Collecting Women: Three French Kings and Manuscripts of Empire in the Italian Wars
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/691389
ISSN2037-6731
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Economic and Social Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeCollecting Women: Three French Kings and Manuscripts of Empire in the Italian WarsJohn GagnéJohn GagnéUniversity of Sydney Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn April 1494, Galeazzo Sanseverino entered Lyon with a team of two hundred horses and a riot of diplomatic gifts. His father-in-law Ludovico Sforza, Milan's de facto duke, had charged him with making the case for war to France's twenty-three-year-old king Charles VIII. A successful French invasion of Naples would supplant Milan's Aragonese foes and reframe Italian politics in Ludovico's favor. Galeazzo, a dazzling courtier and athletic horseman, charmed the sovereign in short order. As a show of affinity, Charles invited Galeazzo to join him in his private chambers and took "one of his young ladies by the hand, saying that he wished to give her to Galeazzo as his mistress; then he chose another for himself, and each of them conversed with his lady for a good two hours."1 With this gesture, the king cemented an alliance between France and Milan by positioning women as objects of exchange. Four months later, Charles VIII crossed the Alps with his army.2 In both flesh and paint, women surrounded the French monarch on his military expedition. Mistresses, as Helen Ettlinger has revealed, constituted rather than challenged the patriarchal system of privilege in fifteenth-century courts through interchanges exactly like this one. It was a system in which husbands colluded as well, offering their wives to rulers in the expectation of tightening their affiliations.3 This essay unpacks that dynamic around 1500, when courtly women—individually, or in bands often labeled brigate—welcomed France's invading kings to Italy.4 Often overlooked, these women, and a strain of visual culture built around them, help us to recover the way that international war brought traffic in women and visions of territorial expansion together into turbulent collaboration.5Little more than a year after their meeting in Lyon, Charles and Galeazzo faced each other again, but now as adversaries. Milan had joined the League of St. Mark against the French, and its forces confronted Charles's army as it descended from the Apennines toward the Lombard plain, heading toward France. Opposing sides clashed in the rain at Fornovo, outside Parma, on July 6, 1495. The battle's outcome was equivocal enough for both sides to construe it as a success.6 From the League's perspective, the victory partly derived from the French king's brisk retreat, leaving wagons full of royal booty vulnerable to the Greek-Albanian horsemen (stradiots) in Venetian employ. Having spent months traversing the peninsula in the guise of a new Charlemagne, Charles VIII had amassed significant treasures including jewels, fine textiles, and horses.7 In addition to these spoils, the king lost a number of personal riches. On July 20, the stradiots sold his jeweled helmet and gilded sword to the Venetian republic; they also found a book of prayers, the golden royal seals, holy relics, and Charles's personal portable altar.8 Among these abandoned treasures was, moreover, a book of portraits of the king's damsels. As we will see, Italian commentators around 1500 polemicized the very idea of these images, since they understood them as representations of Italian women and thus as tokens of conquest. In pursuing the bridge between real women and images of women—in other words, by investigating the space linking women's action and representation in royal circles—we see more clearly Italian women's position as both emblems and agents in these years of war.The inferno of the Italian Wars, of which the above episode from 1494 to 1495 describes just the spark, brought European neighbors into endemic conflict that reframed their interactions. In that regard, the Italian Wars produced a rich discursive feedback loop on the topic of culture, in which both conquerors and conquered took war as an occasion to reflect on their own habits and their relations with each other. Those relations were intrinsically gendered. Studies of European overseas empires have pointed to that reality in the colonial world, but it has been less amply developed in the context of the intra-European contest of the Italian Wars.9This gendered quality of empire found an outlet in art produced for the French kings in their seasons of Italian expansion, especially in manuscript images that specifically called on narratives of intimacy invoking real or putative interactions between the king and Italian women. Empire, of course, centrally preoccupied rulers in the early sixteenth century through explicit invocations of ancient Roman precedent and its contemporary afterlife in the Holy Roman Empire.10 The visual