Madness in Renaissance Italy

Defining the ‘Strano’: Madness in
Renaissance Italy
Nicole Cama
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment

of the requirements of the degree of
B.A. (Hons) in History.
University of Sydney
October 2009
2
Contents
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 3
CHAPTER ONE: Social Deviance: Fear and Loathing in Renaissance Florence .................. 11
CHAPTER TWO: Il ‘Teatro’ del ‘Strano’: The Cruel Gaze of the “Public” ........................... 39
CHAPTER THREE: ‘La Gran Follia’: The Genius of Melancholy?......................................... 56
CONCLUSION.............................................................................................................................76
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................79
3
Introduction
It is easy to recognise madness, but how does one define it?1 This thesis explores the different ways
madness was defined and portrayed in Italian texts from the early fifteenth century through to the late
sixteenth century. Although this thesis investigates how and why people were categorised as mad,
various sources have shown that the treatment of these individuals varied according to different social,
cultural and political contexts. In some cases madness was seen as an undesirable expression of social
deviance and in other cases, a venerated symbol of wisdom. In light of these discrepancies, social
structures stigmatised and often alienated those considered deviant and acted as powerful punitive and
organisational mechanisms. The power of language juxtaposed deviant behaviour against acceptable
behaviour and re-established a sense of order and control over the definition and, consequently, the
treatment of madness. By madness I refer to a psychological condition that contributed to the display
of behaviour, speech and appearances deemed culturally and socially unacceptable. In addition to this
definition, texts from a range of literary genres including novelle, medical treatises, biographies,
poems, letters, chronicles, and advice books, elude fixed definitions and reveal a colourful array of
multi-dimensional perceptions of the nature of madness. The key questions that arise are what
constituted madness, and what do these defining characteristics reveal about the society in question?
The main problem this project poses is the act of historicising madness and its social and cultural
context; the challenge, to borrow John Jeffries Martin’s phrase, is to reconstruct Renaissance Italian
ideas and beliefs ‘on their own terms’.2
Firstly, it is important to outline what madness meant to Renaissance Italians as well as what it signifies
to historical understandings of madness. The term madness is used instead of “mental illness” or
“clinical insanity” because it covers more general territory and is open for reinterpretation without
1
Similar question posed by Dr Jonathan Miller in Madness by Dr Jonathan Miller: To Define True Madness, (1991), dir.
Richard Denton, British Broadcasting Corporation: Education & Training, (60 minutes).
2
John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), this phrase is repeated
throughout the book, p. 14, p. 19, p. 20 and p. 130.
4
privileging twentieth century conventions of psychoanalysis.3 Although the word madness was not used
to signify a mad person during the early modern period, it provides a unifying label under which
different definitions can be explored.4 Renaissance conceptions of madness were applied to individuals
who would probably be classed as clinically insane today. The idea of madness also encompassed those
who essentially transgressed the social norms and exhibited deviant behaviour, those ambiguously
termed ‘strano’ (‘strange’).5 Terms such as ‘buffoni’ (‘buffoons’), ‘follia’ (‘folly’), ‘sciocchezza’
(‘nonsense/foolishness’), ‘frenetici’ (‘frantic’), ‘deliri’ (‘delerious’) and ‘scema’ (‘stupid’) were also
associated with the general term ‘pazzia’ (‘madness’).6 In terms of available care for these individuals,
hospitals were a medieval Arab invention that first appeared in Europe in Spain in 1409.7 These were
religious charitable institutions that also catered for abandoned children, the elderly and those in
extreme poverty.8 These institutions were not provided to cure ill individuals; they were a refuge for
those who were considered “incurable”.9 In Italy, hospitals for those incurables considered mad first
appeared in Bergamo in 1352 and in Florence in 1387.10 However, these institutions only admitted those
who could not afford to be treated at home or did not have relatives willing to keep them away from the
3
Carol Thomas Neely notes that these terms did not exist at this time and that they are nineteenth century creations in
‘Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Psychology Did Madness Have a Renaissance?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44, no. 4
(Winter, 1991), p. 777. See also Monica Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness: An Analysis of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso
and Garzoni’s L’hospedale de’ Pazzi Incurabili’, Ph.D., City University of New York, (2001), p. 84.
4
For a discussion of the etymology of terms related to madness in this period see Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted
Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2004), pp. 3-4.
5
The word ‘strano’ appears throughout the primary texts in: Tomaso Garzoni, Opere: Il teatro dei vari e diversi cervelli
mondani, Il mirabile cornucopia consolatorio, L’ospidale dei pazzi incurabili, La sinagoga degli ignoranti, e una scelta
di brani da La piazza universale, a cura di Paolo Cherchi, (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1993), p. 261. English translation:
Tomaso Garzoni, The Hospitall of Incurable Fooles: erected in English as neer the first Italian modell and platforme, as
the vnskilfull hand of an ignorant architect could deuise, Edward Blount, trans., (London: Printed by Edm. Bollifant,
1600). (Please note: the English translation is an online text accessed via Early English Books Online and does not have
page numbers). See also Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver (‘Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo’), translation
in Lauro Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context, Luigi Ballerini & Massimo Ciavolella,
eds., Murtha Baca, trans., (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2nd edn., 2004), p. 206.
(Subsequent references to the word ‘strano’ are from these primary texts).
6
Garzoni, Opere, pp. 251-252.
7
H.C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault’ in Barbara
C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter, (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1980), p. 253.
8
Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 87. For more detailed information on how these hospitals were run see pp. 87-91.
9
Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 87.
10
5
rest of the community in the family home.11 The local prison in Florence, Le Stinche, was another place
where the mad were incarcerated in order to separate particularly violent individuals from the rest of
society.12 The use of the hospitals to store the “incurably” mad, especially in late sixteenth century Italy,
shows that it was widely regarded as a permanent ‘morbo’ (‘disease’).13 The various definitions of
madness and the treatment of these individuals reveal that madness was also a cultural construct that
changed over time.14 The cures and advice given by physicians nor the gradual “medicalisation” of
madness are themes pursued in this paper.15 This thesis examines the way cultural constructions played
a fundamental part in defining notions of ‘insania’ (‘madness’) and ‘furor’ (‘fury’) and isolating those
who ‘“pateva un poco di cervello”’ (‘“suffered a bit in the brain”’).16
Other characterisations indicate that madness for some Renaissance contemporaries also involved the
elaborate spectacle of erratic and violent behaviour. The stereotypical representation of the theatricality
of madness is by no means one solely attributed to deviants in this period. In the medieval period,
concepts of the ‘bestialissimamente impazzo’ (‘bestially crazed’) and the ‘disordered’ spectacle of
madness were derived from a range of sources and permeated Renaissance depictions deviance.17 The
stereotypical characterisation of the animalistic madman flourished until well into the seventeenth
11
Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 88. See also H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Madness and the Problems of Psychological
History in the Sixteenth Century’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 12, no. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 7-8 and George Mora,
‘Stigma During the Medieval and Renaissance Periods’, in Paul Jay Fink & Allan Tasman, eds., Stigma and Mental
Illness, (Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, Inc., 1992), p. 43.
12
Monica Calabritto, ‘Medical and Moral Dimensions of Feminine Madness: Madwomen in the Renaissance’, Forum
Italicum, 36, (Spring, 2002), p. 26.
13
14
Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 3 and Roy Porter, ‘Madness and
Creativity: Communication and Excommunication’, in Corinne Saunders & Jane Macnaughton, eds., Madness and
Creativity in Literature and Culture, (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 32.
15
For discussions of the ‘medicalisation’ of madness see Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 87.
16
Duncan Salkeld, Madness and drama in the age of Shakespeare, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1993), p. 24 and p. 66. The terms ‘insania’ and ‘furor’ were used to describe madness predominantly in Latin texts.
For the Italian quote see Monica Calabritto, ‘A Case of Melancholic Humors and Dilucida Intervalla’, Intellectual History
Review, 18, no. 1 (March, 2008), p. 143.
17
For the ‘bestially crazed’ see Piers Britton, ‘“Mio malinchonico, o vero... mio pazzo”: Michelangelo, Vasari, and the
Problem of Artists’ Melancholy in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 34, no. 3 (Fall, 2003), p. 662.
See also Paolo Valesio, ‘The Language of Madness in the Renaissance’, Yearbook of Italian Studies, 1, (1971), pp. 200-
201 and W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance, (London and Toronto: Associated
University Press, 1995), pp. 25-26. For medieval notions of madness see: Thomas F. Graham, Medieval Minds: Mental
Health in the Middle Ages, (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967) and Judith S. Neaman, Suggestion of the Devil:
The Origins of Madness, (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1975), p. 135.
6
century, recapitulating the nature of madness as both a fascinating and frightening spectacle. Robert
Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) demonstrates the continuity of this powerful image:
But see the Madman rage downe right

