Chapter 5. Street Corners: Nodes in the Networks of Urban Community

Nevola, Fabrizio

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Chapter 5. Street Corners: Nodes in the Networks of Urban Community

Fabrizio Nevola

Street Life in Renaissance Italy

So begins one of the light-hearted novellas in Franco Sacchetti’s compendious late-fourteenth-century vernacular collection of short stories, the Trecentonovelle. As Sacchetti reports, it was traditional to eat roast goose on the feast of All Saints, and in this instance a canon of the cathedral of...

Author

Fabrizio Nevola

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.187-225

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00290.5

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22186

Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyUrban ecology (Sociology)Florence (Italy)Siena (Italy)City and town life--ItalyPublic spaces--Italy

Chapter 5. Street Corners: Nodes in the Networks of Urban Community

Not many years ago in Florence by the gate of the Duomo [Porta del Duomo] a few youths decided to celebrate All Saints together, without effort and at no cost. So, on the evening of All Saints they set off together to bakeries, where they helped themselves to geese that the servant boys and girls were taking home. Late on in the day, they came to the bakery on piazza de’ Bonizi, and hid near the entrance[.]1Sacchetti, 1970, pp. 542ff. (novella 186).

So begins one of the light-hearted novellas in Franco Sacchetti’s compendious late-fourteenth-century vernacular collection of short stories, the Trecentonovelle. As Sacchetti reports, it was traditional to eat roast goose on the feast of All Saints, and in this instance a canon of the cathedral of Florence, one Filippo Cavalcanti, was the victim of a prank by a group of greedy youths. After an evening of thieving, the youths fetched up at the bakery on piazza de’ Bonizi and hid nearby, listening as the various servants arrived and asked for the goose that had been prepared for their family: the Ricci, the Medici or the Adimari. Then a young servant arrived and asked for Filippo Cavalcanti’s goose, and the youths sprang into action. As the baker served the goose into a tray for the servant boy to take home, the youths ran ahead to a dark corner near a tavern at the foot of the bell-tower by Cavalcanti’s home. When the unfortunate servant stood knocking at the front door, the youths set upon him, took the oven tray from him and disappeared into the night to enjoy their free feast. Meanwhile, Cavalcanti and his servant’s angry cries for help to catch the thieves brought many people in the locality out into the night. Although kindly neighbours offered the canon a place at their table, he was so angry that he declined all invitations in favour of pursuing the pointless quest to recover his goose. So Sacchetti was able to deliver a moralising observation on the gluttony of the clergy, a common theme in vernacular prose collections in the vein of Boccaccio’s Decameron.2On Sacchetti and the novella type, see Brand and Pertile, 1996, pp. 153–4.

The short tale is quite rich with incidental information regarding the street life of tight-knit urban neighbourhoods, and the everyday functions of local amenities. Central to the story is the bakery, whose ovens served multiple functions for the local community: not only did bakers make bread, but they provided the additional service of cooking food for local residents. The bakery in piazza de’ Bonizi served a small area of the city, south of the cathedral, and was presumably located at one end of the street associated with the Bonizzi family name to this day. As the youths waited to identify a likely victim for their plan, the names of local residents from the Ricci, the Medici and the Adimari families were called out, as their geese were brought out of the oven. While it is difficult to pinpoint the homes in question with precision, a degree of topographical accuracy can be verified: near to the Bonizzi enclave is canto de’ Ricci, which confirms the presence of that family in the vicinity, while the residences of the Adimari clan were clustered no more than a block away, just off the via Calzaiuoli.3For the canto de’ Ricci, see discussion in Chapter 3. For the Adimari, whose properties were largely demolished as part of the 19th-century remodelling of the area, see Detti and Detti, 1977, p. 162. Likewise, via della Canonica, in the immediately adjacent area, identifies the location of the cathedral canon’s residence, a narrow alley built with overhanging structures and also marked by a residential tower at the eastern end. Although we do not have evidence contemporary with the period in which Sacchetti was writing, mid-sixteenth-century documents record the presence of a bakery run by one Domenico di Giovanni in the vicinity of the Canonica; the hyperlocal distribution of bakeries in the city makes it plausible to assume that a bakery had long occupied that site.4As recorded in ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), consulted via the DECIMA map, online at https://decima-map.net/ (accessed 11 November 2018), record no. 3,336.

Nodes of neighbourhood interaction

This short story gives a glimpse of the ways in which certain places functioned as nodal points in the city, where people gathered and interacted on a regular basis. Kevin Lynch observed that ‘nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city [. . .] which are the intensive foci [. . .] the focus and epitome of a district, over which their influence radiates.’5Lynch, 1960, pp. 41–2. In the story, the bakery is a node in the local neighbourhood; people converge there daily to purchase bread, and to have food prepared in the oven. Given the essential role of bakeries in the transactions of daily life, they were widely distributed in most cities. So, for instance, in Siena in 1481, the twenty-one bakers who declared their profession in the tax records were distributed across the whole city, while twenty-five shoemakers, whose trade relied on clustering, can be found in the district of Badia Nuova alone.6Data compiled from ASS, Lira, 185–200 (1481); note that tax declarations did not always name a profession so these are not complete numbers. Similarly, in Florence in 1561, bakers were evenly distributed across the city, while a specialist profession such as that of the cloth dyers was mostly located in one place, around the appropriately named corso de’ Tintori, where they had easy access to the river Arno for their water-intensive industry.7ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), fol. 59r–v for the tintori along the street.

Furthermore, the functional reasons why bakeries tended to be sited on street corners are very similar to those that led people to gather around those same places: nodes in the city can be defined as locations that can be reached by the largest number of people with the least amount of effort. As urban theorist Jane Jacobs first showed in her analysis of city blocks in New York, the emergence of nodal sites is very much dependent on localised patterns of movement; such sites shape the social fabric of urban environments by creating the conditions for everyday interactions.8Jacobs, 1961, pp. 178–86. Jacobs argued that ‘short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbourhood’, identifying clearly how tight, interconnected urban environments create multiple opportunities for encounters of all sorts.9Ibid., p. 186. These factors and observations also obtain for the pre-modern city, where local nodes were key sites of social interaction, normal commercial exchange (such as at the baker’s shop or the apothecary’s) and formal and informal distribution of news and information.

The neighbourhood bakery is the central node of the social interactions around which Sacchetti’s story revolves, and an interesting visual counterpart to the novella can be found in a panel in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which depicts what is described as a Florentine street scene (fig. 108).10Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, catalogue entry, online at www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-3104 (accessed April 2018): Wind, 1977; see, more recently, Rodríguez, Borobia Guerrero and Dal Co, 2011, pp. 178, 185, cat. no. 32. The residential neighbourhood depicted might be identified as an actual site in Florence, but at the same time resembles numerous intersections in many towns. What is distinctive about the urban setting is the arrangement of the streets in the background: a narrow, wedge-shaped building dividing two streets lined with humble houses and a more elegant palazzo to the right, opening out into the unpaved space in the foreground. Wedge-shaped (or ‘flatiron’) buildings and the configuration of the streets and spaces around them were not uncommon in Florence; examples survive that split streets radiating out from small piazzas, as at the intersection of the via dello Sprone with via Maggio (fig. 109), or that of via del Sole and via Spada. The painting shows a largely residential neighbourhood, though the central ‘flatiron’ building has a large ground-floor opening protected by a ramshackle overhanging wooden roof, which may represent a shop. Quite standardised grey pietra serena stonework frames many of the doors and windows, as was common in a number of central Italian cities, and the same stone is used for the horizontal string courses that divide the vertical mass of the houses; the most prominent building, the palazzo, fills the right side of the painting, standing out from its neighbours by being raised up from the street on a step, and having a bench beside the door.

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Description: Florentine Street Scene by Unknown

108. Unknown artist, Florentine Street Scene, c. 1540, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Description: Wedge-shaped building at the junction of via dello Sprone and via Maggio by...

109. Wedge-shaped building at the junction of via dello Sprone and via Maggio, Florence.

The open space in the foreground is occupied by twelve people, assembled in various groups. Two women stand in the middle-ground on the right, one carrying a bundle of linen on her head, the other opening the door to the palazzo; they seem to be conversing with the man in a red cloak, whose face and upstretched arm appear to be directed towards them. Various men wearing simple doublets and hose walk through the scene, two in conversation on the left, and two others carrying cloth-wrapped bales on their heads. A central group of comparatively more elaborately dressed men fills the centre of the scene, four of the men engaged in conversation and two others standing close by; they all wear cloaks and, though the colours vary, all have a distinctive border trim of red or black ribbon. There is no reason to accept an old identification of the painting as depicting one of the Seven Works of Mercy – namely, hospitality to a traveller – not least because none of the figures can plausibly be identified as a traveller seeking shelter; it is nonetheless tempting to see the central male group, with their matching costume, as having some sort of formal association, perhaps that of a confraternity dedicated to charitable works.11Borobia Guerrero rejects the Rijksmuseum’s identification of the scene as being from a series of the Seven Works of Mercy and simply sees this as a Florentine street scene; Rodríguez, Borobia Guerrero and Dal Co, 2011, p. 178.

Although there is no additional evidence regarding the precise setting of the scene or the relationships between the figures, the painting nonetheless offers a rare glimpse of everyday street life in a Tuscan residential neighbourhood. It is significant to note that both men and women occupy this urban space, even though the men are clearly shown to be loitering in a leisurely manner, while the women are in the act of making their way into the house; sociability in the public realm appears, at least to some extent, to be divided along gender lines. Some degree of association is evident between the male figures, possibly denoted by their clothing, and is certainly communicated by their central position in the composition and the fact that they appear to be speaking together on a street corner, a common location for such informal social gatherings. The women, on the other hand, are in the process of leaving the scene, entering the home, perhaps with bundles of laundry. Altogether, however, the picture conveys a sense of the everyday acquaintances that structured neighbourhood life and interactions. The central huddle of men talking, while others walk by and the women exit the scene in the middle of an exchange with one of the men – these are the sort of neighbourhood networks in which both family ties and sociability might be expressed in the public space of the street. It is just such a tight-knit social space that the novella of the unfortunate cathedral canon Filippo Cavalcanti presupposes, in which the urban public space of the street is an active agent in shaping identities and the sense of belonging.

Street corners were often nodes in the city, and, like the bakery around which the novella turns, a variety of shop types tended to adhere to street corners, where they were assured greater visibility and custom. Testimony of how such nodes might function as hubs in local and urban networks comes from the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci, whose richly informative diary was compiled as he experienced the city from his shop, first on the corner known as the canto dei Tornaquinci on via Tornabuoni (which he purchased in 1466) and then from new premises nearby (purchased in 1490), in front of the Palazzo Strozzi.12Landucci, 1985 (online edition); see also Landucci, 1927, p. 49. For this area, see Preyer, 2015. His account of life in Florence drew on multiple sources, but was very much informed by personal observation and conversations in his shop. Entries regularly refer to how political events resulted in his having to close the shop: the threat of military occupation and looting when King Charles VIII was in Florence (November 1494) and the close approach of Duke Valentino Borgia’s troops to the city in May 1501 both led to his temporarily closing his premises, though on the occasion of an outbreak of plague in April 1479 he left apprentices in charge and repaired to his villa at Dicomano.13Landucci, 1927, pp. 27 (plague), 68 (Charles VIII), 179 (Valentino). Memorable passages recount the effect of heavy snowfall on a number of occasions; ‘Chi lo vide lo crede’ (‘Anyone who saw it believes it’) he wrote of snowfall in January 1493, which forced shops to close, and in January 1510 he recorded such a heavy fall that people fashioned snow sculptures of lions, nudes and galleys around the city.14Ibid., pp. 56, 243. Famously, of course, Landucci watched from his shop as the vast new Palazzo Strozzi went up before his eyes, reporting on its materials, the workers and the completion of phases of construction.15For a partial completion date of 16 June 1504, see ibid., p. 214; discussed further in Chapter 6. What emerges clearly through the long account, which spans more than half a century, is the tide of events, some prosaic and very local, others of national and international significance, as information flowed through his shop and was also fixed in his personal written record.

Landucci’s shop was not unique in its street-corner setting, and, indeed, along with bakeries and taverns, apothecaries’ shops seem to have been the most common shop types to occupy these much prized locations.16ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), and https://decima-map.net/ (accessed 11 November 2018). See, more generally, comments in Cavallo and Gentilcore, 2008a, p. 2; Cavallo and Gentilcore, 2008b. Another apothecary’s shop, the Speziale del Giglio on the street corner of canto al Giglio, close to the Mercato Vecchio, thrived through the same period as Landucci’s, and its detailed account books provide valuable information about its networks of customers.17For an extensive analysis, see Shaw and Welch, 2011, pp. 31–2, 38–9. The records kept by the owner, Tommaso di Giovanni Guidi, reveal how regular clients, but also new customers connected with people the apothecary knew, were more likely than others to be given credit in the shop, so that there ‘was a high level of interconnectivity amongst the shop’s many clients’.18Ibid., p. 83. These networks were particularly dense among a small group of clients who resided close to the shop, though his contacts extended across much of the city, and included various customers drawn from some of Florence’s leading families, as well as artists and members of the political elite.19Ibid., pp. 81–9, with a suggestion (p. 89) that Tommaso may have been a Savonarolan sympathiser. As only account books survive, it is difficult to extrapolate further regarding the social relations that existed among the shop’s clients, although there is evidence that apothecary shops were significant centres of sociability, as socially varied groups of customers waited their turn to be served and had plenty of time to talk as they waited.20Ibid., pp. 38–9. Such connections can be understood further from evidence pertaining to another fifteenth-century apothecary, at canto alle Rondini, on the eastern side of the city, just beyond the church of San Pier Maggiore, owned by the Palmieri family, who lived close by.21Sliwka, 2015, pp. 14–15. After Matteo Palmieri inherited the shop from his father in 1428, he built up the business, and eventually purchased a second shop in Mercato Vecchio; his clients included some of the most important families in his neighbourhood and the city, and it is likely that these connections contributed to his developing a successful secondary career as a politician and ambassador in the 1450s and 1460s.22Ibid., pp. 17ff., and, for discussion of his friendships, pp. 27ff.

This connection between the physical spaces of the apothecary’s shop and the sort of informal networking that facilitated the exchange of gossip and news, is captured visually in a manuscript illumination from Bologna (fig. 110).23Ibid., p. 14. Behind the shop counter apprentices mix prescriptions from jars of remedies kept on a shelf, while the apothecary in the foreground seems to give instructions to a shop boy about to make a delivery of prepared drugs. Meanwhile, on the left side of the image, just outside the shop and in a public space delimited by an arcade and a palace, a variety of men whose different professions are signalled by their varied dress stand around chatting. It is interesting to note here the permeability between the public space of the street and the interior of the shop, which was accentuated by the need to wait, so that social interaction spilled out from the shop to temporarily occupy the street. Comparable situations may have occurred, at a more localised residential street and neighbourhood level, around bakeries or local taverns.24Taverns are still very little studied for Italy, though interesting new research explores them from a spatial perspective: Rosenthal, 2015b; Salzberg, forthcoming. Of course, such gatherings and conversations might cause concern; in Venice, for instance, we know that not only gossip but gambling was quite common in apothecary’s shops.25For a fascinating account, rich with examples, see de Vivo, 2008. By the later sixteenth century, the city’s numerous pharmacies were under close observation from the inquisitori di stato (‘inquisitors of the state’), officials whose task it was to control political secrets; the inquisitori identified the apothecaries’ shops as key sites in the information economy, where diverse constituencies were able to gather for often prolonged periods of time, playing cards or chess, gambling, sharing news and potentially exchanging secret information.

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Description: Apothecary’s shop by Unknown

110. Apothecary’s shop, manuscript illumination, c. 1440, tempera on vellum, from Avicenna, Canon of Medicine, Ms, 2197, fol. 492, Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna.

