Introduction: hunting for birds in the Italian Renaissance - Ashgate

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Introduction: 

hunting for birds in the Italian Renaissance 

Guido Ruggiero 

In 1514, shortly after finishing The Prince and while working on The Discourses, 

his most serious discussion of politics and republican ideals, Niccolò 

Machiavelli wrote a letter to his close friend and sometime patron Francesco 

Vettori, at the time Florentine ambassador to the Pope. This particular letter 

avoided mention of their often tense political debates, indulging instead in 

another sort of exchange typical of their ongoing correspondence. It recounts 

a bird-hunting experience attributed to their mutual friend Giuliano Brancacci 

which Machiavelli relates as if it were a novella, the highly popular Renaissance 

short story genre. But this was no ordinary bird hunt in the rolling hills of 

Tuscany, for Brancacci began his hunt in the urban centre of Florence: 

He crossed the bridge of the Carraia [one of the bridges that still traverses the 

Arno today] and went along the street of the Canto de’ Mozzi [probably now Via 

del Parione] which leads to Santa Trinita, … and entering Borgo Santo Apostolo, 

he wandered about a bit through those narrow alleys [chiassi] that are in between. 

Not finding any birds waiting for him, … he moved on past the headquarters of the 

Guelph party, through the Mercato Nuovo and, going along the street of the Calimala, 

he came to the Tetto de’ Pisani where, looking carefully through all those hiding 

places, he found a little thrush. 1 

These were unquestionably streets at the urban heart of Renaissance Florence. 

What, one might ask, did a serious observer like Machiavelli, who was quite 

a bird hunter himself, mean the reader to understand when he set this hunt 

in such an unlikely place? Machiavelli certainly knew better. When in exile 

from Florence after the fall of the Soderini Republic in 1512, he wrote to this 

same friend about his own rather sad days hunting birds and set the scene 

near his country villa just south of the city, where a Renaissance reader (and 

we today) would expect such hunting to have occurred. Yet, as the chapters 

in this volume demonstrate, there are birds and there are birds. While most 

rise up and fly proudly, or rest quietly in their nests, or peck at their preferred 

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erotic cultures of renaissance italy 


foods in fields, courtyards and even occasionally at court, some do so more 

metaphorically than others. 

The birds that Machiavelli humorously referred to were the same as those 

discussed by Allen Grieco in Chapter 3: ‘From Roosters to Cocks: Italian 

Renaissance Food and Sexuality’. What is important about these birds is their 

widely understood set of cultural implications. The ways in which a given 

society alludes to the erotic – such as the rising flight of a phallus, its quiet 

nesting in a codpiece, its burrowing into a metaphorical and feminine ‘nest’ 

or its pecking at a preferred ‘fig’ – implies a shared and codified vision of life, 

both material and imaginary. Such widely-used metaphors provide a crucial 

window onto the way daily life was lived, understood and imagined. They 

provide insights into an allusive manner of thinking and speaking that was 

entirely transparent in the past, yet remains relatively obscure today. Although 

this coded convention was understood, used and implemented at all levels of 

society, it has tended to be marginalized if not entirely neglected by scholars. 

It is the identification and translation of this shared code that constitutes the 

premise of this book, and the motivation behind this collective investigation 

into the erotic cultures of Renaissance Italy. 

To return to Machiavelli’s clever tale, any Renaissance reader who knew 

Florence well (as Vettori did) would have understood immediately from the 

description of Brancacci’s hunting places which type of ‘bird’ he had gone to 

seek. Machiavelli moved his hunter through the heart of the city and into the 

centre of a district noted for prostitution and illicit sex of every sort, including 

male prostitution. In the end, however, the ‘little thrush’ that Brancacci found 

was no ordinary ‘bird’ belonging to a poor young man prostituting himself. 

This bird belonged instead to the son of an important Florentine official, a 

youth named Michele who, despite his political and social standing, insisted 

on being paid for his services. When Brancacci tried to con the lad out of 

the money demanded by claiming, in the dark, that he was someone else 

(a mutual friend of theirs well known for his interest in teenage boys) and 

suggesting that he could be trusted to pay him the next day, the story took on 

another series of complications – enlivened with classical allusions to Ovid’s 

Metamorphoses – that we cannot follow here. 

The point is simply that, with Machiavelli’s letter, we are quickly drawn 

into what appears to be a very different and unusual Italian Renaissance, a 

diverse cultural world or series of worlds revealed in the correspondence of 

one of the most famous figures of the age. But as this volume makes clear, 

this cultural world is not an entirely different or unusual Italian Renaissance 

at all. As the chapters presented here demonstrate over and over again, it is 

no longer possible to ignore the generally shared culture of the erotic and its 

omnipresence in daily exchange, nor is it possible to overlook the particular 

subcultures that coexisted at the time and that were such a central part of 

daily life. To neglect any of these aspects of Italian culture means that one 

will not see, read, hear nor ultimately understand the rich complexity of the 

Renaissance. The friendship between Machiavelli and Vettori, the nightlife 




in the urban heart of Florence, the smell of flesh in the streets, the Medici 

buildings rented to prostitutes and bath houses, all these are key elements in 

the tale of Michele, the young son of an important Florentine official, lurking in 

a dark corner and demanding to be paid for his services. These obscure corners 

at the heart of the vibrant life of the city, even the urban hunting of birds, 

require a deeper and more complex understanding of the sexual environment 

of the Renaissance world, an understanding to which this collection makes a 

series of important contributions. 

