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Timothy McCall, "Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
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An interview with Timothy McCall
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books in Early Modern History, a podcast on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host and I'm here Today with Timothy McCall, professor of art history at Villanova University to talk about his recent book Making the Renaissance man, just out this year, 2023 with reaction books. Hi Tim, how are ya?
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A
I am awesome, thank you, Yana. I'm very excited to be here to talk about the book Making the Renaissance Man. This will be fun.
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B
I'm really happy to talk to you as well. How is things in Philadelphia? Closing up the semester.
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A
Just finished the semester. Waiting for final exams. It's freezing. But I'm ready. Yeah, I'm ready. We're about to go into the holidays and I am ready. It's been a semester.
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B
Yeah, I don't know how people. I can only work on a semester. I can go. Maybe it's just because semesters are so full on, but after the end of it, I need a break.
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A
I'm ready for my break.
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Yeah, maybe it's because I don't know anyone who doesn't. Any professors who work less than say 70 hours a week during the semester, maybe that's it.
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A
That sounds right.
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B
Yeah. Okay, so let's get to the book. Our first task is to situate this book kind of in your intellectual trajectory. And it seems a natural step from. From your Brilliant bodies, Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy, which is Penn State Press, 2022. Yeah.
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Yes. Yeah. And I would say that this book definitely builds off that book from about a year and a half ago. Brilliant Bodies with Penn State. That book sort of explored clothing adornment, display, also of elite men in the 15th century in Italy. And the title, Brilliance comes from the. It relates to the fact that in that book, I examine qualities of light, splendor, glamour, luster, polish. All of those things embodied through brocades and shiny silks and glittering gems. Blonde hair, fair faces. It's also a critical sort of investigation of whiteness and of aristocratic status and how it's displayed and how you're thinking also about sort of male spectacle, men on display, men meant to be looked at, people. Peacocks rather than penguins, I always say. And historicizing men's fashion and men's relations. Fashion's relations to bodies also. So there's a. There's a big emphasis on, like, legs, for instance, and the way that they were culturally legibility, that men had beautiful legs in this period. And that's how you know that that's where people's gazes looked. And so this book, really making the Renaissance man takes it up from there. It's for a broader audience. And it also. But it investigates performances of elite masculinity also. So this is all about status. You know, the title foregrounds gender, but this is equally. Or is more about sort of class and status. And the book explores what sort of what noblemen loved in the Renaissance, how they performed, how they demonstrated virility and dominance. So it's things through. Through hunting, through flaunting their mistresses, who are often young girls through. And we can talk about that through jousting. And it also investigates, I'd say, historical configurations of sexuality, particularly heterosexuality. Trying to put some pressure on it, on that framework and historicizing it is not a super valid framework for the past.
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I know. Excellent. And I want to talk about pretty much all of those things in greater detail. Really good introduction, Reaction. Before we get there, I want to talk about your sources a little. And so Reaction always puts together beautiful books. I love them. And this, readers, is no exception. The book contains, what was it, 103 images. 100 in color? Something like that.
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Yeah. All but four or five are in color.
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B
Yeah. And images of such like, variety and depth that using the old. The cliche, richly illustrated, like way undersells this book. And I want to bring this up first. First is an entree into, like, speaking about your sources. What kind of material do you. Do you use for this study? And, like, loads of images, but that's not all art historians do.
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A
Right.
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B
I want to make sure our audience understands what art historians do.
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Right. So, you know, it's tough because also when I was. Because I work a lot on clothing and garments and adornment and things like that, and, you know, I think traditionally, everyone's always trying to figure out how does this painting match up with something that the person actually wore. Right. And it's not sort of that simple. And a lot of times even figuring out those kinds of questions aren't. They don't say that much. They're not super interesting. So it really is sort of like a puzzle piece, how you have to fit together. I read a lot. My main sort of written sources probably are ambassadorial documents because there's. In this century, really, particularly around Milan and a couple of other court centers, there's, as one historian said, a world of paper. There's a huge growing. There's a huge, growing infrastructure of resident ambassadors writing letters, and a lot of these survive in great numbers. I also look at sort of poetry, at literature of various genres written at the time, and looking also at all kinds of surviving visual evidence. A lot of frescoes in particular, I think, like the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia and Ferrara are just. They're so rich in detail that they're very useful for me, but then also thinking a lot of times about surviving material culture objects other of other sorts also. So in this book, you know, I talk about falcon hoods that, you know, that survived from the early 16th century, or all kinds of sometimes garments and other things that were buried with lords that have been exhumed and restored and all kinds of other sort of surviving bits and pieces. And again, it's trying to tell a story by looking at all of these different genres and all of these types of sources and not taking any of them as sort of like, straightforwardly, they all have their own biases and they all tell us some things but misdirect us in other ways also. So it's important to kind of like, try to create something which can never be entirely, you know, complete out of these sort of puzzle pieces of sources, but always being critical of sources, never, you know, just saying oh, because, you know, because he's painted like this, he looked like this. Right. It's always thinking about these sources. All have. Yeah, they're all. They all have their. All. They all have their own ideological biases and trying to look through them. And as an art historian, really what I'm trying to do is it's less about like deciphering symbols, figuring out what this meant or that meant, but trying to figure out what work art does, how it convinces it, in this case, other lords, and more often also subjects that someone deserved to rule. Right. So it's not about just kind of interpreting symbols or interpreting what's meaning, but thinking about how they, how these images worked really. And I think that produces a more rich or more. And you know, that's something that a lot of us, A lot of us art historians have been doing in the, you know, the last decade or so or more than that too. Which, you know, for those who, you know, for some who might have taken art history class in college many decades ago, might be something of a surprise. But I think this is also one way that art history and history and early modern studies have converged a little bit as well.
