dramatic speeches and orations, which recall the dramatic performances of the Com-pagnia della Cazzuola examined above. But what is perhaps most striking are the ceremonial gifts presented by members of the company to the King at the end of the banquet: they correspond precisely to those items described by Vasari as present at the feasts of the Companies of the Cazzuola and Paiuolo: a raven (one of the animals, along with the porcupine and the snakes, present at the feast of Giovanfrancesco Rustici), a frying pan (which corresponds to the cauldron in which members of the Compagnia del Paiuolo enjoyed their supper), the little box, which corresponds precisely to the little box in which the special token of another festive com-pany, the Compagnia della Lesina, which we describe in the next chapter, was kept, adorned with images of all the heroes of classical spilorceria, or miserliness. As we shall see, the company just mentioned, the Compagnia della Lesina, also managed to convey,

� Patricia Simons and Monique Kornell, “Annibal Caro's After-Dinner Speech (1536) 32

and the Question of Titian as Vesalius's Illustrator,” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 61, no. 4 (Winter 2008),

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in a highly symbolic way, criticism of the Medici ruler of its time, Duke Cosimo, and thus, once again, to combine festive banqueting with political commentary.  33

In Vasari’s description of the Feast of Pluto, we also encountered the drinking glasses mentioned by Caro in the goblets out of which the members drank, made in the

� Giovanni Francesco Straparola, in his collection of fabule adorned with images appropriate to 33

each one, remarks: “The wise man will shall seek wisdom of all the ancients, and will vacabit in prophetis. He will keep the narrationem virorum nominatorum, and at the same time will enter in versutias parabolorum: he will seek out the hidden things in the proverbs, and be conversant in the things hidden in parables” (Le tredici piaceuolissime notti di M. Gio. Francesco Straparola da Carauaggio : diuise in due libri : nuouamente di bellissime figure adornate, & appropriate a ciascheduna fauola: con la tauola di tutto quello, che in esse si contengono (Cologne: Gymni-cus, 1529; Venice: Zanetto Zanetti, 1608). In this book of puzzles and enigmas, we can get a glimpse of what actually went on in the companies we have been describing, in which potentially controversial material was carefully concealed, even in the games the members played, beneath the veil of enigmatic and arcane references. This recalls Maffei’s description of the fondness of members of the Cazzuola for riddles and enigmas cited above. The large profusion of such col-lections of motti, proverbi, enigme and favole, many of them printed in Venice, would tend to indi-cate not just their popularity, but might also tend to indicate the presence of a network of similar such organizations, who met in secret, at night, with closely guarded memberships, and, even in the relative safety of their lodgings, felt it advisable to veil their true thoughts and feelings in secrecy. This would in turn suggest that the topics so carefully veiled under the guise of the games we have been discussing must have been extremely controversial, and apt to draw the attention of the authorities. The use of an elaborate network of spies, spread throughout Europe, was a common feature employed by the rulers of the age to keep an eye on what any potential enemies might be saying or thinking. To cite just one example, Cosimo himself was referred to as the “spider-prince” because of just such a net-work of informers, embedded, not just in sensitive areas, but, to reiterate Varchi’s remarks cited in the Introduction, no place, however humble, was free from the attentions of the Duke’s busy spies: “And this [the surveillance of the Florentine exiles] happened to Duke Cosimo because he (imitating the practice of his valorous father in investigat-ing not only the doings, but even the thoughts, of his adversaries, on the basis of reports from both important men, diligent out of friendship, and also from spies, either open or secret, diligent for the sake of money), continually used in credible diligence, and spent an incalculable amount of money, to the extent that I would dare say that, except for his ambassadors, legates and officials, there was not, I won't say, one city, or fortified place in all of Italy, but not even hamlet, or country house, or even tavern, about which Duke Cosimo was not advised daily” (Storia fiorentina 2.15.47). Such a system was enormously ex-pensive to maintain: some historians estimate that Cosimo spent approximately 40,000 ducats a year on his network of spies and informers, an enormous sum. We noted above the assassination in 1548 of the assassin of Alessandro de’ Medici in Venice, an operation which presumably must have required much advance scouting of the terrain and careful preparation. We also noted the persecution of the anonymous author of the Florentinae historiae libri octo by agents of the Medici in Lyon. Given the presence of such a wide and well-organized system of surveillance of dissident individuals, it is no surprise that they should have been forced to resort to an elaborate system of cryptic signs to express themselves safely. As Machiavelli himself lamented, remark-ing on the difficulties of expressing himself freely in the newly-restored Medici regime, he had been reduced, like a circus animal, to a series of mute signs and signals to signal his true feelings about the Medici regime.

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form of a devil’s beaker. We might also note that even Caro’s mention of a pastry might correspond to an item in the repertoire of the Compagnia della Cazzuola: besides its meaning of trowel and tadpole, which we have already mentioned, it also referred to a triangular-shaped biscuit, particular to Tuscany, often served during Lenten season. We even encounter the vase described by Caro, which the shadowy character to the right of the dancing figure in X’s appears to be carrying:

! The Academia della Virtù, in Caro’s account, also took delight in mocking the pre-tentiousness of the official academies of its day, as Simons and Kornell note. This was also a feature of the companies we shall examine in the next chapter. We mentioned above that one of the games enjoyed by after-dinner guests at many Renaissance gatherings was called enigma, in which the guests tried to interpret the meaning of an emblem or a visual image. To play along with the members of the Cazzuola as they enjoyed their after dinner entertainment, let us imagine the following scenario: the porcupine, which, in an ex-

! ! �37

tremely humorous aside, Vasari tells us used to brush up against the legs of his guests from under the table, causing, as one would expect, great consternation among them: as-suming that Vasari meant for his reader to interpret the hidden meaning of this image, what is it? A hint: we have been suggesting that Vasari’s account of the Compagnia della Cazzuola encodes a secret anti-medicean message. Who were the Medici’s natural ene-mies, speaking in terms of the Florentine exiles? Did powerful individuals during the Re-naissance also avail themselves of these kinds of games, or were they only reserved for the members of the working class and middle class? Can you give an example of such a use on the part of a powerful individual in Renaissance Europe? (Think of the first ques-tion.) As a follow-up to the first question, why might this particular symbol be so attrac-tive to members of the Cazzuola in particular, given their political orientation?  34

To take another example: what might the snakes, who perform amusing tricks in Rustici’s fishpond for the amusement of his after-dinner guests, represent? This riddle is much harder, but, in our discussion of Andrea del Sarto’s after-dinner speech, we gave a hint. Who were the natural enemies of the frogs in the pseudo-Homeric poem supposedly written by del Sarto? Do you recall our discussion of the earliest origins of the Academia degli Umidi? What might snakes, and perhaps frogs also, have been doing in Rustici’s fishpond? And here is the final clue, which will solve the entire enigma: what, given your answers to the preceding questions, might have been the entertainment for the snakes in Rustici’s fishpond? a question which Vasari seems to be, in a very subtle way (“and they

� The porcupine was the personal impresa of the King of France, accompanied by the 34

motto “Cominus et eminus,” that is, “[I shoot my quills] from near and far.” The presence of this animal at the feasts of the non-conforming Compagnia della Cazzuola, given the historical status of the King of France as supporter of the Florentine republicans, tends to lend further support to our claim that the compagnia represented a locus of covert opposi-tion to Medici rule in the city. In this interpretation, the eagle would then be a stand-in for the Empire, the symbol of which was an eagle with spread wings.

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did such amusing tricks as you can imagine. . . ”), as he does on several occasions in his text, to be encouraging the reader to try to figure out?  35

And just as those companies we have been discussing, the raison d’etre of the Academia della Virtù, besides providing a convivial space in which members could relax and enjoy themselves, was the mocking of the strict formalities and rules of procedure which characterized the academies founded by Cosimo, a feature of these companies we discuss further below, in the creation of a kind of “alternative universe” to the highly reg-ulated, and often violent, world which characterized Renaissance Florence, and Italy as a whole, especially as the rule of the Medici over the city became steadily more repressive following the restoration of the family to power after the siege of Florence in 1529-30, culminating in the installation of Alessandro de’ Medici as ruler of the city, a man consid-ered, as we noted in the Introduction, by many of his contemporaries to surpass the tyrants of classical antiquity in his depravity and propensity to violence.  36

� They would have been fed mice, since in Del Sarto’s after-dinner poem, the mouse, af35 -ter being chased by a cat, and riding the back of the frog, was eaten by a large water snake. The symbol, as we noted above, of the anti-medicean Academia degli Umidi was a frog. So Del Sarto is no doubt alluding to this academy in his poem, and when, in his poem, he refers pejoratively to the mice as “mangiacruscanti,” he must be alluding to an-other academy, the frogs’ natural enemies. This academy, given the pejorative term by which Del Sarto calls the mice in his poem (“mangiacruscanti”) can only be the Academy della Macina, also called the Macinati, sponsored by the Medici and situated near the Medici palace on the via Larga, and whose emblem, a Macina, or Millstone, foreshadows the later emblem of the Academia della Crusca, and whose members would have been called by a term very like this, that is, “Cruscanti.” So Rustici’s water snakes must, just as the snake in Del Sarto’s poem eats the mouse after it has fallen off the back of the frog, have eaten mice, symbols of the medicean Academia della Macina, those “Medicean mice” who, given the Cazzuola’s status as a non-conforming locus of opposition to the Medici, would have been their natural enemies. In this interpretation, members of the Cazzuola would have taken great delight in seeing their natural enemies fed to Rustici’s fierce snakes as an after-dinner entertainment. If this is the case, it would represent an ex-ample of one of the important functions of these non-conforming academies, namely to provide a kind of “sfogo” or outlet for their members’ hatred of the Medici which would have been dangerous to express openly outside the secret confines of their meetings. We discuss these Macinati, who meddle in others’ business and try to lure them into needless expenses, in the next Chapter.