With furious lookes, a ghastly sight.
Naked in chains bound doth he lye,
And roares amaine he knowes not why?
Observe him, for as in a glasse,
Thine angry portraiture it was.18
This conception of bestial madness was also articulated in various Italian texts. The Commedia
dell’Arte company travelled to Florence in 1589 staging various plays such as La pazzia d’Isabella
(‘The Madness of Isabella’).19 As the title suggests, Isabella performs the stereotypical frantic
incoherence of a madwoman as she enters into a ‘frenzy’, speaks ‘nonsensical’ ramblings, ‘...tears her
clothes from her body, and as if pushed by some force, goes running up the street.’20 In other sources,
such as the Florentine court records of 1407, ‘Margherita, the wife of Lotto, who lives in Porta Fugia
in the territory of Prato’ is described as being ‘insanam furiosam’ (‘furiously mad’).21 The record states
that she was a ‘Piromane’ (‘Pyromaniac’) who often walked the streets of Porta Fugia with a lamp and
one day set fire to the house of Stefano Tomasini.22 Within the same month, Margherita left Porta
Fugia for another village where she met a hostile resident who, thinking that she was ‘“the mad
Pierazza of Florence”’, refused to allow entry in their house saying, ‘“I don’t want to let insane people
into the house.”’23 In the end, the court ordered that Margherita be fined and then isolated from the rest
18
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol I-VI, Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling & Rhonda L. Blair,
eds., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), ‘The Argument of the Frontispeice’, p. lxii. For a discussion on madness in this
period see Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England,
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 122.
19
Anne MacNeil, ‘The Divine Madness of Isabella Andreini’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 120, no. 2 (1995),
pp. 195-196.
20
Flaminio Scala, Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte: Flaminio Scala’s Il Teatro Delle Favole Rappresentative, Henry F.
Salerno, ed., and trans., (New York: Limelight Editions, 2nd edn., 1989), pp. 288-290.
21
Gene Brucker, ed., The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971),
p. 168 and Gene Brucker, Firenze nel Rinascimento, presentazione di Sergio Bertelli, (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1st edn.,
1980), p. 341.
22
Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence, p. 169 and Brucker, Firenze nel Rinascimento, p. 341.
23
Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence, p. 170 and Brucker, Firenze nel Rinascimento, p. 342: ‘ché tu sei una
pazza et non volgl[i]o pazze in casa’.
7
of society in the local prison for a year. If she did not pay her fine, ‘she was to be whipped through the
streets of Pistoia....’24 Margherita’s story illustrates just one case out of many, however, it reveals how
stories about the deviant behaviour of certain individuals were circulated across towns and cities
throughout Italy. It also highlights that a system of behavioural codes existed whereby people
recognised and labelled deviants as ‘strano’ or ‘pazzia’. This analysis will explore other Renaissance
characterisations that went beyond the universally recognised prototype of bestial madness, and relied
on more fluid notions of social deviance. These characterisations and the social context that dictated
the treatment of individuals like Margherita show how madness had numerous meanings for the Italian
citizen living in the early to late Renaissance period.
There are a number of ways of analysing the primary source material; however, as a result of the
complex nature of madness, a thematic structure is the most logical approach to this topic. The first
chapter of this thesis delves into the ways that madness was often construed as a form of social
deviance in early fifteenth-century Florence. Antonio di Tuccio Manetti’s La Novella del Grasso
Legnaiuolo (c. 1480s) (The Fat Woodcarver), a colourful short story of Florentine social values, will be
analysed in relation to the social elements of madness connected with friendship networks.25 This
source is important not only because it involves prominent historical figures, it is important because it
illustrates how erratic behaviour recognised by society as ‘strano’ were facets of social deviance that
took place in the streets of Renaissance Florence. The streets were transformed into a public arena for
dramatic re-enactments of social deviance, and illustrate the way that social codes and institutions
governed how people conducted themselves in the broader community.
24
Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence, p. 170 and Brucker, Firenze nel Rinascimento, p. 342: ‘fustigetur et
fustigari debeat per plateam comunis Pistorie et per alia loca publica….’
25
For Manetti’s The Fat Woodcarver I use the translation in Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet, pp. 171-212. All
quotes from the story are from this edition unless otherwise indicated. Subsequent references to Martines’ analysis of the
story will be entitled An Italian Renaissance Sextet and references to Manetti’s story will be entitled The Fat Woodcarver.
The Italian text was also consulted: Antonio Manetti, La Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo: nelle redazione di Antonio
Manetti, dei codici Palatino 51 e Palatino 200, di Bernardo Giambullari e di Bartolomeo Davanzati, a cura di Antonio
Lanza, (Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, 1989).
8
The second chapter will investigate how madness could also be construed as both a disturbing and
entertaining spectacle. Tomaso Garzoni’s L’ospidale dei pazzi incurabili (1586) (The Hospital of
Incurable Fools) is the primary focus of this analysis and will be examined in relation to themes of
theatrical space and performance.26 Garzoni, with northern Italy in mind, produced a treatise that
constructs a fictitious hospital for a range of ‘pazzi incurabili’. His catalogue of madness reflects a
period in the latter part of the sixteenth century where the number of hospitals in Italy increased.
Although Garzoni constructs a hypothetical of tour of an imaginary hospital, his text is a cultural
artefact detailing the ideological factors that governed the definition and treatment of social deviance.
His patients were characterised as dangerous and amusing spectacles of disorder that needed to be
isolated and confined.
The final chapter will explore the problematic notion of the genius of melancholy and how it often
became identified with madness. The ways madness could be construed as an instigator for intellectual
revelation and a powerful path to truth.27 Apart from the positive connotations that heralded melancholy
as the precious treasure of the Renaissance humanist, this analysis also illustrates the perceptions of
madness as a bestial condition that often resulted in social alienation. Texts such as Marsilio Ficino’s
De triplici vita (1482-1489) (Three Books on Life) and Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti
architetti, pittori, et scultori Italiani (1550) (The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters,
and Sculptors) will be studied in relation to the myth of divine madness and the darker side to
melancholy that produced the ‘ingegno offuscatti’ (‘obscure genius’).28
26
Garzoni, Opere and Garzoni, The Hospitall. Please note: both the Italian text and the 1600 English translation are used in
this thesis. All seventeenth century spellings in the English translation have been preserved.
27
Ernesto Grassi & Maristella Lorch, Folly and Insanity in Renaissance Literature, (New York: Center for Medieval &
Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), p. 91.
28
Marsilio Ficino, Marsilio Ficino: Three Books on Life, Carol V. Kaske & John R. Clark, trans., (Binghamton: Medieval &
Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with The Renaissance Society of America, 1989), Giorgio Vasari, Lives of
the Artists, Volume I, George Bull, trans., (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 3rd edn., 1987) and Giorgio Vasari, Lives of
9
The historiographical developments on the issue of madness in the early modern period have reflected
that there is a relatively considerable gap when it comes to studies of madness in Renaissance Italy in
particular. Early seminal works focussed on madness in seventeenth century Europe and briefly
analysed the Renaissance period as one that witnessed the ‘freedom’ of the mad and one that preceded
an era that silenced these individuals with institutional confinement.29 Criticisms of this conception of
confinement have provided fruitful historiographical discussions especially concerning the nature of
hospitals and other institutions in this period.30 However, the general lack of adequate scholarship on
this subject, led scholars to classify the Renaissance as a ‘black hole’ whereby madness constituted
‘“terra incognita”’ (‘unknown land’).31 Despite the lack of comprehensive scholarship, recent years
have witnessed the emergence of more specific studies concerning madness in Renaissance Italy.32
Other interpretations have provided a substantial base for this thesis in relation to conceptions of
identity, the self, melancholy and the myth of the melancholic genius.33 Melancholy has attracted a vast
the Artists, Volume II, George Bull, trans., (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987). For the term ‘“ingegno offuscati”’ see
Grassi & Lorch, Folly and Insanity, p. 97.
29
For notions of confinement as an historical phenomenon see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard, trans., (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 38 and pp. 63-64, Michel
Foucault, ‘Madness, the Absence of Work’, Peter Stastny & Deniz Şengel, trans., Critical Inquiry, 21, no. 2 (Winter,
1995), p. 294 and Michel Foucault, History of Madness, Jean Khalfa, ed., Jonathan Murphy & Jean Khalfa, trans.,
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 44-77. For other analyses of confinement see Norbert Finzsch & Robert
Jütte, eds., Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-
1950, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary
Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2nd edn., 2007), p.
223 and p. 253.
30
For analyses and criticisms of Foucault’s theory see Porter, Madness: A Brief History, p. 89, Midelfort, ‘Madness and
Civilization in Early Modern Europe’, pp. 247-265, Neely, ‘Did Madness Have a Renaissance?’, pp. 779-780, Neely,
Distracted Subjects, p. 9 and Gary Gutting, ‘Foucault and the History of Madness’, in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Foucault, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., 2005), pp. 49-73.
31
Neely, ‘Did Madness Have a Renaissance?’, p. 779. Neely takes this term from MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 2. This
phrase is also used later in Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society, 14,
no. 2 (1985), p. 176.
32
Recent studies: Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, Calabritto, ‘Medical and Moral Dimensions of Feminine Madness’,
pp. 26-51, Monica Calabritto, ‘Garzoni’s L’Hospedale de’ Pazzi incurabili and the Ambiguous Relation between Word
and Image in Sixteenth-Century Imprese’, Emblematica, 13, (2003), pp. 97-130 and Calabritto, ‘A Case of Melancholic
Humors’, pp. 139-154.
33
Influential works for this thesis: Paolo Valesio, ‘The Language of Madness in the Renaissance’, Yearbook of Italian
Studies, 1, (1971), pp. 199-234, Ronald F.E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence, (New York:
Academic Press Inc., 1982), Ronald F.E. Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations,
Individualism, and Identity in Renaissance Florence’, in Susan Zimmerman & Ronald F.E. Weissman, eds., Urban Life in
the Renaissance, (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989), Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet,
Lauro Martines, Strong Words: Writing & Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance, (Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001), Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, Guido Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love: Sex,
10
amount of scholarly attention; however, the concentration on madness as a form of social deviance
remains a relatively unexplored approach.34 This thesis aims to fill this gap and provide insights into
how and why certain individuals were labelled ‘strano’. In the close reading of primary texts, this thesis
will illustrate the social codes of behaviour that governed urban life, and how individuals who deviated
from them were stigmatised in some way. The main texts dealt with in this project were selected
because they each reveal the complexity and fluidity of madness as a cultural construct. The texts are
cultural and intellectual snapshots of how madness was described in written form in this period. The
unusual nature of texts such as Garzoni’s L’ospidale and the The Fat Woodcarver are a testament to the
nature of this enquiry as a set of complex micro-histories, which reveal three specific features of a
multi-faceted topic. Through a study of these social codes of behaviour, madness can be seen to be a
term that signified a variety of meanings for a range of people from different walks of life in sixteenth-
century Italian society. Intrinsic to this complex social landscape is the age-old conception that madness
was the quintessential loss of the self. In the period that spanned between the early fifteenth and late
sixteenth centuries in Italy, madness was often seen as set of actions and words displayed by someone
who deviated from social codes and presented what contemporaries recognised as a serious threat.
Possibly most striking of all, it often represented a degradation of the self, identity and social
recognition within a broader community.
Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007). Useful studies on
melancholy: Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, pp. 653-675, Grassi & Lorch, Folly and Insanity, Rudolf Wittkower & Margot
Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the
French Revolution, (New York: Random House, 1963), Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky & Fritz Saxl, Saturn and
Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art, (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd,
1964).
34
Scholars who have noted the deficient scholarship on this area: Neely, ‘Did Madness Have a Renaissance?’, p. 779 and p.
784 and Midelfort, ‘Madness and the Problems of Psychological History’, pp. 5-12.
11
CHAPTER ONE
Social Deviance: Fear and Loathing in Renaissance Florence
How can anyone dream that mere simplicity and goodness will get him friends, or even
acquaintances not actually harmful and annoying? The world is so full of human variety,
differences of opinion, changes of heart, perversity of customs, ambiguity, diversity, and
obscurity of values. The world is amply supplied with fraudulent, false, perfidious, bold,
audacious, and rapacious men. Everything in the world is profoundly unsure. One has to be
far-seeing in the face of frauds, traps and betrayals.35
~Leon Battista Alberti, 1432~
Indeed, the mask is the man; he must never take it off.36
This chapter will analyse how and why madness in early Renaissance Florence constituted a form of
social deviance. This focus on social deviance will investigate an incident that occurred in 1409 and
the social context that facilitated an attack one man’s identity and sense of self. Antonio di Tuccio
Manetti’s reconstruction of this event, titled The Fat Woodcarver (c. 1480s), shows how conceptions
of social deviance were constructed based on social classifications and friendship networks. This
chapter examines how processes of stigmatisation and ‘social networks’ operated in relation to notions
of deviance, and how they were based on cultural conceptions surrounding the presentation of the
self.37 These issues relate to Lauro Martines’ quote concerning the obligatory social ‘mask’; Manetti’s
tale illustrates a social context that emphasised the importance of maintaining a certain outward
persona.38 The social construction of ‘strange’ behaviour enabled the deviant in the story to suffer a
fate considered by many of his contemporaries to be social suicide.39 Consequently, this chapter
35
Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence: I Libri Della Famiglia by Leon Battista Alberti, Renée Neu
Watkins, trans., (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), p. 266.
36
Lauro Martines, ‘The Gentleman in Renaissance Italy: Strains of Isolation in the Body Politic’, in Robert S. Kinsman,
ed., The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1974), p. 89.
37
The metaphor ‘social networks’ appears in Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. x.
38
For a discussion of social ‘masks’ see: Michelle Z. Rosaldo, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling’, in Richard
A. Shweder & Robert A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), p. 147 and Grassi & Lorch, Folly and Insanity, p. 77.
39
For the concept of ‘social suicide’ see MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 131. Martines describes Grasso’s final act as
‘ritual suicide’ in An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 213 and Strong Words, p. 179.
12
focuses on outlining the way that certain social structures in the Florentine community outlined
acceptable forms of behaviour and, by default, systematically classified deviancy in a way that
imposed social alienation. This interpretation explores the complexity behind the ‘perversity of
customs, ambiguity, diversity, and obscurity of values’ that Leon Battista Alberti once described, in
order to explore how and why social deviance was so intimately connected with social networks.
Manetti’s account of the incident, though written well after the event, is widely considered to be the
most thorough, not only because he personally knew the story’s characters, but also because it seems
to be the most detailed version of the story.40 The story belongs to the tradition of the Italian novella
along with the Florentine ‘beffa’, which were tales of ‘practical, often cruel, jokes’.41 It details how one
Sunday evening in the winter of 1409, the famous architect Filippo di Ser Brunelleschi and a host of
other well known patrons and artists including Donatello, gathered for dinner in the house of ‘a most
respected’ political figure named Tomaso Pecori.42 After a period of time it became clear to the group
that their friend, affectionately nicknamed Il Grasso (‘the Fat One’), did not attend the dinner party
and, as a result, without so much as a fleeting moment’s consideration for Grasso, they decided to play
a ‘prank’ on him.43 This does not seem like a major cause for concern, since Brunelleschi and Grasso
knew each other well, so much so that he had ‘sometimes discreetly amused himself at Grasso’s
expense.’44 However, the operative word in this instance is ‘discreetly’, and as the story progresses, it
becomes very clear that the joke played on Grasso is deliberately publicised and takes on a more
serious nature. Grasso was targeted because he did not attend an important social event with his
‘intimate group of friends’ and patrons.45 Consequently, his friends felt ‘a bit snubbed’ because he
40
Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 171.
41
Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Fat Woodworker by Antonio Manetti, Robert L. Martone & Valerie Martone, trans.,
(New York: Italica Press, 1991), p. ix.
42
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 171 and Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 215.
43
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 172.
44
45
13
neglected his social obligation to a group of men ‘of a higher rank and station’.46 For that reason,
Grasso’s friends devised the harshest penalty they could imagine: ‘“we’ll make him believe that he has
become someone else and that he’s no longer Grasso the woodcarver.”’47 To add further insult to
injury, this ‘“someone else”’ was to be Matteo, a man who was known for his trouble with the debt
collectors. In a symbolic act of social exclusion, Grasso was to become a man ‘who was not part of the
intimate group of friends who used to dine together.’48 What follows is an elaborate beffa, detailing
how Brunelleschi tricks Grasso by pretending his mother is ill and then breaking into his house. When
Grasso arrives home, Brunelleschi imitates Grasso’s voice and tells him to leave. In a state of
confusion, Grasso decides to go back to his place of work in the Piazza di San Giovanni, so that
someone he knew would walk past and recognise him. Unfortunately, at that point debt collectors, who
were in on the joke, arrested and incarcerated Grasso in the Mercanzia (the local court and gaol).
During his time in gaol, Grasso is tormented by the prospect that he has not only turned into someone
else, but that he has lost his possessions and more importantly, his identity. Grasso, ‘struggling to hold
back his tears’ decides to tell a judge of ‘considerable merit’ about his situation.49 The judge, realising
that someone has played a joke on Grasso, amusingly offers advice. After spending time in the gaol
talking to the judge, Grasso is eventually released when Matteo’s brothers, who are also in on the
prank, pay the debt and take him back to their home. The brothers chastise Grasso, saying that his
‘misconduct’ has brought ‘shame’ on their family.50 They ridicule Grasso further by inviting a priest
who, believing Grasso to be Matteo, lectures him about his behaviour. During this time, Grasso
becomes more and more convinced that he has turned into Matteo and, after Matteo’s brothers drug
him with a strong opiate, Grasso goes to sleep that night with the horrifying knowledge that he had lost
everything he owned. During the night, Brunelleschi and a few other friends move Grasso back to his
own bed. Grasso awakes to the sound of the bells in the Santa Maria del Fiore and becomes overjoyed
46
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, pp. 172-173. For an analysis on status and position within this social group see Martines,
Strong Words, p. 172.
47
48
49
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 180 and p. 183.
50
14
to find that he woke in his own bed. Still unconvinced, he decides to venture into the town centre in
order to ‘verify’ that he was Grasso and not Matteo ‘by meeting other men’.51 He meets Brunelleschi
and Donatello in the Duomo and engages in an exchange whereby Brunelleschi and Donatello
continue to taunt Grasso about the events that unfolded the day before. Grasso eventually discovers
that he had been ‘the victim of a practical joke’ and, in the end, with no other foreseeable alternative,
Grasso decides to flee Florence for Hungary.52
In light of Manetti’s tale, it is necessary to outline the social and cultural framework that delineated
madness as a form of social deviance in Grasso’s story of friendship, betrayal and alienation. The
elements of the story are comprehensible when placed in a social context that privileged words, actions
and behaviour as symbols within an elaborate communication system.53 This system of verbal and
behavioural codes designated ‘fama’ (‘reputation’) as the core component of social relations.54 The
inexorable social structures of ‘onore’ and ‘vergogna’ (‘honour’ and ‘shame’) dictated the complexity
behind ‘fama’ and social relations.55 This facilitated the ‘face-to-face’ nature of society which was
characterised by an elaborate system of behavioural codes in which the individual was tested on a daily
basis.56 Although these were elements integral to the proper functioning of civic life, it is important to
note that this was also a society that defined the male role in society as distinctly public in nature and
appointed women as the absent players in the community.57 Women’s absence from this public role
meant that a man’s social status in the community depended on his ability to project a certain level of
51
52
53
Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, (New York: Academic Press, 1980), p. 129. For another
discussion on the importance of symbols and behavioural codes see Richard C. Trexler, Dependence in Context in
Renaissance Florence, (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), pp. 8-9. See also Roy G.
D’Andrade, ‘Cultural Meaning Systems’, in Shweder & LeVine, Culture Theory, p. 116.
54
For an analysis on reputation see Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 25. For a detailed discussion on the concept of
‘fama’ see Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution During the Florentine
Renaissance, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 60.
55
The terms ‘onore’ and ‘vergogna’ appear in Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 3rd edn., 1987), p. 194 and Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early
Modern Italy, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 83.
56
Trexler, Dependence in Context, p. 8, Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 35 and Dale Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust
in Renaissance Florence, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 6 and p. 90.
57
Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, p. 13 and Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, p. 86.
15
‘social ambiguity’ and decipher the range of gestures, words and behaviour presented to him.58 Those
who did not preserve their honour and maintain the right level of ambiguity within their social
relations faced a serious social threat. This ambiguity was colourfully reflected when, in 1609, the
Venetian scholar Paolo Sarpi wrote, ‘“I am constrained to wear a mask, in as much as one can do no
less, if he lives in Italy.”’59 However, this theme was noted in earlier Italian texts. As early as the mid
fourteenth century, Paolo da Certaldo, highlighted the importance of façade, and even went so far as to
compare his secrets with his ‘liberty’ saying that those who revealed their secrets ‘were mad.’60 Da
Certaldo also noted the centrality of ‘fama’ saying that the respect of fellow citizens was ‘“worth more
than great riches”’.61 In a culture that privileged the importance of ‘fama’ and the intricate workings of
surface appearance, ‘words, actions, and works’, ‘onore’ and ‘vergogna’, were all intimately
connected.62 Hence, social alienation remained an ever-present possibility for those who neglected the
importance of façade. This emphasis on façade indicates that an individual’s sense of self was
‘“bounded”’ or restricted by the external pressures that threatened shame on those who acted against
the prescribed social codes.63 An individual’s sense of self and identity was like a complex patchwork.
It included a multiplicity of overlapping features that demanded loyalty to a range of groups such as
patrons, ‘parenti, amici e vicini’ (‘kin, friends and neighbours’).64 Consequently, a person’s obligations
and allegiances meant that their actions, gestures and words often conflicted with their desires and
58
The term ‘social ambiguity’ appears in Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous’, p. 271.
59
Paolo Sarpi, Letter to Jacques Gillot, (1609), quoted in Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, p. 41.
60
Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 31.
61
Da Certaldo, quoted in Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 25 and Nicholas A. Eckstein, ‘Neighborhood as Microcosm’,
in Roger J. Crum & John T. Paoletti, eds., Renaissance Florence: A Social History, (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), p. 220.
62
For the importance of ‘words, actions, and works’ see Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, p. 44. For another
similar comment about honour and reputation see Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi, (1393-1411), in Veronica Branca,
ed., Merchant Writers of the Italian Renaissance, Murtha Baca, trans., (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 2nd edn., 1999),
pp. 71-72. For an analysis of the system of ‘face-work’ see Burke, The Historical Anthropology, p. 14. For an analysis on
reputation, honour and shame see Daniel R. Lesnick, ‘Insults and Threats in Medieval Todi’, Journal of Medieval
History, 17, (1991), pp. 71-72.
63
Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, p. 13, pp. 17-18 and p. 39. Martin, in referring to the individual as
‘“bounded”’ on p. 39, was quoting Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology,
(1983). See also Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance,
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 10 and Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, p. 5.
64
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, Lydia Cochrane, trans., (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 68. See also Martines, Strong Words, p. 175, Martin, Myths of
Renaissance Individualism, p. 27, Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’ in Roy Porter,
ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 18.
16
beliefs.65 However, as noted previously, this was a community that centred on notions of ‘fama’,
‘onore’ and ‘vergogna’ and so, an individual often faced the challenging task of consolidating their
own interests and self-preservation with what external groups and institutions expected of them.66
Their behaviour was constantly mediated by the awareness that what they did in front of their fellow
citizens would be noted, disseminated and never forgotten. Madness, understood as form of social
deviance, thus represented the moments where the social ‘mask’ failed, where an individual
temporarily suspended their vigilant persona and revealed words and behaviour commonly interpreted
as ‘strano’.
Analysis of the cultural framework that dictated social interaction alludes to another dominant theme
of life in early Renaissance Florence – ‘amicitia’ (‘collective, corporate or communal friendship’).67
This was a world where individuals played a precarious balancing act between ‘onore’ and ‘vergogna’
depending on how they managed their social networks because, as Alberti commented, ‘“social
exchanges hid many layers of meaning, even during exchanges between friends.”’68 Da Certaldo
provided some illuminating statements concerning the nature of friendship as he maintained that ‘“a
man who loses his friends is worse than dead.”’69 Such comparisons echo the familiar Italian
expression, ‘“It is better to die than to live with shame”’; however, there is another element to these
proverbial statements that connects with how social deviance was perceived.70 Alberti noted that
friendships were the most ‘highly prized’ of all relationships, indicating that it was not only an
65
Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, p. 27.
66
Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, p. 46.
67
The term ‘amicitia’ appears in N.P.J. Gordon, ‘The murder of Buondelmonte: contesting place in early fourteenth
century Florentine chronicles’, Renaissance Studies, 20, no. 4 (2006), p. 468. See also F.W. Kent ‘“Be Rather Loved
Than Feared”: Class Relations in Quattrocento Florence’ in William J. Connell, ed., Society and Individual in
Renaissance Florence, (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), p. 14.
68
Alberti, quoted in Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous’, 272.
69
Paolo da Certaldo, Libro di buoni costumi, (c. 1360), quoted in Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 28.
70
This is my translation of the phrase ‘“Meglio è morir che viver con vergogna”’, quoted in Burke, The Historical
Anthropology, p. 95. This saying also often appears as “Meglio è morir con onore che viver con vergogna” (‘It is better to
die with honour than to live with shame’).
17
essential part of social survival, but a fundamental ingredient to ‘living well and rightly.’71 Also writing
in the early fifteenth century, Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti claimed that ‘“nulla sanza gli amici
si può far”’ (‘“nothing can be done without friends”’).72 The ability to maintain friendship networks in
this context was seen as a virtue, and one that required consistent attention and skilful ambiguity as Da
Certaldo once proclaimed: ‘Now, I am not saying that you should be completely distrustful, but rather
that there should be a happy medium in all things. If you always keep to this happy medium in every
aspect of your life, you shall be praised and considered wise.’73 Not long after Da Certaldo’s
comments, Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli recorded his thoughts in a chronicle, also recognising the
critical ability to maintain a vigilant disposition: ‘Once you have won your friends and relatives...you
must be sensible enough to keep their friendship, and even to increase it; and this is how to do it. Don’t
be ungrateful for favors received....If you see that you can be useful to them or honor them, do so;
don’t wait to be asked.’74 Social deviance, in light of these characterisations, represented the rifts and
cracks in social networks. The process of stigmatisation served as a social demarcation of ‘strange’
behaviour in a way that reinforced the importance of what Alberti termed, ‘“the face value of social
exchanges”’.75 If social relationships were part of a complex tapestry, then Alberti’s metaphor of the
‘filo e tessura’ (‘the thread and fabric’) of friendship is an accurate description of this element as it
formed the backbone of life in the Florentine commune.76 This mentality indicates that those who
exhibited ‘strange’ behaviour and neglected to project a certain persona were deviant because they
threatened the very existence of the social codes established to mediate behaviour in the first place.
They were mad insofar as they did not conform; they threatened social harmony in the community by
desecrating the virtues considered central to maintaining the imperative social masquerade.
Contemporary comments concerning the complexity of social relations highlight the way that social
71
Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, p. 94. See also Eckstein, ‘Neighborhood as Microcosm’, p. 220.
72
Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 159.
73
Paolo da Certaldo, Libro di buoni costumi, (c. 1360), in Branca, Merchant Writers, p. 48.
74
Morelli, Ricordi, in Branca, Merchant Writers, pp. 72-73.
75
Alberti, quoted in Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous’, p. 272.
76
This metaphor is quoted and applied in Kent, Friendship, Love and Trust, p. 8.
18
codes mediating identity and the self were perceived as a sacred order, and an intrinsic part of the
community’s cultural make-up that people honoured and occasionally undervalued.
Based on this social context, Grasso’s behaviour and that of his friends can be analysed and
understood more comprehensively. In order to fully understand how Grasso’s actions were construed
as deviant in early Renaissance Florence, it is necessary to explore the vocabulary for madness applied
to those who transgressed behavioural prescriptions and earned the label of the social deviant. One
example of how the language reveals mentalities toward social deviance is how the joke is classified at
the beginning of the story. On the surface, it all seems like a practical joke amongst friends; however,
underlying these comical exchanges is something far more serious. The vocabulary for Grasso’s
punishment switches from ‘prank’, to an ‘amusing joke’, to ‘vendetta’ or ‘revenge’.77 These subtle
linguistic shifts communicate the extent of Grasso’s social mistake within this particular friendship
group, as well as the underlying gravity of social deviance in the broader context of the community.
There are other descriptions throughout the story that consistently depict Grasso as mad or in the
process of going mad. Phrases such as, ‘half out of his wits’, ‘“crazy antics of his”’, ‘“his brains
overturned”’, ‘“mad frenzy”’, ‘like a man possessed’, ‘driven out of his mind by an overwhelming
melancholy’ and so on, all certainly show that terms of reference to madness were applied daily,
whether carelessly or not.78 Grasso’s contemplative moments, made as the beffa unfolds, reveal how
those considered ‘“damned”’ and out of their ‘“wits”’ were treated everyday:
It is certain that I’m no longer Grasso and have become Matteo. Damn my luck and
misfortune! For if this gets out, I shall be humiliated and taken for a madman and the
children will taunt me and I’ll run a thousand risks on account of it. And also, what have I
77
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 172 and p. 173. For analyses on the idea of ‘vendetta’ see Edward Muir, Mad Blood
Stirring: Vendetta & Factions in Fruili During the Renaissance, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993) and Gordon, ‘The murder of Buondelmonte’, pp. 459-477.
78
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, for each phrase respectively: p. 176, p. 187 (for both ‘“crazy antics of his”’ and ‘“his
brains overturned”’), p. 188, p. 177 and p. 181.
19
to do with another man’s debts, or the scrapes he’s gotten into–I, who have always avoided
this and a thousand other dangerous mistakes?79
This interior monologue reiterates the volatile environment of the Florentine commune and the
centrality of maintaining an honourable persona. Grasso’s character, especially his apparent blind
acceptance of the situations presented to him, also needs to be looked at more closely. Grasso’s
comments concerning identity were more than just the tragically innocent ramblings of a simple-
minded man who felt his world falling apart. In the beginning he is described as being ‘a touch simple’
but ‘by no means a fool.’80 Furthermore, Grasso is aware of the fragility of reputation and the balance
of ‘onore’ and ‘vergogna’; when he is arrested he desperately verbalises the seriousness of his
disgrace: ‘“I’m not who you think I am, and you’re committing a great injury by shaming me like
this....”’81 Throughout the story, Grasso epitomises the complicated nature of an individual’s sense of
self within an often suffocating and critical community; he consistently measures his own feelings and
desires up against the expectations of his friends and his fellow Florentines. Although he often kept
within the community’s expectations and boundaries, unfortunately for Grasso, the far-sightedness
Alberti once described was not a quality he possessed. As a result of Grasso’s inability to play the
social game designed to entrap him in the first place, he suffered a cruel assault on his social status and
perhaps more importantly, his sense of self. Grasso may have been no fool, but this was essentially one
“dangerous mistake” that he underestimated.82
Manetti shows how the distinctly male-centred nature of social networks in Florentine urban life
operated based on each man’s social and economic status.83 Factors including their age and occupation
79
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver: for the word ‘“damned”’ see p. 187, for the word ‘“wits”’ see p. 176 and for the longer
quote see pp. 179-180.
80
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 172. Martines also points out the ambiguity surrounding Grasso’s intelligence in An
Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 222.
81
82
The term ‘“dangerous mistakes”’ is used by Grasso in Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 179.
83
Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, p. 15 & 86. Ruggiero notes that the ‘masculine identity’ and ‘masculine culture’ is an
intrinsic part of this story.
20
feature in the story, illustrating how friendship networks followed a strict hierarchy.84 Like Alberti’s
description at the beginning of this chapter, the layered social exchanges and processes that engineered
and publicised Grasso’s alienation reflect the elaborate workings of social life in the Florentine
commune. Brunelleschi clearly understood the intricacy of social networks, and this was displayed
through his engineering of a joke which was to signal the ridicule and social exclusion of the single
man in the group who did not fully grasp the politics of friendship. The illustration of Brunelleschi’s
character as the mastermind of this cruel joke and the social scene within which he operated, provide
illuminating insights into the way that group solidarity often coincided dangerously with social
exclusion. Da Certaldo once wrote, ‘“Test your friend a hundred times...for he who was your friend
earlier has become your enemy because of the trust that you placed in him.”’85 Grasso’s story of
trickery, the complexity of Florentine social networks and the consequences of behavioural
transgressions represents the volatile undercurrents evident in Da Certaldo’s social commentary.
Grasso’s loss of social acceptance as a result of his snub was seen as a logical consequence; the clever
metaphorical joke of his loss of identity was designed to ‘“teach him a lesson”’ since he did not
appreciate his position within and obligations to his particular friendship group.86 Therein lies the crux
of Grasso’s madness: he transgressed the codes of behaviour crucial to maintaining his position in his
social network and therefore warranted the punishment of social alienation and shame at the hands of
his friends. This novella epitomises the intricate nuances of ritual and social relations in the
Renaissance Italian town; there is a powerful sense that the actions and words contained within the
story are layered with meanings that played a role in signifying a person’s place in the Florentine
84
For an analysis not on friendship but of the related hierarchical nature in kinship networks see Nicholas Terpstra, ‘In
Loco Parentis: Confraternities and Abandoned Children in Florence and Bologna’, in Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Politics
of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), pp. 130-131.
85
Da Certaldo, Libro, in Branca, Merchant Writers, p. 48. Also quoted in Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being
Ambiguous’, p. 272. Morelli also made a similar phrase, quoted in Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous’, p.
272.
86
21
commune.87 This analysis of Grasso’s actions, words and behaviour reveals how his story can be seen
as a re-enactment of the classification of social deviance under the guise of madness.
These classifications of social deviance and descriptions of Grasso’s state of mind not only reveal a
universally recognised vocabulary for ‘strange’ behaviour; they also illustrate a dispossession or
displacement of the self. In 1512, Niccolò Machiavelli devised the concept of ‘virtù’ in The Prince.
Machiavelli stipulated that ‘virtù’ encompassed a range of qualities that a prince would need to possess
in order to run his state successfully.88 The word referred to a person’s ‘“talent”’, ‘“skill”’ and
‘“prowess”’ not so much the English word ‘“virtue”’.89 In chapter fifteen, Machiavelli lists a range of
attributes ‘for which men, and especially princes, are praised or blamed’.90 Some of these ‘good’ and
‘miserly’ characteristics included men who were ‘effeminate and cowardly’ and ‘sincere’ and
‘cunning’.91 These polarised character traits pointed to the central characteristic that defined a man’s
level of ‘virtù’, and that was, the assertive political power that ennobled the quintessential masculine
persona.92 Although this concept was outlined in a later period, the elements of ‘virtù’ can be seen in
Manetti’s reconstruction of Brunelleschi’s beffa. Grasso’s community was one that prized the ‘regime
of virtù’ which dictated the way identities were perceived and interpreted.93 The notion of ‘virtù’
encompassed the way that men in the Florentine community displayed their persona, a persona that
was to be characteristically ‘masculine’ in order to guarantee one’s social status, ‘onore’ and ‘fama’.94