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We're definitely interested in kind of the same kind of discourse and the idea of trying to triangulate a culture based on all of these random points that don't agree and you can't 100% trust.
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That's nice, I like that. To triangulate everything. Yeah, you can't trust, don't agree. And yeah, you're not trying to find one answer either. You're just trying to, you know, give. Account for the rich ways that that culture and art works in simple ways that. That it works.
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And also the other thing though is that this the. I want, I wanted to point out, like, I want to bring up the images in part because of this conversation, but also just to let our listeners know that after they read this, they should read this before the next time they go to a museum. Because like, there's a lot about just like understanding what you're seeing that you don't get unless you have this kind of a little bit of an education with this. It was really enjoyable. Okay, so before we go any further though, I wanna have a quick chat. I know you're probably tired of it and. Cause it's such a massive issue then it's kind of everywhere but the idea of using gender as a category for analysis. So like, right now, as we record in late 2023, we're in the midst of a massive Kind of ongoing, contentious conversation about the nature of gender. And I'm just gonna quote you here, actually. Multiple constructions of masculinity always compete for cultural prom. Any single ideal of manhood is far from monolithic or fixed, but rather has conflicting, overlapping, ever shifting, and often ambiguous meanings. Theorists of gender and sexuality allow us to appreciate the socially and historically contingent rather than essential or static nature of masculinities, which is an excellent summation of, like, the state of things at this very moment. I want to know how that works in the past. How did you use that understanding of the current discussion of gender to. To look at early or look at Renaissance Italy?
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A
Right. Yeah, that's a great. That's a. That's a great question. And I think, yeah, it's a big. And I can think of a couple ways to go. I mean, on the one hand, you know, I. Obviously thinking about, like, gender and sex today, you know, we are obviously increasingly aware of the extent to which I think gender and sex are both embodied and also the way that, you know, they're increasingly fluid and unstable. I mean, I'm in my mid-40s, and not only, I would say, constructions of sexuality, but constructions of gender and constructions of sex have changed a lot, even in my adulthood. Right. And those sorts of lessons are useful for us also as historians. I like looking at the past to sort of denaturalize what we take for granted today. Right? To think about the ways that the way things are are not the way that things have to be, because they're not the way that things always were. Right. And so I'm also thinking about what the past can do for us, you know, and why, you know, it's useful for me sometimes, you know, even pleasurable for me to think about a time, you know, when men were on. On display and where fancy dress and bright clothing was key to masculinity, to one elite form of masculinity and to power. Also, one thing I tell students sometimes is the way that the last president of the US Dances around at rallies, flexing his muscles to the Village People's Macho man, right? Which is a song by a group of queer men literally dressed in butch drag, right? A construction worker, a cowboy named after one of the queerest neighborhoods in the world at the time, right? And obviously, it's very campy and camp, and Trump is not something like we can get into right now or totally sort of work through. But my point is that we're, like. I tell the students, there's a lot we're not saying about manhood culturally. And it's doing a lot of sort of, you know, and it's a lot more varied and a lot more multiple. Right. Than we often think that it is. You know, and students kind of work through this also that they see that there are many different sorts of, you know, constructions and ideals of manhood also relating to, you know, race, to ethnicity, to class, to nation, to, you know, time of their lives, you know, and we talk about this, but also the way that masculinity is. It's relational. You know, gender as we understand it, is typically relational. Although clearly we're expanding the relations and we're expanding the kind of directions that gender can sort of be opposed to or be imagined as. But I would say that absolutely, that it's about, you know, sort of opposition to women in some ways, but it's also about domination over other men. Right. And that was certainly the case in 15th century Italy and Renaissance Italy in terms of power. And I think I always want to go back to sort of Joan Scott's thing to do, gender history. It's always thinking about power and that. I don't know if I actually say that in this book, but it absolutely sort of underlines just being able to say, oh, this is masculinity, or this is femininity or whatever else for the sake of doing that is, to me, never quite enough. It's always to think about, you know, it's always fundamental to think about power structurally, sort of beyond that.
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B
So we have this idea in the past too, just like. Just like now, that gender's changing, concepts of gender are constantly changing and that it's constructed in opposition to other things for a purpose.
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Right.
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That there's an understanding of masculinity that is useful in. For. For people. Like there are people in this period who use the construction of masculinity to improve their status and demonstrate their worth.
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Yeah, absolutely. Like, this is how, you know, and masculinity in my. And the way I'm telling it, you know, and representations of it culturally. Right. It's not always about reality necessarily. It's about a representation and trying to convince people they here, these forms of masculinity bolstered power. They bolster social hierarchies. They proclaim and they promise, right, that people, that men who meet these paradigms of elite manhood that they deserve to be in charge, that the people and the people who don't deserve to be ruled. So it's an expression and a sort of manifestation of. And a means to convince others of the way, you know, essentially of power and that those in power deserve to be there. So, yeah, absolutely. Fundamentally, you know, hunting and, you know, seducing mistresses, but. And advertising those things, not only just sort of doing those things, are fundamental to keeping the people in power. In power.
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Right.
