91

“Bizzarrissime fantasie”: Piero di Cosimo’s

Pageant Wagon of the Dead and Girolamo Savonarola

Luigi Lazzerini

i

In the Vite, Giorgio Vasari embellishes the biography of Piero di Cosimo (1461/2–1521) with a detail concerning the painter’s responsibilities in the organization of carnival celebrations and the building of carnival pageant wagons.1 Vasari reports that for the

1512 carnival Piero secretly prepared a most original pageant wagon. The painter worked at length in the Sala del Papa, a building next to the church of Santa Maria Novella where one of the most important centers of Florentine Republican and Savonarolan activity was based. Nobody was permitted to see the final result until the actual day of the procession. On the day itself the effect was extraordinary. Piero had created a pageant wagon of the dead, dominated by a huge figure characterizing death. Here is Vasari’s description of the wagon:

1. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini, commentary by Paola Barocchi, IV, Florence 1976, pp. 59–71. On Piero, see Mina Bacci, L’opera completa di Piero di Cosimo, Milan 1976; Sharon Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention and Fantasia, London 1993; and Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange, New Haven and London 2006. For the image of Piero in Vasari, see Louis A. Waldman, “Fact, Fiction, Hearsay: Notes on Vasari’s Life of Piero di Cosimo”, The Art Bulletin, LXXXII, 2000, pp. 171–179. According to Fermor (ibid., p. 9) “Vasari’s account of Piero is certainly based on fact. At the same time, there is little doubt that he exaggerated and embellished aspects of Piero’s character.” The episode of the carnival wagon is recalled in, for example, Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists. A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution, London 1963, pp. 68–69.

piero di cosimo’s pageant wagon

92 93

luigi lazzerini

Nor will I refrain from saying that Piero, in his youth, being fanciful and extravagant in invention, was much employed for the masquerades that are held during the Carnival; and he became very dear to the young noblemen of Florence, having improved their festivals much in invention, adornment, grandeur, and pomp. As to that kind of pastime, it is said that he was one of the first to contrive to marshal them in the form of triumphal processions; at least, he improved them greatly, by accompanying the invention of the story represented, not only with music and with words suited to the subject, but also with a train of incredible pomp, formed of men on foot and on horseback, with habits and ornaments in keeping with the story; which produced a very rich and beautiful effect, and had in it something both grand and ingenious. And it was certainly a very beautiful thing to see, by night, twenty-five or thirty pairs of horses, most richly caparisoned, with their riders in costume, according to the subject of the invention, and six or eight grooms to each rider, with torches in their hands, and all clothed in one and the same livery, sometimes more than four hundred in number; and then the chariot, or triumphal car, covered with ornaments, trophies, and most bizarre things of fancy; altogether, a thing which makes men’s intellects more subtle, and gives great pleasure and satisfaction to the people.4

The pageant of the dead seemingly contradicted the spirit of carnival, which was supposed to represent light-heartedness, gaiety, and that capacity to live for the moment that is exalted by Lorenzo il Magnifico’s famous Trionfo di Bacco e Arianna. However, the pageant wagon was immensely admired and long remained in the memory of those who witnessed the spectacle; so much so, in fact, that fifty years later old people would still remember it. Vasari continued:

This dread spectacle through its novelty and terror, as I have said, filled the whole city with fear and marvel together; and although at the first sight it did not seem suited to a Carnival, nevertheless, being new and very well arranged, it pleased the minds of all, and

4. Vasari (as in n. 1), p. 63; idem (as in n. 2), p. 812.

This triumphal chariot was an enormous car drawn by buffaloes, black all over and painted with skeletons and white crosses; and upon the highest point of the car stood a colossal figure of Death, scythe in hand, and right round the car were a number of covered tombs; and at all the places where the procession halted for the chanting of dirges, these tombs opened, and from them issued figures draped in black cloth, upon which were painted all the bones of a skeleton, over their arms, breasts, flanks, and legs; which, what with the white over the black, and the appearing in the distance of some figures carrying torches, with masks that represented a death’s head both in front and behind, as well as the neck, not only gave an appearance of the greatest reality, but was also horrible and terrifying to behold. And these figures of the dead, at the sound of certain muffled trumpets, low and mournful in tone, came half out of their tombs, and, seating themselves upon them, sang to music full of melancholy that song so celebrated at the present day: “Dolor, pianto, e penitenzia”. Before and after the car came a great number of the dead, riding on certain horses picked out with the greatest diligence from among the leanest and most meagre that could be found, with black caparisons covered with white crosses; and each had four grooms draped in the garb of death, with black torches, and a large black standard with crosses, bones, and death’s heads.2