This chapter explores further how the urban node, as physically articulated around the street corner, structured behaviours by providing a focal point for a range of activities. Just as certain types of shop – bakeries, taverns, apothecaries, even booksellers – provided places where people would meet, so too street corners themselves could serve similar functions, albeit without the provision of amenity.26See the important work of de Vivo, 2007, incl. pp. 93–8. It was at the principal street corners in different parts of the city that town criers pronounced laws and public edicts, that informal news distribution took place, and that even political dissent might coalesce and be given expression, as we shall see. So, too, churches and local sites of devotion often stood on nodal sites, so that public pulpits outside these buildings might capitalise on their locations to maximise the reach of sermons and other religious public occasions; local street shrines, which were almost always erected on such public sites, extend such practices by the creation of a capillary network throughout the city.27For a discussion of the presence of piazzas around mendicant churches, see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 124–33. As the story of Antonio Rinaldeschi, recounted at the beginning of Chapter 3, reminds us, quite often all these diverse elements of urban living might overlap around one site, so that a nodal site in the city could be the venue for a tavern, for gossip and gambling, and for neighbourhood devotion expressed by street shrines (where miracles sometimes occurred). The clustering of activities at such locations reveals them to be sites with agency, which facilitated and magnified the actions that took place around them.

‘Noverit posteritas’: Writing on walls and street corners

An unusual inscribed tablet known as the ‘epigraph against badmouths’ (epigrafe contro maldicenti) or the ‘stone of the layabouts’ (pietra ociosa), until recently housed in the Museo Civico of Rimini, bears the date 13 August 1397 and the invocation ‘Christ help Iacomo’ (fig. 111).28Pasini, 1970, pp. 64–6; the inscription itself appears to have been lost or perhaps stolen at some point after 1979, as reported in Petrazzi, 2002. It seems that Iacomo was a shopkeeper on a centrally located street corner in Rimini and the inscription went on to proclaim his somewhat confusing ditty: ‘on this street corner you should have patience and strength and virtue to recommend you. Take note: be silent if you want a quiet life; you shouldn’t talk about good things but should report evil to the attentive listener.’29Opinions vary on the transcription (and hence also the translation); reported first in Clementini, 1617–27, vol. 1: Trattato dei magistrati, p. 28. If a little convoluted, the message appears to wish to dissuade people from gossip, although it also cautions them against boasting, encouraging them instead only to report wrongdoing. The key message, ‘taxie se voi vivere in pace’ (‘be silent if you want a quiet life’), is nevertheless pretty clear!

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Description: The so-called stone of the layabouts (pietra ociosa) by Unknown

111. The so-called ‘stone of the layabouts’ (pietra ociosa), 1397, last documented at Museo Civico, Rimini. The verse exhorts readers to refrain from gossiping on street corners.

The late-fourteenth-century marker stone was originally placed outside a shop that occupied the central intersection of via del Rigagnolo della Fontana and via Maestra, but was moved in the sixteenth century, when it is reported to have been walled into the façade of a house opposite, which belonged to one Lorenzo Gambucci of Sassocorvaro. This crossroads – on the street leading to the port, close to the city’s market square and the residential area of San Giuliano – was a place where people naturally hung about, perhaps waiting for work, or scraping a living as witnesses for the notaries who operated nearby. The street corner was also known as the ‘canto de’ Puntiroli’, where ‘punti’ refers to the sting of gossiping tongues.30Pasini, 1970, pp. 64–6; Clementini, 1617–27, vol. 1, p. 28. And so we see the function of the inscription, which was almost certainly put there by the shopkeeper, whose monogram it is that dominates the stone panel, to discourage the loiterers around his shop from gossip. Moreover, that opening, ‘Christ help Iacomo’, sets in stone what seems to be an announcement, suggesting that the whole inscription should be understood as capturing the actual voice of Iacomo, directed at all those sharp-tongued loiterers who gathered around his shop.

While there is little other firm evidence relating to the pietra ociosa, it is clear that, as an object, it is laden with meanings related to its placement in the city, the seemingly everyday language with which it spoke, and the audience of hangers-around at whom it was aimed. It is a rare but prosaic object that testifies to street life, sociability, gossip and the ways in which such activities adhered to nodal points in the city fabric. It is also significant that, with few exceptions, it is entirely overlooked in the scholarly literature on Renaissance urbanism, and is absent from studies of the public inscriptions which were an increasingly common feature of the Renaissance cityscape. This, of course, is unsurprising. Like the study of urbanism, scholarly attention to inscriptions and the public display of the written word has tended to focus on the elements of classical revival on a grand scale that are a commonplace of the style and culture of the fifteenth century.

Scholars such as Roberto Weiss and Armando Petrucci were pioneers in the field of Renaissance epigraphy and set a direction for the study of a continuously expanding corpus of all’antica inscriptions, focusing on such issues as textual philology, classical styles of script, elite patronage and to an extent also the political significance of the practice of displaying inscriptions in various contexts.31Weiss, 1969, pp. 145–66. As Petrucci noted, following the fall of the Roman Empire ‘the conditions necessary for the use of writing out of doors were now lacking’, and were only gradually to re-emerge from the twelfth century, and with greater energy by the fifteenth.32Petrucci, 1993, p. 2. It is within this tradition that the best-known examples of ‘writings on walls’ of the Renaissance period occur on a range of building types, from city gates to church façades and wrapped around public and residential secular buildings. In these contexts, they usually served to proclaim the ambitions or achievements of patrons and rulers, whose claim to legitimacy they presented in bronze or stone in an appropriate language of authority and antiquity. From Giovanni Rucellai’s bold inscription on the façade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, to Paul V Borghese’s presumptuous self-promotion on the front of the basilica of St Peter’s, inscriptions on churches evoked the commemorative strategy adopted on the Hadrianic temple of the Pantheon in Rome, whose bronze inlay inscription provided a prototype for Leon Battista Alberti and others to imitate.33For Roman inscriptions as a model for architects, see Fiore, 2005b. These inscriptions project their message from the most visible vantage points, from friezes above eye-level that command and control the public spaces they dominate.

Growing levels of literacy – a key argument for Petrucci – in part explain the increasing proliferation of epigraphy in early modern cities, but it is nonetheless clear that there remains an important question of audience. Who was intended to read the extensive Latin and Greek inscriptions on Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta’s Tempio at Rimini, or the erudite claims to family and lineage that decorate the façade of the Palazzo Orsini at Nola?34Clarke, 1996; Hope, 1992. It is unlikely that the elaborate Latin inscriptions commemorating Sixtus IV’s renovation of the Ponte Sisto in Rome, or the shorter text emblazoned on the Piccolomini loggia in Siena were really intended for all to read, yet family names stand out and, combined with coats of arms or other family emblems, underline the ownership and patronage of buildings that more often than not project towards ample open spaces.35For the Ponte Sisto, see discussion and bibliography in Chapters 1 and 3. For the Loggia Piccolomini, see Jenkens, 1997; Nevola, 2007, pp. 74–6. By the later fifteenth century, building projects were seldom complete without an inscription; while these can be readily identified on numerous all’antica palaces facing piazzas, such as the unusually inscription-laden house of Lorenzo Manilio in Rome (fig. 112) or the much grander Cancelleria in the same city (see fig. 80), there are instances of less prominent yet equally significant inscriptions on door frames, window surrounds and applied decorated panels.36Clarke, 2003, pp. 22–5, 227–32. They offered additional iconographic meaning, identifying the key players who wielded ownership and authority in the urban fabric: the emblems of the Piccolomini, Montefeltro, della Rovere and others were emblazoned on building fronts for all to see.37Discussed further in Chapter 6. A parallel can be drawn with the ‘decorated shed’ described by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, 1972, p. 87. Inscriptions served both to reinforce the sociopolitical dynamics of patronage and real estate and to affirm participation by the educated urban elites in a shared culture of revived classical learning. The buildings so marked tend to occupy prominent locations in the city, and the inscriptions project towards open spaces of wide streets and open piazzas, thus describing the monumental in the city.

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Description: The house of Lorenzo Manilio, via del Portico d’Ottavia by Unknown

112. The house of Lorenzo Manilio, via del Portico d’Ottavia, Rome. The long inscription, dated 1468, runs along the broad stone band over the ground-floor openings.

Heraldic insignia and inscriptions were a common means by which both families and institutions – religious and secular – marked out urban space, announcing the identity and authority of the bodies housed within buildings to the surrounding streetscape. As Chapter 6 discusses further in relation to the Renaissance palace, benches to accommodate waiting petitioners, balconies and windows that facilitated the visual and aural surveillance of the neighbourhood environment, and grand emblazoned torches that lit façades and their surroundings at night are all examples of how the exterior of such a building articulated the social functions of its residents and their interactions with the public realm. The scale and symmetry of these monumental buildings led to such features coalescing around the axis of the main portal, and on the edges or corners of the walls, which were frequently marked by quoining and coats of arms highlighting the presence of the palace in the streetscape (figs 113–17). All too easily taken for granted, these were defining elements of the palazzo and should clearly be understood through the architectural and social relationships created between the building and the public sphere; it is this dimension that urban designer Jan Gehl describes as the ‘social field of vision’, by means of which the urban landscape is analysed with reference to the close encounters of familiar and everyday experiences associated with a non-monumental scale of observation.38Gehl, 1987, pp. 65–7, 163–5.

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113. The corner of Casa del canto alla Catena (or Casa dell'Arte della Lana), Florence, distinguished by quoining and prominent displays of arms.

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Description: Palazzo Medici by Michelozzo di Bartolomeo

114. The corner of Palazzo Medici, Florence, distinguished by quoining and prominent displays of arms.

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Description: Palazzo Piccolomini by Rossellino, Bernardo

115. The corner of Palazzo Piccolomini, Siena, distinguished by quoining and prominent displays of arms.

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Description: Palazzo Valmarana by Palladio, Andrea

116. The corner of Palazzo Valmarana, Vicenza, distinguished by quoining and prominent displays of arms.

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Description: Palazzo dei Diamanti by Rossetti, Biagio

117. The corner of Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, distinguished by quoining and prominent displays of arms.

If we adopt a ‘social field of vision’ approach, objects such as the pietra ociosa become equally significant – small-scale and site-specific items of the material culture of public space, whose meaning is contingent on contexts that need to be recovered. Here, it is helpful to adopt a spatial approach that does not privilege individual monumental buildings, but rather addresses the typologies and settings of non-monumental inscriptions and their possible collective impact on the city fabric. While in a number of instances such bottom-up forms of expression as non-elite signage and epigraphy might operate to challenge authority or established systems, in others they might provide a distributed or pervasive expression of the centralised control of space. These forms of public writing, ranging from graffiti to street signs, are non-monumental in terms of their relatively small scale, stylistic quality, and linguistic and grammatical correctness, and have been described as ‘deviant phenomena’ (fenomeni devianti), an expression that captures very effectively the view that they break the mould of the classicising ambitions of epigraphy.39Petrucci, 1993. For instance, defamatory inscriptions recorded in seventeenth-century Rome were usually hand-written and affixed at night to the doors of houses and inns, and to walls on street corners and piazzas; the few that have survived do so in the form of transcriptions reported in criminal cases.40Petrucci, 1982; Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 94–5, have termed this ‘house scorning’. The practice of posting such notices reversed the functions of doors as communication thresholds, attacking and subverting the idea of the façade as a public expression of the image and identity of the occupant; it was specifically the public nature of the affixed texts that undermined the honour of the victims.41Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 94–5; Jütte, 2015.

By the latter part of the fifteenth century, public writing was quite common, and scholars have noted that the increasingly urban society of Renaissance Italy led to the production of new types, including shop signs and advertisements for performances and fairs, as well as carnival posters; these were generally ephemeral and rarely survive. Cheap printing facilitated the distribution of propaganda, new legislation, religious pamphlets and the precursors of polemic broadsides throughout cities; these were sometimes posted on walls, scattered informally through fly-posting or affixed more formally at designated sites in the city.42Rospocher and Salzberg, 2012a; Salzberg, 2014. For a discussion of bandi posted in Rome, see San Juan, 2001, pp. 26ff. Venice was a major centre for the printing industry, and it is perhaps unsurprising that innovations in news distribution and circulation are documented there; the proliferation of cheap print supported an economy of street sellers that survived on the sale of single sheets, sometimes directly in combination with the street performance of news, poetry and theatre.43Salzberg, 2014, pp. 54–61. In the late sixteenth century, Tomaso Garzoni’s Piazza universale (1585) indicates that the two hours before sunset were designated for buffoons and charlatans to perform on makeshift stages on piazza San Marco, where hawkers also peddled printed texts.44Ibid., p. 61. Print was so cheap that news and laws could be ‘thrown into print’ (butada in stampa) at very short notice, as the diarist Marin Sanudo noted in 1496 in describing the publication of the city’s involvement in an international alliance.45For news and print, see ibid., pp. 62–3. Thus a dual-channel process gradually emerged, where oral communication from the primary nodal sites – including San Marco and Rialto – passed to wider ephemeral distribution networks through the combined actions of printers and street sellers.46Ibid.; de Vivo, 2007, ch. 4.

Just as some sites emerged as privileged nodes for the exchange of news and information, there is some evidence that specific public sites came to be associated with the publication of parodic or anti-establishment public writing, most famously in Rome around the statue of Pasquino (fig. 118), a much damaged classical figure displayed on a street corner close to the central piazza Navona. This location, visible to passers-by along the key processional route of the via Papalis, seems first to have emerged as a site where erudite yet playful humanist poetry was posted.47For the late-15th-century poetry of Pomponio Leto’s academy, see Curran and Raymond, 2014, pp. 182–3; for the proximity of Pasquino to Cardinal Carafa’s residence, see ibid., p. 188. During the first decade of the sixteenth century, it became a prominent site of public dissent, where the people of Rome expressed their anger and opposition by pasting paper leaflets displaying witty and direct critical statements, often in verse, first against Pope Alexander VI Borgia and then against Julius II della Rovere; the same practice for a similar purpose persists down to the present day.48Ibid., pp. 188–94; San Juan, 2001, pp. 1–8. One pronouncement, reported by the papal master of ceremonies, Johannes Burkhard, on 13 August 1501, began ‘I have predicted it to you, Pope, ox that you are’, referencing the heraldic emblem of the Borgia family, a bull.49Curran and Raymond, 2014, p. 188. A disgruntled comment on the funeral of Pope Leo X reflected on the extravagance and intrigue that had accompanied the Medici pontificate, in the form of a dialogue exchange over his tomb: ‘“Who lies here?” “Deceit, trickery, fear, dark lust.”’50Ibid., p. 189. Pasquino’s position on a street corner was important: this was a public site, prominently visible on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, from which, as one scholar has put it, ‘he commands an urban space shaped by gnarled pathways.’51San Juan, 2001, p. 8. To publish a text on Pasquino was both a very public act and one for which perpetrators sought to preserve anonymity in order to avoid prosecution.

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Description: Pasquino by Lafréry, Antoine

118. Antoine Lafréry, ‘Pasquino’, engraving, 1550, from Speculum Romanae magnificentiae (Rome, 1574?), pl. 78, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome.

