Meanings of Masculinity in Paolo Giovio's "Ischian" Dialogues

GENDER IN EARLY MODERN ROME Meanings of Masculinity in Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues Kenneth Gouwens, University of Connecticut, Storrs IN THE SUM M ER O F 1 5 27 , the humanist, historian, and physician Paolo Giovio (1486–1552) arrived safely on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. It had not been an easy spring. As a client and friend of Pope Clement VII he had witnessed his patron’s increasing desperation as it became clear that Charles de Bourbon’s troops would not honor the truce that the imperial viceroy, Charles de Lannoy, had made with the pope in mid-March. On the sixth of May, when those troops besieged Rome, Giovio was in the Vatican Palace with his spectacularly unfortunate patron who was, as Giovio put it, “vainly wearying an adverse God with his prayers.”1 When Clement fled along the Alexandrine corridor to Castel Sant’Angelo, the humanist accompanied him. Thereafter, trapped in the papal fortress while the city below was being sacked, Giovio passed the time by doing what humanists do best, or at least most: he wrote. Specifically, he composed a tract On the Best Diet, which he dedicated to another refugee and sometime patron, Felice Trofino, the archbishop of Chieti.2 One wonders whether the composition served as a form of wish fulfillment, given that supplies within the fortress were running Contact Kenneth Gouwens at Department of History U-4103, 241 Glenbrook Rd., University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-4103 ([email protected]). I am grateful to the Società Storica Comense and particularly to Sergio Lazzarini and Magda Noseda, both for providing ready access to Giovio’s manuscripts in Como and for their generous hospitality on several occasions. In addition I wish to thank Julia Hairston, Micki McElya, and Sarah Ross for commenting on drafts of the essay. 1. T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 83. 2. Trofino had become archbishop of Chieti in August 1524, after the resignation of Gian Pietro Carafa (the future Pope Paul IV). Clement appointed Trofino to succeed Gian Matteo Giberti as papal datary, but failing health soon led Trofino to resign the post. See ibid., 17, 65, 222, 296 n. 23; Konrad Eubel, Hierarchia catholica medii aevi, sive Summorum pontificum, S. R. E. cardinalium, ecclesiarum antistitum series, 3 vols. (Regensburg, 1913–23), 3:311. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 17, number 1. © 2014 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2014/1701-0003$10.00 79 80 | I T AT TI ST UDIES IN T HE IT ALIAN RENAIS SANCE SPRING 2014 so low that the pope himself had come to look upon roast mule as a special treat.3 The tract evidently did little for Trofino, who died later that year. Its author, however, fared better: after leaving Rome in midsummer, Giovio went on to find savory collations and more comfortable lodging in the locus amoenus of Ischia’s castle, where he enjoyed the protection and support of the prominent poet and cultural patron Vittoria Colonna. Within a few months, at Colonna’s urging, he was once again writing: this time, a set of three dialogues on “notable men and women of our time,” which he dedicated to Clement VII’s advisor and confidant, Gian Matteo Giberti.4 This work provides a valuable window onto the condition and conceptions of Italian manhood during a crucial period in the Italian Renaissance, the time of foreign invasions that began in 1494. Until recently, however, we have lacked a reliable edition of the text, which Giovio himself never published. A transcription of the second dialogue, on illustrious literati, appeared as an appendix in the eighteenth-century history of Italian literature by Girolamo Tiraboschi, but the first and third dialogues—on outstanding men of arms and noblewomen, respectively—were not published until 1984, when a sparsely annotated and often inaccurate rendering appeared in the Italian national edition of Giovio’s works.5 The neglect of the dialogues is understandable: the sole extant manuscript of each of them survives only in draft form, and that on noblewomen surfaced only in the twentieth century.6 Moreover, not only does Giovio describe hundreds of individuals who are now obscure, he does so in prose that is often as labyrinthine as it is larded with arcane vocabulary. The recent appearance of two extensively annotated critical editions of the work, accompanied by translations into Italian (2011) and English (2013), provides an opportunity to explore with newfound clarity what it may tell us about Renaissance Roman conceptions of masculinity.7 3. In his biography of Cardinal Pompeo Colonna (1479–1532), first published in 1548, Giovio would use this example to highlight the exhaustion of resources within the castello before the pope’s surrender on June 6, 1527: “Clemens consumpto commeatu, ita ut asinina etiam carne invitatis quoque quasi ad solennes epulas patribus avidissime vesceretur, desperatisque omnibus effugiis, deditionem fecit”: Paolo Giovio, Pompei Columnae vita, in Iovii opera, 11 vols. to date (Rome, 1956–), 6:141–90, at 180. 4. On Giberti, see Angelo Turchini, “Giberti, Gian Matteo,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 54 (2000): 623–29; Adriano Prosperi, Tra Evangelismo e Controriforma: G. M. Giberti (1495–1543) (Rome, 1969). 5. Girolamo Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan, 1824), 7, pt. 2:2444–99; Giovio, Iovii opera, 9:147–321; vol. 9 was edited by Ernesto Travi and Mariagrazia Penco. 6. On the state of the manuscripts, see Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, ed. and trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 553–54. 7. These editions are Paolo Giovio, Dialogo sugli uomini e le donne illustri del nostro tempo, ed. and trans. Franco Minonzio, 2 vols. (Turin, 2011), and Notable Men. The latter text is followed Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 81 Throughout, it pointedly assesses the failings of manhood on the battlefield, in cultural production, and in the domestic sphere. Giovio gives a gendered reading not only to the decline of military prowess but also to a perceived decline in Latin writing and culture and to the condition of Italian women, whose virtue the men have been unable to defend. The so-called crisi d’Italia, in its political, cultural, and social manifestations alike, is thus in essence a crisis of masculinity.8 Dialogue One, on illustrious condottieri and rulers, addresses in the most detail and with the greatest urgency the consequences of Italian noblemen not fulfilling their responsibilities as military and political leaders. Giovio claims near its opening that he is reporting faithfully the candid conversations that he had on Ischia over a three-day span in late 1527 with a pair of friends. Apart from the figure of the author himself (Iovius), first there is the military commander Alfonso d’Avalos, marquis del Vasto (Davalus), who was spending his career in the service of Spain, primarily in its wars on Italian soil.9 Alfonso was the cousin of Colonna’s husband, Ferdinando Francesco d’Avalos, the marquis of Pescara, and in fact had been born on Ischia, where he was raised by his aunt, Costanza.10 Moreover, Alfonso was close to Vittoria: it has been argued that he studied letters under her guidance and would also assist in the dissemination of her works.11 Late in his career, he would incur disrepute: in 1544 he lost the Battle of Ceresole to the French, and at the time of his death he stood accused of maladministration of Milan. Back when the dialogues were set and mostly written, however, he was a promising young commander who, less than three years before, had led the vanguard of the imperial troops to victory over the French in the Battle of Pavia. After that triumph, on the recommendation of Pescara, Charles V had made Alfonso the commander in chief of his infantry in Italy. Thus at the time of the dialogue he was ideally positioned to speak authoritatively to the Italians’ prowess on the battlefield and more generally to current military practices. herein, except when citation of deleted passages in the manuscripts is necessary. The best analyses of these dialogues to have appeared before 2011 are Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 86–105; Carlo Vecce, “Paolo Giovio e Vittoria Colonna,” Periodico della Società Storica Comense 54 (1990): 65–93. 8. On this manifold conception of the masculine, see Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus, “Introduction,” in The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain, ed. Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus (Toronto, 2010), 13–40, who write that “in this stylized world of the Italian Renaissance court, arms, letters and power are inseparable from manhood itself ” (13). 9. On Alfonso d’Avalos (1502–46), see Gaspare De Caro, “Avalos, Alfonso d’, marchese del Vasto,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 4 (1962): 612–16. 