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PART I
Academies and the Political Environment
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CHAPTER 1
Defining the Place of Academies in Florentine Culture and Politics
Alison Brown
Introduction
A few years ago, a discussion of Florence’s learned academies would have opened by describing Marsilio Ficino’s ‘Platonic academy’ as the forerunner of the later academies founded by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici to control the intellectual output of his new duchy. Now, however, the field is being transformed by the database of the early-modern Italian academies that Simone Testa has aptly called ‘the Facebook of the Renaissance’: the first network that enabled young people all over Italy to exchange intellectual ideas and have fun together, serio ludere, within the new republic of letters.1 So without detracting from the political function of academies in mediating Florence’s transition to the Medici principate, appreciation of their social role has added a new dimension to their importance in the early modern period.
There was a long tradition in Florence of socializing in lay confraternities, guilds and musical gatherings that fed into the later culture of academies and contributed to their importance. As social networks, these early groups at the same time helped to transform Florence from a non-literate, oral society to a literate or print-culture society, which for some scholars is what distinguishes pre- and post-academy culture.2 For whereas the earlier culture was not written down, one of the main functions of the later academies, especially the Accademia Fiorentina, the Crusca and the Alterati, was transcribing texts and ‘lectures’ for publication. Printed texts and printing houses like Torrentino and the Giunti then created a new cultural community of learned, lay professionals outside the Church and the university, who shared ‘a very widely diffused desire’ to get together spontaneously with other conoscenti of similar mental outlook.3 Together they enjoyed not only reading but also singing madrigals and operas, as well as participating in the new experimental science of Galileo and Francesco Cesi, through the new scientific academies of the Lincei in Rome and the later Cimenti in Florence.4
From a political point of view, the academies — as traditionally suggested — helped to create a new intellectual aristocracy which promoted a carefully-censored Tuscan culture as the basis of the grand-ducal hegemony.5 At the same time, as the other face of the coin, they also provided what Michel Plaisance calls ‘shadow theatres’ where political tensions could be worked out. As he and Domenico Zanrè describe, academies like the Umidi kept alive a spirit of irreverent nonconformity through burlesques and masquerades even after its transformation into the respectable and conformist Accademia Fiorentina.6 And Déborah Blocker explains how ‘collective anonymities’ like the Alterati (and similarly the del Piano and the initial Umidi) used pseudonyms to express the counter-culture of marginalized intellectuals.7 These multiple new approaches to the academies present the problem we now face in reassessing their social and political role in early modern Florence: should we still see them as the cultural mouthpiece of the new ducal government or, instead, as its most subversive critics? In what follows, I shall attempt a tour d’horizon by examining the academies in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Florence as prototypes of the institutions that emerged by the mid-sixteenth century, which I shall discuss briefly before essaying a partial answer to the question I posed on their role in Florence.
Fifteenth-Century Florence
Although the original Grove of Academe was associated with Plato and the teaching of his philosophy, the word academy reached the Renaissance — as David Chambers has described — through the filter of Cicero, whose ‘New Academy’ and Academic dialogues defended the freedom to argue from any point of view, sceptical as well as dogmatic.8 This suggests that the word always had the connotation of free debate unconstrained by moral issues, which did in fact typify intellectual discussion, even in mercantile Florence, in the early fifteenth century. Florence was then more famous for its industry and commerce than for its learning, but already in the 1390s a socially diverse group of citizens that included mathematicians, bureaucrats, merchants, scholars and clerics gathered around Manuel Chrysoloras to learn Greek. Shortly afterwards, other members of the cultural avant-garde assembled in the main square to attack scholastic learning by shouting out provocatively that Plato was better than Aristotle and that Varro’s account of ancient pagan religious beliefs was preferable to that of the Church Fathers.9
Poggio Bracciolini was not in Florence at the time, or he might have been one of them. But as an avid book collector and antiquarian, he seems to have been the first person to resurrect the idea of an academy, using the word in the early fifteenth century to describe his own modest home in the countryside, where:
I have a room full of marble heads […] With these statues and some I am getting, I want to decorate my ‘Academy’ in the Val d’Arno, where I mean to rest, if any rest can be had in this tempestuous sea.10
Poggio was a great arguer, as well as a collector of antiquities and books, and it was probably this aspect of the academies that influenced him when he next used the word to describe the social circle of the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, and then his own close circle of Epicurean and Peripatetic friends in the curia in Rome (with whom, we know from other letters, he enjoyed baccanalian feasts, ‘full of laughter and jokes’ at the expense of ‘superstitious religion’).11
No mention yet of Plato’s academy nor of Marsilio Ficino’s so-called Platonic academy, but Poggio’s suggestive evocation of the leisured cultivation of antiquity, sodality and contrarianism does pinpoint important characteristics of later academies, as we shall see.12 We get closer to the later academies by the mid-fifteenth century, when we find a young intellectual pressure group in Florence already calling themselves an ‘academy’ in 1455. In 1461 ‘the chorus of the Florentine Academy’ were clamouring to get the university reopened, and later there were ‘the academicians of the Greek Argyropoulos’ (another emigré from Greece, like Chrysoloras).13 The use of the word ‘academy’ for the pupils of both Argyropoulos and then Ficino suggests that it was used to describe the followers of a teacher as well as the school or gymnasium where he taught — just as it was being used at the same time to describe the devotees of Pomponio Leto in Rome and those of Antonio Beccadelli and later Giovanni Pontano in Naples, the former being described as a ‘sect’ or group of ‘learned youths, poets and philosophers’ living ‘an academic and epicurean life’ (‘una vita achademica et epicurea’).14 There is a hint of pleasure, if not irony, in the Society of the Mammola, a ‘festive band of nobles’ (according to Ficino) that included many members of his academy — among them Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose hedonism (live for today and not tomorrow) and highly sexual carnival songs also suggest an association with epicurean pleasure that seems far removed from Plato’s hallowed grove.15