Machiavelli’s letter transmits an aspect of Renaissance culture and the 

cultures of the erotic that is a central and important theme of this volume. 

At one level, it evokes a widely shared frame of reference in which virtually 

everyone, from the humblest peasant to the most refined humanist or patron 

of art knew, understood and could appreciate that a bird was not simply 

a bird. This common culture associated a rich nexus of emotions, deeds, 

imaginings and everyday practices with the erotic, and expressed these 

associations in ways often specific to the period. Within this shared frame of 

reference, there were also areas in which the erotic was adapted and played 

with in ways suited to particular social groups, genres of art or literature and 

particular places or spaces. This diversity demonstrates that – over and above 

the common, shared culture that spanned all levels of Renaissance society – 

there were also variant erotic cultures specific to subgroups or to precise 

locations. 

As a result of this complexity, the bird-hunting allusions of Machiavelli’s 

letter would have been understood immediately by most readers or listeners 

while the specific references to the places of male prostitution in Florence, or 

his classical references to Ovid, would have required more specific knowledge. 

For the former, a familiarity with the sexual topography of the city and its illicit 

world would have been necessary, while the latter required an acquaintance 

with the erotic literature of ancient Rome. In terms of the cultural levels of 

participants in Renaissance exchanges and sexual innuendo, it is significant 

that a number of the chapters in this volume, all of which share the premise of 

a common erotic culture, also call into question the traditional ‘trickle down’ 

vision of Renaissance culture that sees it as descending from the intellectual 

elite through the various social classes to the rest of society. Thus many of 

the chapters, faithful to the precepts of the ‘new’ cultural history, posit a 

more circular exchange and demonstrate how artefacts, images and practices 

frequently moved up the social scale, with fascinating concrete examples. 2 

Since the 1980s, in fact, a number of Renaissance scholars have begun to 

explore the circulation of culture in the Renaissance, in the area of the erotic 

as well as in other areas of cultural production. But, like Brancacci on his birdhunting 

adventure, today’s historians, art historians, music historians and 

literary scholars who set out to investigate the erotic cultures of the Italian 

Renaissance have had to leave behind the places where they used to hunt 

for their material and find other places in which the past is hidden: at times 

the dark corners in the familiar streets of history, at times uncultivated or 




virtually unexplored territories. And to continue the metaphor, historians have 

also developed new methods of hunting and have looked to other disciplines 

for more fruitful techniques. Over the last generation, this has led to a literal 

explosion of scholarship on the body, sex and the erotic in the Italian Renaissance 

as well as in other areas. In this context, this volume is particularly significant 

because it suggests how much exciting and important hunting still remains to 

be done. In fact, virtually every chapter here might serve as a prolegomenon to 

future studies: the first half of the volume opens new vistas on material culture 

and artistic production more broadly defined, while the second half rethinks 

the social and ritual deployment of the erotic with a revealing emphasis on 

everyday practice over prescriptive theory. At the same time, each of the chapters 

demonstrates how our traditional understanding of Italian Renaissance culture 

and society will be significantly enriched by more aggressively hunting the 

birds and the erotic culture of this period. 

This volume has its origin in a selection of papers on the erotic cultures 

of the Italian Renaissance presented in panels organized by Sara Matthews- 

Grieco for the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting held in 

Cambridge, England in 2005. Part I of this book, ‘Visual testimony and verbal 

games’, focuses on iconographic conventions, material culture and cultural 

production. It opens with a chapter by Matthews-Grieco herself, evocatively 

titled ‘Satyrs and sausages: erotic strategies and the print market in Cinquecento 

Italy’. Here an historian with a special eye for art looks at the sixteenthcentury 

market for prints, demonstrating how the technical innovation of the 

mechanical reproduction of images created new possibilities for erotic images 

that were quickly exploited at all levels of the print market. Most notably, she 

identifies a broad cultural divide in the making and marketing of erotic prints, 

distinguishing between images aimed at an upscale elite market and prints 

produced for a more general public. Unfortunately, few examples of prints 

survive for either market: upscale images have suffered at the hands of later 

censors and generations of heirs more prudish than their original collectors, 

while the cheaper, often less artistic and lower quality pictures that were 

created for a more general public have had an even more limited survival 

rate. 

Nevertheless, working with the limited body of images that are still 

available today, Matthews-Grieco shows how engravers and print publishers 

often created multiple versions of the same print. It seems to have been 

fairly common practice for a printmaker to make an erotically explicit or 

‘pornographic’ image targeted at a limited circle of elite buyers, a niche market 

that presumably appreciated such frankness (such as the circle of friends 

with whom Machiavelli shared his more suggestive letters). Subsequently, 

a less explicit and more erotically allusive version of the same engraving 

was reworked on the same plate and printed for a larger, presumably less 

tolerant market that would have been more subject to censorship. In the 

context of this discussion, Matthews-Grieco makes a useful distinction 

between erotic and pornographic images that works well both for the volume 




as a whole and for the Renaissance in general. This distinction is defined by 

what the author terms ‘the decency threshold’ of the period, whereby the 

pornographic is taken in its original Greek sense as that which represents the 

act of phallic penetration, while the erotic represents the human body in more 

evocative and sexually suggestive ways. She demonstrates how the various 

elaborations of prints move from the former to the latter as they are aimed 

at broader markets. Of course, as this author notes, the decency threshold 

was not always respected by the Italian art market, and there are areas of 

overlap or even direct transpositions from one side to the other. When crudely 

displayed or not camouflaged with a classical setting, the representation of 

female genitalia or the male erect phallus could be perceived as transgressing 

visual conventions and approaching the scandalously obscene. Simply stated, 

boundaries in the area of the erotic remained plural, defined by time period, 

place of production, display, artistic style, humanist packaging, social and 

intellectual milieu, the consumer, the censor and the age or the gender of 

the viewer. Then as now, there was room for considerable ambiguity in such 

attempts at defining where divisions should lie. 