10. On Costanza d’Avalos the Elder (ca. 1460–1541), see Claudio Mutini, “Avalos, Costanza d’, principessa di Francavilla,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 4 (1962): 621–22. 11. See Tobia Toscano, “Due ‘allievi’ di Vittoria Colonna: Luigi Tansillo e Alfonso D’Avalos,” Critica letteraria 16 (1988): 739–73. 82 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S IN T H E I T A LI A N R EN A IS SA N C E SPRING 2014 The remaining interlocutor, representing the statesman, jurist, and orator Giovanni Antonio Muscettola, provides an informed perspective on Neapolitan politics and on matters of literary style.12 If less widely known than Del Vasto, he had at various points held prominent offices in the government of Naples, including some that managed financial policy. In the early 1530s he would represent the emperor in Rome, and Clement VII would hold him in such esteem as to plan to create him cardinal.13 In autumn 1527, Muscettola was serving on the council of the imperial viceroy of Naples, Hugo de Moncada (1476–1528). According to the text, Moncada and the Neapolitan government had just sent him to Ischia on a mission to persuade d’Avalos to resume his military responsibilities on the mainland, and his disembarkation on the island provides the occasion for the conversations in Dialogue One. These verbal exchanges among three males were initially couched as having been recorded for the benefit of a fourth: Gian Matteo Giberti, Clement VII’s datary and close advisor, who had been given over to the imperial troops as a hostage in late September as surety for the ransom demanded of the pope.14 In the earliest surviving draft of Dialogue One, the datary figures large in the opening frame: Giovio is writing, he says, to give Giberti some light reading to intersperse with his study of scripture while he endures captivity. But in subsequent revisions, Giovio excised those passages, and Giberti virtually disappears.15 This leaves the patron who commissioned the work, Vittoria Colonna, as its initial focus. The first dialogue ends with an encomium of Vittoria’s husband, Pescara, as the ideal commander.16 But if the role of the female patron became more central 12. On Muscettola (1487–1534), see Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 88–105, 116, and 316 n. 16; Maria Antonietta Visceglia, Il bisogno di eternità: I comportamenti aristocratici a Napoli in età moderna (Naples, 1988), 136, 181–84. 13. In May 1532 Clement sought to elevate Muscettola to the cardinalate. For Clement’s intention and the circumstances that prevented its realization, see Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. F. I. Antrobus et al., 40 vols. (London, 1901–33), 10:209–10. 14. By the late fifteenth century the office of the datary (datarius) had come to control the sales of ecclesiastical offices and to manage a range of other financial transactions. See John F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (Baltimore, 1983), 27. 15. The title of Dialogue One (on fol. 1r) still reads: “PAULI IOVII DE VIRIS ET FOEMINIS / AETATE FLORENTIBUS / AD IOANNEM MATTHEVM GIBERTVM DIALOGVS. I,” but beyond that, the ultimate version includes only two incidental references to the datary. Compare Minonzio’s reconstruction of the dialogue in Giovio, Dialogo, which takes as integral to the ultimate redaction some of the opening passage addressed to Giberti that the latest edition (Giovio, Notable Men) reads as having been deleted. For a reconstruction of the earliest surviving redaction of the opening, see Giovio, Notable Men, 536–51. 16. Dialogue Three concludes with a celebration of Vittoria herself as the perfect noblewoman. Because the closing pages of Dialogue Two are missing, we cannot know whether she figured prominently there as well. On the dialogues’ portrayal of Colonna, see Kenneth Gouwens, “Female Virtue and Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 83 with revision, even in its last redaction the dialogue eloquently details the crucial failings in manhood that Giovio portrays as underlying the many defeats that Italian soldiers had suffered over the past thirty-three years. Notable Men and Women centers on a conventional question: How does the current generation compare with previous ones? Its interlocutors discuss perceived decline, first of all, in Italian military prowess and political effectiveness; second, in the centrality of Italian Latinists to European learned culture; and, finally, in the status and chastity of noblewomen on a peninsula that is being raped, and not just metaphorically, by foreign troops. Italian political, military, and cultural leaders have not been acting as men should, and their failure to do so has had dire consequences. Together, the three dialogues limn a depressing portrait of malaise besetting men on the peninsula and offer little indication of how recovery might come about. An inquiry into Giovio’s own sexuality may help elucidate why Italy’s ills presented as they did to the humanist physician. The meanings of masculinity in the dialogue will be fleshed out most fully, finally, when it is set in the context of the political and cultural turbulence in early cinquecento Italy that it, like other prominent compositions of the period, both eloquently describes and poignantly exemplifies.17 *** Soon after the dialogue opens, Giovio’s eponymous interlocutor provides deep historical background for contemporary calamities. He attaches pivotal importance to the Emperor Constantine’s having moved the Roman Empire’s administrative center to Constantinople, thereby “abandon[ing] Italy along with the city of Rome. Rome was divested of every dignity and stripped of protection and left to be occupied and devastated by the barbarians.”18 Thus, a particular leader’s gross error had led to repeated invasions amid which Italy “could not catch its breath and was forced into servitude amid squalor and tears.”19 Gradual but devastating decline ensued not only in politics but in culture: “Over the course of nearly ten centuries, it came about that the splendor of our native speech had absorbed various kinds of filth from every barbarian people. The customs that the Embodiment of Beauty: Vittoria Colonna in Paolo Giovio’s Notable Men and Women,” Renaissance Quarterly 68, no. 1 (Spring 2015), forthcoming. 17. For an exemplary study of literary representations of the political and cultural disruptions of the early cinquecento, see Albert Russell Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1987). 18. Giovio, Notable Men, 49. 19. Ibid., 51. 84 | I TAT TI STUDIES IN T HE IT ALIA N RENAISSANCE SPRING 2014 had been instituted by laws in the image of virtue fell completely into desuetude; the choice arts faded away; the schools fell silent; and finally learning, the Muses, and all literature were driven completely into exile.” Barbarian rule dealt a crucial blow to cultural patronage: “No one was supporting industry, uprightness, and literary study in order that they might be able to hold fast to those things for the dignity and adornment of life and protect them with necessary aid.”20 So things went until the late fourteenth century, when at last a supremely effective leader began to revive Italy: Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan.21 Visconti’s first crucial step was to devise improvements in military organization.22 Thereafter, he soundly defeated French and German troops and led the way for independent cities, princes, and pontiffs (notably Nicholas V) “to cultivate magnificence, literature, military science, and elegance.”23 Giovio highlights the importance of Giangaleazzo’s cultural patronage: “He marvelously favored the noblest arts, and once the famous school at Pavia had been established and an illustrious library had been opened at great expense to encourage intellectual pursuits, he brought back the Muses, who had been enveloped in darkness, from their exile. Thus he magnificently restored all things to their ancient grandeur and prestige and redeemed the dignity of the Italian nation.”24 Giovio also singles out three other key military leaders: Francesco I Sforza, Braccio da Montone, and Alberico da Barbiano, the last of whom is noteworthy as “the commander of an army composed of Italians” (Italicae militiae magistrum).25 Only thereafter does he proceed to mention innovators in literature (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio), law (Raphael of Como and Raffaele Fulgosio), astronomy (Biagio Pelacani), medicine (Torrigiano de’ Torrigiani and Gentile da Foligno), painting (Cimabue and especially Giotto), architecture (Brunelleschi), bronze reliefs (Pisano), and statuary (Donatello). In putting forth a Milanese despot as the restorer of an Italian greatness after a millennium of darkness, Giovio 20. Ibid. 21. Giangaleazzo Visconti (d. 1402) became sole ruler of Milan in 1385. A decade later he received imperial investiture as its duke. 22. On Giangaleazzo’s military innovations and especially his tying of mercenaries to the state by means of land grants, see Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Totowa, NJ, 1974), 50–54; William Caferro, John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in FourteenthCentury Italy (Baltimore, 2006), 255–56. 