Pasquino is the most famous of a group of so-called ‘speaking sculptures’ in Rome – others are Marforio, Madonna Lucrezia and ‘il Babuino’ – which came to be recognised as sites for the publication of anti-establishment and parodic texts.52Curran and Raymond, 2014, pp. 180–81. As a number of scholars have recently argued, texts attached to such sculptures should be understood as articulating, through physical presence, the informal speech acts of town criers or the cantimbanchi who recited popular vernacular poems in most cities – material that often also circulated as cheap prints.53Rospocher, 2015, p. 156 and passim; for a valuable and comparable analysis of the bandi that focuses on the 17th century, see San Juan, 2001, pp. 23–56; for the ‘Gobbo’ di Rialto in Venice, see de Vivo, 2007, pp. 136–42. So it is not, perhaps, surprising to find similar but less well-known traditions of speaking sculptures in other centres such as Lodovica (Brescia), Omm de preja (Milan, though he is not documented before the seventeenth century), or the Gobbo di Rialto (Venice; fig. 119).54De Vivo, 2007, pp. 136–41, notes that before the ‘Gobbo’ was produced in 1541 such subversive utterances were posted at other locations. Most of these sculptures have in common that they are positioned at urban nodes, on centrally located intersections, marketplaces or, indeed, close to sites of government – all places in the city that came to be associated with subversive or non-normative behaviours and with gossip that took the form of ephemeral written texts posted for everyday citizens to share and enjoy.

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Description: Gobbo di Rialto by Salò, Pietro di Lorenzo Grazioli da

119. Gobbo di Rialto, Venice. Beside him stands the pietra del Bando, a low column on which the town crier stood to make announcements.

Inscribing authority on the street corner

These locations and their role in public writing subverted and mimicked institutional sites and modes of information exchange. It was these very same locations – street corners, market squares and public buildings – that structured the movements and communications of the city’s town criers (banditori),55Discussed further in Chapter 3. whose pronouncements were made from these nodal points so that they would reach the greatest audience. Recent work on town criers reveals the ways in which officials operated to communicate central decision-making to all parts of the city; a map showing the sites where the banditori made their announcements in Florence reveals a close alignment with local nodes around street corners and parish churches.56For a map with a key, identifying fifty-seven sites, see Milner, 2013, pp. 136–8. With their own distinctive costume, the banditori, mounted on horseback and signalled by a trumpet blast, followed a carefully planned itinerary identified in the documents as i luoghi consueti (‘the usual places’), that radiated from the centre to the city’s edges, and stopped at as many as fifty-seven points, many of them canti (‘corners’), crocicchi (‘minor crossroads’) or the piazzas in front of parish churches.57Ibid., pp. 112–3, 136–8 (map and key), 139–40 (appendix, listing locations).

In Venice, official news and laws were first posted up at Rialto and San Marco, and a designated squat column – the pietra del Bando – was erected, from which the town crier (in Venice, the comandatore) could make his announcements (see fig. 119).58Salzberg, 2014, p. 63; at San Marco the pietra was on the piazzetta, while at Rialto it was on the campo San Giacometto, next to the ‘Gobbo’. After these two principal sites, the comandatore would visit the main locations where people congregated, including the traghetti stations, parish churches, public squares (campi) and local bridges and bakeries; oral announcement by the comandatore was then often followed, in the dual-channel function already described, by the physical posting of a printed document.59De Vivo, 2007, pp. 128–31. A similar sequence was adopted in early modern Rome for the publication of papal bulls, which were read out and temporarily affixed on prominent church doorways as part of the publication process (publicatio in valvis), while new legislation (bandi) was similarly published by being affixed to the wall in various places around the city, for all to see.60Meserve, 2017. On bandi, see San Juan, 2001, pp. 37–45; for a more theorised discussion, see Jütte, 2015, pp. 183–9. Likewise, in the lead-up to Pope Julius II’s reconquest of Bologna and triumphal entry into the city in November 1506,61Weiss, 1965, pp. 179ff. as part of the information war against the leading family, a papal bull of excommunication was issued against Giovanni II Bentivoglio and published widely in the cities of the region; not only was the bull read out, but printed versions were affixed to the doors of churches to ensure that ‘all Christianity’ would know about it.62Rospocher, 2015, p. 117. A similar strategy was adopted as part of the Holy League of 1510, when a papal excommunication issued against King Louis XII of France was proclaimed widely and published on the doors of cathedrals throughout Italy, while cheap printed copies could be bought for a penny in Latin and vernacular on the Rialto bridge in Venice and elsewhere.63Ibid., pp. 138–9; Jütte, 2015, pp. 189–93. Through such practices, town criers and other officials transferred centralised decision-making to all parts of the city through acoustic and visual communication, so that the legislative text was published both by spoken word and as a written document.64For the oral processes of communication of centralised law-giving, see Chapter 3; see also Terry-Fritsch, 2013. For orality and text, see Degl’Innocenti, Richardson and Sbordoni, 2016. More specifically related to political discourse is Rospocher and Salzberg, 2012a. Rimini’s pietra ociosa is the inscribed part of a similar dual-channel process, as the vernacular inscription clearly reminds us that the same message was communicated through the spoken word.

Lapidi proibitorie (‘stone laws’) – simple stone inscriptions that forbade certain types of behaviour – are clearly to be understood in exactly the same way.65Petrucci, 1986, p. 107, describes them thus in relation to 17th-century examples from Rome. The term ‘stone laws’ is used by the DECIMA research group; see, for instance, Rombough, 2019. Numerous such signs – prohibiting, above all, fly-tipping and soliciting for sex, but also such activities as playing ball games – survive on the walls of many Italian cities, the earliest dating from the later sixteenth century; their relatively late date seems to coincide with the growth in the bureaucracy of officials dedicated to the policing of streets and public health.66For plaques against ball games in Florence, see Wood, 2017, pp. 377–9. The predominant use of the vernacular, and the often rather direct tone the lapidi proibitorie adopt, imitate the verbal commands of officials and reinforce them by publishing the fines levied for contravention. Their position likewise addresses particular parts of the city: they can be found, more often than not, on the corners of side streets and narrow alleys, hidden-away spots that, more than others, were likely to be the objects of such legislation, or in the vicinity of sensitive locations, such as nunneries, where legislators were especially keen to prohibit the activity of prostitutes.67See Chapter 3; see also Storey, 2008; Terpstra, 2015b. Such signage has received no systematic study, but is best understood not in isolation from the actions of officials, but rather as the embodied presence of their pronouncements, attached to the most significant areas for their operations. A sixteenth-century example in Florence thunders the regulation enforced by the signori otto, an office that oversaw public decorum, declaring that they ‘proibiscono farrci bruture’ (‘forbid the throwing of litter’) in the vicinity of a small oratory (fig. 120, 121), while another from the following century hedges its bets and forbids games, soliciting and throwing rubbish in the vicinity of the nunnery of San Silvestro (fig. 122).

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Description: Stone law declaring Li signori otto proibiscono farrci bruture by Unknown

120. A 16th-century ‘stone law’ declaring ‘Li signori otto proibiscono farrci bruture’, located in the wall of a small oratory attached to the church of San Michele Visdomini, along via Bufalini, Florence.

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121. A 16th-century ‘stone law’ declaring ‘Li signori otto proibiscono farrci bruture’, shown as set high into the wall of a small oratory attached to the church of San Michele Visdomini, along via Bufalini, Florence.

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122. A ‘stone law’, 1668. forbidding, variously, the playing of games, soliciting and littering, near the convent of San Silvestro, Florence.

A question might arise as to why such signage is uncommon before the sixteenth century, even though archival records confirm that the practices it policed were nonetheless prosecuted in earlier centuries. One answer has to do with the growing bureaucracies that emerged to manage the city streets; the centralisation of these controls perhaps led to a reduction of local neighbourhood self-policing (as documented in the denunzie, discussed in Chapter 3), while at the same time the signage was part of an increasingly complex semantic environment, which saw city walls carry increasing numbers of visual markers, signs, announcements and regulations. A resonant edict of the rector of the University of Rome in 1689 declared that:

no one should dare paint or write with charcoal, pencil, chalk or other instruments on the walls, doors, capitals, windows, columns, cornices, podiums or desks, any images (especially rude), letters, signs, characters, verses, sayings, drawings, emblems or coats of arms, or in any other way vandalise them, even if they write or draw good things.68Petrucci, 1982; Petrucci, 1986, p. 117.

Clearly writing – good or otherwise – could be and was applied to any part of the city and urban furniture. Some of this was sanctioned, but most of it was not. The presence of these markers, like the carefully situated oral pronouncements of the banditori, are perhaps the best evidence we have of the location and clustering of prohibited behaviours around the city. They are another, often overlooked, visual marker of everyday social practices and of how government institutions sought to control them.

Patterns can be discerned from these small-scale inscriptions, so we might use the remaining traces of lapidi proibitorie to propose a map of crime hot-spots in the early modern city, through the sites they identified as particularly requiring a permanent legislative presence.69Terpstra, 2016; for crime analysis of early modern London, see https://www.locatinglondon.org/ (accessed 15 April 2019). Prohibitions on playing ball in Florence were carefully marked up on specific city streets, while the inscribed ‘stone laws’ that prohibited prostitutes from areas of sixteenth-century Florence have been shown to be directly correlated with the locations of nunneries, so that the presence of the former would not disturb the enclosed lives of the latter.70Terpstra, 2015b; Terpstra, 2016; Wood, 2017, pp. 376–8. Similarly, in Siena, a set of stone inscriptions marks the edges of via di San Pietro in Castelvecchio, beyond which prostitutes were not allowed to live or practise their profession (fig. 123). The inscriptions controlled a series of parallel streets that were densely populated with religious foundations, including the large Franciscan nunnery of Santa Margherita in Castlevecchio, an institution favoured by a number of the city’s leading families, which became cloistered only in 1602.71Buccianti, 1995; Reardon, 2001, pp. 10, 129. As in Florence, the inscriptions clearly had the function of separating zones in the city through the visible placement of legislative measures that marked the physical boundaries being protected.

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123. A ‘stone law’, 1689, prohibiting the residence of prostitutes and women of ‘bad repute’ in the via delle Murella (now via Pendola), Siena.

Furthermore, inscriptions and other markers were frequently used as a means of communicating the collective, distributed and participatory nature of urban expansion and renewal. A well-crafted inscription of 1512 in Rome (see fig. 32) marked the recently remodelled intersection of via dei Banchi adjacent to the Zecca (the papal mint) by recording the actions of the maestri di strada, Domenico Massimo and Girolamo Pichi, and celebrating Pope Julius II’s interventions ‘pro maiestate imperii ornavit’. A comparable but especially effective example survives in the form of a series of inscriptions from the last quarter of the fifteenth century onwards in Mantua. The inscribing of buildings, mostly on their most prominent corner, with a text that mentions the Gonzaga duke seems to have become a local practice, though no enabling legislation or edict has been traced to document its adoption; some of these buildings are marked ‘aedes a fundamenta erexit’ (‘building constructed from the foundations’ – that is, ex novo), and the inscriptions served to mark the ruling family’s participation in the renewal and expansion of the small city. One of the earliest and finest examples is that on a candlestick pilaster on the corner of the Palazzo Arrivabene (see fig. 15); dated 1481, it refers to the fourth year of Marquis Federico, and declares that the palace was built anew, ‘So that our descendants will know this’ (Noverit posteritas).72For a partial catalogue, with no spatial analysis, see Signorini, 2010, pp. 46–7 (entry 21) for Arrivabene. Five years earlier, the court artist Andrea Mantegna had built his house from the foundations, ‘On a site given to him as a gift by the Lord Lodovico, most excellent prince . . . 15 November [1476]’, as the street-level corner inscription notes (see fig. 13).73Ibid., p. 93. More unusual is the inscription by a bridge at San Francesco sul Rio, which refers to Francesco Gonzaga as ‘altero Camillo’ – rather obscurely referencing the ancient story of Camillus, who entered Rome without using a bridge – for restoring the bridge for the benefit of the humanist scholar Battista Fiera who lived near it (1496).74Ibid., p. 57 (entry 30). Numerous similar inscriptions and short commemorative panels continued to be added throughout the city during the subsequent century and a half, and a visitor to the city today can still note the predominance of stone corner markers on even quite simple buildings (fig. 124). Viewed on a map, they reveal the gradual expansion of the city, as the urbanised area moved south from the piazza Sordello, connecting up the Gonzaga court precinct to the southern periphery bounded by the Rio canal (see fig. 17); in the light of the ruling family’s bid to expand their capital, the land donation to Mantegna formed part of a policy, to which the Gonzaga foundation of the church and palazzo of San Sebastiano also contributed.75For urban expansion, see Chapters 1 and 4.

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Description: Inscription and corner marker on the house of Bartolomeo Panzera (via Filippo...

124. Inscription, dated 1534, and corner marker on the house of Bartolomeo Panzera (via Filippo Corridoni), Mantua.

What other patterns might be discerned? Again, this is a subject that has received very little attention, though there is plentiful evidence throughout Italy, and especially in the larger centres, of inscriptions used to articulate non-elite identities. Among these, the marker stones of confraternity or guild associations are especially interesting; examples from the so-called potenze of Florence offer a counter-mapping to administrative boundaries, tracing out what David Rosenthal has described as ‘carnival kingdoms’, which were active only at particular times of the year, but whose geographic edges do not necessarily coincide with parish or tax wards (fig. 128).76See Rosenthal, 2015a. Much the same can be said for the operation of the Sienese contrade, as they emerged in their more clearly spatially determined form through the sixteenth century.77Savelli, 2008, pp. 59–100. Inevitably, in Florence as in Siena, it was the street-corner contact points between neighbouring factions that tended to be articulated through visual and textual signs, which would be reinforced at spoken, sung and shouted ritual encounters.78For game culture in Florence, see Wood, 2017; Heywood, 1904, remains a fundamental reference for comparative reading of civic festivals and rituals. In Venice, to an extent, the function of the street corner as a hot-spot in neighbourhood rivalries was instead played out around bridges; here, both the ritualised battle – the ‘war of fists’ – and more everyday give and take took place at the central nodes of non-elite pedestrian movement around the city.79Davis, 1994; see also Judde de Larivière, 2018. Here, then, though they are only sporadic, surviving inscriptions provide a tantalising glimpse of the complex, overlaid and spatially contested boundaries that applied to non-elite urban neighbourhoods every bit as much as they did to the grander clan precincts delimited by coats of arms and all’antica inscriptions.

As this survey has proved, markers, inscriptions and ‘writings on walls’ were not a uniquely elite practice, nor were they always an expression of centralised authority or power. While erudite all’antica inscriptions have tended to dominate scholarly attention, there is a host of other evidence that can be interpreted to show the ways in which everyday urban life was played out in the streets, as politics, ritual and conflict left their physical marks on the city’s walls. Even textual inscriptions do not exist in a vacuum: rather, in most cases, we should understand these writings as embodied and material expressions of orality, or as part of complex and distributed communication networks. Only by interrogating these physical traces of the city’s past through the wider social practices assembled around them is it possible to understand how meanings adhered to nodal sites in the city; the street corners of the early modern city thus become alive again with gossip, rivalry and dissent. Moreover, such an approach offers a worthwhile key to unlocking the meanings of the visual culture assembled around street corners. Adopting a similar approach, we shall now examine comparable interactions, this time of a devotional nature, that occurred at myriad street shrines in cities throughout Italy.

Street shrines and neighbourhood devotion

In 1481 an unusual case was brought for arbitration to the elected rulers of Venice, the signori; it involved two families who were competing for the ownership of an unremarkable street shrine which had recently begun to perform a series of miracles. As reported in the personal accounts of Francesco Amadi, in 1408 his family had commissioned a painting of the Virgin Mary, known as the Madonna degli Amadi, which was ‘placed in our alley, in our Venetian manner’.80Numerous scholars have discussed this example, documented through the unusual diary of Francesco Amadi (Civico Museo Correr, Venice, Ms. Gradenigo 56, pp. 1–7, 37): Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 617–68; Grubb, 2000, pp. 130–31; Morse, 2006, pp. 345–6. It was more than seventy years before this unexceptional expression of local devotion began to change the sacred and physical topography of its neighbourhood. On the night of 23 August 1480, a woman stopped to pray in front of the image, as was her daily habit, and was violently attacked by her brother-in-law Francesco Bendi as she prayed. There had been some legal dispute between the two, and Bendi seems to have sought to settle the score by repeatedly knifing his sister-in-law before leaving her for dead; she instead stood up unharmed, and credited her survival to the intercession of the Virgin, to whom she brought her bloodied and tattered clothes as an ex voto the following day.81Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, vol. 1, p. 620. Following the woman’s miraculous escape, the street shrine became the focus of considerable devotional attention, with people coming from all around the city to seek the Virgin’s intervention, and many claiming beneficial outcomes, so that the image soon came to be known as the Madonna dei Miracoli. The peak of the image’s power can be traced to the eighteen months following the first documented miracle (forty-four in the last months of 1480, seventy-one in 1481, thirty-eight in 1482), and by 1483 the number of reported miracles at the site had significantly fallen off.82Ibid., vol. 1, p. 624, citing figures from miracle accounts published in printed chronicles.

