Hollow Men: Writing, Objects, and Public Image in Renaissance Italy

Hollow Men

Writing, Objects, and Public Image in Renaissance Italy

Susan Gaylard

Fordham University Press, New York, 2013

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Gaylard, Susan.

Hollow men : writing, objects, and public image in Renaissance Italy / Susan Gaylard. — First edition.

pages cm

Summary: Analyzes texts and art objects from the 15th to the late 16th centuries to show that Renaissance theories of emulating classical heroes generated a deep skepticism about representation, as these theories forced men to construct a public image that seemed fixed but could adapt to changing circumstances—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5174-2 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-8232-5191-9 (paper)

1. Italian literature—To 1400—History and criticism.  2. Italian literature—15th century—History and criticism.  3. Italian language—Early modern, 1500–1700.  4. Art, Renaissance—Italy—History.  5. Masculinity in literature 6. Masculinity in art.  7. Renaissance—Italy.  I. Title.

PQ4075.G375 2013

850’.9’002—dc23

2012049723

To the memory of Professor Nelia Saxby (1945–2010), founder and chair of Italian at the University of Cape Town

Contents

Acknowledgments

I. Monuments, Imitation, and the Noble Ideal in Early Renaissance Italy

Introduction: Reinventing Nobility? Artifacts and the Monumental Pose from Petrarch to Platina

1. How to Perform Like a Statue: Ghirlandaio, Pontano, and Exemplarity

2. From Castrated Statues to Empty Colossi: Emasculation vs. Monumentality in Bembo, Castiglione, and the Sala Paolina

II. Print Monuments, Exposure, and Strategies of Concealment

3. Banishing the Hollow Man: Print, Clothing, and Aretino’s Emblems of Truth

4. Heroes with Damp Brains? Image vs. Text in Printed Portrait-Books

5. Silenus Strategies: The Failure of Personal Emblems

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Acknowledgments

It is difficult to express my thanks sufficiently to the large numbers of people who made this book possible. My most immediate debt is to the community of early modern scholars at the University of Washington, and in particular Stuart and Estelle Lingo, whose thoughtful critiques and art historical expertise were integral to shaping the project. Special thanks are also due to Donald Gilbert-Santamaría, Marshall Brown, Louisa Mackenzie, Albert Sbragia, Ben Schmidt, Geoffrey Turnovsky, and Rebecca Wilkin, who critiqued multiple drafts and offered advice and encouragement at critical moments. Ann Rosalind Jones and Walter Stephens provided extraordinarily generous and timely comments on the entire manuscript. Extensive feedback on individual chapters was contributed by Angela Matilde Capodivacca, Aileen Feng, Lisa Regan, Hannah Wojciehowski, and Brandon Jones—who also offered generous and patient aid with Latin translations. Lina Bolzoni and Sergio Zatti inspired me to do the research on Tasso and emblems that started the project, and without the initial encouragement of Timothy Hampton and Trevor Murphy, the project would have died an early death. A conversation with Giovanna Rizzarelli led to the creation of Chapter 4—research for which was generously funded by a Newberry Library fellowship. The Royalty Research Fund of the University of Washington supported extended archival research in Europe, and two grants each from Modern Language Quarterly and the Center for Western European Studies at the University of Washington allowed for investigations without which later research would have been impossible. Staff at the Biblioteca Angelica, the Biblioteca Casanatense, the British Library, the Newberry Library, the Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor, and the University of Washington Libraries were supremely helpful. For their timely and practical help I am eternally indebted to Katie Warrener, Lane Eagles, Risa Pavia, Sonia Steinberg, Erin Tindell, Jenny Allen, Megan Miller, Jessica Kamin, Brian Dionisi, and Sarala Puthuval. My writing group—Andreá Williams, Ilya Parkins, Swati Mukerjee, Lisa Dilling, and Melanie Marshall—made me finish the book, while other friends and colleagues helped in myriad ways: in Seattle, Christine Goettler, Alex Hollmann, Jennifer Keene, Sandra Kroupa, Leigh Mercer, Gina Neff, Cindy Perry, Deb Raftus; in Italy, Monica Bilotta, Peter Ciaccio, Elisa Curti, Chiara de Lena, Fulvio Ferrario, Valerie Hoagland, Cecilia Pasero, Leone Porciani, Eva Valvo; in London, Florian Mussgnug and Lloyd Perry. My parents bravely supported the move to America, and never once suggested that Italian Renaissance studies was an odd career choice. To Albert Ascoli, without whose unfailing guidance, support, and sense of humor no part of my graduate career—or the subsequent long haul that led to this book—would have been possible, I can only say grazie. There are no words with which to thank sufficiently Andrew Donovan, whose courage and sense of humor accompanied me on this long and unexpected adventure.