23. Giovio, Notable Men, 53. Nicholas V was pope, 1447–55. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. Alberico da Barbiano, “The Great” (ca. 1348–1409), was captain of the Company of St. George, a mercenary army said to have been composed entirely of Italians (unlike that of John Hawkwood, in which Alberico had previously served). See Caferro, John Hawkwood, 228; Pietro Pirri, “Alberico da Barbiano,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 1 (1960): 639–41. Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 85 starkly differs from Florentine civic humanists, with their emphasis on republican liberty as essential for cultural prosperity. For Giovio it is Visconti, above all others, who reestablished freedom from foreign domination and thereafter, through patronage, contributed to a cultural revival that has extended up and down the peninsula. Thus for Giovio, an almost Burckhardtian assertion of individual virtù provides a key to understanding how the Renaissance began. In sum, changes in both political and military leadership prepared the way for, if not in fact caused, both a major decline in culture and the eventual recovery therefrom. Conversely, whereas Giangaleazzo through his virtù had resurrected a fallen Italy, early cinquecento leaders of far lesser mettle have unwittingly caused its renewed prostration. In a manner reminiscent of Castiglione’s Courtier, Giovio’s interlocutors devote the first day of conversations to defining the attributes of the perfect commander. Unlike Castiglione, however, Giovio has his speakers survey a range of specific figures to make their point. In all, they assess the relative strengths and shortcomings of over 170 men of arms. In this catalog, the virtues of the generation that has just slipped away receive particular emphasis: its outstanding military leaders far surpassed even the most promising figures emergent in the present historical moment. Unsurprisingly, but also quite plausibly, Giovio particularly lauds the accomplishments of Vittoria Colonna’s closest relatives, including her father, Fabrizio I Colonna, who had died just seven years before the dialogue’s setting.26 As Davalus asks, “who among the Colonnas might dare to compare themselves to Fabrizio and Prospero, or might be confident that they will soon equal the strength, ardor, and passion of Marcantonio and Muzio, who by a cruel fate were killed in wars in the midst of life’s journey?”27 Vittoria Colonna’s husband, Pescara, who died a few months after leading the imperial army to victory over the French in the Battle of Pavia (1525), garners by far the most praise, which crescendos in the encomium of him that closes out Dialogue One. 26. Vittoria Colonna’s parents were Fabrizio I Colonna (ca. 1450/60–1520) and Agnese, daughter of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, who is also celebrated in this dialogue. On Fabrizio, see Franca Petrucci, “Colonna, Fabrizio,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 27 (1982): 407–12, and Condottieri, capitani e tribuni, fino al Cinquecento, ed. Corrado Argegni, 3 vols. (Milan, 1936–37), 1:182–83. Giovio, Notable Men, at 517, attributes not only Vittoria’s political acumen but also her brilliance, personal distinction, prudence, piety, and other virtues in part to her lineage, and he mentions Fabrizio by name. 27. Giovio, Notable Men, 85. On Prospero Colonna (1460?–1523), see Franca Petrucci, “Colonna, Prospero,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 27 (1982): 418–26, and Condottieri, 1:189–90; on Marcantonio I Colonna (1478–1522), see Franca Petrucci, “Colonna, Marcantonio,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 27 (1982): 365–68, and Condottieri, 1:186; and on Muzio (ca. 1480–1516), see Franca Petrucci, “Colonna, Muzio,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 27 (1982): 389–90, and Condottieri, 1:187–88. 86 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S I N T H E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA NC E SPRING 2014 Decades before the deaths of Fabrizio Colonna and Pescara, however, decline had already set in at the top. A handful of key political leaders bear critical responsibility for losing the territorial sway and political autonomy that Italian states had built up over the previous century. These polities would still be flourishing, he says, were it not for the miseries brought on them by Ludovico Sforza “il Moro” (“great-grandson of that Giangaleazzo Visconti who founded the golden age”); by Alfonso II of Naples who, out of “monstrous arrogance,” had provoked Sforza; by the Venetians, “more ambitious than was befitting a free people”; and by Pope Alexander VI, “the worst of men.”28 Notably, this cast of villains appears, albeit with somewhat different degrees of culpability, in Francesco Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia. The identification of the 1490s as the moment when decline began is also highly conventional, as one sees in the histories both of Guicciardini and of Girolamo Borgia.29 Like Guicciardini, Giovio is fascinated by the character of political leaders and how their character relates to errors in judgment and policy.30 But in this dialogue he differs from the Florentine historian in emphasizing and describing in detail the repercussions that failed leadership has had for the soldiery in general and, indeed, for the condition of Italian culture and society. Davalus meticulously details the flawed strategies and tactics of particular leaders: things that he, fighting for the Spaniards, had witnessed and indeed from which he and other imperial commanders had benefited: for example, near the end of the Battle of Ravenna (1512), the victorious French lost their outstanding captain Gaston de Foix who, “since he was inflamed by an inordinate desire to destroy the enemy,” needlessly rushed to his death.31 Among the Italians, Bartolomeo d’Alviano, who led troops on behalf of Venice, was “exceedingly aggres- 28. Giovio, Notable Men, 55. 29. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton, NJ, 1965), 264, notes that the History of the Italian Wars by Girolamo Borgia (1475– 1550) “might be considered as the first historical work which fully evidences the proposition of the invasion of Charles VIII as a European event.” Guicciardini drew heavily on Borgia, who in turn had consulted the manuscript of the Commentary on the Italian War by the Florentine statesman Bernardo Rucellai (1448–1514). 30. For close comparison of their methods and assumptions, see T. C. Price Zimmermann, “Guicciardini, Giovio, and the Character of Clement VII,” in The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss (Aldershot, 2005), 19–27, and “Francesco Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio,” Annali d’Italianistica 2 (1984): 34–52. 31. Giovio, Notable Men, 125. On Gaston de Foix (1489–1512), duke of Nemours (1507–12), see Giovio’s elogium of him in Iovii opera, 8:384–85, rendered in Italian in Paolo Giovio, Elogi degli uomini illustri, ed. and trans. Franco Minonzio (Turin, 2006), 732–34. Compare the criticism of the obstinacy of the imperial leader Pedro Navarro (ca. 1460–1528) and its consequences in that same battle, in Giovio, Notable Men, 123–25. See also Giovio’s elogium of Navarro in Iovii opera, 8:436–38; Giovio, Elogi degli uomini illustri, 844– 48. Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 87 sive,” showing “unfortunate audacity and fatal rashness.”32 Impetuousness could also lead to exhaustion, as in the case of Gaspare Sanseverino, whose “youthful flower of excellence, as it was too precocious and excessive, was not able to come to fruition, and thus as the years gradually progressed, it withered away.”33 As these examples suggest, for Giovio virtù requires measure: like the Aristotelian mean of courage, it is not simply assertiveness. The self-control requisite for good leadership is particularly striking in Giovio’s portrayal of Giovanni de’ Medici “of the Black Bands.”34 As in Luigi Guicciardini’s history of the Sack of Rome, so too here Giovanni is lauded for his exceptional leadership, but Giovio’s praise is qualified: “when his rash and youthful passion, monstrous temper, and outsized lusts had already cooled to some degree, and when he had the imminent prospect of commanding a great army, he fell as he was leading an advance.”35 Thus only at the time of his death was de’ Medici coming to exhibit the proper balance of keenness and caution that is essential in an ideal commander.36 Closer to the ideal is Federico Gonzaga “da Bozzolo,” who successfully imitates and combines other commanders’ good points: “once he has investigated the weaknesses and strengths of others and excellently blended the latter into one, he appears to have achieved a healthy balance of extremes.”37 Thus, as in Castiglione’s Courtier, so too in Giovio’s Ischian dialogues masculinity is presented as “an exercise in Aristotelian temperance.”38 In assessing Clement VII, whom most historians have faulted for pursuing policies that were as inconsistent as they were disastrous, Giovio chooses discretion as the better part of candor. Thus when Davalus notes how the pope had 32. Giovio, Notable Men, 175. 