As the humble and commonplace street shrine rapidly achieved a reputation for its miracle-working powers, the families who lived in the properties immediately adjoining what was becoming a city-wide phenomenon (drawing the faithful to the neighbourhood of Santa Marina from all over Venice) sought to regulate access to the image. The Amadi family memorie report their attempts to remove the image from the external wall facing onto the street to the private courtyard of their house, where they could honour it with a temporary altar adorned with linen and greenery.83For the complex history of the late-15th-century memorie compiled by Angelo Amadi, see ibid. In these plans they were fiercely opposed by their neighbours the Barozzi, who protested at the removal of image and threatened in turn to remove the image to their family chapel in the nearby church of Santa Maria in Formosa.84Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 632–7; Grubb, 2000, pp. 130–31; Morse, 2006, p. 346. The dispute, for which arbitration was sought from Venice’s ruling council, turned on the fact that the Amadi had been the original patrons of the modest image, though it was actually affixed to a wall belonging to their neighbours the Barozzi. As is well known, the ultimate result of the dispute was the construction of a purpose-built shrine to honour the image and facilitate devotion to it, the exquisite church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, of which the Amadi were primary patrons.85For Amadi patronage, see Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, vol. 1, p. 634.

While it is easy to see that there may have been self-interest on the part of the rival families to highlight their primary association with the devotional image, the case of the Madonna degli Amadi provides a valuable illustration of the place of non-miraculous devotional images in the streetscapes of Italian cities in this period. Once the image acquired its miraculous powers, both temporary and permanent measures were put in place to remove it from the street – first by relocating it to a private courtyard, where access to it could be regulated and it might be better honoured, and then to a formal religious institution. But its transformation to cult image also enables us to see with far greater clarity the minutiae of its original placement, which Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan was able to reassemble from scattered references in the family memorie account.86Ibid., vol. 1, p. 632. From these we learn that, while the Barozzi properties faced onto the principal street, the houses of the Amadi were distributed around a courtyard, set back from the main street and linked to it by a private alley (calle). Thus, when Francesco Amadi had commissioned the devotional image in 1408, he had it placed on the corner of the Amadi alley and the main street, in a position where it could be ‘honoured by everyone [. . .] in sight of all passers-by’, who would say prayers there; but as his own family home had no street front, the painting was attached to property that actually belonged to his neighbours.87Chechia, 1742, p. 4, cited in Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, vol. 1, p. 630. Until the events of 1480 transpired, the Madonna degli Amadi was little different from any of the many street shrines in Venice, and although it was associated with the Amadi, who owned a number of the shops along their calle, its day-to-day maintenance appears to have been taken care of by a tenant called Marco Rasti, who kept a lamp burning and provided for flowers.88Chechia, 1742, pp. 4–5.

In these respects, the Madonna degli Amadi – later dei Miracoli – was wholly typical of a myriad shrines that were distributed throughout most pre-modern cities, and still survive in considerable numbers in Italy. In Venice it has been suggested that the incidence of such shrines almost certainly pre-dated twelfth-century legislation requiring that lamps (cesendéli) be kept alight at night beside bridges, covered alleys and narrow street corners – that is, the same locations that were widely chosen for street shrines.89Niero, 1972, pp. 229–90; p. 247 cites legislation by Doge Domenico Michiel (1128) without supporting documentation. The same connection between popular devotion and a rudimentary form of lighting provision in the darkest corners of the city was remarked upon by the German Dominican pilgrim Felix Fabri, who reported on the many street shrines in Venice in his account of his travels.90Ibid., p. 248, citing Fabri, 1483. For similar observations for Florence, see Spencer Chatfield, 1974, pp. 38–40, which reports that Pietro Leopoldo de’ Medici’s plans of 1783 for street lighting were opposed on the grounds that tabernacles did the job already, with specific reference to seventy-eight large tabernacles; see also Bargellini, 1971, pp. 18–19. As with the Amadi example, maintenance of these street shrines was somewhat informal and fell to local residents, or might be coordinated by parish clergy; however, when, in 1450, the Council of Ten promoted the erection of new capitelli (as street shrines were often called in Venice), they also established new rules whereby local patrician families would be charged with the oversight of the local street shrines in their district, or sestriere.91Niero, 1972, p. 248.

Street shrines in Venice took various forms: they might be sculpted in low relief, or take the more inexpensive but perishable form of painted panels or frescoes mounted in small tabernacle structures. They were usually positioned at locations raised above eye-level, above shop openings or doorways, or in aedicules that straddled narrow alleys, and still more often on the corners of buildings, from where the gaze of the sacred image might cover a wider segment of urban space.92For the best analysis of street shrines, see Muir, 1987; see also Muir and Weissman, 1989. Some were located by the traghetti stops, where people waited for the ferries that criss-crossed the wider canals.93Romano, 1994, pp. 369–70. Their numbers across the city were prodigious; one count identified 406 such street-shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary alone, and well over a thousand if all depictions of other members of the Holy Family, angels and saints were included.94Niero, 1972, pp. 264–75 (406 images of the Virgin, 397 of angels), without chronological distinction; Muir, 1987, p. 28. As such, they indisputably formed a key element in the visual culture of pre-modern Venice, constituting what can be described as a capillary or pervasive network of the sacred, which spread through the entire city. This implicated everyone in what Edward Muir termed a ‘procession of the everyday’, as people went about their business interacting with, and under the watchful gaze of, these many religious images.95Muir, 1987, p. 28.

When Francesco Amadi described the devotional shrine at the corner of the alley leading to his family’s properties as being ‘al modo nostro Venetiano’ (‘in our Venetian manner’), he was stating no more than a fact, though the exceptional circumstances associated with his image have resulted in our knowing more about it than the majority of these ubiquitous sites of popular piety. In fact, the ‘modo nostro’ of the Venetians differed little from that of other cities, as we shall see; while some of these shrines (like that of the Amadi) were family sponsored, far more were locally managed by a confraternity, guild, parish or neighbourhood, and only a few – at more strategic or monumental sites – were sponsored by central government institutions. In the majority of cases we know very little about the street shrines of Venice, as indeed is the case for most other Italian cities; in some instances, what little we do know is extrapolated from evidence internal to the objects themselves, or more occasionally from chance references in documentary evidence. Thus, for example, a sculpted marble relief of the Madonna della Misericordia, with the arms of the Scuola Grande della Carità emblazoned on her chest, was erected in rio Santa Caterina, on one of the boundary walls of a property block that had been redeveloped as rental housing, the profits from which were destined for poor relief.96Fortini Brown, 2004, pp. 200–03. In addition to the figures of members of the scuola kneeling beneath the protective cloak of the Madonna, the relief includes the large coat of arms of Tomaso Cavazza and an explanatory inscription: ‘It was erected from the proceeds of the sale of the house of Tomaso Cavazza, which he had left to the governors of the Scuola della Carità so that the profit would long be fruitful for the care of the poor.’ Thus, we can say that this marble relief performed multiple functions in shaping the local devotional landscape, by representing the interests of the scuola as much as those of the Cavazza, whose testamentary bequest had enabled the investment, while also expressing their shared pious dedication to improving the lot of the city’s poor.

Usually street shrines remained more or less as they were originally intended, though there are exceptions – as, for example, is the case for the Madonna della Misericordia, which topped the narrow entrance to the calle del Paradiso (near Santa Maria in Formosa).97Ibid., pp. 13–15. Here, the Virgin is shown flanked by the kneeling figures of Pellegrina Foscari and Alvise Mocenigo in recognition of the dowry Pellegrina had brought to her marriage in 1491 in the shape of twenty-six low-rent row-houses along that same narrow street. What is fascinating in this instance is the way the original fourteenth-century relief of the Madonna della Misericordia was ‘edited’ to the new circumstances of the ownership of the real estate in the area by the addition of a second similar image on the reverse, which marked its transfer from one family to another. The sculpted relief straddled the access to the narrow street, ensuring that the prayers said at the protective image of the Madonna of Mercy by residents of the rental properties would also be directed to their patron–landlords; so, with the change in ownership of the property block, the devotional functions of the image were modified. Furthermore, the relief panel made the most of its location, framed on one side by the narrow calle and on the other by access to it across the bridge leading to the main neighbourhood church and public space around Santa Maria Formosa.

It is clear that street shrines operated in similar ways in most other cities, and were, indeed, distributed in a similarly pervasive manner. Focusing on Florence and concentrating predominantly on religious images that were credited with miraculous power, Megan Holmes has recently shown how devotional images created a sacred web, to form what she has described as a ‘topography of the sacred’.98Holmes, 2013, ch. 3. Mapping the location of miraculous images reveals a relatively even distribution across the city, and shows that these powerful sites of veneration were almost all enclosed within churches.99Ibid., pp. 64–5 (map), 61–103. As we have seen from the example of the Madonna degli Amadi, where particular miraculous events transpired, a local image might be transformed into one of city-wide or national significance, and this change of status was often marked by the erection of monumental architecture to honour and control access to the image. Such was the case in Florence, where many of the most venerated images began life outdoors – as in the most famous example, the Madonna of Orsanmichele – and were moved to, or simply enclosed within, churches and oratories as their reputation grew.100For Orsanmichele, see ibid., pp. 69–74. So then, the Madonna della Palla, a now lost fifteenth-century terracotta low relief, which was originally displayed in a street close to the Annalena nunnery in Oltrarno, was relocated to that nunnery after the Madonna was said to have caught a ball that a boy had thrown at the Christ Child.101Ibid., p. 92. A similar foundation legend explains the construction of an oratory on the east side of the Santa Maria Novella complex, to protect the Madonna della Pura; here, in 1472, one of a group of boys fighting with sticks was called by the Virgin to clear her image of dust and cobwebs, giving rise to intense popular veneration of the fourteenth-century image.102Ibid., p. 84. A similar miracle formed the origin narrative of the Madonna dell’Arco near Naples, discussed in Jacobs, 2013, pp. 50–52.

The process by which street shrines were ascribed miraculous powers marked the city in significant ways, as space needed to be found to erect shrines or entire new churches. When these miraculous images were located in marginal or suburban locations, it was easier to construct large centrally planned pilgrimage churches, such as Santa Maria del Calcinaio at Cortona, or Santa Maria delle Carceri at Prato, to name just two examples of a widespread phenomenon of new church building from the late fifteenth century to the early sixteenth.103Davies, 1992; Davies, 1993; Davies, 1995. On other occasions, considerable modifications to the city fabric might be required; for example, when miracles were reported at the street-shrine Madonna originally painted on the inside wall of one Siena’s western gates, it became the focus of a new centrally planned church around the miraculous image of the Madonna di Fontegiusta (1479).104Mussolin, 2010, pp. 50–56; Nevola, 2007, pp. 138–9. Similarly, in 1470 a new church was consecrated at the foot of the Tarpeian Rock in Rome, a site of capital punishment through the early modern period, after a fourteenth-century image of the Virgin Mary – the Madonna della Consolazione – interceded on behalf of a wrongly convicted man, saving him from hanging when the hangman’s rope failed.105Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 226. For capital punishment rituals, see Chapter 3. Veneration of the Madonna increased and Antoniazzo Romano was commissioned to repaint the image, which was moved to an altar in the new church.

While miraculous images have tended to leave a heavier trace on the built fabric of cities through the devotional narratives attached to them and the monumental architecture with which they were frequently later adorned, the majority of street shrines remained local expressions of piety. A recent study of miraculous images in Liguria has documented intensely localised devotional practices throughout the region, and reports as many as 890 street shrines in Genoa alone, which were often adorned with copies of more important miraculous images from the area.106Ibid., p. 112 (figure relates to the 19th century). A similar census of edicole in Rome recorded 1,100, while estimates for Florence in the sixteenth century suggest simply that there were many hundreds.107Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 282 n. 12, citing evidence from an 1853 catalogue, reported in Cardelli, 1990, pp. 176–90. For Florence, see Strocchia, 2006, p. 74. Ferdinando Leopoldo del Migliore recorded in his seventeenth-century history of Florence that: ‘it is an ancient custom in Florence [. . .] to place in certain tabernacles [. . .] almost on every street corner or crossroad, the image of Christ, of the Virgin Mary or some other patron saint, protector of the house or patron who had it painted there.’108Del Migliore, 1684, p. 391. It was the ubiquitous presence of these humble yet public devotional images that led Walter Benjamin to comment of their presence in Naples: ‘within the tenement blocks, it [the city] seems held together at the corners, as if by iron clamps, by the murals of the Madonna.’109Benjamin, 1997, p. 170, echoed in Garnett and Rosser, 2013, pp. 168, 289 n. 27. Such ubiquity, of course, ensured that the presence of the divine was visible everywhere, throughout the city, giving thus a material or embodied presence to the holy in the everyday spaces of urban life.110For sacred presence in urban space, see Muir and Weissman, 1989, p. 95; Trexler, 1972. It is, perhaps, unsurprising to find that the best-known of these images were credited with miraculous powers, but it is nonetheless equally evident that the majority were not, and remained largely the focus of almost exclusively localised devotion.

The sort of daily interactions that such street shrines elicited was captured by the Franciscan preacher San Bernardino of Siena, who makes a passing reference to the daily encounters with the divine that they might facilitate: ‘you should know that when you salute the Virgin Mary she will immediately respond. Don’t think that she’s anything like those rough peasant women, of whom there are so many: far from it, she’s always pleasant.’111Cited in Bargellini, 1971, p. 6. His comments provide a glimpse of the ways in which devotional gestures – a nod of the head, a short prayer, or a break in step – marked movement about the city, with a continuous exchange between citizens on the street and the holy images that occupied those same spaces. As Muir suggested of the ‘Virgin on the street corner’, these images dotted around the city ‘offered citizens an immediate and personal intimacy with the saints’, as they went about their daily business.112Muir, 1987, p. 28. Locally appointed guardians of street shrines – sometimes known as madonnare – kept them clean and furnished with flowers, and maintained the devotional lamps or candles that were kept alight, while confraternities and other groups managed sung litanies that might be performed in these open-air street-side settings.113Garnett and Rosser, 2013, pp. 115–16, and p. 168 for specifically appointed caretakers funded by a Genoese noblewoman, Virginia Bracelli Centurione, during the mid-17th century.

No systematic comparative study has been made of street shrines in early modern Italian cities, the ubiquitous nature of which certainly speaks of the universal and rooted character of popular beliefs. Within the city, street shrines are a truly pervasive phenomenon, and their locations ranged widely, as did the nature of their patronage. Those instituted and managed by government offices – often the grandest – ranged from huge devotional frescoes painted over city gates to smaller images that frequently adorned the offices of city-gate tax officials or stood at sites of public punishment.114For city gates, see Gardner, 1987; Israels, 2008. For lesser images such as the gabellotto del Dazio in Siena, see also Bargagli Petrucci, 1903, p. 109. The survival of works such as Correggio’s Madonna della Scala (fig. 125), originally situated by the eastern Porta San Michele in Parma, not only provides evidence of the sort of location where such representations were common, but is also a reminder that their survival has tended to be dictated by the artistic significance of individual works.115Ekserdjian, 1997, pp. 142–4; as a result of changes to the city defences, the fresco was later enclosed in an oratory, and in the 19th century was moved to the museum. Originally positioned on the wall on the city side of the gate, and perhaps once including Hilary (another of the city’s patron saints), Correggio’s fresco of the Madonna and Child addressed citizens, pilgrims and other travellers as they exited the city along the via Emilia. Gates – particularly those coinciding with the principal roads that connected cities together – were naturally favoured sites for the display of images that protected travellers, while also providing the apotropaic support of patron saints for the city itself.116Gardner, 1987, pp. 208ff.

