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Abstract
The city-states of the communal period in Italy (ca. 1080–1380) produced the first republican governing bodies in Europe since the fall of the Roman Republic; they also fashioned public squares studded with an unprecedented array of porticoed architecture. Pressured by external and internal forces critical of collective rule, urban nobles and elite citizens sought to legitimize their novel institutions and actualize their participatory ideology. An examination of texts, pictorial works, and architectural form reveals that communes deployed porticoes innovatively to promote radical civic values by showcasing performances of self-governance for public consumption.
Notes
1. A podesta was a nonresident nobleman engaged by a city-state for a temporary term of service; see n. 63 below. The Annales ianuenses manuscript is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) in Paris, MS 10136, fol. 110r for Ottone's first podesta entry, or Luigi T. Belgrano and Cesare Imperiale di Sant'Angelo, eds., Annali genovesi di Caffaro e dei suoi continuatori dal MCLXXIV al MCCXXIV, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1969–72), vol. 2, 37.
2. Annales ianuenses, BNF MS 10136, fol. 109v; and Belgrano and Imperiale di Sant'Angelo, Annali genovesi, vol. 2, 36–37. On communal Genoa, see Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 33–95.
3. The two other miniatures are on fols. 110r and 116r, Annales ianuenses, BNF MS 10136; and Belgrano and Imperiale di Sant'Angelo, Annali genovesi, vol. 2, pls. 5, 8. On their portraitlike features, see ibid., vol. 1, xxv–xxvi, vol. 2, xxxvi–xxxvii.
4. Jürgen Paul, “Die mittelalterlichen Kommunalpaläste in Italien” (PhD diss., Albert-Ludwigs Universität zu Freiburg, 1963), 114–15; and Robert Douglas Russell, “Vox Civitatis: Aspects of Thirteenth-Century Communal Architecture in Lombardy” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1988), 283–302, at 293–98.
5. On the inordinate emphasis placed on their function, see Patrick Boucheron, Le pouvoir de bâtir: Urbanisme et politique édilitaire à Milan (XIVe–XVe siècles) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1998), 103.
6. Aware of medieval anticipations prefiguring these transitive relationships, John Shearman offers a medieval preamble in his chapter on domes. Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 27, 33, 57–59, 148–49.
7. Several studies have been devoted to this conspicuous pavilion type, starting in the nineteenth century with Carl Frey, Die Loggia dei Lanzi zu Florenz: Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung (Berlin, 1885); more recently, Gianni Anselmi, ed., La Loggia dei Cavalieri in Treviso (Treviso: n.p., 2000); and many monographic articles.
8. The twelfth-century miniatures from Genoa (such as Fig. 1) likewise “amputate” the portico from its superstructure and/or surrounding buildings, suggesting that it may have been the case that contemporaries saw or remembered porticoes in precisely this detached fashion.
9. Angela Marino Guidoni, “Architettura, paesaggio e territorio dell'Italia meridionale nella cultura federiciana,” in Federico II e l'arte del Duecento italiano, ed. Angiola Maria Romanini (Galatina: Congedo, 1980), 27–98, esp. 91–94; and Luigi de Lutio di Castelguidone, I sedili di Napoli (Naples: Morano, 1973), 40–41, 68–69.
10. After intense local research in the late twentieth century, recent integrative studies, like this one, are attempting to reveal the shared realities of Italian communes: Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens: Guerre, conflits et société dans l'Italie communale, XIIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2003); Giuliano Milani, I comuni italiani: Secoli XII–XIII (Rome: Laterza, 2005); Alma Poloni, Potere al popolo: Conflitti sociali e lotte politiche nell'Italia comunale del Duecento (Milan: Mondadori, 2010); and Andrea Zorzi, Le signorie cittadine in Italia (secoli XIII–XV) (Milan: Mondadori, 2010).
11. Broletto-type palaces derive their name from the fact that they were typically located on a “broletum,” a term that designated a civic piazza in the communal period but in the High Middle Ages had meant a small, enclosed garden (brolium). Charles du Fresne Du Cange et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, rev. ed., vol. 1 (Niort: L. Favre, 1883), col. 755c.
12. On this historiography, see Massimo Vallerani, “La città e le sue istituzioni: Ceti dirigenti, oligarchia e politica nella medievistica italiana del Novecento,” Annali dell'Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento 20 (1994): 165–230; Milani, I comuni italiani, 159–87; and Alma Poloni, “Il comune di popolo e le sue istituzioni tra Due e Trecento: Alcune riflessioni a partire dalla storiografia dell'ultimo quindicennio,” Reti Medievali Rivista 13, no. 1 (2012): 1–25.
13. Recent studies on the period with earlier bibliography include Philip Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); François Menant, L'Italie des communes (1100–1350) (Paris: Belin, 2005); and Milani, I comuni italiani.
14. Giorgio Chittolini, “‘Crisi’ e ‘lunga durata’ delle istituzioni comunali in alcuni dibattiti recenti,” in Penale, giustizia, potere: Metodi, ricerche, storiografie; Per ricordare Mario Sbriccoli, ed. Luigi Lacchè (Macerata: EUM, 2007), 125–54; and James Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
15. Classic texts on consular regimes include Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule, trans. Rosalind Brown Jensen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 208–36; Hagen Keller, Adelsherrschaft und städtische Gesellschaft in Oberitalien: 9 bis 12 Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979), 36–60; and Maire Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens, esp. 337–62.