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Renaissance rule was always a little precarious. These men were kind, were, you know, they were very aware of the fact that they could either be assassinated by, you know, members of their family or rival factions who could be aristocratic, or they were constantly afraid of the people too, that what they called the popolo that were always, you know, that were always a little bit threatening. Right. And, you know, they should have been afraid. Right. Because these, these men were very often sort of brutal, you know, warlords and, you know, not enlightened rulers as we would imagine. And life was brutal in the 15th century. And so with good reason. These rulers often had, you know, were often suspicious of the extent to which they're, you know, that their, their citizens could, their subjects could rise up against them and. But the way that they could create these separations was through the, the constructions and performances of masculinity that I talk about in this book.
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so, I mean, really it is, you know, it's safe to say that their ability to rule relies upon their demons, their ability to demonstrate that they should be ruling. And this is one of those facets, right?
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Absolutely. Yes.
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Yeah. All right, let's talk about chivalric imagery. Like, what are these guys seeing around them like that and reading. By seeing, I mean, like, visually and like, what are they reading, what are they hearing? That can serve as an exemplar of ideal masculinity.
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Yeah. So it's a lot of you Know, a lot of images of jousting which they performed, sometimes set, you know, with contemporary characters or historical figures, I should say, you know, sometimes set in literature that they are reading. And traditionally, I think historians, until sort of recently have a lot of art historians, I should say, have, interpret this as sort of like a sort of fantasy, sort of like a decaying, you know, the end of a culture where I want to say it's, you know, actually being rejuvenated in lots of different ways. And it's. It's. It's not really about, like, lords barely holding on to power, but it's. It's lords who are powerful, using this to dominate. Right. So it's not like sort of the end of something, although, you know, or they would not have seen it as the end of something. Right. Even. Even if certainly things change in the next couple of centuries. This is fundamental to. To their power. So it's a lot of scenes of jousting. It's a lot of, you know, showing off armor in different ways even. And I think this is something that. That I draw attention to here in this book is the way that portraits of Renaissance lords and armor often are specific in Italy, are often shown in jousting armor. And that's something that we sometimes miss, but that original audiences would not have missed. Right. Also sort of, you know, being inspired by Cupid. Cupid emerges, I think, is an important sort of character and inspiration because love is so important. There are all kinds of fictions of love related to rule here. Right. That I talk about. That power was in many different ways was erotic and was expressed as erotic and not only sort of sexual, but including that, but more than that too. So what we sometimes might separate as sort of classical versus chivalric traditions also very much went hand in hand. And that was the part of the, you know, the 15th century Renaissance for these rulers.
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B
So they have the stories from the classical world that we have. Right. These same kind of the God, the mythology, and then as well, chivalric, like chivalric romances. Like, what are we talking about?
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A
All kinds of, you know, things that we would associate with, like Arthurian legends, but. But, you know, which is not a monolithic group and, you know, literally. Excuse me, which is not a monolithic group, that they're all kinds of related stories, related characters, a lot of them based on Carolingian. That was particularly important in Estee Ferrara, for instance, and Carolingian heroes like, you know, Roland and. But. But expanded beyond that. But then they were also, you know, they were they were looking also at all kinds of fighting manuals that were filtered also through some of this literature. But then I also talk a little bit about a. You know, I'm interested in the books that they were reading as men and the letters that they were writing as young men, I should say, right. As boys, when they're, you know, tweens and teens and they are reading often these sort of pseudo, you know, these Latin grammars that were understood to be Ciceronian but weren't quite. But this is how they're learning their Latin. And then they're. And they're illustrated or illuminated, I should say, with images of. Of ancient battles. But the ancient battles are being fought by what we would consider to be sort of medieval knights. Right. So this is another way that there's all of this sort of mix and, you know, between these, between these traditions, which we shouldn't separate probably as much
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B
as we sometimes do some historical, biblical and these philosophical works. There's also like, as you noted, a great deal of just eroticism, like erotic imagery, like very clearly sexual imagery and embodied sexuality everywhere.
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A
So images of mistresses. Right. I have a chapter on Cecilia Gallerani, the famous I Want to Call Girl with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci, who was, you know, sort of fundamental to the. To power. These, these were representations of essentially of male virility, of the prince's virility. But yeah, I was really just sort of fascinated by the ways that gazes and the way that these lord people, the way that people looked at lords and described them was so often sort of over overlaid with ideas about. About love and about, you know, in eroticism, you know, that people would say that they were in love with their lord. Right. I kept finding this over and over again. You. This also relates a little bit to the history of effeminacy, which is a particular thing that it doesn't align with our ideas culturally today about effeminacy. But why? For instance, a poet called the Lord of Ferrara the most womanly man he had ever seen or the most womanly man of his time, because as many women as he saw that many he desired. They talk about these lords as viewers, men and women constantly, but particularly women constantly falling in love with them. So there is this sort of erotics of power. And I think power, like we understand power, can be sexy today too, and erotic. But I think it was very much the case here. So one of the things that I want to sort of think about in this book is the way that these courts were very much homosocial spaces. Right. And within them, it's not always possible to differentiate, and I don't want to differentiate what was sexual, what was intimate, what was effective. Right. All of these sorts of things. And there are a couple of ways that I explore Renaissance homosociality, but when I do so, I don't want to say it's either or, you know, chaste or erotic. It's. It's sort of all of these things. And that. That's really how power functioned. It was seductive.
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Yeah. This. And. And the idea that there's the intimate, the erotic, the umbuncular, the. The fraternal. All of these things exist at once. Yeah. And I think this is something that I really began to think about here, and I've been thinking about, you know, since I read the book, is just the ways that we separate these in the modern world. And perhaps that. That just doesn't work. Right. It doesn't work in the Renaissance context.
