The Ugly Renaissance (7 page)

Plunging into the heart of the old city, Michelangelo was confronted by the darkness of narrow
vicoli
(alleyways) overshadowed by hastily erected houses, a startling mixture of pungent smells, and the deafening noise of shouts and chatter. As he turned south toward the river, he would have been able to hear the hustle and bustle of the nearby Mercato Vecchio (Old Market), filled with stalls and street vendors selling everything from fruits and vegetables to meat and fish, and from sweetmeats and tasty treats to crockery and cloth. Even at a distance, the air teemed not just with the stench of fungibles gradually going bad in the Tuscan heat but also with the cries of market traders, the laughter of playful children, and incessant haggling over inflated prices.

In addition to legitimate trade, there were more nefarious forms of exchange going on, especially in the narrow streets close to the market through which Michelangelo would have passed. Gaudy prostitutes plied their wares from the early hours of the morning, bravos ran threatening fingers over the blades of their knives, pickpockets ran rampant in the confusion, deformed beggars rattled wooden bowls, and gamblers played dice on every corner. Every so often, petty fights would start. Even to Florentines, it was an arresting scene. As the poet
Antonio Pucci put it a little more than a century before Michelangelo’s journey:

Every morning the street is jammed

With packhorses and carts in the market,

There is a great press and many stand looking on,

Gentlemen accompanying their wives

Who come to bargain with the market women.

There are gamblers who have been playing,

Prostitutes and idlers,

Highwaymen are there, too, porters and dolts,

Misers, ruffians and beggars.

In the streets nearby, the worldly delights that could be sampled in the
Mercato
could be enjoyed at greater leisure, and with greater abandon, in the numerous
taverns and brothels that were a permanent feature of Florentine life. Whether a small wineshop serving the occasional plate of simple food or a large hostelry complete with stables and beds for travelers, inns were lively, debauched places full of the noise and stench of social life in the raw. People drank strong wines and hardy ales in abundance, danced with lusty barmaids, negotiated transactions, played cards, planned robberies, and brawled incessantly.

Frequented by high and low alike, the taverns Michelangelo encountered along his journey through Florence’s oldest quarter were places in which lives often went to pieces, a fact that is vividly depicted in a Florentine devotional painting from the early sixteenth century. This nine-part moral allegory tells
the story of
Antonio Rinaldeschi, who was hanged in Florence on July 22, 1501. By nature a pious man, Rinaldeschi is depicted as having met his ruin at the Inn of the Fig. While sitting at a simple wooden table in the middle of a small courtyard, Rinaldeschi gets rather drunk and foolishly involves himself in a game of dice with an untrustworthy fellow. Inevitably, he loses and immediately flies off into a rage. Cursing God for his luck, he staggers off looking for trouble and—unable to find any more suitable outlet for his anger—ends by hurling dung at an image of the Virgin Mary near the church of
Santa Maria degli Alberighi, just south of the Duomo. By the end of the sequence, he is arrested, convicted of blasphemy, and sentenced to hanging. Apart from the fact that Rinaldeschi repents before his death, the story was entirely typical of Florentine taverns.

Crime, inevitably, was a major feature of tavern life, and the city archives are full of accounts of violence, extortion, robbery, and even
rape in such places. In the late fourteenth century, for example, two men called Lorenzo and Picchino were convicted of swindling a certain Tommaso di Piero of Hungary in the Crown Inn while the latter was on his way to Rome. After getting the poor Tommaso a little tipsy, Lorenzo and Picchino convinced him that they were wealthy merchants who had partners all over Italy. Persuading Tommaso to “sell” his horse to them for 18 florins, Lorenzo promised he would receive payment from his “partners” in Rome. To add insult to injury, Lorenzo and Picchino then “borrowed” a further 28 ducats from Tommaso to “buy” some imaginary jewels from a friend, again promising to reimburse him through business contacts in Rome. Needless to say,
the guileless Tommaso never saw a penny of his money. Condemned in absentia, Lorenzo and Picchino were sentenced to be whipped through the streets, but of course they got away without a scratch.

