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Epilogue. Beyond the Street: Urban Public Space as Socially Mediated
Fabrizio Nevola
Description: Street Life in Renaissance Italy
Street Life in Renaissance Italy
~On 23 May 1498, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola and his companions Fra Domenico Buonvicini and Silvestro Maruffi were brought to the central square of Florence, the piazza della Signoria, where the...
Author
Fabrizio Nevola
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2020 Fabrizio Nevola
Related print edition pages: pp.265-269
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22188
Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyUrban ecology (Sociology)Florence (Italy)Public spaces--ItalyCity and town life--Italy
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Epilogue. Beyond the Street: Urban Public Space as Socially Mediated
On 23 May 1498, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola and his companions Fra Domenico Buonvicini and Silvestro Maruffi were brought to the central square of Florence, the piazza della Signoria, where the three men were tried, hanged and burned at the stake; their ashes were subsequently thrown into the Arno to ensure that no relics survived.1See, most recently, Sebregondi, 2011. Savonarola, a firebrand preacher who inspired the new ‘popular’ republican government that followed the expulsion of Piero de’ Medici from Florence in 1494, was acutely aware of the power of words and images in the communication of his ideas, overseeing publication of his sermons, which circulated widely.2From a vast scholarship on Savonarola, see Weinstein, 2011. For Savonarolan iconography, including discussion of the wide diffusion of his image, see Sebregondi, 2004, pp. lxxi–lxxiii; Sebregondi, 2011. It is thus, perhaps, apt that his immolation was widely reported in a series of late-fifteenth-century images – variously unattributed or connected to Francesco Rosselli and Filippo Dolciati – which portray the use of the public space on that day in spectacular detail.
One image preserved in the friars’ convent of San Marco, almost certainly composed by an artist that witnessed the events of 23 May, shows various steps in the arrest, public trial, judgment and burning of the three friars, and is prominently inscribed with the date of the event (fig. 159).3Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 250 (Ludovica Sebregondi); the image entered the San Marco museum only in 1915, after it was purchased from private owners. Here the piazza is a protagonist in a very public spectacle of punishment – in all the ways Foucault associated with medieval performative justice4Foucault, 1977, esp. pp. 3–7, 195–228 – though there are good grounds for not accepting this as a normative image. The depiction, perhaps by Filippo Dolciati, is completed with a divine mandorla (top left), in which the friars are shown being transported to heaven, marking the painting as having been commissioned within a network of Savonarolan sympathisers, probably for private devotion. Thus, while this multi-scene narrative of events plays out in the city’s public space, following the conventions of the ex voto, it had quite a different distribution trajectory, circulating within a closed group of followers as opposed to being displayed publicly at a devotional site or shrine.
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Description: Execution of Girolamo Savonarola by Dolciati, Filippo
159. Filippo Dolciati (attrib.), Execution of Girolamo Savonarola, 1498, tempera on wood, San Marco, Florence.
The small panel is far from unique in recording the events: a family of thirteen surviving paintings has been identified as depicting the immolation, some of them derived from a common source.5Sebregondi, 2004, pp. 15–17; Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 254 (Ludovica Sebregondi). Among these, a group of larger paintings (c. 90 × 120 cm) adopt a wide-frame view on the events, in which the pyre occupies the middle ground, with the entire piazza, as well as major landmarks of Florence, clearly delineated. The likely prototype, attributed to Francesco Rosselli, is preserved in the convent of San Marco (fig. 160), while other known versions were held by the Dominican convents at Florence, Prato and Perugia and in the private collections of some of the city’s leading families.6Ibid. The prominent scroll in the Rosselli panel is thought to have borne the inscription shown in a number of later versions: ‘Thus do the just die and saints are taken from the earth’, which clearly marks this as a visual record associated with pro-Savonarolan factions.7Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 254 (Ludovica Sebregondi). Moreover, as studies of Savonarolan iconography have shown, the impact of the visual representation of the execution scene was further amplified by the widespread circulation of at least two early editions of an account of the trial, printed in Venice in 1498, whose frontispiece showed the three friars suffering the flames at the stake.8Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 252 (Stefano Dall’Aglio); Sebregondi, 2004, pp. 54–5.
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Description: Savonarola being Burnt at the Stake, Piazza della Signoria by Rosselli, Francesco
160. Francesco Rosselli (attrib.), Savonarola being Burnt at the Stake, Piazza della Signoria, c. 1498, tempera on wood, San Marco, Florence.