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Absolutely. That's. I mean, that's precisely my point. Yeah. You said it better than. Than. Than I did. Than I could.
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B
Well, actually, you know, you said it pretty well in the book, but different thing. Yeah. Which is like, this idea, you know, as everybody gets Machiavelli wrong, it's best to be feared and loved at once.
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That's what he. He says. He says if you can only do one, there's, you know, feared is better, but really what's best is. Is both. And I think. Yeah. And I think that that's very telling exactly both of how this culture worked and number two, how we sort of get it wrong. Also, it's not an either or for him.
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B
So I loved your chapter on animals, and it offers an image of Renaissance men who are both brutal warriors and devoted, who are both feared and loved. Right.
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And I want to say it's my favorite chapter. Can I say that? It's my. It is so fun to write. Yeah. All the dogs and the. The cheetahs and the. The birds and the horses.
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B
So. Yeah, it was. I bet it was really fun to research this, too. That makes sense. So my. My first question is the most, like, actually, like, infantile of questions, but, like, what's up with all the dogs?
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Right. Well, they were up. You know, they. They love their dogs. I mean, we love our dogs. They're obsessed with hunting. I mean, and it was. It's amazing the extent to which these lords always have dogs around them. You know, there's a lot of things in this book that I think that was sort of like, once you Start seeing them. You constantly see them. It was sort of towards the end of my research that I read this sort of amazing article by Francesco Borgo on Leonardo's hunting metaphors at the Milanese court and how Leonardo's hunting metaphors about vision in particular relied on the, at the time, just absolutely, you know, kind of second nature connection or collaboration between sight hounds and scent hounds. And how. And then once I started looking at dogs, I constantly saw them paired and opposed. Right. And you see this, for instance, in the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia, but also in all kinds of sort of hunting manuals and illuminations in them too, that this is just a way that they thought, you know, and they, you know, they, they love their dogs. Right. There's this, you know, my favorite example is Rubino, the dog from Mantua, who, you know, is probably the dog sitting under the, the, the, the chair of the lord and Mantegna's very famous camera picta that at one point he, he went missing from his palace for a couple of days and then he came back soaking wet. And, you know, the ambassador tells the story of this amazing kind of reunion between the lord and his dog. Right. And they had funerals for these animals and even sometimes, you know, we would poetry commissioned for, for them and sometimes even had. Had gravestones made for them. They, you know, it's one of the ways that I think that looking at the past, we can also see like, how like they are to us, but some of the times too, how unlike they are in terms of, you know, you know, those who wielded power to this extent. But it, but it humanizes them to see how much they, they love their animals. But then again, they also treated their animals in ways which we would find completely, you know, sort of inhumane today.
- [29:17]
B
Yeah.
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A
Including animals today also. Right. So.
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B
Right. Obviously. But I mean, they're just the lines of like, what's acceptable are very, they're just. They've drawn in different places and understood differently. You know, you could certainly, although there are people who still hunt with dogs. I grew up on a farm where that happened. There are a lot of people would consider that brutal.
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A
Absolutely, yes. And these dogs, they were companion animals, certainly. But they were above all else, you know, meant to, even if they weren't actually hunting, to suggest that the prince did hunt. Right. So both of those. Both of those, Absolutely.
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B
And there are loads and loads of images, like so much hunting imagery.
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A
Yes. And even with cheetahs, which was something I really got to learn about and really, you know, Was, was excited about the way that these, these princes hunted with cheetahs.
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B
Yeah. Talk to us about hunting with cheetahs.
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A
Right. Well, again, you know, and scholars have talked about this because they, they show up in the, the frescoes of the. Of Gozzoli's Medici Chapel, for instance, and you see them here and there, like, very famously. Or not sorry, not very famously, but something that excited me was even a painting like Gentile da Fabriano's Adoration of the Magi, which is sort of Art History 101. You see it. I've always known that there was a cheetah in the foreground, but way, way in the background, there's a. When the magi's train is kind of winding around, there's a little tiny cheetah way, way in the distance. And it's not just that he's there, but he is looking at a deer which is running, and he's sitting on the, on the back of a horse on his riding carpet, and he's about to launch into the. Launch at it. You can just tell by the way that he. That it's standing. And. Yeah, so they were trained. There were people that were cheetah keepers. Sarah Cockram, a professor, and has done a lot of work on these animal keepers that was really useful. And they all very often have, you know, they're family members that are sort of passing down this type of knowledge. Cheetahs came from both from sort of Africa and from what's now Iran and through various different ways into Italy, often through Venice, but not only through Venice. And they were kept, they were often given as gifts. You know, I was very excited when I found one reference to hurdles being set up and at one point in the court of Ferrara, them, you know, being raced, so the cheetahs being raced, you know, like jumping over hurdle. So clearly they were, you know, these princes were seduced by how quick and how fast they were. And they hunted sometimes deer, they hunted rabbits, but they were. They're relatively tame and well, you know, well trained. You know, they're extremely charismatic animals, I think, and I. So they're. It's an important part of Renaissance culture at this moment, I think. They're, they're not called. They're called hunting leopards. And, you know, I have seen a lot of scholars sometimes think that these were leopards, but, but, but, but there were obviously the, the, the species is cheetah, that, that they. And so there's been, I think, maybe some confusion about that, but it's pretty clear that these Were these were always. Almost always cheetahs, even when leopards are described.