Part I: Monuments, Imitation, and the Noble Ideal in Early Renaissance Italy

Introduction. Reinventing Nobility? Artifacts and the Monumental Pose from Petrarch to Platina

The Florentine church of San Lorenzo is famous for Michelangelo’s Medici chapel (1519–34), whose main point of interest is the elaborate tomb monuments to Giuliano and Lorenzo. Each year, thousands of tourists visit the site to pay their respects to Michelangelo and gaze at the large statues of two good-looking young princes. Many visitors do not notice the masks displayed prominently on the men’s armor, next to the statue of Night, and in the decorative frieze around the room; and most visitors are unaware that the statues were not designed to depict either man with any kind of visual accuracy. Michelangelo is reputed to have said—apparently with great prescience—in a thousand years, nobody will know that they looked any different.¹

Although statues like these were seen as exalting the person commemorated, it has frequently been observed that in the early Renaissance, images of people were considered not so much imitations of reality as a part of reality itself.² The separation of this kind of representation from real reality is part of the story of this book, as this separation occurred alongside and contributed to a rhetorical stance that I call the monumental pose—a pose that demanded and authorized an outward projection of authority, which might or might not coincide with some inner sentiment. The Medici tombs are useful in opening this discussion, as tourists gaze not on true-to-life funerary portraits, but rather on what Stephen Campbell has called ideal heroic bodies. These ideal figures are linked with a series of prominently placed masks or larvae, a word that could also translate as phantasms or ghosts.³ The conventions of tomb sculpture required an idealized effigy of the young princes; Michelangelo, in taking this demand one step further and adding masks that suggest hollowness while emphasizing the artifice involved in crafting these ideal bodies, opened up a gap—much discussed by his contemporaries—between the visual evidence (the tomb sculptures) and the original point of reference (the actual physiognomy of two young men). Although facial features are clearly sculpted, and although (or perhaps because) clothing is so closely molded to the body that it is difficult to distinguish clothing from skin, there are no inscriptions anywhere and the monument is thus self-consciously a simulacrum, a self-referential hollow surface that is more a celebration of art than of the young men themselves.⁴

Although Michelangelo’s point may have been (as Campbell has argued) a valorization of artifice and surface, of the undivinity of art in general and of his own art in particular, the idealized heroic bodies and the ironic mask-like nature of the entire monumentalizing program reflect a far broader and growing sense of contradiction between the will to self-monumentalize (on the part of the elite), and the need to create an enduring, monumentalizing image that was unique but flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. The Medici tombs—with their lack of inscribed dates and names, and their idealizing, nonmimetic statues—exemplify these competing demands.⁵ Given the tombs’ emphasis on beautiful surface rather than specific historical referent, they also illustrate tensions between the interests of those who commission monuments, and those who make them—who likewise want to self-monumentalize.

