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WHAT SORT OF city did Michelangelo encounter before his fateful fight on that summer’s day in 1491?
Although the documentary evidence for this early part of his life is comparatively sketchy, his day would certainly have started at Bertoldo di Giovanni’s school in the gardens of the Piazza San Marco. Arriving there in the early morning, Michelangelo would have found it already buzzing with activity. Among the rich collection of ancient statues and the higgledy-piggledy blocks of un-carved marble sat his friends, each carving away or drawing diligently. He may have called a cheerful greeting toFrancesco Granacci—who would become a lifelong companion. Paper and chalk in hand, he would have approached Bertoldo to discuss the day’s work. Michelangelo made it clear that he intended to spend yet another day sketching at the Brancacci Chapel. Bertoldo—who appreciated the boy’s persistence but who understood the merits of good guidance—would likely have directed him to focus his attentions not on the more celebrated scenes but on one of the more compositionally challenging episodes from the cycle. Because he was already ailing from an unknown illness that would carry him to his grave only months later, it is difficult to believe that Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow (Fig. 1) would not have been at the forefront of Bertoldo’s mind as he gave his advice. And so, dutifully assenting to his teacher’s counsel, Michelangelo would have set off for Santa Maria del Carmine.
Although the peregrinations of any teenager are always hard to predict, his route through Florence would certainly have taken him past some of the city’s most famous landmarks. From San Marco, not far from Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti and the Medici family church of San Lorenzo, he would have passed his home in the Pa- lazzo Medici Riccardi, the Baptistery, and the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Farther on was the great guild church of Orsanmichele and the Piazza della Signoria. His path would have taken him through the streets of the old city, across the Ponte Vecchio, and into the depths of Oltr’Arno before he reached his destination at Santa Maria del Carmine.
In many ways, Michelangelo’s journey was a voyage through the history of the Renaissance itself. The buildings he would have passed are in many senses emblematic of the artistic and architectural achievements of the period. But while they are today treated very much as artifacts to be preserved and admired in pristine condition, Michelangelo would have seen them as buildings in constant use as religious, administrative, and communal structures in a living, breathing city that was the context for the art and culture of the Renaissance. Plunging into the heart of Florence, Michelangelo trod the streets in which the cultural innovations of the period emerged, and he passed visible proofs of the different influences that had conspired to drive those changes.
After emerging as independent states following the collapse of imperial authority in the early eleventh century, the city-republics and despotisms of northern Italy had cultivated new cultural forms geared toward the celebration and preservation of autonomous self-government. The elegance of classical Latin was studied and imitated by the highly educated bureaucrats who handled the ever-increasing burden of legislation, taxation, and diplomacy. Public officials like the Florentines Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni mined the ancient classics for a rhetoric of “republicanism,” while their counterparts in despotic states looked to the literature of the Roman Empire for models of illustrious princes. Particularly in the struggle to protect their independence from other states, the cities consciously fostered a sense of urban liberty. Great public buildings such as Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio were constructed to reflect the grandeur of the republic and to testify to the stability and endurance of communal government. Art was commissioned for public spaces that glorified either the independence of the city-states or the brilliance of the signori (lords). Grown rich on the profits of trade, business, too, contributed. Corporative organizations, such as guilds and lay fraternities, built grand edifices, such as Ognissanti, for their trade and funded public institutions, such as the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Wanting to celebrate their riches or to atone for the sins they had incurred in acquiring their wealth, the new urban merchant elite also eagerly patronized the arts with a view to creating their own, very public image. Richly decorated family chapels proliferated, and fine palaces sprang up in their dozens.
But Michelangelo’s walk was also a figurative journey through the social influences that shaped his life as both artist and man. A city is, after all, the ultimate stage of the social dramas of everyday life and is the cradle in which the artistic dreams of the Renaissance were born. It is where artists lived, worked, and died; it is where social habits, tastes, and conventions were formed and refashioned; it is where life and art coincided, interacted, and cross-fertilized. As he passed the churches, squares, palaces, markets, government buildings, and hospitals that constituted the stage of everyday life, Michelangelo’s walk mirrored the social, economic, religious, and political concerns that shaped his career as a painter and sculptor and that defined his values and priorities as a human being. The sights, sounds, and smells he would have encountered on this journey were part of the weft from which the tapestry of his life and work was woven. The urban landscape in which Michelangelo and his contemporaries worked, played, and fought was, however, much uglier than the landmarks of his journey might initially suggest.
FLORENCE AND THE ILLUSION OF THE IDEAL
Florence in 1491 was a thriving metropolis.
From a population of around thirty thousand in ca. 1350, Florence had grown to become one of Europe’s largest cities. As early as 1338, as the chronicler Giovanni Villani recorded, its inhabitants consumed more than seventy thousand quarts of wine each day, and around a hundred thousand sheep, goats, and pigs had to be slaughtered each year to keep pace with the city’s appetite. By the mid-sixteenth century, it boasted no fewer than fifty-nine thousand inhabitants and was rivaled in size only by Paris, Milan, Venice, and Naples.