33. Ibid., 115. On Gaspare Sanseverino, see ibid., 643 n. 181. 34. While this Giovanni de’ Medici (1498–1526) is conventionally called “Giovanni of the Black Bands,” the appellation is a posthumous one. See Maurizio Arfaioli, The Black Bands of Giovanni: Infantry and Diplomacy during the Italian Wars, 1526–1528 (Pisa, 2005), xiii–xvii, 1–23. 35. Giovio, Notable Men, 163–65. Luigi Guicciardini’s overblown praise of Giovanni de’ Medici is surely owed substantially to his having dedicated his Sacco di Roma to Cosimo I de’ Medici, who was Giovanni’s son. 36. Orazio Baglioni (1493–1528), otherwise a good fighter, is “exceedingly unscrupulous and bloodthirsty.” Giovio, Notable Men, 153. See also Gaspare De Caro, “Baglioni, Orazio,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 5 (1963): 234–37. In contrast, his kinsman Malatesta (1491–1531) displays the ideal balance: “No dangers or hardships have ever deterred him from showing himself at once keen and cautious in every military role—a thing which, by God, is not easy.” Giovio, Notable Men, 147. On Malatesta, see Gaspare De Caro, “Baglioni, Malatesta,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 5 (1963): 230–33. 37. Giovio, Notable Men, 147. On Federico “da Bozzolo” (1480–1528), see Stefano Tabacchi, “Gonzaga, Federico, da Bozzolo,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 57 (2002): 726–29. 38. Ian Frederick Moulton, “Castiglione: Love, Power, and Masculinity,” in Milligan and Tylus, Poetics of Masculinity, 119–42, at 133. 88 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S I N T HE IT A L IA N R E N A IS SA N C E SPRING 2014 shown unprecedented bad judgment in trusting those who had long been his enemies and in not adequately fortifying Rome to prepare for its defense, Iovius asks not to be required to address matters that “I can’t mention while preserving the deference befitting my office.”39 Further impeding the exposition is the fact that Giberti, the work’s initial addressee, had been the foremost advocate of the pro-French policy that led directly to Charles V having dispatched the imperial army toward Rome. Without naming names, Iovius makes clear that he had spoken out against certain counsels that he foresaw would lead to disaster, but “I do not on that account think that the pope’s plans, which were generally very reasonable, ought to be disparaged. Only a brazen man would criticize the excellent counsels of sound men on the basis of so baleful an outcome of horrible circumstances.”40 Ultimately, although they did make mistakes in judgment, neither the pope nor his advisors deserves to be hated on account of them. Giovio proceeds to describe Clement as the most prudent of all princes, one knowledgeable in all aspects of the art of war, including the use of firearms and the construction of fortifications. What he lacked was good fortune. Criticism of the Venetian Doge Andrea Gritti, too, is circumspect, although in this case one may discern a scathing subtext. Iovius lavishes praise on Gritti for how, through exceptional prowess, he has triumphed over the injuries of fortune. After enduring numerous defeats as well as imprisonment by the Turks and later the French, he recaptured cities for Venice, restored it to its ancient greatness, and rose to its highest office. But just before hailing Gritti’s ultimate triumph, he details three occasions on which the future doge literally ran away from the scene of fighting: As he was looking on, the army of his French allies was massacred by the Swiss in front of the walls of Novara. Thereupon he sought safety by flight through the Ligurian countryside. Another time, what groans and tears were his when, after the army had been scattered, a colleague struck down, and so many commanders killed, he fled and was hauled up over the walls of Vicenza to avoid capture. Finally, what despair suddenly took hold of his brave spirit when the Spaniards under Pescara’s command had rushed forward into the outlying fortifications of Milan, and he himself was hastening to flee by night and tell the men of Lodi that the battle had been lost.41 39. Giovio, Notable Men, 93. 40. Ibid., 93–95. 41. Ibid., 99. Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ, 1980), 155–56, briefly describes Gritti’s imprisonment by the Turks and his capture by the French. See also the Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 89 The interlocutor d’Avalos seconds this account of Gritti’s virtue and tenacity leading eventually to success, identifying him and Clement VII as “the two best men in Italy.”42 But the itemizing of Gritti’s hasty departures from the field of combat, given emphasis by its threefold structure, would surely not have been lost on Giovio’s contemporaries.43 Giovio is more explicitly ironic in his praise of the Sieur d’Aubigny.44 Whereas d’Aubigny fought bravely at times, that was not the case in the battle at Seminara di Reggio Calabria (June 28, 1495), from which he fled, leaving his troops behind to be defeated by Ferdinand of Aragon’s forces. Yet, “even though he had sailed from the rout to Naples in ships empty of soldiers, once the citizens had driven out the French, they welcomed him with remarkable enthusiasm as if he were the victor.” Davalus draws from this the lesson that “for a prince, nothing is more efficacious than the love and devotion of the people,” but the outcome here evidences underserved honor, a problem analyzed elsewhere in the dialogue.45 At the far extreme from Ludovico Sforza “il Moro” and the others whose irresponsible assertiveness had brought on the foreign invasions come those who ought since to have played the man but have not done so, either fulfilling their responsibilities only halfheartedly or abstaining entirely from positions of leadership. To be sure, in some instances a commander’s resistance of the impulse to engage the enemy merits praise, as in the case of Francesco Maria della Rovere, the deposed Duke of Urbino. Whereas civilians have faulted della Rovere for excessive caution in his reluctance to engage the imperial forces as they descended the peninsula and for his subsequent refusal to try to rescue the pope, well-trained military men know better: they admire him for his prudence.46 The elogium of Gritti in Giovio, Iovii opera, 8:456–57, and Elogi degli uomini illustri, 726–34. On Gritti’s escape from the Battle of Novara (June 6, 1513), see Robert Finlay, “Fabius Maximus in Venice: Doge Andrea Gritti, the War of Cambrai, and the Rise of Habsburg Hegemony, 1509–1530,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 988–1031, at 1001–2. On the second instance of flight, which took place at La Motta on October 7, 1513, see Finlay, “Fabius Maximus,” 1002–3. 42. Giovio, Notable Men, 100–101: “duorum . . . summorum in Italia virorum.” 43. On the injury caused to honor by flight during battle, see C. Ann Tlusty, The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms (New York, 2011), 91. 44. This sieur d’Aubigny is Bernard Stewart (ca. 1452–1508), a Scot in the service of France. 45. Giovio, Notable Men, 119. On military honor going to the undeserving, see also ibid., 145. 46. Ibid., 177. Francesco Guicciardini, who in 1527 served as lieutenant general of the papal forces under della Rovere’s command, faulted him for delay, as did his brother Luigi Guicciardini. For a compelling revisionist account that supports Giovio’s view as expressed here, see Cecil H. Clough, “Clement VII and Francesco Maria Della Rovere, Duke of Urbino,” in Gouwens and Reiss, Pontificate of Clement, 75–108. For a laudatory account of della Rovere’s conquest of Cremona (September 25, 1526), see Giovio, Notable Men, 135. 