� For an excellent summary of this process, see Najemy 36

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Alessandro was followed in turn by Duke Cosimo, whose sole aim was to secure his absolute control over the city, to which aim the welfare of the citizens was secondary if not entirely irrelevant, as the evidence discussed in the next chapter makes clear. Perhaps most important for our interpretation of the activities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola as expressing covert resistance to Medici rule in the city, however, is that Simons and Kornell end their discussion of the company by noting that several of the games played by members of the company satirize the “overweening ambition and vanity on the part of mock-royals.” This recalls the game of “mestieri” described above in re-gard to the household activities of Gianfrancesco Rustici, where, we suggested, a kind of game of “musical chairs” may have been played, in which the poorer members of the company usurped the seats reserved for the upper-class hosts of the feast. This tends to further support our claim that all the companies we have been discussing had as their primary purpose a satirical critique of the rulers of their age. The above considerations also tend to suggest that our hypothesis that the Com-pagnia della Cazzuola, which bore a close resemblance to these later compagnie di pi-acere—in their informality, frequent changes of meeting place, mixing of social classes and presentation of elaborate spectacles which may have served as veiled commentary on

! ! �40

the political circumstances of their times—may have also represented a locus of opposi-tion to Medici rule in the city is actually well-founded.  37

!! In a very interesting essay, Sanne Wellen has also remarked on the carnivalesque nature 37

of the festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, with particular attention to a mock-heroic poem which the artist Andrea del Sarto, one of the most active members of the company, may have recited there in the X of 1519. Wellen argues that it was precisely this aspect of their celebrations, seen as a survival of bourgeois culture into the age of the nascent Medicean court, which so displeased Vasari, seen as one of the prime advocates for a new, courtly culture based on strict social and artistic norms. We would suggest, however, as we did at the beginning of this chapter, that Vasari includes such detailed de-scriptions of this lost cultural world, not as a means of censuring it, but rather, using this apparent censure as a cover or veil, as a way of keeping a record of its activities alive for future generations. Although this is purely speculative, it is interesting to note that, in criticizing del Sarto for choosing to remain in Florence, while, according to Vasari, his genius would have been better served either in France or in Rome, Vasari would seem to be arguing against his own championing of Medicean Florence as a center of artistic ex-cellence. The implication would seem to be that, while Florence has produced great ge-niuses in the visual arts, they find better soil for the flourishing of their talent elsewhere. We might also remark that the poem supposedly recited by del Sarto takes a familiar sub-ject (the battle of the mice and the frogs), well-known from the fables of Aesop and the pseudo-Homeric Batrochomyomachia but that this subject is very possibly an allegory, familiar from other such compositions, of the competition for cultural supremacy be-tween the academies supported by the Medici and those non-conforming ones which op-posed them cited above, since both Zanré and Plaisance have remarked on the strong possibility of an allegorical meaning present in the numerous mock-epic poems written and recited by the academicians of this period, although neither of these scholars sees these compositions as expressions of anti-Medicean sentiment, but rather as allegories of the defeat by the heroic Medici of their ottimati opponents. Plaisance has also remarked on the function these non-conforming academies served as a place where bourgeois val-ues and culture could survive, if only in a semi-clandestine and marginalized form, in an increasingly autocratic political culture. We might also note that both protagonists of Sar-to’s poem, the frogs and the mice, took on, later in the century, political meanings con-nected with Florentine academies: the mice (whom Sarto dubs “mangiacruscanti”) in the Academia della Crusca, and the frogs, as X informs us, as symbol of the non-conforming Academia degli Umidi, discussed above. Since the frogs are clearly the heroes of Sarto’s mock-epic, and defeat their mortal enemies, the mice, with the help of Jupiter, it would seem that this later conflict between pro- and anti medicean academies is already adum-

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!Carnival 1513: A Political Interpretation of Two Florentine Carnival Parades

! We noted above the use of popular festivities, particularly during times of Carnival, by the Medici after their reassertion of control over Florence in the fall of 1512 as a means of consolidating their rule over the city by providing vivid public displays which testified to their wealth and power, and also proclaimed the benefits which would accrue to her citizens as a result of this rule. Maria-Luisa Minio-Paluello has given us a fascinating account of carnival festivities in the year 1513, less than a year after the restoration of the Medici to power in the city, a record of which we have from no less than three contemporary chroniclers:  38

! Maria-Luisa Minio-Paluello, Jesters and Devils: A Midsummer Voyage, Florence 1514 38

(s.n., 2008).

! ! �42

Perhaps even more fascinating than this invenzione are the events which followed it. According to Minio-Paluello, on the same day as the parade mentioned above, a strange procession made its way through the streets of Florence: ! While from another direction a really ghostly cavalcade, earnest and alto gether real, arrives in Florence these days, black clad and darkly menacing, clattering with their cavalry on the cobbled streets for the days of the festi val. Certainly more threatening than the ephemeral ship of fools drawn on a cart by placid oxen for a short, if lively, evening. ! Citing Cambi, Masi and Sanudo, Minio-Paluello gives an account of this second procession: ! Giuliano de’ Medici came here from Rome to see the festival with six cardi nals, and there was the Pope’s nephew Giulio, the Siennese cardinal, a Venetian one, our Da Bibbiena, and they all walked about not in their car dinals’ habits, but all dressed in black in the Spanish fashion, with swords at their sides, and their faces covered [turati], the same as Giuliano, so that they were giving us a good example and in this way one reforms the Church. May God forgive them, and may he make them repent of their er rors, like all of us Christians. ! While Minio-Paluello speculates that this procession might represent a kind of re-sponse to the first, and astutely remarks that such a procession, in which the participants carried swords and masked their faces, was expressly forbidden by the statutes of the city as far back as the Middle Ages as a means of preventing either internal discord or exter-nal interference in the affairs of the city at a time when many citizens, many of them no doubt inebriated, would have thronged the streets. We would, however, interpret it in rela-tion to the procession which went before. Minio-Paluello speculates that the former procession might have represented a typical “Ship of Fools,” a type of spectacle well-known since the Middle Ages, in which mankind’s follies are humorously exposed. While in our view, this is essentially correct, we would propose that it carried a second, more allusive meaning, namely as a symbolic

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representation on the part of the new rulers of the city of their disdain for, and also their total control over, potentially subversive remnants of an active mercantile culture, once, despite the dominance of the upper classes, powerful in the city, and with values and as-pirations radically different from those of the Medici family. As noted above, Trexler, Najemy and Plaisance have all remarked upon the progressive marginalization of this middle-class mercantile culture as an explicit feature of Medici rule in the city, a process beginning with their restoration in 1512, and continuing into the coming decades. We would hence suggest that the first procession described by Minio-Paluello expresses in symbolic, yet highly dramatic, form precisely this disempowerment of the working class-es of the city: the primary fool on this ship, as noted by the chronicler, is Maestro Antonio di Pierrozzo da Vespignano, a member of the working class; he was a maker of hoods, surely a Savonarolan reference; this individual had been “abducted” the day before and placed in the Palazzo della Podestà, as symbolic “King” of Florence; then made a specta-cle on the cart, where he is dressed in rags and tormented by devils. We would thus suggest that Minio-Paluello’s Ship of Fools presents, in addition to its traditional meaning as a reference to the inevitable follies of human life, a more spe-cific subtext expressed in a symbolic use of the details we have just mentioned; that it, the ritual and public humiliation of the working and mercantile middle classes in face of the newly ascendent power of the Medici family. And following on the “kidnapping” of Maestro Antonio, the chronicler records a second abduction, that of Giovanni Tancredi, “citizen and craftsman.” This individual, significantly, “wore the wool,” a reference to the principle trade of late medieval Flo-rence, the working of wool, and, as the chronicler notes, never even thought to change his trade. For this loyalty to Florence’s mercantile traditions, this individual is also tormented by devils. Such public and quasi-ritualistic humiliation of their enemies was not at all un-known in Medicean Florence. Several examples which might be cited here are the con-version of the Sala del Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, seat and symbol of repub-lican Florence, into a barracks immediately following the destruction of Prato and the re-turn of the Medici to Florence in August 1512; the melting down of the vacca, the great bell of the Campanile, also a potent symbol of republican Florence, in by X to make medals which glorified the Medici family; the Triumph of Camillus, described below, which represented a very public flaunting of Medici power over the city, a sight so dis-