To make erotic representations for the elite less troubling and to give them a 

suitably educated tone, printmakers adopted themes from Classical Antiquity, 

such as the Amori degli dei (Loves of the Gods), which allowed them to represent 

naked bodies in suggestive poses with a veneer of intellectual respectability. 

In a pagan context (pre-Christian and thus pre-Original Sin), nudity, eroticism 

and even to a degree the sexual act itself became less troublesome and somehow 

more erudite – humanism made even lust an intellectual exercise. But as one 

moved down the social scale to prints designed for a wider audience, classical 

mythology functioned less well with a clientele presumably less well versed 

in humanist culture. At this level, two other genres predominated in erotic 

prints: the morality print featuring sinners and the fallen in various stages 

of undress and potentially sinful acts, and the humorous print that played 

with metaphors such as bird hunting (again), cats and mice (woman’s genitals 

that caught and consumed male ones) or simply sausages. The satyr was a 

particularly useful icon in morality prints as it allowed representations of 

the erect phallus (not human, but animal as the lower half of the satyr was 

animal) while developing a moral metaphor based on the need for man to 

control his lower, animal impulses by means of his reason (as represented 

by the human, upper half of the satyr). In conclusion, Matthews-Grieco 

emphasizes the wide circulation of these prints and their erotic metaphors in 

the Renaissance world – a point reinforced by other chapters in this volume – 

and argues that art historians need to compile a dictionary of these visual 

metaphors along the lines of recent dictionaries of erotic euphemisms used in 

the literature of the period. A dictionary of erotic art would permit scholars 

to understand the broad ranging import of sexually connoted imagery in the 

Italian Renaissance and the importance of its metaphorical use in contexts that 

ranged from the domestic household to political propaganda and religious 

invective. 




If Matthews-Grieco extends the range of more traditional art history by 

looking closely at the meanings and markets for erotic prints, the next chapter 

by Guido Guerzoni, ‘The erotic fantasies of a model clerk’, takes us even farther 

afield into the virtually untouched realm of erotic and pornographic sketches 

done by ‘amateurs’ in the margins of Renaissance manuscripts. Pursuing a 

serendipitous discovery of a series of drawings in early sixteenth-century 

Modenese account ledgers, apparently done by a scribe tentatively identified 

as Pietro Bertaldo (otherwise largely unknown to history), Guerzoni delves 

deeper into non-elite ways of representing and visually imagining sex and the 

body. In the footsteps of Carlo Poni and Carlo Ginzburg, this chapter provides 

an example of a visual version of ‘the name is the game’ type of microhistory, 

as it was first theorized in the cutting-edge journal Quaderni storici almost a 

generation ago. 3 In this chapter, the author returns to the archives and uses 

similar techniques to tease deeper meaning out of erotic sketches and doodles. 

Searching in various manuscripts for similar survivals of a largely personal 

and private form of erotic art at a ‘popular’ level, Guerzoni suggests that such 

work gives the lie to those who posit a trickle-down theory of erotic culture. 

He argues persuasively that such drawings reflect a more generally shared 

culture of the erotic that may, in fact, have had a significant influence on more 

elite and ‘sophisticated’ artistic images, an example of culture moving up the 

social scale rather than down. Like Matthews-Grieco, he calls for a scholarly 

project to catalogue these images in order to provide a more systematic 

understanding of their range and import. 

Focusing primarily on what he sees as the pornographic, Guerzoni outlines 

four areas of ‘amateur’ pornography worthy of further study: the erotic created 

for personal reasons, found in manuscripts and other unrelated archival 

documents (largely the focus of the present study); ‘gallant’ manuscripts, 

where amateur erotic drawings were appended to letters or manuscripts meant 

to be shared with others; hidden and not-so-hidden images that were often 

blasphemous and insulting to authority and, finally, obscene images that that 

were more ‘public’ as they often accompanied pasquinades and defamatory 

pamphlet literature. This chapter also provides a fine overview of the issues 

involved in the preservation and survival of erotic and pornographic images 

which complements and extends Matthews-Grieco’s earlier discussion of the 

issue for Renaissance prints. But what is undoubtedly most interesting and 

innovative is Guerzoni’s discovery – and opening for further scholarly study – 

of a hitherto neglected and largely unknown range of visual images hidden 

in Renaissance (as opposed to medieval) manuscripts, and above all in the 

bindings of archival material. This new material has the potential to be an 

important source for understanding the shared erotic culture of Renaissance 

Italy, a culture that hitherto has been largely lost to history in that it falls below 

the level of the more easily accessible, aesthetically recognized and often elite 

artistic production of the period. 