For men within this framework, ‘onore’ rested in his ability to avoid public ridicule and maintain
87
Martines makes a similar point in relation to this literary form in Strong Words, p. 174.
88
See Cary J. Nederman’s ‘Introduction’, in Niccolò Machiavelli, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: On the Art of Power:
The New Illustrated Edition of the Renaissance Masterpiece on Leadership, W.K. Marriott, trans., (London: Duncan
Baird Publishers, 2nd edn., 2007), p. 14. See also Cary J. Nederman, Niccolò Machiavelli, created September 13
2005/updated September 8 2009, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, USA,
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/#3>, viewed 1 October 2009.
89
Nederman, ‘Introduction’ in Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 14.
90
Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 115.
91
Machiavelli, The Prince, pp. 115-116.
92
Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, p. 167.
93
94
22
certain levels of ‘ambiguity’ in his social networks.95 The Renaissance Italian’s ‘social and psychic
survival’ depended on his ability to maintain a strong network of friends.96 Madness in this context was
socially constituted and constructed based on the man’s ‘virtù’.97 In the broader social sense, beyond
his mental state, Grasso was exhibiting characteristics considered inherently offensive. These
classifications of madness and those people, like Grasso who were ‘“prone”’ to ‘“some mad whim”’,
illustrate how performances of identity and the maintenance of that all-important façade signalled an
ongoing struggle with a social reality that demanded certain obligations.98 These qualities, if perverted,
could be construed as violated in some way and therefore, Grasso’s inability to follow the rules of
‘virtù’ signalled a de-masculinised persona through the exhibition of social deviance. Grasso failed to
honour his commitment to a group of important male patrons and intellectuals and when faced with the
consequences, he also failed to maintain a level of rational control and authority of the situation.
Ultimately, Grasso’s seemingly simple mistake cost him his place in the sacred order of ‘virtù’.
Aside from the conceptualisation of madness as social deviance and vice versa, Manetti’s text
demonstrates the complicated apparatus of the social network and the way it mediated behaviour,
words and actions. Da Certaldo’s musings about a man’s secrets is echoed as Grasso articulates his
awareness of the treatment he will receive if he displays his true feelings: ‘“I can’t confide in anyone,
or ask advice, and God knows I need it!”’99 Morelli later reiterated Da Certaldo’s comments about
friendship and also warned of the deceptive surface appearance of kind gestures: ‘“Do not extend your
trust easily or lightly; and all the more, he who demonstrated with his words that he is faithful, trust
him all the less, and he offers to help you, do not trust him at all.”’100 After Grasso’s friends set the
95
Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 26. This is also discussed in Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, p. xxvi.
96
Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 29. This point is also made in Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, p. 63.
97
Ruggiero also notes the dangerousness of madness in Grasso’s context saying that ‘…ultimately even madness
threatened his place in the regime of ‘virtù’ in Machiavelli in Love, p. 95.
98
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 172. For the notion of drama in the streets see also Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, p.
6 and p. 90.
99
100
Morelli, quoted in Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous’, p. 272.
23
beffa in motion, the next important scene in the story is Grasso’s incarceration. The proverbial
comparison between shame and death is resonated when a judge dramatically tells Grasso, ‘“...you
couldn’t be more miserable if you were about to die, or were in danger of some great disgrace.”’101
Unfortunately, Grasso opens up to the judge, informing him that he is telling him his story because the
judge is a ‘man of distinction’ who has shown ‘compassion’ to his plight.102 Grasso also unknowingly
articulates the nature of the beffa as one that was ‘“funny”’ just as long as ‘“it’s not happening to
you!”’, to which the judge wisely responded, ‘“We’re all at risk.”’103 The judge’s final comments echo
the volatile nature of the Florentine community. Contrary to contemporary advice about questioning
the façade of compassion and to his detriment, Grasso reveals his secret and his true feelings, and in
doing so, he relays his sense of humiliation to a person who will act as a further vessel of
communication of the beffa.104 Other figures in the story recognise this dangerous reality. When Grasso
is taken from the Mercanzia to Matteo’s house he meets the local priest who informs him that by
‘“going mad”’ Grasso will become ‘“an object of ridicule”’ and ‘“be in trouble and shame all the rest
of your life.”’105 The priest in a sense performs a social duty and reminds Grasso of the consequences
of his actions: ‘“the more people you talk to, the more you will broadcast this affair, and the worse it
will get and the more it will be held against you.”’106 Grasso’s silences reveal his acute sense of
inferiority when faced with Brunelleschi. In one of the final exchanges with Brunelleschi in the
Duomo, he speaks up and in doing so, demonstrates this awareness and also his interior struggle:
Filippo, these are strange things, and from what I hear, things like this have happened
before. Matteo has spoken and you two have spoken and I have something I could say too,
but it might make you think I’m crazy. I’d better keep quiet. Come, Filippo, let’s not talk
about it any more.107
101
102
103
104
105
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 189 and 190.
106
107
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 206. For a description of Grasso’s ‘inner’ struggle see Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love,
p. 94.
24
In light of Morelli’s writings on social exchanges, Grasso’s statements violate the vital code of silence
and simultaneously signal an awareness of the dangers of outwardly displaying characteristics that
would incur the harsh judgement of his peers. Despite his mistakes, the account of Grasso’s thoughts
throughout the story reveals that he is highly aware of his position as a fairly prominent artisan with a
host of important patrons he can call his friends and protectors. He is clearly deeply conscious of the
power of actions and words in his community and at times, remains silent about his situation, not so
much out of a mute stupidity, but more so out of the fact that anything he said or did would have
undoubtedly become the stuff of gossip. Morelli reiterated the dangers of indiscretion, echoing Da
Certaldo and preceding Alberti’s ‘unsure’ world: ‘Because there are deceitful people in Florence who
will try every trick to corrupt you, and because you can’t recognize all of them, always speak well of
everyone and don’t agree with those who speak ill of others; either hold your tongue, or speak well.’108
Grasso may have been able to read and interpret the importance of social obligations, however, his
fundamental mistake resided in the fact that he had trusted too much. The ambiguity and double
entendre that held strategic social value and ruled the world of social relations in fifteenth-century
Florence, reveals that Grasso’s fate rested in an absent ability to manage a complex web of friends,
patrons and common acquaintances.
The ‘microsocial behavior’ contained in these parts of Manetti’s story express how the framework of
‘virtù’ operated as a classification mechanism, identifying those who transgressed behavioural codes
as ‘“strange”’.109 The ‘face-to-face’ nature of Florentine society is crucial to an adequate understanding
of Grasso’s story, because it accounts for the clearly mediated nature of social interaction as well as
the generally volatile environment that both sustained and destroyed identities. Indeed for Grasso, as
108
Morelli, Ricordi, in Branca, Merchant Writers, p. 72.
109
For the word ‘“strange”’ see Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 206. For the term ‘microsocial behavior’ see Ronald F.E.
Weissman, ‘Reconstructing Renaissance Sociology: The ‘Chicago School’ and the Study of Renaissance Society’, in
Richard C. Trexler, ed., Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe,
(Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1985), p. 40.
25
for Da Certaldo, ‘“a man without a friend is like a body without a soul”’.110 Seen in this light, the final
scenes of the story and Grasso’s seemingly dramatic decision to flee are understandable. In the end,
public sentiment and judgement ruled; it outweighed and essentially negated any solace that Grasso
could have gained from his beloved city.111 He had lost his sense of belonging not only to his social
group, but also to his city. If he stayed, he would have been socially branded, laughed at and ridiculed
as a ‘“madman”’.112 But these depictions also reveal that ‘“foolishness or idiocy or whatever we may
call it”’, were also forms of behaviour that people viewed as intrinsically part of life in the
commune.113 Men of the Florentine community essentially recognised the need to conceal these
questionable passions and actions in the name of self-preservation and also in order to function as an
honourable man ‘“of worth”’.114 The only option for Grasso in order to escape the beffa and the
humiliation tagged onto it, was to literally flee Florence, to salvage whatever honour he could and
salvare la faccia (‘“to save face”’).115 The real danger associated with madness, in this historical
context and for Grasso, was to do with the social consequences of an overall loss of self and
reputation. Grasso was not simply restored to his previous self, along with his reputation, social
networks and other characteristics so intrinsic to his sense of identity. So when Grasso asked himself,
‘“Am I losing my mind?”’ and thought, ‘“I’m really in trouble”’, the question that arises is whether or
not he was also referring to the social implications of his actions.116 In the eyes of his Florentine
counterparts, he had become an ‘infamous victim of a famous beffa’, a classic fool, and therefore, all
the honour he had worked so hard to cultivate evaporated as quickly as did his sense of self.117 Instead
of confronting him directly, Grasso’s friends provide an allegorical drama designed to teach him about
the nature of male social bonds and its hierarchical structure in what Guido Ruggiero termed, ‘a
110
Da Certaldo, quoted in Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 28.
111
Similar idea in Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 223.
112
113
114
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 189. Honour and cleverness is also discussed briefly in Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, p.
xxvi.
115
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 207. This expression is used by Grasso after he finds out the nature of the beffa. For an
insightful discussion of this mentality see Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet, pp.117-119.
116
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 175 & 180.
117
26
virtually perfect poetic justice.’118 Brunelleschi’s trick communicated a harsh lesson; there really was
no room for social deviance and anyone who assumed this was clearly mad or ‘“out of his wits”’.119
Grasso failed to project the right mask, neglected the social codes that stressed the importance of
restraint and therefore, made an exhibition of himself in a drama where his critical audience christened
him the village idiot and his friend, Brunelleschi, the clever trickster. The kind of ritualistic public
shaming of Grasso’s behaviour would have had a strong power not only over the immediate group of
friends, but also over the community. Grasso was held up as an example of what happened when men
did not honour their patronal obligations, and such a carefully orchestrated prank was designed to
induce a certain level of conformity. From another perspective, Grasso endured a ritualistic and
figurative process of emasculation amidst a culture that privileged a system of ‘virtù’. Grasso’s
nonconformity was punished and in the end, he bent to the will of his friends and the nature of social
and cultural systems long instilled in Florentine society. In this sense, he fully perceived and
understood the gravity of his social negligence and the shame tagged onto it and, as a result, he
performed the only socially acceptable act left available to him and fled his community.
This analysis has shown how Manetti’s The Fat Woodcarver, although a lively depiction of Florentine
life in 1409 is more than just a story about a prank amongst friends; it was a dramatic illustration of
how social deviance was literally performed in the streets in a way that honoured and destroyed
identities. The fact that this story was deliberately retold, re-enacted and documented substantiates the
claim that it symbolised a ‘social drama’ that ventured beyond the friendship group in question.120 The
privileging of theatrical themes such as stage space and performance illuminate how forms of social
deviance were recognised and treated by its spectators on a daily basis. Stories of losing identity or the
118
119
See Da Certaldo’s observations in Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 31. Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 176.
120
Martines notes that are at least ‘five versions and fourteen different manuscripts’ of this story in An Italian Renaissance
Sextet, p. 254. On the re-enactment of the story, Manetti notes this in The Fat Woodcarver, p. 212. For the term ‘social
drama’ see: Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, pp. 30-31, Richard C. Trexler, ‘Introduction’, in Trexler, Persons in Groups,
p. 7 and Burke, The Historical Anthropology, pp. 6-7.
27
transformation of the self were not wholly uncommon delineations of madness, with one example
being a baker from Ferrara who thought that he was ‘composed of butter, and durst not sit in the sunne,
or come neere the fire for feare of being melted’.121 Grasso’s story exhibits the key characteristics of
the nature of community in early fifteenth century Florence. Grasso’s tale also reveals how civic
spaces and social groupings were seen as strictly male domains.122 Identities were informed and shaped
by the intimately organised city spaces and the complex social networks.123 This element is crucial to
an adequate understanding of Grasso’s story and his close-knit social group, because it accounts for the
clearly mediated nature of social interaction as well as the general volatile environment that dictated
personal agency and identity. Brunelleschi’s beffa and its theatrical components of stage and
performance ultimately illustrate just one comical play out of a multitude of social dramas that
spanned the grand theatre of the Florentine commune.
The projected personas and ‘public signification’ of actions in this elaborate ‘historical drama’
spotlight the centrality of space, and raise the problematic dichotomy of the “public” and the
“private”.124 In this analysis, the idea of space, the “public” and the “private”, does not necessarily
solely refer to physical spaces. The “public”, on the one hand, can signify a collective group mentality
such as the ‘“fama comune”’ (‘voice of public opinion’) or a particular social network of friends.125
Notions of the “private” or privacy, on the other hand, did not exist or at least did not have the same
meaning in this historical context. The visibility of cultural, social, economic and political exchanges
meant that privacy was an illusory construct.126 Physical spaces such as streets and alleyways formed
121
Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 402.
122
Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, p. 13.
123
Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 35 and Burke, The Italian Renaissance, p. 218.
124
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1980), p. 5.
125
This term is highlighted and defined in Burke, The Historical Anthropology, p. 107
126
For illuminating discussions on the “public” and “private” see: Trexler, Public Life, p. 130, Burke, The Italian
Renaissance, p. 213, Edward Muir, ‘The 2001 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Idea of Community in Renaissance
Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55, no. 1 (Spring, 2002), p. 13, Cordelia Beattie & Anna Maslakovic, ‘Introduction −
Locating the Household: Public, Private, and the Social Construction of Gender and Space’, in Cordelia Beattie, Anna
Maslakovic & Sarah Rees Jones, eds., The Medieval Household in Christian Europe C. 850 - C. 1550: Managing Power,
28
visible stages of social interaction. Paolo da Certaldo voices this spatial awareness and the fragility of
privacy in a colourful description of how city streets were often risky spaces:
...take care not to say anything in the street or near a thin wall that you don’t want
everyone to know....As the saying goes, “Speak no lies when you’re in the street.” Never
say anything in a place where you don’t know that you cannot be heard by some man or
woman whom you cannot see....Beware of hedges and trees, and structures or walls or
corners or any other place where someone can hide – man or woman, large or small – if
you don’t want your secrets to be known.127
Yet Da Certaldo also seems to articulate another characteristic of city spaces; he acknowledges the
phonetic potential of the town streets. This acoustic awareness was also articulated by other
Renaissance contemporaries who realised the damaging potential of Florence’s nooks and crannies.
The streets and piazze represented a colourful cacophony of Florentine social life and culture.
Francesco Alberti’s sonnets from the fifteenth century detail this harsh reality of the power of
neighbourhood, both in geographical and social terms. Francesco explained the volatile nature of the
Florentine commune: ‘“Let him who does not hear the sound not enter in the dance, for anyone who
doesn’t keep the tempo, or doesn’t share it, is without honor and loses all his property.”’128 The
phonetic sensibility is figuratively illustrated here as Francesco claims that to mishear or ignore the
sounds of the neighbourhood is to make a terrible mistake, resulting in a loss of that all-important
element in a Renaissance Italian man’s life – ‘onore’. It also illustrates the fluid nature of the public
and private as a construct that was based in a society where conceptions of community operated
through a process of exclusivity; ultimately, ‘The “public” was a private club.’129 Francesco’s work
reflects the ‘strains’ of living within a close-knit community.130 This social anxiety articulates the
reality of those who inhabited the realm of shame; these were the outsiders, who experienced persistent
Wealth, and the Body, (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), p. 8, Elizabeth Horodowich, ‘The Gossiping Tongue: Oral Networks,
Public Life and Political Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, 19, no. 1 (2005), p. 29, Eckstein,
‘Neighborhood as Microcosm’, p. 220 and Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, p. 86.
127
Da Certaldo, Libro, in Branca, Merchant Writers, p. 47.
128
Alberti, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 161: ‘“Chi non intende il suon non entri in danza,/perché chi non va a
tempo, o nol comparte,/manca l’onore e perde ogni sustanza.”’ See also Eckstein, ‘Neighborhood as Microcosm’, p. 220.
129
Muir, ‘The Idea of Community in Renaissance Italy’, p. 13. See also Foucault, ‘Madness, the Absence of Work’, p. 293.
130
Martines, Strong Words, p. 160.
29
‘“affanno”’ (‘anxiety’) as a result of the pervasive cruel gaze of the neighbourhood.131 Interestingly
though, Francesco adopts the vocabulary designed to describe the kind of behaviour that he himself
exhibited to illustrate social life in Florence; he refers to the volatility of society as ‘dubbio e strano’
(‘doubtful and strange’).132 Contemporary writings on civic life reveal that space was a complex entity.
The geographical layout of the city facilitated many viewing platforms and the demographic
conglomeration of the city’s inhabitants meant that space could vary in meaning according to each
individual.133 The spectacle thus formed the melodramatic hustle and bustle of everyday life. The
exploration of city spaces in Manetti’s text highlights how they, for Grasso, housed ‘“cages for
madmen and difficult traps which, in springing, have ominous tricks, a build-up of errors and fullness
of lies.”’134 Manetti’s novella reveals the different ways how those who did not, as Francesco put it,
keep up with the ‘tempo’ of social life in the Renaissance Italian town were vibrantly spotlighted in
theatre spaces designed to caricature elements of social deviance.135
Manetti’s text communicates the ways that tangible spaces were utilised as public stages for the
dramatic display of deviant behaviour. In many ways, the spectacle of madness was validated by the
intrusive ‘public face of the neighbourhood and urban space.’136 Spaces such as the piazze, streets,
workshops, churches and private dwellings were all essentially pervasive forces in everyday life. Yet it
also reveals the presence of more complex set of intangible spaces that were based on fluid
constructions of public and private domains. Brunelleschi’s carefully orchestrated joke was one that
131
Alberti, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 162.
132
Alberti, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 160 and p. 162.
133
Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Seen and Known: Prostitutes in the Cityscape of Late-Sixteenth-Century Rome’, Renaissance
Studies, 12, no. 3 (1998), p. 395, Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘Theaters of Everyday Life’, in Crum & Paoletti, Renaissance
Florence, p. 62 and Martines, Strong Words, p. 175.
134
Alberti, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 162: ‘“gabbie da pazzi e trappole ritrose,/c’hanno nello scoccar sinestri
inganni,/cumul d’errore e ripien di bugie.”’
135
For a discussion about spaces as stages and spectatorship in general see: Trexler, Public Life, p. 10, Weissman, Ritual
Brotherhood, pp. 30-31, Burke, The Historical Anthropology, p. 8, Nicholas A. Eckstein, The District of the Green
Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence, (Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 1995), p. 97, Roger J.
Crum and John T. Paoletti, ‘Introduction: Florence - The Dynamics of Space in a Renaissance City’, in Crum & Paoletti,
Renaissance Florence, p. 1 and Strocchia, ‘Theaters of Everyday Life’, pp. 55-62. Also, for a colourful analysis of the
‘ritual stage’ of Venice’s bridges and neighbourhoods see Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and
Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 13-46.
136
Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 11.
30
was deliberately set within the bounds of public physical spaces and social networks. Brunelleschi
begins the beffa by breaking into Grasso’s house and by pretending to be Grasso. Consequently,
Brunelleschi invades any sense of privacy and transforms it into a place that loses its value for Grasso
as part of his possessions and consequently, his identity. Grasso then decides to venture to one of the
most important civic spaces in Florence, the Piazza di San Giovanni, in order to validate his own sense
of identity since it is there that his shop is located and there that he meets and greets people on a daily
basis.137 Unfortunately, this space, rather than the usual marker of his social status as a highly skilled
craftsman, turns into a dramatic arena of public humiliation when he is taken to gaol all the while
voicing his awareness of his own disgrace proclaiming the ‘“great injury”’ to his ‘fama’.138 Even in the
darkest spaces, such as gaol, Grasso can never escape the presence of the public; the space becomes
dangerously ambiguous as he resolves not to ‘“send word home”’ because ‘“they’ll make a
laughingstock out of me.”’139 This intimate nature of civic spaces is articulated by Matteo’s brothers
when they tell Grasso, ‘“...we’ll come for you tonight...when there’ll be fewer people around, so that
everyone doesn’t learn of our misfortunes and we won’t be so shamed on your account.”’140 Grasso’s
choice to flee is even more comprehensible because, as if treading a walk of shame through the streets
of Florence, he ‘happened to go by several places where he heard people talking about what had
happened to him, and everyone was laughing and joking about it.’141 This reiterates the nature of the
space as completely altered for him in terms of meaning, especially as it forms the stage for future re-
enactments of the joke. Yet it also meant that he could no longer walk the city streets as an honourable
citizen, since it was his sense of self and honour attached to it that had been stripped from him.
Furthermore, Grasso’s constant references to the enigmatic “them” or “they” represent the persistent
presence of the neighbourhood, monitoring and inhibiting his actions and words. This changing face of
the neighbourhood parallels Francesco Alberti’s metaphorical construction of the Florentine streets: ‘“I
137
138
139
140
141
31
see stretching through diverse streets hidden trap-nooses, terrifying and strange, to catch one who,
going over the open plains, passes in danger of slashing swords.”’142 One gathers a sense of the
dangerous undertones contained in Francesco’s words through the city spaces and neighbourhood
gossip, ‘“slashing”’ like ‘“swords”’ at Grasso as he walks through the streets, early in the morning,
desperately avoiding any more encounters. The public and private dimensions in this story thus
become inextricably bound up in the communality of the space; a person’s name and reputation was
literally circulated and reverberated throughout the city streets.143 Space was essentially one of the
many signifiers of a person’s identity. Throughout the story, Grasso ventures into civic spaces he
thought he knew in search of validation and meaning. Without these familiarities, Grasso loses that
sense of belonging intrinsic to social survival in fifteenth century Florence. As a result, Grasso sees no
point in staying in the city because it had changed and essentially turned against him. Deviant
behaviour was seen as the ultimate spectacle, suffocated by the cruel gaze and gossip of the
community.144 In Grasso’s world, ‘‘“Nothing was so private a matter that it lay beyond the reach of the
commune.”’145 There is a profound sense that he was aware of the temperamental nature of a city he
both loved and feared, because for Grasso, ‘the city truly does whisper in the sleeper’s ear place and
identity.’146
The notion of the performance of madness through certain words and behaviour also features in
Manetti’s novella. The story’s characters are illustrated in a way that points to the importance invested
in performance as a crucial deciding factor of social deviance. Throughout the story, each character has
a ‘script’ to follow and the complex interplay of language, gesture and appearance all produce a
142
Alberti, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 162: ‘“Io veggio tesi per diverse strade/occulti lacci, ispaventosi e
strani,/per prender tal, che per li aperti piani/passa a periglio di taglienti spade.”’
143
Martines also highlights this in: An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 228 and Strong Words, p. 208.
144
Weissman, ‘Reconstructing Renaissance Sociology’, p. 40.
145
Daniel Waley, Siena and the Sienese in the Thirteenth Century, (1991), quoted in Martines, An Italian Renaissance
Sextet, p. 256.
146
32
complicated picture of social relations.147 For instance, when Grasso’s punishment begins, ‘Filippo
made a show of being very surprised’ about hearing of his mother’s supposed illness and, in another
part, Matteo is described as ‘playing his part well’.148 Grasso’s performances are also illuminating
components of the drama. Descriptions such as ‘“mad frenzy”’ and ‘“like a man possessed”’ reveal
that these labels were applied based on his behaviour.149 Grasso is aware of the terrifying reality that
faces the deviant and this disturbing prospect is confirmed later in the story when Matteo’s brother
tells the local priest, ‘“For you know that once someone begins to show such signs, even if later he
becomes the most sober person in the world, he’ll be teased and mocked ever after.”’150 The local priest
also informs Grasso of the risks of social deviance, ‘“Among other things, if you brought such a
disgrace upon yourself, you would run the risk of having children taunt you in the streets, and you
would be in trouble and shame all the rest of your life.”’151 This connects with the element of ‘virtù’
because the dishonour brought by having children, who were considered inferior, throw stones would
have been considered a further assault on a man’s masculinity.152 The brothers, the priest and Grasso
all give the same story; it is clear that they understand the gravity of being labelled the social outcast.
And it seems that Grasso’s fears were not wholly unfounded. In 1325, the famous artist Giotto painted
a series of frescos depicting Saint Francis’ life. One particular scene shows two children on the bottom
right and left hand corners holding stones ready to hurl at Saint Francis.153 In another novella, a
character by the name of Taddeo falls in love with a neighbouring noblewoman and becomes the
victim of a cruel beffa. Relatives of the girl punish him to a point where ‘“even his mother would not
have recognized him,” for “he seemed the strangest beast that had ever been seen.”’154 Taddeo flees the
city, appearing like the ‘perfect picture of lunacy’; stark naked and horrifically beaten he luckily
147
Burke, The Historical Anthropology, p. 21 and Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 225.
148
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 174 and 203.
149
Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, for each phrase respectively, p. 177 and 181.
150
151
152
153
See Patricia Lee Rubin’s Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence, (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2007), p. 151.
154
Anton Francesco Grazzini, Le cene, (c. 1549-1584) quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 188.
33
escapes the fate the priest described in Grasso’s story.155 Like in Grasso’s story, his punishment takes
on a distinctly public and theatricalised nature as it is performed in city spaces such as the Mercato
Vecchio.156 Also like Grasso’s case, the perpetrators of the beffa ‘“went throughout Florence, gaily
describing the whole prank, and bringing laughter to all who heard it.”’157 Taddeo’s attackers perform
their own kind ritualistic castigation and flog him in a public square in order to teach him a lesson, and
perhaps also, send a message to onlookers about the dishonour brought on by Taddeo’s actions.158 In a
cultural and social context that prized ‘onore’ and avoided ‘vergogna’ at all costs, Taddeo’s
punishment was a necessary measure and a just form of punishment inflicted on someone who
compromised the honour and respectability of a family of solid standing within the community.159
Taddeo’s story, although fictitious, mirrors Grasso’s case in terms of the social codes that governed
and mediated behaviour in the Florentine community. Both Taddeo and Grasso were seen to have
shown certain ‘“signs”’ and were therefore, unmasked for all to see in a theatrical display of social
deviance.160
The performance of a bestial or animalistic demeanour also make an appearance in Manetti’s text and
reiterate the masculine discourse that dominated social interaction. Grasso, for example, is strongly
advised to ‘“act like a man, not an animal.”’161 Other performances identified as erratic characteristics
of madness appear throughout the story as Grasso ‘“proceeded to wring his hands and roll his eyes up
and down from floor to ceiling”’.162 His consciousness of the treatment he will receive if he continues
his performance of unrestrained passions is communicated when he asks himself, ‘“what shall I say so
155
Grazzini, Le cene, in Martines, Strong Words, p. 188 and 191. The phrase ‘perfect picture of lunacy’ is Martines’. He
also notes that ‘he would have been killed in the streets, we are told, by children and young hired hands....’
156
Martines, Strong Words, p, 191.
157
Grazzini, Le cene, in Martines, Strong Words, p. 188.
158
159
For comments about contextual elements of punishment see Martines, Strong Words, p. 193. See also Edgerton, Pictures
and Punishment, pp. 65-66 and Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of
Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
160
161
162
34
that I won’t be taken for a madman or a fool?”’163 However, the moments where he reveals his true
thoughts meant that Grasso’s private feelings literally became public property. Renaissance individuals
were ‘bound’ by their ‘passions’; their behaviour was constantly mediated by the knowledge that what
they said and did in front of the community was monitored and potentially condemned. This story
contains the spectrum of passions that formed part of the overall dramatic spectacle of Grasso’s loss of
self; emotions such as deep sadness, fear, despair and confusion all feature in this story from Grasso’s
laughing friends to his own sense of hopelessness when he exclaims, ‘“God help me”’.164 In the end,
despite Grasso’s best efforts to conceal his feelings, they were nevertheless recorded in some form and
perpetuated, emphasising the way that identity and the performance of the self went beyond the private
domain and infiltrated the public sphere. These colourful descriptions in the story communicate how
madness was recognised by its bestial, “unmanly” characteristics. The castigation of deviant behaviour
was one that needed to be performed on the streets in order to reinforce notions of acceptable
behaviour and ritually isolate and exclude those who threatened social order. People within the
commune essentially recognised the need to conceal certain ‘“signs”’ and questionable passions in the
name of self-preservation. Grasso’s main punishment was not dissimilar to the ‘pittura infamante’
(‘defamatory portrait’).165 The ‘pittura infamante’ was a late medieval practice whereby anyone who
had fled the city without paying their debts had their names physically inscribed on the Palace of the
Podestà.166 In Grasso’s case, he may not have had his name inscribed on the city walls; however, he
experienced the same kind of punishment as he walked through the city streets. Grasso’s ritual
exclusion is vibrantly illustrated when, in the final scene of this social drama, he ‘mounted the horse
and set out for that city as if he were a hunted man’.167 Grasso’s ‘infamia’ (‘infamy’ or ‘symbol of
163
164
165
Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 15 and p. 75. See also Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 229.
166
Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 75.
167
35
disgrace’) resided in his social sin and, as a result, his final step as the town fool had to be to flee
Florence in a symbolic act of self-imposed exile.168
Manetti’s tale epitomises the dramatic nature of the spectacle of madness through the ‘mean streets’
and cruel gaze of the Florentine community.169 The nature of the space as one that shifted continuously
between notions of public and private reveals how the loss of identity or the self could pose a
particularly dangerous problem. In light of these serious ramifications, Brunelleschi’s prank went
further than sheer ‘“pleasure and entertainment”’.170 Apart from the presence of theatricality and
performance in the story, another theme presents itself to the reader. Manetti’s story represented a
definitive, quite public stamp of group solidarity. But what did this really mean for the victim who
was excluded from this public show of camaraderie? In Grasso’s case it meant a great deal; it was a
public, ritualistic imposition of shame, in which not only his social group was guilty of engineering but
also in which the wider Florentine community also willingly participated. The ritualistic public
shaming of Grasso’s behaviour would have had a strong power not only over the immediate group of
friends, but also over the ‘cittadini’ (‘urban denizens’).171 Grasso was held up as an example of what
happened when men did not honour their patronal obligations, and such a carefully orchestrated prank
was designed to induce a certain level of conformity.172 From another perspective, Grasso endured a
ritualistic and figurative process of emasculation because he exhibited characteristics that deviated
from established social codes concerning the value of ambiguity and façade. Grasso’s nonconformity
was punished and in the end, he bent to the will of his friends and the nature of social and cultural
systems long instilled in Florentine society. In this sense, he fully perceived and understood the gravity
of his social negligence and the shame tagged onto it and, as a result, he performed the only socially
168
For a discussion on ‘infamia’ see Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 60. For an analysis of Grasso’s final act of
‘ritual suicide’ see Martines: An Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 213 and Strong Words, p. 179.
169
Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, p. 85 and p. 105.
170
Brunelleschi uses these words to describe the beffa in Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver, p. 173.
171
172
For ideas on conformity see Martines, Strong Words, p. 194.
36
acceptable act left available to him and fled his community. Manetti’s text reveals how the city spaces
were territories of honour and shame, where physical and psychological warfare took place in order to
claim and reclaim a place in the masculine domain of ‘virtù’.173 Grasso’s musings show that he was
considering not only the possibility that he was going mad, but the fact that he was also permanently
losing a sense of self and identity. Even though the joke had ended, the loss of identity never went
away as his friends continued to re-enact ‘“one episode to another”’, as a kind of perpetual staged
show designed to reaffirm group involvement in this clever prank.174 Thanks to the public and
theatrical nature of the beffa, his disgraced self would perpetuate, encased in an oral tradition that
helped preserve his humiliation. Identities and attitudes were articulated through the city walls, streets
and piazze and social relationships were also constructed, consolidated and destroyed within these
spatial parameters. As a result, the character of Il Grasso became etched into the memory of the
Florentine public, and it seems in our memory too, as Brunelleschi declared, ‘“This will make you
much more famous than anything you ever did...people will still be talking about you in a hundred
years.”’175
Manetti’s reconstruction of Grasso’s social exclusion illustrates that madness could be seen as more
than a condition of the mind; madness in early Renaissance Florence was also seen as a series of
behavioural and verbal attributes classified as categorically deviant. Texts about the ‘strano’ people
not only reveal what behaviour was considered unacceptable in the broader community, but also
illuminate what behaviour was praised and valued and how social encounters were governed by these
behavioural prescriptions.176 These prescribed behavioural codes, stigmatisation and the intensely
hierarchical principles of social networks were mechanisms that juxtaposed acceptable behaviour
against deviance. A person’s incapacity to observe and act out these codes was perceived as behaviour
173
A similar idea about city spaces and ‘demonstrative maleness’ is highlighted in Davis, The War of the Fists, pp. 109-
111. For an analysis of the ‘urban hotspots’ see Strocchia, ‘Theaters of Everyday Life’, p. 61.
174
175
176
A similar point has been made by Lesnick, ‘Insults and Threats’, p. 72.
37
that needed to be publicly mocked and eradicated through a systematic and often cruel process of
stigmatisation and alienation. Other contemporaries also reveal that stigmas associated with deviancy
were predicated on social structures such as ‘fama’, ‘onore’ and ‘vergogna’. The sources in this
analysis show how Renaissance contemporaries delineated and treated the ‘strange’ people, the people
who were seen as somehow not belonging. This sense or consciousness of belonging were culturally
and socially constructed and shifted in meaning and nature over time. Manetti’s tale would never have
been as popular and widely known as it was if it had not mirrored social elements of life in fifteenth-
century Florence.177 His novella is the archetypal example of what happened when social codes of
behaviour were challenged and social bonds tested. Grasso’s story is emblematic of the complex social
mechanisms in place in fifteenth-century Florence that fostered the volatile nature of friendships and
social bonds as entities that engaged in ritualistic processes of exclusion. Grasso’s public social suicide
may have been seen, to a certain extent, as self-inflicted, however, it was also endorsed by a
community that operated based on gossip systems and intimate civic spaces. If Grasso was mad to
have acted the way he did, it was because his friends and neighbours made it so through their
subscription to social and cultural traditions that stressed the centrality of façade. Grasso’s story of
humiliation may strike the twenty-first century reader as inherently cruel, but where there was cruelty
there was also what Renaissance Florentines saw as practicality and perhaps, necessity coupled with
general amusement.178 The beffa was a punitive tool designed to exclude and eliminate those who
transgressed social codes and friends, neighbours and spectators were the moral arbiters.179 Grasso’s
‘pittura infamante’ was not a tangible inscription on a civic building. It was a figurative inscription of
shame and humiliation onto another public space, that is, the common knowledge of the ‘cittadini’ of
Florence. Grasso may not have really become mad since he had discovered that he was still Grasso and
had not really turned into Matteo. This, however, did not matter. In the end, the powerful social and
cultural traditions of fifteenth century Florentine society overruled any attempts to slip back into a
177
The historical value of the novella is also noted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born under Saturn, p. 14, Martines, An
Italian Renaissance Sextet, p. 11, Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, p. 9 and Branca, Merchant Writers, p. xx.
178
Martines presents a similar point in Strong Words, p. 180 and p. 194.
179
Martines also notes this dynamic in Strong Words, p. 193.
38
sense of normality. What was Grasso’s life before and after the beffa were two completely different
things. Madness as a form of deviancy was constructed in this way in order to reinstate certain social
and cultural values. The public castigation of the deviant acted as a didactic mechanism in a way that
ritually instilled the essential traits of social deviance. The processes of social classification and the
precarious nature of social networks may have been a cultural component of Renaissance Italian
society; however, what they also introduce is the motif of the spectacle of madness. This chapter has
outlined the cultural and social framework within which madness was conceptualised as a form of
social deviance through a prescribed code of actions and words. The spectacle and theatrical motif,
which will be explored in the next chapter, instead sets the scene for the performance of madness in a
dramatic ‘Teatro’ del ‘strano’ (‘Theatre’ of the ‘strange’).

