A Question of Justice: A Story of Renaissance Florence

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Fra Angelico, The Annunciation. Fra Angelico's Annunciation quiz. Uccello, The Battle of San Romano. Lippi, Madonna and Child with Two Angels. Lippi, Madonna and Child with two Angels quiz. Fra Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child. Lippi, Portrait of a Man and Woman at a Casement. Antonio Pollaiuolo, Battle of Ten Nudes. Ghirlandaio, Birth of the Virgin.

Cassone with the Conquest of Trebizond. Botticelli, Birth of Venus. Botticelli, Birth of Venus quiz. The Early Renaissance in Florence including painting, sculpture and architecture quiz. Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ. Piero della Francesca, Baptism of Christ quiz. Piero della Francesca, Resurrection. Signorelli, The Damned Cast into Hell. Video transcript We're in the Ufizzi looking at two portraits that were once joined as a diptych.

So they would have been connected by a hinge. She had just died and this was a commemorative portrait this is a way that he could remember his his wife. We think it was actually painted by Piero della Francesca, possibly from a death mask that had been made of her. Look at how dressed-up she is. They are both very formal. It reminds me of the fact that we're so used to photographs being taken of us from the time we're very little. It's true, this was a very privileged thing. Only the extremely wealthy could have an image that could outlast them.

I'm also reminded that women used to pluck their foreheads. It was considered to be especially beautiful to have a very high forehead. You often see this in northern painting. It's important to remember that Federico da Montefeltro actually brought northern painters, that is Flemish painters down to his court.

In fact Piero who is an Italian painter seems to have borowed that northern interest perhaps not only in the high forehead but also in the great intricacy and specificity of the landscape. We have this wonderful atmospheric perspecive. One of the other characteristics that I also think is so interesting here is the very strict profile on which both figures are rendered.

The formality that you were talking about comes through because of the profile. Soundscapes were not just a consequence of daily life—they built and organized it, and at times even overturned it. Exploiting the power of new digital tools to visualize the Florentine soundscape, Atkinson shows how sound—from the acoustic regime of bell ringing to the cacophony of the street—brought the Renaissance city into being. In this original and imaginative book, the stones of Florence not only come alive but are made to speak.

In this highly original book, Niall Atkinson builds a compelling and beautifully written argument that puts sound firmly back into the urban sensorium and recovers not only the instances and ways in which the city and its life were marked by sound but also the social interactions that were crucially mediated through the soundscape. Niall Atkinson does not simply move the history of Renaissance Florence onto new ground with The Noisy Renaissance —he reorients our thinking about how lives were lived in all late medieval and early modern European cities.

Florence, which has been the focus of so many important studies, emerges afresh in these pages in all of its boisterous splendour. What would it mean to build a city with sound? Several possible responses to that question are the subject of this chapter. This can be illustrated in the fundamentally dual nature of the city as physical phenomenon, a collection of buildings surrounded by a wall and located in space—the urbs —and the city as a cultural dynamic, a collection of people gathered together to live according to reason1—the civitas.

Although in contemporary use this distinction was elided by the preference for the term civitas to designate the Italian city, these two concepts of the city were, in a variety of ways, held in a state of mutual dependence, where the one was rarely represented without the other. Consider, for example, the remarkable portrait of Florence found in a mid-fourteenth-century fresco in the headquarters of the confraternity of the Misericordia in Florence figures 11, Surrounding the walls is the larger Florentine social body, whose members kneel in prayer.

In turn, they are enveloped in the protective mantle of the Virgin of Mercy, who rises above the scene and to whom the Florentine prayers are directed. These successive layers of protection—walls, praying bodies, divine embrace—foreground how both stones and bodies protect the integrity of the city understood as a series of concentric layers of mutually reinforcing entities, while both were also under the celestial safekeeping of the patron saint.

This image clearly reveals the Florentine desire to sanctify both concrete space and the communities that inhabited it. For example, the coats of arms that represented the commune of Florence—the red lily—and the citizens popolo of Florence—the red cross—were amongst the most important and ubiquitous symbols of the city, marking its most important public monuments and spaces. Consequently, Florentines constantly encountered the dual identity of their city in the very places and contexts where such identities were staged, where civic rituals would have dramatized their bonds to others and to the concrete structures that defined their daily lives.