16. Poloni, Potere al popolo, 31–39.
17. Milani, I comuni italiani, 83–91.
18. For instance, the movement forever politicized the generic word popolo by attaching it to their cause; see Poloni, Potere al popolo, 11–39, esp. 35–37.
19. Otto accompanied Barbarossa to Lombardy in 1154; see Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris, 2.13–14, in vol. 46 of Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores rerum germanicarum, ed. Georg Waitz (Hannover: Hahn, 1912), 114–17, esp. 116.
20. Ibid. Italy's city-centered nobiles expanded their ranks exponentially through marriage with nonnobles to the point that 10 to 15 percent of a commune's population was part of the consular class; see Keller, Adelsherrschaft, 303–63; and Maire Vigueur's calculations in Cavaliers et citoyens, 217–20.
21. From as far away as Constantinople, statesman Theodoros Metochites (ca. 1260–1332) denounced rival Genoa as “unrestricted” and a “perverse democracy, quite unreasonable and without limitation.” Theodoros Metochites, Miscellanea 616–17, quoted in Jones, Italian City-State, 518.
22. The Italian Dominican Jacopo da Cessole's De ludo scachorum of about 1300, bk. 2, chap. 5.
23. On this palace type, see Angiola Maria Romanini, L'architettura gotica in Lombardia, 2 vols. (Milan: Ceschina, 1964), vol. 1, 38–45, 181–90 (with earlier bibliography); Gigliola Soldi Rondinini, “Evoluzione politico-sociale e forme urbanistiche nella Padania dei secoli XII–XIII: I palazzi pubblici,” in La Pace di Costanza, 1183: Un difficile equilibrio di poteri fra società italiana ed impero (Bologna: Cappelli, 1984), 85–98; and Enrico Bordogna, “La tipologia dell ‘Broletto’ in alcune città lombarde e dell'Italia settentrionale,” in La lonja, un monumento del II milenio para el III milenio: Actas del congreso internacional, lonjas del Mediterráneo, marzo, 1998, ed. Salvador Lara Ortega (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 2000), 261–76.
24. Maureen C. Miller, The Bishop's Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 115–20, 141–42, 185–87.
25. For instance, Lodi's lobia (an early variant of the word loggia) between 1184 and 1230; see Codice diplomatico Laudense, Part 2, ed. Cesare Vignati, 2 vols. (Milan: G. Brigola, 1883–85), vol. 2, 135, 170, 289, 330.
26. Russell, “Vox Civitatis,” 163–75; and Carlo Tosco, “Potere civile e architettura: La nascita dei palazzi comunali nell'Italia nordoccidentale,” Bollettino Storico-Bibliografico Subalpino 97 (1999): 513–45, at 530–34.
27. Giancarlo Andenna, “Honor et ornamentum civitas: Trasformazioni urbane a Novara tra XIII e XVI secolo,” in Museo novarese: Documenti, studi, e progetti per una nuova immagine delle collezioni civiche, ed. Maria Laura Tomea Gavazzoli (Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1987), 50–73, at 52.
28. On the impressive rigor of the design and its Cistercian affinities, see Tosco, “Potere civile e architettura,” 532–33.
29. On the 10.5-meter-long (34 ft. 5⅜ in.) extension to its east end added in the 1280s and its twentieth-century restoration, consult Emiliana Mongiat Babini, “Il Broletto: Storia e archivi,” in Tomea Gavazzoli, Museo Novarese, 521–28.
30. Andenna, “Honor et ornamentum civitas,” 52, citing Archivio di Santa Maria di Novara, Esteri, no. 57, for September, 3, 1208.
31. See the documents in the Liber potheris communis civitatis Brixiae in Historiae patriae monumenta, vol. 19, ed. F. Bettoni Cazzago and L. F. Fè d'Ostiani (Turin, 1899), cols. 94–95, 110–11.
32. See nn. 30, 31 above and 33, 35, 60 below; and, for Lodi, Codice diplomatico Laudense, vol. 2, 270, 317.
33. Archivio di Stato, Bologna, Registro Grosso, vol. 1, fols. 95v, 100v, 101r, 112r, sixty-one rogations in July 1204 (133v–162r).
34. Specifically in Milan, Monza, Lodi, Mantua, Como, Piacenza, Parma, Verona, and Fidenza. For bibliography, see n. 23 above.
35. For this instance in 1210 and others in Novara, see Alessandro Viglio, L'antico Palazzo del Comune di Novara e gli edifici minori del Broletto (Novara: n.p., 1928), 32–34.
36. Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 110–28, 148–55.
37. From one of the statutes Visconte dei Visconti swore to uphold in 1272, as preserved in a 1480 copy, Statuta mediolani (Milan: Paolo Suardi, 1480), fol. 131r; and in historian Bernardino Corio's Mediolanensis patria historia, written 1485–1503, ad annum 1272, in Corio, Storia di Milano, ed. Anna Morisi Guerra (Turin: Unione Tipografica, 1978), 479.