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B
Is there anything there about, like, kind of the fact that they're exotic from elsewhere, from the East? Is there anything. Does that relate.
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A
Absolutely. Yes, this is. And some of the animal stuff was going to appear elsewhere at one point. And this is absolutely about sort of like global. And increasingly is about global control and can be talked about the way that giraffes, eventually rhinoceros, elephants, eventually tigers also are coming. And lions, who've always sort of been there. And I talk a little bit about lions. They're important to a couple of the cities and also are trained a lot more difficult to train than cheetahs, at least in the late 15th century, from the evidence that I have. But these are absolutely about sort of like domination and increasing global control, too.
- [33:41]
B
Claims for that and the image thereof. And kind of. It's. There's a. An exoticism there that's hard to. You know, that is kind of seductive and as well. So animals that can be about love and war. And then you write on adultery, okay, that adultery, adulterous sex was formative, almost an essential component of noble masculinity and sexuality. Can you comment on that?
- [34:04]
A
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, these were all men, for the most part, who had wives chosen for them, sometimes at a very young age. And it was important to always, you know, the adultery was formative. It was a part of the system here, but it also had its rules that could not be. That could only. That could be broken only with sort of. With. To certain people's detriment. And the rules relate to. Always to gender and always to class as well, too, and status. So most of these princes, you know, and I would. The best would be to have a legitimate son, right, because these princes are always thinking about their family line. And. But particularly in Ferrara, where there was something like 13 illegitimate rulers in a row. And, you know, that. That primogenitor was very flexible, right. And the lord could kind of decide which was the best of the sons to choose. And so it was not impossible to legitimize, particularly with the help of the pope, sometimes the Holy Roman Emperor, to legitimize certain sons. So there was this sort of whole network of advancing illegitimate children, right. And so mistresses gave lords the opportunity to sort of to manage this, right. Of course, with dangers to both mothers and children because of. In childbirth and in the early years, Dangers of all sorts. It was useful also to have this kind of pool of relatively loyal, but also relatively disposable children, but of course, so mistresses go hand in hand, and adultery go hand in hand with. With. With illegitimate children as well, too. So showing off, essentially, that you could have multiple lovers was a lot of times expected out of these lords. There are a couple of princes that. That. That absolutely did advertise these lords and paintings, both panel paintings and frescoes, also medals. Some of these are really relatively well known, like Sigismundo Malatesta. Others like Fiamir Rossi, the rule, the ruler, one of the lords of Parma, a lot less known, but just multimedia campaigns of images of mistresses showing off, in a lot of ways, you know, ideal femininity of a certain class, but possibly even more than that, ideals of virility. Right. That he had his wife, but he could seduce other women as well, too. And it was just always. What was important was that the mistress was of an elevated rank, but just below that of the wife. When the mistress and the wife, if there was a wife, and obviously there were their mistresses when lords were widowed or before they were married as well, if it was unclear who was most important or who was on, you know, who was either more loved or better treated. And that's when problems arose. For instance, when Beatrice d' Este and Cecilia Gallarani wore the same clothing at court, her family. This was the wife and mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan. That became a real issue. But as long as the hierarchy was clear, it was important for these men to show off their virility. Not just to show it off, but to practice it, because it did have real useful outcomes in these children, which they absolutely depended on. And they depended on these networks of children even when they weren't designating one of them as lord. Right. They served all kinds of other diplomatic and familiar purposes, too, within the aristocratic networks in Italy and beyond.
- [38:08]
B
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So once again, there's this very, very practical side of having a number of illegitimate children, but then also this idea that you're demonstrating your virility and your seductive power as well. Yeah, okay. And you dedicate an entire chapter to Cecilia Gallerani, better known to perhaps everyone but her mother as the lady with an Ermine that was painted by Leonardo da Vinci. And you titled the chapter the Girl with an Ermine Between Men. And I bring up. Brings up all these issues that you're talking about throughout. Right. And the first I want to discuss is the girl. While you're calling it the girl rather than the woman. How. How old is she? Why does that matter?
- [38:57]
A
Yeah, there's a real. Well, you know, in a lot of ways, there's a lot of, there's a, there's a culture of youth, of celebrating youth in lots of different ways in Renaissance society. I mean, we obviously still have. Have this today. And that goes along with, you know, like the, the extent both sort of like men, powerful men in Renaissance Italy were obsessed with, in love with having sex with children, according to our, According, you know, according to our categories. And that's something that I think, I think there's a lot of things that art historians and historians, in certain ways, you know, acknowledge but haven't maybe sort of acknowledge all the ramifications of. And I, you know, this, this study, I published something on it in like 2008 or 2009, when I just kind of. It was a very, very slow burn trying to find out a lot of things about Cecilia, looking at the painting over and over again. But also in the last decade or so, some new research has emerged which, which helped me focus on things. It's unclear precisely how old because we don't know precisely when she was born. She's described as between 10 and 11. At a couple of moments, she was probably 12 or 13. When there's a letter where Ludovico essentially is saying that he's in love with this girl and they're trying to have a child together, he writes this to his brother who's a cardinal in Rome. He doesn't name her, but he names her brother, and it's clear that it's her. And, you know, so this is a painting that's in Art History 101, that, or certainly in, like, Renaissance surveys that people know it's one of Leonardo's, you know, maybe not top two or three paintings, but, but, but, but quite familiar to scholars and to the general public also. And there has been this, you know, dating is always an issue with Leonardo. And art historians have sort of tied themselves into knots to try to suggest that she was 17 or 18 years old when she was painted. And, you know, coming up with all sorts, you know, which is, it says more about us, right? About the society. And so I wanted to kind of like, make this case and lay it all out. The extent to which, you know, that this was a fundament, that this love of, you know, 12 and 13 year olds was a fundamental part of Renaissance culture that, you know, we, that we need to sort of wrestle with in different ways. You know, it's a complicated story to try to like, to make that case and to unpack everything so that's why I think it sort of took, but also to emphasize how powerful and sort of remarkable Cecilia was and how she was operating for her family at this moment, too, and how, you know, what she did with her life even beyond her prince's life. And you know, as a sort of, as a poet and as someone who decades later people came to and were sort of also continued to be seduced by, but by her learning as well, too. So how she shaped her kind of life trajectory. It's also a fascinating story, but beginning in something at a moment, right in a phenomenon that I think historians know, but also just have tried hard not to really wrestle with
- [42:23]
C
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- [43:20]
B
Colgate Optic White the idea that Renaissance people are having irregularly like 40, 30, 40 year old men are regularly having sex with 12 and 13 year olds. Girls.