90 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S I N T H E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E SPRING 2014 inaction of other leaders, however, elicits Davalus’s scorn, as in his description of the largely untested military virtues of Vitello Vitelli of Città di Castello: Uninterrupted work in many wars and excellent training at home from his father and uncles, who were very courageous commanders (their history, although sorrowful, is nonetheless distinguished), have made him very famous; but all the same, he is held to be readier to make a plan than to take action. His military experience, along with that ignoble caution which is based on the dangers others have encountered, has trained him to think that the hazards of war, treacherous as it is, ought never to be chanced. In other respects, he is outstanding as a defender of camps and cities and protector of troops: his prime aim has always been to be undefeated in battle. Thus in respect of zeal and vigilance he falls short in no military duty, so that he leaves no place for regret in his planning and his actions—although, in my view, it is most regrettable to let certain victory slip from one’s hand by timid delay.47 If some are too bold and others too timid, many who could be effective leaders decline to take up arms at all. Thus the Genoese aristocrat Sinibaldo Fieschi justifies staying out of the fray on the grounds that nothing could be gained by entering it: Upon being asked why he had abandoned Mars for Athena, he replied: “Why do I need the glory acquired from military service if it must be sought by fighting for foreign kings, with the shameful and cruel defeat of Italy? Why likewise do I need wealth, if I’m required to seize someone else’s riches by sacking wretched cities and laying waste to fields? No, on these direst of terms, I would not fight on behalf of Italy while the unfairness of the Fates is ruining it. For it is better to play at leisure the part of spectator in a criminal war than to be yourself most foully conquered.”48 47. Giovio, Notable Men, 138–41: “Porro Vitellium Tiphernatem continuatus multis bellis labor et domestica excellens disciplina patrisque et patruorum fortissimorum ducum, quamquam funesta insignis tamen memoria, clarissimum reddunt, sed consilio tamen quam manu promptior habetur. Nam et usus bellicarum rerum et illa parum illustris ex alieno periculo facta prudentia sic eum erudiverunt ut numquam fore lacessendam infidi Martis fortunam putet. Ipse alioqui castrorum atque urbium defensor et copiarum conservator egregius, semper id maxime contendit, ne proelio vinceretur. Sic studio <et> vigilantia nulli militiae muneri umquam deest, ut in consulendo atque agendo nullum paenitentiae locum relinquat, quamquam illud meo iudicio maxime sit paenitendum, cum exploratam e manibus victoriam timida cunctatione prorsus emiseris.” 48. Ibid., 159. Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 91 Whether gentlemen have dodged military service out of fear of defeat or a belief in the futility of action, the result is that they “abandon to artisans, slaves, and pimps the squadrons and legions that need to be brought up to full strength.”49 As the unworthy flesh out the ranks, the military crisis deepens. Moreover, the failures of commanders transcend particular individuals’ defects: the old-time prowess and even that of the preceding generation have slipped away. This contrast is particularly evident in Rome, where the current generation fails to measure up not only to ancient Romans but to the recently deceased.50 Davalus laments that “there is no military man of Roman blood in whom the exceptional authority of a great commander shines forth.”51 This malaise is not entirely of the current generation’s making. The widespread use of firearms has drastically transformed battle. As Davalus observes, “Amid smoke and shadows, a captain needs to exercise forethought to prevent reckless action; and when the ground trembles and the air crackles with crashes, he must command soldiers who are deaf and blind; and all have to fight in similar circumstances against the artillery, which is everywhere flattening entire cohorts and squadrons with cruel death.”52 Thus Iovius asserts that present-day commanders are not only excellent but admirable “if we should compare with earlier eras the unusual disturbances of wars, the new technologies of making war, and, in short, the circumstances of all things.” Should the likes of Braccio da Montone and Francesco I Sforza have lived “in these times of aggravated warfare,” they would not have been able to surpass or even equal the interlocutors’ contemporaries.53 While Giovio, like Machiavelli, exaggerates how bloodless quattrocento battles had been, he rightly notes the strains of continuous year-round warfare on standing armies in the age of artillery.54 Moreover, since the Italians do not adequately fund their armies, men are recruited hastily and trained inadequately, and as a result they can only be kept in line through the threat of savage punishment.55 In all, a captain needs to have “prompt decisiveness, com49. Ibid., 157. Conversely, other nobles avoid the military because they are too vain to serve under men of humble birth, however worthy the latter may be. See also ibid., 149. 50. Ibid., 109. 51. Ibid., 85. 52. Ibid., 175. 53. Ibid., 73. 54. Giovio claims, e.g., that at the Battle of Caravaggio only seven died, two of them from being trampled by horses as they were fleeing. The Venetian historian Andrea Navagero more plausibly described the mortality in that battle as high. Giovio also describes the gentlemanly conduct of the Battle of Riccardina (1467), regarding which Machiavelli went so far as to claim that no one on either side died. A modern estimate, however, puts the death toll at six hundred. See ibid., 635 nn. 101–2. 55. Ibid., 67. 92 | I TA T T I STU D IE S I N T HE I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E SPRING 2014 plete authority, and a ready vigor of body and mind in discharging duties.”56 The bar for performance has been raised very high indeed. Even so, the current generation is not let off lightly. The one living commander who may be as formidable as the best of the preceding generation is the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria.57 Toward the end of Dialogue One, however, Davalus emphasizes that “the good men who have died were entirely better than we ourselves are,” and in his view nobody has approached the military prowess of Pescara.58 Unrivalled in discernment of men and of military situations, by his bravery he at once inspired his troops to emulate him and intimidated his enemies. In addition, he showed generosity to his men of all ranks, even to the point that his paymaster grew exasperated. Imposing in aspect, with glowing eyes and battle-scarred face, he spoke so eloquently that he could both persuade others to his opinion in council and inspire troops, whether calming the seditious or stirring the army to victory. In comparison, Davalus admits, he himself looks tame. To be sure, his resources are fewer: “After such great victories,” he poignantly observes, his cousin has left him “as the heir to labors rather than to riches, as I am enmeshed in an unwieldy war and also in a great deal of debt.”59 Nonetheless, he acknowledges that he does not approach Pescara’s prowess: “Often I smile with a certain silent bashfulness when people call me both vigorous and highly skilled at arms, since if I should be compared to him, I would really seem utterly sluggish.”60 If the fraught masculinity of Italians is most evident in the survey of men of arms, Dialogue Two describes a parallel development that has beset literati. Those given to speaking and writing badly are doing a lot of it, although they reap only modest rewards for their pathetic performances. However, many who should be orating and publishing are not doing so. At times they have held back because those of means have offered paltry remuneration, but they are also discouraged by the indifference of the public to the quality of their performances. Giovio faults these men for not writing and speaking despite the lack of appreciation for their efforts: for, as things stand, a kind of Gresham’s Law of humanistic production obtains in which bad literary currency inexorably drives out the good. Yet, cowardice, too, figures into the equation. Giovio is at his most withering in his ironic 56. Ibid., 177. 57. Ibid., 171. 58. Ibid., 197. 59. Ibid., 210–11: “Post tantas victorias me laborum potius quam divitiarum, difficili implicitum bello et multo etiam cum aere alieno reliquit heredem.” 60. Ibid., 208–9: “saepe tacito quodam pudore subrideam, cum me et strenuum et armorum appellant peritissimum, qui profecto, si illi comparer, omnino desidiosissimus videar.” Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 93 praise of the humanist and conciliarist Girolamo Massaini: “At great risk to his life, he has defamed certain popes and cardinals of his time in his splendid books of invectives, which he is holding back for posthumous publication.”61 Such reticence, or passivity, may be taken as part of a more general feminization of cultural standards that Giovio here portrays as diminishing Latin literacy. Women appear seldom in Dialogue Two, and then mostly as an undifferentiated mass whose tastes are contributing to decline. Along with the uneducated (idiotis), they prefer translations of Greek and Latin histories to the originals. The Tuscan dialect, Muscettola observes, is “dear to the elderly, pleasant and convenient to the young, and desirable and delightful to the dispositions of women.”62 Vernacular dramas, says Iovius, delight “women and the illiterate multitude.”63 Such slurs appear only as passing comments rather than as sustained critique: they recapitulate a traditional denigration of women’s literary discernment that Giovio explicitly rejects in his discussion of their capacities in Dialogue Three.64 So, too, the passing criticisms in the second dialogue sit in unresolved tension alongside the survey of outstanding women in the third, where the interlocutors recognize many explicitly for their superb Latinity.65 In Dialogue Three, the celebration of women’s Latin learning juxtaposes uneasily with the trope of cultural decline. Some illustrious noblewomen remain in whom learning, beauty, and a modest and unaffected chastity are paramount. In praising Vittoria Colonna above the others, Iovius details virtues that “men advanced in age and her closest friends admire.”66 These include bringing culture to 61. Ibid., 309. Girolamo Massaini (ca. 1460 to after September 8, 1528), from Poppi, was educated in the Florentine Studio. Evidently his only original publication is the dedicatory letter, addressed to Roberto Pucci, for an edition of Leon Battista Alberti, Opera ([Florence, 1499]). The unpublished work to which Giovio here refers is probably Massaini’s De conciliis. See Luca D’Ascia and Stefano Simoncini, “Momo a Roma: Girolamo Massaini fra l’Alberti ed Erasmo,” Albertiana 3 (2000): 83–103; Nelson H. Minnich, “Girolamo Massaino: Another Conciliarist at the Papal Court, Julius II to Adrian VI,” in Studies in Catholic History in Honor of John Tracy Ellis, ed. Robert Frederick Trisco, Nelson H. Minnich et al. (Wilmington, DE, 1985), 520–65. 