Courts and Patronage

Stefano Cracolici, 'Courts and Patronage', in Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, ed. Gaetana Marrone (New York-London: Routledge, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 516-520. COURTS AND PATRONAGE The relationship between patrons and clients and the correlated phenomena of patronage and clientage offer the most viable approach to the intricate question of the Italian courts and their culture in the period between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The complexity of the question dates back to an old view of the late medieval and early modern periods, a view haunted by the legend of the rise of the Italian middle class, once seen as the pivotal factor in the development of the modern liberal state. Neglected by political and social historians, who excluded the courts from this historical itinerary, the undeniable and almost disturbing presence of the courts spawned a form of descriptive history among intellectual and cultural historians chiefly interested in portraying the ceremonial splendor of Italian courtly life. This resulted in an artificial dichotomy between two separate forms of institutions, in which the political concept of state was favored over the cultural concept of court, the modern idea of bureaucratic administration over the archaic idea of personal cult, and the rational implementation of economic policies over the passionate dimension ofluxury. From this perspective, the differing concepts of state and of court seemed utterly irreconcilable: The state came to identify a positive pole in the institutional development of European history, associated as it was with a strong and shared claim to modernity; the court represented instead a negative pole, doomed as it was to irrationality, waste, and corruption. This old dichotomy, and the concomitant devaluation of the court, was overturned by a set of groundbreaking studies, pioneered outside the field of history by sociologist Norbert Elias (The 516 Court Society. 1983) and anthropologist Clifford Geertz (Negara: The Theatre State in NineteenthCentury Bali. 1980). These studies made historians aware of the complex web of public and private relations deeply ingrained in princely governance and of the ritual, sacred, and symbolic aspects that informed the very idea of princely power. As synthetically affirmed by British historian Trevor Dean, "court and state are now seen as complementary, confused, or identical, and no longer as separate worlds" ("The Courts," 1995). Courtly patronage, whether in the arts, government, academies, or business, is currently regarded as a fundamental, if not an unreservedly necessary, dynamic component in the gradual process of centralization of power that characterized the various forms of rulership in pre-industrial Europe. The unique patron-client relationship certainly involved idiosyncratic favoritism, self-interested nepotism, and the tribal preferment of friends, proteges, and other acolytes active within the princely sphere of influence. But it also enabled the emergence of a new class of court managers, carefully chosen on the basis of their merit and competence, to recast in cultural and political terms the prestige and authority of the prince and his family. It is still a matter of debate whether the activity of these courtly operators ought to be interpreted as a strategic maneuver to domesticate and integrate nobility into a composite ruling class, as Elias had influentially purported, or, conversely, as a way to allow members of the aristocratic elites to gain influence and status within the court, as suggested by Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, in their introduction to Princes. Patronage, and the Nobility (1991). There COURTS AND PATRONAGE is no doubt, however, that the study of the way systems of patronage operated, their aims and procedures, their cultural ramifications and social stratification, and their aesthetic and ideological influence on the actual production of culture constitute an important and vibrant branch of historical investigation. If it is true that patronage studies and court studies converge on numerous issues, their respective domains do not entirely coincide. Patronage, broadly defined as the patron's act of supporting and protecting a given client in exchange for a given service, is not limited only to the courtly context; it also comprises the sponsoring activity of several corporations not necessarily connected to a prince or to members of his family, such as religious confraternities, civic organizations, oligarchic republics, learned academies, independent presses, or professional guilds. The distinction between courtly patronage and other forms of corporate patronage can be heuristically described by means of what anthropologists have termed the "Big Man" system, in which historians have recognized several key features of the courtly institution. This comparison has allowed scholars to portray the court as a hierarchical institution resembling certain tribal societies characterized by the aceumulation of power in the hands of one political leader; by the development of patterns of reverence and benefaction governing exchanges between the leader and his or her subordinates; by competition between rivals and their client groups, both in politics and the arts. To be applied