In order to situate the Medici tombs in some kind of context, we should go back in time to consider this need to self-monumentalize. Dante was famously preoccupied with the problem of how a man eternalizes himself (come l’uom s’etterna; Inferno 15.85)—an issue that imposed conflicting pressures on men of letters, artists, and their patrons in early modern Italy. On the one hand, a successful literary man was expected to maximize his social and political status and to follow the example of active virile writers like Cicero. Learning from his reading, he was to perform and to write, to make himself into a monument by creating an outward identity for himself and rendering himself part of a permanent cultural patrimony. On the other hand, precisely because social status was changing, and the place of the literary man was not secure at the emerging Italian courts, men were forced to adapt to changing circumstances. Following the example of historical figures became problematic, as a new awareness of the passage of history and a sense of inevitable distance from the past contributed to a gradual move away from the use of great exemplars in humanist teaching.⁶ As we shall see, early modern Italian writers tended to conceive of personal and familial glory in a particularly concrete way—a perception at variance with the new imperative to mold oneself to changing circumstances. The quest for an eternity guaranteed by monumentality generated what I call the monumental pose: the self-conscious projection of an image derived from the ideal of visually comprehensible and reproducible exemplars. Since this ideal, however, revealed an interior to the subject that was seen as suspect, effeminizing, or both, it needed to be recast as monumental and masculine.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the contradictory requirements to be both monumental and flexible frequently opened up a gap between exterior surface and interior character—a gap instantiated (intentionally or not) in the Medici chapel masks. The question of interior and exterior has been usefully examined by John Martin, who shows that the tension between the emerging sixteenth-century concept of sincerity and the changing idea of prudence (newly divorced from ethics) resulted in a more complex sense of the individual, also called the modern subject.⁷ The new attention given to a person’s interior as distinct from his or her external behavior is also related to the failure of exemplarity theories: According to the humanists, a man should emulate ancient examples so as to become an exemplar himself for future generations. Yet this paradigm ultimately failed, resulting in what François Rigolot has called a retreat into self-absorbed interiority by the end of the sixteenth century.⁸ In both approaches, there is a clear relationship between the emerging subject and the notion of identity as a performance.⁹ The Medici tombs, with their suggestion of hollow surfaces, and their emphasis on the mask, offer an interesting gloss on William Egginton’s relating the emergence of subjectivity to sixteenth-century developments in theater: Early in the century, the tombs suggest a theatrical split between interior and exterior.¹⁰ Indeed, the Medici monuments showcase the issue with the mask beneath Night’s shoulder, which is uncannily inhabited by wide staring eyes, visible only from certain viewpoints (see the cover image of this book).¹¹ My project follows this line of thought beyond the visual arts into literature, to show that the emerging problematization of interiority derives from a visual ideal—the monument that was the basis of exemplary pedagogy. Simply put, the notion that each man would emulate exemplars to become in turn an exemplar was based on the idea of gazing at, and then becoming, a monument, yet this rhetoric of monumentality led to the emergence of a problematized hollow interior. The monumental pose emerged earlier than either Martin or Egginton suggests the modern individual came into being: The new idea of prudence informed visual and textual representations from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and in each case, the monumental pose itself embodied the tension between inner feelings and outer behavior well before the Reformation articulation of sincerity. The shift toward the need for a more multivalent and ambiguous public persona (for example, in the Medici monuments’ lack of inscriptions and idealizing, nonmimetic statues) coincides with the self-conscious staging of the tension between two contradictory paradigms of understanding art, identified by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood.¹² According to Nagel and Wood, the emerging performative notion of an artwork showing its specific circumstances of production drew attention to (or even invented) the previously dominant substitutional paradigm, in which visual patterns repeated across the centuries, with each instance somehow participating in the ancient (sometimes fictive) original. Although Nagel and Wood stress that the anachronic is specific to material artifacts, humanist exemplarity similarly posited an (ideal) unbroken chain of exemplars going back in time, with each one an instance of ancient virtue surviving into the present, and the whole series validated by this survival.¹³ At the same time, critics have argued that the rhetoric of exemplarity was inherently flawed: I posit that the staging of the failure of exemplarity corresponds (broadly speaking) with Nagel and Wood’s self-conscious substitution-performance tension, and that the two paradigms meet in the monumental pose.¹⁴ If the medieval image had presence while the modern artwork offers representation, the literary monumental pose sought nostalgically to convey the unmediated presence of ancient virtue while acknowledging that such presence was a representation all along. The various iterations of the pose, as proposed by writers on visual models from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ultimately failed to produce an adaptable but permanent self-image, leaving the interior of the subject exposed to the necessity of justifying adaptability rather than exemplifying timeless heroism.

