Italy's Eighteenth Century

Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour

Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth, Catherine M. Sama, Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth, Catherine M. Sama

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804787543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia italiana

In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars, " men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.

PART ONE

Gender and Public Life

ONE

Cicisbei

Italian Morality and European Values in the Eighteenth Century

ROBERTO BIZZOCCHI

Sismondi and the Cicisbei

In J. C. L. Sismondo Sismondi’s portrait of the moral decline of the Italian conscience in the final chapters of his Histoire des républiques (Storia) (1807–1818)—a decline that he attributed to the loss of political and religious freedoms in the sixteenth century—a great deal of space is reserved for the figure of the cicisbeo, the cavalier servente who openly kept company with a married noblewoman, not only in public but also in private. Since the cicisbeo is a figure most commonly associated with the eighteenth century (think, for example, of the “giovin signore [young gentleman]” in the famous poem “Il Giorno” by Giuseppe Parini, 1763), it is all the more interesting that Sismondi speaks of him at the beginning of his chapter on the seventeenth century. It is almost as though the topic pressed upon him with urgency in light of the end of political independence and the

This chapter is an updated and expanded version of an earlier article published in Italian: “Cicisbei. La morale italiana,” Storica 9 (1997), pp. 63–90. Translated by Matthew Sneider.

affirmation of the Counter Reformation. He marvels at the scarce interest dedicated to the theme by other writers:

No one has numbered among the public calamities of Italy what is perhaps the most general reason for the private troubles of all Italian families; the offense, I say, made to the sacred bond of matrimony by another open bond, regarded as honorable, which foreigners always witness in Italy with equal stupor, without understanding the reason—the cicisbei or the cavalieri serventi.

The cicisbei remain the protagonists in the successive pages on Italian corruption, from which I can cite here only a few phrases: “no husband regarded his consort any longer as a faithful companion and partner for life . . . no father dared assure himself that the children of his marriage were his.” In this manner “the institution of all the ridiculous duties of the cicisbei ” was “the most efficacious means of calming agitated spirits recently reduced to servitude.” Sismondi even claims that “not because certain women had lovers, but rather because a woman could no longer show herself in public without a lover, Italians ceased to be men.”¹

The final section of Sismondi’s Histoire is a fundamental text for Italian culture and the image of modern Italy. On the one hand, the Histoire was at the center of attention for and the focus of debates of the nineteenth century’s greatest intellectuals, beginning with Alessandro Manzoni, who in 1819 wrote Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica to refute the text. On the other hand, Sismondi’s invocation of this kind of male behavior revived with greater authority this image of relations between the sexes in Italy that had previously been popularized by a long series of tales, reliable or otherwise, and through judgments, often very negative and contemptuous, reported over the course of the eighteenth century by foreign travelers who came into contact with Italians during their Grand Tours. On cicisbei Sismondi seems particularly to echo the pages of the Englishman Samuel Sharp, whose words were so ferocious as to immediately provoke a resentful response by Italian writer Giuseppe Baretti.²

Cicisbei are an interesting subject for two reasons: first, for the reality of the social phenomenon that they represent, and second, for the national stereotype which was constructed around them. The present chapter deals to a greater degree with the latter issue, but it also seeks to shed some light on the former, although the documentary research here is still in its beginning stages.

Scholars and Cicisbei

A bibliography on the topic of cicisbeismo is not lacking. This bibliography, however, dates primarily to the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; it is composed almost entirely of works by positivist scholars of Italian literature. I note this last fact to clarify the intellectual attitude that marks the greater part of our body of knowledge on the topic: an attitude which mixes, in a manner characteristic of such scholars, moralism and spicy anecdote, erudition and frivolity. It is an attitude in which the most crucial of questions is ever present, sometimes below the surface and sometimes, amusingly, quite in the open: did they do it or didn’t they?

That certain responses to this question have been offered which contradict Sismondi is not terribly important. On the other hand it is worth noting that almost all scholars of cicisbei follow Sismondi, perhaps unconsciously, in his sociological characterization of the phenomenon. I take Luigi Valmaggi as an example of the general tendency. Valmaggi was a cautious follower, regarding the crucial curiosity, of the idea of omnia munda mundis; he was the author of a 1927 book which reprised and reordered the scholarship of recent decades, allowing him to review broadly the eighteenth-century literary sources.³ The cicisbeismo which emerges from Valmaggi’s book is an (innocent) peculiarity of the eighteenth-century Italian nobility, an unexplained unicum in the history of human civilization. Apart from its innocence, the relevant point is that the specialized studies confirm, in an entirely different historiographic context, the gist of Sismondi’s description: his political and moral dramatization of cicisbeismo in relation to servitude and the Counter Reformation would not even be conceivable without enclosing and isolating its usage to Italy, in the early modern period and in the ruling class.