In 1491, Florence was an economic powerhouse. Despite its superficially unfavorable location—inland and at some distance from major trade routes—the city built on close links with the papacy and the kingdom of Naples to develop powerful mercantile andbanking concerns, and succeeded in all but cornering the European cloth market. As Villani explained in 1338, around thirty thousand laborers were employed in cloth making, and the industry as a whole produced 1.2 million florins’ worth of cloth each year, most of it for export. In the same year, eighty banks or money-changing businesses and six hundred notaries were listed, while some three hundred citizens were recorded as being merchants who worked overseas. Although there were intermittent crises—such as the famines of the early fourteenth century, the collapse of the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli banks, and the Black Death of 1348—Florence was nothing if not resilient, and its expansion into new sectors—such as the silk industry—and the growth of the Medici and Strozzi banks contributed to the continuation of the city’s economic miracle.
There was no doubt that the growth of wealth and the institutions of civic government had brought benefits. On the back of the emergence of humanism and the growth of a professional bureaucracy, standards of education and literacy reached levels that were not to be matched until well into the twentieth century and that would still be regarded as exceptional in many parts of the world today. In the mid-1330s, Villani recorded that eight to ten thousand boys and girls were learning to read in the city at that time, a figure which would suggest that 67–83 percent of the population had some basic schooling. While we could be forgiven for treating Villani’s estimate with some skepticism, his testimony is borne out by the evidence of the catasto (tax records). In the catasto of 1427, for example, around 80 percent of the men in the city were literate enough to complete their own returns. By the same token, serious attempts were made to provide for the poor, the sick, and the needy. Designed by Brunelleschi, the Ospedale degli Innocenti was established as a tax-exempt institution in 1495 to care for orphans and to provide facilities for needy women entering childbirth. In 1494, the city opened a hospital for victims of the plague that ensured the city would be insulated against epidemic and that provided medical care for the sick.
Money and civic confidence had also transformed Florence’s urban landscape. At the same time as private wealth was being poured into the construction of buildings such as the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, a deliberate effort had been made to imitate the architecture of antiquity and to create perfect cities. Vitruvius’s De architectura—the most complete classical treatise on building methods and design—had been rediscovered in its entirety by the Florentine Poggio Bracciolini in 1415, prompting a flurry of architects to put the ancient writer’s ideas into practice and to experiment with new approaches to the design and management of urban spaces. There was a veritable fetish for the ideal. Architects, artists, and thinkers vied with one another in producing the most utopian vision of city life, a tendency that is more than evident in The Ideal City (Fig. 2), painted by an anonymous artist toward the end of the fifteenth century.
This fetish for the ideal was mirrored by concerted efforts to put ancient architectural theory into practice, and as the confidence of city-states like Florence grew, the revival of the classical style became a powerful expression of civic identity and pride. There was a sense among Renaissance Florentines in particular that the utopianism of The Ideal City had been real in many ways and that their city was truly perfect. In his Invective Against Antonio Loschi (1403), the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati described Florence with characteristically gushing enthusiasm. “What city,” he asked,
not merely in Italy, but in all the world, is more securely placed within its walls, more proud in its palazzi, more bedecked with churches, more beautiful in its architecture, more imposing in its gates, richer in piazzas, happier in its wide streets, greater in its people, more glorious in its citizenry, more inexhaustible in wealth, more fertile in its fields?
Indeed, so pronounced was this sense of pride and excitement among Florentine intellectuals that an entire genre of literature devoted to the praise of the city was quickly developed. Written at approximately the same time as Salutati’s Invective, Leonardo Bruni’sPanegyric to the City of Florence (1403–4) was designed to provide its citizens with an image of their city capable of filling them with republican pride and confidence and was hence even more packed with praise.
Despite having some doubts as to whether his eloquence was sufficient to describe the majesty of Florence, Bruni described the city’s many merits in exhaustive detail, beginning with an ostentatiously over-the-top celebration of the city’s inhabitants. But what he wished to stress above all else was the urban environment and, in doing so, he provided a wonderfully lyrical expression of the loom on which the fabric of the Renaissance was woven. “What in the whole world,” Bruni asked, “is so splendid and magnificent as the architecture of Florence?” “Wherever you go,” he eulogized,
you can see handsome squares and the decorated porticos of the homes of the noble families, and the streets are always thronged with crowds of men … Here large groups of people gather to do their business and enjoy themselves. Indeed, nothing is more pleasant.
The private houses that lined the streets—“which were designed, built, and decorated for luxury, size, respectability, and especially for magnificence”—were particularly awe inspiring, and Bruni declared that even if he had “a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron,” he could “not possibly describe all the magnificence, wealth, decoration, delights, and elegance of these homes.” And above all these houses, all these churches, and all this splendor loomed the imposing edifice of the Palazzo Vecchio, the center of government in Florence. Like an admiral in his flagship, the proud palazzo seemed to Bruni to stand atop the finest city in Italy, looking down approvingly at the abundance of balance, peace, and beauty below.