This dialectic between the concrete and the social defines the range of ways in which Florentines sought to project themselves onto the spaces around them, to unite their social selves with the built environment, and sound was often the binding mechanism that made this real and concrete. What is crucial in this approach is that space and time were not preexisting categories but products of the social practices of the city itself.

Through the continual repetition and transformation of the sounds the city made, space and time were continually reconfigured in a historical process that linked the meaning of buildings directly to the dynamics of social and political relations. The historical development of architectural style as well as urban design, as it has been understood as a product of ideas, politics, propaganda, taste, and institutional needs, is complicated by the fact that the symbolic meanings we have derived from them are necessarily inflected by the way historical meaning was always contingent upon the actual use and experience of the built environment.

In other words, the relative stability of stones and the persistence of architectural motifs have made it difficult to integrate the ways in which the built environment was both a conceptual whole and a series of conflicted fragments, all of which were unstable in meaning and subject to the continual scrutiny, violence, ritual, and polyvalent perceptions of a very complicated networks of communities. It is this element of the experience and reception of architecture by the urban cultures that has inspired this investigation into sonic culture of streets and squares in early modern Florence.

The sounds that one heard in Florence were as crucial as the sights one saw in a society where information was a product of the full sensorial experience of the city. Reconstructing those aspects of the Florentine urban soundscape that are available to us, however indirectly, allows one to demonstrate the dynamic interplay of the city as urbs and the city as civitas, and how such a dynamic can deepen our understanding of the ways in which early modern culture understood the world it built up around it. Florentines were constantly making noise, and so was their city, and this required that they pay attention to both the harmonic and the discordant dimensions of the city, understood as the product of stones and communities, through specific strategies of representation.

This dialectic between creation and experience, production and reception, is revealed by the representational strategies used by Florentines to forge symbolic links between their city and the wider cosmos. Such myths represented ways in which social groups defined themselves within both larger and more localized groups that were always making competing claims of legitimacy. Visions of distant and ideal cities could coincide with a desire, on the part of urban residents, to transpose a certain harmonics of design onto the necessarily fractured and unfinished built environment that surrounded them.

In this way, the city in which they lived existed as both a mental ideal unity and a concrete physical aggregate of discordant parts. Such visions, however, captured in narrative as much as they were explicitly prescribed in legislation, imagined the social and the physical city as a fully integrated unity, where the cross and the lily, the popolo and the commune, were clearly recognizable in the harmony of their interaction.

Many descriptions of medieval and Renaissance cities dramatize this dialectic between the ideal and the real. When Florentines described, imagined, and recounted their experience of the city, they demonstrated a will toward understanding the city as a social experiment whose imagined coherence was derived from its connection to cosmic harmony, ideal geometry, ancient myths, legendary foundations, and oft-repeated narratives.

The myth of Amphion illustrates this point explicitly. This ancient narrative links the organizational precision of music to the ordering of stones into walls. According to legend, Amphion built the city of Thebes solely with the power of music. By playing his instrument so sweetly, he induced the stones of Mount Cytheron to order themselves, one on top of the other, until they formed the walls of the ancient city figure This mythical tale is referred to in several ancient sources.

In days of yore, this was wisdom, to draw a line between public and private rights, between things sacred and things common, to check vagrant union, to give rules for wedded life, to build towns, and grave laws on tables of wood; and so honor and fame fell to bards and their songs. The resulting harmony was one in which the legal, sacred, social, and civic jurisdictions of urban life were clearly demarcated and embodied in the songs of the rhapsodes, the singer-poets of the ancient world.

It was the verbal enunciation, the acoustic performance, through which the constitutive elements of the city came into being as a multiple system of thresholds. Amphion,4 erstwhile king of Thebes, son of Jove and Antiope, husband of Niobe, and twin brother of Zethus, built the walls and the seven legendary gates around the city of Thebes. In this mythical literary context, the creation of the city, therefore, relied on the intellectual power of the mind to organize matter through the mathematical acoustics of music.

The conception of the ideal city lay in the harmonic way it defined borders and separated elements in an orderly and rational way. On a more practical level, the Florentine government was extremely preoccupied with the precise delineation of borders, separating public from private and regulating access to a hierarchical system of spaces. It is not my claim that Florentine legislators referred consciously and specifically to a myth like Amphion in order to give shape to actual policies.