What is perhaps most remarkable about these images is that they survive in so many versions and copies; it is very unusual for a single event to be recorded in so many variants in the early modern period. It is perhaps helpful to consider them as a distinct form of mediatisation, as the numerous versions of the scene – and the critical message they represented – distributed an alternative version of history, probably to be shared among groups of Savonarolan sympathisers.9On ‘mediatisation’ in media studies as a term for the political shaping of media narratives, see Corner, 2018, with earlier bibliography. Also unquestionably important is the fact that the public space of Florence’s main square is clearly identified and recognisable. In both the tight-frame and wider views, the piazza della Signoria stands out with its distinctive paving of bricks in a stone grid pattern, while the site of authority and government dominates the action – the Palazzo della Signoria, with its outdoor ringhiera (‘raised dais’) running along the front of the main façade, occupied by the city and church officials seated in judgment over the friars. In the wide-angled view the piazza occupies the majority of the composition, but monuments such as the civic Loggia dei Signori (now dei Lanzi) on the right and the huge cathedral dome on the left further reinforce the spatial co-ordinates of the event, while a sense that the city in its entirety is pictured derives from the open views to the Casentino hills in the distance. These are events played out at the heart of the city, in an arena symbolic of civic participation; it is thus that the viewers of these paintings understood and shared them.
This unusual group of images serves to highlight a process of image production and circulation that needs further analysis. Here, it is helpful to look to the recent work of Nicholas Mirzoeff on visual activism and the discussion of images in social media that connect identifiable places with self-constituted groups to create or provoke change.10Mirzoeff, 2015, pp. 296–8. He points to the tight relationship between an event and its depiction in an image shared through social media and the individuals connected to that event in real time in that physical space and the remote locations where its representation is engaged with or consumed. Mirzoeff’s comments relate to new, digitally enabled social-media practices, but the analytic framework he develops, in which image (pixel) and action are related in a productive loop that connects place-based actions with their distribution and adoption, can be extended to our understanding of certain types of pre-modern image.11Ibid., p. 298. In this instance, we might say that the Savonarolan images and their distribution – in printed as well as painted form, so perhaps making them available to a non-elite mass market – serve as a pre-modern example of social-media activism. In this sense the event was harnessed by visual media, so that a recognisable site and specific events were recorded for sharing among a restricted group of government opponents. The Savonarolan images are quite exceptional, in that they challenge the prevailing social-media practices inherent in image production during the period: portraying contestation, they subvert norms by codifying an alternative version of events, meaningful to a specific viewing community. The located image has the power to reconnect the remote to the real, in order to enable and empower socially mediated participation and spectatorship. These depictions of the immolation of Savonarola and his followers on the recognisable piazza of Florence can thus be understood as a form of opposition, a means of renegotiating the events and their memorialisation.
Throughout this book an argument has been made that street life in Renaissance Italy was shaped by structures of authority and government, and re-mediated through the actions of ordinary people in public space. While there is an important story to be told about the large-scale interventions that transformed urban infrastructure throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the creation of new streets and the regularisation of shared façades projecting onto them, it is equally important to consider the urban process and social practices that were inscribed on those spaces, sometimes in opposition to the authorities that constructed them.
In many respects, studies of the emergence of the piazza have followed a similar narrative. Squares emerged during the Renaissance period as perhaps the grandest example of set-piece urban design; public spaces, bounded by significant monumental buildings and accessed by primary streets, served as effective settings for ceremonial rituals of triumph and rule.12Lotz, 1977, remains a key study for the formal development of the typology. As with the study of new streets, scholarly attention to the piazza has tended to gravitate towards detailed case examples of ex novo projects associated with rulers and ruling groups.13This focus on the formal aspects of urban design and the role of architects in these remains a dominant theme in the limited scholarship on the piazza – as, for example, in studies of piazza San Marco (Venice), the piazza del Campidoglio (Rome) and piazza Maggiore (Bologna): respectively, Morresi, 1999; Bedon, 2009: and Tuttle, 2011. These architecturally ordered public spaces could articulate the imposition of centralised authority on the urban fabric and citizenry through carefully designed geometries of converging streets.14See the discussion in Chapter 3. Less frequently, the creation of open spaces could result from the agency of private patrons intent on giving greater visibility to their residences.15Discussed in Chapter 6; see also Elam, 1985. On the other hand, as I have suggested throughout Part 2 of this book, the multi-faceted social function of nodal sites in the city, where people interact through semi-structured encounters and informal meetings, challenges ideas of sharply differentiated public and private space. Instead, I have shown how meanings were encoded on and around significant urban sites.16Camille, 2001. In this respect, we can consider the more defined set-piece piazza as part of a continuum with the public spaces of the street.17As I complete this book, I am starting a new comparative project, funded by a Humanities in the European Research Area grant, ‘Public Renaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present’ (see http://heranet.info/projects/public-spaces-culture-and-integration-in-europe/public-renaissance-urban-cultures-of-public-space-between-early-modern-europe-and-the-present-pure/), which focuses more specifically on squares and piazzas.
