Communication, syphilis, Este and culture.

Some years ago at the Porta Portese market in Rome (though not quite as long ago as the engraving here might suggest) I bought a version of Ptolemy's map of 'Southeast' Asia which had been a fold out frontispiece of the French edition of this history by the Scots historian William Robertson, name too long to type. The original published in Edinburgh in 1791, the French edition in 1792. I liked the map, for itself, but also found it intriguing that in a moment when France was busy with the guillotine and Britain and France were going to war knowledge, wisdom, academic literature moved so swiftly.
We don't hear about Robertson but "Robertson was a founder member of Edinburgh’s Select Society in 1754 along with David Hume, Adam Smith and Allan Ramsay and supported the establishment of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783." [source]

source Amazon

Now, in reading Rita Castagna Mantua, History and Art, Firenze 1979 pages 24 and 26, I read that Francisco II and his son Federico II Gonzaga, Marquesses of Mantova, both died of syphilis.

Wikipedia reports that too, alleging also that the entirely philanderous Francesco contracted it from prostitutes while the son 'inherited it from his father'. [source] [source]  Were Francesco here he would probably sue Wikipedia for suggesting he had to pay.

Lucrezia Borgia, blamed for everything in those years that could not be precisely pinned on her brother Cesare and her dad Pope Alex 6, died aged 39, also in 1519, the record showing death caused by childbirth difficulties. But the record also shows that inter alia Francesco and Lucrezia had a long term raging affair.

Come back to them in a moment. First I want to note that the dominant theory is that syphilis entered Europe with the return of Columbus in March 1493 from his first voyage to the Caribbean.

Then, quick as you can publish a French translation of a history published in Scotland three hundred years later, the armies of Charles VIII of France carried syphilis to Italy and most notoriously to Naples. But as that last link indicates he stopped along the way with quite a bit of customary rape and pillage. That link also brings into focus all the families of the period in Rome and northern Italy. There is mention in particular of the Sforza family, ruling in Milan. I wrote earlier of Caterina Sforza of Forli, bastard child of her role model the dreaded Gian Galleazo Sforza.

source wikipedia

His younger brother Ludovico Sforza was in charge by the time Charles VIII came by, ally in one direction, not in the other, check how the wind blows from Rome. Interesting how these families alternate raging monsters with cultured people with imagination. Ludovico and his sister married a brother and sister Este, from Ferrara, in a joint ceremony orchestrated by Leonardo da Vinci. Leo also splashed some fresco on the wall adjacent to Ludo's dad Francesco's tomb. Not many people go to see Frank's tomb but a crush of people go to see the Ultima Cena - Last Supper. The historical context is often lost in the tourist rush for Big Things.

Easily distracted ... my point was to draw attention to the turmoil of the times and this other dimension of the times, not only a proliferation of printing presses in Italy but also of syphilis. But it seems ridiculous to pin the rampaging, soldiering Francesco Gonzaga's syphilis on the sex industry when he was an archetype of the rape and pillage industry. Nobody of course (or that I've seen) writes about same sex lifestyles of the armies of the renaissance. Though at court there must have been a bit and one suspects that the great idealised poet Torquato Tasso, tolerated especially in Ferrara, may have been a bit queer.

For more on sex in the renaissance try this search.

source wikipedia

Francesco Gonzaga married Isabella d'Este, the Ferrara family of culture and style. I mentioned the Este court in Ferrara before as an end note to discussing the Gonzagas at Mantova. Now I realise that in both courts, the great civilising and artistic patrons were Alfonso II and his sister Isabella, the Estes. Though I earlier suggested that Alfonso's wife Lucrezia Borgia may have been influential in the shaping of Italian language, not least as while known for her affair with Frank Gonzaga, she also carried on some horizontal correspondence with the towering figure of Italian literature Pietro Bembo an owned administrator at the Este court of Ferrara.

Isabella outlived Francesco II Gonzaga by twenty years, dying the same year as her beloved, sensitive, artistic and not-very-good-at-obligatory-war-stuff son Federico. Of whose death wikipedia claims he 'inherited' syphilis from his father. It's not genetic, of course, it's sexually transmitted. Isabella showed no signs. Dad must have introduced his son to it some other ways, perhaps in shared experience, perhaps more directly? I have no background as a historian, but if people are going to leave around such nonsenses as the prostitute and inherited claims, surely I can raise questions.

I commend to you Rita Castagna's book Mantua, History and Art which led me on this expedition through the wild side of the renaissance.