Chapter 3 by Allen Grieco, ‘From roosters to cocks: Italian Renaissance 

fowl and sexuality’, turns the discussion to birds. Here the author 




ventures well beyond ornithological lore and metaphor into the rich realm 

of the association of food and sex, two pleasures of the body that in many 

cultures have generated a rich and revealing set of ways of thinking about 

(and expressing) physical desire and pleasure. The chapter begins with a 

discussion of the etymological and literary tradition of bird texts that provides 

a fascinating history of avian allusions that range from nesting to hunting to 

pecking at figs. The essay then examines the visual use of birds with a more or 

less explicit sexual meaning appearing at all levels of iconographic expression: 

graffiti on university benches, decorated pharmacy jars, obscene engravings, 

morality prints and even high art. He argues persuasively for the ubiquitous 

nature of the ornithological euphemism in Renaissance Italy, ‘not only as a 

metaphor for the male organ but also for the sexual act and the whole sphere 

of sexuality in general’, 4 and then asks the logical question that has not yet 

found a satisfactory answer: what is the origin of this association, and why is 

it so universal in this period? 

To resolve this fundamental problem, Grieco turns to the important dietary 

literature of the Renaissance (which he has extensively discussed in a number 

of earlier publications), and examines the place of birds as well as their erotic 

meanings in that area of literary production. Key to his reading of alimentary 

lore are the classical ‘Great Chain of Being’ and the humoral theories current 

among the medical and dietary theorists of the day. Because birds were 

situated higher on the Great Chain of Being, they were considered a suitable 

food for the social elite and quite unsuitable for their social inferiors. The 

reasoning behind this lay in the fact that birds were creatures of the air and 

thus a type of food far superior to the base and earthly fare deemed appropriate 

for the lower classes (lowly foods like onions and garlic). Moreover, from 

the perspective of the humoral theories of medical and dietary writers such 

as Michele Savonarola and Baldassarre Pisanelli, birds were hot and moist, 

humoral qualities associated with masculine sexuality and active, aggressive 

performance. As a result – and as moralists and preachers of the day warned – 

one could easily slide from the sin of gluttony (due to the consumption of 

fowl) into the sin of lust (due to the physical consequences of eating such fare). 

Tellingly, Grieco notes that only the ‘best’ of men were considered capable of 

controlling the effects of eating birds, for their superiority meant that they 

would be empowered, as opposed to corrupted, by such a potent foodstuff. In a 

rather amusing example, he points out the vast quantities of partridges served 

to the nine Priors of Florence and their eventual dinner guests: on an average, 

more than 65 birds were served per day. This particular item on the Priors’ menu 

was supposed to both reinforce their role as physically potent and politically 

aggressive leaders (in accordance with humoral theory), and confirm their elite, 

social and political position (in terms of the Great Chain of Being). Once again, 

a bird was not simply a bird; food and its culture were deeply intertwined 

within a widely shared erotic culture. In this erudite chapter, Grieco marshals 

religious, dietary, visual and literary evidence to demonstrate the penetration of 

these cultural concepts at all levels of Renaissance society. 




The world of food and its social and sexual implications are just the tip 

of the iceberg in the dynamic between the everyday world and Renaissance 

erotic cultures. In an article based on archival and literary texts published 

in the early 1990s, I called for a rereading of Renaissance discourses about 

marriage, civic morality and the disciplining of the body which would meld 

the methodological innovations of recent literary criticism with new trends 

in social and cultural history. 5 Crucial for such a rereading, I argued, was the 

way in which prescriptive literature and the leaders of society (at least in their 

capacity as leaders) increasingly perceived the culture of the ‘illicit’ as being a 

radical rejection of the central values of ‘licit’ society. What made this cultural 

tension particularly interesting was the degree to which these two cultures 

were nonetheless deeply intertwined, the way in which the boundaries of eros 

(between the licit and the illicit) were plural and highly porous. I suggested 

that those boundaries would be progressively hardened and the licit more 

clearly separated from the illicit, not just in prescriptive literature, sermons and 

legislation (as was the case in the Renaissance) but eventually also in practice, 

daily life and even our sense of self, which is perhaps one of the unrecognized 

keys that most separates the modern from the premodern. In Chapter 4, ‘“The 

spirit is ready, but the flesh is tired”: erotic objects and marriage in early 

modern Italy’, Marta Ajmar-Wollheim takes these preliminary hypotheses far 

beyond what I had imagined in that original essay. Here she examines the rich 

mixture and deliberate overlap of the illicit and the licit that was to be found 

in the erotic culture of material objects surrounding marriage and everyday 

life in the Italian Renaissance. 