38. Statuta mediolani, fol. 131r: “ … et subtus dictum palatium ubi melius et idoneus videbitur fiant aliqua banchalia seu sedes super quibus possint sedere et quiescere ibidem conversantes.”
39. For example, at the Rialto Market in Venice in 1394–95: Archivio di Stato, Venice, Maggior Consiglio, Deliberazioni, reg. 21 (Liber Leona), fols. 75v, 81v.
40. On concordia as a political virtue, see Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 119–21.
41. On the validation of citizens viewing each other in Italian communes, see Chiara Frugoni, A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World, trans. William McCuaig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 82–117.
42. Romanini, L'architettura gotica, vol. 1, 40, 43.
43. Contrasting materials are also found in the early Broletto of Pavia (1198–99) and the Palazzo del Comune in Brescia (1223–27); see Romanini, L'architettura gotica, vol. 1, 39, 43–44.
44. Boucheron, Pouvoir de bâtir, 103.
45. For Novara's frieze, see Maria Laura Tomea Gavazzoli, “Villard de Honnecourt e Novara: I ‘topoi’ iconografici delle pitture profane del Broletto,” Arte Lombarda 52 (1979): 31–52. For other artworks, see Gherardo Ortalli, “ Comunicare con le figure,” in Arti e storia nel Medioevo, vol. 3, Del vedere: Pubblici, forme e funzioni, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo and Giuseppe Sergi (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), 477–518, esp. 486–90, 496–502. An equestrian statue of podesta Oldrado da Tresseno was installed in 1233 in Milan's Palazzo della Ragione (Fig. 4, visible over the fourth pier).
46. Miller (Bishop's Palace, 86–121, esp. 117) insightfully observes that, unlike their episcopal predecessors, communal palaces were proportionally suited to inclusive gatherings where authority could be built through consensus among participants of relatively equal status. For the bishops' porticoes, see Miller's plans in figs. 33, 40, 55.
47. Ibid., 111.
48. Maire Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens, 246–83. On links between the broletto palace and the rural architecture of Cistercian monasteries, see Marina Righetti, “Architettura monastica: Gli edifici; Linee per una storia architettonica,” in Dall'eremo al cenobio: La civiltà monastica in Italia dalle origini all'età di Dante, ed. Gian Carlo Alessio (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1987), 486–575, esp. 539, 543–45. Specifically for Novara's Palazzo del Comune, see n. 28 above.
49. In his handbook on communal governance: Giovanni da Viterbo, Liber de regimine civitatum (ca. 1240), chap. 132, edited by Gaetano Salvemini in Bibliotheca juridica medii aevi, vol. 3, ed. Augusto Gaudenzi (Bologna: Monti, 1901), 215–80, esp. 270; also Black, Political Thought in Europe, 119.
50. Many northern Italian communal piazzas were gated and enclosed, but not fortified. Novara's Broletto was described as “murus claudendi Broveti [sic] a sero aedificatus” (the wall built closing the broletto to the west) in 1210; see Costantino Baroni, “L'arte in Novara e nel novarese,” in Novara e il suo territorio, ed. Leopoldo Marchetti and Carlo Bevilacqua (Novara: Banca Popolare di Novara, 1952), 557–61, at 560. Milan's Broletto Nuovo was built with a high wall around it (“alto mura circumdatum”), according to chronicler Galvano Fiamma (1283–1344), Cronicon extravagans, written in 1330, ed. Antonio Ceruti, Chronicon extravagans de antiquitatibus Mediolani et Chronicon maius, in Miscellanea di Storia Italiana 7 (1869): 439–784, at 452–53.
51. Regulations survive for Milan and Cremona; see discussions in Boucheron, Pouvoir de bâtir, 103–4; and Monica Visioli, “La piazza maggiore dal Medioevo all'età moderna,” in Il palazzo comunale di Cremona: L'edificio, la storia delle istituzioni, le collezioni, ed. Andrea Foglia ([Cremona]: Banca Cremonese, 2006), 17–57, esp. 21–23.
52. Poloni, Potere al popolo, 45–82, esp. 74. Also, Giovanni de Vergottini, “Arti e ‘popolo’ nella prima metà del secolo XIII,” in his Scritti di storia del diritto italiano, vol. 1, ed. Guido Rossi (Milan: Giuffrè, 1977), 461–91; Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Knopf, 1979), 45–61; John C. Koenig, Il “popolo” dell'Italia del Nord nel XIII secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), 183–229; and Jones, Italian City-State, 485–520.
53. Enrico Artifoni, “I governi di ‘popolo’ e le istituzioni comunali nella seconda metà del secolo XIII,” Reti Medievali Rivista 4, no. 2 (2003): 2–20; Milani, I comuni italiani, 120–26, 135–36; and Poloni, Potere al popolo, 62–64.
54. Alberto Grimoldi, Il Palazzo della Ragione (n.p.: Arcadia Edizioni, 1983), esp. 70–121.
55. Russell, “Vox Civitatis,” 85–94; and Robert Douglas Russell, “Il Palazzo della Ragione di Bergamo riconsiderato,” Archivio Storico Bergamasco 20 (1991): 7–34, at 30–31.
