City Ritual as a Key to Interpreting Renaissance Genoa
George L. Gorse
Pomona College
During the past generation, scholars and administrators have moved outward from an individual "masterpiece" approach to the history of architecture and historic preservation--a string of "major monuments" linked historically by similarities, influences, "traditions" or relationships of style and building technology--to an urban history of "major monuments" and "vernacular environments," viewed in the context of the inscription of ritual space--the dynamic, ever-changing, yet habitual, performance (the creation, recreation, and contestation) of community.
Certainly, the influence of anthropology on history and the history of art & architecture has been a major catalyst in this disciplinary transformation. In his seminal essay, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," Clifford Geertz argued for a more dynamic notion of culture than that often found in the humanities, which Geertz characterized as a "repository of high culture"--"great books," "great ideas," "great works of art," "great traditions." Geertz criticized the same, rather inert, preserve of "low or popular culture" in anthropology, the social sciences, and social-cultural history, where "customs" become a body of everyday language, expressions, actions, artifacts, etc., "a way of life," the field of inquiry. In the introduction to his essay, Geertz responded:
The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pronouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication.(1)
Following Geertz, other anthropologists, in particular I want to cite Victor Turner and James Clifford, have developed the notion of cultural anthropology and ethnography as interpretive field disciplines. Whether it be the circumscription or linear inscription of ceremonial spaces, places of passage, initiation, transformation, disjunction and reunion with community, what Turner called "liminal spaces" in Ndembu ritual ceremonies of northwest Zambia, or the "anthropology of performance" in everyday life, ritual practices (i.e., prescribed observances; solemn, repeated actions, etc.) become "dynamic" in Turner's analysis, a move from structural to post-structural anthropology.(2) More recently, James Clifford applied cultural anthropology to the study of pilgrimage and, in particular, tourism, as a contemporary form of pilgrimage, passage, representation, transformation, liminality (in-between experiences), in various ancient to modern cultures. In their early book, Victor and Edith Turner wrote a series of case-studies on sustained pilgrimage sites, what they called "liminoid phenomena," from St. Patrick's Purgatory at Lough Derg in Ireland to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico.(3) James Clifford's most recent study, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, continues this line of inquiry, based on the history of medieval pilgrimage to modern tourism (through Le Grand Tour of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries) in what Clifford calls "the production and consumption of culture, memory, myth-making, and power relations" informing "cultural heritage sites," networks, itineraries, and the modern museum as "a major contact zone in the performance of culture."(4)
Historians have much to say about pilgrimage as a prelude to tourism. Here, the work of Peter Brown is particularly important to my views. In his book, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Brown answers Edward Gibbon's classic, Enlightenment interpretation of the decline and fall of Rome with Christianity, by arguing: Rome did not "fall," it was "transformed."(5) Through the fourth and fifth centuries AD, Rome's monumental pagan-civic ritual center persisted with its powerful senatorial families, while alternative communities (an "edge city") arose on the margins, outside the city walls, with basilican hall-burial churches and adjacent garden (paradisal) cemeteries, built by Emperor Constantine (c.317-337 AD), his mother Helena, and other converted senatorial and imperial families, who sometimes gave their suburban villa estates to the cause. Once an oppressed, minor, private, domestic house religion, Christianity gained monumental presence in competition with the pagan center, at the gravesides of martyrs in these "ring cities," not only in Rome but throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world. Re-centering an alternative society, the cult of saints, martyrs, bones, relics, sacred sites and rites, became the new foci of "the holy," where the visible met the invisible; while pilgrimage to Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Campostela, and a myriad of other competing centers, fueled new forms of community throughout the Middle Ages.(6) Pilgrimage, travel under arduous circumstances, brought one into contact with "the holy," places of worship, gathering, community and salvation. The saint, bishop, pilgrim and crusader came together at the grave site, the new place of "aura." Gradually, the edge changed the center of Rome and many other "sacred cities," particularly after the sixth and seventh centuries AD.(7)
Patrick Geary, in his Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, argued that the theft of relics from the Holy Land during the Crusades (after 1096) became a principal part of the social, political, economic, religious, and institutional development of western commercial cities and royal kingdoms. Commerce in relics, sacred spoils, played a key part in ecclesiastical, royal and communal history, the search for power, identity and legitimacy.(8) Religious, royal, and civic rituals framed these relics, powerhouses of "the sacred" in relation to competing elites and lower class audiences within the theatre of church, kingdom, and city.