It was a sentiment that grew only stronger as the years went by. In his De illustratione urbis Florentiae, published ca. 1583, but most probably written in the last years of the fifteenth century, Ugolino Verino observed that “every traveler arriving in the city of the flower admires the marble houses and the churches textured against the sky, swearing that there is no place more beautiful in all the world.” Indeed, Verino—like Bruni—was acutely conscious that his abilities were insufficient for the task of describing this most awe inspiring of cities. “How can I properly describe the paved and spacious streets,” he asked,
designed in such a way that the traveler’s journey is impeded neither by mud when it rains nor by dust during the summer, so that his shoes are not dirtied? How can I sufficiently praise the grand temple supported by majestic columns consecrated to the Holy Ghost [Santo Spirito], or the Church of San Lorenzo erected by the pious Medici … ? What can one say about the great Cosimo’s magnificent palace, or about the four large bridges crossing the Arno, the river which runs through the city before flowing into the Tyrrhenian Sea?
It was no surprise that—as Verino’s near contemporary the merchant Giovanni Rucellai reported—“many people believe that our age … is the most fortunate period in Florence’s history” or that Verino himself could mock the ancients by claiming that their “Golden Age is inferior to the time in which we now live.”
It all looks too good to be true. And the fact is that it was too good to be true. Despite the fantastic praise that Salutati, Bruni, and Verino heaped upon Florence, the visible signs of the city’s wealth coexisted with—and even depended upon—conditions that spoke to a very different mode of existence and that ultimately (if indirectly) contributed toward Michelangelo’s broken nose.
Regardless of its wealth, Florence continually struggled to overcome the unpleasant effects of its thriving mercantile trade. The ostentatious displays of wealth indulged by the city’s merchants were frequently the object of opprobrium, not least from theDominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, whose attacks on the rich concentrated on their luxurious palaces, extravagant clothing, and lavish private chapels. It all struck a discordant note with the standards of living experienced by the overwhelming majority of ordinary Florentines. As mercantile fortunes rose, the wages of the unskilled fell. Poverty was always around the corner. Begging was rife, and crime was endemic. Lacking any clear conception of economics as a distinct sphere of activity, the city government continually and unsuccessfully grappled with vast disparities in wealth, poor standards of living, and rampant disease. For more than two centuries, Florence was rent by political divisions and social rivalries, tormented by incessant epidemics, racked by crime, and blighted by social marginalization. And all of this was acted out in the same streets and squares that Salutati, Bruni, and Verino were so desperate to celebrate as the centerpieces of a new and ideal world and through which Michelangelo passed in 1491.
CULTURE, RELIGION, REVOLUTION: SAN MARCO
The location of Michelangelo’s school embodied these contradictions. Large and well-appointed, the convent and church of San Marco were home to a growing community of Dominican friars and looked every inch the embodiment of the calm and studious piety that Renaissance religious life might be thought to be.
Like the nearby Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, San Marco was the archetype of the learned cloister. After receiving the massive sum of 36,000 gold florins from Cosimo de’ Medici in 1437, it had been transformed into a sanctuary of art and learning. Adorned with frescoes by the convent’s own Fra Angelico, it had been graced with a magnificent new library designed by Michelozzo, which it had promptly filled with a vast collection of the choicest manuscripts money could buy. Indeed, according to Verino’s De illustratione urbis Florentiae, the library of San Marco contained “so many thousands of volumes written by the Greek and Latin fathers that it could rightly be called the archives of sacred doctrine.” Coupled with the school for artists that Lorenzo de’ Medici had established in the gardens outside, this rich repository of learning conspired to make San Marco one of the centers of Florentine intellectual life. By 1491, it had become a key meeting place for book-loving humanists like Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano (both of whom were subsequently buried in the church) and for artists hungry to learn from the sculptures in its garden. It was no surprise that Verino thought San Marco the place “where the Muses dwell.”
The church was, moreover, the site of genuine devotion. Among San Marco’s most treasured possessions and greatest attractions was the Christmas cradle, which has been on display since the fifteenth century and can still be seen today. Consisting of a large number of exquisitely carved figures, it captured the imagination of contemporaries (including Domenico da Corella) and served as the centerpiece of the city’s annual Epiphany celebrations. This dramatic event was a magisterial interplay of light and darkness, filled with music, costume, and the scent of incense. By cover of night, friars dressed as Magi and angels led a procession of the city’s most distinguished dignitaries into the church accompanied by burning torches. The carved Christ child was then symbolically brought to the cradle, where it was ritually adored by the “Magi” before being passed around to allow the congregation to kiss its feet. The atmosphere was apparently electric. An anonymous young man who witnessed the procession in 1498 observed that “paradise was in these friaries, and [that] such spirit descended to earth that everyone burned in love.”
But San Marco was also rapidly becoming a hotbed of religious extremism, political intrigue, and outright violence. In July 1491—that is, at about the time Michelangelo’s nose was broken—Fra Girolamo Savonarola was elected prior of the convent. A deeply learned and powerful orator, this gaunt and self-denying man was suffused with a passion for the simplicity of what he perceived to be the true life of Christian piety and was consumed with contempt for the frivolous trappings of wealth. The Advent before his election, he had preached a series of blistering sermons that condemned usury, greed, financial deception, and the celebration of riches but reserved his most bitter scorn for precisely those whose lavishness had made San Marco so important a center of culture—the Medici. He railed against luxury, “lascivious” paintings, fine clothing, and even the poetry of those who frequented the cloister. Since he studied and worked in the shadow of San Marco, it was perhaps inevitable that Michelangelo should have joined those who crowded to hear Savonarola’s sermons. Although his enthusiasm was not quite as pronounced as that of Botticelli (who briefly gave up painting under the friar’s influence), he could still recall the sound of Savonarola’s powerful voice years later.