culture of this thread of imperialism has a brilliant interpreter in R. W. Scheller, who has revealed its varied articulations in the ambit of the French kings in Italy.11 The classicizing and programmatic art of imperialism that Scheller has traced can be complemented by other visions of empire that come into sight through feminist analysis. In other words, this article acknowledges empire as an institution and tradition but takes even stronger cues from feminist critiques that see complex transactions of gendered power at play in the imperial project.12 Likewise, postcolonial scholarship has done much to point to those same dynamics, and it thus seems valuable to align this research on conquest with some of the concerns of that fruitful way of thinking about domination's histories.One of those concerns is the manner in which conquest mobilized gendered systems and representations to nourish expressions of sovereignty and difference. That confluence occupies this study in the form of three illustrated manuscript books produced in the milieux of the three French kings at the heart of the Italian invasions: Charles VIII (r. 1483–98), Louis XII (r. 1498–1515), and François I (r. 1515–47). Two features make them worth juxtaposing. First, they all depicted Italian women as objects of desire in French expansionism and so shared fundamental formal attributes linking sex and conquest. Despite their many differences, the value of bringing these products together into a single analysis lies in rethinking the way that gender could operate subtly in imagining the overlapping power relations between sexes and nations. Second, their association with the kings bespoke a particular sphere of elite ideation, in which we might grasp regal (or pararegal) visions of the pleasures associated with domination.The argument is not that these manuscripts shared any particular connection by design. Aside from the fact that each of the three productions orbited its respective monarch on his transalpine campaign—reason enough to compare them—their individual contexts are too diverse to sustain a case for programmatic unity. Rather, the contention is that by virtue of their ideological and material similarities, they offer purchase on the gendered construction of French sovereignty in the Italian Wars and thus deserve to be seen in light of one another. Collecting women (including their representations) and collecting territory could be collapsed into each other through fertile conceptual slippages enabled by art. As tokens of civility and beauty, images of women helped to authorize conquest insofar as they served to naturalize visions of mastery, in both discourse and practice. This art was not large-scale or expensive, nor was it amassed, so far as we know, with the same avidity as the kings showed for the work of elusive virtuosi. Instead, these manuscripts were the kind of easy-to-use luxury items that could confirm—rather than challenge—a desired status quo. In that sense, the analysis offered here positions them as articulations of preexisting notions about women as well as timely reconstruals of women's place in the unfolding imperial enterprise. The hinge linking those two views in these manuscripts was Italian women's intimacy with the monarch. Presupposing the ruler's magnetism, the manuscript makers figured the politics of French domination through allegories of personal proximity and liaison. Those figurations called on familiar mistress tropes but made them new by couching them in terms of the sexual or social intercourse occasioned by imperial contact.One of this article's methodological commitments is to test how deeply we can anchor the manuscripts in their contemporary context. It works to do so by examining the social environment of their production and by tracing histories of the monarchs' contact with real women on their campaigns. Such contact ranged from the violent, as implied in the context of Charles VIII, to the courtly, as evoked in the section on François I. But it would be misleading to separate those concepts too cleanly. Violence and courtliness were not mutually exclusive for elite men; they were often reciprocally sustaining.13 Women were constant participants in this masculine dialectic between force and grace as objects of desire and (simultaneously in many cases) as intellectual subjects.14 As cultural products and commodities of that setting, these books were entangled objects in the sense that they gave artifactual form and narrative energy to the intercultural contact.15 The entanglement was strong because these manuscripts reflected on the very imperial project in which they were involved, and some of them occasioned commentary as they passed through various hands. This essay attempts to reconstruct those passages and interpret their entanglements.We begin with the lost book of ladies putatively produced for Charles VIII during the first Italian war in order to examine women's place in the formulation of French imperialism south