My own research on Medieval and Renaissance Genoa focuses on triumphal entry ritual as a way of "mapping" the city, reconstructing major routes, monuments, protocols of reception, representation, and ceremonial interaction with foreign powers.(9) Relics played a key part in this nodal matrix of city.(10) Between 1502 and 1548, a series of monumental triumphal entries by French, Spanish, and papal monarchs with their court representatives defined a statecraft, ephemeral in decoration, but of lasting significance in political, religious, and economic terms.(11) Genoa among other Italian city-states became central parts of a larger European system, prescient (in some respects) to modern European unity, always a hotly contested issue.(12) One might interpret these medieval chivalric and Roman style entries as simply the enforcement of authority by northern European powers over smaller, less powerful Italian city-states and southern, Mediterranean kingdoms.(13) But the history of art, contemporary humanist treatises, court and communal chronicle descriptions, diplomatic correspondence, administrative commission documents, print and painted views, drawings and architectural-urban planning, indicate a much more complex interaction--a military-political flow southward and a cultural-monetary confluence northward--central to these and other ceremonial entries and festive processions in the development and performativity of "the early modern state."(14)
For instance, in the Florentine historian, diplomat, professional commander, Francesco Guicciardini's vivid account of the French King Charles VIII's military approach and triumphal entry into Florence in 1494, following the expulsion of Piero de' Medici and his family from the city with the re-establishment of a "popular" republican government, the author observed:
In Florence there were many suspicions about the King's intention, not seeing any hope of resistance either by force or any other way, they had decided (as the last dangerous course) to receive him into the city, even hoping to find some way of placating him. Nevertheless, to be provided against every possibility, they had ordered many citizens to secretly garrison their houses with men of the Florentine domain, and commanded the captains serving in the pay of the Republic to enter Florence, concealing the reason, with many of their troops, and instructed everyone in the city and surrounding towns to be ready to seize arms at the tolling of the great bell of the Public Palace.
The King made his entry with his army, in the greatest pomp and display, all magnificently and carefully prepared both by his court as well as the city of Florence; and as a sign of victory, he entered, both himself and his horse in armor, and with his lance on his thigh. Negotiations for an agreement were immediately embarked upon, but with great difficulties. For, aside from the excessive favor which several of the King's party manifested for Piero de' Medici, and the inordinate demands for money which were put forward, Charles openly claimed rule of Florence, alleging that, by having entered armed in that manner, he had, according to the military rules of the realm of France, legitimately gained dominion. Ultimately, however, he withdrew that demand; yet he wanted to leave in Florence certain Ambassadors of the Long Robe (as doctors and persons wearing gowns are called in France) with such authority that, according to French institutions, he would have been able to claim considerable jurisdiction for himself in perpetuity. The Florentines, on the contrary, were most stubbornly determined to maintain their liberty entirely, notwithstanding any peril. The collision of such diverse points of view at the conferences continually enflamed passions on both sides. Nevertheless, neither party was disposed to settle their differences by arms; for the Florentines, long habituated to business affairs and not military activities, were terribly afraid of having within their own walls a most powerful king with a mighty army manned by ferocious and unknown peoples; and the French were very apprehensive of the great number of inhabitants, who had shown, on the day the [Medici] government was overthrown, many more signs of audacity than would have been believed before. The French were also aware of the public rumor that at the sound of the great bell [in the Palazzo Signoria], innumerable men from all the surrounding towns would flock into the city. As a result of these common fears, there often arose unsubstantiated alarms, at which each party would tumultuously seize their weapons in self-defense, but neither side would provoke or assault the other.(15)
From the Romantic, nineteenth-century perspective of Burckhardt and other scholars, artists and writers, Medieval and Renaissance ceremonies (indeed, all "artistic collaborations," for example, cathedral building, etc.) were spontaneous, public affirmations of community, all classes working together in "the great Age of Faith."(16) But from the perspective of contemporary sources, these were culture clashes--complex, conflict-ridden spaces of mutual incomprehension, fear, anxiety, potential and actual violence, tentative accommodation, negotiation, and otherwise--out of which ceremonial procedures emerged for whatever cause. These were dangerous liminal spaces; they were processes of negotiation, works in progress, not simple affirmations.