It was only narrowly that Michelangelo avoided seeing San Marco’s final transformation into the epicenter of religious revolution. Metamorphosing from moral campaigner into political scourge, Savonarola masterminded the overthrow of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son Piero and orchestrated the establishment of a short-lived but dramatic theocratic oligarchy from the convent. It was also at San Marco that Savonarola fell. While hundreds of worshippers were at prayer on Palm Sunday 1498, an angry mob laid siege to San Marco, demanding the friar’s death. The church’s gates were set on fire while the besiegers surged into the cloisters and scaled the walls accompanied by the frenzied ringing of the bells. Hurling tiles from the roof and brandishing swords and crossbows, the defenders—both friars and laity alike—fought back in a bloody pitched battle that claimed dozens of lives and lasted well into the night. As with Michelangelo’s nose, however, the very violence that characterized San Marco’s experience on that dreadful spring night was a product of precisely the same tendencies that had led it to become such a center of Florentine learning and devotion.
STREETS, SQUARES, AND RITUALS: THE VIA LARGA TO THE PIAZZA DEL DUOMO
The peculiar mixture of elegance and brutality, culture and suffering, becomes more pronounced as we follow Michelangelo’s path deeper into the city.
Walking down the via Larga, he passed his temporary home at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi. Designed for Cosimo de’ Medici by Michelozzo, it had been completed only thirty years before, and its stylishly massive structure was a visible testament to the wealth, power, and cultural clout of the young Michelangelo’s patrons. The street itself was, however, a different matter. Although broad and well proportioned by contemporary standards, the via Larga was unpaved and nothing if not filthy. Even close to the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, the abundance of excrement thrown from windows, or deposited wherever people found a space, would have been hard to ignore. As Michelangelo wrote in a poem years later:
Around my door, I find huge piles of shit
since those who gorge on grapes or take a purge
could find no better place to void their guts in.
Despite the stink of effluence, the street thronged with people from every stratum of society, and the air buzzed with the sounds of city life. As horses and carts carrying bolts of cloth, barrels of wine, or cargoes of grain rattled noisily along, august merchants and notaries gathered to discuss business or politics in their fine black and red robes, young men in loose doublets and tight-fitting hose stood together gossiping, shopkeepers argued with customers, and priests, monks, and friars walked along with their heads bowed. Holding simple bowls or merely proffering their hands, beggars desperately called for alms, while the sick and the lame pleaded pathetically from the ground.
At the end of the crowded via Larga, the way opened out into the Piazza del Duomo. Towering above him was the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore—the largest construction of its kind since antiquity—and the imposing structure of Giotto’s campanile (bell tower). In front of him stood the Baptistery—erroneously thought to have been founded as a Roman temple in antiquity—complete with the huge bronze doors that Lorenzo Ghiberti had cast for the east entrance. It was Michelangelo himself who saluted the doors as being “worthy of heaven” and thereby inadvertently dubbed them the “gates of paradise.”
Yet the square, too, was filled with people, activity, and noise. With the feast of Saint John (June 24) only days away, preparations for the festival would have been in full swing. The greatest celebration in the Florentine calendar, the festival spanned several days and was always a vast exercise in civic pride. Already, workmen would have been busy erecting the huge gold-colored awning around the Baptistery that would play host to the “mostra of the riches” on the first day of the celebrations. There, beneath this colossal tent, the merchants of the city would display the very choicest of their wares: the richest jewels, the finest silks, the most exquisite garments; everything, in short, that was of the highest quality and the greatest value. It was an opportunity not for profit but for the city to revel in its own wealth, to take pride in its own enormous prosperity, and to shame those poor foreigners who happened to catch a glimpse of what was on show.
On subsequent days, the square would throng with processions. Arrayed in the most lavish and exorbitantly over-the-top vestments, hundreds of clergy would march through the city to the cathedral, accompanied by trumpeting, singing, and chanting, where they would ritually dedicate the citizenry’s riches to the city and to Saint John. Then processions of the citizen-soldiers beloved of Machiavelli, “moral” laymen—mostly merchants—and confraternities would display Florence’s wealth once again in glorious fashion. And finally, the communes subject to the city’s rule were compelled to march to the cathedral bearing symbolic gifts of candles and silks to do ritual homage to the very masters who had spent days rubbing their noses in their wealth and magnificence.
The festival was, however, also much more human and ended with a massive communal celebration. Much like its equivalent in Siena (which is still held annually today), the palio was a vast horse race run through the streets of Florence. If anything, however, the Florentine palio was more fun than its Sienese equivalent and was more a matter of winning bets than settling neighborhood scores. Starting in the meadows near the church of Ognissanti, the liveried jockeys spurred their horses through the city, past Michelangelo’s stopping point in the Piazza del Duomo, and on to the finish line at the now mostly destroyed church of San Pier Maggiore. For most Florentines, this was the high point of the entire festival.