56. For Romanini's observations on this ocularcentric design shift, see L'architettura gotica, vol. 1, 43–44.
57. On the guilds and the Palazzo dei Paratici, see Giancarlo Andenna, “Die Ambiguität des Symbols: Die ‘piazza’ einer italienischen Stadt zwischen dem 13. und 15. Jahrhundert,” in Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare der Macht, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 131–58, at 138–39. For the podesta and the chancery buildings, see Andenna, “Honor et ornamentum civitas,” 57–58.
58. The commune's porticoes also included those of the nearby haberdashers, butchers, shoemakers, and others in the service of the public; see Baroni, “L'Arte in Novara,” 561; and Andenna, “Honor et ornamentum civitas,” 55.
59. The Loggia degli Osii (Fig. 11) existed on the Broletto Nuovo in some form by 1246 (see n. 61 below). Other loggias would soon be added: the Portone della Ferrata (1325–26) by signore Galeazzo Visconti (r. 1322–28), used for auctions (removed in 1872), and the Portico d'Azzone (1336) by his son Azzone Visconti, for bankers (destroyed by fire in 1644). On the west side of the piazza, the merchants' guild refurbished its offices, the Camera dei Mercanti, misleadingly known as the Casa dei Panigarola (restored in 1858 and 1967), to include a portico in 1433. A statute asked that a portico be built for the podesta's residence on the east side (Statuta mediolani, fol. 134v), but it may not have been carried out (Fig. 7). On Milan's Broletto Nuovo, see Grimoldi, Palazzo della Ragione, 16–57; Carla Ghislaberti, “Il Broletto nel quadro dello sviluppo urbano della Milano comunale,” Arte Medievale, 2nd ser., 3, no. 2 (1989): 73–83; and Bordogna, “Tipologia del ‘Broletto,'” 263–67.
60. Such a sentence was handed down on July 22, 1248, “in broreto [broletto] novo subtus palatio novo comunis” against two citizens who had cut windows and a door into a wall that gave on to the convent of S. Radegonda; see Atti del Comune di Milano nel secolo XIII, ed. Maria Franca Baroni, 3 vols. (Alessandria, It.: Ferraris, 1976–92), vol. 1, 722–23, and similar instances in vol. 1, 8, 475.
61. On the oath of the Società dei Capitani e Valvassori “super lobiam Osarum in broleto novo” in 1246, see Atti del Comune di Milano, vol. 1, 686–90. The Loggia degli Osii was still in its prerenovation state at this time (see below).
62. In later loggias discussed below, one glimpses what Marvin Trachtenberg calls a scenographic strategy, in which a building controls the space around it, the positions of beholders, and the angles of their view. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 165–84, esp. 178.
63. Standard readings on the podesta include Emilio Cristiani, “Le alternanze tra consoli e podestà ed i podestà cittadini,” in I problemi della civiltà comunale, ed. Cosimo Damiano Fonseca (Bergamo: Cassa di Risparmio delle Provincie Lombarde, 1971), 47–51
; Paolo Cammarosano, “Il ricambio e l'evoluzione dei ceti dirigenti nel corso del XIII secolo,” in Magnati e popolani nell'Italia comunale (Pistoia: Centro Italiano di Studi di Storia e d'Arte, 1997), 17–40 ; and Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, “L'ufficiale forestiero,” in Ceti, modelli, comportamenti nella società medievale (secoli XIII–metà XIV) (Pistoia: Centro Italiano di Studi di Storia e d'Arte, 2001), 75–97.64. Enrico Artifoni, “Tensioni sociali e istituzioni nel mondo comunale,” in La storia: I grandi problemi dal Medioevo all'età contemporanea, vol. 2, Il Medioevo, pt. 2, Popoli e strutture politiche, ed. Nicola Tranfaglia (Turin: UTET, 1986), 461–91, at 480–83.
65. They were so described in early political theory on communes: Ptolemy of Lucca, De regimine principum (ca. 1300–1305) 4.1.5; and Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis (1324) 1.14–15. See also Nicolai Rubinstein, “Marsilius of Padua and Italian Political Thought of His Time,” in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. John Rigby Hale, John Roger Loxdale Highfield, and Beryl Smalley (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 44–75, esp. 46–48; and Ottavio Banti, “Forme di governo personale nei comuni dell'Italia centro-settentrionale nel periodo consolare (secc. XI–XII),” in Studi sul Medioevo cristiano offerti a Raffaello Morghen per il 90. anniversario dell'Istituto Storico Italiano (1883–1973) (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1974), 29–56.
66. On these Carolingian precedents, none of which survives in Italy, see Kim Sexton, “Justice Seen: Loggias and Ethnicity in Early Medieval Italy,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, no. 3 (2009): 308–37, esp. 310–14.
67. The loggias in the Annales ianuenses appear to be at ground level (Fig. 1), as do most podestas' loggias in central Italy (see below) with exceptions such as Florence's Bargello. On the latter, see Walter Paatz, “Zur Baugeschichte des Palazzo del Podestà (Bargello) in Florenz,” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 3 (1931): 287–321, at 294–96. For loggia-bridges, see Sexton, “A History of Renaissance Civic Loggias in Italy from the Loggia dei Lanzi to Sansovino's Loggetta” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1997), 90–96, and n. 70 below.