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tasteful to the ottimati, seen as a very public display of their political marginalization and impotence at the hands of the new regime, that one contemporary reports that, unable to bear the sight, many of them withdrew in mute protest to their villas in the hills.  39

If this interpretation of the first Carnival procession, that of the Ship of Fools, as a symbolic humiliation of Florence’s working and middle classes is accepted, we would also suggest that the second procession described by Minio-Paluello, which, in the de-scription of the contemporary chroniclers, seems highly strange and also slightly sinister, is, also, in a symbolic way, connected to the first: that, should the Florentines choose to ignore the message of the first procession, that is, the absolute control of the Medici fami-ly over the city and its mercantile traditions, then the family and its Roman allies were ready, willing and able to use force (in the form of armed and veiled figures of authority) to ensure their dominance over Florentine political life.  40

As such, the second procession would have served as a kind of “commentary” or gloss on the first, as a kind of veiled warning as to Medici designs on the city under the new dispensation. The fact that Florentine audiences for these kinds of spectacles pos-sessed highly sophisticated skills in the decipherment of their political subtexts is made clear from a third anecdote, this one also connected to Carnival, to which we now turn. An extremely rare pamphlet printed on the occasion of the 1513 Carnival repro-duces the carnival songs of the three companies discussed in this chapter, the compagnie del Broncone, Diamante, and Cazzuola, as well as a carnival song, perhaps by Antonio Alamanni, a member of an old and distinguished Florentine family, the Canzona della Morte, sung, according to one scholar, the year before the other three songs reproduced in the pamphlet.  While Cummings and Mozzati, cited above, would argue that the songs 41

reproduced in this pamphlet all represent a common theme, namely, the Medici use of

� For this anecdote, see Chapter 2.39

� For a similar use of Carnival festivities to simultaneously impress and intimidate the 40

civilian populace of a city, in this case those of Reggio-Emilia, see Serge Bouchet, “De la fête communale à la fête princière dans les villes d'Emilie-Romagne (XIVe-début XVIe siècle): affirmation de pouvoir et sujétion des citadini,” Le Verger: La fête à la Renais-sance, available online at http://cornucopia16.com/blog/2014/11/30/le-verger-bouquet-vi-la-fete-a-la-renaissance/.

� William F. Prizer, “Reading Carnival: The Creation of a Florentine Carnival Song,” 41

Early Music History, Vol. 23 (2004), 185-252

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public spectacles to publicize the advantages of their rule, we would argue that only the second and the third of the Carnival songs reproduced, those of the Diamante and Bron-cone, may be said to serve this function. And, as one scholar has noted, while the second song, that of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s compagnia del Broncone, presents an unequivocally positive image of the glorious return of a Golden Age under Medici rulership (“Torna il secol felice,/E come la fenice,/Rinasce dal Broncone del vecchio Alloro/Così nasce dal ferro/Un secol d’oro”), the third song, that of Giuliano’s compagnia del Diamante, is conspicuously lacking in this triumphalist element, rather displaying a more melancholic take on the passing of the ages: ! Volan gli anni, i mesi, e le ore. . . E pero chi ‘l tempo perde, Nell’età giovane, e verde. Poco dura, e presto muore.

! The trionfo which accompanied Lorenzo’s song displayed, in vivid visual form, with carri trionnfali surrounded by performers and animals garbed in various forms (in-cluding one in the costume of an elephant as a reference to Hannibal) the heroic deeds of the Medici, which paralleled, if not surpassed, those great heroes of the Roman past. That

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of Giuliano’s, as this Prizer notes, was much more modest, displaying only the three ages of man. This display was called by contemporary chroniclers the Trionfo delle tre Parche. It will be noted that the latter theme, in which we see the three fates, Lachesis, Atropos and Clotho, spinning, spooling out, and cutting off the thread of human life, is not at all incompatible with a penitential, Savonarolan message, man’s ages ending in decline and old age, then followed by death, only the ages of God leading to a final rebirth and restoration.  42

We discussed above a possible anti-medicean message concealed in the imagery of the Carnival song of the Cazzuola, carefully hidden beneath the extremely obscure and allusive language of the song. We would suggest that the first song of the pamphlet, the Canzona della Morte of Francesco Alamanni, might also have encoded just such a mes-sage.  43

This song (recently attributed by another scholar to Castellano Castellani) may have been performed at the same Carnival celebrations as the other three, in the spring of 1513, although there is some debate among scholars about this. This song presents a strong contrast with the other three in its Savonarolanesque warnings to the Florentines of the evanescence of earthly pleasures and the need for repentance: What is especially interesting about this song (and such inclusions of sober re-minders of man’s mortality were not uncommon in medieval and Renaissance carnival celebrations) is that, according to one contemporary, it caused great consternation upon the occasion of its performance, and was explicitly interpreted in political terms by the spectators. Vasari, in his life of Piero di Cosimo, remarks that the song caused a sensation and frightened many spectators, and that some of them interpreted it as a prediction of the return of the Medici to Florence, and, even, perhaps, as a veiled threat of possible retalia-tion directed to the republican opponents of their restoration. The chronicler seems also to imply that the reception of this Carnival song was mixed, many, but not all, of the spectators in attendance viewing it as a celebration of the return of Medici rule, but not all.

! John Shearman, “Pontormo and Andrea Del Sarto, 1513,” The Burlington Magazine, 42

Vol. 104, No. 716 (Nov., 1962), 450 + 478-483

� For a discussion of the Canzone della Morte, see William Prizer, “Reading Carnival: 43

The Creation of a Florentine Carnival Song,” Early Music History, Vol. 23 (2004), 185-252

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If all four songs were performed during the same Carnival (which seems likely, given that such ephemeral pamphlets were customarily printed either immediately before or soon after the events they commemorated) we may observe the following progression: a spectacular and terrifying image of Death, holding a scythe; Lorenzo’s triumph of the return of the Golden Age, personified by six elaborate chariots depicting the glorious deeds of the Medici’s Roman ancestors, Giuliano’s much reduced presentation of the Three Ages of Man, represented by the Three Fates; and finally, proceeding through the streets and squares, accompanied by the canzone of the Cazzuola (which, as mentioned above, may have contained a highly cryptic and allusive reference to the rebirth of the city under the aegis of a return to the values of the time of Savonarola), a seated female figure, representing Peace, surrounded by small children, a common representation of the benefits of just rule from classical times onward:

! In this interpretation (although, as noted above, the Canzone della Cazzuola is highly cryptic and hard to interpret, much less visualize) the “parvoletti” and the “gran

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memoria dell’età passata,” in whose grace you [the “alma ciptà”] flourished, would be references to the small children protected by this seated figure, which the assembled spectators would be entreated to remember, a reference, perhaps, not to the present regime, in which, while the Medici had succeeded in establishing military domination over the city, there could be no real peace as long as large numbers of the civilian popu-lace, including the working and middle classes, were excluded from any real participation in civic life. Hence the Canzone della Cazzuola which concluded the Carnival festivities of 1513, which, as we have seen, began with a frightening recollection of Savonarolan themes of Death and the need for repentance, followed, in a kind of strange parenthesis, by the elaborate chariots depicting the glories of the new Medicean order succeeded by Giuliano’s melancholy recollection of the evanescence of human life, would, in this in-terpretation, as the last image the spectators saw, have promised, perhaps, the possibility of a return to the republican ideals of just government and social justice which formed the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings (for all the excesses to which the republic had been subjected by over-zealous arrabbiati determined to punish, not just the former parti-sans of the Medici, but their entire social class) of the republican regime which had just ended. This interpretation of the Carnival festivities of 1513 becomes more plausible when we consider that, for Florentines of all social classes, a large seated female figure, succouring small children would have immediately recalled images of Florence herself, seen as a kind of alma mater protecting those under her care, an image dating, not to the Medici regime (although they attempted to co-opt it in a series of medals issued in the late 1400s in which Florence is depicted in this manner), but rather to the city’s commu-nal past. Perhaps this might be the true explanation for the shock and horror the Carnival festivities of this year aroused in the onlookers mentioned by Vasari; perhaps the shock was due not so much to the appearance of an image of Death per se (this image was a common part of almost all Carnival celebrations), but rather by the audaciousness of pre-senting such imagery in a city now at least nominally under Medici control. Mozzati also notes that two out of the four songs we have been discussing, the third and fourth (those of the Diamente and Cazzuola) were sponsored either by the Caz-zuola or by Giuliano in his role as a member of this organization. If we allow for the pos-sibility that the first song also, La Canzone della Morte, may have also been sponsored