39
CHAPTER TWO
Il ‘Teatro’ del ‘Strano’: The Cruel Gaze of the “Public”
Madnesse is nothing else but too much appearing passion.180
~Thomas Hobbes, 1651~
Thomas Hobbes’ statement, though made in a later period, sums up one of the central facets of
madness as social deviance in the Renaissance Italian imagination. This core characteristic of social
deviance, i.e. the display of unbridled passions, is one that pervades primary source material from this
period. This chapter explores how behavioural transgressions were held under a powerful social
microscope and played out as a public ‘transaction’ for all to see in a vibrant ‘Teatro’ del ‘strano’
(‘Theatre’ of the ‘strange’).181 Tomaso Garzoni’s L’ospidale dei pazzi incurabili (1586) demonstrates
how the recognition of madness depended heavily on behavioural elements and the performance of the
self. The previous chapter delved into the social framework of this study, i.e. the system of behavioural
codes that determined what actions were categorised as shameful and the process of stigmatisation that
demarcated those who transgressed these social barriers. This chapter ventures further by exploring the
role that the “stage” of the spectacle and the “performance” of certain behaviour played in the
characterisation of madness as social deviance. Deviant behaviour was construed in such a way that it
was considered disturbing in one sense, and amusingly entertaining in another sense. The spectacle of
madness enabled a dramatic and public process of social derision designed to castigate the deviant.
This ritualistic punishment raises a number of questions in relation to the main text: Why does Garzoni
insist that the ‘pazzi incurabili’ of his hospital be constantly stared at and mocked? This study will
investigate the deep recesses of Garzoni’s ‘Theater of sundrie humors and inclinations’, tune in to the
‘shrill cries and exclamations’ of the ‘abandoned’ and observe those ‘enchanted in braine’ to account
180
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (1651), quoted in Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England
from the Restoration to the Regency, (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 42.
181
I have adapted this particular metaphor, however, the words ‘Teatro’ and ‘strano’ are used by Garzoni to describe his
hospital and its inmates in Garzoni, Opere, p. 252 and p. 261. The term ‘transaction’ is used to describe the nature of
emotions in this period in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe & Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in Gail Kern Paster,
Katherine Rowe & Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of
Emotion, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 18. See p. 2 for a discussion of Renaissance
understandings of emotions as ‘“passions”’. For other discussions of emotions see Robert C. Solomon, ‘The Jamesian
Theory of Emotion in Anthropology’, in Shweder & LeVine, Culture Theory, p. 248.
40
for why spectators responded with ‘risi’ (‘laughter’), ‘maraviglie’ (‘admiration’) and ‘stupirvi’
(‘woonder’).182 This analysis will delve into the meaning behind Hobbes’ statement to account for how
a colourful Florentine imagination fostered a sense that social deviance involved the display of too
much ‘“passion”’.
Tomaso Garzoni’s L’ospidale dei pazzi incurabili is a colourful treatise that locates madness as the
quintessential expression of social deviance. Garzoni was a priest of the Lateran Canon which was an
adjunct of the ‘canonici regolari’ (‘regular canons’) operating in northern Italy in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.183 This order followed a regime based on the rule of Saint Augustine which
included a strictly communal, cloistered and contemplative lifestyle.184 Garzoni’s contemplative
lifestyle led him to produce a text full of an array of humoral theories, classical allegories and
contemporary ‘aneddoti’ (‘anecdotes’) highlighting the complexity of deviant behaviour.185 Garzoni’s
treatise is a mix of moralistic commentary, ‘pseudo-medical’ terminology and contemporary
colloquialism.186 His text has been situated in the genre of the ‘theatrum’, which was a popular literary
form in the sixteenth century.187 The ‘theatrum’ was defined as an encyclopaedia; however, others
interpreted the ‘theatrum’ to signify a piece of literature used to stage the characteristics of
humankind.188 Garzoni’s dynamic approach to madness is embodied by his fictitious hospital of ‘pazzi
incurabili’. He provides twenty-nine ‘discorsi’ (‘discourses’) describing various attributes of
madness.189 He introduces the ‘discorsi’ with a prologue outlining a range of forms of madness. In the
182
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 251: ‘Teatro de’ miei cervelli’, p. 270: ‘odi ed ascolta non le voci, ma i
stridi veri di questi abbandonati’ and p. 254: ‘fra risi e maraviglie’ and ‘stupirvi’. See also Allen Thiher, Revels in
Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature, (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 63.
183
Calabritto, ‘Ambiguous Relation between Word and Image’, p. 97 and Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 99.
184
Calabritto, ‘Ambiguous Relation between Word and Image’, p. 97.
185
The word ‘aneddoti’ appears in Paolo Cherchi’s explanatory premise concerning Garzoni’s stylistic approach in
Garzoni, Opere, p. 247. See also Calabritto, ‘Medical and Moral Dimensions of Feminine Madness’, p. 33.
186
Calabritto, ‘Ambiguous Relation between Word and Image’, p. 97 and p. 98. See also Calabritto, ‘The Subject of
Madness’, p. 81.
187
See Cherchi’s commentary in Garzoni, Opere, pp. 248-249. See also Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 94.
188
Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 94. See also George W. McClure, The Culture of Profession in Late
Renaissance Italy, (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press Inc., 2004), p. 30 and p. 76.
189
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 254.
41
prologue he summons the metaphorical symbolism of his hospital, painting it as an heroicised bastion
for society’s deviants:
…I being amazed and astonished at this their so great folly, after my Theater of sundrie
humors and inclinations, have taken upon me to build this most famous Hospitall, where
the renowned folly of these men may be seene and discerned, written (as it were) in Text
letters, and in chambers of lodgings apart, painted and set foorth by me with so beautifull
and workmanlike prospective, that other Fooles shall flocke about them; and as the Kings
of Fooles, they shall receive an open-mouthed applause of them all....190
This excerpt indicates Garzoni’s recognition of the fundamental difficulty in describing madness as he
appropriates an image of himself as a ‘maestrevole’ (‘masterly’) painter through his use of the verb
‘dipinta’ (‘paint’).191 Garzoni chooses to illustrate it, cloaking it with richly textured metaphorical
imagery and literary tropes. As a result, his text switches between the colourful, allegorical depictions
of the ‘amica de’ buffoni’ (‘friendly and pleasant sort of Buffones’), to the more formal descriptions of
his collection of ‘bizarri e furiosi’ (‘brutish and furious’).192 Garzoni’s segments his hospital patients
both conceptually and physically in order to impose a system of alienation. The broad spectrum of
symbolic behavioural characteristics indicates that he envisages madness to mean more than just a
physical imbalance of the bodily humors. It signified a code of words, gestures and behaviour that
pushed the bounds of social conduct and ventured into the realm of the ‘strano’.
190
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 251: ‘...io, di tanta loro follia stupido ed attonito, mi ponga a fabricare,
dopo il Teatro de’ miei cervelli, questo solennissimo Ospidale, dove la gloriosa pazzia di costoro ha da vedersi a lettere
maiuscole in un camerone appartato, con sì bella e maestrevole prospettiva da me dipinta che gli altri pazzi gli faranno
corona intorno; e, come re de’ matti, riceveranno uno strabocchevole applauso da tutti...’
191
Although Blount translates this word as ‘workmanlike’, the word ‘maestrevole’ could have also been used in this
instance as a variation of the word ‘maestro’ (‘master’). See Pat Bulhosen, Francesca Logi & Loredana Riu, eds., The
Pocket Oxford Italian Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 3rd edn., 2006. Oxford Reference Online,
<http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/views/BOOK_SEARCH.html?book=t66a&subject=s16>
, viewed 24 April 2009.
192
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 251 and p. 252.
42
The characterisation of Italy as a ‘società spettacolo’ (‘theatre society’) is a persistent one in scholarly
research on Renaissance communities.193 In order to fully appreciate how social deviance was
construed as a spectacle, it is necessary to reiterate the central importance of identity and projected
personas. Social façades were ‘performances’, played in a range of spaces as part of a process that both
reaffirmed cultural values associated with behaviour, and reinforced a person’s place in the
community.194 These were not fixed identities and neither were they solely based on this performance
motif.195 The ‘mask’ that was vital to social survival was subject to a cruel gaze which juxtaposed the
honourable man against the ‘social sinner’.196 Despite persistent characterisations of the deviant as odd
and repulsive in some way, the performances in Garzoni’s text reveal that there was a special place
allocated for society’s misfits.197 Another example of this role was the city feasts in Florence in the mid
1400s which included the ‘“triumphal wagon full of madmen”’ paraded through the city streets as
civic entertainment.198 This special role is reflected in Garzoni’s text as he presents an encyclopaedia of
in which different ‘species’ of madness serve as a message to spectators about the treatment of these
individuals.199 Garzoni was writing in an historical context witnessing the rise of the ‘“ospedali degli
incurabili”’ (‘“hospitals of the incurables”’) across Italy.200 The forces of the Catholic Church and
independent lay groups and institutions combined in order to improve these hospitals.201 In Rome in
1548, the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Pietà de’ Pazzerelli was established to care for ‘“all those
193
The term ‘società spettacolo’ appears in Virgilio Titone, La società italiana sotto gli spagnuoli, (1978), quoted and
analysed in Burke, The Historical Anthropology, pp. 10-13. For other interpretations on this motif see: Richard C.
Trexler, ‘Florentine Theatre, 1280-1500. A Checklist of Performances and Institutions’, Forum Italicum, 14, no. 3 (1980),
pp. 454-475, Sharon T. Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 149-177, Cohen, ‘Seen and Known’, p. 392, Martin, Myths of Renaissance
Individualism, p. 18 and pp. 35-36, Strocchia, ‘Theaters of Everyday Life’, p. 55 and Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, p.
93. For another more specific interpretation with this prevalent motif see Davis, The War of the Fists, p. 47.
194
The word ‘performances’ is used in Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, p. 14. See also Ruggiero, Machiavelli
in Love, p. 7.
195
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 8. Similar expression also in Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from
Petrarch to Descartes’, p. 18.
196
The metaphor ‘social sinner’ is appropriated in Martines, Strong Words, p. 180 and 186.
197
Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 125.
198
Trexler, Public Life, p. 255.
199
The word ‘species’ appears in Blount’s introduction in Garzoni, The Hospitall.
200
201
43
who lack brain and who are mad, of any sex and country”’.202 Perhaps these developments are a
testament to the fact that authorities realised they could no longer keep the ‘pazzi’ on the streets in
front of the wider community. In 1561, Pope Pius IV created a bill that commended the Hospital of
Santa Maria della Pietà as a place where ‘“all the mad individuals abandoned and deprived of nay
other help and subsidy may be accepted...in this hospital they may be governed and fed with
everything necessary to them....”’203 Garzoni’s L’ospidale, and indeed two of his other works Il teatro
dei vari e diversi cervelli mondani (1583) (The theatre of the various and disparate brains of the
world) and La sinagoga degli ignorant (1589) (The synagogue of ignorant people), seem to focus on
outlining the essential characteristics of social deviance. Considered in light of the religious turmoil of
the Catholic Reformation that characterised the mid sixteenth century, it is possible that Garzoni’s text
is a conscious attempt to provide a comprehensive list of behaviour that he and by extension, the
Catholic Church, considered inherently offensive.204 At any rate, the widespread popularity of
Garzoni’s text, as it was translated into French and English, attests to the idea that his encyclopaedia
connected with his readership.205 Garzoni’s mode of expression reflected the contemporary vernacular
and contributed to a ‘“discorso generale”’ (‘general discourse’) amidst an intellectual environment
witnessing increased literacy and book buying rates.206 This chapter ventures further than describing
the characteristics of deviant behaviour. Based on the literary and contextual elements outlined above,
Garzoni’s text was a cultural expression of how madness formed a source of voyeuristic pleasure and
entertainment for spectators as much as it was used to systematically punish and ostracise.
Garzoni’s treatise affords an extensive vocabulary outlining deviant behaviour and provides an insight
into how madness may have been conceptualised in the sixteenth century. For Garzoni, his hospital
202
Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 89: ‘“tutti quelli che sono poveri di cervello, e pazzi di qualsivoglia sesso, o
natione”’.
203
This quote is taken from Calabritto, ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 89: ‘“tutti li Matti derellitti et abandonati d’ogni altro
aiuto, et sussidio, siano accettati…nel quale Hospitale siano governati et alimentati di tutto quello gli sarà necessario….’
204
205
Thiher, Revels in Madness, p. 63.
206
McClure, The Culture of Profession, p. 29.
44
served as a haven for ‘many infirme, and naked of wit and understanding’.207 His language implies that
this task is a necessary evil: ‘Considering, I have taken upon my selfe this burden, to manifest to the
worlde, the prodigious and monstrous kindes of folly….’208 His hospital consists of a range of
‘lunatici’ (‘lunatics’), some violent and some an entertaining spectacle.209 Garzoni provides an
extensive list of labels designed to classify madness; his cell occupants ranged from the ‘franticke and
delirant’, ‘melancholike and savage’, ‘ydle and carelesse’, ‘forgetfull and fickle headed’, ‘stupide, lost,
and halfe dead Fooles’, ‘the ridiculous’, ‘the vaine-glorious’, ‘desperate’, ‘heteroclite, light-brained,
and addle-headed’, ‘scoffing Fooles’ to the ‘mischievous or diabolicall Fooles’.210 The behaviour
described is diverse and even includes descriptions of the ‘ubbriachi’ (drunken fools’) as one of the
many forms of ‘follia’ (‘madness/folly’).211 Da Certaldo claimed that drunken behaviour was a serious
threat to a person’s social status because it lessened a man’s ability to judge within reason.212 Garzoni
furthers this concept equates drunken behaviour with a loss of masculinity and honour: ‘Bacchus was
painted in forme of a boy, in that, drunkardes forgoe their wit and understanding, and in womans
forme, because drunkards performe no operation manlike….’213 This gendered perspective implies that
social deviance could often involve a degrading process of emasculation; ‘strange’ behaviour was
unmanly and by default, it was categorically feminine.214 These gendered labels and classifications also
communicate that Garzoni presupposes that the locus of madness resided ‘in every speech, gesture,
word, signe, and action’.215 The deviant was someone who performed in a way that was ‘perversa’
207
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 252: ‘tanto infermi e nudi di ogni senno’.
208
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 254: ‘Dapoi c’ho preso questo carico alle spalle di fare publiche al
mondo le mostruose maniere della pazzia....’
209
210
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 252: ‘frenetici e deliri’, ‘maninconici e selvatici’, ‘scioperati overo
trascurati’, ‘smemorati overo dementi’, ‘stupidi, persi e morti’, ‘ridicoli’, ‘gloriosi’, ‘disperati’, ‘eterocliti, balzani,
stroppiati del cervello overo matti spacciati’, ‘buffoneschi’ and ‘infernale de’ pazzi da mille forche overo del diavolo’.
211
212
Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 31 and Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, pp. 126-127.
213
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 277: ‘...Bacco si dipingeva in forma di putto (perché gli ubbriachi
perdono il senno e l’intelletto); in forma di donna (perché gli ubbriachi non fanno operazione alcuna ch’abbia del
virile)....’
214
For another analysis on the gendered definitions of madness see Calabritto, ‘Medical and Moral Dimensions of
Feminine Madness’, pp. 26-51.
215
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 288: ‘in ogni motto, gesto, parola, cenno ed azione’.
45
(‘perverse’) as much as it was ‘strano’.216 This preoccupation with the perverse is evident through his
sustained figurative construction of madness as a parasitic monster: ‘But now retire a little while the
monster is loosed and fixe your eies steadfastly upon him, if you will wonder at the first sight.’217 This
sustained metaphor is reiterated when he personifies madness as a poisonous female monster, intent on
perverting the qualities held most important to the Renaissance man: ‘…who entering once into the
seate of the braine, she obfuscateth imagination, perverteth conceit, alienateth the minde, corrupteth
reason, and so disturbeth and hindreth a man, that he can neither read, deliver, nor act any thing as he
shoulde doe….’218 Garzoni’s constant shift from disturbing forms of violent behaviour to lighter modes
of folly represents a discrepancy that suggests that madness was seen as a diverse form of social
deviance. His imaginary hospital inmates were those ‘borne into the world to be unquiet, and a
disturber’.219 The articulations of social disquiet and the gendered ideas ingrained in Garzoni’s text
illustrate the concern that existed at the heart of late Renaissance perceptions of madness as social
deviance, and that is, perversion.
Themes of perversion and the gendered nature of Garzoni’s catalogue of ‘pazzi incurabili’ is further
demonstrated when the reader comes across the final section of the hospital, that is, the woman’s
quarter. Although this section comprises the smallest part of the entire text, it is perhaps the most
detailed and divergent description of social deviance. In light of Garzoni’s broad vocabulary for
madness, the labels and imagery served a didactic purpose in not only identifying deviant behaviour
but also in representing it as a perverse parasite. Each woman is described in relation to their behaviour
216
217
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 254: ‘Or ritiratevi alquanto, ch’ei scioglie il mostro. E stato bene con gli
occhi affissi se volete stupirvi al primo tratto.’
218
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 255: ‘La quale, entrado dentro alla casa del cervello, offusca
l’immaginitiva, pervertisce la cogitazione, aliena la mente, corrompe la ragione, impedisce, che l’uomo non discerne,
non elegge, non parla, non opera cosa che sia a proposito....’
219
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 347: ‘nacque al mondo per non riposare e per essere inquieto’.
46
and appointed an ‘impresa’ or symbol to connote their form of madness.220 One Terenzia Sannite is
described in relation to her ceaseless ‘laughter’ and the ‘thousand gestures, with her hands, and eies,
sometimes this way, then that way’.221 Terenzia is characterised according to her bestial behaviour as
she would ‘grunt like an hog’ and told her audience that ‘the occasion of her calling them together,
was to no other ende, but that so noble a grunting belch, might bee honored with so goodly an
assembly as there then was....’222 Terenzia’s ‘impresa’ takes the form of the ‘maschera’ (‘mask’) of the
Commedia dell’Arte character known as Zani, symbolising her role as the hospital’s clown, to be
laughed at and mocked in her cell.223 However, other women, such as Giacoma da Pianzipane are
described in relation to another side of social deviance. Giacoma ‘who is chained to a bedde…is a
certaine beastly foole…who the other day plaide this fine pranke, for a boie comming neere to her to
haue emptied her close stoole, she tooke the pot and laide it on his head, so despitefully, that the poore
lad was three daies after, ere he came to himselfe.’224 The violence present in this description of
deviance, however, is overshadowed when the reader comes across Ostilla Mutinese. Garzoni reserves
the harshest labels for Ostilla and yet he deliberately omits any information about her behaviour. She is
classified as ‘diabolicall, and stuffed vp euen to the verie gorge with all kinde of flagition and
villanie.’225 Garzoni declares her ‘so monstrous and malignant’ that ‘there is no deuise in the world that
can sufficiently expresse her peruerse, wicked, and abhominable nature.’226 Garzoni’s portrait of Ostilla
ventures beyond the bestial madness attributed to Terenzia and Giacoma. Ostilla remains the only
220
Calabritto, ‘Ambiguous Relation between Word and Image’, p. 100 and Monica Calabritto, ‘Women’s Imprese in
Girolamo Ruscelli’s Le imprese illustri (1566)’, in Donato Mansueto & Elena Laura Calogero, eds., The Italian Emblem:
A Collection of Essays, Volume 12, (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2007), pp. 65-67.
221
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 367: ‘…questa volta (non senza risa però) fece mille atti di mani e di
occhi, ora da una parte ora dall’altra….’
222
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 367: ‘rutto da porcella’ and ‘disse che non per altro gli aveva congragati
se non perché un rutto sì gentile fosse onorato da una sì grossa compagnia com’era quella.’
223
Garzoni, Opere, p. 367. See also Calabritto, ‘Ambiguous Relation between Word and Image’, p. 112.
224
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 368: ‘Quella, poi, che sta incatenata presso a quell letto é una certa
matta bestiale…la quale fece l’altr’ieri quella bella botta che, avvicinadosi un garzone a lei per vuotarli la cassa dai suoi
bisogni, presse il pitarro in mano e li menò sul capo di maniera spietatamente che il poveretto é stato più di tre giorni
che non era in lui.’
225
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 370: ‘diabolica e d’ogni cattiverie piena’.
226
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 370: ‘strana e maligna’ and ‘che non é arma al mondo che possa
sufficientemente significare la sua perversa, iniqua ed abominevole natura.’
47
‘foole’ in the entire hospital not described in full, not given an impresa and, as a result, Garzoni
instead leaves the reader with an ominous warning:
So that honourable beholders I conclude thus much, that it were much better for you neuer
to come neere her Cell: for if she doe but perceiue your being here about, make account
that like another Alcina, she will turne you all into beasts, trees, or stones; and instead of
entring into an Hospitall Fooles, you shall finde your selues in that palace, where cursed
destinie transformeth men into Asses, and this is all you might gaine by the sight of her.227
In this passage the ‘monster’ described earlier is personified by Ostilla, the female inhabitant of the
last cell of Garzoni’s grand tour. Ostilla’s ‘strange and enormious properties’ threatened the power
dynamics between the social deviant and her scrutinizers.228 Garzoni chooses to end his tour of the
hospital with a reiteration of the idea that the ‘strana e maligna’ (‘strange and malign’) madwoman
deprived the Renaissance man of reason, and by extension, his authority.229 In general, Garzoni’s
interpretation of what constituted ‘pazzi incurabili’ reveals that the sixteenth century Renaissance
conceptualisation of madness extended beyond social classifications. For Garzoni, madness was not
only a manifestation of social deviance through behaviour; it could also be an illness with humoral
origins physically located in the brain and the rest of the body. In spite of Garzoni’s proclamations of
the opposite, the hospital was not a place where madness was cured or protected; it was a public arena
organised in such a way that displayed the performance of deviant behaviour. The locus of madness
thus resided mainly in the Renaissance man or woman’s behaviour; there existed a system of signs that
illustrated a person’s deviance and forced the social classification of conditions onlookers felt they
could only label as ‘perversa’ and ‘strano’.230
227
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, pp. 370-371: ‘Talché, onorati spettatori, io conchiudo questo, che meglio
sarà per voi non accostarvi a patto alcuno alla sua cella, percioché, se costei s’accorge del vosto star qua attorno, fate
conto che a guisa d’un’Alcina vi mutarà tutti in bestie o in sterpi o sassi, e, in cambio d’essere entrati dentro in un
ospidale da matti, vi trovarete in quel palazzo dove la fata pessima trasforma gli uomini in asini. E questo é quello che da
costei potresti guadagnare.’
228
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 370: ‘strane ed enormi proprietà’. See also Calabritto, ‘Medical and
Moral Dimensions of Feminine Madness’, pp. 42-43.
229
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 370. These words appear in the Blount translation as ‘monstrous and
malignant’.
230
48
This vision of Garzoni’s hospital as a public arena designed to display deviant behaviour conjures up
the spectacle motif, especially in relation to the body. Nakedness and the spectacle of the body play a
prominent role in Garzoni’s conceptualisation of the hospital’s ‘pazzi incurabili’. Stripping one’s
clothing in this context involves more than just a physical action; it connotes a metaphorical
chastisement of the self because it exposes the individual ‘in publico’ (‘to publike view’).231 These
concepts of ritual punishment are nowhere more evident in Garzoni’s text than in the section
designated specifically for women. Garzoni bypasses the token classical anecdote in his consideration
of the ‘misero spettacolo’ (‘miserable spectacle’) and he immediately makes clear the focus of his
demonstration of ‘strano’ behaviour in women.232 It is as if there is a deep-seated fascination with the
spectacle that madness in women proposes; Garzoni fetishizes the madwomen through the language
that he employs: ‘…beholde with your eies, the most ridiculous emploiments of foolish women, that
euer peraduenture you haue seene in the worlde….’233 One woman, Lucilla da Camerino, is described
in relation to the spectacle of her body and the physicality of her condition:
Now this woman about noone time besmeareth all her body ouer, and being naked draweth
heere to the maides of the keepers house, when it is about dinner time, so that all of them
agast at so foule a sight, runne away, and leave the table and meate as a praie to that
rauenous she wolfe, who without any discretion at all, doth in a manner ordinarilie plaie
those prankes, to the children, servants, and all the rest of the house.234
His vision of the ‘foule’ ‘sight’ forms most extreme form of female deviance; it involves one of the
women being completely naked, encompassing the ultimate example of feminine perversion –
immodesty. Perhaps even more compellingly, Garzoni’s graphic description of Lucilla’s nudity as
231
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 350. See also Valesio, ‘The Language of Madness’, p. 203.
232
233
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 357: ‘...farvi vedere con gli occhi propri i più ridicolosi soggetti di
femine pazze ch’abbiate mai per sorte visto al mondo....’
234
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, pp. 362-363: ‘Ora costei da mezzo dì si tinge tutta la persona, e nuda si va
accostando presso alle donne della famiglia del custode, quando sono da mezzogiorno a far collazione, tanto che tutte, di
sì brutta cosa ispaventate, fuggono via e lasciano la mensa in preda a quella lupa che senza discrezione alcuna fa questi
tratti quasi per ordinario, alle puttee ed alle serve ed a tutta la casa.’
49
exhibiting a form of assertiveness represents a further affront to standardised female behavioural
codes. The naked females were ‘strane’ and quintessentially perverse because they emanated an air of
authoritative control over the situation.235 Despite this potential for power, the scenario remains clear,
and that is, the women in Garzoni’s hospital are exposed to the public gaze and are therefore open to
the scrutiny, stigmatisation and ridicule of their spectators. There are some instances where male
nudity is involved; however, Garzoni briefly describes it and moves on to actions and behaviour that
he ranks as more perverse. Contrary to the women’s nakedness, the male cases are set in city spaces
such as market squares, buildings and streets. He gives an example of a man who ‘in the Hospitall of
Milan’ would call ‘straungers to him saying; that he woulde shewe them the valley of Iehosaphat, and
by little and little discouering to them his bare buttockes, he made euery one blush for shame that came
neere him.’236 In another case, Lorenzino of Chioggia:
...would run naked through the market places, discouering all his priuie parts…hee went
through the market place, iustling all those he met withal…he woulde lay at men with
staues & stones, and sometimes (being a matter exceedingly woorth the laughing at) he
woulde disple himselfe vpon the naked buttocks…running after the boies, with the filthie