I have tried to apply this immediate concept of liminality--in-between spaces of mutual incomprehension and recognition, competing representations--to my own research. During the first two triumphal entries of the French into Genoa in 1502 and 1507, we see two very different dynamics of interaction: the first celebratory, the second punitive. In celebration and confirmation of the alliance between Louis XII and Genoa in August 1502, the monarch and his court arrived by land from Milan at the Lantern entrance to the harbor.(17) Beneath his royal canopy, held by representatives of Genoa, with sword of state in hand, the king encountered a series of tableaux, paintings in praise of the French and the commune. These represented a process of negotiation between monarch and city (right on the street), part of the royal progress at key points, where orations, formal receptions, and theatrical presentations were performed: first at the Lantern, then in front of the city gates, and finally at the Cathedral, where the king celebrated mass and paid homage to Genoa's sacred relics before going to the communal palace for audiences and formal negotiations. According to documents, arena (sand) was spread on the streets for the horses from the Lantern through the city, marking a "white road" for "la joyeuse entrée." At a key point next to the communal coat-of-arms on the (now open) fortified city gate of San Tomaso, the urban boundary and frontispiece, an elaborate apparatus was set up with "a spectacle of greenery all covered with apples, pomegranates and oranges like a chapel, at the top of which was attached the escutcheon of France with arms all plain to see." This evocation of a "Golden Age of Plenty," peace, prosperity, abundance and good government, carried through the city, where "the streets were hung and adorned with tapestries and fabrics, works with life-like, speaking images; the streets were filled with ladies and young girls, of the middle and merchant class, all in white robes, and all beautifully and richly adorned, who resembled nymphs and mythological goddesses more than human women. All the great street [to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo] was spread and made green with flowering branches and palms of oranges and pomegranates, planted with green apples hanging from the branches of the same trees." A gendering of city takes place here through classic (feminine) pastoral and chivalric illusion. Both the French and Genoese commissioned chronicle accounts, reflecting cross-cultural perceptions of the ceremonial and political events.(18) During the next ten days, sumptuous entertainments at the communal palace and country villas of leading Genoese nobles, in particular the Fieschi family, connected the monarch to the city through elaborate festive displays and a closely monitored itinerary of symbolic interaction. August 26, the date of Louis' triumphal entry, became an annual holiday.
1507 was another matter. The previous year saw an uprising by artisan guilds and the expulsion of Genoese nobles, the Fieschi and French governor, from the city. Louis XII now returned with an army to retake Genoa by storm to punish the betrayers. The conquest complete, Louis purposefully retraced the 1502 triumphal entry route and routine, this time "en armes."(19) Still wearing his suite of armor with sword drawn, now an implement of conquest rather than a symbol of state, Louis converted the entry into a ritual of castigation; for the Genoese, a chance, in the context of ceremony, to beg for mercy, to avoid being sacked, a frequent reward for resistance and disloyalty. Vividly, French chroniclers describe thirty weeping representatives, dressed in black, kneeling before the monarch beyond the Lantern, the normal outer limit of reception; instead of singing his praises, they pleaded for clemency, crying "Misericordia!" Reciprocal rituals of vengeance and penitence followed. The "stop" and "go" patterns of ritual unfolding now were broken through by the king. At the Lantern and again at the city gate of San Tomaso, Louis refused the pleas of mercy from the Genoese, marching straight through the gate, without pause, "striking it with his sword as he passed." So the forced entry, vengeful violation rolled on, right to the Cathedral. Along the way, rich tapestry hangings, joyful displays of plenty were replaced by bare palace facades and displays of sorrow by groups of kneeling young girls, again dressed in white, with palm branches in hand, pleading for royal pardon. While Louis celebrated mass in the Cathedral, his soldiers secured the city, placing gallows (not festive tableaux) at the principal crossroads, soon decorated by leaders of the revolt for public edification. Paolo da Novi, leader of the rebellion, was captured, summarily drawn and quartered, his four body parts placed on the four principal city gates, compass point rejoinders to the 1502 floral plenty. All the arms of the citizens were confiscated and placed (like trophies) in the chapel of the communal palace, where Louis now resided, not in the suburban villa of the Fieschi. Genoa lost even the semblance of communal autonomy. Extraordinarily, Louis summoned Genoese representatives to the courtyard of the communal palace, center of civic authority, where the Genoese were forced to kneel before the king and his court on their raised platform. A French orator, speaking in Italian so nothing would be missed, then addressed them, comparing Louis to Camillus, savior of the Roman republic, the two conquerors, Scipio Africani, and other Roman heroes "praised for their virtue of temperance, for which without doubt the Most Christian King is worthy of great praise;" and the orator went on to lecture the Genoese in the courtyard of their communal palace on the principle of "Sub iusto principe vivere summa est libertas" ("To live under a just prince is the supreme liberty"). Recounting Genoese perfidy, the French orator compared their revolt to Adam's Original Sin against God, and to Hannibal and Carthage's treachery against Rome, among other primal crimes. "After this harangue, the Genoese pledged their fidelity to His Majesty, and watched as their book of privileges, franchises and liberties was brought out on stage, torn up and burned before their eyes. A new book was dictated to them, placing the city, its government and sovereignty directly in French hands."(20) The sack never came, but all else vanished through ceremonial reversal, played out within (and on) the canvas of the city and communal center.