68. The no longer extant “laubia lignorum comunis Brixiae” showcased both consuls and podestas; see Baldassare Zambone, Memorie intorno alle pubbliche fabbriche più insegni della città di Brescia (Bologna: Forni, 1975), 5; and Liber potheris, col. 700, which reveals it to have been part of the old communal palace of Brescia (“super laubia lignorum palatii veteris comunis brixie”). For other references to this loggia, see Paolo Guerrini, “Il monastero benedettino di S. Pietro in Monte a Serle: Notizie e documenti inediti (sec. XI–XV),” Memorie Storiche della Diocesi di Brescia, 2nd ser., 2 (1931): 161–242, at 186–89.
69. Ubaldinus, a notary of the podesta, read aloud the will and testament of one Guidolinus Soyarius “‘super arengario comunis Mantue’ in a general public assembly convened in the usual manner at the sound of horns and bells by mandate and express authorization of the podesta of Mantua, Johannes de Caluçinis of Padua.” Ubaldinus was one of four named officials on the Arengario for this public act; from Pietro Torelli, L'Archivio Capitolare della Cattedrale di Mantova fino alla caduta dei Bonacolsi (Verona: Mondadori, 1924), 463–64.
70. As documents indicate, they performed these duties from above, “on the loggia [super laubia]” more often than “in” it. Although “in” could be used in reference to an upper-floor gallery, “super” would not do for a ground-floor portico. For Brescia, see n. 68 above; for acts of podestas in Milan “super lobiam Osarum,” see Atti del Comune di Milano, vol. 1, 412, vol. 2, 8, 20, 71–72, 79, 81, 830, vol. 3, 34–35, all dating from 1232 to 1277.
71. All of the following loggias date to periods of popular governments in their respective cities: for Lodi, see Codice diplomatico Laudense, vol. 2, 308, 420, in 1230 and 1292 respectively. On the use of loggias in Milan by podestas, see Gerolamo Biscaro, “La loggia degli Osi e la ‘Curia Comunis' nel Broletto nuovo di Milano,” Archivio Storico Lombardo 31, no. 1 (1904): 352–58, at 354–56. Loggias bridging the space between a communal palace and a podesta's or capitano's palace (therefore likely used by the official) are found in Mantua (1208–9 or 1250–59), Parma (1324), and Reggio Emilia (1280). See, respectively, Ercolano Marani, “Vie e piazze di Mantova (analisi di un centro storico), 30: Broletto,” Civiltà Mantovana 3, no. 15 (1968): 139–99, at 146–47, 158; Maurizio Corradi Cervi, “Evoluzione topografica della Piazza Grande di Parma dall'epoca romana alla fine del secolo XIII,” Archivio Storico per le Province Parmensi, 4th ser., 14 (1962): 31–52, at 43; and Vittorio Nironi, “I palazzi reggiani del comune e del capitano del popolo dal secolo XII agli inizi del XIV,” Bollettino Storico Reggiano 13 (October 1980): 23–35, at 24–27.
72. Atti del Comune di Milano, vol. 1, 214.
73. On the rise of signorie, see Martines, Power and Imagination, 94–110; Jones, Italian City-State, 521–650; Milani, I comuni italiani, 145–54; Poloni, Potere al popolo, 74–77; and Zorzi, Le signorie cittadine, 29–48.
74. Francesco Somaini, “Processi costitutivi, dinamiche politiche e strutture istituzionali dello stato visconteo-sforzesco,” in Storia d'Italia, vol. 6, Comuni e signorie nell'Italia settentrionale: La Lombardia, ed. Giancarlo Andenna et al. (Turin: UTET, 1998), 681–786, esp. 691–93.
75. One need but recall Florentine Brunetto Latini's pitch that “the science of speaking well and governing men is the noblest of the world's arts,” from his encyclopedia of communal civilization, Li livres dou tresor 1.1.4, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 18; see also Enrico Artifoni, “Boncompagno da Signa, i maestri di retorica e le città comunali nella prima metà del Duecento,” in Il pensiero e l'opera di Boncompagno da Signa, ed. Massimo Baldini (Greve in Chianti: Grevigiana, 2002), 23–36, esp. 24–28.
76. Enrico Artifoni, “I podestà professionali e la fondazione retorica della politica comunale,” Quaderni Storici 21, no. 63 (December 1986): 687–719.
77. Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica novissima 13, ed. Augusto Gaudenzi (Bologna: Petri Virano olim Fratrum Treves, 1892), 296–97, at 297. On the importance of gesture in civic life, consult Jean-Claude Schmitt, Il gesto nel Medioevo, trans. Claudio Milanesi (Rome: Laterza, 1990), 258–62.
78. On these anxieties among the educated elite and the class context of Boncompagno's chapter 13, see Artifoni, “Boncompagno da Signa,” 28–30.
79. Boncompagno, Rhetorica novissima 13 (297).
80. The Lateran Loggia in Rome framed the authority of a sole sovereign assisted by one or two attendants, as seen in the surviving fresco fragment depicting Boniface VIII in the loggia; consult Silvia Maddalo, “Bonifacio VIII e Jacopo Stefaneschi, ipostesi di lettura dell'affresco della loggia Lateranense,” Studi Romani 31, no. 2 (April–June 1983): 129–50. On the judicial use of portals by some twelfth-century bishops, see Christine Verzár Borstein, Portals and Politics in the Early Italian City-State: The Sculpture of Nicholaus in Context (Parma: Istituto di Storia dell'Arte, 1988), 32–38.
