Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances

Gender, Art and Culture in Early Modern Italy

Joyce de Vries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351953207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In the first major book in four decades on Caterina Sforza (1463-1509), Joyce de Vries investigates the famous noblewoman's cultural endeavors, and explores the ways in which gender, culture, and consumption practices were central to the invention of the self in early modern Italy. Sforza commissioned elaborate artistic and architectural works, participated in splendid civic and religious rituals, and collected a dazzling array of clothing, jewelry, and household goods. By engaging in these realms of cultural production, de Vries suggests, Sforza manipulated masculine and feminine norms of behavior and effectively promoted her social and political agendas. Drawing on visual evidence, inventories, letters, and contemporary texts, de Vries offers a penetrating new interpretation of women's contributions to early modern culture. She explains the correlations between prescriptive literature and women's actions and reveals the mutability of gender roles in the princely courts. De Vries's analysis of Sforza's posthumous legend suggests that what we see as "the Renaissance" was as much a historical invention as a coherent moment in historical time.

Chapter 1
Creating a Spectacle

[Caterina] mounted a horse to enter the city and ... many people came to meet her and organized themselves along the last mile to the city .... She dismounted at Imola, where part of the citizenry was on horse and part on foot ... together with the governors of the territory they all presented her with the keys [to the city] and spoke some words. As she and her company entered the town, they paused briefly to listen to verses and watch Florentine-style theatrics, and look at the decorations that spread from the entrance to the city to the steps of the palace. All were in praise of her and [her new husband] Count Girolamo.

—report to Caterina Sforza's step-mother, Bona of Savoy, 3 May 1477 ¹

As was typical for noble women in the Early Modern period, Caterina Sforza's first major public appearance was during her wedding, a series of events that took place over several weeks and in numerous locations. During the wedding ritual, a bride usually traveled from her home to that of her spouse, where she then took up residence. The physical move underscored the symbolic transfer of her loyalties: she left her father's jurisdiction and entered into her husband's. For a noble bride, this journey might require days or even weeks to cover the distance from one principality to another. In the process, the bride not only married her husband, but was transformed from daughter to wife and consort with authority over territories. Her new status required acknowledgement from peers and subjects alike, and so along the way, she would honor the cities and territories sympathetic to her natal and marital families with ceremonial visits. The festivities provided by each city expressed its support of the bride and her family and, of course, the cities within her husband's territories would stage the most extravagant celebrations as: official welcome to her new role.² This was the case for Caterina Sforza in 1477 when she entered her husband's territory of Imola, as described above in a letter to her step-mother, and for countless other noble brides. The ceremonial enacted during the wedding journey derived from long-standing rituals that forged complex webs of alliance and possession—among the bride, the subjects, and the land—that were ultimately about the display of both established and recently contracted power relationships.

Caterina Sforza's participation in these overtly public events offered peers and subjects a good look at her carefully crafted persona. Like other nobles, Caterina organized and took part in processions, triumphal entries, and civic and religious rituals in which she transitioned into and performed her changing gendered roles as daughter, wife, consort, mother, widow, and regent. Many of the people in the fifteenth century who knew of Caterina Sforza would have come to know her through witnessing these types of official public activities. If they could not view her actions personally, they might have been able to read or listen to accounts or examine the artifacts that accompanied or commemorated the events. Elites might have been privy to more detailed, or even contradictory, information about her in letters from ambassadors or spies, but they still largely relied on her performance and its official records to form their opinions of her character, social status, and political situation.

Because of their diplomatic importance, elite ceremonies inspired ample textual and material traces, and records of Caterina's public performances are numerous. Documents tell of the festivities that marked her wedding and the triumphal entries, processions, and official diplomatic visits and receptions that she participated in as the consort of her well-placed husband Girolamo Riario. After her husband's assassination, Caterina's role clearly changed with her new status as widow and regent for her young son. She had to manage her public face to counteract social disapproval of her position in general and some of her private choices in particular. She took on the masculine role of ruler and presented herself as an indomitable regent who would not tolerate any dissent within her territories, and she built up her military defenses to insure her power. Nevertheless, Caterina succumbed to Cesare Borgia's siege of Forlì in 1500 and lost control of the Riario lands. The public image she had previously cultivated was no longer feasible without her political title, and she retreated to more normative gender roles. Taken together, these events provide a clear outline of her biography, which will further unfold through the rest of the book. While some of the details of Caterina's public performances, such as her dress, will be revisited in later chapters, here the focus is on her appearance and comportment during public ceremonies and events as well as the accompanying commemorative artifacts. Together, these provide a broad view of the way Caterina crafted a public persona, an exemplary display of power and performance by a woman in a Renaissance court.

Courtly Ceremony and Ritual in the Italian Renaissance

Staged celebrations and ceremonies were especially significant events within the princely courts of Early Modern Italy, a culture that was renowned for its extravagant and meaningful ritual performances. Public presentation, with lavish personal adornment, afforded an opportunity for the thoroughly choreographed and spectacular display of social hierarchies, intellectual prowess, and political alliance. While family connections, and often brute force, were essential to identity and status in the Renaissance, carefully chosen words, deeds, and appearances could nuance or even improve one's position. Contemporaries recognized that even pronouncements and proclamations were a potential medium for rulers to exhibit their wealth and power.³ Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise On the Family (1441), argued that a strong-willed man can certainly create himself through words and actions, but his successful achievement of excellence hinges on whether others think he actually is, and not just seems, what he wants to be: "To gain glory a man must have excellence. To gain excellence he need only will to be, and not merely to seem, all that he wishes others might think him. For this reason they say there are few prerequisites to excellence. As you see, only a firm, whole, and unfeigned will, will do."⁴ In Alberti's estimation, "being" is the reality construed from the play between inner character, outward appearances, and reception. In the early sixteenth century, Baldassare Castiglione similarly emphasized the importance of appearances and behavior in his Book of the Courtier and Niccolò Machiavelli simplified self-fashioning with his repeated assertion that appearances are reality, at least in political matters; Machiavelli stressed that "seeming" was more important than "being."⁵ The subtleties aside, for these writers the construction of a powerful persona demanded a full understanding of the part and its proper presentation.

