Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence

Widowed Bodies, Mourning and Portraiture

Allison Levy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351904483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood.

PART I
THE ANATOMY OF MOURNING

Chapter 2

Mnemonic V(o)ices

‘History is in mourning and eloquence is dumb.’
Coluccio Salutati

Talking Trauma from Day One

‘All we ever hear is “So-and-so’s dead” and “So-and-so’s dying.”’¹ And so it goes that ten traumatized Florentines, assembled in the church of Santa Maria Novella, ‘which was otherwise almost deserted,’ decide to escape the catastrophe and chaos of the Black Death by fleeing the city, where people ‘dropped dead in the open streets,’ for the ‘less harrowing’ countryside, temporarily taking their minds off of the devastation and disruption of plague by recounting 100 tales over ten days; this is, of course, the story of The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s celebrated narrative of narratives.² But is there yet another story still to be told?

From what, precisely, do these Florentines flee? What are they trying so hard to forget? And, curiously, if determined not to remember, why, then, so many recitations? That is, against the socio-historical backdrop of silence and erasure, why such loquaciousness and repetition? But is this apparent fluency just that or, rather, just a series of false starts? I suggest that we read this early modern project of purposeful yet selective remembering and forgetting in and against the cultural discourses of trauma and commemorative practice, locating the site/sight of anxiety for Boccaccio’s protagonists in the functions – and failures – of the Florentine mourning ritual:

It had once been customary, as it is again nowadays, for the women relatives and neighbors of a dead man to assemble in his house in order to mourn in the company of the women who had been closest to him; moreover his kinsfolk would forgather in front of his house along with his neighbours and various other citizens, and there would be a contingent of priests, whose numbers varied according to the quality of the deceased; his body would be taken thence to the church in which he had wanted to be buried, being borne on the shoulders of his peers amidst the funeral pomp of candles and dirges. But as the ferocity of the plague began to mount, this practice all but disappeared entirely and was replaced by different customs. For not only did people die without having many people about them, but a great number departed this life without anyone at all to witness their going. Few indeed were those to whom the lamentations and bitter tears of relatives were accorded; on the contrary, more often than not bereavement was the signal for laughter and witticisms and general jollification – the art of which the women, having for the most part suppressed their feminine concern for the salvation of the souls of the dead, had learned to perfection … in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown towards dead goats.³

Boccaccio’s passage on the complete breakdown of social order during the 1348 plague summarily lays out the rules of ritual, but it also makes clear the paradox of performance. To begin with, he provides insight into the binary structures underlying mourning ceremonial: public/private, visibility/invisibility, witness/weeper.⁴ This is a system organized according to gender, whereby women, visible and audible within the private sphere, offer ‘lamentations and bitter tears’ inside the home, preparing the corpse for burial; men, in opposition, perform a public work of mourning that is emotionally tempered, stoically witnessing and removing the body that has already been cared for and cried over by women. This is the standard division of labor, at least when ritual goes according to plan. And yet, bodies are memorable not only for what they do but also for what they do not do, and Boccaccio also tells us what happens when bodies – female bodies, in particular – act up and act out. To his dismay and dissatisfaction, women have a mind of their own, having ‘learned to perfection’ how to ‘suppress their feminine concern’ by replacing wailing with wit and lamentation with laughter. Indeed, as any reader of The Decameron knows, these bodies are bold and bawdy – irreverent and indecent, flirtatious and feckless. In short, they do not do what they are told.

Just as Boccaccio introduces his über-narrative with uncooperative bodies, I begin my story of mourning and memory with the body that is both overworked and yet does not work. My composition focuses on decomposition or, rather, decomposure – not the natural decay of the diseased body but the social malfunction of the ritual body. This, then, is also a story of disappearance insofar as, for Boccaccio’s protagonists, the site/sight of anxiety is not the presence of the corpusculent body but the absence of the commemorative body. These traumatized (and traumatic) Florentines flee to forget (their own) forgetfulness; so as not to remember the failed discourse of remembrance, they repetitiously recount other narratives, performing in Fiesole instead of Florence.⁵

This chapter explores both bodily performance and performance failure – the insistence on recuperative narrative yet the inevitability of the debilitating st … st …stutter. The story told here attempts to answer what Peggy Phelan asks in Mourning Sex; Performing Public Memories: ‘To what end are we seeking an escape from bodies? What are we mourning when we flee the catastrophe and exhilaration of embodiment?’⁶ I share Phelan’s interest in what she calls ‘the deep relationship between bodies and holes, and between performance and the phantasmatical.’⁷ In the following pages, I begin to re-think the dialogue between the uncooperative and the incorporeal, between the widow and the one she is meant to remember. Let me suggest, here, that the mnemonic voice – no matter how fleeting – will unforgettably haunt the one it is meant to remember.