and stinking bowels, and casting them at those that came about him, like a companie of
birdes about a madge-howlet.237
The ‘Teatro’ of the ‘strano’ was a place, in Garzoni’s imagination, designated for the ‘fooles, who day
by day perform things so strange, fantastical, and vnusuall, that partly for the raritie of them, and partly
for their excesse therein, make anie one laugh that seeth or giueth any eare vnto them….’238 It was a
space that housed those who performed without their obligatory social ‘mask’, and onlookers observed
235
Similar idea in Calabritto, ‘Medical and Moral Dimensions of Feminine Madness’, p. 34 and pp. 40-41.
236
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 295: ‘…nell’ospidale di Milano, che dimandava i forastieri a sé, dicendo
di volergli mostrare la valle di Giosafat; e pian piano scoprendo le natiche, faceva arrossire di vergogna qualunque se
gli accostava.’
237
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 312: ‘…in modo che nudo correva per piazza mostrando tutte le
vergogne; e talvolta, inviluppato in un cestone, andava urtando per piazza tutti quelli che incontrava; talora poi, uscendo
del seminato in tutto, con sassi e con bastoni percoteva le persone; e qualche volta (cosa da ridere fuor di modo) con una
trippa di bue sulle natiche nude si disciplinava in mezo alla piazza, e dopo correva dietro a’ putti con l’intestina marce e
fracide, slanciandole contra quelli ch’erano ridotti intorno a lui come gli ucceletti intorno ad un civettone.’
238
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 299: ‘…pazzi i quali fanno alla giornata certe cose cotanto strane,
inusitate ed insolite che, parte per la novità, parte per l’eccesso, danno da ridere a qualunque le vede overo ascolta.’
50
with fascination the ‘novità’ (‘novelty’) of social deviance.239 Garzoni’s text incorporates the spectrum
of social deviance, from the archetypal figure of the fool, to the ‘wilde and vntamed’ ‘lunatici’; these
outsiders, misfits and eccentric individuals often provided a unique exhibition of human folly.240 In
Garzoni’s hospital hallways, cells and the streets in towns across sixteenth-century Italy, the
performance of social deviance was witnessed, laughed at and categorically scorned in a dynamic
theatre of contemporary life.
Garzoni’s L’ospidale also communicates the theatrical motif and the spectacle of madness through the
metaphorical stage of the hospital. Like Alberti’s ‘“gabbie da pazzi”’ (‘cages for madmen’) described
in the first chapter, Garzoni constructs ‘celle distinte’ (‘distinct cells’) for each ‘foole’ in his hospital.241
He appeals to pagan Gods to ‘permit euerie one to enter within the gates of this Hospitall, that they
may behold the miserie of these vnhappie and infortunate....’242 Acting as a tour guide, Garzoni
manoeuvres his guests through the space and prepares his audience with a statement loaded with
anticipation and wonder. He also depicts his hospital as a kind of freak show, where spectators pay, for
‘no small delight and pleasure’, to view the patients:
The first thing shewed, shall be a monster with many heads, who with his deformity shall
make euerie one amased, neither were Hydra, Medusa, or Python so dreadfull and horrible
as he will be: And then one after another you shall see the palace of the Witch Alcina,
chamber by chamber, full of people enchanted in braine, and transformed with brutish
Metamorphoses into vnreasonable and sottish folke, where betweene laughter and
admiration, euerie one shal thinke his nine-pence well spent, departing well satisfied with
the Author, who with new Magicke will hereafter represent vnto you the castle of Atlas full
of Dawcocks, and he will labour to conduct you thither in safety by Logistilla, giuing you
239
240
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 334: ‘furibondi e bestiali’.
241
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 252. See also Calabritto, ‘Medical and Moral Dimensions of Feminine
Madness’, p. 33.
242
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 252: ‘...che lasci entrare ciascuni dentro alla porta di questo ospizio per
vedere la miseria di questi infelici e sfortunati.’
51
Angelicaes ring in your hand, by meane whereof, discouering other mens follies, you may
shew your selues the wiser.243
The opening of hospitals to the public was not a figment of Garzoni’s imagination. In 1575, the
Hospital of Santa Maria della Pietà opened its doors for public viewing to raise money and patients
were taken out for a ‘“passeggiata”’ (‘“stroll”’) in the streets of Rome.244 This exhibition was designed
to spur philanthropic feeling from those who witnessed the spectacle, however, it also provided a stark
reminder of what happened to those who performed deviant behaviour or, in sixteenth century terms,
those who revealed too much ‘“passion”’.245 This phenomenon and the above excerpt communicate the
contradictory perception of the spectacle of social deviance. In one sense it was seen as a wonderful
and potentially amusing sight, but in another sense, it was seen as inherently disturbing. Garzoni thus
paradoxically envisages it as something that needed to be contained and separate from the broader
community, and at the same time, something that was paraded and open for general amusement.
Through the inclusion of mythical allegories and anecdotes, his text lingers between historical drama
detailing fictitious and actual events, and the contemporary reality underlining sixteenth-century
perceptions of madness.
The main theatrical feature of this text is the performers, or cast, featured in the ‘Theater of sundrie
humors and inclinations’. Garzoni illustrates the performative elements of madness through his
emphasis on behaviour, words and actions. The ‘pictures of true folly’ were those who performed
actions categorised as ‘strano’ and this is represented when he describes the second discourse of
243
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, 253: ‘non picciol diletto e piacere’ and p. 254: ‘La prima cosa che si
mostrarà sarà un mostro di più teste, che farà stupire ogni uno con la sua difformità: né l’Idra, né Medusa, né Pitone
furono così orribili e spaventosi, come sarà questo. E poi, di mano in mano, si farà vedere il palazzo della fata Alcina a
camera per camera, pieno di gente incantata nel cervello e trasmutata con bestiale metamorfosi in gente stupida ed
irrazionale; dove che, fra risi e maraviglie, ognuno s’allegrarà d’averci speso vinti soldi, partendo sodisfatto
dall’auttore, che non nuova magia vi rappresentarà il castello d’Atlante pieno di balordi, e cercarà di condurvi a
salvamento da Logistilla, dandovi in mano l’anello d’Angelica, per lo cui mezzo, scoprendo le pazzie degli altri, tanto più
saggi vi dimostriate.’
244
Calabritto, ‘Medical and Moral Dimensions of Feminine Madness’, p. 34 and p. 48 and Calabritto, ‘The Subject of
Madness’, p. 90.
245
Calabritto notes the charitable purpose of the ‘“passeggiata”’ in ‘The Subject of Madness’, p. 90.
52
‘franticke and doting Fooles’.246 This section calls to mind the notorious figure of the fool and is
personified by ‘one Santino of Tripalda’ who interrupted a conference of scholars in the University of
Padoa to claim he had ‘more wit, then al the doctors, & schollers that were in Padoa’.247 Amidst the
‘laughter’ from the scholars, Santino:
...all in iesting manner consenting therevnto, and crying out with a liuely voice, long liue
Santino of Tripalda…comming downe from the pulpit or readers place, turning to all the
assemblie hee saide: Friends and companions, euery one performe his part, and I giue you
place, in the lecture following I meane to returne to my towne of Tripalda, doctorized thus
by your grace, and fauour….248
In another discourse Garzoni describes the ‘grosse and three elbowed fooles’ who specialise in
‘vttering iestes that procure laughter, and playing their prankes out of all season’.249 In the twelfth
discourse, Garzoni examines those ‘fooles’ who did not ‘procure laughter’ and performed deviant
behaviour considered more disturbing than entertaining. He reveals how social deviance involved the
violation of social codes and the neglect of the imperative social mask through the story of ‘a certaine
vicious foole’ who was:
...standing one day at a window, and seeing a faire yoong maide in an other right ouer
against him, as if in an instant hee had beene enflamed with her loue, he saide to her,
Signora lei volete bene ad io? Ladie will it please you my heate to coole? Signor no,
perché sete un sier Mattio: No sir, said she, bicause you seeme but a foole: then he replied;
Lasciatemi adunque fare il fatto mio: Let me yet furbish you with my toole.250
246
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 256: ‘ritratto di vera stultizia’ and p. 261: ‘De’ pazzi frenetici e
deliranti’.
247
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 264: ‘che più cervello avevano i buoi dalla Tripalda che quanti dottori e
scolari erano in Padoa.’
248
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 264: ‘E consentendo tutti per burla, e gridando ad una voca «Viva
Santino dalla Tripalda» (per essersi dato nel ragionamento a conoscere per tale) esso smontò del pulpit e, voltatosi a
tutta quella brigata, disse: «Compagni, ciascuno faccia la sua parte; io vi lascio la catedra vuota; in sequenti lectione io
tornerò alla Tripalda addottorato per grazia vostra».’
249
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 338: ‘De’ matti sperticati o di tre cotte’ and ‘dicendo botte da far ridere,
e facendo cose mattesche non troppo secondo il tempo’.
250
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 295: ‘D’un certo matto vizioso si racconta questa: che un giorno fattosi a
una finestra e visto all’incontro una certa giovane bella, quasi che in un tratto fosse acceso del suo amore, disse verso di
lei: «Signora lei volete bene ad io?» E quella rispose: «Signor no, perché sete un sier Mattio». Ed esso contrarispose:
«Lasciatemi adunque fare il fatto mio».
53
This excerpt also illustrates the intimate nature of the city spaces. The woman in this story is kept
away from the masculine domain of the public streets, however, her visibility is evident as the ‘vicious
foole’ is able to view and communicate with her through a window. This ‘foole’ was ‘vicious’ because
he spoke disrespectfully to an unmarried woman in the streets and in doing so, he violated the social
codes that monitored and controlled male and female interaction. In keeping with the social ‘mask’,
the fool symbolised the masked figure who vibrantly unveiled the reality of human error and folly.251
The fool discarded the all-important social codes designed to mediate behaviour and acquired a special
status as both an appreciated entertainer and an isolated freak. Garzoni’s Santino of Tripaldo and that
‘certaine vicious foole’ both embodied the fool who did not respect ‘time, place, persons, nor a
thousand other necessarie circumstances.’252 They recognised the value in performance and the idea
that ‘ciascuno faccia la sua parte’ (‘euery one performe his part’).253 However, the fool also
symbolised the quintessential ‘social sinner’, all the while playing a vital role in a society that both
laughed at and condemned him.
The text’s literary genre and its variable nature of expression, provide a critical insight into how
madness may have been translated as a form of social deviance during the latter part of the
Renaissance period. Decades before the supposed imposition of confinement in the seventeenth
century, Garzoni wrote about the institutional isolation of the deviant in a way that contradicts
romanticised views that the Renaissance witnessed the liberation of the mad.254 Garzoni’s hospital
patients did not just include those who, in their town, were considered the archetypal social deviants.
Garzoni’s hospital maps more expansive territory to include those who were literally “incurable” and
performed violent actions against themselves and other individuals. Garzoni’s systematic
251
For a thorough analysis of the figure of the fool see Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly During the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 1-3.
252
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 338: ‘...non risguardando (come dico) al tempo né a luogo né alle
persone né a mill’altre circostanze necessarie.’
253
Garzoni, The Hospitall and Garzoni, Opere, p. 264. This can also be translated as ‘everyone plays their part’.
254
Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 38 and p. 64. However, Foucault also acknowledges Garzoni’s early vision on p.
35.
54
stigmatisation of deviant behaviour promoted a vision of the ‘strano’ as a condition that extended
beyond the inherited ideological and classical definitions of madness. He presents a paradoxical
picture of his hospital patients; they incited amusement coupled with a sense of danger. Both cases
display a voyeuristic preoccupation in a way that reveals how madness was defined from the point of
view of the spectator or the socially designated “sane” person. This brings up yet another aspect of
madness – the nature of personal agency. Garzoni dismisses any traces of personal agency and
authority through the power of language. He depicts the patients as he wishes to see them, as
‘perversa’, ‘strano’ or as a ‘novità’. Despite of the absent voice of his ‘pazzi incurabili’, the situations
reveal that they had some agency even though much of it is filtered through the descriptions of the
viewer. Yet another dominant theme is presented to the reader in relation to both Manetti’s and
Garzoni’s texts. A heavily gendered conceptualisation of madness flows throughout these texts.
Manetti illustrates the dominating role that men played in public civic spaces in fifteenth-century
Florence through the male-centred nature of friendship networks. In Garzoni’s text, there is a decisive
division between madness as experienced by men as opposed to madness experienced by women as he
automatically transforms his manner of expression when describing the female section of his fictitious
hospital. Ultimately, Manetti’s depiction of Florence’s ‘mean’ spaces and Garzoni’s fortress for the
‘pazzi incurabili’ both offer interpretations of spaces as public arenas designed to exhibit the typical
features of the social deviant.
In closing, Garzoni’s ‘pazzi incurabili’ reflect those members of Renaissance Italian society who were
unmasked in a theatrical display of social deviance and in front of the ubiquitous cruel gaze of the
broader community. This chapter has traced the ways that Garzoni’s sixteenth century anthology of
deviance actively recognised and exploited the theatrical value of figurative and tangible spaces such
as hospital hallways and the body. This theatrical motif was integral to the cultural and social
landscape and facilitated the projection of a range of identities that the wider community both
55
commended and occasionally shunned. Garzoni’s treatise communicates the power of language as a
classificatory mechanism; he determines the definition of deviance, from the ‘diabolica’ (‘diabolicall’),
to the ‘sfrenata’ (‘wilde’) and the ‘diavolosa’ (‘diuelish’) ‘fooles’.255 The power dynamic invoked by
the spectacle of madness is represented by how these designated social deviants were sometimes
transformed into a spectacular freak show, exhibiting behaviour, words and gestures that served a
moral lesson to all those who witnessed their humiliation. The social disquiet reveals that underneath
the conception of madness as an entertaining spectacle resided a darker expression of deviance.
Garzoni’s “incurable” patients were a personification of social disorder. His patients inhabited the
metaphorical space of the hospital cell where their behaviour was dramatically spotlighted in such a
way that emphasised their perversion. In this sense, the ‘novità’ of madness coincided with the
underlying chaotic dangerousness that the social deviant posed for the broader community. One
compelling feature raised by the first two chapters, and perhaps a perplexing problem for the study of
madness, is the notion that the worst outcome that madness posed for Renaissance Italian individuals
was not so much the experience of the condition. Instead, the most devastating element associated with
madness was its social consequences; social deviance and its nature as a theatrical spectacle resulted in
the destruction and censure of the self. The spectacles of madness analysed in chapters one and two
have relayed the vast ‘urban production’ that facilitated the performance of behaviour and identities.256
This particular study has demonstrated how the spectacle motif often embellished conceptions of
madness and set the scene for the performance of social deviance in a dramatic ‘Teatro’ del ‘strano’.
255
256
Martines uses the word ‘urban production’ in Strong Words, p. 174.
56
CHAPTER THREE
‘La Gran Follia’: The Genius of Melancholy?
...I came a little out of my melancholy, or rather my madness....257
~Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1525~
Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning....[I]f it
should be necessary that it does issue from Saturn, I shall, in agreement with Aristotle, say
that this nature itself is a unique and divine gift.258
~Marsilio Ficino, 1476~
The image of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s complex and troubled personality has plagued popular
notions of the Renaissance artistic genius. Implicit in these characterisations is the romanticised
conclusion that without Michelangelo’s moody moments, he would not have produced what was, and
still is, widely regarded as some of the most beautiful artworks in European history. Yet his offhand
statement and the melancholic persona that ensued, communicates one colourful trope that dominates
humanist literature and theory in this period. Various sources illustrate that melancholy was seen as a
condition that induced exceptional intellectual qualities and one that became increasingly synonymous
with madness. For Renaissance humanists, ‘la gran follia’ (‘the great folly’) represented a form of
madness that was acceptable in certain social contexts and, to a certain extent, a desirable quality.259
Michelangelo’s conflation of melancholy and madness, although minor, indicates an illuminating
linguistic slip-up. Although Michelangelo’s use of the word ‘pazzo’ should not be taken as a true
reflection of his state of mind, it nevertheless betrays the underlying perceptions of melancholy’s
257
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Letter to Sebastiano del Piombo, (May, 1525), quoted in Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 662:
‘...usci’ um pocho del mio malinchonicho, o vero del mio pazzo....’ This letter also appears in a different translation in
E.H. Ramsden, ed., The Letters of Michelangelo Volume I & II, E.H. Ramsden, trans., (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1963), volume 1, Letter no. 170, p. 160: ‘I emerged a little from my depression, or rather from my obsession.’ See
also Wittkower & Wittkower, Born under Saturn, p. 74: ‘…it drew me forth a little from my melancholy, or shall we call
it my mad mood….’
258
Marsilio Ficino, Letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti, (1476), quoted in George W. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in
Italian Humanism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 150. Also in Ficino, Three Books on Life, p. 20 and
p. 22.
259
The phrase ‘la gran follia’ appears in Grassi & Lorch, Folly and Insanity, p. 93. The idea of madness as a ‘compliment’
or desirable quality is also pointed out in Porter, Madness: A Brief History, p. 66.
57
association with madness.260 This perception of melancholy and its link with madness will be
demonstrated first by examining the inherited classical theories responsible for instigating this motif.
This analysis will then delve into Renaissance Italian texts that propagated the idea of creative
madness, with particular attention to Marsilio Ficino’s characterisation of the ‘divine gift’ of
melancholy. In order to fully illustrate Ficino’s influence, this chapter will survey specific examples of
how certain artistic and literary figures of the age possessed the ‘gift’ or at least reflected on the issue
of melancholy in their work. At this point it is important to recognise that melancholy, as delineated in
classical literature and the early modern period, signified a great many things and did not necessarily
solely refer to the notion of intellectual brilliance. Furthermore, it should also be noted that there is a
noticeable absence of women in contemporary evaluations of the illness indicating that the
melancholic genius was categorised as uniformly male.261 Aside from the gendered exclusivity, two
things are clear when it comes to Renaissance interpretations: one is the emergence of the notion of
intellectual and creative brilliance of the melancholic individual, and the second is that melancholy has
closely been associated with or defined as a type of madness. The previous chapters on social deviance
and the spectacle have shown how madness in Renaissance Italian societies was recognised based on
social codes that spotlighted behaviour that was ‘strano’. This chapter turns the conception of madness
as social deviance on its head. It shows how ‘pazzia’ and ‘follia’ occupied two facets of the same
general idea: madness could be the dark, chaotic expression of deviance and simultaneously represent
coherent, transcendental wisdom itself.262 It explores the ways that Ficino’s ‘sick and invalid scholars’
could be construed in a positive light, and how popularised views of melancholy as a form of sublime
madness immortalised key intellectual, literary and artistic figures of the Italian Renaissance.263
260
Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 662. Also pointed out in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born under Saturn, p. 101.
261
Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance
Literature, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 3 and p. 110.
262
Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 13 and p. 35 and Foucault, History of Madness, pp. 28-35. Midelfort notes
Foucault’s view of madness as both a negative and positive condition in ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern
Europe’, p. 250.
263
The words ‘sick and invalid scholars’ are Ficino’s in Three Books on Life, p. 109.
58
Firstly, it is important to outline the ideological foundations of Renaissance thought on melancholy
along with how it came to be associated with exceptional talent and creativity. Although the purpose of
this essay is not to go into detail about humoral theory, it is necessary to explore the inherited cultural
and medical perceptions of melancholy and more generally, madness.264 Theories on the nature of
melancholy can be traced to Hippocratic conceptions of the four humors. Hippocrates concluded that
the locus of melancholy was in the black bile humor and resulted from an ‘“excess”’ or general
‘imbalance’ in the humors.265 The Roman philosopher, Galen, later adapted and developed Hippocratic
theory to conclude that melancholy went beyond the physiological origins, was related to
‘temperament’ and should be included amongst the ‘psychological complexions’.266 Other ancient texts
termed it as a ‘“disease of heroes”’ and key figures, such as Seneca, declared ‘“there never has been
great talent without some touch of madness”’.267 Apart from humoral interpretations, Platonic theory
delineated the nature of poetic genius as one who possessed the ‘“divine frenzy”’ (‘“mania”’) of
inspirational madness, later termed ‘“furor”’.268 Aristotle, who reiterated humoral features of
melancholy, however, was the first to connect melancholy with genial ability illustrating it as a form of
‘good madness’.269 Aristotle opened his Problemata with a crucial question concerning the nature of
melancholy: ‘“Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or
the arts are clearly melancholics, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases
caused by black bile?”’270 Aristotle also implied that melancholy somehow improved intellectual and
264
A similar point is made in Jennifer Radden, Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression, (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 5.
265
Neaman, Suggestion of the Devil, p. 7, Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 3, Salkeld, Madness and drama in
the age of Shakespeare, p. 20 and Radden, Moody Minds Distempered, p. 5.
266
Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 97, Salkeld, Madness and drama, p. 23 and Radden, Moody Minds
Distempered, p. 5.
267
For the term ‘“disease of heroes”’ see Gellius, Noctes Atticae, XVIII, quoted in Klibansky, Panofsky & Saxl, Saturn and
Melancholy, p. 16. For the Seneca’s quote see Wittkower & Wittkower, Born under Saturn, p. 99: ‘“nullum magnum
ingenium sine mixture dementiae fuit”’.
268
Plato, The Symposium, M.C. Howatson & Frisbee C.C. Sheffield, eds., M.C. Howatson, trans., (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 21, Porter, Madness: A Brief
History, p. 66, Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 101 and pp. 103-104 and Klibansky, Panofsky & Saxl,
Saturn and Melancholy, p. 17.
269
The phrase ‘good madness’ appears in M.A. Screech, ‘Good Madness in Christendom’, in W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter &
Michael Shepherd, eds., The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Volume 1, (London and New
York: Tavistock Publications, 1985-1988), p. 35.
270
Aristotle, Problemata, XXX, I, reproduced in Klibansky, Panofsky & Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 18 and Jennifer
Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
59
creative endeavours: ‘“But many, because the heat is near to the seat of the mind, are affected by the
diseases of madness or frenzy, which accounts for the Sibyls, soothsayers, and all inspired
persons....Maracus, the Syracusan, was an even better poet when he was mad....”’271 Platonic,
Aristotelian and Galenic thought pervaded early Christian thought and remained widely available
sources of information to the learned men of the Renaissance.272 These classical notions shifted
between conceptions of melancholy as a pathological condition and a character attribute. They
consequently transformed the mythical status of the mad genius into something far more tangible, and
contributed to an important conception adopted and promoted by Renaissance intellectuals, i.e. that all
great men were inevitably melancholic.
Aside from the ideological foundations of melancholy and its associations with ‘divine’ madness,
Marsilio Ficino’s De triplici vita (1482-1489), has been generally acknowledged as the most
influential of all texts on melancholy in this period.273 Ficino’s perspective, as both a self-diagnosed
sufferer of melancholy and a commentator on the causes and effects of the illness, offers a unique
portal into the Renaissance conception of melancholy and the ‘mente divina’ (‘divine mind’).274 In
Book I, Ficino furthers Aristotelian notions of genius and melancholy to imply that there was not just a
link between the two; the genius was fabricated and shaped by the melancholic humor of black bile. In
defining melancholy as a character type, Ficino elevated the ‘“vita contemplativa”’ (‘speculative life’)
2000), p. 57. This text has been attributed to one of Aristotle’s followers, Theophrastus; however, the general consensus
is that the work is at the very least, Aristotelian in nature. For a discussion of the authorship of this source see Winfried
Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance, (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz,
1991), p. 20 and Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, p. 55.
271
Aristotle, Problemata, XXX, I, in Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, p. 58. Also in Klibansky, Panofsky, Saxl, Saturn
and Melancholy, p. 24 and pp. 36-37.
272
This influence is noted in Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Training in Italian
Universities after 1500, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 15 and Thiher, Revels in Madness, p. 45.
273
For Ficino’s widespread influence see Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia, p. 26, Wittkower & Wittkower, Born
Under Saturn, p. 98, Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 115 and p. 160 and Angus Gowland, ‘The Ethics of
Renaissance Melancholy’, Intellectual History Review, 18, no. 1 (March, 2008), p. 107.
274
Ficino, Three Books on Life, p. 242 and p. 243.
60
into a domain accessed by the privileged few.275 However, this life came at a price; the gifted
intellectual faced the persistent reality of ‘furiososque’ (‘madness’).276 This mutual dependence of
‘melancholicis’ (‘melancholy’) and ‘divinum furorem’ (‘divine madness’) is illustrated when Ficino
cites his theoretical influences:
This Aristotle confirms in his book of Problems, saying that all those who are renowned in
whatever faculty you please have been melancholics. In this he has confirmed that Platonic
notion expressed in the book De scientia, that most intelligent people are prone to
excitability and madness. Democritus too says no one can ever be intellectually
outstanding except those who are deeply excited by some sort of madness. My author Plato
in the Phaedrus seems to approve this, saying that without madness one knocks at the
doors of poetry in vain. Even if he perhaps intends divine madness to be understood here,
nevertheless, according to the physicians, madness of this kind is never incited in anyone
else but melancholics.277
Ficino not only derived his theories from Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, he added Christian and
astrological embellishments claiming that all melancholics were born under Saturn.278 Aside from
astrological elements, Ficino highlighted the humoral causes of melancholy stating that melancholics:
...are compelled to secrete...black bile, which they call melancholy...melancholy, if it is too

