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Filelfo in Milan
Writings 1451-1477
By Diana Robin PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03185-9
CHAPTER 1
THE SCAR
BY HIS OWN testimony, Filelfo was already in his fifty-third year when he began to toy with the idea of publishing his epistolary autobiography. He had not wanted to publish his private correspondence earlier, but his public was beginning to hound him for it—this was his claim at any rate. In February 1451 he had first approached his friend Niccolo Ceba, asking him to return the letters he had sent Ceba, so that he could include them in his forthcoming Epistolae familiares. He was still finding it difficult to think about undertaking a major project that year, though the civil war in Milan was over and the Milanese had at last received Francesco Sforza as their duke and padrone.
In the summer and fall of 1451 the plague visited Milan with an unprecedented virulence, and for the next year and a half Filelfo spent months at a time on the road. At first he and his family took refuge in the smaller towns along the Po where the disease had not yet spread. Later, when the danger of contagion waned, he shuttled back and forth on his own between Lodi, Pavia, Calvisio, or wherever the duke was encamped with his troops. On occasion he took the road to Ferrara where he visited his old friends at the Este court.
Filelfo made no mention of his letterbook again until May 1453, when he promised Giacomo da Camerino that he would mail him a draft of the first ten books of his Epistolm sometime that year. He routinely promised quantities of work he could not deliver, and his promise to Camerino was no exception. One year later, when Alberto Parisi asked him for a copy of the first part of his letterbook—namely, the letters from the late 1420s and 1430s—he put his friend off. IfParisi could send him the opening phrases of whatever old letters of his he could manage to locate, Filelfo suggested, he might then be able to reconstruct some of the letters from that period of his life. Otherwise, he could not fulfill his friend's request—"for most of those letters are missing, as far as I know," he wrote.
When Filelfo returned from his travels through the plague-torn cities of Lombardy at the close of 1452, he was in a reflective mood. In the space of twenty years, he had lost two cherished wives, the mothers of his children. He had seen civil wars all but destroy Bologna, Florence, and most recently Milan, and he had lived amid pestilence and famine. These recurrences of violence and disease seemed to him the inevitable consequences of nature. In describing the trajectory of his life in his epistolary memoirs, Filelfo returned always to the same images. His themes were Augustan, gilded with reminiscences from Horace and Vergil. He was an exile—a fugitive from the misfortunes of other lands, and his journey through the glittering cities and courts of Quattrocento Italy was a voyage by sea. Whenever the water looked its most tranquil, he knew then that a squall—civil war, sedition, or perhaps plague—was on its way. Soon there would be gale winds, towering waves, and for him, the voyager, shipwreck—naufragium.
Thus, Filelfo located his first book of letters appropriately in Venice, that most shiplike of cities, in the plague year of 1427:
For you press me [he wrote his friend Daniele Vitturi], and with such an abundance of affection, not to agree to remain in Venice during so searing an epidemic of plague, but to depart for Padua, or wherever else I can come to a decision about my life under safer circumstances. If I were to say I am totally without fear, I would be lying.
Petrarch, whose largely fictitious Latin epistolario was certainly a model for Filelfo's own work, had begun his first book of letters in much the same spirit, with an epistle written the year the great plague came to Italy from Asia:
Time, as they say [wrote Petrarch], has slipped through our lingers; our former hopes are buried with our friends. The year 1348 left us alone and helpless; it did not deprive us of things that can be restored by the Indian or Caspian or Carpathian Sea. It subjected us to irreparable losses. Whatever death wrought is now an incurable wound.
The futility of hope, the pain of betrayal, and with it the impossibility of trust in anything in this life, were also to be important themes in Filelfo's letters. But his letterbook resembled Petrarch's Epistolae familiares in more ways than this one. Like Petrarch's letters, Filelfo's were for the most part addressed either to his patrons or to other writers and scholars who were clients of his patrons. Thus, his letters yield, among other things, a series of tableaux of Renaissance patronage, seen from the viewpoint of a client.
Views of Patronage: From Science to Satire
Patronage was by no means a new phenomenon in the Renaissance. While Gene Brucker saw the immediate roots of the system in the agrarian feudalism of medieval Europe, Richard Sailer's study of the ideology of patronage in imperial Rome pointed to still earlier models for the system as a phenomenon of urban culture in the Mediterranean. Anthropologists such as Ernest Gellner, S. N. Eisenstadt, and L. Roniger, moreover, have seen a common amalgam of core traits as characteristic of client-patron relations in both modern and traditional societies the world over. Ronald Weissman, Dale Kent, and F. W. Kent have recently suggested that the work of these anthropologists on the social phenomenon of patronage might provide a useful conceptual framework for Renaissance historians. The core traits in patron-client relations were seen as these: the inequality of its partners in terms of power and resources; the long-term nature of the patronage bond; its distinctive ideological and ethical basis as opposed to a legal one; and the diffuse and multistranded nature of its exchanges—the patron, that is, might furnish not only gifts and protection to his clients but also brokerage, influence, access to networks of friends, and the like.