This was not the first time that Piero had turned his hand to carnival themes. In his youth he had been an ingenious inventor of masquerades and pageant wagons and in particular had distinguished himself for making certain innovations in the processions, such as the inclusion of songs related to the theme of the wagon and the introduction of horsemen and grooms to accompany the whole structure. All of this was seasoned with an exceptional talent for surprising the onlookers with his “bizzarissime fantasie” (“most bizarre things of fancy”):3

2. Vasari (as in n. 1), pp. 63–64. For the English translation, see Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, intr. and notes by David Ekserdjian, II, New York 1996, pp. 812–813.

3. Vasari (as in n. 1), p. 63; idem (as in n. 2), p. 812.

piero di cosimo’s pageant wagon

94 95

luigi lazzerini

figure of a drummer, once again representing a corpse, holds center stage.9

The question of the meaning of the pageant wagon by Piero di Cosimo can be considered also from another point of view. According to Vasari, the painters Andrea di Cosimo and Andrea del Sarto, Piero’s collaborator and pupil respectively, gave the pageant wagon a political interpretation. In 1512, the Florentine republic fell and the Medici returned to power. Vasari, reporting the words he himself heard from Andrea di Cosimo and Andrea del Sarto, who were present at the time, observes that the pageant wagon was interpreted by many as a presage of the Medici’s future return to power:

I have heard from the lips of Andrea di Cosimo, who helped him to carry out the work, and of Andrea del Sarto, who was Piero’s disciple, and who also had a hand in it, that it was a common opinion at that time that this invention was intended to foreshadow the return of the Medici family to Florence in the year 1512, since at the time when the procession was held they were exiles, and, so to speak, dead, but destined in a short time to come to life; and in this sense were interpreted the following words in the song

Morti siam, come vedete, Così morti vedrem voi; Fummo gia come voi siete, Voi sarete come noi, etc.,

whereby men wished to signify the return of that family (a resurrection, as it were, from death to life), and the expulsion and abasement of their enemies; or it may have been that many gave it that significance from the subsequent fact of the return of that illustrious house to Florence, so prone is the human intellect to applying every word and act that has

9. On the Florentine football pageant and Callot’s engravings illustrating this, including that of the skeletal drummer-figure, see Horst Bredekamp, Calcio fiorentino. Il Rinascimento dei giochi. Il calcio come festa medicea, Genoa 1995. On the Pisan game of the bridge, another carnival festivity with the characteristics of a contest, and in general on the specific violent and deathly context of carnival in Pisa, see Luigi Lazzerini, “La festa d’inverno. Violenza civile e violenza rituale nella Pisa medioevale e moderna”, in Le destin des rituels: Faire corps dans l’espace urbain, Italie–France–Allemagne, ed. Gilles Bertrand and Ilaria Taddei, Rome 2008, pp. 175–189.

Piero, the creator and inventor of the whole, gained consummate praise and commendation for it; and it was the reason that afterwards, going from one thing to another, men continued to contrive lively and ingenious inventions, so that in truth, for such representations and for holding similar festivals, this city has never had an equal. And in those old men who saw it there still remains a vivid memory of it, nor are they ever weary of celebrating this fantastic invention.5

Ethnology has shown how in the culture of carnival the themes of death and rebirth are constantly intermingled, as are the urge to live and the awareness of death. From this point of view, as Michel Vovelle observed, the presence of the pageant wagon proves to be fully comprehensible.6 Under many other aspects death dominated carnival life, both in Florence and elsewhere. At the time in which Piero’s pageant wagon was created, there was already a widespread form of carnival celebration during which a mannequin representing the king of the celebrations was put to death, usually by means of dissection.7 A rather singular variation of these ceremonies was the public staging, in anatomical theaters set up for the purpose, of dissections on convicts condemned to death.8 These carnival death ceremonies were accompanied by carnival battles, competitive fights whose origins lay probably in old, propitiatory agricultural rites. The Florentine football pageant, played in the carnival period, belongs to this category. It may not be a coincidence that in one of the engravings that Jacques Callot dedicates to football, the battle between the two ranks in piazza Santa Croce can be made out in the background while the lean

5. Vasari (as in n. 1), p. 64; idem (as in n. 2), p.813.6. Compare the observations on Piero di Cosimo by Michel Vovelle, Immagini

e immaginario nella storia. Fantasmi e certezze nella mentalità dal Medioevo al Novecento, Rome 1989.