At the bottom end of the scale, brothels were of much the same order as inns. Were it not for the rampant sex and even more rampant disease, it would, in fact, be comparatively hard to tell them apart from taverns. Indeed, the two often enjoyed extremely close relations. In 1427, it was reported that beneath the house of Rosso di Giovanni di Niccolò de’ Medici at the entrance to the Chiasso Malacucina there were “
six little shops” that were “rented to prostitutes who usually pay from 10 to 13 lire per month [for a room].” A certain Giuliano, an innkeeper, managed the whole operation. Giuliano kept the keys to all the rooms and put “whoever he wishes [into the rooms].” Presumably, he also collected the rents and took a cut of the profits, too.

Yet not all brothels were such small-scale affairs. It was principally for its larger whorehouses that this part of Florence was especially famous. Indeed, so renowned were the brothels of the old city that verses were penned in their celebration. In the liveliest of all, the poet Antonio
Beccadelli (1394–1471; better known as Panormita) urged his book—
The Hermaphrodite
—to visit his favorite establishment and by way of recommendation provided a piquant little pen-portrait of the pleasures that his scandalously titled volume could expect:

Here is the congenial whorehouse,

a place which will breathe out its own signs with its stench.

Enter here, and say hello from me to the madams and the whores,

in whose tender bosoms you will be taken.

Blonde Helen and sweet Mathilde will run up to you,

both of them experts in shaking their buttocks.

Giannetta will come to see you, accompanied by her puppy

(the dog fawns on her mistress; her mistress fawns on men).

Soon Clodia will come, her breasts bare and painted,

Clodia, a girl sure to please with her blandishments.

Anna will meet you and give herself to you with a German song

(as Anna sings she exhales the new wine on her breath);

and Pitho the great hip-wiggler will greet you

and with her comes Ursa, the darling of the brothel.

The nearby neighborhood, the one named for the slaughtered cow,

sends Thais to greet you.

In short, whatever whores are in this famous city

will seek you out, a happy crowd at your arrival.

Here it’s allowed to speak and perform dirty things,

and no rejection will make your face blush.

Here, what you can do and what you’ve long wanted to do,

you will fuck and be fucked as much as you want, book.

In addition to privately run establishments, there were state-operated sex emporia. On the other side of the Ponte Vecchio in the area known as Oltr’Arno (literally “Across the Arno”) was a site that had previously been set aside for the construction of a public brothel.
It was planned by the priors in the quarter of Santo Spirito in 1415, and the city government hoped that by expanding the state’s bordello business, it could ensure that prostitution—which could not be exterminated entirely—could at least be controlled and regulated. The priors even coughed up 1,000 florins to build, furnish, and construct the brothel in Santo Spirito and another in the quarter of Santa Croce. Although the bordello in Oltr’Arno was never constructed, the more realistic members of the Renaissance elite freely acknowledged the good sense of such provisions.

Walking through the Old City and toward Oltr’Arno, Michelangelo had encountered the truly visceral side of Florentine life. It was perhaps no surprise that confronted with a similar array of sights, sounds, and
smells, Petrarch felt moved to complain of contemporary existence in harsh terms a little over a century before. In a letter to his friend
Lombardo della Seta, Petrarch described his surroundings in terms that did ample justice to the darker side of this part of the city. “To me,” he declared,

this life seems the hardened ground of our toils, the training camp of crises, a theater of deceits, a labyrinth of errors … silly ambition, lowliest elation, futile excellence, base loftiness, darkened light, unknown nobility, a riddled purse, a leaky jug, a bottomless cave, infinite greed, harmful desire, dropsical splendor … a workshop of crime, the scum of lust, the forge of wrath, a well of hatreds, the chains of habits … the fires of sin … harmonious discord … simulated virtue, badness excused, fraud praised, disgrace honored … a kingdom of demons, a principality of Lucifer …

Michelangelo’s thoughts may not have been so scathing, but he is likely to have been aware of the contrast between the grandeur of Orsanmichele and the world of crime, sex, and depravity that lurked below.