to the courtly system, this model needs some further refinement. The institutional figure of the leader entails not only "Big Men" but also "Big Women," at the center of a complex system of relations that includes members of their families, their extended household, and the local aristocratic establishment, all deeply entangled in a web of self-interest, personal relationships, and political allegiances, both private and public. A paramount example of the gendered dimension of the courtly system is provided by Mantua, ruled by the marquis Ludovico Gonzaga (1412-1478) and his influential wife Barbara Hohenzollern of Brandenburg (1422-1481), whose international connections and political intelligence assured the small city-state of northern Italy European renown and prestige, well before the reign of Francesco Gonzaga (1466-1519) and his famous wife Isabella d'Este (1474-1539), eager collectors of art, avid readers of chivalric literature, and sensitive patrons of humanists and poets. The system of reverence and worship that governs the highly ritualized discourse of the client toward the patron entails a progressive differentiation of the leader's entourage from the rest of the aristocratic entourage, a differentiation that depicts the leader, whether man or woman, as a distant and sacred entity. This becomes evident in the proliferation of panegyric orations, where the leaders are portrayed as godlike entities, heavenly creatures, or divine rulers, but affects also the conventions of regular epistolary exchanges, where the princes are addressed as dei (gods), semidei (demigods), celsitudini (celestial entities), and so on. Patrons seek to assert and confirm their political and cultural supremacy within a given territory; clients provide them with a highly discerning discourse with which to manage and control, but also justify and legitimize, their power. The relationship between patrons and clients involves a complex system of procedures through which notions of merit, competence, and efficiency, whether within the realms of diplomacy, politics, medicine, or the arts, are sophisticatedly elaborated and consciously implemented in a web of reciprocal exchanges and interdependences. In the case of Italy, the study of courtly culture is further complicated by the geographical distribution of different forms of power, government, and dynastic traditions within the sociopolitical mosaic of the peninsula, which make it almost impossible to discern a unified rationale for investigating the phenomenon from a national perspective. During the fifteenth century, cities with strong municipal or oligarchic traditions, such as Florence, Venice, or Siena, tended to produce a quite different culture from the one produced in territories traditionally subjected to aristocratic families, such as Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, and Naples. Equally different was the culture produced in centers within the papal state and in centers governed by imperial feudatories, not to mention those hybrid cases, such as the court of the Estensi, where the rulers were feudatories of both the pope and the emperor. Similar discrepancies are also to be found between courts ruled by families descending from ancient aristocratic stocks, such as the Gonzaga, the Visconti, the Este, and those, such as the Medici and the Sforza, descending from bourgeois origins or more recent nobility. The flourishing oflyric poetry during the second half of the fifteenth century, to name just one prominent example, is less pronounced in Florence and Venice than in cities hosting major courts, such as Milan, Naples, Ferrara, and Mantua; similar differences could be found by studying the distribution of other emblematic 517 COURTS AND PATRONAGE genres, such as chivalric or pastoral poems. All these complexities and regional differences have so far prevented a more general study of at least one singlc court from its medieval origins to its modern eclipse-a study that must also take into account from a political point of view, the increasing presence in Italy of foreign powers and from a cultural point of view, the emergence of other forms of institutional patrons, both private and public, such as learned academies, presses, theaters, religious orders, prominent religious figures, professional associations, and even banks (the famous Pietro Aretino started his career at the service of the prominent banker Agostino Chigi). A further distinction should be advanced, at least heuristically, between forms of political patronage and forms of cultural patronage active within the court. A corresponding divergence exists between historians who tend to concentrate on the administrative relations between court and household, as well as between court and state, and historians who instead consider the court a microcosm of intrinsic political, social, and economic forces that converged in shaping the main subject of their inquiry, namely courtly culture. If the first approach mainly characterizes the kind of history practiced outside of Italy, and to some extent outside the field offered by the Italian courts, privileging instead the courts of France, Burgundy, England, and Germany, the second approach, ambitiously endorsed by the Centro Studi "Europa delle corti, " active since the late 1970s, is predominantly concerned with the study of the Italian