Although the prizes on offer were not especially impressive, men like Lorenzo de’ Medici often hired professional jockeys to scoop big wins on bets riding their ultraexpensive steeds. As the horses raced through the streets, the city came alive with the shouts of the crowd, the cries of fallen riders, and the incessant chatter of betting men swapping wagers. Writing to his friend Bartolommeo Cederni, the Florentine Francesco Caccini noted that in 1454, the weather had delayed the start of the race and even caused some to talk about cancellation, but by the time the race began at 7:00 p.m., “large quantities of money and all sorts of things” were gambled on the horses. The favorite, Andrea della Stufa’s horse, Leardo, led for most of the palio, accompanied by endless cheering, but Andrea fell off just short of the cathedral and came in last. There was much grumbling. As Caccini reported, “Pandolfo lost eighteen florins, Pierfrancesco and Piero de’ Pazzi fifty florins … Because of the rain, Matteo Rinaldi lost eighty-four florins, and so did Pierleone, along with a lot of other people.” In the aftermath, the Piazza del Duomo resounded with shouts of laughter, arguments over bets, and endless singing, dancing, and drinking. By the end of the night, the Piazza del Duomo was very far from the peaceful and restrained arena for art that it has become today.
POLITICAL DRAMAS: THE PIAZZA DELLA SIGNORIA
Michelangelo’s path through the Piazza del Duomo would have gone past the base of the Onestà (the city’s prostitution control board) and down the via dei Calzaioli. This was the financial and commercial center of the city; here were Orsanmichele—initially a grain market, but by then a church—and the palaces of the Arte della Lana and the Arte della Seta (the wool and silk guilds), the headquarters of the guilds that controlled both trade and government for much of Florence’s history. Here, the crowds would have become thicker. Drawn to the shops that lined the streets, men and women elbowed their way through the throng to get at the best products, while tradesmen haggled over prices, and guild officials argued over regulations. In streets much narrower than the via Larga, the stench and the noise of the massed bodies would have been oppressive.
Past this stretch lay the nexus of civic power: the Piazza della Signoria. This elegant and well-appointed square was the heart of Florentine political life during the Renaissance. It presented an impressive sight that appeared to chime well with the grandeur of the festivities of Saint John the Baptist. Erected between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, at the time when Dante Alighieri was active in civic government, the huge, Romanesque Palazzo Vecchio (also known as the Palazzo del Popolo) dominated the piazza. The home of the city’s legislative and executive organs, it was the seat of the priors—the city’s highest governing body—and the gonfaloniere di giustizia, the ultimate guardian of law and order. Fortresslike and austere, it was a powerful statement of Florence’s civic identity and determination to protect its liberty. Some years later, Michelangelo’s David (1501–4) would stand outside its door as an allegorical affirmation of the city’s resistance to external domination. Alongside the Palazzo Vecchio stood the equally impressive but lighter and airier Loggia dei Lanzi, which had been constructed between 1376 and 1382 by Benci di Cione and Simone di Francesco Talenti as a meeting place for Florence’s public assemblies. Consisting of three wide bays framed by Romanesque arches, its facade includes depictions of the cardinal virtues and is a reminder of the moral rectitude and openness with which Renaissance panegyrists wished to associate the Florentine Republic.
But the grand and imposing impression conveyed by the Piazza della Signoria conceals the dramas to which it played host and gives the lie to the impression conveyed by the celebrations in the Piazza del Duomo. This very public stage was the setting for scenes of violence and brutality that illustrate the nature of the social world in which Michelangelo was raised. It was here that Savonarola was burned after the siege of San Marco and the collapse of his theocratic regime. After weeks of brutal torture in the spring of 1498, he was burned at the stake in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, and his ashes were scattered in the Arno.
It was here, too, that the imbalances of wealth and political power burst forth in what became known as the Ciompi Revolt in the long, hot summer of 1378. Fueled by frustration at the factionalism paralyzing government, furious at their exclusion from the guilds, and angry at their poverty, skilled workers had joined with unskilled, propertyless laborers in rebellion, demanding access to the guilds and a greater say in city government. Attacking the grassi (fat cats), they took over the Pa- lazzo Vecchio and installed the wool carder Michele di Lando at the head of a socially revolutionary regime in July. Although this popular regime was ultimately starved out of existence by a lockout, the revolt regained momentum in August, and violence once again filled the streets of the city. But they were no match for the grassi. Not to be outdone, the powerful oligarchs—in alliance with artisans frightened by the rebelliousness of their employees—reacted violently, and on August 31, 1378, a large crowd of rebels was cut to pieces in the Piazza della Signoria.