abundant or vehement, vexes the mind with continual care and frequent absurdities and
unsettles the judgement. Hence it can justly be said that learned people would even be
unusually healthy, were they not burdened by phlegm, and the happiest and wisest of
mortals, were they not driven by the bad effects of black bile to depression and even
sometimes to folly.279
It has been suggested that Ficino consolidated classical and astrological notions in order to produce a
theory of the melancholic genius that fostered a specific ‘ego-formation in men.’280 The notion of
275
Klibansky, Panofsky & Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 243. See also, McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, p. 149. The
words ‘“vita contemplativa”’ can also be translated as ‘“contemplative life”’.
276
Ficino, Three Books on Life, p. 116.
277
Ficino, Three Books on Life: for the Latin terms see p. 116 and for the latter quote see p. 117.
278
Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, p. 13.
279
Ficino, Three Books on Life, p. 113.
280
Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 16.
61
Ficino’s motive to include himself amongst the talented is clear in one letter to his friend, Niccolò
Michelozzi. In it, he concludes that he seems ‘“to have gone mad” in the manner of the inspired poet
or philosopher.’281 This and the concept of ‘ego-formation’ invoke the consistent absence of any female
figures from classical and Renaissance theories on melancholy; it was a heroic condition reserved for
the learned man. In any case, Ficino’s main achievement was that he resurrected the melancholic and
black bile and instigated a renewed interest in the intellectual value of the sufferer. For him,
melancholy was a condition that hovered between despair and aesthetic pleasure, between madness
and divine inspiration.282 His personal experience with the illness and conception of it as a ‘unique and
divine gift’ meant that he fashioned melancholy into an ‘elite “illness”’, and propelled it into a cult
status that was to continue for generations to come.283
Ficino’s text formed one of the foundations of Renaissance conceptions of what it meant to be a
“melancholic” and his outline of the physiological and temperamental characteristics permeated other
Italian texts, demonstrating how the trope of genial melancholy gained momentum throughout this
period. These texts contain a designated vocabulary for melancholy that recognised a connection
between melancholy and madness. Adjectives such as ‘strano’, ‘salvatico’ (‘wild’, ‘antisocial’),
‘bizzarro’ (‘bizarre’), ‘capriccioso’ (‘capricious’), ‘stravagante’ (‘extravagent’), ‘grottesche’
(‘grotesque’) and ‘fantastico’ (‘fantastical’) all illustrate this connection.284 However, they also
illuminate how melancholy was seen exclusively as a disease inflicted upon those of exceptional
intellectual and creative potential. The Florentine theologian Fra Giovanni Maria Tolosani, outlined
the typical features of the melancholic in a poem in 1514 and, in doing so, contributes to a popular
perception of the melancholic genius:
281
Ficino, Letter to Niccolò Michelozzi, (c. 1476), quoted in McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, p. 150.
282
Schiesari makes a similar point in The Gendering of Melancholia, pp. 125-126.
283
For the term ‘elite “illness”’ see Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 7. This is also noted in McClure, Sorrow
and Consolation, p. 150 and Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, p. 37. Schiesari also notes that Ficino’s work
was widely popular amongst the ‘social and cultural elite of the Renaissance’ in The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 115.
284
Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 666. See also, Giovanni Battista Armenini, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting,
Edward J. Olszewski, ed., and trans., (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., Inc., 1977), Book I, chapter vi, pp. 121-122.
62
The melancholic is cold and dry