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Description: Madonna della Scala by Correggio

125. Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio, Madonna della Scala, 1523–4, fresco, originally beside the Porta San Michele, Parma, now in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma.

Significantly, within the city, most street shrines were erected on visible street corners. As was noted above for Venice, the majority were managed locally – by a confraternity, guild, local community, neighbourhood, or family – as opposed to being sponsored by central government institutions. Although del Migliore noted that such paintings appeared on ‘almost on every street corner’ of Florence, it is not always simple to reassemble their history; unless they were believed to have miraculous qualities, or were painted by well-known artists, they tend to be poorly researched and documented.117Paolini, 2004, p. 60. So, for example, Vasari’s comments on a fresco by Sodoma, painted for the shoemakers of Siena, are indicative: ‘on the corner near the Piazza de’ Tolomei he painted in fresco, for the Guild of Shoemakers, a Madonna with the Child in her arms, St John, St Francis, San Rocco, and San Crispino, the patron saint of the men of that guild, who has a shoe in his hand’.118Vasari, 1966– , vol. 5, p. 386. Vasari’s remarks reveal a successful combination of elements coming together in the work, which was placed at a prominent site and depicted the goods that the patrons produced, as well as their patron saint, thus serving a double function of self-promotion and devotion. In fact, guild commissions of this sort were not uncommon: in 1423, the notaries’ guild of Siena commissioned the prestigious artist Gentile da Fabriano to paint them a fresco of the Madonna and Child for the corner of the piazza del Campo and via del Casato, where their offices were.119Fattorini, 2010. The image (which is now lost) came to be known as the Madonna dei Banchetti, on account of the outdoor desks where the notaries did their business, and in 1516 an unusual hanging loggia was erected at the site to protect the painting and the notaries’ meeting space on the street corner.120For the loggia by Guerrino da Sansepolcro, see ibid., p. 159.

In Florence, large numbers of tabernacoli survive, many of them on street corners. So, for example, the Madonna della Tromba was originally in the heart of the city’s commercial area on the corner of via di Calimala and vicolo delle Trombe, near Orsanmichele, an intersection where the town criers (the trombetti – so named for the trumpet blast that preceded their proclamations) had their offices. Although the original setting was altered as part of the nineteenth-century reordering of the Mercato Vecchio precinct, the sizeable tabernacle, which was decorated with a Madonna in Majesty by Jacopo del Casentino, underlined both the presence of the town criers and signalled the significance of street corners, favoured sites for their public announcements, in their activities.121Bargellini, 1971, fig. V; Milner, 2013. The nearby Orsanmichele could likewise be said to have offered a monumental expression of the street-corner shrine, through the prominent, guild-sponsored niches facing each of the streets that surround its free-standing structure. Not all guild groups were assured a space on the exterior of Orsanmichele; so (for example) the lowly wool-beaters (the battilani) erected a tabernacle decorated with the Madonna and Child, flanked by Sts John the Evangelist and John the Baptist, well outside the centre on the corner of via Santa Reparata and via delle Ruote, near an oratory where they gathered.122Ermini and Sestini, 2009, pp. 165–8: Petrucci, 1998, p. 124 n. 17. Similarly, the city’s community of German wool-weavers gave a visual articulation to their presence in the city by commissioning the Biliemme tabernacle (fig. 126), a grand polychrome low relief of the Madonna and Child flanked with saints, produced by the della Robbia workshop and installed over a public water fountain (thus explaining its other name, Madonna delle fonticine, which refers to its multiple water spouts).123Burke, 2007, pp. 87–9; Rosenthal, 2006, pp. 165–8. The Biliemme tabernacle stands to the west of San Lorenzo on what was at the time variously known as via Tedesca or via Santa Caterina (now via Nazionale), where many of the migrant German weavers lived; it was also prominently visible from other streets converging on the site, including via Ariento, where the weavers gathered at the Cella di Ciardo tavern.

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Description: Biliemme Tabernacle (or Madonna delle fonticine) by Robbia, Giovanni della

126. Giovanni della Robbia (attrib.), Biliemme tabernacle (or Madonna delle fonticine), 1522, glazed terracotta, via Tedesca or via Santa Caterina (now via Nazionale), Florence.

Street corners were favourable locations for the display of images for the simple reason that they could be viewed from multiple directions, but they were also potentially places of conflict or contestation, as ‘edges’ often marked the property boundaries between rival families or other community groups. Images and symbols displayed on corners might therefore gain further significance as turf-markers, as has been suggested for the Città Rossa symbols (fig. 128) and the statue of Sant’Ambrogio on the corners of the piazza of the same name in Florence (fig. 127).124Rosenthal, 2015a. Here, local devotion and neighbourhood loyalties overlapped, giving the street corner a multi-faceted function in defining the edges of the area and marking its nodes of social encounter (see the final section of this chapter).

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Description: Città Rossa symbols (on the corner of the church) and a statue of St Ambrose...

127. Città Rossa symbols (on the corner of the church) and a statue of St Ambrose (on the adjacent building), piazza Sant’Ambrogio, Florence.

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Description: Città Rossa symbol on the corner of the church of Sant' Ambrogio, detail by...

128. Detail of Città Rossa symbol on the corner of the church of Sant’Ambrogio, Florence.

A short distance from the same piazza, along via dei Pilastri at the intersection with borgo Pinti, the Monteloro tabernacle provides another interesting example of the way in which street corners could become contested sites of devotion (fig. 129). Here, a fourteenth-century fresco of the Virgin attributed to Puccio di Simone is framed in a later all’antica-style pietra serena frame, of uncertain date.125Paolozzi Strozzi, 1991, suggests the stonework is late 15th century. The altar base and the capitals of the tabernacle carry a distinctive device of hills topped by a cross (Monti d’Oro) – possibly a reference to the arms associated with of one of the nearby convents, Santa Maria Maddalena (the Cestello) or Santa Maria di Candeli, but specific to the confraternity that managed the street shrine and may also have met in those churches.126The coat of arms that provides the source for the tabernacle’s unusual name as ‘Monti d’Oro’ was rendered ‘Monteloro’; ibid. For discussion of a confraternity of Santissima Annunziata at Monteloro and Santa Maria Assunta a Monteloro connected to the site from 1320, see Henderson, 1994, pp. 108–11. Certainly, these convents exerted some sway over the neighbourhood, and, in fact, during the fifteenth century the nuns of Santa Maria di Candeli had a hand in closing down a tavern that operated on the crossroads, marking their corner of the street with a short inscription proclaiming ‘Timor Domini’ in 1473.127L’Illustratore fiorentino, 1835, vol. 1, p. 105 (with references to Biblioteca Ricciardiana, Florence, Ms. Riccardiano 2427). Tussles continued well into the sixteenth century regarding the tavern; a law of 1488 establishing minimum distances between taverns and convents mentioned Monteloro, but was evidently not effective in the long term, as a tavern called the Fiasco d’Oro (‘Golden Flask’) was recorded close to Monteloro in the census of commercial properties of 1561.128For the ban on taverns, see ASF, Provvisioni, 180, fols 21v–23v (May 1488); for the Fiasco d’Oro listing, see ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), fol. 103v. Indeed, the tension between the religious and profane clustering of activities around the street corner continued well into the seventeenth century, when a stone plaque affixed by the otto di guardia repeated a law of 1461 that had forbidden prostitutes from living or working within 100 braccia of the nunnery walls.129The extant inscription (dated 22 October 1667) on the corner of via Alfani and via dei Pilastri records the 1461 ban on prostitutes.

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Description: Monteloro Tabernacle by Puccio di Simone

129. Puccio di Simone, Monteloro tabernacle, 14th century (with later stone frame), at the corner of borgo Pinti and via dei Pilastri, Florence. The many stone markers on the adjacent corner document conflict around this nodal site.

What emerges here is the degree to which activities of various sorts clustered around street corners. Evidently such nodal points in neighbourhoods on the working-class periphery of the city might serve as magnets for sociability around taverns, and in turn also drew prostitutes to the same clientele; prostitutes were often described as femmine meretrici cantoniere, clearly defining their trade in relation to the street corners (cantoni) where they solicited.130For example, ASF, Ufficiali dell’ onestà, 1, fol. 22r (8 April 1511); see also Chapter 3. To this day, shops cluster at the Monteloro crossroads, a pharmacy replacing the site occupied by a baker in the sixteenth century, and the original visual markers still showing how control of urban space was staked out by the tabernacle and other inscribed stone signs.131For the baker, see ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), fol. 104; for Monteloro as a potenza boundary, see Rosenthal, 2015a, pp. 18–20. There is, furthermore, some documentary evidence of the lay religious confraternity dedicated to worshipping at Monteloro from at least 1471, and a later rubric in their statutes stated in 1578:

they are obliged, above all, to keep the tabernacle clean, and every first Sunday of the month and on all the feast days of the Virgin Mary to prepare its altar, place a mantle on the Virgin and a crown on her head, and keep good care that no one should deface or dishonour the said place.132Paolozzi Strozzi, 1991, citing ASF, Capitoli delle compagnie soppresse, 811, fols 1–2 (1471 rights), fols 11–12 (1578 maintenance).

Though brief, the rubric offers an unusual glimpse into the localised ritual and devotional practices that revolved around the street shrine: the day-to-day maintenance and honouring of the tabernacle, but also the ways in which the image was adorned with accessories at regular intervals. The Monteloro tabernacle is only one of hundreds of such locally managed devotional sites in Florence, and although it has left only a slight documentary trace it conforms to the observations, derived largely from later evidence, made for Liguria and discussed above.133For madonnare who looked after street shrines, see Garnett and Rosser, 2013, pp. 114–15. For jewels and other accessories that adorned holy images, see ibid., pp. 124–8. Although it may not be possible to extrapolate from this single example the idea that all shrines were the object of structured collective local devotion, it nonetheless helpfully illustrates their far greater significant in the everyday life of early modern streets than is usually suggested.

Topography, authority and the sacred gaze

The degree to which these neighbourhood sites were considered important expressions of the pervasive presence of the sacred in the public spaces of the city is further reinforced by instances of blasphemy perpetrated against street shrines, which was punished in a variety of ways. As we saw in Chapter 3, Antonio Rinaldeschi’s desecration of a street shrine near Santa Maria degli Alberighi in 1501 was ultimately punished by Florence’s city authorities in his very public hanging from a window of the Bargello; Antonio’s fate was more severe than was common, perhaps as a result of the Savonarolan populist religious fervour that still influenced the city.134Connell and Constable, 1998, p. 79, note the rise c. 1500 of the prosecution of sodomy as documented by Rocke, 1996, p. 224. For examples of blasphemy punished by fines or jail sentences, see Chapter 2. A later, similar, example of a gambler insulting the Madonna at Porta dei Borghi in Lucca (March 1588) resulted in the image itself working its own punishment, as the would-be blasphemer’s arm was broken; this event gave rise to mass popular devotion for the Virgin’s miraculous intervention, which resulted in the removal of the image to the city hall and then to the church of San Pietro.135Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 64. The miraculous agency of the Virgin again intervened on 2 July 1552, when an occupying Spanish soldier aimed his arquebus at a glazed low-relief terracotta sculpture of the Madonna installed on the front of a house in a simple tabernacle in the working-class district of Provenzano in Siena.136For legends, see Bandini Piccolomini, 1895, pp. 45–60; see also Alessi, 2008; Falassi, 2008, p. 124. One version of the story recounted here suggests that the devotional sculpture was in the care of a former prostitute (the area saw a concentration of taverns and prostitutes), who had given up her profession to tend the image. The arquebus backfired, the soldier was killed and the Madonna was saved, as the sculpture sustained only some damage to the lower part, below the Virgin’s shoulders. These events were interpreted as miraculous, and the site became a focus for popular devotion, marked by a new church built to house the image at the end of the sixteenth century; thus, an act of sacrilege laid the foundations for the city’s second most venerated religious feast, dedicated to the image of Santa Maria di Provenzano.

Perhaps the best-known of all the examples of street-shrine Madonna images considered by contemporaries to have been subjected to an act of blasphemy is the fresco of the Virgin and Child with saints that originally adorned the house of the Jewish banker Daniele da Norsa in Mantua.137For a thorough study, which also highlights the anti-Semitism of the case, see Katz, 2000, on which these brief comments rely. When Daniele bought the house on borgo San Simone in 1493, he was granted permission by the vicar of the Bishop of Mantua to whitewash the fresco. In spite of the permit, erasing the fresco was considered by many to be an act of sacrilege, and, following various attacks on his property by the local populace, Daniele sought the support of the Marquis Francesco II Gonzaga with a petition dated 29 May 1495. While Isabella d’Este offered Daniele her protection, Francesco wrote from the battlefield at Fornovo (where he was commanding the Venetian army against the French forces of Charles VIII) to repeal his wife’s decision; he demanded first that Daniele have the fresco replaced with one ‘more beautiful and ornate’, and subsequently commanded that he should pay 110 florins for Andrea Mantegna’s monumental Madonna della Vittoria altarpiece (now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris).138Ibid., p. 475 and nn. 1–5. Daniele was later required by the marquis to forfeit his property, which was razed to make way for a commemorative chapel where Mantegna’s altarpiece was installed (fig. 130); only at this point, in August 1497, was Daniele cleared of the charge of having profaned a religious image.139Ibid., p. 483 and n. 37. Another painting was commissioned, showing Daniele and his family in a submissive position beneath the Virgin’s throne (now in the church of Sant’Andrea, Mantua); ibid., pp. 483–5.

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Description: Chapel of the Madonna della Vittoria by Ghisolfi, Bernardino

130. Chapel of the Madonna della Vittoria, Mantua, 1497.

It is evident that Daniele da Norsa was the victim of anti-Semitic persecution, both by the local citizens of Mantua and by the marquis, who sought to make the most of the situation to underwrite an expensive act of religious patronage that celebrated his military prowess. However, it is also significant that the extant chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria stands on a crossroads, the very same site previously occupied by Daniele’s house and the whitewashed fresco. There can be little doubt, therefore, that the visibility of the site and the public nature of the fresco itself served to highlight the changes made by Daniele to his home, and, indeed, to showcase both his punishment and the new church that resulted from it. That the site was central to the case is underlined by Francesco Gonzaga’s letter demanding funding for Mantegna’s altarpiece; he threatens that, if the money is not forthcoming in three days, ‘[Daniele] will be hanged in front of his house, on the very spot where the aforementioned image of the glorious Virgin was painted’.140Ibid., p. 493 n. 34.

Although Daniele da Norsa faced an extraordinary series of punishments for erasing the fresco of the Virgin and Child that adorned the house he acquired in Mantua, the image itself was unexceptional and the same subject graced the façades or corners of many houses and palaces throughout Italy. While, as we have seen, a number of street shrines were commissioned to serve as the focus of local confraternity or guild devotion, the majority were almost certainly the product of family patronage. The history of these commissions is often obscure, and inevitably those that have received most attention are by the hand of significant artists. By their very nature – as artistic and devotional objects created for outdoor settings and thus subjected to centuries of atmospheric damage – the works that have attracted scholarly interest have tended to be discussed, above all, as artistic objects in isolation, and conservation strategies have led to the removal of many of them from their original settings.141Most discussions of street shrines within the oeuvres of individual artists tend to show these cropped out from the wall surfaces where they were originally installed, much as they appear in museums and galleries. This treatment parallels the stripping of jewels from miraculous images, discussed in Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 126, as resulting from the ‘fastidiousness of modern clerics’ and the ‘purgation’ exercised by art-historical conservation.