T
HE
O
THER
H
ALF
: O
LTR
’A
RNO

It was along the Borgo San Jacopo in Oltr’Arno that Michelangelo would also have encountered the humbler residential quarters of the city. Inhabited mostly by cloth workers in the late fifteenth century—particularly wool carders, combers, and beaters—this area was undoubtedly lively—with a small but active market near the church of Santo Spirito—but cramped and dirty. In contrast to the major thoroughfares on the north side of the Arno, the streets were largely unpaved and filled with mud and filth. Trudging along on foot, Michelangelo would have had to take great care where he stepped and would probably have had to cover his nose from time to time. Despite the priors’ repeated attempts to improve public
hygiene, it was still a deeply unsanitary environment, and the awful smell of fish and rotting vegetables found in the Mercato Vecchio was still much better than the odor that rose from the streets in which poorer Florentines lived. For the most part,
people relieved themselves wherever the opportunity presented itself, frequently tipping empty pots out of windows; but although certain parts of the city were equipped with dedicated cesspools, these were inadequate for the sheer volume of effluence produced by the city’s growing population and often overflowed straight out into the road. In June 1397, for example,
the city magistrates fined three men 10 lire for failing to construct an adequate cesspool and for allowing human excrement to fill the street. At the same time, it was common for animals to be driven through the streets, and while horses (and their droppings) were a part of everyday existence, it would not have been unusual for Michelangelo to have seen oxen drawing carriages, sheep being driven to market, or pigs snuffling in the dirt.
Indeed, in advising Francesco “il Vecchio” da Carrara, lord of Padua, as to how a ruler ought to govern his state, Petrarch emphasized that a good statesman should take particular care to ensure that pigs did not run rampant through the city.

Lining these streets were a multitude of houses occupied by ordinary men and women. Although there were still some fairly “grand” pa- lazzi in this area—such as that owned by the Nerli family—the majority of the dwellings bore the imprint of difficult lives. Despite the vogue for classical ideas in urban design, the homes of the poor were erected either in the absence of regulations or in defiance of occasional attempts at civic improvement and were consequently built in a ramshackle manner according to the limited resources available. Particularly in Oltr’Arno, these houses were narrow—with a frontage generally no more than fifteen feet—but deep and often very tall, regularly comprising up to four stories, and would typically be inhabited by a number of
families renting a few cramped rooms for a few florins per year. Covered with a simple form of plaster, walls were commonly crisscrossed with threatening cracks and, lacking paint or decoration, presented a dull and forbidding appearance.

A feeling for the streets of Oltr’Arno can be gained from a roughly contemporaneous painting in the nearby church of Santo Spirito. In the background of his
Madonna del Carmine
(also known as the
Pala de’ Nerli
; ca. 1493–96) (
Fig. 4
), Filippino Lippi painted a truncated view of the streets running westward from the Palazzo dei Nerli to the gate of San Frediano. Although the three-story palazzo is predictably imposing, the houses lining the road leading away from it are almost absurdly small. Their roofs tilting in apparently random directions, they are constructed
in a comparatively flimsy and unplanned manner. The street itself is populated by a mixture of working men and women, animals, and children. Nearest to the palazzo, two pigs are shown snuffling in the dirt while a child runs past a two-wheeled wagon pulled by what—judging by its size—is probably a mule. A little farther away, a man struggles with a heavily loaded packhorse, while another conducts some business through a window. And under the gate itself, walking out toward the fields beyond, is a woman, steadying a large platter of wares on her head with one hand and holding her infant child safe with the other. The mother’s concern is an understandable testament to the standards of the area. If her little boy managed to defy the odds to survive his earliest years, he would count himself lucky to live much beyond thirty-five in Oltr’Arno.