Another bridgehead to the academies that combined pleasure and sobriety was provided by Florence’s guilds and lay confraternities, as Kristeller suggested some time ago.16 There was a long tradition of convivial feasting on the ‘feast day’ of their patron saints that made these bodies also the link that Bryce and Bareggi describe between the earlier oral/aural popular culture and the new text-based, literate culture of the age of printing — indeed, in the mid-fifteenth century one guild lamented the fact that ‘many come more to drink and eat rather than to make offerings’ and ‘indulge in unseemly behaviour, as if they were at a tavern’.17 These confraternities also established a precedent for later academies in the plays or rappresentazioni they produced to celebrate feasts like the Ascension or the Beheading of St John the Baptist; and although they, too, had a predominantly sacral function, they provided, as well, an occasion for consuming considerable amounts of wine and food, nicely described in the accounts as ‘food for the angels’ and ‘breakfast for the Apostles’. The Laudesi companies, as their name suggests, also sang praises, with payments to pipers and singers recorded in the same accounts.18
Another link between confraternities and the later academies is provided by the so-called ‘School of San Marco’. In combining the school’s didactic functions and the social functions of the confraternity or Company of St. Luke, founded in the fourteenth century for painters, this informal school of art in the Medici gardens has been seen by Karen-edis Barzman as the forerunner of the later Accademia del Disegno founded in 1563 by Duke Cosimo.19
Music, as well as art, links the confraternities and Laudesi companies to the later activities of the academies. In Florence brigate of young men from the ruling class engaged in musical-poetic contests, or giostre, in which — as Blake Wilson describes — northern musicians moonlighted from church employment and from singing in Laudesi companies to sing polyphonic songs for secular patrons. This was initially a mercantile pursuit, like buying northern tapestries and paintings in cities like Bruges where Florentines traded. But since it gave these musicians greater freedom than they enjoyed in courts, it helped to put Florence in the avant-garde of collecting and performing music of this sort, which became in the following century the new, more princely, art of madrigal singing. It would not have developed, however, without what Wilson describes as the ‘vital local culture of carnival song, devotional laude, and improvisatory solo singing’ in which Florentines of all classes, and especially Lorenzo de’ Medici, were involved.20
The mention of carnival in turn introduces us to the potenze, which in contrast to the middle- and lower-class confraternities were companies or — as their name suggests — power groups of plebeian wool workers. As David Rosenthal describes so well, they subverted the established political order by dividing the city into kingdoms with their own kings to celebrate carnival with shows and festive banqueting, through which they manipulated the official culture of the day for their own benefit.21 Among the upper classes banqueting could also serve subversive purposes, especially during and after the Savonarolan years, when hot-blooded young men assembled to subvert Savonarola’s puritanism and later to form local militias to prevent the Medici’s return. On one occasion the young patrician bravos called the Compagnacci attempted to take back their traditional carnival from Savonarola’s parades of purified youth groups by holding a provocative dinner, served by twenty youths dressed in a special livery of white stockings, cloaks and hats all edged with black velvet, before the music and dancing began.22
Although the subversion encouraged by these dinners and by carnival songs and masques was ostensibly confined to the pre-Lent period, it acted as a leavening, and even a levelling, force among all classes in the city, through the influence of the confraternities, potenze and the companies that I have been describing. It survived to influence the socially mixed and often sexually ambivalent companies and academies of the later period, which would not have developed in princely Florence in the way they did had they not been firmly rooted in the traditional civic culture of the city in the fifteenth century.
The Proto-Academies of the Early Sixteenth Century
The period between the Medici’s exile in 1494 and their final return to Florence in 1530 left a cultural vacuum that was filled by the literary and social gatherings in the gardens of the Rucellai family, the Orti Oricellari. The gardens provided the ideal forum for the mixture of culture and contrarianism that marked the later academies, as Francesco Guicciardini describes so well in saying the gardens were ‘like an academy, where many learned men and young lovers of letters discussed their work and fine things’. Yet their host, Bernardo Rucellai, was ‘a restless man who could never accept and be happy with any regime that governed the city’, and according to Guicciardini he later behaved like a siren in ‘corrupting the minds of many young men’, who by conspiring against the Medici brought an end not only to the meetings in the gardens but also to the republican regime itself.23 It was there that Niccolò Machiavelli famously talked about Roman republicanism before a young and enthusiastic audience, who ‘loved his conversation’, according to Nardi, and valued greatly all his writings — especially his Discorsi (Discourses on Livy) which he dedicated to two of its members.24 So he, too, has been blamed for corrupting them with his republicanism. Since several members of the early and later meetings in the Rucellai gardens were also readers of Lucretius — Bartolomeo Fonzio, Pietro Crinito, Piero Martelli and most notably Machiavelli himself (as we shall see) — there may have been an element of contrarian epicureanism in the meetings as well.25 Although Bartolomeo Scala had died by then, we know that he had held literary gatherings in his beautiful gardens in Borgo Pinti, where in the 1490s Pico della ...