Instead, my claim is that a certain set of ideals that connected the city and its inhabitants to a larger cosmic harmony underlay the earthly geometries of the lived spaces of the city and its political propaganda. This formed a complement to the desire by planners, who were often part of the same governing class, to instill or imagine that such a harmonics guided planning as well.

Florentine sources reveal, moreover, that the auditory environment was a primary sensorial field through which identities, of both individuals and communities, were continually reconstructed and maintained in ways that seem, at first, to contradict desire for harmony. This environment gave rhythm to forgotten modes of social relations, thus making possible collective forms of expression, both celebratory and conflicting, which are now almost completely lost to us.

He served as bell ringer of the commune from to about For the next seventeen years, until , he served as town crier banditore of the commune, whose duties included observing council deliberations and proclaiming laws and notices to the people throughout the city. As an archivist who will reappear throughout this study, he represents an important link between the sonic dimensions of the street and those of the Florentine government.

He was also the author of one of the most widely circulated compendiums employed by professional storytellers to organize their repertoires. Organized together, they reflected, on the one hand, the personal interests and character of their authors and, on the other, the more general circulation of learned and popular texts throughout Florentine society.

This is his version of the story: He was an expert and very well educated and with the help of the sciences he ordered and made that city, especially through the science of music because he and his wife played and sang so sweetly that according to the poets the stones picked themselves up, and moved and arranged themselves one on top of the other, and in this way he walled the city. The zibaldone format was well suited for juxtaposing diverse texts, the pairing of which could evoke unimagined associations.

Florentines used it to record such things as their favorite tales, proverbs, sermons, memories, passages from Dante, contemporary events, classical fragments, rumors, and gossip, all of which amounted to a kind of haphazard intertextual experiment that was the corollary to the random encounters and fragmented vistas that characterized a society that relied heavily on face-to-face oral communication. As an educated functionary, Pucci was interested in the classical past for how it spoke to his own present circumstances.

Based on the number of copies and the contents of this manuscript, scholars have determined that this zibaldone, like so many others similar to it, provided a circulating repertoire for the public performance of such narratives sung by professional storytellers, known as cantimpanche or cantastorie. It follows the foundation myths of various real and mythical cities Rome, Venice, Saracen cities , all based on the travel writings of Marco Polo. There is a city built on water, and one where the inhabitants make wool from the bark of trees.

He counts rooms and houses, measures the wall of the tower of Babel and the steps of Babylon. He describes how Alexander the Great founded twelve cities, and finally he arrives at the legendary origins of his own city of Florence,14 followed eventually by comments on Arezzo, Perugia, Todi, and Venice. It is a mix of the real and the fantastic, all destined for dissemination in the public piazza. Such emphasis on describing the origins of both fabled and real cities relates directly to the urban setting in which these stories were heard by Florentines. As such, these tales would have echoed within actual urban spaces, imbuing streets and squares with the most fantastic associations and a richer, more cosmopolitan cultural memory.

However, the compilers of zibaldoni were never passive copyists. They intervened continually in texts that they made conform to their real and symbolic worlds, with anecdotes, rewritings, and personal interpretations. In order to figure out what the myth of Amphion means, therefore, Pucci, like any self-respecting Florentine, turns immediately to Dante for an explanation. Reading the Commedia as a compendium of knowledge, Pucci finds in the Inferno , canto 32, that Dante had appealed to the same muses of the human sciences that had helped Amphion to build Thebes.

He did so in order that they might also give him the linguistic power to construct, through words, the enveloping textual frame around the hell into which he was descending: It was the men of the city who were sweet and capable of being shaped, but also rugged like the stones that were guided by his words into place. An urban poet, compiler of stories, earnest patriot, bell ringer, town crier, and urban storyteller, Antonio Pucci spent his life in public service to the Florentine commune.

As such, he was perfectly capable of holding diametrically opposing theories about how the city was built.

The Noisy Renaissance

By recalling Amphion, Pucci imagined the city as a work of art, an ideal design that was the result of careful planning and execution, effortlessly ordered by human reason, a solitary authority whose sweet music ordered stones into an perfectly proportioned city. In the second case, the city was created not by a single founding act but through the continuous dynamics of human conflict, commerce, and clatter, which were encouraged, amplified, mediated, and contained by the concrete architecture of the city square.

