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Introduction: locating communities in the early modern Italian city

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2010

FABRIZIO NEVOLA
FABRIZIO NEVOLA*
Affiliation:
Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
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Extract

From late antiquity until the nineteenth century the Italian peninsula was made up of numerous states and city-states, governed as republics, or ruled by kings, dukes or popes. While diverse attempts were made to unify these disparate political entities through language and culture, or warfare and realpolitik, the dominant situation was one of intense rivalry and intermittent conflict. That uniquely Italian idea of campanilismo, or pride in one's own bell-tower, was borne of this continuous rivalry. It encapsulates an important concept, that local pride was inscribed in the physical fabric of the city, that a bell-tower could stand for a collective sense of one city's self-image and that this was expressed and calibrated in relation to neighbours, who were usually rivals. It is within this frame of references that much recent scholarship on urban image and identity has focused, teasing out the intentional distinctions that were drawn socio-politically and culturally, between the major centres of the peninsula. Such a process has significantly altered the view, dominant until quite recently, that style in art and architecture followed a single evolutionary route that passed from one place to another, as each lived a ‘golden age’ that defined a single ‘urban’ school – Siena, Venice, Florence, Rome, Bologna. In its place, a more nuanced view of how each centre fostered, reacted, responded and adopted innovation and change has come to the fore. In a generation of scholarship that followed Michael Baxandall's ground-breaking Painting and Experience, the idea that Renaissance Italians consciously fashioned urban images and identities has entered the mainstream. Scholars have put artworks and buildings back into close relation with the social contexts of their production and have asked how they worked in relation to their users and viewers.

Type
Introduction
Information
Urban History , Volume 37 , Special Issue 3: Locating communities in the early modern Italian city , December 2010 , pp. 349 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 From a growing bibliography in this vein see, for example, Brown, P. Fortini, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (London and New Haven, 1988)Google Scholar; Welch, E., Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven and London, 1995)Google Scholar; Campbell, S.J., Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450–1495 (New Haven and London, 1997)Google Scholar; Syson, L. and Gordon, D., Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (London and New Haven, 2001)Google Scholar; Campbell, S.J. and Milner, S.J. (eds.), Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.

2 S.J. Campbell and S.J. Milner, ‘Art, identity and cultural translation in Renaissance Italy’, in Campbell and Milner (eds.), Artistic Exchange, 1–13; P. Fortini Brown, ‘Renovatio or Concilatio? How renaissances happened in Venice’, in Brown, A. (ed.), Language and Images of Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1995), 127–54Google Scholar.

3 An exemplary use of Baxandall's approach, which develops his methods subtly and in great detail, is Rubin, P., Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (London and New Haven, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 Burke, P., The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (Cambridge, 1986), 130–42Google Scholar, and more in general in his What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004).

5 The point, for example, was at the heart of the exhibition Syson, L. et al. (eds.), Renaissance Siena: Art for a City, exhib. cat. (London and New Haven, 2007)Google Scholar, a major shift from the artist-based approach of the earlier ground-breaking show on the same subject, Christiansen, K., Kanter, L.B. and Strehlke, C.B. (eds.), Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420–1500 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

6 Furolotti, B. and Rebecchini, G., The Art and Architecture of Mantua: Eight Centuries of Patronage and Collecting (London 2008)Google Scholar.

7 Burke, P., Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, specifically within the context of a study of cultural self-representation. A helpful survey is Lynch, K., Individuals, Families and Communities in Europe, 1200–1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society (Cambridge 2003)Google Scholar.

8 The ‘mosaic of worlds’ is proposed as a metaphor by Burke, Peter in his The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern History. Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 7–8Google Scholar.

9 Muir, E., ‘The idea of community in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 On the boundaries and intersections in the definition of community, dependent upon analysis first advanced by Georg Simmel, see Spierling, K.E. and Halvorson, M.J., ‘Introduction: definitions of community in early modern Europe’, in Spierling, K.E. and Halvorson, M.J. (eds.), Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2008), 7–8Google Scholar. This theme of mixing or overlap emerges also in Burke, Languages and Communities, 5–7. Coming at the issue from the perspective of ‘neighbourhood’, but identifying close overlaps with ‘community’, is the collection edited and introduced by Garrioch, D. and Peel, M., ‘Introduction: the social history of urban neighborhoods’, Journal of Urban History, 32 (2006), 663–76, at 664–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For a more detailed reading of membership in Sienese society and religious iconography, see F. Nevola, ‘Civic identity and private patrons in Renaissance Siena’, in Syson et al. (eds.), Renaissance Siena, 16–29, esp. 21.

12 See also Rebecchini, G., ‘After the Medici. The new Rome of Pope Paul III Farnese’, I Tatti Studies, 11 (2007), 147–200Google Scholar.

13 Archivio di Stato di Mantova (ASMn), AG, b. 881, c. 448r–v, Fabrizio Pellegrini to Federico Gonzaga from Rome, 8 Jan. 1532, ‘che a ogni piccolo grido o rumore si gridi “Roma, Roma, Italia, Italia” et si riducano a casa del loro caporione, di modo che è pericolo un giorno non naschi qualche desordine’.

14 From a variety of studies on early modern Rome, two that address this variety of overlapping jurisdictions and semiotics are Burroughs, C., From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar, and Nussdorfer, L., Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar.