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by an individual, who, as the evidence presented by one scholar suggests, if not himself a member of the company, may at least have been not unsympathetic to the Savonarolan message, and thus one of those ottimati opponents of Medici control of the city (of which there were many), this consideration might also tend to support our hypothesis of a Savonarolan, implicitly anti-medicean subtext for the Carnival celebrations of 1513. Lorenzo’s highly triumphalistic presentation of the supposed benefits of a return to Medici rule would, then, in this scenario, find itself sandwiched between three other tri-umphs which presented a highly pessimistic view of human life, recalling Savonarolan themes of death and old age, and strongly contrasting with the triumphalistic vision of life in Florence under the newly-created Medicean hegemony. And certainly the content of the first and third songs, the first explicitly, in its terri-fying image of Death, the third implicitly (with its classical reference to the Three Fates) leaves no doubt as to their Savonarolan provenance, a fact which makes an interpretation of these Carnival celebrations in a pro-medicean key, as has been the case for some scholars, even harder to sustain. As noted above, the Carnival celebrations of following year may have represented, perhaps, a response on the part of the Medici to the Savonarolan tone of the festivities just described, intended to send a strong message that it was the Medici, and not their former ottimati friends and clients, who were now running the show in Florence. Two objections to our interpretation of the Carnival celebrations of 1513 immedi-ately arise: how can one prove that such an interpretation is correct, and how can one re-ply to the obvious objection that such a presentation of Savonarolan themes, albeit in a highly symbolic and encoded manner, in Carnival festivities only seven months after the return of the Medici, seems highly improbable, given the seemingly impenetrable hold the family had on the city at this time. To the first objection, we can only reply that both the dating, the meaning, and even the authors of the Carnival songs discussed above are still highly unclear and hotly contested by scholars, which might allow for the possibility that, however improbable on its face, the interpretation we have just proposed not be dismissed out-of-hand. We might further note that, as Hale and Najemy have noted, the rule of the Medici over the city at this time was far from assured, and open to challenges of all kinds, from both the popular and the upper-class side, until well into the fourth decade of the century; such a consideration might also allow for some flexibility in allowing that at this time,

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control, not only of the city, but also its public spaces had not been entirely secured by the Medici; at this relatively early stage in the progression of the city from a post-oli-garchic to an absolutistic state, there may still have been spaces, both metaphorically, in the languages and symbolism of Carnival, and physically, in the control over the public space, for some expression of popular, and also oligarchic, discontent with this situation. This might tend to suggest, following our interpretation of the festivities of the Cazzuola as representing a veiled allusion to the tyrannical nature of Medici rule and a celebration of the virtues of the former Savonarolan order, that such forms of dissent could, even months after the restoration of the Medici, still be performed in public, and did not have to be limited to the shadowy, nocturnal world of the festivities of the company so vividly described by Vasari. Seen in this light, the festivities of the following year described by Mino-Paluello would represent a response to this still semi-fluid character of the public sphere, in which dissenting voices still had some space, until the replacement of this still-indeterminate character by an unequivocal assertion of Medici control through the spectacles described by Minio-Paluello, which also represented, we suggest, an encoded, but this time unam-biguous, message: that the artisan groups which formerly had control in the city were now, in their public mocking, their enthronement as “king” of the city through the public investiture of Maestro Antonio with this power in the Palazzo della Podestà (as noted above, a travesty of the practices of the popular artisan groups discussed by Gori), their public humiliation in the “abduction” of Tancredi and his public flogging by the devils, and the final “pursuit” of this sorry spectacle by the sinister masked figures described by Minio-Paluello, perhaps representing a kind of cleansing of the city of the messy and dis-orderly burden of its communal past by the Medici, heroic restorers of the city to its for-mer greatness as a happy realm under their benevolent and paternal care. Such a vision would have appealed especially to their former friends and clients who had benefitted from the family’s de facto rule over the city, but it might also have appealed to ordinary citizens tired of the fighting and factionalism which had characterized the time of Savonarola. Butters (cited in Chapter 2) also notes the reluctant consent on the part of the Flo-rentine Signoria to Lorenzo di Piero’s assumption of the bastone di dominio in and that this represented an unprecedented departure from the constitutional procedures of the city.

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Najemy notes the unprecedented creation by Lorenzo of his own private army in, once again, a patent violation of the city’s political traditions, again intended to make clear once and for all who the real rulers of Florence actually were. Against this back-ground, the elaborate festivities of the Compagnia della Cazzuola described by Vasari might be viewed as a popular response to this situation on the part of groups newly-mar-ginalized from political power in the city through the creation of a kind of “counter-car-nival” to compete with these elaborate celebrations sponsored by the Medici. We noted above the essentially carnivalesque nature of the company as described by Vasari, per-haps best embodied in Machiavelli’s Rabelesian Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere, as well as the elaborate games alluded to by Vasari, in which members of the company managed to express, in highly cryptic ways, their opposition to Medici rule. Such consid-erations also might tend to suggest that members of the social classes now excluded from power by the Medici return to the city might well have availed themselves of Carnival (where traditionally, some license was permitted for the criticism of those in power) at this time to register, albeit in an oblique and encoded way, their discontent with this state of affairs. To sum up what has been said, all the examples just cited suggest that many, if not all, the public festivities which celebrated Carnival and the Feast of St. John in Renais-sance Florence (of which we have a rather full record, both in eyewitness accounts and in the later studies of scholars) had a political subtext involving political power and the con-trol of the public sphere, and, as we would argue, that far from evoking images of a glori-ous return of a happy age for the city under the beneficent and benevolent rule of the Medici, the Carnival festivities of 1513 evoke, in their veiled allusions to the Savonarolan themes just discussed, precisely the opposite: an appeal to the citizens to remember, and perhaps work to restore, a former age marked, not by factionalism and political strife, nor the domination of one powerful family, but rather by the rule of the laws and institutions of the early Republic, characterized (at least ideally) by justice and a sharing of power among the various classes, and whose fruits were the peace evoked by the procession of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, with its dramatic image of a fostering female figure hold-ing small children, traditional symbol, from classical times onward, of the final effects of just government. Ottimati watching this latter spectacle might also have reflected that, if the work-ing classes of the city, represented by the madmen of the Ship of Fools, could be publicly

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humiliated in this manner, surely the new lords of the city could not be assumed to be willing to accord them any greater share of power; as noted by Najemy, any of them who still clung to this delusion were finally disabused of such a notion in the brutal reprisals which followed the final defeat of the exiles at Montemurlo which made it abundantly clear, to those who might still cling to such notions, that any opposition to Medici hege-mony on the part of their class would be just as brutally repressed as the revolts of the populo minuto; indeed, as noted above, this entire period was characterized by a pro-longed power struggle between a steadily-diminishing share of ottimati still hoping for a share of power in the new medicean dispensation, and, on the other side, Medici determi-nation to establish absolute, uncontested rule over the city, in which every decision, whether cultural or political or economic came under Cosimo’s absolute control.  44

Seen, then, in this longue durée, in which the process of consolidation of Medici power as absolute rulers of the city took place over many years, endured many vicissi-tudes (in the briefly reestablished republic of 1527-30), was hotly contested (in the nu-merous conspiracies against the Medici, for example, the Boscoli plot of 1522 to assassi-nate Giulio, presumably to prevent his imminent election as Pope), and was not finally completed until over 20 years after the restoration of the family to rule in the city in the fall of 1512, the public spectacles we have been discussing may be seen, perhaps, not as monolithically pro-medicean, but as allowing for some “wiggle-room” for the expression of the discontent, on the part of both the ottimati and the popular classes, which would have been an inevitable part of this process. It is easy for modern historians, looking back at events which occurred more than 500 years ago, to compress events into a much small-er space than would have been the case for the actual participants, who lived these events

� For a similar use of Carnival festivities to simultaneously impress and intimidate the 44

civilian populace of a city, in this case that of Reggio-Emilia, see Serge Bouchet, “De la fête communale à la fête princière dans les villes d'Emilie-Romagne (XIVe-début XVIe siècle): affirmation de pouvoir et sujétion des citadini,” Le Verger: La fête à la Renais-sance, available online at http://cornucopia16.com/blog/2014/11/30/le-verger-bouquet-vi-la-fete-a-la-renaissance/. For a study of Carnival festivities in Venice as expression of po-litical dissent, see Linda Carroll, “Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 16, 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 487-502. For the politi-cal situation in Florence in the years 1512-1530, see the excellent summaries of Najemy, Butters, Hale and .