It stresses the riotous goings-on and noisy ebullience of the civic culture that flourished there, where all the messy elements that constitute urban society found a voice amid the chaotic architecture of commercial exchange. He begins the poem by declaring that he has seen many piazzas, ones beautiful like that of Perugia but also those, like the Campo in Siena, which are environmental disasters, where one wastes away in the winter and suffers the blazing sun in the summer.

There are artisans and vendors of all kinds, gentlemen, prostitutes, peasants, ruffians, and swindlers. Every morning the streets leading into it are jammed with carts and animals burdened with a ceaseless flow of provisions. The market was defined more by the practices that took place within it than the buildings and spaces that formed it. It was more important for Pucci to describe those things about the piazza that struck the multiple intersections of his senses; what he saw, certainly, but also what he felt, heard, tasted, even smelled sento in the market.

In the piazza itself, well-stocked food vendors jostled against a vibrant commerce of fraud. He describes how they would soon be drinking water and eating dried bread, lamenting the memory of wine, capons, and partridges. The final image is a conventional moral warning about how the ritual rise and fall of such artisan brigades is governed by the rotating wheel of Fortune and its ceaseless cyclical caprice, a satirical reference to the inevitable triumph and tragedy Fortune bestowed in much grander epic narratives of a much wider cultural geography.

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Pucci is able to enliven the square in a way that allows the reader to imagine the dynamic bodily experience of premodern civic spaces. The mercato represents a social and political space overabundant in goods, people, sounds, smells, and riotous activity figures 18, All the messy elements that constitute urban society found a voice amid the chaotic architecture of commercial exchange. It was a poem representing one type of auditory environment through its performance in the context of another, making the soundscape both the subject and the medium of the narrative itself.

Such a soundscape, however, was in direct contrast to the absolute social harmony invoked by the myth of Amphion. Instead of a single author commanding men in unison, Pucci represented the market as an expansive social space that enveloped the full range of urban heterogeneity. That heterogeneity is expressed as the sound of commercial exchange competing with the acoustic language of daily social relations, from the wealthy to the naked and entirely destitute.

In describing the market, Pucci concentrates on the seasonal provisioning of foodstuffs, the abundance of production and consumption, and the pursuit of meals both grand and meager to evoke both olfactory and taste sensations. But it is primarily the noisy activities of competitive trade and commerce, fraud and physical scuffles, that inspire him to set the market to the rhythms of verse.

In light of these coarse and at times questionable activities, it is difficult to discern just what it was that Pucci found so beautiful and compelling about the Florentine Mercato Vecchio. The apparent chaos at first appears to completely undermine his claim for its paramount beauty. Pucci lived at a time before beauty could exist as an aesthetic quality based on the solely formal qualities of things, and this may help to explain the apparent contradiction between his hyperbolic claims and his dissonant description, where exaggeration, parody, and caricature are in play throughout.

Such a reading of the poem in historical terms, taking seriously but not literally what it tells us about its times, is a productive way of gaining perspective on street life in the early modern city, where the absence of sustained popular media resources obscures the vitality of daily life. Although a literary construction, narratives like this one performed the critical task of staging how—in grotesque or comic terms—urban society came to terms with its relationship to and the part it played in constructing the urban environment.

Their importance, therefore, for historical investigation cannot be overstated. They do not give rise to a history of facts so much as generate a representation of historical experience, where attitudes and assumptions become the subject of ridicule, mock praise, and biting critique. Urban stories, ones like this one that were likely told and retold, enable us to understand the city as a socio-spatial construction in ways that may not correspond to the traditional domains of architecture and urban history but were integral components of the construction and functioning of the built environment.

Historically, the Mercato Vecchio figured prominently in the daily lives of Florentines. Legally, it was amongst the oldest and most important public spaces of the city. To Pucci, this piazza was more valuable, more dignified, more esteemed, and more precious than any other piazza. This idea leads directly to a fundamental debate about the coercive potential of architectural or urban design to elicit certain kinds of behavior and regulate urban relations.

It begs the question of how much our physical environment determines our social identities and how much agency or power inhabitants have to resist, transform, or manipulate their surroundings by impressing themselves, physically and psychologically, upon them. Beauty in this configuration must be linked not so much to viewing pleasure as to moral action. It is not purely surface delight or compositional unity that makes for a beautiful urban space; it also has to be teeming with movement and voices.