In Prato, for example, a tabernacle damaged by bombing in 1944 and now displayed in the Museo Civico was painted by Filippino Lippi for a site on the central Mercatale; Vasari suggested that this was a Lippi family commission, as the artist’s family residence was nearby, while the street shrine was adjacent to the nunnery of Santa Margherita where Filippino’s mother, Lucia Buti, had been a nun (fig. 131).142Vasari, 1966– , vol. 3, p. 562. While Vasari’s story offered a biographical significance to the shrine, the late-fifteenth-century fresco was in fact a commission of the Tieri family; firm documentary evidence indicates that Lippi had business contacts with the Tieri di Antonio Tieri, whose family arms and name saints were depicted on the tabernacle, and on the corner of whose property, close to Lippi’s own family home, the tabernacle was painted.143Nelson and Zambrano, 2004, p. 48; see also Bartoletti, 2008, pp. 117–24. The whole tabernacle has now been removed to the Museo Civico, Prato. Just as the fresco’s location, on the canto del Mercatale, made it a visible focus on the northern edge of the city’s vast open market space, so also many of the city’s other street shrines were on street corners. Close to the Mercatale, and running parallel to it, is the via dei Tintori, which takes its name from the dyers who worked in the wool industry centred in this peripheral area of the city, near the river Bisenzio; on this street is the tabernacle of the Cantaccio, or ‘bad corner’, whose unusual name may derive from the fact that the intersection was a haunt for prostitutes in this working-class district, though it may simply refer to a tight and busy crossroads that was difficult to negotiate.144Bartoletti, 2008, p. 35, cites Cesare Guasti’s Calendario pratese (1859) for reference to the ‘alley of Marietta the prostitute’. Either way, the chamfered street corner that accommodates the early-fifteenth-century tabernacle must have provided additional space for the devout to gather, while also perhaps easing congestion.145The association of street shrines and sites where prostitutes solicited in the streets is a recurring theme; at night, the lamps that burned in front of the holy images also served to locate the prostitutes. For the systematic application of the chamfered street corner block as deployed by Ildefonso Cerdà in Barcelona, see Kostof, 1991, pp. 151–3.

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Description: Madonna and Child by Lippi, Filippino

131. Filippino Lippi, Madonna and Child, 1498, fresco in a tabernacle, originally located ‘in sul Canto del Mercatale’, now in Museo Civico, Prato.

That street corners were a favoured site for family-sponsored tabernacles in Prato is again illustrated by a commission of 1485 to the local artist Tommaso di Piero del Trombetto, which stated that the image of the Virgin and Child he was to paint for Masnieri di Benino on via Santa Trinità should be ‘on the corner of his house’, where it can still be seen in the small niche carved out from the corner property.146Bartoletti, 2008, p. 54, on the corner of via Silvestri and via Santa Trinità. The same artist is identified with the heavily abraded fresco of the same subject in via San Fabiano, contained in a niche scooped out of the corner of the house on the crossroad; the flat floor of the hollow creates a surface that could be used for displaying flowers or candles to honour the image. Variations of this arrangement were not uncommon, in Prato and elsewhere, since by creating a chamfered edge on the street corner, a small functional space, resembling that in front of an altar table, could be made before the devotional image; at the same time, setting back the image into the wall space provided protection from the bustle of the street and especially the throngs that gathered on street corners.

Again in Prato, the famous merchant Francesco di Marco Datini had a street shrine painted in the late fourteenth century (1391) by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, attached to the enclosing wall of the garden he owned across the street from his large, centrally located house.147For the ‘Tabernacolo del Ceppo’, see ibid., pp. 39–52; the classic biography of Datini remains Origo, 1957. Today an aedicule still marks the site, although the fresco has been removed to the city museum, and the urban context has changed somewhat, as the garden has gone and the tabernacle appears less closely associated with Datini’s properties, which originally it may have served to link together. As is well known, Datini was a prolific writer of letters, and as part of this correspondence a letter, probably of 1395, from his right-hand man in Prato, Lapo Mazzei, notes: ‘you say, I have Our Lady made on my street corner in Prato, [but] I say to you, She is in the city, which is filled with churches, hospitals and images.’148Undated, Mazzei, 1880, p. 106. While confirming the sense of ownership and proximity associated with the family tabernacle on ‘my’ street corner, Mazzei’s observation gives a clear sense of quite how many sites of devotion and street shrines jostled for the attention of devout viewers in the city. In fact, Mazzei’s comments preface remarks that sought to encourage Datini to commission another street shrine, this time in the countryside outside the south-western edge of the city at Romita.149For discussion of the Romita tabernacle, see Bartoletti, 2008, pp. 61–9. Mazzei’s comments are about as clear a statement as one could hope for of a donor’s possible motives in paying for a religious image in a public space, and of the reason why street corners were especially favoured sites for them:

I’ll tell you this much, that even though a million people will pass by your front door after you die, few of them looking at your house [Palazzo Datini] will spare a prayer to God for you; but making that Blessed image, here, on the crossroad and intersection [at Romita], through the centuries people will kneel daily, and there’s no way that you won’t have prayers said for you every day.150Mazzei, 1880, p. 106.

Mazzei’s remarks imply that perhaps the sight of Datini’s grand house might make passers-by feel less inclined to pray for him. Above all, however, he makes it quite clear that in the city centre the huge number of institutional and more informal familial sites of devotion vied for the prayers of passing citizens in their daily kinetic devotional practices. Street corners were hubs in the communication network of the early modern city, and individuals and families competed for a space on these crowded information points. Like the images at city gates, which were both devotional and apotropaic, the widespread distribution of sacred images in the public space of the city’s network of streets and alleys brought the gaze of the divine to bear on the polity, while also associating divine oversight with a specific family or neighbourhood.

The city’s very topography came to be marked by the names attached to popular shrines, as, in an age before the numbering of houses, way-finding used these markers as reference points, as it did family clan areas, or more prosaic referents such as bakeries, taverns or prominent signage.151Discussed further in Chapter 4 in relation to family enclaves. It is this practice of describing location in relation to prominent sites, waypoints or landmarks that led Nicholas Eckstein to speak of the ‘prepositional city’, very much in the same way that Kevin Lynch’s analysis reveals the practices and experience underpinning modern descriptive cartographies.152Discussed in Chapter 2; see Eckstein, 2016; Eckstein, 2018. Thus, for example, it has recently been shown that a house on the canto dei Carnesecchi in Florence came to be identified as the ‘c[h]asa della Vergine Maria’, on account of the street-shrine fresco of the Virgin and Child painted by Domenico Veneziano around 1440 (fig. 132).153Lillie, 2014. Vasari noted that Veneziano’s fresco was especially well placed, as the tabernacle site aligned in one direction towards the cathedral and was sited at the intersection of the two main streets leading to the Dominican complex of Santa Maria Novella.154Ibid., notes the significance of the location, from Vasari, 1966– , vol. 3, p. 358. As Amanda Lillie has observed, ‘this work once had street power and a defined ceremonial and religious purpose’, resulting from its prominent location on an important ceremonial axis and its position raised well above street level, which afforded it greater visibility.155For the installation of the fresco, raised up to its original height, in the exhibition ‘Building the Picture’, Sunley Room, National Gallery, London, see Lillie, 2014.

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Description: The Virgin and Child Enthroned by Domenico Veneziano

132. Domenico Veneziano, Madonna and Child Enthroned, c. 1440, fresco, originally in a street shrine on canto dei Carnesecchi, Florence, now in the National Gallery, London.

A comparable case can be made for Sodoma’s fresco of the Lamentation, called the Madonna del Corvo (c. 1530), painted over the entrance of the Palazzo Marescotti, right in the heart of Siena, close to the main intersection of the principal ceremonial axis leading to the cathedral (fig. 133).156For this ceremonial approach to the cathedral, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 178–9. It seems that the work’s unusual name derives from its proximity to the family coat of arms (an eagle), which stood directly beneath it in the door frame of the family palace; however, already in 1536 – on the occasion of Charles V’s entry into Siena – the location was referred to as the ‘canto della Madonna’, indicating how rapidly the image had made its mark on the description and experience of urban topography.157Leoncini, 1994, pp. 36–7. Examples such as these give a clear indication of how street shrines on residential properties might become associated with the owner or patron’s family through local usage and naming that linked the religious subject to the family in question, just as occurred with the Madonna degli Amadi, discussed earlier. Such naming strategies and associations have in many cases been lost over time, and only in some instances is it possible to recover them, though we can probably assume that the majority of street shrines and tabernacles created through family commissions conveyed this connection in some way by their local identification, as we have seen for a number of the examples from Prato.

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Description: Lamentation, the so-called Madonna del Corvo by Sodoma

133. Sodoma, Lamentation, the so-called Madonna del Corvo, c. 1530, fresco in a tabernacle, Palazzo Marescotti, via Madonna del Corvo, Siena.

Beyond the widespread commissioning of street shrines by families or local devotional groups, common themes or tropes can be identified among the more exceptional foundation narratives for such shrines throughout Italy. In Rome, a city with perhaps more than a thousand such images – locally known as Madonnelle – a number of emblematic examples stand out.158Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 282 n. 12, citing Cardelli, 1990, pp. 176–90. Numerous images were associated with miraculous responses to varying degrees of sacrilege or insult perpetrated upon them by gamblers and people playing ball games. For instance, the devotional image that is now the centrepiece of Pietro da Cortona’s church of Santa Maria della Pace is a Virgin and Child that was originally located in the portico of Sant’Andrea degli Acquaricciari, a site managed by the city’s water-sellers.159Fiori, 1995, p. 55. Local residents were much impressed when the image bled after a gambler threw a stone at her, and Sixtus IV, a dedicated supporter of devotion to the Virgin Mary, went there in solemn procession, commanding that a new church be built to honour the image after the end of the Pazzi war.160Stinger, 1985, p. 34. A similar story is that of the Madonna della Misericordia originally located on vicolo delle Palle, near the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini; allegedly an angry player of bocce (boules) threw the ball at the Madonna when he lost, and the image developed bruising beneath the right eye. The boules player lost the offending arm, naturally sought mercy and did penance, and the arm miraculously returned forty days later, after which time the image was moved into the nearby church.161Fiori, 1995, p. 57. The Madonna della Vallicella was originally located on the via di Parione, where, in 1525, someone playing in the street hit the image with a stone; the Virgin bled, and the fresco was detached from the wall and taken to the local parish church before it found its definitive home in a newly built eponymous oratory in 1575.162Ibid., pp. 57–8. Other images owed their importance to their intercession on behalf of individuals caught up in street violence, as in the case of the fresco that gives its name to the church of the Madonna del Pianto.163Ibid., p. 55. Here, a fourteenth-century painting of the Madonna and Child, originally installed on one of the arches of the Teatro di Pompeo (in front of Arco dei Cenci), was rehoused (first at San Salvatore dei Calderai and then in the purpose-built new church) after witnessing a street brawl between two men on 10 January 1546, weeping when one of them was killed. Others still had names that merged with the local topography, like the Imago pontis, a Coronation of the Virgin located on the via Coronari adjacent to the bridge used by pilgrims to cross to the Vatican precinct.164Ibid., p. 34, reports that an image on that site was recorded from at least 1400; a commission of 1523 by Cardinal Alberto Serra di Monferrato to Antonio da Sangallo the Younger for a new classical aedicule is recorded in an inscription on the base of the piece.

As these examples from Rome show, myriad foundation stories were attached to these local sites of devotion, which in turn created distinct and local webs of meaning in the everyday lives of city dwellers. Observation reveals that, throughout Italy, street shrines and other religious symbols affixed to buildings often occupy locations on house and palace façades that are comparable with those commonly used for coats of arms and other heraldic insignia. Indeed, religious signs are more common across the social spectrum than coats of arms, which tend to be associated more exclusively with urban elites. In her biography of the popular preacher Bernardino of Siena, Iris Origo commented on the widespread, spontaneous adoption of marble or terracotta plaques bearing the monogram of Christ (IHS) installed on domestic residences of all social conditions, as an expression of the widespread popular devotion to the saint.165Origo, 1962, p. 3. In displaying IHS plaques, householders followed the example of erecting images of the Virgin Mary in the form of ubiquitous signs on the street to express their everyday devotion to her. It is interesting that family coats of arms project towards the city, while street-shrine niches usually intrude into wall surfaces and are often protected – as it were – by fictive window frames.166For theoretical discussion of the window as frame, see Randolph, 2014, pp. 69–102; see also Chapter 6. And yet these devotional windows look down on the street, offering a form of ‘soft’ surveillance: they provide a divine version of the protective eyes on the street that Jane Jacobs described in her famous ethnographic study of New York.167Jacobs, 1961, ch. 2: ‘The Uses of Sidewalks’, pp. 29ff. For discussion of surveillance, see Chapter 3; Nevola, 2013b, pp. 100–02. The mundane procession of the everyday, whereby urban populations moved about the city under the watchful gaze of these countless public shrines, created a pervasive network that overlapped with the nodes of information and exchange, intertwining the devotional with the quotidian at street level.

Locating community: Depicting neighbourhoods and the public realm

As we have noted, street corners, intersections and small piazzas formed vital nodes in the pre-modern city, around which a variety of activities clustered. Proximity to these key sites in the urban network was much prized, as they guaranteed a high level of visibility because of footfall, as well as because people loitered around these hubs of information and gossip. Certain categories of shop, which were frequently visited or the nature of whose trade required prolonged waiting times, clung to these sites; bakeries needed to be within easy and daily reach, much as did taverns and apothecaries (and, in some cities, booksellers), and in these places customers tended to have to wait and consequently had time to talk to other customers. These nodal sites likewise stood out as marking the edges of areas of influence in the city, whether these were administrative borders between districts and parishes, or the boundaries between one family residential enclave and another, or indeed the more ephemeral dividing lines between factions or working-class festive kingdoms or areas. Furthermore, as we have seen, information of all sorts adhered to these sites, as news and gossip, official proclamations and subversive writings all reached their audiences from these strategic points in the fabric. These largely secular functions and social practices were further enriched by the layering of devotional activities articulated around street shrines. A dense visual language of signs and markers – shop signs, coats of arms, neighbourhood emblems, inscriptions and religious images – distinguished these socially constructed spaces, traces of meaning that it is possible carefully to unpick, even though it is not always simple to resurrect the complex interactions that brought these street corners to life.168Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 16–18.

One way that we can catch a glimpse of the ‘specific use of space[s], and hence [the] spatial practice that they express and constitute’ (to continue with Henri Lefebvre’s formulation) might be through contemporary images, informed by our reading of the physical fabric, so that ‘a space [may] be read or decoded’.169Ibid., pp. 16–17. In adopting such an approach, we would be deploying Michael Baxandall’s well-known methodology of applying the ‘period eye’ – in this case, to consider works that are shaped by the Renaissance built environment, specifically pictorial compositions that might be inscribed with the meanings of everyday actions and rituals of the kind we have been discussing.170Baxandall, 1972; see also Chapter 2.