Coining Oneself from Dante to Pisanello

The complexities of the quest for a concrete kind of glory start to be apparent if we return to Dante: In Dante’s text, Brunetto Latini supposedly teaches him self-eternalization through writing, which is closely compared with coining. Before the fifteenth century, coins showing the emperor’s image were the only models for autonomous secular portraiture. Coining also imposes form (a masculine act for Aristotle) on (passive, feminine) matter: Women were thus excluded from this process of self-monumentalization (as Dante’s audience would have taken largely for granted), and the various coining references to Brunetto, a sodomite, are profoundly ironic.¹⁵ In addition to the linkages between writing and coining in Inferno 15, Dante’s Convivio likewise emphasizes that words have the power to construct identities: Albert Ascoli has shown that the discussion of the true nature of nobility is part of the author’s agenda to acquire poetic auctoritas for himself.¹⁶ Dante was one of the earliest of the many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers to engage in the debate concerning noble identity and who thereby essentially appropriated the authority of arbiter of nobility.

Petrarch took up the challenge of coining oneself by giving some ancient coins to the emperor Charles IV, instead of the book Charles had requested, Petrarch’s De viris illustribus.¹⁷ According to Petrarch’s letter to the emperor, the coins bear the portraits of our ancient rulers and inscriptions in tiny and ancient lettering, . . . and among them was the face of Augustus Caesar, who almost appeared to be breathing (Fam. 19.3).¹⁸ The gift of coins is intended as didactic (Charles should imitate the Caesars depicted on the coins and so become worthy of joining the illustrious men in Petrarch’s book), and antihierarchical (it reverses the usual direction of patronage, asserting Petrarch’s autonomy and pedagogical authority). Petrarch’s strategy of coining Charles in the image of the Caesars failed, as Charles misread the coins as objects of economic exchange rather than texts (as Ascoli points out), and seems to have sent an image of Caesar back to Petrarch. Although it is unclear from Petrarch’s response exactly who the gift came from, Petrarch’s letter suggests that Charles was the sender, and mourns that the image of Caesar would cause you, if it could speak or be seen by you, to desist from this inglorious, indeed infamous journey out of Italy (Fam. 19.12).¹⁹ Petrarch clearly tried—and failed—to appropriate ancient artifacts in the construction of his relations to a powerful patron. His lack of success is partly attributable to his audience’s misreading the gift of coins and rejecting the exhortatory nature of lifelike portraits. Charles’s response disappointed Petrarch, who claims to have expounded at length on the pedagogical nature of his gift (Fam. 19.3). Yet this moment is profoundly important for the humanistic ideal of exemplarity: In a gesture meant to affirm his own authority, Petrarch proposed a visually accessible exemplar to be imitated; to his dismay, the artifact was appreciated not as an exemplar but as an object of value in and of itself—much like the Medici tombs, which self-consciously invite commentary on their value as beautifully crafted surfaces, rather than inspiring generations of men to imitate the two heroes supposedly depicted.

Petrarch’s own De remediis utriusque Fortune warns of precisely this problem: Reason argues that, although images of heroes may inspire men to virtue, they should not be cherished too much in themselves (De remediis 1.41). Yet while staying in Milan, the author venerates the tomb effigy of St. Ambrose as though it were alive and breathing, using language typical of ancient discussions of lifelike images, as though indulging in the veneration of beautifully crafted surfaces (Fam. 16.11).²⁰ Yet while the author perhaps failed to venerate the saint rather than his likeness, and never managed to cast the emperor in the role of the ancient Caesars, another letter presents Petrarch as an exemplary model for a lowly goldsmith, who took the image of Petrarch as the inspiration for a new way of life: He had begun spending a sizeable portion of his patrimony in my honor, displaying the bust, name, and portrait of his new friend [Petrarch] in every nook of his house, and carving his image even more deeply in his heart (Fam. 21.11).²¹ Unlike the emperor, who willfully misunderstood the images of the Caesars, the aging goldsmith has sculpted the image of Petrarch into his heart, and proceeds to follow the author’s example by renouncing his occupation and instead taking up literary studies. In a more characteristically contrived pose of modesty, another of Petrarch’s letters warns Francesco Bruni against praising him (Petrarch) immoderately, and gives the example of Pandolfo Malatesta’s going to great lengths to commission a portrait of Petrarch, a longed-for face of an unknown man (Seniles 1.6).²² Although the first portrait (Petrarch says) was made without his knowledge, Malatesta later sent the greatest painter of the age to make another likeness of Petrarch, who, realizing what was going on, unwillingly allowed it. The fascinating part of this tale is that the artist failed to portray Petrarch: Notwithstanding all his artistic skill, he could not do it (Seniles 1.6).²³ Malatesta took the image anyway and, according to Petrarch, treasured it because it bore the author’s name. The failure to produce a true likeness that Petrarch reports is perfectly in accord both with Petrarch’s very elaborate and nuanced self-portrayal over the decades of his career, and with much later developments in which, we shall see, a visual or rhetorical portrayal fails to communicate the nuances required of an author’s public image. The portrait aneċe clarifies that the naïve goldsmith of Familiares 21.11, for all his skill in making treasured objects, may be able to carve Petrarch’s image onto his heart, but will never be able to carve himself in the image of Petrarch.