- [43:31]
A
Boys and girls.
- [43:32]
B
Boys and girls. Yeah. And it just, it seems so foreign and so objectable and so just like, ooh, gross, that I think you're right. I think we, like, try real hard not to think about it, but it is like it's there and it's an essential part of the story and we're not going to get, we're not going to understand effective and erotic what have you, kind of relationships between Renaissance people. If we can't like really look at this and say how much the culture of youth isn't just about being young, it's also about attracting youth and being like being seductive to young people.
- [44:10]
A
Absolutely. Yes.
- [44:11]
B
Right.
- [44:12]
A
And this is another way that, you know, virility is fundamentally, you know, exercised. I mean, it's both sort of Like a privilege of it and an expression of it and.
- [44:24]
B
Go ahead.
- [44:26]
A
No, sorry, go on.
- [44:27]
B
Well, no, and I mean, it's just. I'm thinking about, like, how, you know, we make these kind of. It's almost. It's a joke now when old men are with younger women and we talk about how much, like, money can. Can like, forgive that. But we don't have the concept. We. The. The concept that men could continue to be attractive to young women is alive and well in this period. Not just. It's not just for his money. Right, Like.
- [44:52]
A
Right, absolutely. Yeah. No, it's about. Yeah. You know, again, power seductive. And these princes, you know, are. They're. They're. Everyone's in love with them. This is whether or not this is true. This is what people say. Right. And so that's. Absolutely. This is a function of that.
- [45:06]
B
All right, so we got the girl that. She's very young, and that's an important part of the story. I want to talk about the ermine. What is the ermine doing there? Right.
- [45:17]
A
And, you know, this is one thing that I think some people might know, but a lot of us don't. Ehrman's not actually. There isn't an animal called an ermine. I mean, there is, but there's not. Right. An ermine is any one of a. Type of a. Of a couple of different sorts of mustelids, sort of weasel like animals when they're in their white winter coats. So most often they're stoats, but they can be other animals as well. So you'll never see an ermine in the summer, right? Because. So ermine, you know, I mean, it's understood as an animal by us and by them, but at the same time, too, really, it's an animal sort of product. It's. It's animal fur. And so whenever you see, you know, and I also want us to think about the way that, you know, they were connected to animal bodies in ways that, you know. You know, we've so gotten away from furs that whenever you see, you know, a portrait of a French king or Napoleon or not, sorry, not Napoleon, but a French king with, you know, showing off the white fur with all those little black dots. Right. Each one of those black dots is the tip of the ermine tail. So each one of them is a different animal. Right. Is a different pelt. Right. So they're showing off how many dozens of dead animals they're wearing. And in this period, you know, furs were generally worn on the inside of clothing, but they'd always be flipped out a little bit so that you could see what the fur was. Right. The most common fur was squirrel fur, actually, at the time, Vair. But ermine was in a number of cities in Italy, was reserved only for the aristocracy. Right. So even though very no one, you know, they didn't keep ferrets or weasels as pets in this. In this period. They didn't keep stoats as pets. You even can't today. They're. They're the cutest little animals, but they are mean. And even though they never held them like Chichilia is holding it, they absolutely felt ermine on their bodies. The people like Cecilia and Ludovico and the people who would have been looking at this image, right, that. But it was not as of a living animal. There's a pun based on the name of weasel or ermine in Greek, and her name, and this is common. We see these sorts of sort of word plays and plays of identity in portraiture at the time, sort of, most famously for Leonardo, his portrait of Ginevra da Vinci with the juniper bushes behind her. So there's that. But at the same time, too, I think it's all about sort of elite tactility. There's a real connection between her face and the ermine's face. Also, the ermine as an animal has a lot of different meanings that relate to, I think, the way mistresses were understood, or that's sort of one of my interpretations here that relates to the ways that these women were both meant to be pure and chaste, but at the same time they were sexualized as well. Ermines were famous for their fertility and sort of animal lore. They were also famous for their purity. Most ermine and animal lore at this time, and there's a couple examples that I mentioned, including one that was in a book that Leonardo even owned. The ermine would give itself up rather than spoil its perfect white fur if a hunter was chasing it. Right. Rather than run through the mud or run through dirt, it would stop. So it became an emblem of purity and by extension, of chastity, too. So sometimes they're associated with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her virginity and purity. So it's an animal that means a lot of things and does a lot of work, but that relate, I think, both to sort of, you know, aristocratic culture in terms of erotics, but also in terms of, you know, the luxury material culture. And the way that she's sort of stroking it, I want to, you know, suggest is something that would have related to that, people would have felt that they would have known what it means to have ermine and silk and skin right next to each other. You know, the viewers of this painting, because they showed off their privilege by those sorts of senses in particular.