Makes you realise how tame Shakespeare's take on Italy is. Perhaps he had to keep it tame to stay out of prison in fusty England. I note Anthony Burgess's speculations on Shakespeare's syphilis.

The Trumps and the Borgias

screenshot images from Foreign Policy

I wrote two blog entries recently on this, here and here — go down to the end of the second link for discussion of Lucrezia Borgia, the House of Este and the history of the Italian language.

Now comes Foreign Policy magazine with "A Working Theory: the Trumps are the Borgias of the 21st Century".

Whether this comparison holds up in detail is not the issue, comparisons never hold up when exposed to scepticism.

screenshot from Foreign Policy

The piece in Foreign Policy dwells on comparison of Lucrezia Borgia and Alfonso d'Este with Ivanka and Jared Kuschner. Given that we are living in the Era of the Unexpected, it may, just may, be possible to imagine Jared assembling a court of finest painters and musicians and presiding over some equivalent of the foundations of modern Italian language, as happened under the Estes. Please consider in light of the decision by the Oxford Dictioaries to award the word of the year title for 2016 to 'post-truth'.
Here begins the future of language? We should also note that Foreign Policy relies on fiction for images of the Borgias...

Trump and literature and culture, I hear you smile... Cop this

With the day by day stories of the Trumps, we have a return to the conventionalism of scholars, in putting the women in the story in ancillary roles, as well may be the actuality of their lives, but who would know if it were different?

I ventured at the end of this blog entry (link as above) that we might consider whether Lucrezia Borgia had a role in the foundation years of Italian language. I look forward to seeing a feminist revisionist perspective of the Once and Future Trumps. There are many fairy tale elements already, if we survive long enough for more to be written. On the male side the great grandfather changing his name from Drumpf to Trump and the grandfather apprenticed as a hairdresser before running away to Seattle to escape military service: surely the present was on the cards.

But the future, what do the cards say about that? I know who thinks he holds the cards but people have to play to make it a game. The other great gangster houses of the renaissance begin to form alliances. See this and this and this. Just a start. Trump-Putin-Assad-Netanyahu against the world of multinational business?

On wealth: Gonzaga, Este, Borgia, Medici... and Trump

I wrote yesterday of the enormous wealth of the Gonzagas of Mantova,  also mention of the Este family in Ferrara and connections with other gigantically rich families, the Borgias, the Medici and the grasping of those especially for the papacy and expenditure on art and fame which lost them, in several cases, all their wealth.. and in the case of the papacy, half the church to Luther and the Germans generally, resentful, hateful of taxes and 'indulgences' sold by the popes to finance the art of Rome.

Edith Templeton, calling them Renaissance gangsters, questioned their happiness amid their wealth.

Today, reading James Fallows's invaluable political blog at The Atlantic I find a link to a reflection on wealth and Citizen Kane by Donald Trump. Which surely the Gonzagas, Russian kleptocrats of the present, the Koch brothers might do well to have watched at some time. The clip is from a never finished film by Errol Mark Morris, known mostly for his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara.

Fallows describes that as 'astonishly introspective' for Trump.

True, but one also sees in it Trump likening himself to Kane.

Here is Orson Welles, including with chorus line,

doing a bit of a Trump in the original promotion for Kane.

It would be sensible of both Clinton and Trump (and Putin)
to watch the Eleven Lessons of Robert McNamara,
not believing all the argument but understanding the tragedy involved in being 'right.'

Also spare a thought for the Gonzagas and Estes and Medicis
persistently at war, for evil or duty or right?
Right/s (diritto/diritti) a word with all its ambiguity, in English and Italian.
In Latin far apart:
iustum: justice, justness, formality, uprightness.
fas: divine law, divine command, Destiny, sacred duty, Right.
— in current times too, there is surely a lot of slippage in crisis or vision from iustum to fas
or rather there is insufficient common understanding of what may be our nations, tribes, states
to avoid conflict in which fas and iustum is confoundedly confused.

McNamara added ten more after seeing the film, see wikipedia

Mantova according to Edith, part 2 plus a bit more

Ludovico III Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua and Barbara of Brandenburg
with their children, fresco by Andrea Mantegna at San Giorgio Castle, Mantua, around 1470
source wikipedia

I had in mind drawing substantially on Edith Templeton's The Surprise of Cremona to discuss Mantova here, but have decided to be brief — and bring you a movie, albeit in Italian, but remember one picture is worth a thousand words. 