Elites practiced this kind of self-fashioning in their everyday activities, but they truly exploited its potential during public events with all their pomp, ceremony, and, perhaps most important, participants. The public nature of courtly and civic ceremonies and rituals was fundamental to their efficacy. On the most basic level, the audience played the necessary role of witness to the event, and in the case of such activities as taking possession of a city or a triumphal entrance, the viewers were in fact active participants in a ritual process that delineated hierarchical relationships of mutual respect and instituted legal authority.⁶ As Machiavelli recommended in The Prince, the ruler "meets with [the guilds] sometimes, and makes himself an example of courtesy and princely generosity—always holding fast, nevertheless, the dignity of his high position, because this he never at any time forgets."⁷ He referred to ceremonies in which all levels of society, each in their rightful place, are present, and these include many of the ritual processions and displays within the princely courts. Although Machiavelli and other contemporary theorists unequivocally assumed a male model for princely behavior, women regularly participated in courtly ritual and display. When a noblewoman served as regent she took on more masculine duties that required her to act the part of the prince in the public sphere. She, too, needed to meet with the various guilds. The successful female regent adapted her public behavior to balance the gendered expectations associated with her sex and her position to preserve the "dignity" of her role.

Renaissance nobles recognized the benefits of well-cultivated display. Machiavelli summed up the ramifications of attention to appearances: "Nothing makes a prince so highly esteemed as do great undertakings and unusual actions .... Above all, a prince strives to gain from all his acts notoriety as a strong man of superior ability."⁸ Staged events and entertainments were among the prince's most visible actions, and Machiavelli advised that "at proper times of the year he engages the people's attention with festivals and shows."⁹ Machiavelli echoed the ideas that Giovanni Pontano, a humanist who served the court of Naples in the late fifteenth century, set forth in his treatises regarding the moral aspects of spending money (1498). Pontano elaborated that a ruler's expansive public endeavors are part of his striving for magnificence, the highest earthly virtue he can achieve and a fundamental trait for a great prince. Included in his list of potentially magnificent events are lavish triumphal entries, weddings, funerals, and religious festivals along with other, less ephemeral activities, such as erecting well-made palaces and public buildings.¹⁰ To succeed, these events and monuments must serve the larger public good, whether through entertainment, beautification, and/or affirmation of collective values and identities. As Jacob Burckhardt rightfully observed, ceremonies and celebrations are "a higher phase in the life of the people, in which its religious, moral and poetical ideas took visible shape."¹¹ Everyone could have enjoyed the events and monuments, but both Machiavelli and Pontano agreed that it was the prince who reaped the greatest benefits when he engaged his subjects with public activities. The quality of the events reflected the ruler's generosity, imagination, and connections, while truly successful festivities would have increased popular confidence in the prince and strengthened his position.

When Caterina paraded through the gates of Imola, she followed well-established customs that drew on stories of Imperial Rome to bolster contemporary power. Events like these were enacted by ancient emperors, and while they continued in practice for centuries, during the Renaissance, rulers more conscientiously modeled themselves after their Roman predecessors. Pontano frequently cited the behavior of Roman emperors in his treatises on princely spending and performance. The rise of humanist knowledge sparked this surge of interest in recreating the glorious past, and rulers, with help from advisors, strove to demonstrate their intellectual pursuits through what they understood as authentic or accurate revivals of ceremonies. When they reenacted ancient Roman customs, fifteenth-century rulers not only modeled themselves on the victorious emperors and conquerors of the past, but, according to Renaissance codes of self-fashioning, they also became their cultural heirs.¹²

The transformative aspects of public events and ritual were important in establishing a new ruler, bride, or even governor in his or her position. The events made visible the social, political and religious ideas that structured Renaissance life, heightened in intensity by the atmosphere of celebration. Jacob Burckhardt's comment that festivals entered into "the world of art" is apt.¹³ These public events required intellectual advisors and numerous craftspeople to produce the appropriate setting of temporary arches and pavilions, create and coordinate the decorations of garlands and tapestries hanging from windows along the processional way, and formulate the entertainments of orations and dramatic performances. Celebrations amplified the already strong prerogative of display within the princely courts, and as such were a true opportunity for the ruler to cultivate greatness and excellence, both manifestations of his or her power.

The Marriage of Girolamo Riario and Caterina Sforza

Caterina Sforza understood the importance of appearances from an early age. Her marriage to Girolamo Riario, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, placed her within one of the most powerful courts of Europe and gave her access to political and social opportunities that she might not have enjoyed with a lesser match. Born in late 1462 or early l463, Caterina was the illegitimate yet fully acknowledged daughter of the extravagant Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. His court was one of the most lavish of fifteenth-century Europe, and Caterina experienced it first-hand. When her father became Duke in 1467, she and the other children borne by his mistress Lucrezia ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 CREATING A SPECTACLE
• 2 BUILDING MAGNIFICENCE
• 3 SPLENDOR IN THE PRINCELY COURT
• 4 THE CULTIVATION OF MIND AND SPIRIT
• 5 THE POLITICAL AFTERLIFE OF CATERINA SFORZA
• Bibliography
• Index