- [49:39]
B
All right, and all of this we know about and is brought home to us by men. Right. This whole series is kind of presented by a variety of different men of different kind of gifts and statuses. I mean, Leonardo da Vinci, who was a bit of a celebrity, one could say. But then Ludovico Sforza, her lover, is one of the most powerful men of his era. Right.
- [50:08]
A
And then the Duke of Milan. Yes. Or the ruler of Milan, eventual Duke. Yes.
- [50:11]
B
And then she's married off to yet another Ludovico.
- [50:16]
A
Yeah, yes, to one of his soldiers, essentially, once his wife is. Once his wife is pregnant. And Ludovico, he was, because his brother was assassinated, he married relatively late. He didn't have a wife as a young person. This is part of the story of adultery, too, that princes marriages were often managed for them. It was only when he was almost in his late 30s, which is well into adulthood in 15th century Italy, that he had a wife. And it was only once she became pregnant that it was sort of important that, okay, the mistress go away, or at least this mistress sort of go away. He did have. Later had other mistresses as well. Excuse me, sorry. He did have other mistresses as well. And so he married one of. Sorry, she was married off to one of Ludovico's soldiers, essentially an aristocratic soldier. And he. And they. The family. And the child that Cecilia had had with Ludovico, officially was the son who could possibly be the ruler if that was necessary, was given a palace, Right. Not far from the castle. So it's unclear if he ever, you know, if he ever gave up Cecilia or if he did immediately. Ludovico did seem to be quite in love with his also very young bride, Beatrice. But. Yeah, so she was well positioned. She wasn't, you know, sort of abandoned by. By any means.
- [51:51]
B
No, rather you can make an. I mean, there's a very clear argument to make that her. This is. She. Her life is made through these relationships. Being Ludovico Sforza's mistress was great for her.
- [52:05]
A
Yes. And so that's what I argue about, you know, that, you know, there's a lot of both sort of material gain for her and her family and also sort of cultural capital as well that she built upon throughout the many decades of the rest of her Life, which is a lot less well known. And I think there's a lot more work to do. She was a poet. None of her poetry actually survives, at least as far as I know, but it might somewhere out there. But I've tried to reconstruct what we know about her. And yeah, she did live another couple of decades and with her husband and then beyond her. Her husband's life also.
- [52:47]
B
Right. Yeah, it's just a very. Such a great place to use. This is such a great case study to use to really look at all of the ways all of these dimensions of masculinity are at play. And I got. We've been talking forever and I'm not quite done yet. I'm so sorry. But just one more major topic I want to get to, but in some ways I feel like it's the biggest and most interesting question. That's probably more about me than anyone else. But Borso d'. Este.
- [53:17]
A
Yes. So this is the final chapter where I look at Borso d', Este, the ruler, Ferrara, who was never married and supposedly never had children. It seems like he might have. He probably did some illegitimate children, but he definitely didn't acknowledge them. And he is one of these lords that is famous in his own time and famous now for being very elegant, bejeweled. Right. And so some 20, 21st century scholars have sort of straightforwardly said, well, he was. He was gay, he was queer. And I want to question that and say that that very much could be the case. Right. But at the same time, too, it's not the case in that he didn't identify himself as that. Right. That's our category and not his. But to think by, if we think through him, what are the ways that he both, you know, how did he construct his self image relating to sex, power and, you know, erotics in a very homosocial space, in a space that was, you know, sort of populated by men and boys, you know, in a court where power was organized around sort of like the promotion of beautiful youths and loyalty to the prince. Right. And this is the way that he, you know, ruled Ferrara for about two decades, relatively successfully, too, and also managed to. To keep other family members from encroaching on his rule too much. He had a nephew. He usurped the power of one of his nephews who he managed with some of his other brothers, some of whom were. He was illegitimate. Some of his brothers were legitimate. He managed to very successfully, to kind of keep them all, probably by not having children. To keep them all, to keep the Peace in Ferrara. And once he died, one of his brothers and one of his nephews, there were two coup. There was a couple assassination attempts that I talk about two different attempted coups. Finally it ends up with, with the uncle beheading as punishment, the nephew, but then giving him the state funeral with his head sewn back on. So to suggest that, you know, everyone got along in the family. But what I try to do in this chapter is think about histories of sexuality and the ways that Borso sort of managed his, you know, what we saw about him, how he, how he showed his power, but also how he sort of managed rule in Ferrara, in town and sort of amongst his family members as well.
- [55:56]
B
All right. And it's a good place, you know, kind of this like, is he gay? Question, which is one that people really like to ask and it's so not the right question on every level. Right, Yeah.
- [56:12]
A
I say it can bring a lot of pleasure to think about queer people in the past and to say this, but at the same time too, if we think we have an answer to that question, it sometimes shuts down more interesting questions about what does sexuality do and how do we understand identity and, and what does that tell us about today?
- [56:34]
B
Right.
- [56:34]
A
Sometimes it's, it's, it's a nice answer, but sometimes it's too easy of an answer. It masks what I think are much more interesting sort of like cultural and social phenomenon about selves and power and, and rather than just having like a simple answer. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [56:53]
B
I mean, well, and the discussion kind of goes back, you know, I see like there ping pongs a little or pinballs, whatever, these extremes, like, no, there was no gay in history ever. La la la. Which is kind of a knee jerk historicist reaction to gays everywhere. Hooray.