Streets, the distributed networks that criss-cross the city, funnelling movement in and out of urban centres and defining neighbourhoods and residential enclaves, have been the focus of this study. At various points the discussion has drawn on contemporary visual evidence in which these public spaces were depicted. As we have seen, this evidence often concerns the localised hubs of community and neighbourhood, such as the spaces around street shrines, bakeries, apothecaries, confraternities and local parish churches, expressed as intersections that operated as mini-piazzas – nodes in the urban network. By viewing these images collectively and comparatively, it is possible to consider the degree to which they codified the socially mediated nature of spaces and practices. Recognisable urban areas became part of the vocabulary of quite a widespread type of religious image, through which collective devotional attachments were communicated to larger audiences by artworks that preserved the meaning and associations accrued to them at specific moments. Insofar as the majority of such images were created by narrowly determined groups (families, confraternities, neighbourhood communities) but were made available to larger groups of viewers (in churches), such practices resemble the communicative dynamics of socially mediated practices, generated outside centralised authority structures and consumed widely outside the group that created them.18Mirzoeff, 2015, pp. 62–9. While less complex than the Savonarolan images of contestation discussed above, such images nevertheless visually encode practices and events of localised significance.
For example, Cosimo Rosselli’s fresco from Sant’Ambrogio in Florence (see fig. 134) holds up a mirror for locals and visitors to a site of local importance (a chapel) that locates an event (a miracle) in the very physical spaces in which the viewers stood. It serves thus to record and re-inscribe the sacrality of the site for all to see and experience, constantly remaking it local and familiar to its viewers. Such visual representation of events and spaces reorientates their meaning to those of one group, and communicates them more widely, through visual media, to another – the wider audience who may not know the location. To interpret the meaning of these images, therefore, it is necessary to consider the agency of people and place, understanding both to be fundamental components or actors in a composition. By factoring in the ‘period eye’ of contemporary viewers in the real spaces of the Renaissance city, we can begin to recover a sense of the meanings constructed in urban space, and recorded and communicated through images.
By highlighting the role of the street, I have proposed that we move away from a focus on the centrally planned spaces famously conjured by the panel of the ‘ideal city’ (see fig. 4) – an all’antica pastiche of the revived classical past – devoid of any human life. Such idealised visions are a manifestation of the principles of Renaissance urban-design theory,19Discussed in Chapter 1. which represented the city as a series of grand symmetrical alignments focused on piazzas, and expressed the power of the city-building patrons to whom that theory was dedicated. The more inclusive understanding of visual and material culture set out in this book allows us to consider the street – the built form and the social practices enacted there – as constituting significant evidence of the mediatisation of public space in the pre-modern city. In so doing, we can recover the ways in which the city’s streets, piazzas and open spaces were fashioned by elites to impose authority and meaning, could be deployed by the citizens to challenge and subvert those intentions, and yet remained the key ecosystem of everyday urban living.
 
1     See, most recently, Sebregondi, 2011. »
2     From a vast scholarship on Savonarola, see Weinstein, 2011. For Savonarolan iconography, including discussion of the wide diffusion of his image, see Sebregondi, 2004, pp. lxxi–lxxiii; Sebregondi, 2011. »
3     Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 250 (Ludovica Sebregondi); the image entered the San Marco museum only in 1915, after it was purchased from private owners. »
4     Foucault, 1977, esp. pp. 3–7, 195–228 »
5     Sebregondi, 2004, pp. 15–17; Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 254 (Ludovica Sebregondi). »
6     Ibid. »
7     Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 254 (Ludovica Sebregondi). »
8     Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 252 (Stefano Dall’Aglio); Sebregondi, 2004, pp. 54–5. »
9     On ‘mediatisation’ in media studies as a term for the political shaping of media narratives, see Corner, 2018, with earlier bibliography. »
10     Mirzoeff, 2015, pp. 296–8. »
11     Ibid., p. 298. »
12     Lotz, 1977, remains a key study for the formal development of the typology. »
13     This focus on the formal aspects of urban design and the role of architects in these remains a dominant theme in the limited scholarship on the piazza – as, for example, in studies of piazza San Marco (Venice), the piazza del Campidoglio (Rome) and piazza Maggiore (Bologna): respectively, Morresi, 1999; Bedon, 2009: and Tuttle, 2011. »
14     See the discussion in Chapter 3. »
15     Discussed in Chapter 6; see also Elam, 1985. »
16     Camille, 2001. »
17     As I complete this book, I am starting a new comparative project, funded by a Humanities in the European Research Area grant, ‘Public Renaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present’ (see http://heranet.info/projects/public-spaces-culture-and-integration-in-europe/public-renaissance-urban-cultures-of-public-space-between-early-modern-europe-and-the-present-pure/), which focuses more specifically on squares and piazzas. »
18     Mirzoeff, 2015, pp. 62–9. »
19     Discussed in Chapter 1. »
Epilogue. Beyond the Street: Urban Public Space as Socially Mediated
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