Like earth, and always has a bitter heart;
He is pale and spare and seems lost,
And he is mean, grasping and miserly:
He lives in anguish, grief, pain, and mourning,
And for his sickness there is no remedy:
He is solitary, and seems like a monk,
Is without friends, and has a fantastical mind.285
In this excerpt, other characteristics are introduced, shifting the locus of melancholy from
physiological elements endorsed by classical and medieval writers, to demeanour and character traits.
Moreover, the romanticised perception of the solitary melancholic intellectual in despair is also
depicted; the melancholy sufferer underwent a transcendental state of self-imposed ‘alienatio’
(‘alienation’).286 Aristotelian theories claiming that melancholy somehow enhanced creative talent
appears both explicitly and implicitly in various Renaissance Italian texts. This is not to say that there
were not critics of this perception. Later in the period, contemporaries began to question the ideas of
genial melancholy propagated by Ficino and, in 1586, the painter Giovanni Battista Armenini
proclaimed that:
An accursed abuse has entered into the minds of ordinary people, and perhaps even of the
learned, to whom it seems as it were natural that one cannot be an excellent painter, unless
one is sullied with some ugly and unspeakable vice, and, on top of that, possessed by a
capricious and fantastical humour caused by many peculiarities of the brain.287
285
Fra Giovanni Maria Tolosani, ‘La Nuova Sfera’, (1514), Book II, stanza 30, quoted in Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p.
656.
286
For the term ‘alienato’ see Gowland, ‘The Ethics of Renaissance Melancholy’ p. 107.
287
Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura, (1586), quoted in Christopher Allen, ‘Caravaggio’s
Complexion: The Humoral Characterization of Artists in the Early Modern Period’, Intellectual History Review, 18, no. 1
(March, 2008), p. 61: ‘è entrato un maledetto abuso ne gli animi delle genti volgari, e forsi anco de’ savii, a i quali par
come naturale che non possa esser pittor molto eccellente, che non sia macchiato di qualche brutto e nefando vizio e che,
appresso, non sia accompagnato da un umor capriccioso e fantastico per molte bizzarie di cervello.’ See also Armenini,
On the True Precepts, Book III, chapter xv, p. 274.
63
Armenini further claimed that the painters of the day did not achieve ‘greatness and fame’ through
their ‘capricious and eccentric’ temperament.288 Additionally, his advice was to ‘keep far away from
the vices of madness and incivility.’289 Despite these oppositions, Armenini’s cynical perspective
seems to constitute the voice of the minority in the Renaissance humanist world of literature and the
arts. In these contemporary texts, the special vocabulary for the melancholic as ‘fantastical’ and
‘capricious’ is repeated and it suggests that melancholy was more than just a debilitating illness with
humoral origins. The consistent use of the word ‘complexion’ indicates that melancholy was perceived
to be much more than an illness in the ‘brain’ or ‘mind’; it was not an acquired physical torment of the
mind, it was a natural temperament that encouraged intellectual brilliance.290 In contemporary
depictions of the melancholy, there is a consistent struggle between physiological explanations and
temperamental and behavioural attributes. However, they demonstrate that melancholy had, by the late
fifteenth century, well and truly entered the Renaissance humanist consciousness as a ‘unique and
divine gift’.
Aside from contemporary interpretations and analyses of melancholy, it is necessary to assess the ways
that it was, both as an illness and character type, ascribed to artistic figures of the day. The topos of the
wilful heteroclite appears in numerous Renaissance biographies, novelle, letters and chronicles. Before
turning to Michelangelo, the greatest melancholic of them all, there are interesting connections
between madness or melancholy and certain other artistic figures. In one tale featured in Francesco
Sacchetti’s Il Trecentonovelle, a painter’s wife alluded to the nature of the melancholic artist: ‘“You
painters are all whimsical and of ever-changing mood; you are constantly drunk and are not even
288
Armenini, On the True Precepts, Book III, chapter xv, p. 278.
289
Armenini, On the True Precepts, Book III, chapter xv, p. 278.
290
The term ‘complexion’ is quoted in Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 653 and in Gowland, ‘The Ethics of Renaissance
Melancholy’, p. 103. This term is also used to describe melancholics or those of ‘sanguine complexion’ in Garzoni, The
Hospitall.
64
ashamed of yourselves!”’291 However, no other text illustrates the extent of the topos of the
melancholic artistic genius better than Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et
scultori Italiani (1550). The language used to describe the artists re-emphasise the vocabulary
designated for the melancholic genius, however, words such as ‘bizarro’, ‘grottesche’ and ‘fantastico’
imply different meanings. When Vasari applied this vocabulary to artworks, it contained positive
connotations. Conversely, when he used them to describe behavioural and temperamental attributes, it
contained negative undertones.292 One example of this paradoxical application is when he describes the
work of Florentine painter, Piero di Cosimo. Piero’s ‘wildly inventive and fanciful’ disposition
enabled ‘grandiose and ingenious’ artistic creations that exhibited unique ‘freakish, bizarre, and
fantastic’ characteristics.293 However, the ‘strangeness of Piero’s mind’ meant that ‘through his brutish
ways he was rather held to be a madman’.294 Similarly, another painter, Graffione Fiorentino, is
described as being ‘“a bizarre and fantastic person.”’295 The common depiction of the melancholic as a
solitary figure also appears in numerous character portraits of contemporary artists. Vasari attributes
this tendency for ‘solitude’ to Piero di Cosimo, Jacopo Pontormo and Francesco Salviati.296 Leonardo
da Vinci reflected on the solitary nature of the artist, reinforcing the myth of the lone melancholic
genius and the ‘“vita contemplativa”’: ‘“the painter must live alone, contemplate what his eye
perceives and commune with himself”’.297 Girolamo Borselli Bolognese wrote a chronicle on the
sculptor Niccolò dell’Arca exposing how he ‘“...did not want to have pupils nor to teach anybody. He
was strange and had barbaric manners; he was so rough that he repulsed one and all. As a rule he
lacked even the necessities of life; being pig-headed, he never accepted the council of friends.”’298
Vasari also describes Bolognese painter Amico Aspertini as possessing ‘un capriccioso e pazzo
291
Francesco Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, (late fourteenth century), quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under
Saturn, p. 14.
292
Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 666. See also Bernard Mc Elroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, (Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press, 1989), p. 1.
293
Vasari, Lives, Vol II, p. 108 and p. 111.
294
Vasari, Lives, Vol II, pp. 110-111.
295
Giorgio Vasari, Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, (1550), quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower,
Born Under Saturn, p. 71.
296
Vasari, Lives, Vol II, p. 105, p. 256 and p. 289.
297
Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 64.
298
Girolamo Borselli Bolognese, quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 68.
65
cervello’ (‘a capricious and crazy brain’).299 Aspertini’s madness, it seems, went beyond his behaviour
and into his work as he painted figures considered ‘pazze e capricciose’ (‘mad and capricious’) before
he finally became ‘bestialissimamente impazzo’ (‘bestially crazed’) in his later years.300 The bestial
decent of the artistic genius is also colourfully expressed in Vasari’s account of Francesco Mazzuoli:
Finally, still always obsessed by that alchemy of his, like all the others who have once lost
their wits over it, and changing from a gentle and fastidious person into an almost savage
man quite different from what he was, with a beard and long straggling locks, he was
assailed, in this sorry state of melancholy and oddness, by a grave fever....301
Borselli’s and Vasari’s allusions to the ‘barbaric’, ‘strange’ and bestial aspects of madness comprise
the darker side of the melancholic genius. Although there is no evidence to associate Vasari’s
conclusions on melancholy with Ficino’s work, the connections made between melancholy and artistic
brilliance would suggest that, at the very least, Aristotelian theories on this were widely known.302 In a
statement echoing Aristotle’s famous rhetorical question, Vasari wrote:
...the majority of the artists of the past have had from their nativity a certain madness or
wildness, which, apart from making them absent-minded and fantastical has been the
reason, more often than not, that the shadow and darkness of their vices has been more
visible than the brightness and splendour of those virtues that rightly make Raphael’s
followers immortal.303
In spite of Vasari’s subscription to classical notions of divine madness, there were paradoxical
elements to these characterisations. The ‘strano’, in its appropriate context, i.e. when it involved the
production of art deemed aesthetically brilliant and unique, signalled situations when the artist’s
melancholy was commended. When Vasari used words such as ‘fantastico’ and ‘bizarro’, he was
299
Vasari, Vite, quoted and translated in Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 662.
300
Vasari, Vite, quoted and translated in Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 662.
301
Vasari, Lives, Vol II, p. 196.
302
Britton concludes that there is no evidence that Vasari was quoting Ficino in ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 658. However, the
Wittkowers conclude that Platonic and Aristotelian theories were widely read in Born Under Saturn, pp. 104-105.
303
Vasari, Vite, quoted in Allen, ‘Caravaggio’s Complexion’, p. 65: ‘...quasi la maggior parte de gli artefici passati avevano
sempre da la natività loro arrecato seco un certo che di pazzia e di salvatichezza, la quale oltre il fargli astratti e
fantastichi fu cagione, il più delle volte, che assai piú apparisse e si dimostrasse l’ombra e l’oscuro de’ vizi loro, che la
chiarezza e splendore di quelle virtu, che giustament fanno immortali i seguaci suoi’.
66
remarking on an artwork’s ‘whimsical’ and ‘imaginative’ aspects.304 However, in an inappropriate
context, i.e. through the presence of ‘oddness’ in demeanour and the general exhibition of erratic
behaviour, the melancholic genius was projected as a ‘savage’ manifestation of ‘pazzia negative’
(negative madness) or the failure of melancholy.305
Michelangelo and the reflections contained in his letters to friends, patrons and especially to his
family, offer a colourful illustration of his ‘mad mood’ and account for how he came to occupy pride
of place in Vasari’s imagination of the melancholic genius.306 Michelangelo was widely reported to be
a troubled and difficult person by fellow artists and key patrons. In 1512, Pope Julius II told
Sebastiano del Piombo: ‘“He is terrible, as you can see, and one cannot deal with him.”’307 From a
young age, Michelangelo’s ‘terribilità’ appears in his letters to his brother and father.308 In what he
called his ‘“gran passione”’ (‘“grand passion”’), when he was just twenty-two years old he wrote to
his father of his melancholic nature: ‘“Do not wonder if I have sometimes written irritable letters, for I
often suffer great distress of mind and temper”’.309 This statement seems to suggest that he viewed this
‘“gran passione”’ as more part of his character as an artist than as a physiological illness. His sense of
suffering continued throughout his life: ‘...for twelve years now I have gone about all over Italy,
leading a miserable life; I have borne every kind of humiliation, suffered every kind of hardship, worn
myself to the bone with every kind of labour, risked my very life in a thousand dangers, solely to help
my family....’310 Michelangelo also referred to his ‘stupendous labour’ and his lack of friends,
reiterating the myth of the solitary artistic genius: ‘I am living here in a state of great anxiety and of the
304
For a discussion of these elements see Britton, ‘Mio malinchonico’, p. 667.
305
For the term ‘oddness’ and ‘savage’ see Vasari, Lives, Vol II, p. 196. For the term ‘pazzia negative’ see Grassi & Lorch,
Folly and Insanity, p. 96.
306
The term ‘mad mood’ is from Michelangelo’s letter to Sebastiano del Piombo, (May, 1525), quoted in Wittkower &
Wittkower, Born under Saturn, p. 74.
307
Pope Julius II’s comment is quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 73.
308
For the term ‘terribilità’ see Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 73.
309
Buonarroti, quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 74. See also Buonarroti, Letter to Dominico
Lodovico Buonarroti in Florence, (August, 1497), in Ramsden, The Letters, Vol I, letter no. 3, p. 5.
310
Buonarroti, Letter to Giovan Simone di Lodovico Buonarroti in Florence, (June, 1509), in Ramsden, The Letters, Vol I,
letter no. 49, p. 52.
67
greatest physical fatigue; I have no friends of any sort and want none.’311 His dramatic reflections
continued, consistently emphasising his unstable temperament: ‘For I lead a miserable existence and
reck not of life nor honour – that is of this world; I live wearied by stupendous labours and beset by a
thousand anxieties. And thus have I lived for some fifteen years now and never an hour’s happiness
have I had....’312 Aside from these intense meditations, he also seemed aware of the way that his
contemporaries contributed to his famous reputation. In 1524, he wrote to his friend, Pietro Gondi,
exclaiming:
No-one ever entered into relations with me...to whom I did not do good with all my heart.
Afterwards, some trick of temper or some madness [“pazzia”], which they say is in my
nature, which hurts nobody except myself, gives them an excuse for speaking evil of me
and calumniating my character.313
Michelangelo’s tormented musings remain a prevalent theme throughout his letters, especially in his
later years when he consistently expresses a consciousness of his own mortality, dramatically
declaring: ‘I am an old man and death has robbed me of the dreams of youth....’314 In spite of
Michelangelo’s ‘burdens’ and despair at his ‘treacherous world’, he contradicts his articulations of
sorrow by hinting at the positive, almost purifying aspects of the melancholic disposition.315 When he
was seventy-four years old, Michelangelo wrote to his friend, Giovan Francesco Fattucci attesting to
the nature of melancholy: ‘“You will say that I am old and mad; but I answer that there is no better
way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than being mad.”’316 Classical notions of melancholy and
madness, including the idea that melancholy was an essential ingredient to artistic and intellectual
311
Buonarroti, Letter to Buonarroto di Lodovico Simoni in Florence, (July, 1512), in Ramsden, The Letters, Vol I, letter no.
77, p. 70 and Letter to Buonarroto di Lodovico di Buonarrota Simoni in Florence, (October, 1509), Vol I, letter no. 51, p.
54.
312
Buonarroti, Letter to Lodovico di Buonarrota Simoni in Florence, (October, 1512), in Ramsden, The Letters, Vol I, letter
no. 82, p. 75. Also, see Vasari’s letters from Michelangelo reproduced in his Vite: Vasari, Lives, Vol I, p. 406.
313
Buonarroti, quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 74. See also Buonarroti, Letter to Pietro Gondi in
Florence, (January, 1524), in Ramsden, The Letters, Vol I, letter no. 161, p. 153.
314
Buonarroti, Letter to Messer Luca Martini in Florence, (March, 1547), in Ramsden, The Letters, Vol II, letter no. 279, p.
72.
315
The terms ‘burdens’ and ‘treacherous world’ appear in Buonarroti, Letter to Messer Giorgio Vasari in Florence,
(February, 1556), in Ramsden, The Letters, Vol II, letter no. 410, p. 161.
316
Buonarroti, quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 74.
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creativity, appears through Michelangelo’s transitory use of the terms ‘malinchonico’ and ‘pazzo’.317
Michelangelo’s reflections suggest that he was not only conscious of his growing mythical status as a
melancholic genius, but that he also perceived the positive qualities of his condition and perhaps
nurtured it because, as he once put it, ‘“Melancholy is my joy,/And discomfort is my rest.”’318
In addition to the apotheosis of Michelangelo and his ‘mad mood’, the “divine” madness allotted to
poetic figures is another facet of the melancholic genius. During the late fourteenth century, Francesco
Petrarca categorised melancholy as a ‘morbus’ (‘disease’) of ‘acedia’ (‘sloth’).319 Petrarca alluded to
his ‘inexorable passion’ in his letter to the Abbot of St. Benigno and claimed that ‘I find myself always
in a sad and languishing state when I am not writing....’320 He attributes his ‘ills of the soul’ to his lack
of inspiration and reiterates one of the themes thought central to the melancholic genius, i.e. ‘alienato’:
‘It is after all but a poor consolation to have companions in misery. I should prefer to be ill by
myself....They are afraid, I infer, that my disease will not make way with me promptly enough.
Between their goading and my own madness I shall doubtless gratify their wishes.’321 Although
Petrarca never explicitly acknowledges a connection between melancholy and intellectual brilliance,
he nevertheless subtly echoes Renaissance conceptions of the unique genial and melancholic qualities
of the poet:
If you would find an explanation for all this, you must recollect that although the delights
of poetry are most exquisite, they can be fully understood only by the rarest geniuses, who
are careless of wealth and possess a marked contempt for the things of this world, and who
are by nature especially endowed with a peculiar elevation and freedom of soul....How
317
On the extent of Michelangelo’s awareness of this connection see Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 105.
318
Buonarroti, quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 74: ‘“La mia allegrez’ é la maniconia/E’l mio
riposo son questi disagi.”’ Also in Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 8.
319
Gowland, ‘The Ethics of Renaissance Melancholy’, p. 112. See also Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 36.
320
Francesco Petrarca, Letter to the Abbot of St. Benigno, undated, reproduced in Familiar Letters, in James Harvey
Robinson, ed., Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, James Harvey Robinson, trans., (New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1898), created August 1995, Hanover Historical Texts Project, Hanover College, via The Internet
Medieval Sourcebook hosted by Fordham University, USA, <http://history.hanover.edu/texts/petrarch/pet03.html>,
viewed 1 August 2009, p. 162.
321
Petrarca, in Familiar Letters, <http://history.hanover.edu/texts/petrarch/pet03.html>, p. 164 and pp.165-166.
69
delightful indeed must this gift be to those who really possess it, when it can exercise such
a fascination over sluggish minds....It pricks my conscience that I should be responsible in
great part for fostering all these forms of literary madness....But never mind, I suffer for
my sins, for I am in a rage if I stay at home, and yet hardly dare nowadays to venture into
the street.322
Petrarca fostered the image of “divine furor” of the poet in subtle ways.323 His characterisation of
‘literary madness’ pervaded Renaissance Italian poetry and strengthened the myth of genial
melancholy. It seems, however, that this ‘delightful’ ‘gift’ that Petrarca described, transformed into
something far more serious in the case of fellow fourteenth century contemporary, Simone Serdini da
Siena or Il Saviozzo (‘the sage fool’).324 Saviozzo occupied a position that bordered on the opposing
forces of societal and patronal obligations and a severe psychological affliction.325 He voiced the
interior workings of a tormented soul in his Rime, contradicting the positive connotations that other
contemporaries associated with melancholy as a form of transcendental poetic madness. His condition
deteriorated so rapidly toward the end of his life that he had turned into ‘“a wild beast”’ and wrote a
stanza in prison alluding to the darkness he felt had consumed him: ‘“I know not whether shadow or
disgrace wraps itself around my mind, now all out of line, not as it was.”’326 His despair in prison
continued and his vocabulary indicates that he had descended into the darker side of melancholy and
acquired the bestial qualities of madness. He communicated his ‘“insanity”’ (‘l’insania mia’), his
sense of ‘“oblivion”’ and the bestial elements of his madness concluding that he, ‘“a monster to the
world”’, desired nothing more than death itself.327 In the end, possibly during one of his fits of despair,
Saviozzo stabbed himself to death in his prison cell.328 Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti, another
contemporary poet, also articulated a discrepancy between positive conceptions of the poetic genius
322
Petrarca, in Familiar Letters, <http://history.hanover.edu/texts/petrarch/pet03.html>, pp. 166-168.
323
This is also pointed out in Klibansky, Panofsky & Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 248 and Schiesari, The Gendering of
Melancholia, p. 167.
324
Christopher Kleinhenz, ed., Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2, L-Z Index, (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.
1022.
325
326
Saviozzo of Siena, Rime, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 131: ‘“Io non so che si sia, ombra o disgrazia, che mi
s’avvolge intorno de la mente, tal che tutta é disforme a quel ch’ll’era.”’
327
Saviozzo, Rime, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, pp. 131-132.
328
Saviozzo’s suicide took place in 1419 or 1420, Martines, Strong Words, p. 113.
70
and ‘pazzia negative’: ‘“Be off, go away, Melancholy; let me not find you here; go lodge somewhere
else...Go with God, and may He strike you with calamity.”’329 Aside from the tragedy involved with
Saviozzo and the Francesco’s persistent melancholy, another poet who endured the dark side of
melancholy was Torquato Tasso. French philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, wrote of Tasso’s gifted
poetic abilities proclaiming his status as a ‘“Platonic maniac”’.330 However, Montaigne rejected
Ficino’s conceptions of the ‘divine gift’ in light of the fact that Tasso’s ‘“genius”’ was ‘“marked by
squalid lunacy”’.331 In 1579, Tasso was eventually imprisoned in the hospital of Saint Anne in Ferrara,
placed under supervision and, much to Montaigne’s dismay, he was in ‘“so pitiful a state, surviving
himself, not recognising himself or his works....”’332 Saviozzo’s suicide, Francesco’s torment and
Tasso’s confinement demonstrate that Ficino’s popularised views of the ‘divine gift’ of melancholy
did not translate into the experience of some Renaissance Italian poets. These figures exhibited the
bestial or ‘strange’ characteristics considered a negative by-product of melancholy, and consequently
suffered a persistent assault on the self that negated any comfort derived from their creative abilities.
The myth of the innovative, melancholic genius in possession of non-conformist characteristics that
make him the object of fascination amongst his contemporaries remains a persistent motif throughout
historiographical studies on Renaissance humanism. However, the repetition of the genius of the
melancholic artist and the incorporation of a vocabulary of the ‘bizarro’, underscores another popular
myth. The construction of the artistic genius as completely autonomous is one that has pervaded
secondary scholarship on Renaissance Italian history.333 An example of this concept is the elevated
329
Alberti, quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 141: ‘“Spacciati, vaten via, Malinconia, Fa’ ch’io non ti ci truovi; altrove
allogia...Vatti con Dio, che lui ti dia il malanno.”’
330
Michel de Montaigne, quoted in M.A. Screech, Montaigne & Melancholy: The Wisdom of the Essays, (London: Gerald
Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 2nd edn., 2000), p. 38.
331
Montaigne, quoted in Screech, Montaigne & Melancholy, p. xvii and p. 38.
332
Montaigne, quoted in Screech, Montaigne & Melancholy, p. 38. See also Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered:
Gerusalemme liberata, Anthony M. Esolen, ed., and trans., (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2000), p. 2.
333
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 3rd edn., 1995). For critical
analyses on the concept of individualism and identity see Robert A. LeVine, ‘Properties of Culture: An Ethnographic
View’, in Shweder & LeVine, Culture Theory, pp. 67-69, Trexler, ‘Introduction’, in Trexler, Persons in Groups, pp. 3-15,
71
status appointed to the artist, and the subsequent concessions made in light of ‘strano’ character traits
and behaviour. This heroicised view of the artist is demonstrated throughout Vasari’s Vite. In 1420,
Filippo Brunelleschi was placed in a difficult situation that raised questions about his level of artistic
freedom and, perhaps ironically for this analysis, his state of mind. In 1417, Brunelleschi, whom
Vasari described as being ‘sent by heaven’, was asked to work on the cupola of the Santa Marie del
Fiore in Florence.334 According to Vasari, Brunelleschi told the wardens of the Duomo to summon
architects from around Europe to assess the cupola in an attempt to demonstrate his architectural
brilliance.335 Each architect was to explain their plan, however, when it came time for the great master
himself to speak, the wardens ‘mocked and laughed at him’ believing him to be ‘talking nonsense.’336
Brunelleschi ‘grew more and more heated’ as he tried to explain his vision, was dismissed as ‘an ass
and a babbler’ and forcibly removed from the conference ‘leaving all the people at the audience
convinced that he was deranged.’337 In language reminiscent of the prank he had engineered and the
subsequent fate that had befallen his friend, Grasso, he refused to walk the streets, ‘for fear of hearing
people call out: “There goes the madman”’ and even considered fleeing Florence altogether.338 Vasari
describes how Brunelleschi, ‘anxious for the fame it would bring’, demonstrated his theory and was
eventually granted the commission.339 However, fellow artist Lorenzo Ghiberti was commissioned to
share the work, much to the ‘despair and bitterness’ of Brunelleschi.340 The way that Vasari
characterises Brunelleschi and this event, reiterates the elevated mythical status of the artist.
Brunelleschi’s ‘impetuosity’ and his ambitious motivations evoke the idea that the artistic genius was
complicit in, or at least encouraged, the fabrication of a character type.341 It reinforces the idea that
Weissman, ‘Reconstructing Renaissance Sociology’, pp. 39-45, Burke, The Italian Renaissance, p. 193 and p. 239,
Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous’, pp. 269-279, Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, in Porter, Rewriting the Self,
p. 2, Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’, pp. 17-26, Martin, Myths of Renaissance
Individualism, Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, pp. 5-18, Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, p. 5.
334
Vasari, Lives, Vol I, p. 133.
335
336
337
338
Vasari, Lives, Vol I, pp. 145-146.
339
340
341
72
there existed a specific ‘ego-formation’.342 Despite the appearance of bold independence on the surface,
underneath, Brunelleschi suffered the ‘agonies of the mind’, and the volatile social environment that
once hailed him an architectural genius turned on him, and found another genius to venerate.343
Aside from Brunelleschi’s political game and Vasari’s reconstruction of his failed pursuit of artistic
autonomy, contemporary character portraits of Michelangelo point to the creation of another myth.
References to Michelangelo’s temperamental character fostered a common perception that he was one
of the very few artists of the period who wielded a free hand over his commissions. The Renaissance
conception of the ‘divino artista’ (‘divine artist’) was one that had been around since Plato’s theory of
poetic ‘“furor”’.344 In 1436, Leon Battista Alberti subscribed to this idea saying that the artist was an
‘alter deus’ (‘another god’).345 In his Vite, Vasari further endorsed this myth of the artist by reserving
the word ‘divino’ mainly for Michelangelo.346 As in Brunelleschi’s case, Vasari believed that
Michelangelo was the ‘perfect exemplar in life’ and was also sent by God to remedy the lack of ‘true
art’.347 However, when he broaches the issue of Michelangelo’s famous ‘terribilità’, he remains
remarkably conciliatory. Unlike the ‘brute beast’, Piero di Cosimo, and his ‘fiercely unsocial
behaviour’ and, contrary to Pontormo’s ‘estrangement from human companionship’, Michelangelo’s
‘solitudine’ (‘solitude’) assumes a more positive, if not mandatory, status: ‘No one should think it
strange that Michelangelo loved solitude, for he was deeply in love with his art, which claims a man
with all his thoughts for itself alone.’348 Michelangelo’s ‘terribilità’ and ‘stranezza’ (‘strangeness’) thus
came to signify both the obligatory expression of his troubled melancholic character and paradoxically,
342
For the term ‘ego-formation’ see Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 16.
343
344
Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 98.
345
Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura, (1435), quoted in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 98.
346
Vasari, Lives, Vol II, p. 129.
347
348
For the quotes concerning Piero and Pontormo see Vasari, Lives, Vol II, p. 107, p. 114 and p. 256. For the term
‘solitudine’ see Giorgio Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, quoted in Allen,
‘Caravaggio’s Complexion’, p. 65. For the larger quote see Vasari, Lives, Vol I, p. 419.
73
the quintessential expression of his genius and aesthetic brilliance of his art.349 Despite the concessions
made concerning Michelangelo’s character and behaviour, artistic figures in this period were
constrained by various political, social and economic factors that inhibited any sense of true
authoritative independence.
The myth of artistic freedom and the social reality of the restrictions placed on the Renaissance Italian
artist’s creativity are clearly demonstrated in another case. In July 1573, the painter Paolo Veronese
appeared before the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Venice and was questioned about the thematic
content of a painting he had completed earlier in the year. One of the many interesting exchanges in
the tribunal was when Veronese was asked ‘“What is the meaning of those armed men, dressed in the
German style, each with a halberd in his hand?”’350 Veronese answered this probing question with the
following: ‘“I must say a few words here....We painters take the same licence as do poets and
madmen....”’351 This comment seems to echo Michelangelo’s statements concerning the character type
assigned to him by his contemporaries. Yet Veronese’s statement also appears to be a double entendre;
he indicates the subtle power that artists and poets may yield in terms of their licence to push the
boundaries and he also, perhaps inadvertently, connects the creative genius with madness. These may
seem like the words of a non-conformist, determined to exercise a certain level of freedom over his
subject. When situating these comments in context, however, it can be seen that there existed a
restrictive set of social codes and values that dictated notions of patronal obligation and exactly how
far an artist’s idea of “individuality” could be stretched.352 In an attempt to justify the liberty he had
taken with his painting, he pointed to one of his contemporaries, Michelangelo, reiterating the common
perception of Michelangelo as not only the most famous melancholic genius of all but as one who
349
Similar point expressed in Wittkower & Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, p. 73. For the term ‘stranezza’ see Vasari, La
vita di Michelangelo, quoted in Allen, ‘Caravaggio’s Complexion’, p. 65.
350
David Chambers & Brian Pullan with Jennifer Fletcher, Venice: A Documentary History, 1450-1630, (Oxford and
Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 234.
351
Chambers, Pullan & Fletcher, Venice: A Documentary History, p. 234.
352
For an analysis on the idea of individualism in this case and more generally see Martin, Myths of Renaissance
Individualism, pp. 3-4.
74
pushed moral, political and social boundaries: ‘“...I must say again that I am obliged to follow the
example of my predecessors....In Rome Michelangelo, in the papal chapel, depicted Our Lord Jesus
Christ, his mother and St John, St Peter and the heavenly court, all of them...naked...and with little
reverence.”’353 The prevalent trope of the melancholic plagued by a certain degree of ‘pazzia’
represents a tradition in which some intellectual figures deliberately fashioned a myth or image of
themselves as a ‘divine’ genius. However, this does not detract from the barriers that restricted these
talented figures. As chapter on social deviance and spectacle demonstrated, certain institutions and
groups governed and manipulated any sense of individuality that a person may have felt in social,
cultural and political contexts. Artists and poets may have enjoyed an elevated status, however,
Brunelleschi’s public scrutiny, Michelangelo’s consistent references to his financial pressures and
patronal responsibilities in his letters and Veronese’s trial all demonstrate that they were also
constrained and bound by political, economic and social obligations.
This chapter has shown how men of a certain social and intellectual calibre occupied a precarious
position in the balance between socially acceptable behaviour and the erratic bounds of madness. This
transcendental madness was cloaked with a range of euphemistic labels designed to detract from
behaviour considered ‘strano’. The most famous of these euphemisms was Ficino’s ‘unique and divine
gift’ of melancholy. This conception of melancholy and its common conflation with madness can be
seen in popular novelle, biographies, letters and poems produced from the late fourteenth century
through to the late sixteenth century. Giorgio Vasari’s most prized ‘divino artisto’, Michelangelo
Buonarroti, was perhaps Italy’s most popular melancholic, and what Vasari’s biography and
Michelangelo’s letters clarify, is that melancholy quickly transformed into an acceptable form of
madness. The acceptability of this form of madness, however, did not constitute the same treatment for
all artistic and literary figures of the day. The descriptions and poetry from the likes of Saviozzo of
353
Chambers, Pullan & Fletcher, Venice: A Documentary History, p. 236.
75
Siena, Francesco Alberti and Torquato Tasso illustrate the unstable interplay between ‘la gran follia’
and ‘pazzia negative’. In general, contemporary characterisations have illuminated how a unique
‘cultural idiom’ flourished in certain intellectual circles and dominated humanist literature of the
Renaissance.354 It transformed itself from an imbalance of the humors, to a stylised and exclusively
male illness. This final chapter has highlighted only one particular trope of Renaissance interpretations
of melancholy. The foregoing contemporary comments and case studies, being merely excerpts, cannot
convey the complete picture of Renaissance conceptions of melancholy. Despite this, these ideas of
melancholy can pave the way for more comprehensive studies of the mythical notion of the
Renaissance individual. Although this analysis does not completely reject the notion that this period
witnessed the birth of the modern individual, more fluid interpretations concerning personal agency
and the construction of the self need to be considered in light of social, political and financial
obligations. Texts such as Ficino’s De Vita need to be read alongside more cynical explanations such
as Armenini’s True Precepts. Vasari’s idealised work and the dramatic events Veronese’s trial
demonstrate that these principles of artistic and intellectual freedom require consistent revision and
that for some melancholic geniuses, the demands of society often clashed perilously with the ongoing
torment of the mind.
354
The term ‘cultural idiom’ appears in McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, p. 165.
76
Conclusion
Madness in the fifteenth to the late sixteenth century in Italy represented behavioural and verbal
attributes that were systematically classified under one general term – ‘strano’. The chronicles, poems,
treatises, novelle, letters, biographies and advice manuals from this period illuminate how madness
often pointed to the social mechanisms that stigmatised and alienated certain individuals. The
systematic labelling of people reinforced cultural and social values and demarcated those who
threatened or swayed away from these rules. These codifications acted as powerful social dividers and
markers for the control and manipulation of identities.
The first chapter has revealed how madness in early fifteenth-century Florence was not considered a
permanent condition of the mind, but more a range of behaviours that deviated from fixed social codes.
Social commentary from Paolo da Certaldo, Giovanni Morelli, Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco
Alberti show how the nature of social deviance also depended on social constructs such as ‘onore’ and
‘vergogna’. It highlights how social narratives of the past can reflect social values on a smaller scale.
The novella provides access to these elements because it stages moral and social crises that test an
individual’s sense of self. Brunelleschi’s status as trickster in the elaborate beffa personifies a social
and cultural environment that functioned based on a range of overlapping and often demanding
expectations. His was a character that publicly affirmed the hierarchical nature of social relations and
the elements of ‘virtù’. Grasso’s story, played out on the streets of Florence, shows how identity
depended on validation from neighbours, friends, acquaintances and patrons. His comments and
interior struggles reveal a sense of anxiety and a strong feeling of urgency to have his ‘fama’
reinstated. This analysis shows that the Florentine community functioned based on a ritualistic system
designed to ostracise those who deviated from social norms. This system cleansed the community of
77
its deviants and reinforced social and cultural traditions. Self-policing was a form of control over
behaviour and a disciplinary measure designed to keep people’s “desires” and “passions” in check.355
The second chapter has shown how conceptions of confinement and isolation emerged out of a critical
awareness of the need to contain madness. Garzoni’s ‘pazzi incurabili’ enabled the projection of
different forms of folly and were the ultimate critique on the human condition. They were a social
necessity, a part of everyday life in the streets and piazze of Renaissance Italian towns and served to
juxtapose ‘social sin’ against acceptable behaviour. However, there was a dark side to this view of
madness; the ‘bestiall’ and ‘diabolicall’ individuals represented dangerous manifestations of madness.
The spectacle of madness in terms of civic space, performance and the body highlight the purpose of
the theatrical motif. It was often strategically utilised by some Renaissance contemporaries in a way
that re-established the power dynamic between those in authority and those considered ‘strano’ and
‘perversa’.
The final chapter highlighted how madness could be construed as acceptable and even desirable in
certain intellectual circles in Italy throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Another interesting
concept has arisen in the research of this topic: the language concerning madness such as “folly” and
“melancholy” often formed fancy euphemisms for the dangerous reality of madness. Ficino’s treatise
and Vasari’s biography reveals how cultural contributions to the myth of the melancholic genius
directed attention away from the negative aspects of madness. However, as the letters and poems from
these gifted melancholics have demonstrated, the social, cultural and financial obligations often
weighed heavily in their minds and contravened any enjoyment of the benefits of melancholy.
355
Ruggiero presents a similar idea in Machiavelli in Love, p. 18.
78
In connection with Martin’s comments in the introduction to this thesis, the historian ventures further
than defining attitudes and beliefs based ‘on their own terms’. The historian acts as a ‘translator’ of
these elements in to ascertain what they can reveal about the society in question.356 Instead of
presenting interpretations couched by medicalised assumptions of madness, and in place of value
judgements concerning the nature of treatment for madness in this period, madness needs to be
historicised in terms of its nature as a relative cultural and social construct. Madness and forms of
madness in this period were ‘social artefacts’, situated within a historical context where its people
decided what was ‘strano’ based on cultural tradition and values.357 This criterion for classifying
madness reflects the way that Renaissance Italian societies functioned. I started this thesis with an
approach framed by an interest in exploring concepts of madness and deviance in this period. What
resulted was a complex investigation of the way that madness could incur a range of cultural and social
connotations for different individuals. Analysing this inadequate and general term can reveal a more
complex social and cultural reality, one that presents the possibility that madness never signified one,
definable thing. It materialised in many different forms as shown in the cases of Magherita the
Pyromaniac, Grasso the social deviant, Santino the joker, Ostilla the ‘wicked’ and Tasso the ‘savage’
melancholic genius.
356
Peter Burke uses the term ‘translator’ in ‘Cultures of translation in early modern Europe’, in Peter Burke & R. Po-Chia
Hsia, eds., Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7.
357
Midelfort, ‘Madness and the Problem of Psychological History’, p. 12.
79
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Film:
Madness by Dr. Jonathan Miller: To Define True Madness, (1991), dir. Richard Denton, British
Broadcasting Corporation: Education & Training, (60 minutes).