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intensely and day-to-day, and thus to construct a “master-narrative” to account for the of-ten bewildering amount of information with which they are confronted. This process of compression and schematization leads inevitably to over-simplifi-cations of various kinds, perhaps the most important of which, for the purposes of this study, is the creation of that “golden myth” of Medici benevolence, objections to which, both public and private, have formed the object of this study. In our view, the only anti-dote for such a process is to disrupt this master-narrative through the gradual accumula-tion and bringing to light of facts at variance with it, in the bringing to light of “counter-voices,” albeit often hard to hear and barely audible, which can disrupt it and lead us to a fuller and more nuanced view of the period. To sum up what has been said, it may not be going too far to assert that most, if not all, Florentine popular celebrations, at least after the return of the Medici to power in 1512, had, more or less clearly expressed, a political subtext, whether as vehicles for the promotion of pro-medicean positions, or, as we have been suggesting, for the expression, in some cases, of sentiments opposed to the family’s domination of the city and their im-position of values incompatible with its mercantile and republican traditions. The same might be said for Florentine Renaissance drama, to which we now turn. !

The Compagnia della Cazzuola and Renaissance Drama The same themes we have been discussing--the violence and unbridled lusts of the tyrant, and the sufferings of those subject to them--also appear in Renaissance dramas staged or written by members of the Cazzuola or by individuals associated with them. In the heroine of the Rosmunda of Giovanni Rucellai (one of whose relatives, Francesco, was, according to Vasari, one of the founding members of the Cazzuola) we encounter a sympathetic female figure, once the queen of a great kingdom, now subject to the violence of a powerful male figure, who seeks to humiliate her and subject her to his will, forcing her to drink wine from the skull of her father, whom the tyrant, Albuino, has slain in battle. The tyrant receives his final comuppance at the end of the play, when allies of Rosmunda slay and decapitate him in his tent. In Rucellai's play, just as in the feste of the Cazzuola analyzed above, we see the theme of cannibalism closely associated with the figure of the tyrant. We also see the tyrant receiving his final just recompense for his arrogant and violent behaviour. And just

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as in Seneca's Thyestes, the main action of Rucellai's play is interspersed with lyrical in-termezzi expressing commonplaces from Stoic philosophy regarding the power of For-tune over all mortals, kings not excluded, and abjuring these kings to rule justly, since they are subject to the whims of Fortune just as much as the common man, and can suffer sudden reversals of fortune which can at any time make them subject to those they once ruled. Important to note in this regard is that the image of a suffering female figure, sub-ject to the depredations of a powerful male figure, was, for Renaissance audiences, com-monly understood as a symbol of the political domination of one city or state by another, as the art historians Yael Even and Margaret Carroll have pointed out.  As noted by the 45

art historians, the figure was employed as such in many works of literature and visual art of the period. In our discussion of the feste of the Cazzuola above, we noted the appear-ance of the figure of Proserpina, the unwilling captive of Pluto, carried off by him to the underworld to satisfy his lusts and be his captive queen, another example of this common Renaissance topos. Given this interpretive predisposition, many, if not most, of those in attendance at Rucellai's play would have immediately recognized his Rosmunda as a symbol of Florence, or Tuscany, subject to the forceful domination of the Medici. As the editor notes in the 1728 edition of the play (Padova: G. Comino), Rucellai modeled his play on the Hecuba of Euripides, whose subject is the loss of a kingdom by a captive queen who suffers outrage at the hands of her Greek captors, among them Agamemnon, son of Atreus, who, as noted above, provided one the most potent symbols in all of classical literature of the fierce and vindictive figure of the tyrant. The first performance of the Rosmunda took place in Rucellai's gardens for Leo and his retinue of cardinals on the occasion of the Pope's triumphal visit to the city in November 1515, immediately before his humiliating colloquy with King Francis in Bologna, where the King insisted on the surrender of the cities of Parma and Piacenza and that the Pope hand back Reggio and Modena, which he had recently acquired from the Emperor, to France’s ally Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. It thus seems possible that the final exhortation of the play—a warning to rulers that the only way to secure their states in safety is to rule with humanity and humility--is directed not at kings in general, but to

! Yael Even, “The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,” Woman’s Art Jour45 -nal, 12 (1991), pp. 10-14 and Margaret Carroll, “The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence,” Representations, 25 (1989), 3-30.

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the new prince of Rome and de facto ruler of Florence not to abuse his power, but to rule his native city with moderation and justice. As such, this admonition would be analogous to the orations directed to new officials upon their taking office, for example the podestà, urging them to rule justly, one of the important genres of Renaissance rhetoric.  46

Rucellai's close friend and artistic competitor Gian-Giorgio Trissino's Sofonisba presents us with yet another image of a highly sympathetic female character, subject to unjust domination by a superior male force, in this case, surprisingly, the Romans, who have just conquered her native city, Carthage, which, as the former queen pointedly re-marks at the beginning of the play, was once used to living in liberty, before the onset of her civic misfortunes upon the betrayal and death of Dido at the hands of Aeneas, and her

! As another example of a well-known Renaissance drama which, according to one 46

scholar, makes a veiled critique of Leo is Ariosto’s Il negromante, composed at the Pope’s request one year after the performance at the papal court of the author’s hugely successful Suppositi in of 1519 Attempting to answer the question of why this play was never performed in Rome, this scholar demonstrates conclusively that it was because the play represents an allusive and highly negative portrait of the Pope himself, in the person of the Iago-like character Iachelino, who obtains what he wants from the other, weaker, characters by means of deceit and the ability to assume many identities. According to this scholar, the reason why this play was never performed at Leo’s court was not its scabrous and obscene language and its references to sodomy, intended to satirize the papal court, and present in even greater measure in his other plays, but rather the frequent references to Iachelino’s greed and his astrological manipulation of “magiche sciochezze” to extort money and favors from those he needs; in the words of this scholar, Iachelino “pontifi-cates over the world of Il negromante. . . .dispensing artificial services for real cash.” As a veiled allusion to the sale of indulgences and Leo’s manipulation of religion in the ser-vice of personal self-aggrandizement, the machination of this character would have struck a particularly sensitive cord, just three years after the posting of Luther’s theses, which taxed the Roman court for just such improprieties. In reference to our claim that the names of the characters of both Machiavelli’s Mandragola and Caro’s Gli straccioni are important clues to the anti-medicean subtext of these plays, Porter observes Ariosto’s similar use of proper names to hint at the actual personage who lies behind his fictive Iachelino. In reference to our claim that Raphael’s famous portrait of the Medici Pope contains a humorous allusion to his extreme myopia, we might note that Porter also ob-serves a similar use of this detail in Il negromante to further direct the audience’s atten-tion to the political subtext of the play (I. A. Porter, “A Non-performance of Il Negro-mante,” Italica 59.4 (1982). 316-329).

! ! �56

forging of diplomatic alliances which proved ruinous to her and resulted in her final sub-jugation. Just as Rucellai's Rosmunda, Trissino's Sofonisba is a heroic figure who prefers death to the dishonor of servitude to the conquering Romans, and emerges from the play as a stronger and more determined figure than her male counterparts. And just as the Rosmunda, the play draws inspiration from the plays of Seneca, which take as their pri-mary theme the highly melodramatic theme of the injustice of tyrants, resisted, if not al-ways conquered, by the heroic efforts of the truly just individual, interspersed with choral interludes which celebrate the power of Fortune and the gods (and, in some cases, as in Machiavelli's Mandragola, Love) as final arbiter in all human affairs, to whom kings, no less than the ordinary individual, are ultimately subject. The topical reference of Trissino's play is a bit more difficult than that of Rucellai's to determine, but it does seem possible, that, given the Spanish King’s determination, well-known to contemporaries, to bring all of Europe, including France, Italy, the Low Countries as well as north Africa, under the sway of the Spanish crown (a feature of his reign which included the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492, an event which Machiavelli referred to as a kind of "clever cruelty"), that the Carthaginians of Trissino's play, subject to Roman conquest and enslavement, may have been intended by the author as an implied allusion, or "stand-in" for just such a policy of imperial conquest, with all its tyrannical, unjust and painful features to which the conquered are inevitably subject.  47

If this interpretation of the play as implied critique on contemporary rulers is ac-cepted, it would represent another example of a Renaissance inversion of the traditional heroic role assigned to the Romans, another example of which is to be found in Rem-brandt’s painting The Oath of the Sarmathians, painted for the town hall of Amsterdam, where the leader of the latter tribe makes a heroic gesture of resistance to Roman rule, raising his sword and swearing an oath of vengeance together with his companions. The painting was intended by the artist as an implied rebuke of Spanish power and a celebra-tion of those who steadfastly oppose it. Interestingly enough, the Borgia Pope’s ascension to the Papacy on 11 August, 1492, just weeks before the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors, was the occasion of the presentation of Marcellino Verardi’s Fernandus Servatus (Ferdinand Pre-served), a play (written probably in early 1493) which also, in a way somewhat analogous