courts, especially those that flourished in the northern part of the peninsula from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. In the first phase of this interdisciplinary project, the center sponsored a wide range of conferences and studies primarily focused on the literary, artistic, and more generally cultural legacy of Baldassare Castiglione'S Illibro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), seen as the epitome of the intricate system of values, beliefs, and forms of life that informed the courtly culture in Italy primarily during the sixteenth century. The goal of this initial approach was to elicit a discursive vocabulary, both verbal and gestural, through which to understand and appreciate the way in which the highly differentiated courtly operators staged their existence in theoretical and conceptual terms. In the second, current phase of the project, focussing on the rather abstract "grammar" that helped to define the court as a labyrinthine, self-enclosed, and highly symbolical space of action, the center turned its attention to the 518 ways in which various categories such as adroitness ( accortezza) , discretion (discrezione) , dissimulation (dissimulazione) , favor (beneficio) , gracefulness ( grazia) , honor ( onore) , magnificence (magnfficenza), nonchalance (sprezzatura), politeness (politezza), as wen as their .various synonyms and antonyms, were part of a tangible system of political references and social conditions that allowed Italian courtiers to act, feel, and think accordingly. In this vein Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversazione (The Art of Conversation, 1574) is read as an arbor textualis (textual tree) defining a complex code of behaviors that deeply informed courtly life (Amedeo Quondam, "Introduction," 1993). From a literary and cultural perspective, this approach has made possible the reevaluation of a different canon of works, hitherto confined to an archaic repertory of unprofitable and unavailing books by certain modernist interpretations of the Renaissance. Besides authentic best sellers, such as Castiglione'S II libro del Cortegiano, Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo, avera de' costumi (Galateo, 1558), and Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversazione, the references used by contemporary cultural historians to explore the phenomenon of the courts also include once-neglected treatises and repertories such as Paolo Cortesi's De Cardinalatu (On Cardinalship, 1510), Francesco Alunno's La fabrica del mondo (The Edifice of the World, 1548), Giulio Camillo De1minio's L'idea del teatro (The Idea of Theatre, 1550), Tommaso Garzoni's La piazza universale di tulle Ie professioni del mondo (The Universal Square of All the Professions of the World, 1585), or Torquato Accetto's Della dissimulazione onesta (On Honest Dissimulation, 1641). Dynastic poems and princely treatises, such as Catone Sacco's Semideus (Demigod, 1438), written for Filippo Maria Visconti (1392-1447); Francesco Filelfo's Sforziade (1450) for Francesco Sforza (1401-1466); Tito Vespasiano Strozzi's Borsias for Borso d'Este (1413-1471); Giovan Mario Filelfo's Martiados for Federico da Montefeltro (14221482); and Laurentias for Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492), to name but a few, are also being studied seriously for the first time. Together with encomiastic, nuptial, and funeral oratory performances, these works form the cultural background for a different appreciation of already canonical works, such as Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482-1483), Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580), as well as COURTS AND PATRONAGE famous pictorial cycles, such as those exemplified in Mantua by Andrea Mantegna's Camera pieta for Ludovico Gonzaga (1414-1478), the "studiolo" for Isabella d'Este (1474--1539), and the sumptuous Palazzo Te, built and decorated by Giulio Romano for Federico Gonzaga (1500-1540). This new body of texts, sometimes available in accurate critical editions but often still unedited, allows for a better comprehension of those works traditionally labelled as anticourtly literature (notably those of Pietro Aretino, whom Ariosto used to call by the nickname of "flagella dei principi" or "scourge of princes"), away from the partisan and sometimes instrumental readings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which promoted these titles as documents of the degeneration of courtly culture, toward a more dynamic and dialectical understanding of the phenomenon. The vast number of scattered studies sponsored and produced under the aegis of the Centro Studi "Europa delle corti" has been sharply criticized by social and political historians active outside of Italy, who blame them for the excessive attention initially paid to the symbolic, textual, and totalizing dimension of the court, viewed primarily as an "epiphany of power," to use Carlo Ossola's expression ("Ii 'luogo' della corte," 1978), at the expense of different typological varieties, political-dynastic variables, and historical realities. As Trevor Dean bluntly expressed, the "study of the grammar and rules of court society has not only questionably elevated the court as a closed system but has also neglected the study of relations between court and society (whether the material support of the court or its