15 A sample of this complexity of overlapping ‘visual claims’ can be had for one street in Salerno, L., Spezzaferro, L. and Tafuri, M. (eds.), Via Giulia: una utopia urbanistica del '500 (Rome, 1973)Google Scholar.

16 For a political reading of the architectural and sculptural symbolism of the Capitoline Hill, see, among others, Burroughs, From Signs to Design.

17 The strategy resembles the better-known and successful intervention on the via Baullari; see Spezzaferro, L., ‘Place Farnèse: urbanisme et politique’, in Le Palais Farnèse (Rome, 1981), vol. I, 85–123, at 115–23Google Scholar.

18 ASMn, AG, b. 1911, c. 53r, Nino Sernini to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga from Rome, 5 Feb. 1541. For a discussion of this document, see Spezzaferro, Place Farnèse: urbanisme et politique, 114. For the hospice, see Williams, M.E., The Venerable English College, Rome: A History (Leominster, 2008), 1–9Google Scholar.

19 This is evidently an aim not unique to this collection! Two issues of Quaderni Storici have recently been entirely dedicated to such issues, although as often, the material that they publish is predominantly post-1600; see Olmo, C., ‘Premessa: morfologie urbane’, Quaderni Storici, 125 (2007), 341–54Google Scholar, and Barbot, M., ‘L'abitare in città: un concentrato di storie’, Quaderni Storici, 127 (2008), 283–300Google Scholar.

20 An exemplary study along such lines is Connors, J., ‘Alliance and enmity in Roman baroque urbanism’, Romisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 25 (1989), 207–94Google Scholar.

21 Central to the summary definition of space offered here, is Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; emblematic in this regard is the collection edited by Paoletti, J.T. and Crum, R., Renaissance Florence. A Social History (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar, which though declaring to be a ‘social history’ in the title, is predominantly a multi-author enquiry into the varieties of ‘space’ as they occurred in Florence.

22 The work of Elizabeth and Thomas Cohen has been particularly innovative in this area, see for example, Cohen, E. and Cohen, T., ‘Open and shut: the social meanings of the cinquecento Roman house’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 9 (2001–02), 61–84CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; more recently, and from the perspective of a historian of music, see Dennis, F., ‘Sound and domestic space in early modern Italy’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 16 (2008–09), 7–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Preyer, B., ‘Planning for visitors at Florentine palaces’, Renaissance Studies, 12 (1999), 357–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Dennis, ‘Sound and domestic space’, 14–16. This promising line of enquiry has recently been taken up in this journal by Colleran, K., ‘Scampanata at the widows’ windows: a case-study of sound and ritual insult in cinquecento Florence’, Urban History, 36 (2009), 359–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 One of the most sophisticated readings of urban space in relation to ritual in this period is R. Ingersoll, ‘Ritual use of public space in Renaissance Rome’ (University of California Ph.D. thesis, 1985); a collection that owes much to Spiro Kostof's study of urban form in relation to ritual is Çelik, Z., Favro, D. and Ingersoll, R. (eds.), Streets. Critical Perspectives on Public Space (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar. Laitinen, R. and Cohen, T.V. (eds.), Cultural History of Early Modern European Streets (Leiden, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, published first as a Special Issue of Journal of Early Modern History, 12 (2008), 3–4, have indeed addressed some of the themes of our collection specifically from the point of view of the street, and with a pan-European remit.

25 R. Laitinen with T.V. Cohen, ‘Cultural history of early modern European streets – an introduction’, in Laitinen and Cohen (eds.), Cultural History, 204; the early modern Italian street is the main focus of Fabrizio Nevola's ongoing research project, Street Life in Renaissance Italy (which will be published by Yale University Press).

26 On the historiographic distinctions around ‘negotiation’ and ‘resistance’, see Laitinen with Cohen, ‘Cultural history’, 199–202.

27 The manner in which the potenze transferred strategies for group representation has been explored in detail in Rosenthal, D., ‘The genealogy of empires: ritual politics and state building in early modern Florence’, I Tatti Studies, 8 (2000), 197–234Google Scholar, and ‘Big Piero, the empire of the meadow and the parish of Santa Lucia: claiming neighborhood in the early modern city’, Journal of Urban History, 32 (2006), 677–692.

28 Such strategies of use are also explored in Cavallo, S., Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities (Manchester, 2007)Google Scholar; for the elite paradigms see also Dennis, F. and Ajmar-Wollheim, M. (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy (London, 2006)Google Scholar. See for example the recent collections: Ajmar-Wollheim, M. and Dennis, F., ‘Introduction: approaching the Italian renaissance interior: sources, methodologies, debates’, Renaissance Studies, 20 (2006), 623–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Olson, R.J.M., Reilly, P.L. and Shepherd, R. (eds.), The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Maldon and Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar.

29 Some parallels might be observed here to the way that recent work on Renaissance pharmacies has ‘borrowed’ the paradigms developed for later discussions of the coffee-house; for which see de Vivo, F., ‘Pharmacies as centres of communication in early modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, 21 (2007), 505–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 506–7, and in the same journal S. Cavallo and D. Gentilcore, ‘Spaces, objects and identities in early modern Italian medicine’, 473–9, and E.S. Cohen, ‘Miscarriages of apothecary justice: un-separate spaces of work and family in early modern Rome’, 480–504.

30 See most recently for these Christian, K.W., Empire without End. Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome c. 1350–1527 (New Haven and London 2010)Google Scholar.