Drama Queens

If the traumatic body cannot be located, the dramatic body is conspicuously present: ‘“In Tuscany there is lacerating of the face, rending of garments, and pulling of hair.”’⁸ This vivid literary account of the grieving female body, offered up by the medieval Florentine chronicler, Boncompagni da Signa (c. 1165–c. 1240), finds visual parallels as late as the end of the fifteenth century, in and beyond Tuscany. For example, in Niccolò dell’Arca’s emotionally-charged Lamentation over the Dead Christ of 1463, in the church of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna (Fig. 2.1), women wring their hands (Fig. 2.2), clench their flesh (Fig. 2.3) and shriek wildly (Figs 2.4 and 2.5).⁹ This dramatic, gender-specific performance is both fact and fiction; Mediterranean women have long mourned in this manner (‘“They beat their breasts, scratch up their faces and toil to tear out their hair without ceasing their shrill cries”’), yet these are merely cultural customs, performative practices.¹⁰ Posing, or, rather, purposefully posed, women play the part, cast in supporting roles opposite their male counterparts. The juxtaposition of a male and female mourner from the same sculptural group, St John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalen, underscores this point (Fig. 2.6). Her uncontrolled ululation is countered by his rational restraint, her flailing body is steadied by his fixed stance, her chaotic convulsions are calmed by his stoic contemplation. In sum, the drama of mourning is defined as much by the disorder of her body as it is by the order of his.

Other representations, both religious and secular narratives, share this iconography of grief.¹¹ A predella panel by Domenico Veneziano, The Miracle of Saint Zenobius, painted around 1445, locates this gendered division in urban Florence (Fig. 2.7). The story unfolds as follows: St Zenobius (337–417), Bishop of Florence, who, of note, was well-known for resuscitating dead boys, temporarily takes as his charge the young son of a widow, who then dies under his care.¹² Shown kneeling in prayer over the dead body in Borgo degli Albizzi, Zenobius, ramrod straight, echoing the medieval palaces behind him, appears in striking contrast to the grieving mother, whose collapsed posture and frenzied reaction take center stage. The segregated chorus, whose presence and participation bolsters this mourning narrative, further divides the composition – and the culture.

Eliding narrative events yet maintaining gender differences are the frieze of the arcosolium tomb made for Francesco Sassetti by Giuliano da Sangallo between 1485 and 1490 for the Sassetti Chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Trinità (Fig. 2.8) and the marble slab depicting the death of a woman in childbirth, thought to be from the tomb of Francesca Pitti Tornabuoni, attributed to a follower of Andrea del Verrocchio, carved around 1480, and originally erected in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome (Fig. 2.9).¹³ Violent gestures, agitated limbs and disheveled bodies in such dramatic depictions as these find their source in the story of Meleager, as depicted in Roman sarcophagi (Fig. 2.10); clearly, this gendering of the iconography of grief is a longstanding tradition, but what interests me most is how and why such representations, despite cultural and stylistic adaptations, remain constant.¹⁴

These dichotomous narratives, but particularly the explicit subtext of women’s grief, suggest to me more than just universal ‘gestures of despair.’¹⁵ Rather, seeking ‘to put Iconography and Social History in productive conversation,’ as Cristelle L. Baskins has successfully done working on representations of widowed Rome, I read these repetitive representations of unbridled bodies as visually defining and reinforcing a specific set of gender roles at the especially vulnerable and disruptive time of death.¹⁶ And so, my own conversation necessarily continues with Judith Butler:

The action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimization … this ‘action’ is a public action … gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.¹⁷

Insofar as the public mourning ritual stands as a cultural mechanism designed and performed in order to reaffirm social order, the categorization and repetition of gender roles within that ritual are a necessary element of the dramatic performance.

But bodies have problems, especially these, insofar as this mnemonic performance borders on the demonic. Kathy Lavezzo has recognized queerish aims, specifically female-female identification and desire, in the excessive emotional display of women’s mourning practice; concerned with late medieval Europe, she argues that ‘the female homoeroticism produced at the site of female lamentation constitutes a disruptive act in which the proper turns improper, and the pious strays into the perverse.’¹⁸ I will take up a similar position in the next chapter on early modern widowhood, speculating that identification boundaries, despite reconfigurations of female mourning, continue to be collapsed. But, already here, I suggest that even more so than the shock of the unbridled body, it is the crazed, hysterical scream of the performance that will be cause for concern. Lamentation, a necessary yet disturbing part of the mourning narrative, is not a sweet song. Moreover, the voice leaves the body in unpredictable ways, sometimes with smooth incantation, other times with catastrophic results.¹⁹ In other words, the body that acts up also breaks down, and the voice, so startlingly seductive in its subversiveness that it must be separated from the body, cracks.

This discordant tension between body and voice might be best understood in the context of opera and queer theory.²⁰ If ‘opera is the reflection of our historical reality, and this mirror breaks in those places where the image is split with a sudden incongruity,’ as Catherine Clément clearly articulates in Opera, or the Undoing of Women, then the figure of the grieving woman, at once favored yet faulty, validated yet vulnerable, is a body severed.²¹ ...