What Ajmar-Wollheim discovers is a porous set of boundaries where 

marriage, the most licit institutional setting for sex according to the 

prescriptive literature of the age, was rife with erotic material objects that, 

from a formal point of view (in that they represented frontal nudity and 

physical intimacy), belonged to the illicit. Yet, in the Renaissance household, 

the sexual was deeply intertwined with the everyday. Pottery, for example, 

was often designed for domestic use (with a close etymological relationship 

to the contemporary obscene term for a woman’s genitals, pota) and, in many 

cases, its decoration provides an excellent example of this mixing of the 

erotic with the quotidian, the illicit with the licit, in a surprising number of 

surviving pieces that portray relatively explicit erotic scenes. As the author 

points out, some of these were drawn from the print tradition discussed by 

Matthews-Grieco, but many were also based on Antique pottery remains 

discovered in the Renaissance. Ajmar-Wollheim suggests an important 

change over time in marriage-related maiolica between the beginning of the 

sixteenth century and the 1530s and 1540s, the latter revealing a dramatic shift 

in the representation of marital love ‘from formal and symbolic compositions 

to more naturalistic, physically intimate and erotically charged scenes’. 6 

She sees this change as reflective of a desire to commemorate a marriage 

and its inception by stressing the sexual effusions and ritual intimacy that 

were customary in pre-Tridentine marriage, and that are examined in more 




detail by another author in this volume, Cecilia Cristellon. Until late in the 

sixteenth century, when the reforms of marriage drawn up by the Council of 

Trent began to be enforced (albeit very unevenly), commemorative maiolica 

works that stressed love and physical intimacy provided a perfect vehicle for 

representing social and religious expectations with regard to the requirements 

of marriage. Expressions of love demonstrated mutual consent and the will 

to marry (the theological requirement for a valid marriage before Trent), 

while physical intimacy suggested the sexual consummation of the marriage 

required by civil society (often demonstrated by rituals such as displaying the 

marriage sheets after the couple’s first night together). Sexual relations with 

the goal of procreation were also required by ecclesiastical courts, insofar 

as an unconsummated marriage was considered invalid from a theological 

point of view and could be annulled. Thus pottery decorated with amorous 

motifs and explicitly sexual, commemorative images spoke eloquently to 

these expectations, while fulfilling, at the same time, more easily recognized, 

commemorative purposes. 

Beyond the social and legal issues that influenced the decoration of pottery 

and other household objects related to marriage, Ajmar-Wollheim’s study 

of such items reinforces more recent and more nuanced studies of marital 

sexuality which have suggested that the Renaissance marital bed was not quite 

the wasteland it was once thought to be. 7 There was room there for love and 

desire, for women as well as men, and only further research will tell us just 

how much and how widely such values were shared and practised. In fact, 

located outside the more private spaces of the house (such as the bedroom) 

were larger maiolica works such as the huge plates that Ajmar-Wollheim 

argues were so big that they almost certainly were intended to be displayed 

quite publicly, in rooms where their sexual content would have spilled over 

into the everyday, licit world once again. Tellingly, however, such plates were 

made primarily for elite markets and audiences. Not only did they have had an 

elevated cost, but their erotic scenes were often cloaked in classical mythology – 

much as Matthews-Grieco has noted for prints – an iconographic convention 

that made their content more refined, intellectually valid and thereby more 

acceptable in elite circles. Once more, in this fine essay, we find a rich material 

record of erotic cultures and plural boundaries working in a Renaissance 

context, a complex interplay of the licit and the illicit in everyday life that we 

are still just beginning to understand and appreciate. 

Part II of the volume, entitled ‘Ritual eroticism and sociability’, shifts the 

focus away from cultural products and material culture to look more closely 

at social practice and ritualized interaction at various levels of the Italian 

Renaissance world. Although one might wish – for the sake of historical 

simplicity – that culture and practice would match up neatly, especially in an 

area like sexuality, that was seldom the case. The division of this volume allows 

for comparisons between the two and some subtle evaluations of their overlaps 

and interactions. This second section opens with a chapter by Cecilia Cristellon, 

‘Public display of affection: the making of marriage in the Venetian courts 


10 



before the Council of Trent (1420–1524)’. Cristellon looks at marriage from 

both a legal and a more practical everyday perspective in Renaissance Venice. 

There, like Ajmar-Wollheim, she sees a greater emphasis on displays of marital 

affection before the mid-sixteenth century and the Council of Trent. Based 

on the rich records of the Patriarchal Archives of Venice studied (for a later 

period) by Joanne Ferraro in her prize winning book, Marriage Wars in Late 

Renaissance Venice (2001), Cristellon is at her most suggestive when she looks 

beyond the legal requirements of church and government to how marriage 

actually worked – and sometimes did not work – in the fifteenth and early 

sixteenth century. 

As many scholars have noted, before the Council of Trent there was 

great uncertainty about what actually constituted a marriage, given that the 

Church required merely an exchange of consent to have a sacramentally 

valid union. While a number of social rituals and material forms emerged 

both to commemorate and mark the inception of marriage (such as the 

pottery discussed by Ajmar-Wollheim) and to dispel any uncertainty as to 

the issue of consent, for the lower classes especially marital status often 

remained a bit vague. At the neighbourhood level of everyday life, marriage 

was, in fact, frequently quite irrelevant, as has been shown by several recent 

studies based on trial records of marriage disputes and even criminal cases. 8 

Cristellon’s essay mines the unusually detailed ecclesiastical archives to 

provide interesting new material that further illustrates how such uncertain 

unions played out on a local and day-to-day level, confirming that long-term 

marriage-like relationships were often sufficient to convince neighbours that 

the couples involved were honourable people and no different from other, 

more formally married couples. In fact, informal unions at the lower levels of 

society may well have been the norm. Cristellon also confirms that premarital 

sex, although condemned in prescriptive literature, was the order of the day. 

This was especially true for the lower classes, who continued to practise what 

has been termed ‘fornication and then marriage’, most probably derived from 

longstanding rural customs that allowed sexual intercourse subsequent to a 

promise of marriage. 9 On the basis of her cases, she also argues that bigamy 

and remarriage were more widely practised and accepted than most scholars 

have thought. Most importantly perhaps, throughout her chapter Cristellon 

brings to the fore a number of telling examples of the danger of confusing 

prescriptive literature and formal discourse about sexuality in marriage with 

the highly complex world of everyday practice in the Renaissance. These 

examples reinforce her observation that marriage was far from being the 

uniform and ubiquitous institution that historians once assumed, especially 

at lower class levels. 