Nonetheless, Edith's book is an excellent reflective guide, though 60 years old. We will carry it to Mantova.

Descriptive of art and artists, it also dwells with some puzzlement on the Gonzaga family who seized the city in 1328 or so, built the castle to end all castles with fifteen courtyards, churches etc, etc and went bankrupt from extravagance of a wedding in 1608, whereafter most of their pictures sold to Charles I in England, more works seized and taken away by Napoleon and others. This wedding spared no expense, including one of Monteverdi's most notable operas. (The city was devastated by the Thirty Years' War, plague and sacking. It now has an elegance and charm and an integrity from being away from the main tracks of tourist tramping.)

Discussion of the Gonzaga mind, the persistent search for happiness in the art and construction, in Mantova and Sabbioneta. A fear of death on preoccupation with which she quotes Lorenzo de' Medici, another 'gangster' of the renaissance:

"Fair is youth and free of sorrow
Yet how soon its joys we bury.
Let who would be now be merry:
Sure is no-one of tomorrow."

• quoted at page 161, Readers Book Club edition (Australia) 1955

As elsewhere Edith finds a professor, this time to discuss the Gonzaga extravagance and in response to her perspective that the Gonzaga's creations were just folie de grandeur  the professor responds that this was not so, the immense wealth of the Gonzaga was acquired by plunder in war, that they had no way of sharing the wealth as in modern times building industry, their construction works and commissioning of art enabled sharing of their wealth. And against her observation that Venice, even richer, built dainty palaces compared with the Gonzaga monster, the professor points out that Venice had an entirely different and trade oriented economy. [pp183-4].

We shall go see, Templeton in hand.
-----

I wrote also in an earlier blog entry regarding those times.

The map at right in this text (link also in right column) shows the Po delta in 1570, before effects of an earthquake that year. Note the great lake in front of Bologna, Mantova in a lake and Ravenna out to sea. Chioggia is in the northeastern corner of the map. Venice off the map just north of that. 
Note Ferrara - pointer from the bottom. Ferrara a great rival of the Venetian Republic and hostile to Venetian desires to muck around with the delta and block off their lagoon from floods. 

But then the Este family who had made Ferrara great (their works are what people go to Ferrara to see) ran out of legitimate heirs—and so Pope Clem 8 in 1598, [declaring them a pack of bastards] sent in his army and grabbed the city. But then the same Clem 8 declared a Holy Year in 1600, meaning he would do no warring. The Venetians quickly upped spades and in four years diverted much of the flow away from their lagoon. And then in the south the land grew and the delta marched out to sea (continuing)

source wikipedia
Lucrezia Borgia had died
after difficult pregnancy and childbirth
in 1519

These cities on the north of Italy went through extraordinary times in the Renaissance, the arrival of the printing press, many of them in Venice in particular, altered possession of and entitlement to information (compare with the Shock of the Internet since 2000) and also altered language, enthusiasm for an 'Italian' language, a shift from Latin. The great foundation literary work of Italian language, Orlando Furioso, which draws on Arthurian legend as well as that of Rowland, was written by Ludovico Ariosto who was an administrator for the House of Este. He produced three editions of Orlando Furioso, changes reflecting the 'great argument' about how an Italian language should be, in those years.

Portrait of a Woman by Bartolomeo Veneto,
traditionally assumed to be Lucrezia Borgia.

 Dominant figure in literary direction and music and the popularisation of the madrigal, at the time, was Pietro Bembo.

It was probably a contributing consideration Ariosto's responses to Bembo's advice on his text that Bembo was senior to him in the court of the Este family, indeed senior to the point of carrying on with the wife of the duke of Ferrara, a certain Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alex 6.

And, and, we are back to the point, just a bit, inasmuch as also Lucrezia was carrying on with her husband's sister's husband, Francisco II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantova.

Herewith let me venture, if none has before, that Lucrezia Borgia was surely thus a major influence on the form of the Italian language—and the popularisation of the madrigal.

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/3746/

Look at those two, sound out the word 'popularisation'  and ask yourself...or ask Rupert Murdoch!

Alfonso deserves credit too, having brought an array of painters and musicians to Ferrara. While Alfonso 'acquired' Ariosto when he inherited Ferrara, in the shining pages of history the visual artists and musicians are way ahead.

--------

The National Gallery of Victoria claims this on the right is the only true painting of Lucrezia Borgia: "We have the only known portrait of the most famous and notorious woman in Renaissance history."

Were a man so described he could certainly be a major figure in literary history...

Hey look, what's she been writing?