It is beautiful because it is a dynamic process rather than a finished product. As a result, urban space took part directly in governing the city. Architecture played a didactic role. From where does his faith in the civilizing power of social space emerge? What does he hear in the voices of quarreling vendors, the wheezing and puffing of those whose scuffles sometimes lead to blows and brawls, the frenetic trade, fraud, begging, borrowing, stealing, desiring, singing, and storytelling?

It is my belief that, at the civic heart of a city whose politics was the result of a robust dialogue of conflict and consensus, universal claims and naked self-interest, Pucci was translating those continual negotiations from the council halls of the state to the forum of public life. In doing so, he displays no romantic sentimentality about civic life in the market, no patronizing moralism toward the petty crimes of a desperate underclass, and no fawning admiration of the elite. On the contrary, he celebrates this diversity.

It was precisely the fact that the piazza was the site of open exchange, crowded as it was with the continual arrival of new bodies and products, that gave it its imperfect but effective regulatory power.

Everyone belonged there, and everyone had a stake in the functioning of the market. Neighbors were part of an extremely ritualized mode of behavior, and access to such categories of social relations was constantly negotiated in space and time. Class differences were not erased in the square—they were set in stark relief—but no one was excluded and everyone had a role, however detestable or pitiful, to play.

Written by someone who would have been present at, if not directly participating in, official political debates, the poem could also function as an ironic critique of Florentine political practices. It was clearly an ambivalent beauty, but one that could exist in real space, a space that could tolerate human heterogeneity.

The piazza was flexible enough to accommodate this and even minimize extreme violence. Instead, idling bodies still sing as the persistent rhythms of daily life counter and literally drown out the eruptions of periodic violence, recalling the civilizing power of music. Such beauty was never morally pure but was, nevertheless, profoundly resilient. Pucci displays a deep sympathy for the weaknesses of his fellow compatriots, and he understands how even tricksters deserve a place at the table.

In its stubborn refusal to separate the entire range of social classes living cheek by jowl or even distinguish between bankers and gamblers, the mercato provided the space not for some misplaced social cohesion but for the expansive inclusiveness of a more chaotic and heterogeneous civic belonging. This is evident from the way the piazza acted as a site for the economic exchange of food, goods, and accumulation of profit, but also as the place of social and ritual exchange between diverse social groups—both the naked and the elegantly dressed.

Both of these creative acts were in a constant state of aggressive tension that was representative of the desire of late medieval Italian communal governments to legislate a morally upright, beautiful, unencumbered, and productive city in which they were, inevitably, forced to confront the unavoidable task of actually negotiating the opacity of urban spaces, filled as they were with the interests and belongings of endlessly contentious rival groups.

Although public spaces were meant to be physically accessible, they were filled with legislation. Nowhere in the poem does the voice of authority impose itself explicitly upon the vigorous competition between sellers, beggars, brawlers, strollers, and vagrants of both genders and all classes. In fact, it could also be read as an overturning of legislative order, beginning as it does during Carnival, when such ritual disruptions of hierarchical authority performed their social critique.

Order, such as it exists, seems to come, literally, from the ground up and the collective experience of the cycles of social and religious seasons, distinguished and unified by the changing landscape of food. Such experience was embedded in the square itself and acknowledges that the laws of fortune were far more powerful and inevitable than any drafted by mortal hands. The dissonance between the claims for universal beauty and the boisterous and chaotic social exchanges that characterized the market would have generated a great deal of sympathy and derision on the part of listeners.

All of the noisy ebullience and unruly mischief described would have resonated, literally, with the walls of the city to create a dialogue with the very audiences who would have recognized and participated in such activities. When performed in Florence, the poem would have offered a narrative self-portrait of the most dissonant acoustic practices of those it addressed, and would likely have received the very exuberant responses it describes. Various elements of the poem generate a complex series of relations with the acoustic dimensions of the city. Nowhere is the market visually described.

Instead it is anchored in space by reference to the four churches that sit at each corner, at the intersections of the streets that connect the market to the rest of the city and the sources of its wares figure Ironically, this piazza has left the weakest visual imprint on the rhetoric and representation of Florentine urban space. Though it was destroyed in the grand urban renewal projects of the nineteenth century, its legacy remains in various fragments: The subplot of the competing youth brigades upon which the poem ends is an important element of how urban space was the product not only of policies but also of use.