Some anthropologists, however, emphasized the more dysfunctional aspects of the patronage relationship. Eisenstadt and Roniger noted that dissonance was inevitably created when an ethos of intellectual egalitarianism was superimposed on an economic relationship that was inherently hierarchical, as was the case in the dominant-dependent dyad in patronage. If one were to disregard this dissonance, one might assume with some social scientists that patronage would tend to reinforce stability in societies. But as soon as one looked more closely at the contradictions underlying the relationship, the solidarity between the two partners appeared tenuous indeed. Though the partners might profess a shared ethos or a unity of purpose around that ethos, because of the inherent inequalities in the relationship, that ethos was bound to be interpreted differently by the client and patron, giving rise to varying degrees of ambivalence. Second, in patron-client relations voluntary services and mutual obligations were peculiarly, yet characteristically, coupled with an ever-present potential for coercion and abuse. If we consider the system from the vantage point of its contradictions and paradoxes, then, we cannot help but see in patronage the seeds not for cohesion and stability but for the violence and conflict that characterized life in the great cities of Renaissance Italy.
Sharon Kettering's recent study of clientage in seventeenth-century France demonstrates that in case after case the contradictions inherent in the patron-client nexus made instability and conflict an inevitable condition of the relationship. What often led to anger and violence in a relationship, as she saw it, was the illusion of the immutability of its partners. Because the fides relationship was based on mutually professed interests, it invariably ended amid charges of hypocrisy and betrayal when those interests changed:
Client relationships began as a slow, stately dance in which the opening step was a carefully plotted move to attract a patron's attention. They ended in frenzy of emotion, with cries of disloyalty and ingratitude mingled with charges of betrayal. A patron considered himself betrayed if a client accepted the favors and the patronage he offered and then did not obey him, provide the services he expected, or defend his interests. A client considered himself betrayed if his loyalty and services went unrewarded by a patron, or if his interests were neglected for a long period of time.
Filelfo's letters to his numerous patrons manifest, generally, the same kinds of phenomena that modern scholars have seen in the fides relationships they studied. The fact that fifteenth-century clients and patrons, as we shall see in the letters, more often than not perceived the fides relationship and its obligations very differentiy from one another led to the inevitable misunderstandings, tension, resentment, and disillusionment that characterized Renaissance amicitia. On the other hand, it is precisely Filelfo's representation of this volatility, this emotional lability in his relationships, that gives the letters their intensity and charge.
Often Filelfo is at pains to show that no ethical code is more fraught with hypocrisy than his patron's concept of amicitia. At other times he plays the role of the dutiful client, espousing the terms of amicitia, as he found them codified in Cicero and Seneca. Cicero, who made his way to the upper echelons of Roman society through a series of strategic friendships, had idealized the patronage relationship (amicitia) as a symbiotic bonding of kindred spirits, but one that tended fortunately to result in economic gain for those who engaged in it. Indeed, in the same breath that Cicero eulogized friendship he found it necessary to defend himself against the charge that his intellectual and spiritual alliances were perhaps venal:
For nothing gives more pleasure than the return of goodwill and the interchange of zealous service [between kindred souls] (14.49) ... And again, it seems to me at any rate that those who falsely asssume expediency to be the basis of friendship take from friendship's chain its loveliest link. For it is not so much the material gain procured through a friend as it is his love, and his love alone that gives us delight; and that advantage which we derive from him becomes a pleasure only when his service is inspired by ardent zeal. (De amic. 14.51)
Filelfo satirizes and sabotages the ideals of patronage on a number of planes in his writings—that of the state's relationship with its client cities in the Sforziad, in city politics in the Odes, and on the most intimate level, in his Epistolae. In his correspondence with Leonardo Giustiniani, Cosimo de' Medici, and Francesco Sforza, he lays bare the hollowness of those assumptions he seems once to have trusted. Though he may appear weak and ineffectual to his unsuspecting benefactors, he will show in the Epistolae that he has learned to take the upper hand—to play David to his patron's Goliath. Like Nietzsche's man of ressentiment he is one who "loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, ... [who] understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble."