81. The earliest of the three miniatures (1190) is more hierarchical: a podesta pictured at a large scale (Manegoldo da Brescia) stands under a single-bay loggia with his consuls off to each side at a smaller scale (Annales ianuenses, BNF MS 10136, fol. 110r; and Belgrano and Imperiale di Sant'Angelo, Annali genovesi, vol. 2, pl. 5).
82. I thank Jill Caskey for bringing this miniature to my attention. On this image, see Marianne Reuter, Metodi illustrativi nel medioevo: Testo e immagine nel codice 132 di Montecassino “Liber Rabani de originibus rerum,” trans. Agostino Marsoner (Naples: Liguori, 1993), 173–74.
83. Bernardino Corio, who had access in 1485–1503 to archives since lost, writes that Matteo “had the marble loggia constructed [constuere]” (Storia di Milano, 638). Before the advent of popular rule, the loggia had belonged to the Osii family (ibid., 480–81). For the building's chronology, see Biscaro, “La loggia degli Osi”; on form and style, Romanini, L'architettura gotica, vol. 1, 283–85. For the 1904 restoration, consult Grimoldi, Palazzo della Ragione, 132–36.
84. For the money changers, see pro-Visconti Galvano Fiamma's Cronicon extravagans, 453.
85. Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica novissima 13 (297).
86. Matteo Villani, Cronaca 7.41 in Cronica, con la continuazione di Filippo Villani, ed. Giuseppe Porta, vol. 2 (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo/Ugo Guanda, 1995), 61. The lot cleared for this “grand loggia” is the site on which the Loggia dei Lanzi (Fig. 19) was later built. For associations drawn between Villani's comment and the Loggia degli Osii, see Nicolai Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298–1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 86. Historians have too often taken Matteo Villani's comments at face value, as Louis Green points out in Chronicle into History: An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 51–52.
87. As early as 1965, some historians began to doubt that communes “failed” because they became battlegrounds between republicans and tyrants; see Philip Jones, “Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 15 (1965): 71–96, reprinted in Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. John E. Law and Bernadette Paton (Farnham,U.K.: Ashgate, 2010), 3–33. On the polemical use of the word tiranno (“tyrant”) in communal Italy, see Rubinstein, “Marsilius of Padua,” 60–61; and Zorzi, Le signorie cittadine, 145–56.
88. See n. 73 above; and on the post-1350 era, Zorzi, Le signorie cittadine, 125–44.
89. On the instability of the semiotics of the loggia in urban spaces, albeit not in northern Italy, see John M. Najemy, “Florentine Politics and Urban Spaces,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. Robert J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19–54, at 36–37.
90. Paolo Zaninetta, Il potere raffigurato: Simbolo, mito e propaganda nell'ascesa della signoria viscontea (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2013), 57–68.
91. The connection between the loggia and the gates was deliberate; see Corio, Storia di Milano, 347–48; Ghislaberti, “Il Broletto,” 7; and Boucheron, Pouvoir de bâtir, 104–8.
92. Romanini, L'architettura gotica, vol. 1, 284.
93. These two coats of arms were either altered or added between 1466 and 1468 by Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza, whose initials, as well as those of his mother, Bianca Maria Visconti, appear above the Visconti viper; see Boucheron, Pouvoir de bâtir, 546–47.
94. Examples of central Italian loggias for visiting magistrates existed in the subject towns of Barga, Certaldo, Pescia, and Cutigliano: see Niccoló Rodolico and Giuseppe Marchini, I palazzi del popolo nei comuni toscani del Medio Evo (Milan: Electa, 1962), 152, 154, 155; and Leonardo Castellucci and Cosimo Bargellini, I palazzi di potere: Storia delle strutture pubbliche delle province di Firenze, Lucca, Pistoia e Pisa (Milan: Libri del Bargello, 1991), 22, 93, 107–11, 123.
95. Classic surveys of central Italian communal palaces include Maria Caterina Faina, I palazzi comunali umbri (Milan: Mondadori, 1957); Rodolico and Marchini, Palazzi del popolo; Francesco Cardini and Sergio Raveggi, Palazzi pubblici di Toscana: I centri minori (Florence: Sansoni, 1983); and Carla Uberti, “I palazzi pubblici,” in L'architettura civile in Toscana: Il Medioevo, ed. Amerigo Restucci (Siena: Monte dei Paschi di Siena, 1995), 151–223. Recent publications on aristocratic towers include Klaus Tragbar, Vom Geschlechterturm zum Stadthaus: Studien zu Herkunft, Typologie und städtebaulichen Aspekten des mittelalterlichen Wohnbaus in der Toskana (um 1100 bis 1350) (Münster: Rhema, 2003); and Aldo A. Settia, Erme torri: Simboli di potere fra città e campagna (Vercelli: Società Storica Vercellese, 2007).
96. Getulio Ceci and Umberto Bartolini, Piazze e palazzi comunali di Todi, ed. Mario Pericoli (Todi: Tiberina, 1979), 65–79; and Samuel David Gruber, “Medieval Todi: Studies in Architecture and Urbanism” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998), 181–86.