7. On the death ceremonies in carnival time, the importance of which has been emphasized in turn by Frazer, see Paolo Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano, Turin 1955.

8. For a comparison of anatomical theaters and death ceremonies in carnival time, see Luigi Lazzerini, “Le radici folkloriche dell’anatomia”, Quaderni Storici, new series, LXXXV, 1994, pp. 193–223.

piero di cosimo’s pageant wagon

96 97

luigi lazzerini

have tried to explain elsewhere, in the formation of the idea, later to be taken by Luther as his own, that grace is a gift bestowed on us freely by God not according to our deserts but, if at all, out of his infinite mercy. In this doctrine lies the theological cornerstone of a religious vision that rejects all that is superficial, ceremonious, or ritual in a pejorative sense, in favor of interiority. In the years following the death of Savonarola, these two texts would constitute the ideological-religious manifesto of the Savonarolan groups and would be published with widespread success both in Italy and abroad. This triumph of the Miserere in the Protestant world has been attested in particular in Luther’s edition, and later by the Calvinist edition of Duplessis-Mornay.13

After a short crisis that followed the death of the prophet in 1498, Savonarola’s followers had soon recovered their political role through an alliance with the gonfaloniere for life, Piero Soderini. Savonarolism and Republicanism joined forces in the political phase that came to an end in 1512. In his Trattato sopra el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, Savonarola had spoken in praise of the republican ideology and had declared that it was the best regime possible, in particular for Florence. The Savonarolans had held important public offices in Florence at that time and had inspired, although not without encountering difficulties and contradictions, the acts of the republican government. For instance, extensive projects for the reorganization of public charity were drawn up, and a new tax legislation that did not favor the wealthier classes was passed.14

Relations between Piero di Cosimo and Savonarola and his followers were complex. On the one hand the artist was pre-eminently a represen-tative of the very heathenish elements in art that Savonarola condemned. This appears most evident in the spalliera paintings, many of which, as Dennis Geronimus hypothesizes, were probably destroyed in the bonfire

13. See Luigi Lazzerini, Nessuno è innocente. Le tre morti di Piero Pagolo Boscoli, Florence 2002.

14. On the Savonarolan movement, see Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence, 1494–1545, Oxford 1994. For the historiography of Savonarola’s contribution to the political and constitutional debate during the republican period, see Mark Jurdjevic, Guardian of Republicanism: The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance, Oxford 2008, pp. 21–23.

come previously, to the events that happen afterwards. Certain it is that this was the opinion of many at that time; and it was much spoken of.10

It was not a peaceful period that formed a backdrop to the carnival of 1512. The pope had formed the Holy Roman Empire with Spain and the Holy League with England, and he had reopened hostilities with France in Romagna. The Florentine Republic, a traditional ally of France, was in danger. At the time there was no reason to suspect that the Medici would reconquer the city: Giuliano de’ Medici was to arrive in Florence only on the first of September 1512.11 Men, Vasari remarks, tend to give retrospective explanations of events and it is therefore possible that the Medicean interpretation of the pageant wagon was affirmed only after the Medici had effectively returned.

There is nevertheless a fact recorded by Vasari that should not be disregarded: following the pageant wagon in the procession there was a company of penitents intoning Psalm 50 (51), otherwise known as Miserere: “After the car were trailed ten black standards; and as they walked, the whole company sang in unison, with trembling voices, that Psalm of David that is called the ‘Miserere’.”12 The importance of this psalm in Florentine political and religious culture of the early modern age cannot be underestimated. It was in fact the better known of the two psalms that Girolamo Savonarola had expounded from prison in the months immediately preceding his death and during his trials (three in all, according to the most recent interpretations). The two commentaries of Savonarola regarding Psalm 50 (51), Miserere, mei, Deus, and Psalm 30 (31), In te, Domine, speravi, describe the situation of a man who at the point of death chooses not to draw from the traditional remedies of faith and to eschew its good deeds in particular. Rather, on the one hand he presents himself as a sinner and on the other declares his hope for the immensity of God’s mercy. This religious vision marks a fundamental stage, as I

10. Vasari (as in n. 1), pp. 64–65; idem (as in n. 2), pp. 813–14. The words of the song in English are: “We are dead as you can see, / Dead like you will one day be. / Once, as you, we had life and breath, / You will follow us in death!” For the translation see Wittkower (as in n. 1), p. 69.