In times and in the hands of spirits much closer to ourselves, the theme of cicisbei has been the object of three analyses which have a scholarly acuity lacking in those of the early twentieth century. Luciano Guerci has the merit of having gathered and interpreted eighteenth-century treatises (which Valmaggi must have judged less amusing than the poems and the accounts of travelers) and, above all, of having connected the gallantry of the cavalieri serventi to the “sociability” of conversations and salons.⁴ Romano Canosa has placed the custom in the context of the sexual repression promoted by Catholic moralists, in his opinion substantially victorious in imposing chastity in every nonconjugal relationship between men and women.⁵ Finally, Marzio Barbagli has dedicated to husbands and cicisbei a brief but dense paragraph in his important book on the family where, following a famous page of Cesare Beccaria, he relates “gallantry” and cicisbeismo to the absence of “freedom in marriage”—the ability to choose one’s spouse. In this sense, cicisbeismo was a practice which offered a controlled outlet for impulses of physical attraction, friendship, and “sympathy.”⁶

When one examines the historical sociology of marital or extramarital relations between the sexes, the cavalier servente ceases to be the ridiculous marionette of erudite literati or the tragic puppet of Sismondi. He remains, however, a human specimen specific to eighteenth-century Italian nobility. Barbagli, who like Guerci and Canosa,⁷ shares this conviction with his predecessors, makes the objection which occurs spontaneously at this point: if the cicisbeo is related to the absence of freedom in marriage—a fact widespread also outside of Italy—why does the custom appear characteristic of the Italian aristocracies? I propose to reformulate the very premise of this question.

Contracts and Cicisbei

An important component of this image of cicisbeismo as a peculiarly Italian custom is the prevailing conviction that it had the character of a legally regulated institution. In fact, Barbagli argues that the usage was legally fixed: “The cicisbeo was chosen jointly by wife and husband and was sometimes provided for in the nuptial contracts.”⁸ This affirmation is not accompanied by reference to any evidence. In reality it is an opinion repeated many times before Barbagli, whose proof, however, remains rather vague.

In his book on Parini, Cesare Cantù asserts that “in nuptial contracts it was stipulated that a cavalier servente be given to the lady, and a specific individual was sometimes even named.” This assertion is accompanied by a note, however, which speaks of a sonnet by Parini in praise of a woman who does not have a cicisbeo.⁹ Giosue Carducci, also speaking of Parini, repeats the thesis of the “cavalier servente stipulated and even designated by the nuptial contracts,” adding that “when the Marquis Spinola, in mideighteenth century Genoa, acted in a contrary fashion—stipulating his refusal of any servente—it appeared singular and inconvenient.”¹⁰ Note that this is an accord regarding the absence, and not the presence, of the cicisbeo. In any event, Carducci depends for this information on Achille Neri, one of the positivist literati to whom I made reference above, who in his turn depends on the legal historian Carlo Gabba, who depends on still others—a mechanism of Chinese boxes in which reference to any specific notarial act seems to have been lost.¹¹

A notarial act marked with a place, a date (Rome, September 17, 1793), and a notary’s name (Felci), appears and is also partially published in a zibaldone, an anecdotal book written around the time of Neri’s study. The author, David Silvagni, reports for several pages on the patrimonial agreements contained in the nuptial contract between don Paluzzo Altieri and donna Marianna di Sassonia where—he comments—“there was not the usual promise to grant to the bride . . . a cavalier servente of her liking, as was the usage and as we have read in the contract of a Visconti woman married into the house of the Marsciano counts.”¹² Silvagni, however, shows us nothing of this Visconti-Marsciano contract.

Among the authoritative scholars of our own day, Paolo Ungari, in his fundamental book on the family law, has explicitly dealt with the problem of legal formalization:

Leaving aside the possibility of documenting pacts regarding the cicisbeo in nuptial contracts, which are attested by many, the series of accessory stipulations . . . , all of which clearly preordain an independent social and sentimental life, are interesting and very easy to document.

The “accessory stipulations” are those which regarded the “treatment” of the wife—allowance, servants, carriage, box at the opera, and so on. Ungari exhibits notarial formulas regarding this treatment. But he can adduce not one nuptial contract which includes agreement over a cicisbeo, despite the caricatured representation of a contract’s stipulation in Vittorio Alfieri’s satirical comedy Il divorzio.¹³

In his book on eighteenth-century Venice, the French historian Jean Georgelin, on the trail of an unsubstantiated reference by Philippe Monnier, also went in search of notarial stipulations of agreement on cicisbei: “The anecdote—he concludes—had the success that one might imagine. But the examination of thousands upon thousands of noble marriage contracts obliges us to deny it: we have not found even one which mentions it.”¹⁴ I can declare the same thing—for what my tens of contracts, added to the thousands, are worth—regarding the Tuscan contracts which I have read.

In conclusion, even if we cannot argue that the phenomenon of legal stipulation never existed, we can regard it as being much less pervasive than many studies on cicisbeismo imply. Until contrary proof comes to light, it will be correct to regard cicisbeismo as more a common practice than a legal institution.

Compari and Cicisbei

The fact that cicisbeismo may not have been a matter of law and contracts reveals some interesting dimensions of this social practice. The less one insists on the institutionalized role and the crystallized artificiality of the relationship of cicisbeato, the more we may consider it within the overall reality of relations between the sexes and therefore contextualize it in an environment rather far from the literary satire of Parini’s giovin signore.

The existence of recognized and overt ties between men and women, ties which are independent of and prior to—but also contemporary with and parallel to—the engagement and marriage of one or both of the parties with another person, has been attested among the populations of various parts of Italy and Europe for centuries, almost up to the eve of the sexual freedom of our own time. The most obvious of these ties is godparenthood—the bond of spiritual family relations and familiar intimacy which is created between godfather and godmother and between these two and the godchild and parents. We do not need Boccaccio’s slyness (novellas VII, 3 and 10; novella X, 4) to imagine opportunities for adulterous sex in the relative freedom of encounter conceded to godfathers and godmothers.

But for our purposes this sacramental and technically circumscribed family relation is less interesting than a generic and widespread usage which clearly has some relation to baptism—as demonstrated by its most common name, godparenthood of San Giovanni (comparatico di San Giovanni), and the importance of the ...