of the Alps. The subsequent section interprets an unusual imperial fable produced for Louis XII around the Genoese patrician Tommasina Spinola. The article's final section offers a new context for an album of female portraits fashioned for François I in Milan by Giovanni Ambrogio Noceto. Whether in fact the kings really pursued intimate liaisons with specific Italian women remains, in most cases, unknowable. Instead, the political potentiality of sex explains the empire-building value of invoking the royal mistress type. Both Gallic imperial projects and Italian territorial resistance converged in the persona of the sovereign's subjected lady.Charles VIII's Book of LadiesCharles VIII's book of ladies both defies and invites interpretation. It is now lost, but to judge by the word of a Mantuan witness, it almost certainly existed. After Fornovo, news of this album became ammunition in a polemic over the barbarism of the French invaders. By tracing the history of this now-vanished object, we can reconstruct the volatile environment it addressed so provocatively. The credence that contemporaries afforded it testifies to the way it distilled a set of arguments about women's place in the French invasion. In that sense, the book's absence is a secondary concern. More importantly, its discursive and polemical framing allows us an alternative way to think about these wars as a conflictual field in which women's images and actions served both to kindle and to assuage grievances.Mantua's marquis, Francesco Gonzaga, led Venetian forces and their allies when they engaged King Charles VIII at Fornovo. The fighting was quick but "extremely cruel," the marquis later wrote to his wife Isabella d'Este.16 Among Charles's abandoned treasures was reportedly a book of "portraits of the king's damsels" (retracti de quelle damiselle del Re). This description survives in a letter of Isabella d'Este's secretary, Benedetto Capilupi.17 The book came into Francesco Gonzaga's possession, and he sent it, along with some lance fragments from the battle, back to Mantua.18 Shortly thereafter, Francesco sent to the king "a little book and a few pages of various pictures that were found here," which could have been this book of portraits.19 The king replied from Turin on August 17: "From your trumpeter I have received a letter from you along with certain drawings that were lost by one of my painters (certi dessegni che foreno persi per uno mio depinctore) which were discovered amongst your soldiers, for which I thank you indeed."20 The king further requested Francesco's help recovering his relics and a golden maestà that he understood now to be in Parma. Charles hoped the marquis would grant a royal herald a safe-conduct "for the sole purpose of recovering the aforesaid images (li dessegni predicti)."21 This chain of correspondence continued into the early months of 1496. The king asked for Francesco's help recovering "several paintings of diverse manners and subjects that one of my painters had depicted, pictures (portraictes) in which were some cities and castles, naval maps, other novelties from Italy, and apparently the registers and papers concerning my expenditures."22These letters to Francesco Gonzaga suggest Charles VIII could suffer to lose his helmet and sword to the Venetians but was less willing to part with his artistic marvels. While these works may have been fashioned by Italians, the king's references to "my painters" instead imply that one or more French court artists may have traveled on campaign in 1494–95; the most likely candidate is Jean Perréal.23 Charles VIII preferred (perhaps the same) "Jean de Paris" to travel to Germany to portray a woman renowned for her beauty, or at least he did in the fictional world of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, first published in 1558.24 Marguerite's tale not only recalls European habits of diplomatic or betrothal portraiture, but it also opens a specific context in which to see court artists depicting a foreign feminine beauty at the king's bidding. If Marguerite could imagine Perréal traveling at his sovereign's behest to capture the likeness of a striking woman, it strengthens the notion that Charles may have commissioned one of his artists to draw portraits of Italian women ("the king's damsels") whom he encountered during his season of peninsular conquest.The Veronese physician Alessandro Benedetti served the Venetian army at Fornovo and claimed in his Diary of the Caroline War to have glimpsed the book during the chaos of the French retreat. Benedetti also attached a very particular politics to it: "In that plunder I saw a book in which were painted various nude images of his mistresses (pellicum … ex naturali depictae), differing in appearance and age as his lust and insane love had impelled him in each city; these pictures he carried with him as souvenirs (memoriae gratia)."25 Far from seeing the book of ladies as a celebration of refined beauty, Benedetti read it as a document of