- [57:14]
A
Well, and absolutely. And you know, and I'm not discounting, you know, the possibility, the probability, I would say for him that, you know, because power is all about these relationships with, you know, in this case, young men. And, you know, they, some of these princes wanted beautiful young men around them. They, they specifically asked, you know, beauty was, but, but being beautiful was, you know, that also, you know, being surrounded by young men was, was part of, like, also display generally. Right. It was useful not for the, the prince doing the looking, but for all of the people who were looking at the prints and their courtiers. Right. So. But I'm not discounting one, one or the other. And another point I want to make is because, you know, I think like, you know, I talk about, okay, One other point I want to make also here is that sometimes when we identify figures in the past as gay or queer, that we certainly. That we tend to. That we tend to kind of feel an affection for them, and rightfully so. But these lords also were sort of, you know, dominant, awful warlords. They were cruel to their citizens. And I don't want to sort of idealize a figure too much. I want to keep in mind the way that, okay, even if they were, you know, even if they, you know, had sex with men, or more likely in this case, very young men, that at the same time we don't idealize them too much, that we. That we understand that, you know, you know, how power worked here and how these men were in a lot of ways very, very brutal. Right. So I just don't want to over idealize them.
- [59:03]
B
You got that? I got it. Don't worry. No, that very much. That. That doesn't. Like they're not some fuzzy gay bear is kind of, I think, what you're trying to get.
- [59:16]
A
And it's important not to lose. And it's not to lose track of the fact that. Right. You know, where their power came from and where their privilege came from. Right. That, that, yeah. Not. Not only to idealize them, just because, you know, we might feel like they're like us in the past and, and, you know, that they're, you know, that they're. It doesn't make them necessarily progressive. Right. According to our. Our ideals.
- [59:37]
B
Right.
- [59:37]
A
We want them to be.
- [59:39]
B
No. And. And not. And regardless of, like, what's happening, it's not something we're going to recognize as like, the gay subculture, the queer subculture we're looking for.
- [59:49]
A
Right. And hopefully in this. This chapter, I kind of lay that out precisely about. I mean, because it was really useful too, for me. I mean, I think, you know, we were in grad school probably about the same time and asking super similar questions that I kind of had like a eureka moment a year or two ago where thinking about, like, the late 90s, early 2000s in terms of history of sexuality, it was all about what was essential and what was constructed. Right. And there was this debate in early modern studies, I mean, in a lot of fields, art history and history in particular, and it kind of dawned on me that what was considered to be essential at that moment was the kind of like late 20th century ideal of, you know, sort of male, urban, you know, elite homosexuality. And 25 years later, that's not essential anymore. Right. So maybe. Maybe that's a good lesson. That that was never essential. Right. And that we should be careful. That, you know, about was sort of. Yeah, I kind of had. It sort of dawned on me that, you know, the extent to which, you know, manifestations of sexuality, practices of sexuality have changed even in the last two decades should allow us to reflect upon, you know, even further in the past. Right. And to be. To be careful of our assumptions. Right. Because we can only imagine how things are going to look 10 or 40 years from now. Right. We should imagine that they're not going to be the same. Right. So that was a further caution, just even from my own sort of recent lifetime and experience, to be more careful about, you know, projecting our own ideas onto the. Onto the past.
- [61:34]
B
That is such a good thing, to constantly remind ourselves, Right. That just, like, what people are going to think of us 100 years from now or 500 years from now, they are not going to get it right.
- [61:47]
A
And.
- [61:48]
B
Or they're, at best, they're going to do what we're doing and triangulate and try to come at it. Yeah. All right. I have taken up so much of your time. This is a really long interview, but it's fascinating and I just enjoy talking to you so much.
- [62:01]
A
So thank you.
- [62:03]
B
This was great. Of course it was. Of course it was fun to talk to you, but I. So I've got, like, one more question I want to say. I. Just one more thing. What's next? What are you working on now?
- [62:14]
A
Right. So I am co authoring. Well, I'm trying to finish and need to very shortly, a book, a very short book, but I'm excited about, with John Gagne, who's a professor at history professor at University of Sydney, on Renaissance war banners and thinking about material culture, war power. You know, these were things that. This is a type of material culture that people died to protect, and some of them still survive. And I don't know. In Renaissance studies, the banners that have been mainly studied are gonfaloni, sort of ecclesiastical processional banners, but these were pieces of silk and gold that people killed and fought over. And we want to sort of try to tell that story in a short book. And then I'm working on a much larger project on the materiality of fashion in early modernity. So some of the dyes and mordants and things that went into clothing and the wars that were fought over them. Again, to think just about sort of like power and display, I guess, is one way to think about my work more broadly. Different in new sort of ways and fashion and.
- [63:25]
B
And textiles that are do not last very long.
- [63:29]
A
Absolutely. Or they and they don't last very long, you know, in their sort of beautiful and they're in their ideal, you know, appearances.
- [63:39]
B
Interesting. Yeah, that probably says something about you. That was a conversation for drinks, not this podcast. Hey, Tim, thanks so much. It was great to chat with you, Ryan.
- [63:52]
A
This was awesome. I appreciate it.
- [63:55]
B
All right, we'll talk again soon. Ciao. Ciao, ciao.
- [64:11]
C
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