And it was here that Francesco Salviati, archbishop of Pisa, was hanged from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio by a lynch mob after the failure of the savage but abortive Pazzi conspiracy, staged in 1478, three years after Michelangelo’s birth. By the mid-fifteenth century, Michelangelo’s future patrons, the fabulously wealthy Medici family, had already established themselves as the de facto rulers of Florence, but their dominance had begun to ruffle feathers in a city traditionally restive and unstable. Together with the Salviati, the Pazzi family—also successful and ambitious bankers—resolved to oust the Medici from power with the tacit support of the pope. On April 26, 1478, in front of a huge congregation, Giuliano de’ Medici was stabbed to death by a gang of conspirators (including a priest) in the Duomo. His brother, Lorenzo—who later doted on the injured Michelangelo—fled for his life while bleeding profusely and hid with the humanist Poliziano. But the coup faltered. Getting wind of what was afoot, the Florentines were galvanized into action. One of the conspirators, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, was hurled from a window, dragged naked through the streets, and thrown into the river. The Pazzi were immediately erased from Florentine history and forfeited everything. Francesco Salviati himself was summarily lynched, and the twenty-six-year-old Leonardo da Vinci—then engaged in painting an altarpiece for the Palazzo Vecchio—sketched another conspirator, Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli, twisting in the wind after he was hanged. Later in life, Michelangelo would tell Mi- niato Pitti of how he had been carried on his father’s shoulders to see the execution of the remaining conspirators on April 28.
GAMBLERS, PROSTITUTES, AND IDLERS: THE OLD CITY
If San Marco, the Piazza del Duomo, and the Piazza della Signoria tell a story radically different from that told by Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, the picture became even more vivid as Michelangelo left the square on his way toward the Ponte Vecchio, moving from the grand public buildings to the streets in which the drama of everyday social life was played out. A close look at The Map of the Chain (Fig. 3)—a panoramic view of Florence produced ca. 1471–82—reveals that beneath the massive structure of the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio lay a teeming mass of smaller and more modest buildings. Too numerous for the anonymous artist to depict in detail, they constituted a disorganized muddle, lacking any consistent style and bereft of any coherent sense of order. A mixture of houses, workshops, hostelries, and shops, their confused and cramped arrangement makes the buildings for which Florence is still famous look almost out of place.
Plunging into the heart of the old city, Michelangelo was confronted by the darkness of narrow vicoli (alleyways) overshadowed by hastily erected houses, a startling mixture of pungent smells, and the deafening noise of shouts and chatter. As he turned south toward the river, he would have been able to hear the hustle and bustle of the nearby Mercato Vecchio (Old Market), filled with stalls and street vendors selling everything from fruits and vegetables to meat and fish, and from sweetmeats and tasty treats to crockery and cloth. Even at a distance, the air teemed not just with the stench of fungibles gradually going bad in the Tuscan heat but also with the cries of market traders, the laughter of playful children, and incessant haggling over inflated prices.
In addition to legitimate trade, there were more nefarious forms of exchange going on, especially in the narrow streets close to the market through which Michelangelo would have passed. Gaudy prostitutes plied their wares from the early hours of the morning, bravos ran threatening fingers over the blades of their knives, pickpockets ran rampant in the confusion, deformed beggars rattled wooden bowls, and gamblers played dice on every corner. Every so often, petty fights would start. Even to Florentines, it was an arresting scene. As the poet Antonio Pucci put it a little more than a century before Michelangelo’s journey:
Every morning the street is jammed
With packhorses and carts in the market,
There is a great press and many stand looking on,
Gentlemen accompanying their wives
Who come to bargain with the market women.
There are gamblers who have been playing,
Prostitutes and idlers,
Highwaymen are there, too, porters and dolts,
Misers, ruffians and beggars.
In the streets nearby, the worldly delights that could be sampled in the Mercato could be enjoyed at greater leisure, and with greater abandon, in the numerous taverns and brothels that were a permanent feature of Florentine life. Whether a small wineshop serving the occasional plate of simple food or a large hostelry complete with stables and beds for travelers, inns were lively, debauched places full of the noise and stench of social life in the raw. People drank strong wines and hardy ales in abundance, danced with lusty barmaids, negotiated transactions, played cards, planned robberies, and brawled incessantly.
Frequented by high and low alike, the taverns Michelangelo encountered along his journey through Florence’s oldest quarter were places in which lives often went to pieces, a fact that is vividly depicted in a Florentine devotional painting from the early sixteenth century. This nine-part moral allegory tells the story of Antonio Rinaldeschi, who was hanged in Florence on July 22, 1501. By nature a pious man, Rinaldeschi is depicted as having met his ruin at the Inn of the Fig. While sitting at a simple wooden table in the middle of a small courtyard, Rinaldeschi gets rather drunk and foolishly involves himself in a game of dice with an untrustworthy fellow. Inevitably, he loses and immediately flies off into a rage. Cursing God for his luck, he staggers off looking for trouble and—unable to find any more suitable outlet for his anger—ends by hurling dung at an image of the Virgin Mary near the church of Santa Maria degli Alberighi, just south of the Duomo. By the end of the sequence, he is arrested, convicted of blasphemy, and sentenced to hanging. Apart from the fact that Rinaldeschi repents before his death, the story was entirely typical of Florentine taverns.
Crime, inevitably, was a major feature of tavern life, and the city archives are full of accounts of violence, extortion, robbery, and even rape in such places. In the late fourteenth century, for example, two men called Lorenzo and Picchino were convicted of swindling a certain Tommaso di Piero of Hungary in the Crown Inn while the latter was on his way to Rome. After getting the poor Tommaso a little tipsy, Lorenzo and Picchino convinced him that they were wealthy merchants who had partners all over Italy. Persuading Tommaso to “sell” his horse to them for 18 florins, Lorenzo promised he would receive payment from his “partners” in Rome. To add insult to injury, Lorenzo and Picchino then “borrowed” a further 28 ducats from Tommaso to “buy” some imaginary jewels from a friend, again promising to reimburse him through business contacts in Rome. Needless to say, the guileless Tommaso never saw a penny of his money. Condemned in absentia, Lorenzo and Picchino were sentenced to be whipped through the streets, but of course they got away without a scratch.