The mediation of authority via objects, like coins or portraits, that were ancient or imitated ancient artifacts became a well-used trope by writers, artists, and their patrons, in Quattrocento Italy. The coining metaphor developed by Dante and Petrarch was actualized by the mid-fifteenth century, as portrait medals of contemporary figures became fashionable in Northern Italian courtly circles, eventually spreading southward to Florence and then Naples.²⁴ The new archeological interest in ancient coins—and in imitating them—worked in conjunction with the study of classical texts: In the early fourteenth century, even before Petrarch’s more famous coin-collecting was publicized, the Veronese historian Giovanni Mansionario had sketched coin images of emperors in the margins of his Historia imperialis.²⁵ The text-image connection remained after fifteenth-century portraitists began to cast medals, as we see in a miniature illustration attributed to the workshop of Pisanello, who was one of the earliest and most celebrated Renaissance medal portraitists. The image, in a presentation copy of the Scriptores historiae augustae of the 1430s or 1440s, depicts a medallion of two Caesars alongside the text.²⁶ Pisanello even followed in Petrarch’s footsteps by sending a wedding gift to Leonello of an image of Julius Caesar, as a companion to Guarino’s biography of Caesar.²⁷

A few years later, in 1448, Leonello d’Este commissioned Pisanello to cast a portrait medal of the court humanist Pier Candido Decembrio, as a gift to Decembrio.²⁸ Here, the construction of authority is mediated by the patron, whose gift simultaneously operates as payment, confers a kind of authority on Decembrio, and puts him under further obligation to Leonello. What is important about Pisanello’s three medals of humanists is that the artist had no models for a coin image of a writer who was still living—although there was a tradition of portraying venerable auctores (such as the evangelists and the Church Fathers) in the act of writing their magnum opus. The new medals derived from the Roman coin tradition, which had traditionally depicted the Caesars: Despite Petrarch’s claims of autonomy and authority over the emperor, in the fourteenth century there was no way to interpret the image of Caesar on Charles’s reciprocal gift as a model for the writer.²⁹ Thus the claim of authority for Decembrio is startling, in particular as the reverse of the medal depicts a book inscribed liber svm (I am the book).³⁰ The humanist becomes the book, symbol of timeless transcendent truth. The inscription also holds a second meaning, I am free, suggesting the freedom of the intellectual from political bonds, and the link between freedom and the study of truth. Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon suggest that the motto may allude to the Bible (linking Decembrio with pious scholarship), but the inscription could also reference Horace’s satire of wealth and high office as a form of servitude, as the slave Davus teaches Horace about freedom: ‘liber, liber sum,’ dic age (come, say, I am free, am free; Satires 2.7.92).³¹ In this case the ironies are even more startling: The point of the gift to Decembrio is precisely his indebtedness to the Este family, so the liberty implied by the coin’s inscription is self-evidently a fiction.