Violence, Honor, and Suppression in the Epistolae
Filelfo took care to excise from his Epistolae the more coercive, exploitative, and violent aspects of his relationships with his patrons. If he ever experienced a loss of dignitas, or physical abuse at the hands of his patrons, he suppressed it in his published letters. Twice in his life, in 1431 in Florence and some thirty years later in Milan, Filelfo's patrons issued warrants for his arrest and imprisonment because they did not like what he wrote about them. Yet no traces of these brushes with the law—and with public dishonor—are to be found in either the Trivulzian manuscript or the printed editions of his Epistolae.
Filelfo's letter to Enea Silvio Piccolomini, in which he lavishly frames what is perhaps the most flambuoyant moment in the Epistolae, provides us with a paradigm of his constant preoccupation with the process of reconstituting himself, muting whatever violence he suffered and masking his humiliation. On 18 May 1433, as he made his way to deliver his morning lectures in Florence, he was almost murdered—this was his claim—by an armed assassin. His assailant, Filelfo later testified, was a paid assassin, responsible ultimately to Cosimo de' Medici himself, the man whose patronage had brought Filelfo to Florence four years before.
By the spring of 1433 Filelfo's outspoken criticism of the party in power, the Medici, and his advocacy of the opposition party had brought his relations with the Medici to a point of no return. It is also a matter of record that on the morning of 18 May 1433 Filelfo was physically attacked and that his assailant was an employee of persons close to Cosimo. Doubt remains, however, as to whether in 1433 there was actually a plot to assassinate Filelfo. The fifteenth-century Florentine bookseller and biographer Vespasiano makes no reference to the incident in his vita of Filelfo. Indeed, Filelfo's only explicit reference in the Epistolae to the 18 May assault occurs not in Book 2, where all the letters for the Florence years (1429–1434) are contained, but in a letter he wrote to Enea Silvio Piccolomini, dated 28 March 1439—six years after the event. Filelfo's two modern biographers, Carlo Rosmini and R. G. Adam, have simply accepted as fact Filelfo's story of the alleged attempt on his life, and subsequent historians have followed suit. Nonetheless, at the end of the last century Giuseppe Zippel published two documents that at least cast suspicion on the account of the events in question given in the letter to Piccolomini. One of these was an unedited letter Filelfo himself wrote to Tommaso de Bizzocchi, secretary at the Malatesta court in Rimini, one month after the alleged assassin's attack. The other, from the Atti del tribunale del Podestà of Florence for the year 1433, contains the official record of the mayor's proceedings against the defendant in the case, Girolamo Brocchardi di Imola, rector of the Florentine Studio. To see how Filelfo represented events—embellishing some facts, suppressing others altogether—depending on his particular purposes, we have only to compare the three sources we have on the attack. The first, the Atti del Podestà, contains the following charges leveled against Brocchardi in court, to which he confessed under torture,
that in the present year and month immediately prior, May, of the said year, the said Messer Girolamo [Brocchardi] willfully and with forethought, caused the crime of the conscious, guileful, zealous, and premeditated commission and perpetration of the here below described cutting and wounding, and ordered Filippo Masi Bruni da Imola ... to cut and wound the said Francesco Cecchi, also known as Filelfo of Tolentino of Ancona in the Marches, with whatever sort of cut or wound—namely on lord Francesco's face itself and elsewhere as well—so long as he did not kill him. This Filippo in executing and fulfilling the order issued by Messer Girolamo consciously, guilefully, zealously and with premeditation, cut the said lord Francesco causing the greatest flow of blood [from the wound], from which cutting there followed a [disfigurement] of lord Francesco's face because of the prominent cicatrice or mark [left by the wound]; and in this manner, by cutting the said lord Francesco, Filippo executed and consigned for execution the said commission. (my emphases)
Girolamo Brocchardi's hostility toward Filelfo had its own peculiar history. As rector of the Studio and a Medici partisan, he had not only openly opposed Filelfo's tenure since 1431 but had also exposed him to continual harrassment at the university. The key clause, however, in Brocchardi's testimony was "dummodo eum non occideret": the hoodlum he hired was under strict orders to cut and wound Filelfo in any way he liked—"so long as he did not kill him." Also of crucial importance here are the threefold repetition of the instructions "to cut and wound" and Brocchardi's highly specific directive to Filippo to cut Filelfo's face. We should also take note of the emphasis placed in the testimony on the cicatrix Filelfo sustained from the assault. This last part of the report, concerning the scarring of Filelfo's face, makes it clear that the assault—a kind of ritual branding in effect—constituted a profound affront to his honor.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Filelfo in Milan by Diana Robin. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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