At the bottom end of the scale, brothels were of much the same order as inns. Were it not for the rampant sex and even more rampant disease, it would, in fact, be comparatively hard to tell them apart from taverns. Indeed, the two often enjoyed extremely close relations. In 1427, it was reported that beneath the house of Rosso di Giovanni di Niccolò de’ Medici at the entrance to the Chiasso Malacucina there were “six little shops” that were “rented to prostitutes who usually pay from 10 to 13 lire per month [for a room].” A certain Giuliano, an innkeeper, managed the whole operation. Giuliano kept the keys to all the rooms and put “whoever he wishes [into the rooms].” Presumably, he also collected the rents and took a cut of the profits, too.
Yet not all brothels were such small-scale affairs. It was principally for its larger whorehouses that this part of Florence was especially famous. Indeed, so renowned were the brothels of the old city that verses were penned in their celebration. In the liveliest of all, the poet Antonio Beccadelli (1394–1471; better known as Panormita) urged his book—The Hermaphrodite—to visit his favorite establishment and by way of recommendation provided a piquant little pen-portrait of the pleasures that his scandalously titled volume could expect:
Here is the congenial whorehouse,
a place which will breathe out its own signs with its stench.
Enter here, and say hello from me to the madams and the whores,
in whose tender bosoms you will be taken.
Blonde Helen and sweet Mathilde will run up to you,
both of them experts in shaking their buttocks.
Giannetta will come to see you, accompanied by her puppy
(the dog fawns on her mistress; her mistress fawns on men).
Soon Clodia will come, her breasts bare and painted,
Clodia, a girl sure to please with her blandishments.
Anna will meet you and give herself to you with a German song
(as Anna sings she exhales the new wine on her breath);
and Pitho the great hip-wiggler will greet you
and with her comes Ursa, the darling of the brothel.
The nearby neighborhood, the one named for the slaughtered cow,
sends Thais to greet you.
In short, whatever whores are in this famous city
will seek you out, a happy crowd at your arrival.
Here it’s allowed to speak and perform dirty things,
and no rejection will make your face blush.
Here, what you can do and what you’ve long wanted to do,
you will fuck and be fucked as much as you want, book.
In addition to privately run establishments, there were state-operated sex emporia. On the other side of the Ponte Vecchio in the area known as Oltr’Arno (literally “Across the Arno”) was a site that had previously been set aside for the construction of a public brothel. It was planned by the priors in the quarter of Santo Spirito in 1415, and the city government hoped that by expanding the state’s bordello business, it could ensure that prostitution—which could not be exterminated entirely—could at least be controlled and regulated. The priors even coughed up 1,000 florins to build, furnish, and construct the brothel in Santo Spirito and another in the quarter of Santa Croce. Although the bordello in Oltr’Arno was never constructed, the more realistic members of the Renaissance elite freely acknowledged the good sense of such provisions.
Walking through the Old City and toward Oltr’Arno, Michelangelo had encountered the truly visceral side of Florentine life. It was perhaps no surprise that confronted with a similar array of sights, sounds, and smells, Petrarch felt moved to complain of contemporary existence in harsh terms a little over a century before. In a letter to his friend Lombardo della Seta, Petrarch described his surroundings in terms that did ample justice to the darker side of this part of the city. “To me,” he declared,
this life seems the hardened ground of our toils, the training camp of crises, a theater of deceits, a labyrinth of errors … silly ambition, lowliest elation, futile excellence, base loftiness, darkened light, unknown nobility, a riddled purse, a leaky jug, a bottomless cave, infinite greed, harmful desire, dropsical splendor … a workshop of crime, the scum of lust, the forge of wrath, a well of hatreds, the chains of habits … the fires of sin … harmonious discord … simulated virtue, badness excused, fraud praised, disgrace honored … a kingdom of demons, a principality of Lucifer …
Michelangelo’s thoughts may not have been so scathing, but he is likely to have been aware of the contrast between the grandeur of Orsanmichele and the world of crime, sex, and depravity that lurked below.