Twenty years later, the situation changed. The Genoese admiral Andrea Doria led a revolt of the Genoese against the French, expelling them from the city in September 1528, a culmination of the Italian wars. Doria led the nobles in re-establishing an artistocratic republic on the model of Venice, allied to the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, clearly the victor over the French and papal forces after the Sack of Rome in May 1527. Soon thereafter, Charles V's triumphal entry into Genoa and his imperial progress through Italy for coronation by a humbled Pope Clement VII de' Medici in Bologna in February 1530, redefined relations between northern Europe, Italian principalities and communes.(21) A Roman "Augustan" style became the visual language of representation and interrelation between the Hapsburg empire and the Genoese patrician republic, which became the banking and commercial center of the Hapsburgs through the seventeenth century. Charles V's triumphal naval entry into Genoa in August 1529, highlighted his alliance with admiral Andrea Doria and the new iconography of Mediterranean rule. From the harborfront to the Cathedral of Genoa, the Florentine artist, Perino del Vaga, a student of Raphael and court painter to Andrea Doria, designed a triumphal arch sequence in Roman classical style, the first major example of this monumental idiom in Genoa, a strong indication of its ceremonial importance to the new republic and Hapsburg alliance. On the harborfront (inscribed "arco di molo di Genova"), Perino designed a single triumphal arch surmounted by the Hapsburg eagle over paired Doric columns, a reference to the Hapsburg Plus Oultre (More Beyond) emblem, symbolic of the paired columns of Hercules at the Straits of Gibraltar and the world empire beyond. Halfway to the Cathedral, a second triple arch elevated Justice with sword and scales above scenes of Roman imperial governance in an elegant perspective style. Together, these drawings respatialized congested, medieval Genoa into a spacious "new Rome" by fictive allusion to the single Arch of Titus and triple Arch of Septimius Severus sequence on the Sacred Way, leading through the Roman Forum. Temporary festive architecture in wood and painted canvas transformed Genoa into a "second Rome," entry port into Italy and the Mediterranean kingdom.(22)
During the mid sixteenth century, festive architecture became a monumental Roman Renaissance urban style in Genoa. Outside the city gates of San Tomaso, the Villa of Andrea Doria took over the suburban field of civic representation, identifying the admiral with the harbor, city and republic. Perino del Vaga's open, U-shaped, Hellenistic, Florentine arcade style of painted architecture created a ceremonial sequence of sumptuous decorations and formal gardens for the reception and entertainment of the court and emperor.(23) The Villa Doria became a "state within the state" to quote Machiavelli. Above the medieval city, a new Roman Renaissance perspective palace street, called by contemporaries the Strada Nuova or Via Aurea (Golden Street), gave Augustan prominence to the temporary Roman illusionism of the triumphal entry scenography. A balanced series of Roman block palaces were commissioned by major members of the Genoese old noble families who controlled the republic and the Hapsburg banking aristocracy.(24) During the second half of the sixteenth century, the old noble palace precinct lent ceremonial focus to the representation of Genoa for foreign monarchs, dignitaries and visitors. By the early seventeenth centuries, a parade of European travelers redescribed Genoa as an integral part of Le Grand Tour, a prelude to modern tourism.(25) The Genoese Roman palace street signified the city within the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire and New World trade. Apparently, experimental architecture from the 1529 and other Roman triumphal entries tested ideas and audience responses, paving the way for permanent residential and civic architecture and urban planning, fashioning the ceremonial protocols and avenues of the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By the Baroque Age of Absolutism, Genoa was lionized as an architectural style of European nobility by northern court artists, in particular, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck.