11. See Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, Florence 1985, p. 325.12. Vasari (as in n. 1), p. 64; idem (as in n. 2), p. 813.

piero di cosimo’s pageant wagon

98 99

luigi lazzerini

Agostino Capponi, Boscoli availed himself of the Miserere in order to prepare for death. He was assisted until the very end by a Dominican and Savonarolan friar, Cipriano da Pontassieve, and by a friend, Luca della Robbia, who left a detailed description of his death.21

The occupant of the cell next to that of Boscoli and Capponi was Niccolò Machiavelli, the secretary of the former republic. Pardoned and forced into exile, Machiavelli dedicated a couple of sonnets to the sensations he had experienced when imprisoned in the Bargello jail, in which he appeals to Giuliano de’ Medici. In the first of these sonnets, Machiavelli describes himself as prisoner in an evil-smelling cell infested with lice as large as butterflies. Alarming sounds of iron and bolts reach him from outside while a man is being subjected to the torture of the strappado. However, what causes him true remorse is the sense of relief that he feels upon learning that the two occupants of the cell next door, Boscoli and Capponi, have been led away to their execution while he has been spared the death penalty:

I have, Giuliano, a pair of shackles on my legs,With six hoists of the rope on my shoulders:My other miseries I do not want to talk about,As this is the way poets are to be treated!These walls exude liceSick with the heaves no less, that (are big as) butterflies,Nor was there ever a stench in (the massacre of ) Roncevalles.Or among those groves in Sardinia,As there is in my dainty inn;With a noise that sounds just as if at the earthJove was striking lightning, and all Mount Etna [too].One man is being chained and the others shackledWith a clattering of keyholes, keys, and latches;Another shouts that he is [pulled] too high off the ground.What disturbed me most

21. See Luca della Robbia, “Recitazione del caso di Pietro Paolo Boscoli e di Agostino Capponi, scritta da Luca della Robbia, l’anno MDXIII”, Archivio Storico Italiano, I, 1842, pp. 275–312; and Lazzerini (as in n. 12).

of vanities ordered by Savonarola.15 Still more intricate is the case of the Hunting Scenes now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which were painted for the piagnone, or Savonarola follower, Francesco del Pugliese. A distinctly republican and Savonarolan interpretation was given by Ashley West to these works, a hypothesis that is discarded by Geronimus without denying that the execution of Savonarola in 1498 influenced Piero as much as it did other artists.16 Between 1510 and 1512, at the age of around fifty, Piero painted numerous altarpieces in which the influence of Savonarola appears evident,17 whereas there was no notewor-thy artistic relationship between Piero and the Medici.18

Savonarola tried to transform Florentine carnival by introducing moral and religious elements, and by making groups of devoted young children the real protagonists of the celebrations.19 Savonarolan iconography certainly offers a precedent for the theme of Piero’s pageant wagon: a cart, drawn by four oxen, is surmounted by a figure of death holding a scythe in the engraving on the frontispiece of the fourth edition of Savonarola’s Predica del arte del bene morire, published in Florence shortly after 1500 (Fig. 1).20

When the Medici returned to power the Savonarolans did not completely disappear from public life in Florence. Yet there was no doubt that there was a clear signal marking the decline of the power of the republicans’ adherents. A year later, in 1513, a conspiracy was organized against the Medici, right in the middle of the period of the carnival celebrations. Among others a Savonarolan called Pietro Pagolo Boscoli took part. On being arrested and condemned to death along with his co-conspirator

15. See Geronimus (as in n. 1), p. 79.16. See Geronimus (as in n. 1), p. 131; and Ashley West, New Beginnings for

Renaissance Florence: Lucretius and Piero di Cosimo’s Early Man Panels, New York 2003.17. See Geronimus (as in n. 1), p. 225; and Anna Forlani Tempesti and Elena

Capretti, Piero di Cosimo. Catalogo completo, Florence 1996.18. See Bacci (as in n. 1), p. 30.19. On the Savonarolan carnivals, see Michel Plaisance, “Carnival in the Time

of Savonarola”, in Florence in the Time of the Medici: Public Celebrations, Politics in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Toronto 2008, pp. 55–84.