! Here we might note that Trissino—cf. Plaisance.47

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to Milton's Lucifer, manages to present its "villain," Ruffus, the would-be assassin of the King, as a far more sympathetic and courageous figure than his intended victim.  On the 48

same occasion of the Pope’s election, the Romans were treated to a mock battle between the Spanish troops and the Moors in the Piazza Navona, and the spectacle of a tauro-machia in the streets of Rome, a barbarous and blood-thirsty spectacle completely alien to Roman humanist and curial culture, a Florentine version of which, sponsored by the Medici for the festa of San Giovanni on 25 June, 1514, occasioned one outraged Floren-tine to remark on the diabolic barbarity of the spectacle.  49

Trissino’s Sofonisba, just as the other plays we have been discussing, also derives, in its highly rhetorical and melodramatic presentation of the violence associated with im-perial courts, from the dramas of Seneca. Another play we will cite here is Lodovico Domenichi's Progne (a translation of Gregorio Correr’s humanist tragedy Procne, composed around 1427) a myth, as we ob-served above, closely associated with that of Tantalus in the classical tradition (Atreus even refers to it obliquely in the Thyestes as a crime he aspires to outdo), where, just as the myth of Tantalus, it symbolized the cannibalistic consumption by the tyrant of his own offspring. The cutting out of Philomela's tongue by the tyrant of Domenichi's play is intended to keep her silent regarding her rape at his hands, a deed eventually avenged by the slaying of his sons and the feeding of them to him in a stew. The heroic figure of Procne, who avenges her sister's rape, thus forms an exact parallel to the slaying and be-heading of the tyrant by the allies of Rucellai's Rosmunda, an act of vengeance on the part of a suffering female figure which, in Rucellai's play, represents one of the those "implied gestures" described by Tromly, intended to recall to mind the heroic Judith of

! Humanist Tragedies, tr. by Gary Grund (Cambridge, MA: The I Tatti Renaissance Li48 -brary, Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. xxxv-xxxvii.

! Gori, Chapter XVI, “Le feste diaboliche del 1513, 1514, ed altre,” pp. 204-207.49

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the Piazza della Signoria who slays the Medici tyrant and holds his head aloft for all to see, restoring freedom to her city.  50

And just as the Rosmunda and the Sofonisba, the play shows the strong influence of Seneca in its highly melodramatic, rhetorical dramatization of the iniquities and final punishment of the tyrant. While not associated with members of the Cazzuola (Domenichi worked later in the century as an editor and translator for the Venetian publisher Giolito and the Floren-tine printer Torrentino), Domenichi includes in his 1559 edition of poems by renowned Italian women (the first collection of exclusively female poets ever published) as the very first poem in the volume Aurelia Petrucci’s poem lamenting the internal divisions within the city of Siena, the cause of her eventual conquest by Florence. Fully a quarter of the poems in the volume are by Siennese women (a number of whom took an active role in the defense of the city during the siege of 1554), and many of the poems in the volume lament the sorry state of war-torn Italy and make urgent calls for peace.  Coming only 51

five years after the defeat of Siena by Florentine forces, and Cosimo’s subsequent tri-umphal declaration of a Tuscany now under Florentine control, it seems hard to escape the conclusion that the entire volume represents an implied critique of Medicean territori-al policy of conquest and domination. In a sonnet of Tullia d’Aragona, the courtesan describes, in highly cryptic and al-lusive terms, her escape from the tyrant Tereus’s prison, as a modern-day Philomela, re-covering her voice and briefly flying free, only to become subject to another captivity in

! “Like many Renaissance writers, including Chapman in his tribute, Marlowe frequent50 -ly evokes classical myths without actually naming them, and in many cases his most sig-nificant myths are only implicit in patterns of images. In the plays especially, there is no need for Tantalus to be named, for we see versions of him in the stage-pictures Marlowe creates through props and the postures of the actors” (Tromly, 11). On the Judith, see Sarah McHam, “Donatello’s Bronze ‘David’ and “Judith’ as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence,” The Art Bulletin, 83 (2001), pp. 32-47.

! Lodovico Domenichi, Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne (Lucca: Bus51 -drago, 1559). The article which discusses this volume is by Marie-Françoise Piejus, “La pre-mière anthologie de poèmes féminins: L’écriture filtrée et orientée,” in Le pouvoir et la plume: incitation, contrôle et répression dans l’Italie du XVIe siècle (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982), 193-213.

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the prison of the addressee’s power.  As one scholar has pointed out, Cosimo's freeing of 52

the poet from prison, where she had been imprisoned for breaking Florence’s sumptuary laws, as a special favor granted to her as a poetess ("fasseli gratia per poetessa") ensured her loyalty to him and her subservience to the Medici regime.  So it seems entirely pos53 -sible that Domenichi's choice of the classical Procne, the liberator and avenger of her abused sister, as subject of his play might represent yet another veiled reference (as we

! Ann Rosalind Jones, “New Song for the Swallow: Ovid’s Philomela in Tullia d’Arago52 -na and Gaspara Stampa,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. by Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991) 263-277.

! Deana Basile, “”Fasseli gratia per poetessa’: Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Role in the 53

Florentine Literary Circle of Tullia d’Aragona,” in Eisenbichler, 135-39.

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saw in the case of Rucellai's Rosmunda) to a contemporary female figure subject yet again to a contemporary tyrant.  54

! Vasari also notes that the Compagnia della Purificazione, a confraternity consisting for the 54

most part of boys devoted to the religious life, and closely associated with Savonarola (its sede was in the Cloister of San Marco) performed in the year for Alessandro and his sister a play by a certain Giovan Maria Primerani on the theme of Tamar, one of David’s concubines, a young woman assaulted by Ammon, which led to her taking vengeance upon him at a feast, where she . Here again, as in Rucellai’s Rosmunda, Trissino’s Sofonisba and Domenichi’s Procne, we are confronted by the spectacle of a young woman, victim of the unwanted advances of a powerful male figure, who is eventually punished for his actions while enjoying a feast. Along with the better-known examples of Judith and Susanna (spied upon in her bath by the elders), Tamar was considered a paragon of the courageous female hero, who dares to assert herself against the ag-gression of a more powerful, but unjust, male figure. Interestingly enough, Vasari also records that, subsequent to the performance of this play, the author found himself in prison, from which he was liberated after writing another play “of his own choosing” for the Duke. Significantly, this play took as its theme Joseph unjustly accused of violating his mistress, where X (perhaps a stand-in for the author himself) is freed from prison after correctly interpreting the king’s dream. In light of our discussion of possible topical references in Florentine Renaissance plays (even directed, in some cases, at the powerful individuals for whom they were performed), it does not seem to us impossible that Primerani may have intended his first play as an implied rebuke of the prepotenza and violence which characterized the rule of Alessandro in Florence, a rebuke which, when Alessandro perceived it, led him to punish the author by confining him to prison. The con-dition of his release, then, was to write a play which, in effect, counteracted the message of the first play by presenting an image of a just ruler falsely accused of a violent act]. While there is no way to determine whether this hypothesis is correct, if it is, it accords well with similar uses of the threat of prison on the part of the Medici rulers to discourage literary productions which pre-sented them in an unfavourable light, examples of which were Cosimo’s possible coercion of Benedetto Varchi’s loyalty by means of a trumped-up charge of rape, and Cellini’s compliance through his actual imprisonment, discussed in the Introduction, as well as his use of similar means to silence Lodovico Domenichi, discussed below. We also cite another example of the theme of a heroic female who takes her just revenge upon a predatory ruler in a late Renaissance play, Federico della Valle’s Iudit, discussed below. Primerani’s play, just as Della Valle’s, had a long afterlife in both Europe and in Italy; for example For the Compagnia della Purificazione, see Konrad Eisenbichler, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), Christopher Black, Italian Confraterni-ties in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Lorenzo Poliz-zotto, Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence, 1427-1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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In the 1561 Giuntine edition of the play, the Progne is bound together with Rucel-lai's Rosmunda, which might also indicate that contemporaries associated the themes, and perhaps even the contemporary references, of the two plays with each other.