Much larger and far more immediately obvious than the liber svm inscription is Pisanello’s own claim to authorship of the medal: Opus pisani pictoris (the work of Pisanus the painter) encircles the book. This large signature implies that Decembrio has reached the summit of authority by becoming a free book through the work of Pisanello, who here claims the title pictor. Although pictor appears on many of Pisanello’s medals, it deviates significantly from the more standard formulae used by his medal-casting contemporaries, along the lines of opus pisani or simply pisani.³² Like Dante’s poetry, Petrarch’s coining pedagogy, and Michelangelo’s tombs, Pisanello’s medal reveals an attempt by its creator to monumentalize himself within the cultural canon—even though this work is a commission intended to glorify someone else. Indeed, it is worth noting that Pisanello, like Petrarch, also thought about coining himself: We have a coin image of the artist from the 1440s or 1450s (when he was at the height of his fame) in which the artist, shown in profile, is clearly prosperous (he has a fleshy face and chin and rich clothing), and is again labeled Pisanus Pictor. On the reverse, the medal lists the initials of the three cardinal virtues and the four theological virtues, clarifying that the artist’s success derives specifically from these virtues.³³ As Syson and Gordon point out, the unsigned coin was most probably made in Pisanello’s workshop, and was almost certainly accepted as a self-portrait by Pisanello’s contemporaries.

Negotiating Nobility via Objects of Virtue

In recent years, art historical scholarship has paid a great deal of attention to the symbolic value of objects like Pisanello’s medals; at the same time, new editions and translations have focused attention on Quattrocento discussions of both nobility and magnificence.³⁴ As we have already seen, there was substantial crossover between the creation of objects of authority and writings on the same subject. It is surprising, then, that little attention has been given to the rhetoric about monuments that permeates writings on nobility: This rhetoric, we will see, derives simultaneously from the humanist idea of exemplarity and the crisis in the idea of nobility. Emerging questions about what constituted nobility also raised problems for the representation of nobility: For this reason the Quattrocento both produced an extraordinary number of works debating the term noble and responded to the crisis by promoting the representation of nobility via objects.

Even texts that try to disprove any link between wealth and nobility tend to connect nobility with artifacts. This connection was often justified in terms of exemplarity, as collecting statuary or portraits could be linked with the desire to emulate the exemplars depicted. Although literary humanistic circles followed the example of Dante (and of the Romans) in emphasizing stoic virtue as the primary characteristic of nobility, expensive artworks like Pisanello’s medals increasingly came to have a value of their own in establishing not only authority and nobility but also—in part thanks to the humanist equation of nobility with virtue—virtue itself. In both Florence and elsewhere, there was an emerging conception of magnificence, especially following Cosimo de’ Medici’s programmatic construction of public buildings from the 1430s on. The funding of public buildings, first pioneered in fourteenth-century commissions by the Acciaiuoli and Alberti families, changed so that by the mid-fifteenth century it was both accepted and expected that the wealthy elite would invest in displays of their riches.³⁵ Many different kinds of objects, from jewelry to tableware, were produced and circulated as projections of the owners’ virtue.³⁶ The new paradigm of display signaled a departure from earlier religious and political ideas, which had considered poverty a virtue and personal expenditure on public architecture unwise (it made one appear too powerful)—but readings in St. Thomas’s Summa Theologiae and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics helped to justify displays of wealth. In the 1440s Francesco Filelfo articulated a theory supporting displays of wealth to dignify the rich; Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria of the 1450s similarly expressed the idea that investment in architecture brought honor to one’s family and descendants. Giovanni Pontano, writing in the later part of the century, composed a treatise exalting the virtue of magnificence, in which he connected noblemen with the permanence and beauty of the buildings they left behind, and remarked on Cosimo de’ Medici’s construction of buildings in the ancient style as an instance of actual and visual exemplarity: It seems to me that he has done this so that future generations might know how to build.³⁷ The idea that such monuments constituted exemplars to be imitated eventually helped to justify the display of wealth as both virtuous and noble in humanistic circles, yet for much of the fifteenth century such justifications were by no means a given, and nobility remained a highly contested category.