As the youth brigades move in and out of the square, desiring and consuming its products, the market space becomes a festive space, reconfigured in its symbolic import as the site where rituals of social bonds were enacted. They would lay claim to their neighborhood by processing through it to ritually mark its borders, where they would often fight battles with rival gangs. And they would organize contests and meals that were paid for by the largesse of wealthy patrons.

In other words, their upending of social hierarchies was an important satirical disruption of the established order. The market, therefore, becomes an ironic microcosm of, reflection of, and corrective to the larger political organization of the city. The piazza described by Pucci literally refuses to be silenced. None of its sounds were meaningless; all formed part of a larger auditory landscape, an urban sensual dialogue, whose rhythms formed a certain type of poetics of space, a collective expression of the tension of the conflicting sounds that characterized the early modern piazza.

So we naturally look to authorities, planners, intellectuals, and architects to explain the visual rhetoric of beautiful walls and stones. But such tendencies cannot explain the tumultuous beauty that Pucci felt and heard more than he saw in the disorder of the market square. Naturally, I reacted with horror at the sight of this daily amassing of organic and industrial waste.

However, it was that very clutter that, to a social geographer, represented the last spasms of an active communal life in a city choking on its own artistic past. And so I realized that premodern Florentines, like Pucci, already understood this dialectic of urbs and civitas and how the antagonism between them, between bodies and buildings, was the engine of social life. Pucci, however, does not seem to have been fazed by the contradiction implied by these two images of the city and would never have felt compelled to resolve it. Cities were always defined precisely by the ability of citizens to exist simultaneously in an imperfectly functioning social and architectural configuration and by an imagined ideal society of perfect socio-spatial proportions.

Reason induced people to create an urban community whose values were reflected in its concrete surroundings. Walls became symbols; ideas became concrete building material. It did not matter how the mercato was built. Its power lay in the way it reflected and imposed, however distortedly, a common, if messy, idea of urban justice. The civilizing power of architecture was the result of the interaction between an urban dialogue and an urban spatial structure.

The rhetoric of words was transformed into the rhetoric of stone, and the materiality of stone was transformed into the materiality of words. What bound these modes together was sound; the power of speech, both the sweetness of a single voice and the confusion of many. Sonic harmony created a spatial one, motivating bodies, inspiring minds, all of which resonated off the very stones of the city. Words uttered had both meaning and a spatial echo.

Sounds, in the urban environment, did not completely disappear at the moment of their pronouncement.

Piero della Francesca, Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino

They reflected off walls and left traces in texts, maintaining, imperfectly perhaps, the memory of the dialogue that arranged those stones in the first place and continued to resound within them. In Florence, the dialectic between order and disorder, harmony and dissonance, played out within and around the official soundscape that successive regimes constructed, primarily through the ringing of bells. This acoustic regime remained relatively stable over throughout the period of the republic, from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, developing only in increasing complexity as time progressed and bells were added, lost, and recast.

These were sounds that were intimately connected to the daily lives of Florentines, and they were, by and large, the objects of civic devotion. This particular aspect of the acoustic art of city-building lies between the two opposing but ultimately complementary practices that Pucci expresses: And although this investigation into the urban soundscape primarily concerns Florence, the development of a regular acoustic regime of mass communication, of marking time and prayer in the early modern city, was a near-universal phenomenon in the Christian West.

As a way of introducing the main themes and interpretive methods used in this study, I would like to use the following four narratives—two historical and two literary—to illustrate the tension generated between competing ideas about harmony and discord, order and disorder, in the aural landscape. They are also representative of the ways in which the soundscape can be excavated by attention to both the historical record and narrative invention, how the mechanisms of one can reflect and complement those of the other. Subjecting both to a representational analysis is not part of a search for historical facts, of piecing together fragments of the soundscape in a process of historical reconstruction.

Such an investigation and reconstruction will be dealt with in the next chapter. Instead, the interpretive strategy introduced below reveals attitudes, desires, and assumptions about the meaning, experience, and critical importance of the ability to make noise and the power to interpret sound. As such, one finds that political conflicts and narrative humor share a great deal of similar attitudes, desires, and assumptions.