political support through patronage networks and faction)" ("The Courts," 1995). The polemical note called for a greater scrutiny of the mechanisms of patronage and clientage in relation to the ascendancy of princely power and to the hierarchies of skilled officers. This system of relationships gradually transformed the traditional retinue of courtiers into a prebureaucratic system of political and administrative professionals. For British historians, writes David Starkey, "the history of the court is the history of those who enjoyed access to the king" ("Introduction: Court History in Perspective," 1987); for Italians, the same history tends to be approached as a formulaic vocabulary, a symbolic labyrinth, a stage for a graceful and highly idealized conversation, viewed as an institutional system that shaped the culture of the Italian ancien regime. This methodological divergence, motivated also by the considerable typological diversity of the Italian courtly mosaic, has been fruitfully resolved in the groundbreaking studies edited or written by Cesare Mozzarelli such as, for instance, "Prince and Court: Why and How Should the Court Be Studied Today?" (1989) and La corte nella cultura e nella storiografia (1983), and in a set of recent Italian publications sponsored by yarious institutions, such as the well-established Istituto Storico Italiano per if Medio Evo and the newly founded Centro Studi "Matteo Maria Boiardo." In these studies, the combination of different disciplines and different methodologies constitutes an innovative field of scholarly inquiry in which to define, in new terms and new perspectives, the culture of what was once called the Italian Renaissance. STEFANO CRACOLICI See also: Renaissance Further Reading Asch, Ronald G., and AdolfM. Birke, "Introduction: Court and Household from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries," in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court atthe Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450-/650, edited by Ronald G. Asch and AdolfM. Birke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Biow, Douglas, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Bourdua, Louise, The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Burke, Jill, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione's "Cortegiano," Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Chittolini, Giorgio, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera (editors), Origini dello Stato: Processi di formazione statale in Ita/ia fra medioevo ed eta moderna, Bologna: II Mulino, 1994. Cummings, A. M., The Maecenas and the Madrigalist: Patrons, Patronage, and the Origins of the Italian Madrigal, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004. Dean, Trevor, "The Courts," The Journal of l'Jodern History, 67(1995), 136-351. Droste, Heiko, "Patronage in der [ruhen ｎ･ｵｺｩｴｾｉｮｳﾭ tion und Kulturform," Zeitschrift fur Historische Forschung, 30:4(2003), 555-590. Elias, Norbert, The Court Society, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Gallo, F. Alberto, Music in the Castle: Troubadours, Books, and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Geertz, Clifford, Negara: The Theatre State in NineteenthCentury Bali, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. 519 COURTS AND PATRONAGE Gundersheimer, Werner L., "Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach," in Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 198!. Kent, Francis W., and Patricia Simons, "Renaissance Patronage: An Introduction Essay," in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by Francis W. Kent and Patricia Simons, Canberra: Humanities Research Centre Australia-New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. King, Catherine, Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy c. 1300-c. 1550, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Korshin, Paul J., "Types of Eighteenth-Century Literary Patronage," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 7:4(1974), 453-473. Lazzarini, Isabella, Fra un principe e altri Stati: Relazioni di potere e forme di servizio a Mantova nell'eta di Ludovico Gonzaga, Rome: lstituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1996. Matarrese, Tina, and Cristina Montagnani (editors), Il principe e fa storfa, Novara: Interlinea, 2005. Mozzarelli, Cesare (editor), "Familia" del principe e famiglia aristocratica, 2 vols., Rome: Buizoni, 1988. Mozzarelli, Cesare, "Prince and Court: Why and How Should the Court Be Studied Today?" Schi/anoia, 8 (1989), 33-36. Mozzarelli, Cesare, and Giuseppe Olmi (editors), La corte nella cultura e nella storiografia: Immagini e posizion! tra Otto e Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983. Ossola, Carlo, "II 'Iuogo' della corte," in Le Corti farnesiane di Parma e Piaeenza (1545-1622), edited by Marzio A. Romani and Amedeo Quondam, vol. 1, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Quondam, Amedeo, Introduction to Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, vol. 1, Ferrara; Panini, 1993. Santagata, Marco, and Stefano Carrai, La !iriea di corte nell'ltalia del Quattrocento, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1993. Starkey, David, "Introduction: Court History in Perspective," in The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, edited by David Starkey, London: Longman, 1987.