97. Artifoni, “Tensioni,” 477–83 (with earlier bibliography); Milani, I comuni italiani, 108–41; and Roberta Mucciarelli, Magnati e popolani: Un conflitto nell'Italia dei comuni, secoli XIII (Milan: Mondadori, 2009), 15–18.
98. For instance, Remigio dei Girolami's De bono communi (1302), Ptolemy of Lucca (see nn. 65 above, 99 below), and Bartolus of Sassoferrato's Tractatus de regimine civitatis (ca. 1330). Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 49–67; Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 76–95; and Robert Black, “Communes and Despots: Some Italian and Transalpine Political Thinkers,” in Law and Paton, Communes and Despots, 49–59.
99. For instance, Ptolemy of Lucca's De regimine principum 4.8.4, 4.18.3; also Rubinstein, “Marsilius of Padua,” 52.
100. On the rise of guild communes, see n. 52 above; and John M. Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 35–182.
101. John M. Najemy, “Guild Republicanism in Trecento Florence: The Successes and Ultimate Failure of Corporate Politics,” American Historical Review 84, no. 1 (February 1979): 53–71, at 57–58.
102. Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 44–75, esp. 71–74. The first quote is from Florentine statutes (1343), as cited by Najemy, “Guild Republicanism,” 60, and 64–67 for similar testimony. The second comes from a letter of 1377 written by Florentine statesman Coluccio Salutati, as cited by Roland Witt, “The De tyranno and Coluccio Salutati's View of Politics and Roman History,” Nuova Rivista Storica 53 (1969): 434–74, at 454–55.
103. The bibliography on magnates is vast, with many publications focusing on individual cities; for a recent historiographic essay, see Carol Lansing, “Magnate Violence Revisited,” in Law and Paton, Communes and Despots, 35–45, esp. 35–39.
104. Florence's Ordinances of Justice (1293–95) are the best-known body of antimagnate legislation, but Bologna's earlier Ordinamenti sacrati e sacratissimi (1282 and 1284) form another, along with decrees contained within municipal law codes such as Pisa's 1313–23 statutes; see the survey in Mucciarelli, Magnati e popolani, 145–74.
105. Jones, Italian City-State, 590–97.
106. Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealths: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
107. War (“guerra”) between the people and the nobles did not stop with the naming of the first podesta: see “La cronica todina di Ioan Fabrizio degli Atti,” fol. 22r, from a part of the chronicle written or just transcribed into Italian in about 1300–1322, edited by Franco Mancini in Le cronache di Todi (secoli XIII–XVI) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979), 123–214, at 133.
108. Gruber, “Medieval Todi,” 201, citing Archivio della Congregazione della Carità, cass. X, no. 102. Another common phrase is “the loggia under the vault”; see Archivio Storico Comunale (ASC), San Gimignano, “Libro di Lettera G,” no. 71, April 29, 1358.
109. For the trumpeters and criers, see Getulio Ceci, Todi nel Medio Evo (1897; Todi: Forni, 1977), 218–19; and for Mantua, see n. 69 above. The podesta could also appear at the foot of the stair, which was originally on the south side but was moved to the north side perhaps in 1267, a staircase that likewise left no traces; see Gruber, “Medieval Todi,” 184–85.
110. Ceci, Todi nel Medio Evo, 142–43, 223.
111. Ceci and Bartolini, Piazze e palazzo, 65–79, and documents 169–350; and Gruber, “Medieval Todi,” 186–88, at 185 on the stair.
112. The gables are seen on the facade of the cathedral of Siena; see Gruber, “Medieval Todi,” 188; see also above.
113. The market took place only on Saturday, at least as of 1275: Gruber, “Medieval Todi,” 179–80.
114. Ceci, Todi nel Medio Evo, 214–16.
115. For statutes enacted by podestas or capitani del popolo in ground-floor loggias other than Todi's, in Pescia, Spello, Lucca, Cortona, and Siena, consult, respectively, Gottlieb Leinz, “Die Loggia Rucellai: Ein Beitrag zur Typologie der Familienloggia” (PhD diss., Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität, 1977), 75; Faina, Palazzi comunali umbri, 91; Rodolico and Marchini, Palazzi del Popolo, 160; Sexton, “A History of Renaissance Civic Loggias,” 370–71; and, for Siena's “loggia in front of the palazzo del podestà,” Michele Cordaro, “Le vicende costruttive,” in Palazzo Pubblico di Siena: Vicende costruttive e decorazione, ed. Cesare Brandi (Siena: Monte dei Paschi, 1983), 29–146, at 140 n. 45.
116. On the Loggia dell'Orologio, see Ivo Ceccarini, S. Gimignano: Palazzo del Podestà, Loggia, Teatro (San Gimignano: n.p., 1981), 19–31.
117. Overlord states like Pistoia, Pisa, Florence, Siena, or Rome supplied podestas to their subject cities. Florence was known to require subject towns to have a loggia to showcase his activities; see David H. Friedman, Florentine New Towns: Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 189. Town halls with ground-floor loggias survive in the subject localities of Fucecchio (first half of the fourteenth century), Palazzuolo sul Senio (loggia possibly ca. 1384), and Sovana (possibly thirteenth century). For these as well as Uzzano, see n. 94 above.
118. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 1991), 31–33, 212–18.
119. Jacques Le Goff, “Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval West,” in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 58–70, esp. 64–67; and Herbert Appelbaum, Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 183–94.
120. Randolph Starn and Loren W. Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 9–80.
121. Ceci and Bartolini, Piazze e palazzi, 4.
122. Pierre Bourdieu, “Champ du pouvoir, champ intellectuel et habitus de classe,” Scolies 1 (1971): 7–26, with elaborations in his The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
123. Some went further to argue the “magnate” was a constructed threat whose defamatory definition merely served to legitimate the guild regimes; see Andrea Zorzi, “Politica e giustizia a Firenze al tempo degli Ordinamenti antimagnatizi,” in Ordinamenti di giustizia fiorentini: Studi in occasione del 7. centenario, ed. Vanna Arrighi (Florence: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1995), 104–48. Recent work emphasizes that the magnates' violence was real: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Retour à la cité: Les magnats de Florence, 1340–1440 (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2006), 109–42; and Lansing, “Magnate Violence Revisited,” 40–45.
124. Cities regulated the height of towers even before antimagnate laws, but Florence's Ordinances of Justice reveal the culture war; quoted in Klaus Tragbar, “‘De Hedificiis communibus murandis …': Notes on the Beginning of Building Regulations in Medieval Tuscany,” in Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Construction History, ed. Malcolm Dunkeld et al., vol. 3 (Cambridge: Construction History Society, 2006), 3117–31, at 3119.
125. Sergio Raveggi discusses instances of the popolo's appropriation of music and spectacle, but not architecture, in his “Appunti sulle forme di propaganda nel conflitto tra magnati e popolani,” in Le forme di propaganda politica nel Due e nel Trecento, ed. Paolo Cammarosano (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994), 469–89.
126. Giovanna Petti Balbi, “Genesi e composizione di un ceto dirigente: I populares a Genova nei secoli XIII e XIV,” in Spazio, società, potere nell'Italia dei comuni, ed. Gabriella Rossetti (Naples: GISEM-Liguori, 1986), 85–103; Cammarosano, “Il ricambio,” 29–40; Klapisch-Zuber, Retour à la cité, 193–238; and Mucciarelli, Magnati e popolani, 61–68. Many noblemen were involved in commerce as well: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Nobles or Pariahs? The Exclusion of Florentine Magnates from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 2 (April 1997): 215–30, esp. 218–19.
127. Tragbar, Vom Geschlechterturm zum Stadthaus, 139–46.
128. Brenda Preyer, “Two Cerchi Palaces in Florence,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, ed. Andrew Morrough et al. (Florence: Giunti, 1985), 613–30. On the Donati-Cerchi feud, see Andrea Zorzi, La trasformazione di un quadro politico: Ricerche su politica e giustizia a Firenze dal comune allo Stato territoriale (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2008), 95–120.
129. Cammarosano, “Il ricambio,” 39. Volterra's Palazzo Pretorio, originally shared by the podesta and the capitano del popolo, was restored in 1846–50, and no images of the building before 1846 survive. However, historian Annibale Cinci (1824–1889) testified to the two side arches being reopened in their original location, while the central arch had never been closed; see Cinci, “Il Palazzo del Potestà,” in Dall'Archivio di Volterra: Memorie e documenti (Volterra: Tipografia Volterrana, 1884), vol. 1, 3–17, esp. 10–13.
130. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, 128–29, 165–78, 223, 256–57, 304 n. 236. The analogies proposed here concern the relation of viewers to one building rather than to an entire piazza in which a loggia might be part of an architectural tableau.
131. The earliest surviving protocol for officials (1415) concerns Florence's Loggia dei Lanzi (Fig. 19): Statuta populi et communis Florentiae: Publica auctoritate, collecta, castigata et praeposita anno salutis MCCCCXV, 3 vols. (Freiburg: Michael Kluch, 1778–83), vol. 2, 501–4.
132. John White, Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 3rd ed. (1957; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987), 50, 61, 80–81; and Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, 176–77.
133. A fresco was commissioned in 1338 for San Gimignano's loggia, but the document could refer to the Loggia del Comune (partially visible at right in Fig. 14): ASC, San Gimignano, Deliberazioni e Provvisioni, NN, no. 64, fol. 6r, for September 3. The Palazzo del Podestà's loggia in Fucecchio (Tuscany) has a fourteenth-century tabernacle framing a sixteenth-century fresco. Daniel da Volterra's 1532 Justice (now in the Volterra Pinacoteca) once graced the interior of the loggia of Volterra's Palazzo Pretorio (Fig. 18): Cinci, “Palazzo del Potestà,” 4, 15–16. For other instances, see Castellucci and Bargellini, I palazzi di potere, 14, 22, 95, 165.
134. The loggia is no longer extant. The contract (1401) is published in Luigi Chiappelli, “Registi e notizie di documenti pistoiesi importanti,” Bullettino Storico Pistoiese 24, no. 4 (1922): 159–62, at 161–62.
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Kim Sexton
Kim Sexton is associate professor of architectural history at the University of Arkansas, specializing in space and civic architecture in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy. She is completing a book on the Italian loggia [Department of Architecture, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Ark. 72701, [email protected]].