Cosimo Rosselli’s fresco from Sant’Ambrogio in Florence, depicting the Procession of the Holy Blood (1484–6), offers a good point of entry, with its depiction of events that transpired in the small neighbourhood piazza adjoining the convent church of the Benedictine nuns, which doubled as the local parish church of this working-class district on the eastern edge of the city (fig. 134).171Vasari, 1966– , vol. 3, p. 444, was dismissive of the work of Rosselli, but considered the fresco his best in Florence; a number of studies have explored the historical events depicted, most recently Curran, 2013, which draws on Borsook, 1981; see also Strocchia, 2002. Rosselli’s fresco was painted as part of an elaborate and extended programme to embellish a chapel inside the church, where a vial of precious liquid, allegedly the Holy Blood of Christ, was preserved following a miracle of 1230 recorded by the local parish priest, Uguccione.172This valuable relic was said to have materialised from remains of consecrated wine in a chalice turned into flesh and blood overnight; for the full extent of its impact in the patronage of art for the church, see Borsook, 1981, pp. 148–9; Strocchia, 2002, p. 744. This significant relic was honoured through processions and display in the church on three days each year: the Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi, the local feast day of St Ambrose, and the day of the miracle, 30 December; increasing its devotional significance, in 1459 Pope Pius II awarded major indulgences to visitors to the church on specific feast days.173For Corpus Christi processions, and the Sant’Ambrogio relic, see Borsook, 1981, pp. 149–51; Strocchia, 2002, p. 745, clarifies that 600 days’ indulgence were awarded to visitors to the shrine on the feast days of the Assumption, Sant’Ambrogio and the dedication of the convent church; this was part of Pius II’s wider promotion of the Corpus Christi cult. It was this honour that appears to have provided new impetus to devotion at the shrine of the Holy Blood, and this, in turn, led to the construction of a new chapel, the main wall of which was decorated with Rosselli’s fresco.

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Description: The Miracle of the Holy Blood by Rosselli, Cosimo

134. Cosimo Rosselli, The Miracle of the Holy Blood, 1484–6, fresco, Sant’Ambrogio, Florence.

While there is still some discussion as to the precise nature of the events depicted in the scene, what Vasari first recognised was that it represented ‘a procession on the piazza of that church’.174Vasari, 1966– , vol. 3, p. 444. Debate revolves around the identity of the cleric standing at the door of the church and the kneeling priest at the foot of the steps; for the question as to whether the fresco evokes the foundation events of 1320 or a more contemporary scene, see Borsook, 1981, p. 182; Curran, 2013, p. 162; Strocchia, 2002, p. 753. For broader discussion of piazzas and their functional attachment to churches, see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 124–33. What is also clear is that Rosselli depicted the piazza as it appeared in his day, a relatively small public space closed off to the east by the church and to the north by convent properties, while the left side of the image is left somewhat more open, with views to the countryside and a suggestion of the housing along via dei Pilastri. Corners stand out in the composition; on the extreme right side, the stone quoining of the church façade is in evidence, with the stone marker of the local neighbourhood festive kingdom (or potenza) called the Città Rossa, which had only recently been installed, visible just above heads of the bystanders (see figs 127 and 128).175For the Città Rossa territories, see Rosenthal, 2006, pp. 168–71, which notes that the first stone was placed in the mid-1480s. The middle ground is filled by the corner of the flight of steps that ascends to the main entrance of the church, serving to draw the viewer’s eye towards the focus of the scene at the church door, while the background is divided by a vertical band created by the hard pietra serena stone quoining of the house overlooking the square. With the exception of the windows onto the piazza, the only openings are the door of the church, where a group of nuns gather around the reliquary held by the cleric, and beyond it the entrance to the convent.

The rest of the scene is made up of the open space of the piazza, filled with a crowd of onlookers, whom we can assume to be local residents gathered on the piazza on the occasion of an event of ritual importance – probably the end of a procession, as implied by the numerous clergy and altar boys carrying candles – as the reliquary of the Holy Blood is brought back into the church. What is striking about the scene is the fact that it seems to represent a local crowd, though a tradition, established by Vasari, suggests that the group of three younger men standing in the foreground might include the philosopher Pico della Mirandola (centre). In marked distinction to many religious scenes, where contemporary figures are introduced in quite strictly segregated gender groups, the piazza of Sant’Ambrogio is filled with a diverse assembly of young and old, men and women, most them in small animated knots of three or four – a naturalistic portrayal of a crowd breaking up after the main event has ended. It is the variety of poses, with facial expressions captured mid-conversation, that imbues the occasion with the life-like quality of a scene observed rather than imagined.

Cosimo Rosselli was probably a local resident, and certainly had become so within a couple of years of painting the fresco, by which time it is known that he had bought a house in the vicinity from the nuns.176Strocchia, 2002, p. 745 n. 40, notes the purchase in February 1489: Borsook, 1981, p. 183, suggests that these frescoes may have been executed in lieu of rent or out of piety, though this is not documented. Either way, he captured the feeling of this local piazza, transmitting onto the wall of the church a scene familiar to parishioners as their own neighbourhood space. In so doing, he rendered the scene as a non-elite urban area, populated by local residents, to be viewed by those same residents; it was their piazza, their miracle, their church. Moreover, as the account books of the nunnery and later censuses reveal, the relationship between the citizens on the piazza and the nuns in the convent was in many cases symbiotic, as many of the former were tenants of the latter.177ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), fols 100, 101; 3782, fols 153v ff.; see also Strocchia, 2002, p. 760. Fanning out from the piazza Sant’Ambrogio are five streets, all of them originally of a similar type containing artisan row-housing, though nineteenth-century renovations have somewhat altered their appearance. The view of via dei Pilastri in Bonsignori’s map of Florence (1584) reveals the street to be made up of recognisable terraced housing, a standardised form that adopted two doors for each housing unit, with two upper floors and narrow garden allotments behind (see fig. 104). Such arrangements – sometimes known as casolaria – were common outside the centre, and were favoured by developers such as religious institutions.178See Chapter 4; see also Bianchi and Grossi, 1999. Facing the church across the piazza on the tight corner of via di Mezzo and via dei Pilastri stood the confraternity oratory of San Michele della Pace (built 1444), which also signalled its devotion to the local relic by means of a carved marble roundel decorated with the Eucharistic symbol of the infant Jesus rising out of the chalice, dated 1473 (fig. 135).179For another artisan-dominated confraternity of Santa Maria delle Nevi on nearby borgo la Croce, see Rosenthal, 2006, p. 170 and n. 34. A further corner on the complex intersection formed around the piazza, where via de’ Macci meets borgo la Croce, was marked in the first quarter of the sixteenth century by an elegant della Robbia polychrome terracotta sculpture of St Ambrose (fig. 127). Interestingly, the neighbourhood patron was co-opted by the Città Rossa festive brigata as their protector, and their symbol appears in della Robbia’s work with an image of the nearby church (framed by cornucopia) beneath the saint’s feet.180Ibid., p. 169. It is from this corner of the piazza that Rosselli framed his view.

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Description: Oratorio della Compagnia di San Michele della Pace by Unknown

135. Oratorio della Compagnia di San Michele della Pace, piazza Sant’Ambrogio, Florence. A Eucharistic symbol, dated 1473, is fixed above and to the right of the door.

The fresco therefore figures a microcosm of the neighbourhood, a scene set in the piazza, to be viewed within the church; notably, the angle from which the viewer approaches the fresco in the chapel mimics that in the composition, leading from the piazza towards the church door, creating a fluid experiential connection between the act of being in the urban space, and viewing that same space inside the church. Within the fresco, people and the recognisable built environment embody the community of Sant’Ambrogio in ways that only locals would properly understand – the officiating presence of the nuns, and the predominantly working-class residents, perhaps even known individuals picked out here and there. Moreover, a small detail such as the visible stone marker of the Città Rossa would have had meaning only for local viewers, who would understand its key function in the informal topographies of artisan ritual.181For these ‘subgeographies’ marked out on the city, see ibid. Much as was described above in relation to the complex layering and contestation of urban space around the nearby corner of Monteloro, the Città Rossa marker stone was inscribed with meanings specific to a group of local residents. The fresco thus conforms with Clifford Geertz’s well-known formulation of the ‘story [people] tell themselves about themselves’, in that its primary audience was the community that regularly engaged with it and interpreted their experiences through it.182Geertz, 1973, p. 453; for Geertz’s ideas applied to the analysis of early modern ritual, see Muir, 1997, pp. 1–14. Further, its position in a side chapel of the parish church of Sant’Ambrogio meant that a wider audience of viewers also had access to it, and to the image of the neighbourhood and local community that it presented.

In this regard, it is worth considering the broader implications of Cosimo Rosselli’s fresco and the eye-witness account it provides of neighbourhood life around a locally significant node. It raises the issue of the degree to which naturalistic depictions of recognisable urban spaces, which increasingly found their way into the settings of religious cycles on the walls of churches throughout Italy, were intended to create comparable degrees of resonance between viewers and the neighbourhoods that they inhabited. This issue is further complicated by the question of the relative and variable extent to which audiences could access these works, which might be readily viewed if on the façade of a building, or the main body of a church, but in other cases might be accessible only to specific categories of viewer.183It is impossible here to address the extensive scholarship on the contemporary reception of artworks, the implications of which are considered magisterially in the various chapters of Shearman, 1992, a work that has inspired countless other studies. Among these, for a view of how gender impacted access to artworks, see Randolph, 1997.

In Florence, a group of paintings produced between around 1424 and 1486 chose as their settings the public spaces outside churches as a fitting stage for representing ceremonial occasions of local significance.184See, most recently, Eckstein, 2014, pp. 45–51. Bicci di Lorenzo’s Consecration of the Church of Sant’Egidio by Pope Martin V (c. 1424) and Masaccio’s now lost Consecration of the Carmine (before 1426) both focus on crowd scenes, set in the public space outside the respective churches, and both include portraits of identifiable important personages.185Ibid., pp. 44–5; Henderson, 2006, pp. xxvi–xxviii; Paolozzi Strozzi and Bormand, 2013, pp. 460–61 (Ludovica Sebregondi). Bicci di Lorenzo’s work was widely accessible to viewers, as it originally appeared on the façade of the hospital church of Santa Maria Nuova; some debate remains as to the precise location of Masaccio’s lost work.186Eckstein, 2014, p. 44 and n. 42, collates early written sources that tend to suggest that Masaccio’s fresco was in the monastic cloister of Santa Maria del Carmine, though a location in the nave has been hypothesized. It is not clear how widely accessible Ghirlandaio’s portrayal of the Resurrection of the Roman Notary’s Son was in the Sassetti chapel at Santa Trinita, though it performed a similar task of figuring a neighbourhood piazza to the almost contemporary fresco in Sant’Ambrogio.187Borsook and Offerhaus, 1981. Here the composition is arranged to showcase the Sassetti clan, but the street scene in the background is rich with accurate architectural details, including the Palazzo Spini Ferroni on the left and the church of Santa Trinita on the right, from which can be seen exiting a number of Vallombrosan monks; it was, indeed, the monks and the Sassetti family who were the most likely to enjoy unfettered access to the scene.

In these images, as in many others from across Italy, the recognisable depiction of local settings in religious scenes of local significance gave rise to what has been described as an eye-witness style.188As formulated in Fortini Brown, 1988. Such an approach encouraged a typology of painting that interwove foundational mythologies and saints’ lives with contemporary characters and events, in which recognisable urban settings articulate the narrative, blending historical events with contemporary settings so that past meanings could be constantly relived in the present. To an extent, these recognisable settings became increasingly common for all religious art of the fifteenth century, as the new science of perspective facilitated naturalistic depictions that collapsed the boundaries between past and present. This allowed direct visual connections to be drawn between subjects such as local saints and their community of devotees, so that ‘places themselves became sacramental through their participation in the holy life of the [. . .] saint’.189Lillie, 2014. As social practices – devotional and secular – inscribed meaning upon the public spaces of the city, so too they informed the ways that viewers understood these artworks, which located the holy in the urban everyday.

1 Sacchetti, 1970, pp. 542ff. (novella 186). »

2 On Sacchetti and the novella type, see Brand and Pertile, 1996, pp. 153–4. »

3 For the canto de’ Ricci, see discussion in Chapter 3. For the Adimari, whose properties were largely demolished as part of the 19th-century remodelling of the area, see Detti and Detti, 1977, p. 162. »

4 As recorded in ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), consulted via the DECIMA map, online at https://decima-map.net/ (accessed 11 November 2018), record no. 3,336. »

5 Lynch, 1960, pp. 41–2. »

6 Data compiled from ASS, Lira, 185–200 (1481); note that tax declarations did not always name a profession so these are not complete numbers. »

7 ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), fol. 59r–v for the tintori along the street. »

8 Jacobs, 1961, pp. 178–86. »

9 Ibid., p. 186. »

10 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, catalogue entry, online at www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-3104 (accessed April 2018): Wind, 1977; see, more recently, Rodríguez, Borobia Guerrero and Dal Co, 2011, pp. 178, 185, cat. no. 32. »

11 Borobia Guerrero rejects the Rijksmuseum’s identification of the scene as being from a series of the Seven Works of Mercy and simply sees this as a Florentine street scene; Rodríguez, Borobia Guerrero and Dal Co, 2011, p. 178. »

12 Landucci, 1985 (online edition); see also Landucci, 1927, p. 49. For this area, see Preyer, 2015. »

13 Landucci, 1927, pp. 27 (plague), 68 (Charles VIII), 179 (Valentino). »

14 Ibid., pp. 56, 243. »

15 For a partial completion date of 16 June 1504, see ibid., p. 214; discussed further in Chapter 6. »

16 ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), and https://decima-map.net/ (accessed 11 November 2018). See, more generally, comments in Cavallo and Gentilcore, 2008a, p. 2; Cavallo and Gentilcore, 2008b. »

17 For an extensive analysis, see Shaw and Welch, 2011, pp. 31–2, 38–9. »

18 Ibid., p. 83. »

19 Ibid., pp. 81–9, with a suggestion (p. 89) that Tommaso may have been a Savonarolan sympathiser. »

20 Ibid., pp. 38–9. »

21 Sliwka, 2015, pp. 14–15. »

22 Ibid., pp. 17ff., and, for discussion of his friendships, pp. 27ff. »

23 Ibid., p. 14. »

24 Taverns are still very little studied for Italy, though interesting new research explores them from a spatial perspective: Rosenthal, 2015b; Salzberg, forthcoming. »

25 For a fascinating account, rich with examples, see de Vivo, 2008. »

26 See the important work of de Vivo, 2007, incl. pp. 93–8. »

27 For a discussion of the presence of piazzas around mendicant churches, see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 124–33. »

28 Pasini, 1970, pp. 64–6; the inscription itself appears to have been lost or perhaps stolen at some point after 1979, as reported in Petrazzi, 2002. »

29 Opinions vary on the transcription (and hence also the translation); reported first in Clementini, 1617–27, vol. 1: Trattato dei magistrati, p. 28. »

30 Pasini, 1970, pp. 64–6; Clementini, 1617–27, vol. 1, p. 28. »

31 Weiss, 1969, pp. 145–66. »

32 Petrucci, 1993, p. 2. »

33 For Roman inscriptions as a model for architects, see Fiore, 2005b. »

34 Clarke, 1996; Hope, 1992. »

35 For the Ponte Sisto, see discussion and bibliography in Chapters 1 and 3. For the Loggia Piccolomini, see Jenkens, 1997; Nevola, 2007, pp. 74–6. »

36 Clarke, 2003, pp. 22–5, 227–32. »

37 Discussed further in Chapter 6. A parallel can be drawn with the ‘decorated shed’ described by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, 1972, p. 87. »

38 Gehl, 1987, pp. 65–7, 163–5. »

39 Petrucci, 1993. »

40 Petrucci, 1982; Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 94–5, have termed this ‘house scorning’. »

41 Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 94–5; Jütte, 2015. »

42 Rospocher and Salzberg, 2012a; Salzberg, 2014. For a discussion of bandi posted in Rome, see San Juan, 2001, pp. 26ff. »

43 Salzberg, 2014, pp. 54–61. »

44 Ibid., p. 61. »

45 For news and print, see ibid., pp. 62–3. »

46 Ibid.; de Vivo, 2007, ch. 4. »

47 For the late-15th-century poetry of Pomponio Leto’s academy, see Curran and Raymond, 2014, pp. 182–3; for the proximity of Pasquino to Cardinal Carafa’s residence, see ibid., p. 188. »