THE OTHER HALF: OLTR’ARNO
It was along the Borgo San Jacopo in Oltr’Arno that Michelangelo would also have encountered the humbler residential quarters of the city. Inhabited mostly by cloth workers in the late fifteenth century—particularly wool carders, combers, and beaters—this area was undoubtedly lively—with a small but active market near the church of Santo Spirito—but cramped and dirty. In contrast to the major thoroughfares on the north side of the Arno, the streets were largely unpaved and filled with mud and filth. Trudging along on foot, Michelangelo would have had to take great care where he stepped and would probably have had to cover his nose from time to time. Despite the priors’ repeated attempts to improve public hygiene, it was still a deeply unsanitary environment, and the awful smell of fish and rotting vegetables found in the Mercato Vecchio was still much better than the odor that rose from the streets in which poorer Florentines lived. For the most part, people relieved themselves wherever the opportunity presented itself, frequently tipping empty pots out of windows; but although certain parts of the city were equipped with dedicated cesspools, these were inadequate for the sheer volume of effluence produced by the city’s growing population and often overflowed straight out into the road. In June 1397, for example, the city magistrates fined three men 10 lire for failing to construct an adequate cesspool and for allowing human excrement to fill the street. At the same time, it was common for animals to be driven through the streets, and while horses (and their droppings) were a part of everyday existence, it would not have been unusual for Michelangelo to have seen oxen drawing carriages, sheep being driven to market, or pigs snuffling in the dirt. Indeed, in advising Francesco “il Vecchio” da Carrara, lord of Padua, as to how a ruler ought to govern his state, Petrarch emphasized that a good statesman should take particular care to ensure that pigs did not run rampant through the city.
Lining these streets were a multitude of houses occupied by ordinary men and women. Although there were still some fairly “grand” pa- lazzi in this area—such as that owned by the Nerli family—the majority of the dwellings bore the imprint of difficult lives. Despite the vogue for classical ideas in urban design, the homes of the poor were erected either in the absence of regulations or in defiance of occasional attempts at civic improvement and were consequently built in a ramshackle manner according to the limited resources available. Particularly in Oltr’Arno, these houses were narrow—with a frontage generally no more than fifteen feet—but deep and often very tall, regularly comprising up to four stories, and would typically be inhabited by a number of families renting a few cramped rooms for a few florins per year. Covered with a simple form of plaster, walls were commonly crisscrossed with threatening cracks and, lacking paint or decoration, presented a dull and forbidding appearance.
A feeling for the streets of Oltr’Arno can be gained from a roughly contemporaneous painting in the nearby church of Santo Spirito. In the background of his Madonna del Carmine (also known as the Pala de’ Nerli; ca. 1493–96) (Fig. 4), Filippino Lippi painted a truncated view of the streets running westward from the Palazzo dei Nerli to the gate of San Frediano. Although the three-story palazzo is predictably imposing, the houses lining the road leading away from it are almost absurdly small. Their roofs tilting in apparently random directions, they are constructed in a comparatively flimsy and unplanned manner. The street itself is populated by a mixture of working men and women, animals, and children. Nearest to the palazzo, two pigs are shown snuffling in the dirt while a child runs past a two-wheeled wagon pulled by what—judging by its size—is probably a mule. A little farther away, a man struggles with a heavily loaded packhorse, while another conducts some business through a window. And under the gate itself, walking out toward the fields beyond, is a woman, steadying a large platter of wares on her head with one hand and holding her infant child safe with the other. The mother’s concern is an understandable testament to the standards of the area. If her little boy managed to defy the odds to survive his earliest years, he would count himself lucky to live much beyond thirty-five in Oltr’Arno.
IN PETER’S SHADOW
It would have been by means of precisely these streets that Michelangelo would have arrived at the doors of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. On his journey from the gardens of San Marco, he would have seen his native Florence both as a city aspiring to the ideal and as a city of inequality, division, unrest, violence, and privation. Stepping across the threshold and into the hallowed calm of the church, he perhaps had cause to reflect on the dual character of his world as he walked toward the Brancacci Chapel.
Inside the chapel, to the left of the altar, was Masaccio’s fresco Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow. In this piece, the serenely statuesque figure of Saint Peter is shown walking peacefully down a typical city street in the company of Saint John and an old man with a beard and a blue cap. Despite the amazement of the two onlookers to his right, Saint Peter seems almost unaware that his saintly shadow is miraculously alleviating the ailments of the paralyzed Aeneas of Lydda and his older, crippled companion.
Despite its religious theme, the fresco is a portrait of Michelangelo’s Florence. Masaccio had striven to make the scene as naturalistic as possible and had attempted to bring the drama into the fifteenth-century city. Although clad in classical garb and modeled after a piece of antique statuary, Saint Peter is walking down a street lined by buildings that are recognizably contemporary. In the foreground, there is the rusticated facade of a palace belonging to a rich gentleman, and farther down the unpaved road there are two or three much simpler buildings covered with stucco and with their ill-supported upper stories jutting out over the street. What’s more, there are not merely beggars but crippled beggars in the street. Even in Masaccio’s fresco, riches and poverty coexist. It is, in other words, a scene that Michelangelo would have recognized as having been painted from life.
It’s an idealized representation, just like the image of Florence given by Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni. As we have seen from Michelangelo’s trip through the city, no fifteenth-century Florentine street would have been so neatly arranged or so clean and well constructed. The two—very restrained—beggars aside, there is no hint of the disorder, bustle, and noise that filled the city’s roads and vicoli, and the street vendors, shopkeepers, robbers, prostitutes, and animals that Michelangelo would have encountered en route are entirely absent from Masaccio’s scene. It was not so much a representation of reality per se as a representation of how Masaccio wanted reality to be. As such, the pictorial story of Saint Peter’s shadow tacitly—and perhaps ironically—testifies not only to the self-confident artistic utopianism of Renaissance Florence but also to the grim and often unpleasant character of the city that Masaccio and Michelangelo knew so well.