62. Giovio, Notable Men, 258–59: “[Etruscae litterae] sunt enim et gratae senibus et suaves et commodae iuventuti et feminarum ingeniis optabiles et periucundae.” 63. Ibid., 284–85: “feminarum ac indoctae multitudinis.” 64. See ibid., 355–75. At ibid., 375, the interlocutor Davalus asserts that they must “bear in mind the condition of that extremely frail sex and the injustices of the arrogant men by which it is oppressed.” 65. Compare Jane Tylus, “Epic’s Endless Deferral: Vernacular Masculinities in the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” in Milligan and Tylus, Poetics of Masculinity, 75–100, at 76–77 and 98–99, on the ultimately incomplete and failed efforts of Lorenzo “il Magnifico” de’ Medici and Angelo Poliziano to masculinize the Tuscan dialect at precisely a moment of Florentine expansionism, an uphill battle from the outset inasmuch as the Tuscan vernacular was “seen in disparaging, even effeminizing terms next to its ancient precursors” (ibid., 77). 66. Giovio, Notable Men, 514–15: “[dotes] quae viri aetate provecti ac eius maxime familiares admirantur.” 94 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S IN T H E I T A L I A N R EN A IS SA N C E SPRING 2014 a characteristically rustic Roman household and governing towns at least as well as any man could. Through her wit, nobility of mind, splendor, prudence, chastity, and piety, “not only has Vittoria raised herself marvelously beyond womanly capacity, but she has equaled the most widely esteemed and wisest men.”67 More generally, women in the environs of Naples have had the greatest opportunity to realize their potential. That opportunity, however, was now in jeopardy, not only because of financial hardship but also because of a new French threat to Spanish-ruled Naples, which was already being felt in the summer of 1527 as a French navy sailed into the Tyrrhenian Sea and menaced the coast.68 Then, just as Giovio was writing Notable Men and Women, a French army under the command of the viscount of Lautrec laid siege to Naples. The example of what had already happened to occupied Milan boded ill: there, French and then Spanish soldiers had corrupted or violated many local women. Giovio’s interlocutors hold Italian men partially responsible: their weakness and capitulation has at times even enabled the foreigners’ misdeeds. Thus in Milan, husbands “ransomed their plundered possessions by means of the nights of their wives. No home was safe from the greed of foreign soldiers unless a matron, by friendship with some well-known prefect or tribune, depended on his lust as surety.”69 Those Italian males who remained powerful and independent had good reason to be anxious about whether they would be able to continue playing the man, whether by engaging successfully in physical combat on the battlefield or by protecting their wives and daughters at home. But what of the humanists who depended on the fortunes of the powerful for their livelihood? Certainly the debilitation or disgrace of one’s patron could be a major blow, as Giovio had experienced in 1517 when his then-Maecenas, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli, was 67. Ibid., 516–17: “Iis enim ipsa Victoria non modo supra muliebrem captum sese mirabiliter extulit, sed cum probatissimis ac sapientissimis viris exaequavit.” 68. Concern over the threat posed by the French had prompted Vittoria Colonna’s brother, Ascanio, to send his wife, Giovanna d’Aragona, from the mainland to Ischia. Other noblewomen who had sought refuge for the same reason, and who were present on Ischia even before Giovio arrived, included Giovanna’s sister Maria d’Aragona and Costanza d’Avalos the Younger. See ibid., 5. On Giovanna (1502–75), see Giuseppe Alberigo, “Aragona, Giovanna d’,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 3 (1961): 694–96; on Maria (1503–68), who was married to Alfonso d’Avalos, the namesake of Giovio’s interlocutor Davalus, see Giuseppe Alberigo, “Aragona, Maria d’,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 3 (1961): 701–2; on Costanza the Younger (ca. early sixteenth century to 1575), see Claudio Mutini, “Avalos, Costanza d’, duchessa d’Amalfi,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 4 (1962): 622–23. 69. Giovio, Notable Men, 380–83: “neque ullus expilandis possessionibus finis erat, nisi eas viri tantis incommodis fatigati uxorum noctibus redemissent, nullaque etiam ab avaritia militari domus erat incolumis nisi domina, alicuius praefecti aut tribuni insignis amicitia, sequestra libidine niteretur.” Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 95 suspected of involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Pope Leo X and consequently imprisoned.70 At that time, Giovio somehow landed on his feet, in the household of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the future Clement VII. Still, given what had happened with Sauli, Giovio may have felt particularly vulnerable when Clement, impoverished and under guard, had to let him go. Did Giovio, like humanists who were utterly ruined by the Sack, feel unmanned by it? The evidence is murky. If indeed the events of 1527 had that effect on Giovio, it was not the first occasion on which he was metaphorically unmanned. Toward the end of his life, in his dialogue on imprese (devices), Giovio focused instead on an incident that occurred around two decades before the Sack. Thus, he wrote cryptically about how, “being smitten by love as a youth in Pavia, in order not to provoke even worse for myself I was forced to pursue a damaging course to save my life.”71 This incident quite probably precipitated his writing the tract Anterotica, by which he sought to remedy a youthful passion.72 Whatever in fact transpired, Giovio says it led him to choose as his impresa the beaver, “which, as Juvenal relates, when pursued on account of the great medicinal properties of its testicles, cuts them off with its teeth as a last resort and leaves them for the hunters.”73 He labeled the impresa ANAGKE (Greek for “necessity”). It is extremely unlikely that literal castration is meant here: were that the case, surely contemporaries would have commented on his voice and alluded in other ways to his condition. On the contrary, various invectives portray him as oversexed, with his outsized passions directed on occasion at men or boys. A scurrilous poem preserved in manuscript in the Vatican Library suggests that, at some point after the dialogue’s fictive date, Giovio may have kept a passive male sexual partner at his disposal. The anonymous author apostrophizes, “Who can see this, 70. After his stay in Castel Sant’Angelo, Sauli would be pardoned and have his privileges restored, only to die within a few months. See Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 14–15; Helen Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Woodbridge, 2009). 71. Giovio, Iovii opera, 9:419: “in mia gioventù, essend’io preso d’amore in Pavia, fui necessitato, per non far peggio, apprendere un partito dannoso per salvar la vita” (trans. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 10). 72. Giovio, Notable Men, 225–27. While Giovio’s Anterotica is not known to have survived, his presence in Pavia dates its composition to 1506–11. Evidently it participated in a tradition of literary remedies for unrequited love. See Franco Minonzio’s comments in Giovio, Dialogo, 2:545–46 n. 48. Minonzio gives particular attention to the Anterotica, sive de amoris generibus of Pietro Edo (ca. 1427– 1504), written in 1492, which discusses love as an illness of youth, and around half of which draws closely on Ovid’s Remedia amoris. 73. Giovio, Iovii opera, 9:419, trans. in Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 10. See Pliny, Natural History, 8.47.109; Aelian, History of Animals, 6.34; and Juvenal, Satires, 12:34–36. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 10, notes how, with the adoption of this device, Giovio’s cryptic anecdote about suppressing youthful passion “acquired certain Abelardian tones.” 96 | I TAT TI STUDIES IN T HE IT ALIA N RENAISSANCE SPRING 2014 who can endure it, unless immoral and having lost all sense of shame?”74 Giovio is described as a “she-bishop worn out by sexual excess” (diffututa episcopa) who is on that account an embarrassment to the pope, and by his behavior he is threatening permanent damage to the reputation of literary studies.75 Another unattributed pasquinade gives him the epitaph, “Here lies Giovio; at such a great name the whole regiment from Sodom and Gomorrah come running.”76 In still another, a line has been ripped, screaming, from its context in the Psalms and applied with malice to the humanist: “Sinners have gone to work upon my back.”77 And Pietro Aretino, perhaps the least inclined to self-censorship of all Renaissance authors, portrayed Giovio as having enjoyed being gang-raped during the Sack of Rome, after which the soldiers charged him thirty scudi for his having had the privilege.78 Such doggerel is of little probative value: like their classical antecedents, Roman humanists routinely lampooned one another by attributing to them sex acts that were perceived as degrading.79 Even then, the accusations leveled at Gio- 74. For the Latin, see n. 75. 75. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS. Vat lat. 5225, vol. IV, fol. 903v: “Quis hoc potest videre? quis potest pati? / Nisi impudicus & pudore perdito? / Cynedum habere presulis locum senem / Et insidere christi in optimatibus / eumque millies dico vel amplius / Vorare mentulatum in aulicum gregem? / Beate Pontifex videbis et feres / es impudicus et pudore perdito / Pater superne, tuque Petre claviger / eo ne nomine in crucem miserrimi / Abistis, et molestias gravissimas / Ut ita vestra diffututa episcopa haberet, unde mentulas regluberet? // Et audet interim ac cupit viderier / Novissimi esse gesta cuncta saeculi / foras daturus, Ital<or>um omnium unicus / Par-on [sic] videre prostitute presbiter / Nates movendo mentulis trabalibus / Nisi impudica nomina reliqueris / Futur<o> perpetem notamque saeculo / Reique publicae Dei atque curie / Bonisque litteris et elegantibus? / Quis hoc potest videre? quis potest pati? / Nisi impudicus et pudore perdito?” The usage of “regluberet” would appear to indicate that Giovio had become so worn out that in the future he would not be able to be sexually aroused by means of friction. On the word form “(de)glubere,” see Robert J. Penella, “A Note on (De) glubere,” Hermes 104 (1976): 118–20. 76. “Qui giace il Giovio: a sì gran nome corra / Tutto lo stuol di Soddoma e Gomorra.” From a manuscript cited in Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 324–25 n. 49. 77. “In Jovium: Supra dorsum meum fabricaverunt<ur> peccatores.” Cited in ibid., 324 n. 46; cf. Psalm 129:3 (alt. 128:3): “supra dorsum meum fabricabantur peccatores / prolongaverunt iniquitatem suam.” I draw the phrase “ripped, screaming, from its context” from a talk by Anthony Grafton. 78. The passage appears in Aretino’s Pas vobis, brigate, lines 424–29: “né avere rispetto / al vostro pescatore, / che·ll’han preso a·ffurore e strafottuto: / el cazzo gli è piaciuto, / ma voglion bene, e crudeli, / che paghi trenta scudi in fottitura.” Giovio is called pescatore because of his recent composition of De piscibus romanis, with the added resonance that the term was also a synonym for “sodomite.” See Danilo Romei, “Pas vobis, brigate: Una frottola ritrovata di Pietro Aretino,” Rassegna della letteratura italiana 90 (1986): 429–73, at 448, 466; and esp. Jessica Goethals, “Vanquished Bodies, Weaponized Words: Pietro Aretino’s Conflicting Portraits of the Sexes and the Sack of Rome,” in this issue. 79. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 115, writes: “Accusations of sodomy were so common among clerics and humanists as almost to form a literary genre.” Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000), 443–44, in situating Giovio’s sexuality in the context of that of Reginald Pole and his friends (442–50), misreads mentulis trabalibus in the above pasquinade as “three-balled” and misconstrues the poem’s thrust. For the use of mentula as penis, see J. N. Adams, The Latin Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 97 vio did not strictly concern male-on-male encounters. Thus Aretino also wrote, “Here lies the hermaphrodite Giovio, who played at one time the part of the wife; at another, that of the husband.”80 In his own letters to Federico Gonzaga “da Bozzolo,” Giovio proudly detailed his heterosexual affairs, and he may also have fathered an illegitimate son.81 In Dialogue Three, he portrays himself as he was in 1522, in his midthirties, as barely able to resist the attractions of Isabella Giustinian when he saw her dance at a private party in Venice: “standing out in relief against the backdrop of her dark eyes there was a glow that attracted and inflamed the passions of those watching. If she wasn’t able to scorch me by their fires—I was in the front row of dinner guests sitting opposite to her—still, she might have been able to breathe upon me some of their gentle warmth had I not been aware of the potential for injury and decided that the sudden shoots of love must be resisted to the best of my ability as a man.”82 In discussing women of middling rank below the nobility, Iovius notes the pleasure he had taken in seeing those who were “illustrious in chastity” when he himself was “a young man and beset by uncontrolled passions.”83 He also recalls that when he was in Florence in 1520–22 in the retinue of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (the future Clement VII), in hopes of winning a particular woman’s favor, he had sung the praises of Florentine women in a book in the Tuscan vernacular.84 Even as the interlocutors acknowledge that age has diminished their drive, when they describe women their gaze verges on a leer, as, for example, in discussions of the proper degree to which breasts should be covered.85 In sum, whatever truth there may be in poetic charges of engagement in same-sex sodomy, that evidence, complemented by Giovio’s own accounts of his desire for women, indicates a vibrant Sexual Vocabulary (London, 1982), 9–12. Adams, 11 n. 3, observes that learned classical Romans, including even Augustus, did not hesitate to abuse one another with obscene epigrams alleging sexual perversion. Thus the exchange of such verbal currency among Renaissance humanists, regardless of its truth-value, may be taken as an integral part of the classical revival. 80. “Qui giace Paolo Giovio ermaphrodito / Che ora fece da moglie, or da marito.” Cited in Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 324 n. 49. 81. Ibid., 115. The attribution of a son to Giovio is in Pompeo Litta, Famiglie celebri di Italia, 10 vols. (Milan, 1819–83), unpaginated, under “Giovio.” Unfortunately, while Litta’s tables can be valuable, they are also notoriously unreliable. 82. Giovio, Notable Men, 399. 83. Ibid., 405. 84. Ibid., 431. The addressee is not named. On Giovio’s stay in Florence and the account of it in Notable Men, see Ernesto Travi, “Giovio, gli orti oricellari e Machiavelli,” Testo 5 (1983): 53–61, who speculates (at 53–54) that the list of Florentine women in the earlier tract in Tuscan was subsumed into the third Ischian dialogue. 85. See Giovio, Notable Men, e.g., 429, 481. 98 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S I N T H E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA NC E SPRING 2014 sexuality that belies too literal an identification of the author with the self-mutilating image on his impresa. Giovio’s appropriation of the beaver does speak poignantly, however, to the way that he understood his position as a courtier and, more generally, the current condition of Italian manhood. Frequently, he commented on benefactors not having remunerated him adequately for his talents and accomplishments.86 Thus when expressing hope for a modest stipend from Pope Paul III to assist him in finishing his Histories, Giovio wished ill upon the memory of his late patron, Clement VII, describing him as a “bungler who wished me to have to stay in bed while my stockings were being repaired for lack of another pair.”87 His disappointment extended beyond the financial, and even the ecclesiastical (his quest to be named Bishop of Como came to naught), to an inability to be heard with respect to the formation of policy. Thus in Notable Men and Women the interlocutor Iovius portrays himself as having offered good counsel that his superiors proceeded to ignore.88 Indeed, in viewing himself as a close observer of politics whose talents were unrecognized and whose advice went unheeded, Giovio strongly resembles Machiavelli. In both cases, a sense of personal powerlessness runs parallel to the perceived collective impotence of the Italians.89 86. For example, on his disappointment at not gaining a substantial pension from Charles V at Bologna in 1530, an incident recounted by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, see Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 155–56. Most infamously, Giovio wrote to Rodolfo Pio of Carpi in 1535 that “a man cannot be expected to rack his brains at his own expense” (trans. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 136). See also Giovio’s juxtaposition of Clement’s ill fortune with his lack of liberality (implied but not stated): Giovio, Notable Men, 101. For a contrast of Giovio’s criticism of Clement’s parsimony with Guicciardini’s emphasis on the pope’s vacillation, see Zimmermann, “Guicciardini, Giovio, and the Character of Clement VII.” 87. Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 163. 88. Giovio, Notable Men, 93–95: “Though during this entire deadly war I often outspokenly condemned some points of wrongheaded counsel or lax administration that I foresaw would lead to this lamentable outcome, I do not on that account think that the pope’s plans, which were generally very reasonable, ought to be disparaged.” Although expressed diplomatically, the sense that his advice has been ignored is clear. In a reversal of the gendering, later in the dialogue (ibid., 353) he laments that the pontiff was too swayed by the authority of men “whose spirit had long ago been rendered unmanly by fatal avarice” (ibid., 352: quorum animus exitiali avaritia iam pridem erat effeminatus). 89. Note in particular Albert Russell Ascoli, “Machiavelli’s Gift of Counsel,” in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 219–57, at 251–52, with somewhat different emphasis: “The image of Fortuna as a woman just waiting to be raped, usually assumed to be prototypically Machiavellian, is instead the sign of a total exclusion of prudence, and hence of Machiavelli’s vision, from the historical domain of politics, and can even be said to dramatize in the most brutal terms the author’s sense of his own vulnerability to princely violence.” Compare Giovio’s motto: “FATO PRVDENTIA MINOR.” Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 99 Notable Men and Women offers little hope for the kind of redemption that Machiavelli described at the end of The Prince. On the battlefield men have not behaved as men should, nor are they producing in sufficient number children who could equal or surpass them in that capacity. In the opening of Dialogue Three, Davalus laments how the noble houses of Italy, not least the Aragonese dynasty in Naples, have been dying out. The only political hope offered is that Charles V may restore liberty of a sort through his good government of the peninsula, something obviously not dependent on Italian prowess. Faced with bleak political prospects, Muscettola advises that the Italians should practice a patient dissimulation: “I think we need to live in the manner of wary and honest slaves who, with a humble and cunning ingenuity, disguise their status in such a way that, with a submissiveness that is not sullen but eager, they await liberty in good time.”90 Thus they must cultivate an ambiguous persona, endure their current condition stoically, and be ready to take action only on some unspecified future occasion when so doing might yield positive results.91 Nor is much hope offered for recovery from the corresponding decline in literary studies and in the condition of noblewomen, which are intimately related to the military crisis and in fact have substantially resulted from it. The decline of Latin letters, especially with respect to its flourishing north of the Alps, shows every sign of continuing. And, while the third dialogue’s closing flourish portrays Vittoria Colonna as the perfect noblewoman who provides an inspiring model, her exemplary actions do not include the bearing of children. It may be high praise to say that her breasts are “swelling now not with milk but with a certain heavenly nectar,” but the benefit of that development for the nourishment and revitalization of Italy’s youth remains unclear.92 Soon, as we know, not only would she go on to greater prominence as poet and cultural patron, she would also play a crucial role as a promoter of religious reforms advocated by Juan de Valdés and Bernardino Ochino.93 But Giovio never showed enthusiasm for the latter cause, 90. Giovio, Notable Men, 169. 91. Muscettola’s advice here calls to mind Lucio Paolo Rosello’s comment in his Ritratto del vero governo del principe dall’esempio vivo del gran Cosimo de’ Medici that the prudent man “is compelled by necessity . . . and accommodates himself to the times, now concealing, now revealing, as circumstances allow.” See John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Houndmills, 2004), 52, in the context of a nuanced discussion of prudential rhetoric in the cinquecento. 92. Giovio, Notable Men, 511. 93. See Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008); and Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago, 2007). 100 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S I N T H E I T A L I A N RE N A I S S A N C E SPRING 2014 and the former, in his view, could not recompense losses to the Latinate literary culture that he saw as passing away, to the detriment not only of the Italians but of his own prominence given that he, unlike Guicciardini, Machiavelli, or Colonna, was placing his hopes for lasting fame on compositions written in classicizing Latin. Giovio’s inability to complete Notable Men and Women is owed above all to the rapid political changes in the late 1520s. Most importantly, by 1529 Clement VII became allied permanently with Charles V, whose power on the peninsula was by then unrivalled, and the following year, in Bologna, the pope crowned Charles as Holy Roman Emperor.94 Now that the struggle for the libertà d’Italia had definitively ended, the praise and blame that the dialogue had apportioned so candidly to the erstwhile rivals were at best irrelevant and might also serve to revivify painful memories.95 Around the time of the coronation, as a literary summit of sorts was taking place in Bologna, Giovio sought to rework the dialogue, even going so far as to obtain top-quality paper from Isabella d’Este for a polished version. But evidently he could find no easy way—or even a difficult one, for that matter—to reorient it to accommodate the times.96 The surviving manuscripts, with their copious addenda and delenda, reorganizations of material, abrupt shifts of tone, and occasional lacunae, attest to Giovio’s protracted labors in an ultimately failed enterprise.97 In the final analysis, however, the dialogue’s 94. Although Charles is generally described as “emperor” after his election to that position in 1519, he was technically emperor-designate until the coronation. 95. On this point, see Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 111. 96. An important parallel is Pierio Valeriano’s unfinished dialogue On the Misfortune of the Learned, set in post-Sack Rome nearly two years after the event. As Julia Gaisser observes about that text, “the literary design of his dialogue was both created and disrupted by real events. Valeriano used a specific historical moment to give his dialogue not only its occasion, but also its structure and meaning. But the moment was brief—hardly a nanosecond of historical time. When events changed and the moment was gone, the work lost its relevance and much of its artistic power.” Julia Haig Gaisser, “Pierio Valeriano’s De litteratorum infelicitate: A Literary Work Revised by History,” in Bellunesi e feltrini tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento: Filologia, erudizione e biblioteche, ed. Paolo Pellegrini (Rome, 2008), 121–78, at 123. 97. The manuscripts of the first and second dialogues are preserved in the Centro Studi “Nicolò Rusca” in Como, Fondo Aliati, Casetta 28; that of the third, in the Biblioteca Civica of Como, Fondo Giovio MS 1.6.16. To name but a few significant changes that Giovio made in his revisions: in Dialogue One a long passage was deleted regarding the initial addressee, Gian Matteo Giberti (fol. 1r–v); a clause was added specifying that in marching on Rome Bourbon had acted against the emperor’s wishes (“contra caesaris voluntatem”; fol. 25v); and Giovio added extensively to a diatribe against astrology (largely rewritten within fols. 9v–13v). In Dialogue Three an unexplained gap of several line spaces, evidently awaiting an insertion, separates the description of Bolognese women from that on Genoese women (fol. 13v). In all three dialogues numerous brief passages on particular individuals are deleted and others added. Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues | 101 very lack of sustained trajectory or robust resolution may be its greatest value as a historical document. In its rough-hewn form it both articulates and reflects the fraught circumstances of its composition, at once describing and exemplifying the difficulties of reasserting Italian masculinity in the turbulent political environment after the Sack of Rome.