! ! �62

In his dedication to Giannotto Castiglione, Domenichi asserts the value of tragedy in teaching proper ethical behaviour to rulers, making an explicit connection between the fictions of the dramatic genre and contemporary events.  55

! That Renaissance farces could often have a didactic intent directed at the rulers to whom they 55

were presented is made clear by a farce of Jacopo del Bientina, a member, along with Giovan Battista Ottonaio, of the Compagnia della Cazzuola, recited “agli excelsi Signori di Firenze in 1512,” which Bientina, in the Prologue, claims apologetically: [non è] una ordinata comedia, distinta a punto in cinque acti, togata o palliata, racolto in un sol dì del tutto el sunto,” but rather a “storia inmaginata partita in tempi, più di cinque in punto.” As with the other Renaissance plays we have been discussing, but in a different register, Bientina’s play represents yet another rebuke, similar to the plays of Rucellai and Trissino discussed above, of Florence’s current lead-ers, immediately after their restoration as lords of the city, and an attempt to teach them the prop-er way to behave with their subjects. Although Bientina never refers directly to Florence, it is clear that his play was intended to function as an implied critique of the current social and politi-cal climate, since he rebukes, in a Savonarolan, medievalizing way, the self-centeredness of the lover, the merchant, and the lord, which explains his use of the words “storia inmaginata” to de-scribe his play, i.e. consisting of relatively simple dialogue between a few carefully-delineated characters, accompanied by the appropriate visual supports. Here we might also cite Giovanni Battista Ottonaio’s L’ingratitudine, a Savonarolan-flavored play in which a rich man is reproved for his ungratefulness toward his friend, possibly an allusive reference to Ottonaio’s treatment at the hands of the Medici, by whom he was dismissed from his position as Herald of the Signoria in for reasons which remain unclear. What is clear is that the play is most likely also an allusive censure of the vices of the Medicean court, since, just as in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, the pro-logue refers to the avaricious man’s having just returned to his homeland from abroad, thirsty for honor and riches and all the prestige the court can bring. The play was clearly intended to serve, in a manner similar to Savonarola’s sermons, as a reproof of courtly vices and a call to repen-tance. Among the vices of the court which comes in for special censure is that of avarice, which sets one man against another and destroys the bonds of friendship, thus voiding the social con-tract and introducing into society all the vices associated with this. In this regard, it may be sig-nificant that, while Ottonaio died in 1527, the play did not see its first edition until 1549, by the Giuntine press, although Poggiali suggests that earlier editions may have existed, possibly dating to the time of the first performance of Machiavelli’s Clizia and Mandragola, perhaps indicating an active effort on the part of the Medici to suppress the play. As noted above, the first perfor-mance of La Clizia was intended to celebrate the release from prison of one of the members of the Cazzuola, who had been arrested for some unknown transgression against the Medici regime. In our view, it is significant that both Bientina and Ottonaio were members of the Cazzuola and followers of Savonarola; this tends to suggest that our hypothesis of a hidden Savonarolan and anti-Medicean agenda present in the activities of the company is indeed well-founded. The Can-zone della Chazuola, discussed above and at length by Cummings, has also been attributed to Ottonaio, for which see also Cummings 103, 107-12 et passim.

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Finally, in the Tullia of Lodovico Martelli, we encounter the inversion of the themes we have been discussing, a play in which a ruthless queen plots with Tarquin to usurp the Roman throne by killing her father and husband. In Livy’s account, she forms a vivid exemplum negativum in pointed contrast to the virtuous Lucretia and her ferocity and depravity lead to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Roman republic. Significantly, at the end of the play, the Furies descend on the city of Florence but are turned back by divine intervention and civil discord is averted. Given what has been said about the symbolic function of the Furies in classical literature as the inciters of the tyrant to violence, it seems possible that the Furies of Martelli's play were meant to symbolize the civic strife fomented in the city of Florence by the tyrannical regime of the Medici, which can only be forestalled by the propitious intervention of those Savonarolan lovers of her freedom.  Given the contemporary political subtext of plays--in both the 56

classical era and in the Renaissance--which take as their subject the deeds of the tyrant, it seems possible that the Furies of Martelli's play might have been intended to suggest an even more specific reference, that is, the storming of the Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria by Medici partisans during the coup d'etat which restored the Medici to power in September 1512, in which cries of "palle" echoed through the streets, intended

! In one of the carnival songs included in Lasca’s mid-cinquecento anthology, Rucellai 56

makes an explicit connection between the Furies and the present sorry state of Florentine political life, to which another author, in a humorous rejoinder, remarks that, rather than referring to Florentine political life in general, they represent the travails of ordinary Flo-rentines, hounded by the constant harassment of the city’s ever-present fiscal authorities.

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by partisans of the Medici as a tactic of intimidation, one which, in this case, succeeded, leading as it did to Soderini's abdication and flight to Ragusa.  57

So it appears that Seneca's Thyestes served as the foundational text for a whole se-ries of Renaissance dramas which censured the evils of tyranny in an indirect way.  Giv58 -en what has been said about the circumstances of their performances, and the composi-tion of the groups which performed them, it seems fair to say that there is only one set of

! Martelli was a close friend of Giovanni Gaddi, the brother of the powerful anti-57

medicean Cardinal Niccolò Gaddi, who dedicates his edition of Martelli’s work as a post-humous tribute to the memory of his departed friend, and who was the center of a clan-destine group of opponents of the Medici based in Rome, of which Michelangelo himself was a member, together with such staunch opponents of the Medici as Donato Giannotti, the Cardinals Niccolò Ridolfi and Giovanni Salviati, Benedetto Varchi, Bartolomeo (Bac-cio) Cavalcanti and Niccolò Ardinghelli. The group also included such free spirits as Pietro Aretino and Francesco Maria Molza, both known for their anti-authoritarian atti-tudes (Molza composed an epigram on the assassination of Alessandro de' Medici in 1537, as did Varchi), as well as Annibal Caro (the personal secretary of Giovanni Gaddi). This information is from Raphaële Mouren, “The Role of Florentine Families in the Edi-tions of Piero Vettori” (paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, April 3, 2008, available online at http://raphaele-mouren.enssib.fr/ Chicago2008#15).

! For the rediscovery of Seneca’s tragedies, and their influence on tre- and quattrocento 58

Italian drama, see Grund, vii-xx. In this regard, it is interesting to note that every play printed in Grund's edition of humanist tragedies has a contemporary political subtext, more or less overtly expressed, regarding the nature of tyranny and the necessity of com-bating it (Humanist Tragedies, ed. Gary Grund (Cambridge, MA; London, England: Har-vard University Press, 2011).

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individuals to whom these plays can reasonably be said to allude, that is the newly-re-stored Medici and their Spanish supporters.  59

The plays for which the Cazzuola was particularly famous in its role as a kind of traveling theatre-company—the Cassaria and Suppositi of Ariosto, and the Calandria of Bibbiena--also had a political subtext, according to several scholars.  Solerti describes a 60

performance of the Calandria in Lyon in September of 1548 before King Henry of France and his court in which the intermezzi consisted of a procession of scenes which dramatized the return of the Age of Gold, to replace “quella, ch’hora /(Benché dispiaccia

! The fact that dramatic performances could represent a potent challenge to the authority 59

of the Medici regime in Renaissance Florence is attested to by an edict published on 21 May, 1581 by Sebastiano de’ Medici, canon of the Florentine cathedral, at the behest of Alessandro de’ Medici, Archbishop of Florence, noting that since it had come to his [Alessandro’s] attention the presence of “alcuni disordini per i quali si potrebbe destrug-gere tanta utilità spirituale,” he has determined and ordered that “non si recitino in modo alcuno Commedie, Tragedie, Farse, Tragicommedie o altri spettacoli né di cose sacre né di profane” in the oratories of sacred companies, nor anywhere else without the express consent of the Archbishop of his Vicario Generale (cited by Michel Plaisance, “Littéra-ture et Censure à Florence à la Fin du XVIe siècle: le Retour du Censuré,” in Le Pouvoir et la Plume, 249-250). If “disordini” threatening to Medici authority in the city could be a problem in the theatrical performances of the sacred companies, and had to be tightly regulated, one can only imagine the possibilities for the proliferation of dramatic perfor-mances with subversive intent in the multitude of non-religious organizations of the city. This paper has attempted to document only one of what were very likely many other such uses of drama to express discontent with the Medici regime, and to keep alive, if only un-derground and only on stage for an evening’s performance, the memories and traditions of the vanished Florentine republic.

! Anna Fontes-Baratto, “Les fêtes a Urbin en 1513 et la Calandria de Bernardo Dovizi da 60

Bibbiena,” in Les écrivains et le pouvoir en Italie a l’époque de la Renaissance, ed. An-dré Rochon (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1974), pp. 45-79 and Dominique Clouet, “Empirisme ou égotisme: la politique dans la Cassaria et les Suppositi de l’Ario-ste,” in Rochon 7-44. On the Calandria, see also Ronald Martinez, “Etruria triumphans: Fables of Medici Hegemony in Bibbiena’s Calandra” (paper delivered at the conference “Italy in the Drama of Europe,” University of California, Berkeley, 24-25 April, 2009, now available as Renaissance Drama 36/37 Italy in the Drama of Europe, ed. William West and Albert Ascoli (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010).

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a voi) qua giù dimora,” that is, the Age of Iron, as Apollo sings at the beginning of the play.  61

With Apollo appear onstage the four ages of man, and as the Age of Iron, the one now ascendant, comes forward, Apollo sings that it is characterized “D’ogni bruttura, e ‘l vizio cole a ama/Quel sol pregiando che ‘l suo troppo schiva,/Sí ch’altrui morte e altrui danno brama” and, being so hated by the King, is to be sent back underground by his val-or. At the end of the play, the Age of Gold descends from the stage to present a golden lily to the Queen as a gift from the nazione fiorentina of Lyon.    6263

Here it seems an almost inevitable conclusion that, in this performance for repub-lican Florence’s traditional ally, at a time of Cosimo’s ascendance, by a company of play-ers including members of the Cazzuola, in a city which was home to a large number of Florentine exiles, we are confronted once again with a play which manages, under the guise of being merely a diverting comedy in the Plautine tradition, to cleverly conceal its

! Angelo Solerti, “La rappresentazione della Calandria a Lione nel 1548,” Raccolti di 61

studi critici dedicata ad Alessandro D’Ancona (Florence: Barbèra, 1901), 693-99.