mastery, a feminine metonymy of the cities the king had invaded. The book's very existence, Benedetti's description implied, validated Italians' critique that the French invasion coupled irrational lust for conquest with ferocity; in fact, such complaints proliferated after the battle at Fornovo. Benedetti's Latin account went to press in 1496. Bernardino Corio, the Milanese court historiographer, imported this tale almost verbatim into his own vernacular Historia Patria (1503). "A book was found there," he related of the battle site, "in which many women of various forms and ages raped by them [the French] (per loro violate) in several cities were depicted al naturale, and they carried it with them to remember."26If Benedetti's account implied violation, Corio made it explicit. He pluralized the culpability, however. The king himself avoided specific blame, and it fell instead on the invading French army in general. An ostensibly courtly product came to stand in for the habits of the invaders' culture. Many scholars have drawn attention to this book, noting it merely as a historical curiosity or perhaps a testament to the king's so-called gallant conquests.27 In general, their focus has been on recovering the history of the object rather than the history of the women implicated, understandable insofar as the object might still resurface; the women, by contrast, have left no other traces. Some kind of royal book of portraits probably did exist; the idea of its contents and subject matter led Italians like Benedetti and Corio immediately to sensationalize it as evidence in an anti-imperialist critique against the French. To label this critique propaganda, however, would overlook the opportunity it affords to ask deeper questions about the invaders' relations with women, particularly as the critique responded to a wartime environment in which the very idea of this book resonated with current events.28 We must pursue the historical conditions that made the notion of this book credible in its own time. Whether the album was as scandalous as our Italian commentators reported cannot be known, but it nonetheless became a tool through which to recast the narrative of invasion. It situated Italian women's chastity as one of the many treasures seized by French invaders. The conquerors carried off entire libraries, art collections, and stained glass windows, but they also stole—to phrase it in fifteenth-century language—Italian women's honor.Contemporaries framed the invasion as an outrage to Italian women's propriety, often grouping theft (of goods) and violence (against people) together. Corio's disturbing description of Charles VIII's album traveled alongside a vigorous debate about violence in the 1490s and after. Pietro Bembo's History of Venice (composed 1530–44) made the link between women and war booty explicit. When in 1495 Venetian galleys captured French ships departing newly conquered Naples, "in them were found a great many female prisoners and a number of nuns who had been carried off from their convents at Gaeta and raped, also ecclesiastical gold and silver, and bronze doorpanels, masterfully made and very expensive, which the French had removed from the castle at Naples."29 Neapolitans had tried to avoid such a fate by enclosing all the city's women and their belongings in churches, hoping to "avoid crimes" by wagering that the invaders would respect the sacred precincts.30 They did not; after all, the sexual license of the French invaders led Neapolitans to name their new venereal disease after the foreigners, and it also helped to establish a popular typology figuring Italy as a woman whose body was wounded by scars (Italia fragelata).31 When soldiers were billeted in private homes—as they often were in these wars—"no woman was safe," one Italian pamphlet opined.32 It would be a mistake to dismiss these complaints as inevitable consequences of war or merely as Italian polemics to shame and diminish the French, whose politico-military power cloaked the peninsula. Instead, they can open a space in which to evaluate the conquerors' attitudes toward women, both as objects of violent desire and as agents in the fraught politics of conquest. Unpacking the ideological baggage of the French imperial project—from the king's own bags, as it were—can reveal the way that it justified or contested the treatment of women in war and positioned them in the broader discourse of conquest. Male elites on both sides, sensitive to accusations of rape, debated whether such crimes had even been committed. At the same time, Italian noblewomen appeared constantly in the circles around the king, conscripted specifically for their physical beauty to embellish festive entries and balls. These women, despite their assigned role as ornaments, also performed a range of equestrian and oratorical feats that the French conquerors associated with Italian refinement, thereby complicating the narrative of mastery established through their military strength.The issue of