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What is the thesis about?

What is the thesis about?

What time period does the thesis cover?

What time period does the thesis cover?

Defining the ‘Strano’: Madness in

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment

CHAPTER THREE: ‘La Gran Follia’: The Genius of Melancholy?......................................... 56

ideas and beliefs ‘on their own terms’.2

who ‘“pateva un poco di cervello”’ (‘“suffered a bit in the brain”’).16

But see the Madman rage downe right

citizen living in the early to late Renaissance period.

governed how people conducted themselves in the broader community.

isolated and confined.

melancholy that produced the ‘ingegno offuscatti’ (‘obscure genius’).28

recognition within a broader community.

Indeed, the mask is the man; he must never take it off.36

Grasso decides to flee Florence for Hungary.52

of life in early Renaissance Florence – ‘amicitia’ (‘collective, corporate or communal friendship’).67

community’s cultural make-up that people honoured and occasionally undervalued.

“dangerous mistake” that he underestimated.82

transgressions represents the volatile undercurrents evident in Da Certaldo’s social commentary.

as a re-enactment of the classification of social deviance under the guise of madness.

patrons and common acquaintances.

as ‘“strange”’.109 The ‘face-to-face’ nature of Florentine society is crucial to an adequate understanding

spanned the grand theatre of the Florentine commune.

theatre spaces designed to caricature elements of social deviance.135

Florence in a symbolic act of self-imposed exile.168

dramatic ‘Teatro’ del ‘strano’ (‘Theatre’ of the ‘strange’).

included a strictly communal, cloistered and contemplative lifestyle.184 Garzoni’s contemplative

contemporary ‘aneddoti’ (‘anecdotes’) highlighting the complexity of deviant behaviour.185 Garzoni’s

treatise is a mix of moralistic commentary, ‘pseudo-medical’ terminology and contemporary

incurabili’. He provides twenty-nine ‘discorsi’ (‘discourses’) describing various attributes of

for society’s deviants:

and contributed to a ‘“discorso generale”’ (‘general discourse’) amidst an intellectual environment

deviance, and that is, perversion.

instead leaves the reader with an ominous warning:

could only label as ‘perversa’ and ‘strano’.230

demonstration of ‘strano’ behaviour in women.232 It is as if there is a deep-seated fascination with the

exhibiting a form of assertiveness represents a further affront to standardised female behavioural

neere him.’236 In another case, Lorenzino of Chioggia:

theatre of contemporary life.

‘no small delight and pleasure’, to view the patients:

‘laughter’ from the scholars, Santino:

vicious foole’ who was:

laughed at and condemned him.

division between madness as experienced by men as opposed to madness experienced by women as he

features of the social deviant.

the conception of madness as an entertaining spectacle resided a darker expression of deviance.

Michelangelo’s conflation of melancholy and madness, although minor, indicates an illuminating

Firstly, it is important to outline the ideological foundations of Renaissance thought on melancholy

between conceptions of melancholy as a pathological condition and a character attribute. They

great men were inevitably melancholic.

cites his theoretical influences:

...are compelled to secrete...black bile, which they call melancholy...melancholy, if it is too

status that was to continue for generations to come.283

‘bizzarro’ (‘bizarre’), ‘capriccioso’ (‘capricious’), ‘stravagante’ (‘extravagent’), ‘grottesche’

perception of the melancholic genius:

The melancholic is cold and dry

depicted; the melancholy sufferer underwent a transcendental state of self-imposed ‘alienatio’