Poggio Bracciolini famously collected ancient statues, as we learn from an aneċe that opens his own foray into the textual debate on nobility—a dialogue written in 1440. Here, the author-narrator tells the reader that he had brought his friends, Niccolò Niccoli and Lorenzo de’ Medici (brother of Cosimo il Vecchio), to his country villa in order to show them his collection of ancient statues. To Poggio’s dismay, however, his audience scoffs at the sculptures, saying that they are a feeble effort to ennoble Poggio and his villa, an attempt to bring Poggio fame among his descendants:

Hic hospes noster . . . , cum legerit esse moris antiqui apud priscos illos excellentes viros, ut domos, villas, hortos, porticus, gymnasia variis signis tabulisque maiorum quodque statuis exornarent ad gloriam et nobilitandum genus, voluit cum progenitorum imagines deessent, hunc locum, et se insuper his pusillis et confractis marmorum reliquiis nobilem reddere, ut rei novitate, aliqua eius ad posteros illis gloria manaret. (Poggio 65)

(Our host, having read that illustrious men of old used to ornament their homes, villas, gardens, arcades, and gymnasiums with statues, paintings, and busts of their ancestors to glorify their own name and their lineage, wanted to render his own place noble, and himself, too, but having no images of his own ancestors, he acquired these meager and broken pieces of sculpture and hoped that the novelty of his collection would perpetuate his glory among his own descendants.) (Rabil 122–23; translation modified)³⁸

This comment, attributed to Lorenzo, links the misreading of ancient texts (cum legerit) with the misuse of ancient monuments, yet superficially, both the host and his visitors—all noted humanists—seem to consider monuments as instruments of glory, whether they are inherited from the past or bequeathed to the future. The collection of statues is an extension of its owner, and both the author and his audience imply that Poggio is trying to annex ancient artifacts to create a present-day identity.

Poggio’s dialogue bypasses the statues and becomes a verbal negotiation of opinions that address the relatively new awareness that nobilis is not a fixed term with transcendent meaning—an awareness whose corollary is the possibility of self-fashioning. Niccoli, who leads the ensuing debate, argues that possessions and wealth cannot convey nobility, but he does admit that they elicit admiration:

Atria vero maiorum imaginibus referta, porticus signis ac tabulis ornati, magnificae villae, templa constructa, varia domus ornamenta plus admirationis aspicientibus quàm nobilitatis secum ferunt. (Poggio 80)

(Courtyards filled with statues of ancestors, arcades decorated with sculptures and paintings, magnificent villas, newly built shrines, and richly decorated houses obtain more wonder in spectators, than nobility.) (Rabil 84; translation modified)

In response, Lorenzo points out that although virtue is one part of nobility, the external signs rejected by Niccolò make men famous, and bestow nobility: Without the externalization of inner qualities, the public recognition that confers nobility is impossible (Poggio 81; Rabil 86).³⁹

Although the main force of Poggio’s dialogue is that nobility is found only in virtue, Carlo Marsuppini, in poetic response to Poggio (also from 1440), felt the need to reiterate this idea, remarking,

Est qui si proavum monstret imagines

Varius per veteres undique et atria

Exornet pario marmore et omnium

Maiorum statuis, ordine dictitans

Longa facta mirum quique securibus

Ornatus fuerit, qui capitolio

Olim claruerit curribus aut equis

Aut qui pertrepidis tempore civibus

Dictator patriae consulit anxie.

Illis quippe viris se similem putet,

Tanquam gloriolae pars sibi cesserit

Heredi misero.

(The falsely noble conspicuously displays in his foyers

statues of his ancestors, sculpted from Parian marble,

and recites at great length their wonderful deeds—

which one held high office,

which one was famous on the Capitoline with horse and chariot,

or which one, when the citizens were terrified,

as dictator provided for the state in danger.

Doubtless, he thinks he is like those men,

as if some small share of their glory was passed on to the wretched heir.)⁴⁰

Marsuppini’s derogatory poem about the falsely noble ends by linking generositas (true nobility) with virtus et probitas (virtue and goodness)—generositas meaning nobility but also implying generosity (De Nobilitate 108–9).⁴¹ Despite the poem’s extended condemnation of those who associate nobility with birth and wealth (the ancient feudal aristocracy), it ends with an encomium that justifies the display of new wealth in conjunction with family (blood), by attributing to Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici gifts of mind and body (De Nobilitate 109).