In the end, Rondinelli failed to appear, and so Savonarola tried to claim victory by forfeit. But in a city intensely divided between his partisans and his enemies, Savonarola was forced to return to his convent of San Marco with an armed government escort, surrounded by his brothers, who had to protect him from many who felt tricked out of a good miracle. The next day, Palm Sunday, an angry mob set siege to San Marco and threatened to kill this false prophet figures 27, Under threat of the wholesale destruction of their convent by an angry and hostile government, they finally surrendered.

Trials ensued, and Savonarola, along with two of his closest aides, was condemned and burned as a heretic in the Piazza della Signoria. However, what was also at stake was the right to make noise. The government had already decreed that Savonarola had to leave the city, and the streets were increasingly under the control of violent forces. According to Martines, the government decided not to send in its own militias, since they could not be trusted to side against the friars of San Marco.

That call for help would also be the last sound it made before it too was condemned by the authorities. Founded in the tenth century, the Badia, which was originally built at the edge of the Roman city walls, was intimately enmeshed in civic politics. In , levying a new tax on religious institutions to help pay for military operations probably sounded like a good idea to the cash-strapped Florentine government. Politics as usual in late medieval Florence. In the edition of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects , Giorgio Vasari recounts an episode from the life of the fifteenth-century painter Sandro Botticelli.

A cloth weaver moves in next door to the artist and proceeds to assemble no less than eight looms inside his home.

The Noisy Renaissance

He hoists an enormous rock onto the roof of his house and balances it on the wall that separates him from his noisy neighbor figure Dante agrees to put in a good word and sets off to the palace figure But something strange happens along the way: But he mixes up the verses and generally hacks its syntax to pieces, so much so that Dante feels it as a personal injury figure I have no other trade, and you are destroying it for me. The executor agrees that this is a grave crime indeed, and so, instead of having the fine against Adimari dismissed, Dante succeeds in having it doubled.

Therefore, a closer look at what was at stake for Florentines in confronting the noises, and the silences, they encountered can also provide ways of navigating the thorny relationship between historical events and literary narratives. The bell tower of the Badia was an important acoustic transmitter in Florence and was deeply embedded in the daily sonic rhythms of prayer and work. Each Florentine day began with a complex series of exchanges between the towers of the Badia, the Bargello, and the Palazzo Vecchio—monastery, judicial courts, and legislative councils figure The Badia marked the early morning prayers that led to a dawn mass with a series of rings, which was answered, according to statutes, by six muted rings of the bell of the Leone in the Palazzo Vecchio.

This extended series of acoustic exchanges between sacred and secular institutions legally marked the beginning of the day. Before mechanical clocks, the daily rhythms of monastic life were amplified by bells, so that their salutary sound encompassed the entire city. In exile, Dante placed this sound deep within the Florentine psyche and far back into the distant past. In Paradiso , canto XV, his great-great grandfather, Cacciaguida, laments the moral decline of the future city by remembering the past through the sound of the bell that marked the canonical hours of terce and nones from the campanile of the Badia figure For Dante, the sound of a distant golden age still echoed in the sound of a bell ringing more than two centuries later.

Such a sound excavated the traces of the long-demolished ninth- to eleventh-century walls, which had been built on even remoter Roman foundations. The city at peace—sober and chaste—that lay within those ancient walls of the city was long forgotten as it now spilled out from its original Roman grid into its medieval suburbs figure What is remarkable is the way in which Dante associated ancient Florentine virtue with a particular space and a certain sound.

Not only did the bell of the Badia mark time throughout the day; the sonic rhythms that emanated from its campanile also excavated the memory of a privileged urban territory. Its spatial signification was much more immediate and its temporal and spatial topography more easily apprehended. Bells enacted rituals of inclusion against borders of exclusion. This was so even though Florentines of all classes, rich and poor, lived throughout the areas enclosed by the final circuit of walls. One such unwanted element may have been the concentration of industrial wool production in the very area of the city in which Dante lived.

Around the area of San Martino, which was right next to his beloved Badia, wool workers toiled to the sound of a very different bell figure It would have created an entirely different symbolic territory even within the jurisdiction of the bell of the Badia. These bells were part of an elaborate mechanism that attempted to circumscribe the urban experience of subjected workers. They represented an acoustic marginalization of one kind of labor located in spaces within the more general rhythm opening and closing workshops that sounded from the Badia.