In Chapter 6 of this volume, ‘Mail humour and male sociability in the 

epistolary domain of Francesco II Gonzaga’, Molly Bourne turns our attention 

to the revealing erotic world of Renaissance letters and male sociability. 

In many ways, the letter was a particularly Renaissance form of literature. 

Handwritten and relatively short, it was well suited for circulation among 


Guido Ruggiero 11 


friends and acquaintances in an age when the printing press was only just 

beginning to facilitate the circulation of written material in printed form. 

The letter was also a vehicle of friendship and sociability that fit well with 

an upper-class style of life, where solitary evenings could be spent using the 

epistolary medium to communicate with friends and others with whom one 

wished to build or maintain contacts. Furthermore, letters were easily copied 

and could thus circulate quite widely if they were significant, interesting or 

simply entertaining. As is well known, many literary figures and intellectuals 

reworked their letters for publication, and with the printing press such letters 

became a genre in their own right, much studied by later scholars. Less 

attention has been paid, however, to the less formal, often friendly letters 

that are usually unpublished and often poorly catalogued (if at all) in Italian 

archives, collections of private papers and manuscript repositories. Yet, these 

Renaissance letters are a rich source for understanding the way life was lived, 

recounted and imagined at the time, especially as they were created and 

circulated at a generally uncensored and personal level. 10 

In Francesco II Gonzaga, Bourne has found a perfect Renaissance male 

figure to study: a noted condottiere, a major political actor, a patron of the arts 

and, despite being married to the young and lively Isabella d’Este, a man who 

prided himself on his sexual liaisons beyond the marital bed. While much of 

his correspondence focused on administrative and financial matters, Bourne 

argues persuasively that his letters also provided a space in which Francesco 

and a select group of professional men attached to his court fashioned an elite 

masculine identity for themselves, using the practice of epistolary exchange 

to ‘articulate sexual transgression, power relations and cross-class male 

sociability’. 11 Once again, the licit and the illicit intertwine in these letters in a 

way that shows how easily the one could slide into the other, especially in the 

area of male friendship and the building of informal relationships of power 

behind the scenes of the more traditionally studied, political manoeuvres of 

the day. They also show clearly how a shared erotic culture could be given 

a classical upgrading, or taken to the most shamelessly pornographic level, 

depending on the riffs that the letter writers played on the theme. 

Bourne’s discussion of the correspondence between Francesco II Gonzaga 

and the Bolognese jurist and priest, Floriano Dolfo, is particularly interesting. 

Although Floriano was neither a member of the Gonzaga court nor in the direct 

service of the Marquis, in the approximately 70 surviving letters addressed 

to Francesco he supplies gossip and political information from Bologna, 

along with elaborate and often racy literary ‘entertainment’ that he correctly 

realized his correspondent would enjoy. Often the erotic material, in line with 

the discussion in previous chapters, was dressed up in a classic and learned 

form to make it less transgressive, or more in tune with the requirements of 

elite self-fashioning. But the priest was not above descending quickly from 

references to the Golden Age and pagan gods to the bawdy and scatological: 

he describes in brutal physical detail the bathers at Porretta and, in a lighter 

vein, how women in one of his dreams fought over who might buy the largest 


12 



penis, adding some rather facetious asides regarding the size of Gonzaga’s 

own member. Such playful banter reveals yet another arena for erotic culture 

and its articulation in the social world of the Renaissance, an arena of great 

potential significance in the often highly personal world of patronage and 

power. Bourne’s fascinating study suggests that there is rich potential for 

further study of this particular type of erotic culture and social exchange that 

crosses class boundaries to create another sort of social category: that of male 

gender, friendship and sexuality. 

‘Unlocking the gates of chastity: music and the erotic in the domestic 

sphere in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy’ by Flora Dennis takes us into 

yet another area of erotic culture that scholars have just begun to investigate 

more aggressively – the sensuality of the Renaissance soundscape of music 

and song. As Dennis persuasively shows, it was not just the suggestive words 

of songs or the melodious creation of sounds that contributed to Renaissance 

erotic culture and to culture in general, but also the act of playing and the 

decoration of the instruments themselves. Many instruments were associated 

with parts of the human body, and stroking them or playing them emphasized 

this association, equating ‘the skill needed to coax an appropriate response 

from a musical instrument with the dexterity required during sexual play and 

intercourse’. 12 Sung riddles and suggestive songs often alluded to such erotic 

associations and demonstrate how widely they were understood, not only 

in court circles but also among the urban elite. Dennis also shows that such 

associations were further enhanced by the decorations applied to the musical 

instruments themselves, which could range from amorous scenes painted on 

the instrument (presumably reflective of the music played) to naked bodies 

that echoed the ‘human’ form of the instrument and made the erotic association 

more explicit. Once again, many of these decorations were aimed at a largely 

elite or courtly audience and thus drew upon classical themes in order to give 

a higher cultural tone to sexually candid subject matter. 