sexual violence during the French invasion proved instantly contentious. While some apologists for the invaders insisted on the soldiers' decency, there can be no doubt that the French army committed sex crimes in Italy in 1494: too many chroniclers report it as fact to dismiss.33 Accounts of these offenses—against both women and men—remain to be studied.34 While this article focuses mostly on mistresses, Corio's reference to violent assaults demands an assessment. Aware of reports of rape, military elites were committed to policing the behavior of their fighters, and the charges demanded a reckoning. In his Mémoires, the French diplomat Philippe de Commynes described Italians' disenchantment with the French, whom the former had at first "adored as saints, finding us to be all faith and goodness. But this idea lasted only a while, partly because of our disorder and pillage, and partly because our enemies preached widely to the people, accusing us of raping women (nous chargeans de prendre femmes a force), of taking money and other goods wherever we found them. In Italy there can be no worse accusation because they are more jealous and avaricious than other people. As for the women, they were lying, but for the rest there was some truth in it."35 Commynes flatly rejected accusations of sex crimes, although he seemed ready enough to admit to others. Nor was Commynes above turning the same charge on France's enemies, the Neapolitan kings, accusing Alfonso and Ferrandino, father and son, of "raping many women."36Commynes maintained the same position in his correspondence with Milan's duke, Ludovico Sforza. On November 27, 1494, Commynes noted that "news flies among the cityfolk that when the king arrived in Florence he took all their liberty away and that in the homes where our men are billeted they have done bad things toward women. But I know that these are all lies and I will not dwell on it."37 Ludovico, for his part, claimed just days later to have upbraided Charles VIII—at least that is what he reported to two Venetian ambassadors—for the bad behavior of the French:[Ludovico]: One day, having heard news of many cruelties that he and his men had committed disregarding God and the world by violating holy sites, women, and all sorts of vile acts, I said to him: "Sire, you shall no longer heal by miracle of God those who have scrofula, because it's said that when a sufferer is presented to Your Majesty, you confess him and heal him in making the sign [of the cross]. You have committed such evils in coming here that if you wished to confess yourself, you would find no one able to absolve you, and therefore you are no longer able to work miracles."38Contemporaries blamed Ludovico for "inviting" the French to invade the peninsula in the first place; Ludovico may have mounted this rhetorical performance merely to convince ambassadors that his attitudes toward France had hardened. But the fact that Sforza made his case partly on the basis of rapes—particularly in the wake of Commynes's letter to him just a week earlier disavowing French guilt for them—reveals that sexual violence was a matter of lively dispute both in the streets and squares of Italian cities (as Commynes implied) and in the halls of princes.39 Here, then, is a specific context for Bernardino Corio's claim that the French had collected drawings of violated women. The realities of sexual violence in 1494–95, coupled with disputes over culpability, made Italians like Corio eminently amenable to a narrative in which these acts might be registered in an artistic trophy item. The invaders' brutality became a platform for recriminations. As one chronicler concluded in describing a tale of retributive murders between French and Italians in the wake of an attempted rape in 1499, "it is often said that there is no fury greater than French fury."40Alessandro Benedetti's description of the portrait book—that it portrayed the king's own Italian mistresses—shared Corio's focus on women's bodies but imagined them instead as proxies for Italy's states. In 1494, most cities perceived the magnitude of the French invasion to be so great that they mounted no initial resistance and instead welcomed the invaders openly by mounting festive entries and balls for the king. Charles VIII consequently had several opportunities to encounter the young women whom these cities marshaled as ornaments in their civic celebrations. In Chieri near Turin, a tableau vivant featured an all-female nativity scene to honor the recent birth of the dauphin. It culminated when three young women crowned the monarch with flowers, kissed him "humbly," and named him "king of the ladies."41 At the end of Charles's time in Milan, twenty-four women led by the duchess Beatrice d'Este presented themselves to him on horseback and later joined him at a ball. The king's painter, probably Perréal, sketched the duchess's likeness and her luxurious Milanese attire to send back to France.42 These sketches, belonging to an emerging manuscript