In closing, one would recommend that Genoa reconstruct the ceremonial routes and festive architecture which played so important a part in redefining the urban landscape. This temporary architecture is lost, but eminently reconstructible from extant drawings and scholarly collaboration. A second recommendation would be to plot the various civic and religious processional routes, protocols, receptions and travel descriptions of the city as a way of making urban history more vital and dynamic, more about people than simply about buildings. This might be done by an interpretive marker system through the city or a computer simulation of the city on site or in the context of a Museum of the City, by no means an entombment of city. Such would be an opening of the city to the fourth dimension of history, time, and narrativity--the stories that cities have to tell. Each city, I would suggest, needs a Museum of the City, which focuses on urban history, historic preservation, population, and ritual functions of daily and extraordinary urban experiences from the various vantage points of class, race, and gender. This particular focus on the history of cities often falls between local historical societies and art museums, and this would become a road map to modern tourism and economic development. A guided tour of a city through an interpretative marker system or in virtual reality becomes a major pedagogical device in the recreation of past and present, the revitalization of city life. The city is a great story teller, and if it is true that we are the stories we tell, then it holds that we need to tell as many stories that cities have to tell, rather than regarding cities simply as empty shells.
NOTES
1.
2. V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967; Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, NY: PAJ Publications, 1987. Also, G. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, NY: Zone Books, 1994.
3. V. and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives, NY: Columbia University Press, 1978.
4. J. Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, passim. Also J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 1-26.
5. E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776, University of Chicago Press, 1952; P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, University of Chicago Press, 1981; Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, 3-62.
6. For the ceremonial functions of the seven great station churches of Rome as locations, objectives, an itinerary for pilgrims in the Eternal City during the Middle Ages, see R. Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals: Topography & Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. For Renaissance and Baroque axial planning in Rome, which gave perspective unity and monumentality to this pilgrimage conception of city: R. Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655-1667, Princeton University Press, 1985.
7. One thinks of Pope Sixtus III's monumental Ionic basilican hall church of Santa Maria Maggiore with comprehensive biblical mosaic cycle between 432-440 AD near the center of Rome, and Pope Boniface IV's rededication of the Pantheon from a pagan temple and imperial monument to all the gods, to the Church of Sta. Maria Rotunda and all the saints in 609 AD, critical moments in the transformation of the center and early rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary, not only as an image but the embodiment of the Catholic Church and papal power in Rome. See R. Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308, Princeton University Press, 1980, passim.
8. P. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, Princeton University Press, 1978.
9. Following are reflections, an overview with recommendations, based on a previous study, where one can go for details on these ceremonial entries: G. Gorse, "Between Empire and Republic: Triumphal Entries into Genoa during the Sixteenth Century," "All the world's a stage...": Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. B. Wisch & S. Munshower, University Park, PA: Papers in Art History from The Penn State University, vol. VI, 1990, pt. 1, 188-257. Previous urban histories of Genoa, which trace its ancient Ligurian and Roman to Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern histories, include: L. Grossi Bianchi and E. Poleggi, Una città portuale del medioevo: Genova nei secoli X-XVI, Genoa: Sagep Editrice, 1980; E. Poleggi and P. Cevini, Le città nella storia d'Italia--Genova, Rome: Laterza, 1981. For contemporary accounts of royal triumphal entries and religious processions from the end of the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, see the famous series of Genoese civic chroniclers: Annali genovesi di Caffaro e dei suoi continuatori, Genoa, 1923-29, 7 vols.
10. For, Genoa, see Geary, Furta Sacra, passim.
11. A panorama of Italian and European triumphal pageantry is given by B. Mitchell, Italian Civic Pageantry in the High Renaissance: A Descriptive Bibliography of Triumphal Entries and Selected Other Festivals for State Occasions, Florence, 1979; Mitchell, The Majesty of the State: Triumphal Progresses of Foreign Sovereigns in Renaissance Italy 1494-1650, London, 1984; J. Jacquot, ed., Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, 3 vols., Paris, 1960; and B. Wisch and S. Munshower, "All the world's a stage...".