Suggestive also is Dennis’s discussion of the ways in which these visual 

images were half hidden, sculpted or painted on instruments in such a 

manner as to give the audience a glimpse at a strategic moment of the 

performance without being flaunted throughout. In this concern with the 

location of suggestive decorations, she sees a parallel with erotic display in 

other domestic objects, such as cassoni with sensual pictures hidden under 

the lid, or nude paintings kept behind curtains or in more private rooms, all 

locations that allowed for selective viewing at what would have been deemed 

the correct context and moment. Once again, the decoration of musical 

instruments suggests yet another way in which the licit and illicit intermixed 

in the Renaissance, to the extent that contemporary moralists lamented the 

blurring of such boundaries and the sins that such blurring could invite. 

Concluding her chapter with a closer look at this latter issue, Dennis examines 

the fears that music elicited in prescriptive literature, especially its ability 

to aurally stimulate the senses and the particular dangers it presented for 

women and children. The performance of music on social occasions brought 




together groups of mixed gender, and thus potentially constituted a dangerous 

opportunity for sinning and sexual dishonour. The lover’s serenade evokes 

perfectly these auditory dangers and the way music could transcend the 

boundaries of domestic space, dangerously tempting daughters (and even 

wives) who were theoretically safely locked within their homes. Here Dennis 

reminds us of yet another compelling aspect of the musical cultures of the 

erotic in Renaissance Italy – the way it crossed virtually all boundaries: social, 

cultural, gendered and even physical – and thus provides an evocative ending 

for this richly documented chapter. 

Music and its erotic potential were also an important aspect of the cultural 

world of the celebrated Italian courtesan. 13 The chapter by Tessa Storey that 

closes the volume, ‘Courtesan culture: manhood, honour and sociability’, 

returns us to perhaps the best known of all the social contexts of Renaissance 

erotic culture. Building out from recent studies that see courtesans as 

protagonists in the ‘mainstream life’ of late Renaissance society, Storey 

examines the way in which ‘association with elite courtesans was not so 

much an illicit aspect of male culture, nor a question of private immorality, 

but rather was closely meshed with constructions of elite manhood and 

male honour’. 14 The key to her analysis is, once again, the ways in which 

an erotic and thus formally illicit culture intertwined with a licit lifestyle, at 

times even reinforcing it at the level of the courtesan and her clients. As has 

been observed in a number of this volume’s chapters, a classical veneer of 

humanist learning was an important aspect of this particular erotic culture: 

‘it was humanist culture that encouraged the appearance of an elite type 

of prostitute, who was conferred an aura of onestà and virtù through her 

association with Classical Antiquity’. 15 In fact, in establishing close links 

between the courtesans in Rome, the humanists who resided there and 

networks of clients with high social status, Storey transforms what has 

been a rather vague suggestion about how courtesan culture worked into a 

powerful equation whereby humanists actively integrated courtesans into 

elite society and, conversely, courtesans promoted humanists in Renaissance 

Rome. In these circles, social manners and the arts of love and courtship 

were filtered through classical and medieval courtly forms and performed 

by would-be elite males in their relationships with courtesans in ways that 

were central to the social life of Renaissance Rome and, by implication, 

elsewhere in late Renaissance Italy. 

Storey concludes her chapter with two case studies: the triumphal entry 

into Rome of the Florentine courtesan Maddalena Saltarella, and the humanist 

Lelio Capilupi’s account of his success with a noted Neapolitan courtesan. 

Maddalena left Florence and an important lover – presumably devastated at 

losing her as he continued to keep track of her career – and went to Rome to 

try her fortune there. The secretary to the Florentine ambassador in Rome 

reported back to her ex-lover in Florence, relating her various successes, 

including a triumphal entry into the city that mobilized a large segment of 

Roman society. Here Storey concludes, in line with her earlier observations, 


14 



that ‘the attention and cost lavished on these public festivities remind us 

that the public nature of these liaisons was central to their raison d’être … 

[and is] also a testimony of the extent to which the courtesan’s liaisons with 

elite men were framed by classical references and courtly rituals which 

conferred honourability, embedding them in the world of chivalry and 

virtue’. 16 Storey also points out that Maddalena’s many successes attracted 

critics who launched a particularly vicious attack on her, claiming that she 

had syphilis. Interestingly, although it is not entirely clear what her longterm 

fate was in Rome, it appears she faded rather rapidly from the scene. 

In contrast, Lelio Capilupi describes in his own correspondence an evening 

spent with a noted Neapolitan courtesan, an encounter which is presented as 

a social and personal triumph. Capilupi crafts his account so that it could be 

presented not only to male friends who were clerics, but also to the Duchess 

of Camerino, Giulia Varano, who was apparently a patron whom he wished 

to impress. Here Storey shows concretely how being accepted by a noted 

courtesan could be used to claim status and build networks of support and 

alliance, even at times with powerful women, and how such relationships 

could be perceived and presented in terms of amorous dalliance and the 

confirmation of social standing rather than in terms of money. Once again, 

the world of formally illicit sex and the erotic culture of the courtesan 

were deeply intertwined with mainstream questions of masculine status, 

power and patronage, and to dismiss this erotic culture and its emphasis 

on amorous and courtly conventions would entail the risk of missing the 

Renaissance itself. 