costume-book tradition, may themselves have comprised the book lost at Fornovo, and a network of rumor could have taken (or mistaken) it as a trophy book. Courtly collectors gathered serial images of women wearing both generic and distinctively proprietary costume as a way to expand their ken of regional styles and emerging novelties, although we still know little about the history of such manuscripts.43 Illuminated French books now in Oxford and Paris—showing Lombard, Genoese, Venetian, Florentine, Roman, Neapolitan, French, and Spanish women around 1500—point to this appetite, borrowed from a tradition of serially celebrating Italy's major states (figs. 1 and 2).44 Not incidentally, the Paris manuscripts culminate with a portrait of Charles VIII's mistress, the duchess of Bar, Philippe de Gueldres (fig. 3).45 As for the ladies at the Milanese ball in 1494, rumor had it that Charles was enamored of one of their number.46 And so it continued, with each city offering its submission through the ritualized ministrations of its women. In Pisa, a group of women ceremonially served food to the king's gendarmes, and in Siena "the king diverted himself six or seven days," Commynes wrote, "and they showed him the ladies."47 In Naples, a French observer of Charles's ceremonial entry described princesses, duchesses, and baronesses kissing the king's hands, "which is why I say that the only triumph here involves ladies" (toute la triumphe d'icy ne est que en dames).48Figure 1. Details of six of the seven female types in the Scépeaux book of hours, ca. 1500. Lunbarde, Florentina, Veneciana, Ieonesa, Romana, Napolitana. Not shown: La Spagnolle. (Oxford University, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 264, fols. 9r, 18r, 19r, 25v, 28v, 36v.)Figure 2. Six of the nine female types in an illustrated miscellany produced for François Robertet, ca. 1500. La Genevesa, La Lombarde, La Florentine, La Venicienne, La Neapolitane, La Romaine. Not shown: Lalemande, Lespaignolle, La Francoise. (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 24461, fols. 99r, 101r, 102r, 103r, 104r, 105r.)Figure 3. La Duchesse de Bar, Philippe de Gueldres (1467–1547), the mistress of King Charles VIII. Caption: "Pour haultain port pour gaye contenance / Riche acoultrure en nouuelle ordonnance / Pour bel acueil et beaulte prinse au chois / Nulle nen est dont on a souuenance / Qui tant pleust onc a Charles roy francoys" (For proud bearing and merry countenance / Sumptuous costume in the new style / For kind welcome and choice beauty / There is no one in memory / Who has ever so pleased Charles the French King). (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 24461, fol. 107r.)This parade of women may have been, on some occasions, a privilege destined exclusively for the king's eyes. One French nobleman in the king's retinue wrote to his wife to tell her he never saw young women in Italy—numerous as he knew they were—because his female hosts were never younger than sixty.49 But others saw many and described them as "gorgeous."50 Because most historians discuss these women merely as the objects of royal fancy, we may be missing significant contextual clues as to the function of young Italian women in the king's circle during the French invasions.51 Two women in particular attracted Charles's attention in 1494: one reputedly from a branch of the Gonzaga clan in Guastalla (whose name cannot be traced) and another from the Piccolomini family, named Lionora da Marzano, often called the daughter of the duchess of Amalfi.52 A key similarity between these two women is that both appear to have belonged to aspiring dynasties in contested counties.53 For a young woman to draw the king's sole attention was to attract the potential of royal support for geopolitical claims. In the best case, families might gain lands through gifts of infeudation that would otherwise need to be won by force. Charles VIII and his successors, by the simple fact of their Italian incursions, brought legal and dynastic havoc to dozens of already contested sovereignty claims. These mistresses were often key players in Italian factional or dynastic efforts to gain royal grace through channels other than military ones.Lionora da Marzano's case illustrates how Italian mistresses could help to pivot French policy in favor of their clans. Marin Sanudo claimed that King Charles fell in love with Lionora upon his arrival in Naples in March 1495. The chronicler also noted that Lionora's mother manufactured this affection to gain traction in a lengthy territorial dispute between feuding nobles. Wishing to regain feudal rights over the Abruzzese county of Celano—contested territory since at least the 1420s that had been gifted to Lionora's father by King Alfonso I54—the duchess presented the girl to the king "dressed in gold and riding a well-ordered carriage." Lionora pressed her claim to the territory, and the king "found the girl so lovely that
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