12. Genoa became the banking and commercial center of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire, including Spain, Flanders, Austria, the Catholic principalities of Germany, and the New World, as a result of the Italian wars. This "Golden Era" of Genoese history and its economic implications are told by R. Lopez, "Predominio economico dei genovesi nella monarchia spagnola," Giornale storico e letteratario della Liguria, XII (1936), 65-74.
13.European dominance certainly is suggested by the history of the Italian wars--which Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and other contemporary commentators called "the crisis of Italy," or the end of Italian Early Renaissance city-state autonomy--from France's first peninsular invasion in 1494 to the Sack of Rome in 1527 by Spanish, German, and Swiss mercenary troops of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. For this devastating period, see C. Ady, "The Invasions of Italy," The New Cambridge Modern History I: The Renaissance 1493-1520, ed. D. Hay, Cambridge University Press, 1976, 343-367; and F. Spooner, "The Habsburg-Valois Struggle," The New Cambridge Modern History II: The Reformation 1520-1559, ed. G. Elton, Cambridge University Press, 1976, 334-358.
14. It was the classic first chapter on "The State as a Work of Art" of Jakob Burckhardt's Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, published in Basel in 1860, that launched the retrospective study of Renaissance statecraft, secular notions of state, power, the selective use of violence, and constitutional theory as "the origins of the modern state." Ceremonial rituals played an integral part in Burckhardt's argument on the development of "modern" notions of state: J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. G. Middlemore, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1965, 1-80; also chap. 5 on"Society and Festivals," 217-260.
15. F. Guicciardini, The History of Italy, trans. S. Alexander, NY: Collier Books, 1969, Bk. I, pp, 62-63.
16. See Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, chap. 5. "Society and Festivals," 217ff., etc.
17. For details, Gorse, "Between Empire and Republic," 190-192.
18. The quotations above come from the famous French, eyewitness, court chronicle, sumptuously illuminated in deluxe manuscript: Jean D'Auton, Chroniques de Louis XII, vol. III, ed. R. de Maulde La Clavière, Paris, 1893, 43-85. See Gorse, "Between Empire and Republic," 190. For Genoa, the humanist chancellor's acccount by B. Senarega, De rebus genuensibus commentaria ab anno MCDLXXVIII usque ad annum MDXIV, ed. E. Pandiani, in L. Muratori, Rerum italicarum scriptores, XXIV, Bologna, 1932.
19. For this chilling account: Gorse, "Between Empire and Republic," 192-193.
20. D'Auton, Chroniques, IV, 260-277.
21. For the context and Roman style of the triumphal entries of Charles V into Genoa in 1529 and 1533, see Gorse, "Between Empire and Republic," 193ff.
22. Archival documents reveal the hasty process of erecting these architectural sceneries, plagued by labor shortages, lack of materials, high prices, last minute drawings, etc. Completed just before the emperor's arrival, these sources provide a healthy antidote to the solemn effect of permanence they created. Even more noteworthy, the documents reveal the extraordinary measures taken to insure crowd control and the security of the city from foreign and domestic enemies during the imperial visits, another reminder of the vulnerability of ritual rather than simply its affirmation. During the triumphal entry of Charles V's son, Prince Philip, in 1548, fighting broke out between Spanish guards and unnamed Genoese right in the middle of the ceremonies, resulting in the closure of the city for three days of high tension and negotiation. Ritual space was forever vulnerable, prone to disruption and contestation. See Gorse, "Between Empire and Republic," 194ff. and 216ff.
23. For these Raphaelesque, Roman Mannerist decorations and their spatial sequence: Gorse, "Between Empire and Republic," 198ff.
24. For this major Renaissance axial palace street: G. Gorse, "A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility: The Strada Nuova and Sixteenth-Century Genoa," Art Bulletin, 79 (1997), 301-327.
25. In particular, the Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. W. Bray, London, 1857, I, 84-88. Other descriptions in E. Poleggi, Strada Nuova, una lottizzazione del Cinquecento a Genova, Genoa: Sagep Editrice, 1968, appendix.