In the end, as this volume powerfully shows, the erotic cultures of the 

Renaissance were not some minor sidelight of the period, easily overlooked 

by those who prefer to study the more canonical aspects of art and learning, 

or the more traditional areas of society, economics and politics. Although 

the erotic and the illicit were formally rejected by prescriptive literature, 

although they were aggressively attacked by the moralistic legislation of 

governments trying to establish a civic morality for urban society, even 

though they were theoretically contained and disciplined by marriage, 

family and the Christian ideal of sex as a duty aimed solely at reproduction, 

and although they were feared and decried as destroying reason, selfcontrol 

and virtù, the erotic and the illicit still continued to permeate and 

shape both society and social life. The erotic cultures of the Renaissance 

were ubiquitous. They appear in the doodles of bored clerks, in the playing 

of musical instruments, in the self-fashioning of humanists and in the flight 

of birds, in the decoration of the marital bed and the beds of courtesans, on 

pots and in prints. The erotic cultures of the Renaissance also broke across 

social and cultural boundaries, melding with and helping to fashion – in 

original and telling ways – both urban life and court culture. Hunting for 

birds and pecking at figs in the Renaissance offer, in this volume, a rich and 

satisfying hunt and a feast of new insights on Italian history and culture. 


Notes 



1 Machiavelli to Vettori, 25 February 1514, in Machiavelli, Opere, ed. Franco Gaeta 

(Turin, 1984), vol. 3, p. 448 and vol 2, p. 314. ‘Passò il ponte alla Carraia, e per 

la via del Canto de’ Mozzi ne venne a Santa Trinita, et entrato in Borgo Santo 

Appostolo, andò serpeggiando per quei chaisci che lo mettono in mezzo; e non 

trovando uccelli che lo aspettassino … sotto la Parte Guelfa attraversò Mercato, 

e per Calimala Francesca si ridusse sotto il Tetto de’ Pisani; dove guardando 

tritamente tutti quei ripostigli, trovò un tordellino … ’. For a more extended 

discussion of this letter and its broader context see Guido Ruggiero, Machiavelli 

in Love, Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 2007), pp. 98–104 and 

132–41. 

2 For a quick theoretical overview of the theory behind the new cultural history 

that stresses the circularity of culture as against a trickle down view, see: Lynne 

Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989). Of course, the idea is 

much older and for the Renaissance and early modern period was perhaps most 

impressively pioneered by the work of Natalie Davis and Robert Darton. 

3 Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of 

Europe: Selections from Quaderni Storici (Baltimore, 1991). 

4 See the chapter by Grieco in this volume, p. 110. 

5 Guido Ruggiero, ‘Marriage, Love, Sex and Renaissance Civic Morality’, in James 

Grantham Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, 

Texts, Images (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 10–30. 

6 See the chapter by Ajmar-Wollheim in this volume, p. 151. 

7 See for example Joanne Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (New 

York, 2001); Daniela Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice 

(Aldershot, 2004); Lauro Martines, Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in 

the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001); and the not-so-recent Guido Ruggiero, 

Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power at the End of the Renaissance 

(New York, 1993); Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime and 

Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1985) and Stanley Chojnacki, ‘The 

Power of Love: Wives and Husbands in Late Medieval Venice’, in Mary Erler 

and Maryanne Kowaleski (eds), Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens, 

GA, 1988), pp. 126–48. 

8 For Venice, see the classic by Gaetano Cozzi, ‘Padri, figli e matrimoni clandestine 

(metà sec. xvi–metà sec. xviii’, La cultura, 14 (1976): pp. 169–212. More recent 

studies that treat this subject include Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance 

Venice as well as her Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in 

the Republic of Venice, 1557–1789 (Baltimore, 2008); Alexander Cowan, Marriage, 

Manners and Mobility in Early Modern Venice (Aldershot, 2007); Daniela Hacke, 

Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice; Jana Byars, Concubines and 

Concubinage in Early Modern Venice (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 

2006); Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros and Ruggiero, Binding Passions. 

9 For an excellent discussion of this in a slightly later period see Sandra Cavallo 

and Simona Cerutti, ‘Female Honor and the Social Control of Reproduction in 

Piedmont between 1600 and 1800’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), 

Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective: Selections from Quaderni Storici (Baltimore, 

1990), pp. 73–109. For the dangers of such practices at an upper-class level see 

Ruggiero, ‘“More Dear to Me than Life Itself”: Marriage, Honor and a Woman’s 


16 



Reputation in the Renaissance’, in Binding Passions, pp. 57–87; for the phrase 

‘fornication and then marriage’ in relation to premarital sex in Renaissance 

Venice, and a discussion of those practices there, see Ruggiero, The Boundaries 

of Eros. See also the path-breaking work of Gaetano Cozzi on these issues, 

especially his edited volume, Stato, società e giustizia nella Repubblica Veneta (sec. 

15–18) (Rome, 1980) and his ‘Padri, figli e matrimoni clandestine’. 

10 Particularly relevant in this context is the work of Deanna Shemek on the letters 

of Francesco’s young wife Isabella d’Este, which Bourne cites in her chapter. 

A significant sample of Isabella’s often personal letters, soon to be published 

by Shemek, will provide a fascinating and rich new vision of this important 

Renaissance figure. John Najemy, in his seminal work on the correspondence 

between Machiavelli and Vettori, has demonstrated just how revealing such 

letters can be: Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli– 

Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton, NJ, 1993). 

11 See the chapter by Bourne in this volume, p. 201. 

12 See the chapter by Dennis in this volume, p. 226. 

13 For an illuminating volume on these issues that provides a rich bibliography, see 

Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (eds), The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural 

Perspectives (Oxford, 2006). 

14 See the chapter by Storey in this volume, p. 247.

Introduction: hunting for birds in the Italian Renaissance - Ashgate

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