48 Ibid., pp. 188–94; San Juan, 2001, pp. 1–8. »

49 Curran and Raymond, 2014, p. 188. »

50 Ibid., p. 189. »

51 San Juan, 2001, p. 8. »

52 Curran and Raymond, 2014, pp. 180–81. »

53 Rospocher, 2015, p. 156 and passim; for a valuable and comparable analysis of the bandi that focuses on the 17th century, see San Juan, 2001, pp. 23–56; for the ‘Gobbo’ di Rialto in Venice, see de Vivo, 2007, pp. 136–42. »

54 De Vivo, 2007, pp. 136–41, notes that before the ‘Gobbo’ was produced in 1541 such subversive utterances were posted at other locations. »

55 Discussed further in Chapter 3. »

56 For a map with a key, identifying fifty-seven sites, see Milner, 2013, pp. 136–8. »

57 Ibid., pp. 112–3, 136–8 (map and key), 139–40 (appendix, listing locations). »

58 Salzberg, 2014, p. 63; at San Marco the pietra was on the piazzetta, while at Rialto it was on the campo San Giacometto, next to the ‘Gobbo’. »

59 De Vivo, 2007, pp. 128–31. »

60 Meserve, 2017. On bandi, see San Juan, 2001, pp. 37–45; for a more theorised discussion, see Jütte, 2015, pp. 183–9. »

61 Weiss, 1965, pp. 179ff. »

62 Rospocher, 2015, p. 117. »

63 Ibid., pp. 138–9; Jütte, 2015, pp. 189–93. »

64 For the oral processes of communication of centralised law-giving, see Chapter 3; see also Terry-Fritsch, 2013. For orality and text, see Degl’Innocenti, Richardson and Sbordoni, 2016. More specifically related to political discourse is Rospocher and Salzberg, 2012a. »

65 Petrucci, 1986, p. 107, describes them thus in relation to 17th-century examples from Rome. The term ‘stone laws’ is used by the DECIMA research group; see, for instance, Rombough, 2019. »

66 For plaques against ball games in Florence, see Wood, 2017, pp. 377–9. »

67 See Chapter 3; see also Storey, 2008; Terpstra, 2015b. »

68 Petrucci, 1982; Petrucci, 1986, p. 117. »

69 Terpstra, 2016; for crime analysis of early modern London, see https://www.locatinglondon.org/ (accessed 15 April 2019). »

70 Terpstra, 2015b; Terpstra, 2016; Wood, 2017, pp. 376–8. »

71 Buccianti, 1995; Reardon, 2001, pp. 10, 129. »

72 For a partial catalogue, with no spatial analysis, see Signorini, 2010, pp. 46–7 (entry 21) for Arrivabene. »

73 Ibid., p. 93. »

74 Ibid., p. 57 (entry 30). »

75 For urban expansion, see Chapters 1 and 4. »

76 See Rosenthal, 2015a. »

77 Savelli, 2008, pp. 59–100. »

78 For game culture in Florence, see Wood, 2017; Heywood, 1904, remains a fundamental reference for comparative reading of civic festivals and rituals. »

79 Davis, 1994; see also Judde de Larivière, 2018. »

80 Numerous scholars have discussed this example, documented through the unusual diary of Francesco Amadi (Civico Museo Correr, Venice, Ms. Gradenigo 56, pp. 1–7, 37): Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 617–68; Grubb, 2000, pp. 130–31; Morse, 2006, pp. 345–6. »

81 Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, vol. 1, p. 620. »

82 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 624, citing figures from miracle accounts published in printed chronicles. »

83 For the complex history of the late-15th-century memorie compiled by Angelo Amadi, see ibid. »

84 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 632–7; Grubb, 2000, pp. 130–31; Morse, 2006, p. 346. »

85 For Amadi patronage, see Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, vol. 1, p. 634. »

86 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 632. »

87 Chechia, 1742, p. 4, cited in Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, vol. 1, p. 630. »

88 Chechia, 1742, pp. 4–5. »

89 Niero, 1972, pp. 229–90; p. 247 cites legislation by Doge Domenico Michiel (1128) without supporting documentation. »

90 Ibid., p. 248, citing Fabri, 1483. For similar observations for Florence, see Spencer Chatfield, 1974, pp. 38–40, which reports that Pietro Leopoldo de’ Medici’s plans of 1783 for street lighting were opposed on the grounds that tabernacles did the job already, with specific reference to seventy-eight large tabernacles; see also Bargellini, 1971, pp. 18–19. »

91 Niero, 1972, p. 248. »

92 For the best analysis of street shrines, see Muir, 1987; see also Muir and Weissman, 1989. »

93 Romano, 1994, pp. 369–70. »

94 Niero, 1972, pp. 264–75 (406 images of the Virgin, 397 of angels), without chronological distinction; Muir, 1987, p. 28. »

95 Muir, 1987, p. 28. »

96 Fortini Brown, 2004, pp. 200–03. »

97 Ibid., pp. 13–15. »

98 Holmes, 2013, ch. 3. »

99 Ibid., pp. 64–5 (map), 61–103. »

100 For Orsanmichele, see ibid., pp. 69–74. »

101 Ibid., p. 92. »

102 Ibid., p. 84. A similar miracle formed the origin narrative of the Madonna dell’Arco near Naples, discussed in Jacobs, 2013, pp. 50–52. »

103 Davies, 1992; Davies, 1993; Davies, 1995. »

104 Mussolin, 2010, pp. 50–56; Nevola, 2007, pp. 138–9. »

105 Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 226. For capital punishment rituals, see Chapter 3. »

106 Ibid., p. 112 (figure relates to the 19th century). »

107 Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 282 n. 12, citing evidence from an 1853 catalogue, reported in Cardelli, 1990, pp. 176–90. For Florence, see Strocchia, 2006, p. 74. »

108 Del Migliore, 1684, p. 391. »

109 Benjamin, 1997, p. 170, echoed in Garnett and Rosser, 2013, pp. 168, 289 n. 27. »

110 For sacred presence in urban space, see Muir and Weissman, 1989, p. 95; Trexler, 1972. »

111 Cited in Bargellini, 1971, p. 6. »

112 Muir, 1987, p. 28. »

113 Garnett and Rosser, 2013, pp. 115–16, and p. 168 for specifically appointed caretakers funded by a Genoese noblewoman, Virginia Bracelli Centurione, during the mid-17th century. »

114 For city gates, see Gardner, 1987; Israels, 2008. For lesser images such as the gabellotto del Dazio in Siena, see also Bargagli Petrucci, 1903, p. 109. »

115 Ekserdjian, 1997, pp. 142–4; as a result of changes to the city defences, the fresco was later enclosed in an oratory, and in the 19th century was moved to the museum. »

116 Gardner, 1987, pp. 208ff. »

117 Paolini, 2004, p. 60. »

118 Vasari, 1966– , vol. 5, p. 386. »

119 Fattorini, 2010. »

120 For the loggia by Guerrino da Sansepolcro, see ibid., p. 159. »

121 Bargellini, 1971, fig. V; Milner, 2013. »

122 Ermini and Sestini, 2009, pp. 165–8: Petrucci, 1998, p. 124 n. 17. »

123 Burke, 2007, pp. 87–9; Rosenthal, 2006, pp. 165–8. »

124 Rosenthal, 2015a. »

125 Paolozzi Strozzi, 1991, suggests the stonework is late 15th century. »

126 The coat of arms that provides the source for the tabernacle’s unusual name as ‘Monti d’Oro’ was rendered ‘Monteloro’; ibid. For discussion of a confraternity of Santissima Annunziata at Monteloro and Santa Maria Assunta a Monteloro connected to the site from 1320, see Henderson, 1994, pp. 108–11. »

127 L’Illustratore fiorentino, 1835, vol. 1, p. 105 (with references to Biblioteca Ricciardiana, Florence, Ms. Riccardiano 2427). »

128 For the ban on taverns, see ASF, Provvisioni, 180, fols 21v–23v (May 1488); for the Fiasco d’Oro listing, see ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), fol. 103v. »

129 The extant inscription (dated 22 October 1667) on the corner of via Alfani and via dei Pilastri records the 1461 ban on prostitutes. »

130 For example, ASF, Ufficiali dell’ onestà, 1, fol. 22r (8 April 1511); see also Chapter 3. »

131 For the baker, see ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), fol. 104; for Monteloro as a potenza boundary, see Rosenthal, 2015a, pp. 18–20. »

132 Paolozzi Strozzi, 1991, citing ASF, Capitoli delle compagnie soppresse, 811, fols 1–2 (1471 rights), fols 11–12 (1578 maintenance). »

133 For madonnare who looked after street shrines, see Garnett and Rosser, 2013, pp. 114–15. For jewels and other accessories that adorned holy images, see ibid., pp. 124–8. »

134 Connell and Constable, 1998, p. 79, note the rise c. 1500 of the prosecution of sodomy as documented by Rocke, 1996, p. 224. For examples of blasphemy punished by fines or jail sentences, see Chapter 2. »

135 Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 64. »

136 For legends, see Bandini Piccolomini, 1895, pp. 45–60; see also Alessi, 2008; Falassi, 2008, p. 124. One version of the story recounted here suggests that the devotional sculpture was in the care of a former prostitute (the area saw a concentration of taverns and prostitutes), who had given up her profession to tend the image. »

137 For a thorough study, which also highlights the anti-Semitism of the case, see Katz, 2000, on which these brief comments rely. »

138 Ibid., p. 475 and nn. 1–5. »

139 Ibid., p. 483 and n. 37. Another painting was commissioned, showing Daniele and his family in a submissive position beneath the Virgin’s throne (now in the church of Sant’Andrea, Mantua); ibid., pp. 483–5. »

140 Ibid., p. 493 n. 34. »

141 Most discussions of street shrines within the oeuvres of individual artists tend to show these cropped out from the wall surfaces where they were originally installed, much as they appear in museums and galleries. This treatment parallels the stripping of jewels from miraculous images, discussed in Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 126, as resulting from the ‘fastidiousness of modern clerics’ and the ‘purgation’ exercised by art-historical conservation. »

142 Vasari, 1966– , vol. 3, p. 562. »

143 Nelson and Zambrano, 2004, p. 48; see also Bartoletti, 2008, pp. 117–24. The whole tabernacle has now been removed to the Museo Civico, Prato. »

144 Bartoletti, 2008, p. 35, cites Cesare Guasti’s Calendario pratese (1859) for reference to the ‘alley of Marietta the prostitute’. »

145 The association of street shrines and sites where prostitutes solicited in the streets is a recurring theme; at night, the lamps that burned in front of the holy images also served to locate the prostitutes. For the systematic application of the chamfered street corner block as deployed by Ildefonso Cerdà in Barcelona, see Kostof, 1991, pp. 151–3. »

146 Bartoletti, 2008, p. 54, on the corner of via Silvestri and via Santa Trinità. »

147 For the ‘Tabernacolo del Ceppo’, see ibid., pp. 39–52; the classic biography of Datini remains Origo, 1957. »

148 Undated, Mazzei, 1880, p. 106. »

149 For discussion of the Romita tabernacle, see Bartoletti, 2008, pp. 61–9. »

150 Mazzei, 1880, p. 106. »

151 Discussed further in Chapter 4 in relation to family enclaves. »

152 Discussed in Chapter 2; see Eckstein, 2016; Eckstein, 2018. »

153 Lillie, 2014. »

154 Ibid., notes the significance of the location, from Vasari, 1966– , vol. 3, p. 358. »

155 For the installation of the fresco, raised up to its original height, in the exhibition ‘Building the Picture’, Sunley Room, National Gallery, London, see Lillie, 2014. »

156 For this ceremonial approach to the cathedral, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 178–9. »

157 Leoncini, 1994, pp. 36–7. »

158 Garnett and Rosser, 2013, p. 282 n. 12, citing Cardelli, 1990, pp. 176–90. »

159 Fiori, 1995, p. 55. »

160 Stinger, 1985, p. 34. »

161 Fiori, 1995, p. 57. »

162 Ibid., pp. 57–8. »

163 Ibid., p. 55. »

164 Ibid., p. 34, reports that an image on that site was recorded from at least 1400; a commission of 1523 by Cardinal Alberto Serra di Monferrato to Antonio da Sangallo the Younger for a new classical aedicule is recorded in an inscription on the base of the piece. »

165 Origo, 1962, p. 3. »

166 For theoretical discussion of the window as frame, see Randolph, 2014, pp. 69–102; see also Chapter 6. »

167 Jacobs, 1961, ch. 2: ‘The Uses of Sidewalks’, pp. 29ff. For discussion of surveillance, see Chapter 3; Nevola, 2013b, pp. 100–02. »

168 Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 16–18. »

169 Ibid., pp. 16–17. »

170 Baxandall, 1972; see also Chapter 2. »

171 Vasari, 1966– , vol. 3, p. 444, was dismissive of the work of Rosselli, but considered the fresco his best in Florence; a number of studies have explored the historical events depicted, most recently Curran, 2013, which draws on Borsook, 1981; see also Strocchia, 2002. »

172 This valuable relic was said to have materialised from remains of consecrated wine in a chalice turned into flesh and blood overnight; for the full extent of its impact in the patronage of art for the church, see Borsook, 1981, pp. 148–9; Strocchia, 2002, p. 744. »

173 For Corpus Christi processions, and the Sant’Ambrogio relic, see Borsook, 1981, pp. 149–51; Strocchia, 2002, p. 745, clarifies that 600 days’ indulgence were awarded to visitors to the shrine on the feast days of the Assumption, Sant’Ambrogio and the dedication of the convent church; this was part of Pius II’s wider promotion of the Corpus Christi cult. »

174 Vasari, 1966– , vol. 3, p. 444. Debate revolves around the identity of the cleric standing at the door of the church and the kneeling priest at the foot of the steps; for the question as to whether the fresco evokes the foundation events of 1320 or a more contemporary scene, see Borsook, 1981, p. 182; Curran, 2013, p. 162; Strocchia, 2002, p. 753. For broader discussion of piazzas and their functional attachment to churches, see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 124–33. »

175 For the Città Rossa territories, see Rosenthal, 2006, pp. 168–71, which notes that the first stone was placed in the mid-1480s. »

176 Strocchia, 2002, p. 745 n. 40, notes the purchase in February 1489: Borsook, 1981, p. 183, suggests that these frescoes may have been executed in lieu of rent or out of piety, though this is not documented. »

177 ASF, Decima Granducale, 3784 (1561), fols 100, 101; 3782, fols 153v ff.; see also Strocchia, 2002, p. 760. »

178 See Chapter 4; see also Bianchi and Grossi, 1999. »

179 For another artisan-dominated confraternity of Santa Maria delle Nevi on nearby borgo la Croce, see Rosenthal, 2006, p. 170 and n. 34. »

180 Ibid., p. 169. »

181 For these ‘subgeographies’ marked out on the city, see ibid. »

182 Geertz, 1973, p. 453; for Geertz’s ideas applied to the analysis of early modern ritual, see Muir, 1997, pp. 1–14. »

183 It is impossible here to address the extensive scholarship on the contemporary reception of artworks, the implications of which are considered magisterially in the various chapters of Shearman, 1992, a work that has inspired countless other studies. Among these, for a view of how gender impacted access to artworks, see Randolph, 1997. »

184 See, most recently, Eckstein, 2014, pp. 45–51. »

185 Ibid., pp. 44–5; Henderson, 2006, pp. xxvi–xxviii; Paolozzi Strozzi and Bormand, 2013, pp. 460–61 (Ludovica Sebregondi). »

186 Eckstein, 2014, p. 44 and n. 42, collates early written sources that tend to suggest that Masaccio’s fresco was in the monastic cloister of Santa Maria del Carmine, though a location in the nave has been hypothesized. »

187 Borsook and Offerhaus, 1981. »

188 As formulated in Fortini Brown, 1988. »

189 Lillie, 2014. »

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