What links these two pieces of writing is their attempt to define nobility in terms other than concrete manifestations of glory: In both cases, ancient sculptures are displayed in the vain hope of concretizing their owner’s status. Both texts suggest not only that nobility may have different meanings according to time and place, but also (despite their strenuous protests, or perhaps because of them) that statues and monuments—at least superficially—offer a common language of nobility through a substantive glory that transcends these differences. In both cases, noble identity is foremost a verbal negotiation: It is no accident that Poggio’s interlocutors start with a philological discussion of the word nobilis. By supplanting physical artifacts with discussion, Poggio’s interlocutors (and by extension, the author-narrator) imply that dialogue, or at least this dialogue, has greater persuasive power than do statues from the past. Marsuppini likewise considers Poggio’s treatise written for posterity, and it is clear from the dialogue (and its subsequent history) that Poggio’s written work is both more compelling and more permanent than are his meager and broken pieces of sculpture.⁴² This is especially true for a writer and bureaucrat of limited means: Only the very wealthy (like the Medici) could afford the kind of visual self-representation that went beyond the redeployment of broken fragments. Poggio’s dialogue proposes that the term nobilis, unlike the ruined sculptures, can be largely reconstituted through philological reconstruction and discussion.⁴³ Yet in both texts, the discussion begins with, and depends on, the material evidence of nobility.

Marsuppini’s scathing poem recalls Juvenal’s ridicule of those who have painted masks, all those statues, and so many portraits of noble ancestors:

tota licet veteres exornent undique cerae

atria, nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus.

Paulus vel Cossus vel Drusus moribus esto,

hos ante effigies maiorum pone tuorum,

praecedant ipsas illi te consule virgas.

(Though you adorn your entire atrium with ancient wax portraits in every direction, virtue, and virtue alone, is the only nobility. So, be a Paulus or a Cossus or a Drusus in your behavior. Honor their images above all your ancestral portraits.)⁴⁴

Juvenal reminds the reader that images of predecessors have the function of exemplary exhortation: The point of surrounding oneself with portraits, he says, is to be their subjects via imitation—not to use the images as a short-cut to a noble pedigree. Yet in Poggio’s text, Lorenzo elides the notion that exemplary portraits inspire virtue and suggests instead a more direct link between portraits and nobility: The ancients thought that visible examples of those who had a zeal for fame and wisdom would help ennoble and excite the mind.⁴⁵ Although Niccoli replies with irony that, according to this logic, artists and sculptors are the most noble men of all, Lorenzo’s comment still suggests that for the educated elite (which at this time would have excluded artists and sculptors), there is a connection between nobility and concrete manifestations of glory.

Poggio’s dialogue draws from Buonaccorso da Montemagno’s earlier De nobilitate tractatus (c.1428), in which the first speaker offers the opinion that the function of statues and monuments is to glorify great men through their descendants: Those images, by artifice and contrivance, conceal the physical representation of illustrious men, but nature reveals the true images of the parents in their children.⁴⁶ This speech recalls the connections between coining and self-eternalization in Inferno 15, as nobility through a bloodline of virtuous men is closely linked with the Aristotelian idea of generation: The images of parents have been impressed upon the faces of their children; the possession of nobility itself has been left to me as an inheritance, in that the very images have been implanted by my ancestors as an hereditary possession.⁴⁷ The argument for inherited nobility—although convincingly opposed by Buonaccorso’s second and final speaker—thus depended on the idea that the descendants of great people were in themselves monuments that made visible the ancient nobility of their forebears; this is an idea that is strikingly close to Nagel and Wood’s substitutional paradigm for art.

Especially interesting in these texts is the fact that the leading opinion (that nobility comes from virtue) must constantly attempt to counter very specific and well-articulated arguments linking objects (especially statues and portraits) with nobility. In fact, despite strenuous opposition from writers like Poggio, Marsuppini, and Buonaccorso, the idea that monuments offered a shortcut to nobility seems to have had widespread currency, as we see in an undated letter by Leonardo Bruni. Writing to Poggio, Bruni denounces as vain and crass the construction of an elaborate tomb to Bartolomeo Aragazzi, commissioned (according to Bruni’s letter) by Aragazzi himself, in his will.⁴⁸ Although Aragazzi was a