! I would like to thank Professor Richard Andrews for informing me of the later history 62

of the Cazzuola represented by its performances in Lyon. Whether the compagnia re-mained active in Florence into the 1540s is a question which we cannot answer at this point. Given that one of the meanings of “Cazzuola” is “tadpole”, a creature in a constant state of transformation, placed together with the worker’s trowel by the members of the company on their impresa, it does not seem impossible that the company may have “mu-tated” into another clandestine organization, perhaps keeping some of the same members, and changing its name, impresa, and places of meeting.

! For a discussion of covert critique of contemporary rulers in the Italian Renaissance 63

romances, see Ascoli, Quint, Cannon. For mock-epics which make veiled allusion to con-temporary events, see Plaisance and Zanré. The latter two authors note the likely presence of veiled political allusions in several mock-epics produced in the fourth and fifth decades of the 16th century by Florentine academicians, but they do not go into great de-tail about these allusions, and consider these pejorative references allusions to the otti-mati who opposed Medicean hegemony over Florence. Given our preceding discussion of veiled critique of Medici rule in Florence during these years, we consider it equally pos-sible that these pejorative allusions, in which giants are reduced to the size of pygmies, might rather represent an implied satirical diminishing of Medicean pretensions to great-ness, similar to Michelangelo’s parodic deflation of Medici pretensions discussed in Chapter 2.

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political meaning. In this performance, it is the intermezzi, not the main body of the play, which manage to convey, in an oblique and highly symbolic way, its true meaning.  64

Four years later, after the revolt of Siena in July 1552, an invasion led by Piero Strozzi, the Florentine exiles, and French forces appeared imminent, a final attempt to dislodge Cosimo from his hold on Tuscany. But the Golden Age so earnestly solicited from the King by the players of the Cazzuola never dawned; the defeat of the exiles at Marciano in August 1554, and the subsequent public humiliation and execution of exiles

! As another example of political commentary donning the guise of Plautine comedy, see 64

Faccioli’s discussion of Lorenzino de’ Medici’s L’Aridosio, which the editor claims al-ludes to present-day circumstances in Medicean Florence, specifically, the harshness of Alessandro’s rule. As an interesting side note, we might remark that, according to Vasari, the play was intended by its author, the future assassin of Alessandro de’ Medici, to phys-ically kill the Medici audience in attendance at its first performance by means of a clever-ly-concealed device which was to cause the proscenium to collapse on top of the specta-tors in the front row, a calamity prevented only by the timely and diplomatic intervention of the artist himself (Lorenzino de' Medici, L’Aridosia, ed. Emilio Faccioli (Turin: Ein-audi, 1974). The title of the play (given in some editions as “L’Aridosia”) would seem to be a veiled reference to Cardinal Francesco Alidosi, a supporter of Leo in his attempts to unseat from his position as ruler of Urbino. Alidosi was a known catamite, that is, the homosexual lover of the previous Pope, Julius II. Hence Lorenzino’s reference in his title to this individual using its feminine form would seem to be a joking reference to this fact, and an indication of the author’s opposition to Leo’s policies of territorial expansion at the expense of one of Florence’s traditional allies against Medici rule, known especially as the last hope of the Florentine republicans beseiged by the combined forces of the Pa-pacy and the Empire during the siege of Florence in 1527. This would in turn tend to suggest that the main character of the play, X, who treats his son harshly and seeks to impose stern discipline on him, is indeed a veiled reference to the harshness of Medici rule in Florence.

! ! �68

from the leading families assured that Cosimo’s Reign of Iron would endure for the rest of the century (Najemy 483-484)    6566

! We might also cite Federico Della Valle’s Iudit, an overlooked masterpiece of late Renaissance 65

drama (Della Valle is better-known for his La Reina di Scozia), in which we encounter, once again, the same theme of the tyrant punished for his abuse of a young woman. This play (which also appeared under the title “Betulia liberata,” “Betulia” being Hebrew for “young woman’) presents striking parallels to the plays we have been discussing, especially Seneca’s Thyestes and Rucellai’s Rosmunda: the tyrant is encouraged by Judith to immerse himself in drink, and, once he is too drunk to defend himself, he, along with his drunken companions, are slaughtered and decapitated by the heroic Judith and her Israelite companions. The scene in which he and his fellow-banqueters stagger about the stage, making half-hearted attempts to attack the Jews en-sconced behind the walls of Jerusalem, is truly a masterpiece of Renaissance drama, and de-serves to be better known. As part of this comic (but also highly dramatic, given what is about to happen to the King and his companions) interlude, we are also treated to a hilarious “encomium” to the virtues of wine, as opposed to the harshness of Mars, in a tour-de-force of comic writing which recalls the philosophical interludes of the Thyestes, where, as noted above, we encounter Stoic commonplaces which warn of the pitfalls which attend the arrogance of kings and celebrate the simple virtues of the common man. Given our suggestion of possible topical references in the Renaissance plays we have been discussing, where the tyrants represented are possibly intended to refer to contemporary historical circumstances, Della Valle’s play might have also been in-tended to censure a similar abuse of power on the part of a powerful ruler of his day, namely the

! Another literary genre which may have seen a very fertile life in Renaissance Italy as a 66

means for the expression of covert criticism of Medici and Imperial rule are the numerous bucolic poems produced during the period, which, under the seemingly innocent guise of a pleasant pastoral, used metaphors of ordinary country life to express opposition to Medici and Imperial domination of the peninsula. Examples which might be cited here are Luigi Alamanni’s Coltivazione, dedicated to the King of France, and Giovanni Rucel-lai’s Le Api, which concludes with a very curious passage on the death and resurrection of a swarm of bees, a curious detail which seems to point to a hidden meaning concealed by this striking image. In this regard, it is worth noting that Piero Vettori, his hopes of ser-vice to the Medici dashed by Cosimo’s policy of the promotion of men drawn from the provinces as administrators of Florence, retired to his villa in and wrote a bucolic trea-tise, the Trattato delle lodi et della cultivatione de gl’vlivi (Florence: Giunti, 1569). An Italian scholar, currently a rare book dealer in London, has also noted this use of pastoral as mask for political commentary by Italian writers of the settecento; according to this scholar, by this time, such a use of bucolic poems to convey political lessons was so well-known as to be immediately obvious to the reader.

! ! �69

The Compagnia del Paiuolo as Locus of Opposition to Medici Rule ! Interestingly enough, the Compagnia del Paiuolo, founded together with the Com-pagnia della Cazzuola sometime in the fall of 1512, but limited, unlike the Cazzuola, to only to a select group of artists, may have also functioned as locus of covert opposition to Medici rule. Vasari hints at this by giving us a tantalizingly brief description of its activi-ties, but, if we look closely at the festa Vasari does describe, we see that it is a reenact-ment of the same myth of Tantalus, symbol of the punishment of the tyrant, followed by the same celebratory feast we encountered in the feste of the Cazzuola. The ceremony takes place in a giant cauldron, with a view of the half moon above. Around a table, the members of the compagnia are eating a splendid feast, served from the branches of a tree above. But what is significant is that Vasari mentions that one of the members is charged with making sure that no water escapes from the cauldron. What this implies is that, prior to their feast, the members may have witnessed the spectacle of a Tantalus tantalized by fruits hanging from the very same tree, with water up to his chin, a common representation of the myth in the Renaissance mythographers. The water would then have been drained out, the Tantalus tree would have descended be-low, lovely music would have been heard, and then the tree would have reappeared laden with all the fruits of Paradise as a celebratory feast for the lovers of freedom gathered around the table. If this is the case, it would form an exact parallel with the feasts of the Cazzuola we have been describing, in which the tyrant is punished, and the just rewarded. Once again, Vasari seems to be hinting at an important message encoded in his text, and dis-cretely urging the reader to look closer. Tromly makes mention of a "Tantalus tree" and a cauldron in which an evil-doer is punished in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, so it would seem that both the Tantalus tree and perhaps the entire ceremony formed one of the common-places of Renaissance theatre throughout Europe, a detachable element with symbolic meaning, an example of what the scholar of Italian Renaissance theater Louise Clubb has called a "theatregram." An interesting question would be whether Marlowe also, in addi-tion to serving as an expression of the fraught relations between his fellow courtier/intel-lectuals and the Elizabethan court, might have also intended his play to be seen as an en-coded rebuke of tyrants and a celebration of the just.