20. Girolamo Savonarola, Predica fatta il 2 novembre 1496 dell’arte del bene morire, Florence, Tubini, ca. 1500. The first edition was printed in the same year by Bartolomeo de’ Libri. On this sermon, see Lorenzo Polizzotto, “Dell’arte del ben morire: The Piagnone Way of Death 1494–1545”, I Tatti Studies, III, 1989, pp. 27–87.

piero di cosimo’s pageant wagon

100 101

luigi lazzerini

Was that close to dawn while sleepingI heard chanting: “Per voi s’ora.” [“We pray for you.”]Now they can go their own way;If only your mercy may turn toward me,Good father, and these criminal bonds be untied.22

Perhaps it was about this time that Machiavelli wrote his sermon entitled Exortazione alla penitenza, which was shot through with Savonarolan themes inspired by the Miserere. In this text Machiavelli accepts the position of the Florentine prophet he had bitterly criticized on other occasions and recognizes the intrinsic value of the religious message left by the dying Savonarola.23

Thus Piero di Cosimo’s pageant wagon took on multiple meanings that were not necessarily in contradiction with one another: as well as representing the macabre themes that constituted a relatively recondite aspect of the carnival tradition, it seemed to reflect, in full Savonarolan style, on the transitoriness of life, in a political-religious context that still smacked of Savonarola and republicanism and that was not, as Vasari

22. “Io ho, Giuliano, in gamba un paio di geti / con sei tratti di fune in sulle spalle; / l’altre miserie mie non vo’ contalle, / poiché così si trattano e’ poeti! / Menan pidocchi queste parieti / bolsi spaccati che paion farfalle, / né fu mai tanto puzzo in Roncisvalle / o in Sardigna fra quegli alboreti, / quanto nel mio sì delicato ostello; / Con un romor, che proprio par che ’n terra / fùlgori Giove e tutto Mongibello. / L’un si incatena e l’altro si disferra / con batter toppe, chiavi e chiavistello; / un altro grida: è troppo alto da terra! / Quel che mi fe’ più guerra / fu che, dormendo presso alla aurora, / cantando sentii dire: “Per voi s’òra”. / Or vadin in buona ora; / purché vostra pietà ver me si voglia, / buon padre, e questi rei lacciuol ne scioglia”: Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere, IV: Scritti letterari, Turin 1989, pp. 423–424. For the English translation, see William J. London, Politics, Patriotism and Language: Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Secular Patria” and the Creation of an Italian Identity, New York 2005, p. 94. On Machiavelli’s attitude to religion, and on his presumed atheism, see Marcia L. Colish, “Republicanism, Religion, and Machiavelli’s Savonarolan Moment”, Journal of the History of Ideas, LX, 1999, pp. 597–616; and Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli’s God, Princeton 2010. For the relationship between Machiavelli and Savonarola, see Giorgio Cadoni, “Qualche osservazione su Machiavelli e Savonarola”, La Cultura. Rivista di Filosofia, Letteratura, Storia, II, 2000, pp. 263–278.

23. See Luigi Lazzerini, “Machiavelli e Savonarola. ‘L’Esortazione alla penitenza’ e il ‘Miserere’”, Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, XLIV, 2008, pp. 385–402.

wants us to believe, Medicean. This should not be surprising: themes of low and popular culture in the Renaissance period often intermingled with high culture to the point of constituting iconological or literary elements that were essentially of a plurilinguistic nature.24

The eccentric Piero would never shake off his obsession with death; in fact as an old man he expressed his wish to die the same death as those condemned to the gallows rather than that of a sick man forced to succumb to the attentions of doctors and druggists. Vasari narrates that Piero

praised death by the hand of justice, saying that “it was a fine thing to go to your death in that way; to see the broad sky about you, and all that throng; to be comforted with sweetmeats and with kind words; to have the priest and the people praying for you; and to go into Paradise with the Angels; so that whoever departed from this life at one blow, was very fortunate”.25

24. On the plurilinguistic nature of Renaissance culture, see Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington 1984.

25. Vasari (as in n. 1), p. 71; idem (as in n. 2), p. 818.

694 695

lowe (pp. 102–107)

1. Detail of the medallion in Jacopo Pontormo, Madonna and Child with St. Anne and Four Saints, 1527–29, oil on wood, 228 5 176 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, no. 232.

lazzerini (pp. 91–101)

1. Frontispiece of Girolamo Savonarola, Predica del arte del bene morire, Florence, Antonio Tubini, ca. 1500, woodcut, 20 5 14 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1925, no. 25.30.95.