Therefore, the sound of a bell could dissociate a space from its own location and set it adrift in space as part of a network of socio-spatial marginalized zones of segregated labor. The persistence of terce and nones was the power of the bell to evoke the memory of a wished-for past, while at the same time it excluded other spaces created by the sound of other bells or superseded and redefined the spaces created by those very same bells ringing for other reasons.

For Dante, the memory contained within the sound of the bell gave it the power to purge the present of the kind of fractious violence that led to his exile in and was still plaguing a besieged regime in that was struggling to construct a civic acoustic landscape as part of its efforts to maintain political control.

Therefore, the city awoke, went to work, ate, prayed, and returned home, all to a familiar sound that bound them together in space, sanctified their labor, and brought the past vividly to life. Perhaps it was this bond that the government tried to break when it ordered the destruction of the tower. As historian Robert Davidsohn has written, bells functioned as the primary medium of mass communication in an age before printing.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the regime had spent enormous sums on the casting of a giant bell that was completed that very year. Weighing in excess of sixteen thousand pounds, it waited in the piazza while the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio was being completed. The new civic soundscape was still under construction, and the Badia may have been a casualty of exuberant mismanagement, because the new bell was destined to bring the entire expanded urban polity together within a single jurisdiction, uniting ancient center with periphery and dismantling the ancient boundaries over which the Badia guarded.

The Council of One Hundred consiglio dei cento set aside funds to help the Badia rebuild its bell tower in completed in , and a new bell was cast in figures 43, This architectural resolution hints at what would become, I believe, an acoustic strategy on the part of the Florentine government. It also speaks to the complicated relationship between successive popular governments and the Benedictines of the Badia.

When councilors were being harassed by their political foes, the monks had rented them space to hold their councils in In the same year, the commune required the monks to rebuild their church so that its decrepit state did not embarrass the newly rebuilt city courts across the street. Conversely, in and again in , the commune threatened to drive a street right through the heart of the Badia to connect the civic grain market which had been appropriated from the monks in to the Bargello, a move that would have required the total demolition of the bell tower figure After the government was forced to pay restitution for initial demolitions in , its conciliatory mood in is understandable.

Instead of silencing them, the government instead amplified their sound. When the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio was finally completed in , the daily morning sonic exchange between regime and monastery, which punctuated the entire day, represented a hard-won political lesson. Instead of the usual antagonistic policies of urban planning through architectural demolition, the government used sound not to challenge the Badia but to harmonize itself with an institution to which Florentines felt a strong historical affinity.

By the time Dante the author was transformed by Franco Sacchetti into Dante the character, around the s, the civic soundscape had fully integrated itself into the gaps in between the ecclesiastical ringing from both the cathedral and the Badia, carefully orchestrating ancient and new sounds. What the regime had learned was that bells were better at uniting people than dividing them, and that the future prosperity of the city could be bound to its past glory through the careful orchestration of ancient and new sounds.

The implication is that the smith was not reciting from the Commedia precisely, but was singing versions of it that he had heard in the piazza by cantatori who would continually reinterpret stories as they performed them. At the turn of the fifteenth century, Sacchetti was using Dante and his poetry as a means to explore the complex class relationships in which wealthy, nonelite guildsmen, that fluid class of merchants, bankers, and judges, tried to distinguish themselves from both violent upper-class clans and the less affluent and more numerous lower guildsmen, like blacksmiths, who were legally enfranchised but did not participate directly in the large textile and international financial sectors that drove the Florentine economy.

This context put Dante in a rather awkward position. The text is explicit about how the blacksmith was singing the poem just like a street performer. But those additions and variations were tearing Dante apart. The personal injury he felt was caused by the loss of control over the medium through which he established his identity as a writer and citizen.

Sacchetti was posing the question about how much control an author ought to have—even from the grave—over the consumption and distribution of his work and whether the reading and listening public had a right to adapt such texts to its social needs. It is the means by which he maintains himself, and he had as much right to hold on to it in the way any property holder might, as a particular configuration of words, by virtue of an early idea of what are now known as intellectual property rights.

Such restrictions would, theoretically at least, fall within the statutory purview of the regulation of labor and control of who could and could not perform their tasks in public spaces.

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