Primer acte: tot conquerint el silenci

The new Italian nobility, rising mostly during the second half of the fifteenth century, used visual language in order to promote their newly-acquired titles, and, in part, to maintain the political and social positions in the unstable Renaissance world. Various art forms and formats that were created for this new nobility served clear propagandistic purposes. One of them was the representation of their fiefs as in the case of Piero della Francesca's

"Double Portrait of Duke Federico da Montefeltro and his spouse Battista Sforza", of 1465-70, with Urbinate landscapes shown behind the sitters.

Another was the representation of the living family members in order to avoid doubts about legitimate offspring, as in the case of the Gonzaga's Camera degli Sposi in Mantova, decorated in 1474, in which the members of immediate family were shown together with the courtiers and servants who belonged to the Gonzaga's extended family. The works of art also served to

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communicate a family's or a ruler's allegiances to the most important, contemporary, political authorities, in order to legitimize an illegitimate heir to a throne. Such was the case with Federico da Montefeltro's studio in his Palace in Urbino in which the effigies of the popes Martin V and Sixtus IV served this very purpose.

The supremacy of procession over other ritual modes of behavior in the festivities is notable in both the fifteenth- and the sixteenth-centuries' practices.[3] As political power, though, became centralized in Italian cities, these rituals changed, and a shift of focus can be traced in them: from the moving display of pageantry to the theatrical statement. In them, the central role was played by the central protagonist of power – the ruler, that is – who participated in the spectacles as the focal point of the staged "theatre of the world" which featured rich, and usually arcane, allegories.[4, 5]

The nobility of new Italian aristocracy rested in their virtues as rulers and condottieri as well as in their associations with actual political and religious authorities who granted their rights or by whom they expected honors.[6] However, none of them used the iconography that would elevate either themselves or the members of their families as nobles equal to the highest political authorities of their days. Cosimo I de' Medici, duke of Florence, did, though, as he compared the political and social influence and virtues of his family to the highest authority of his day, to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Figures 1 and 2. Agnolo Bronzino, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, 1545 (oil on wood, 74 x 58, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) and Eleonora of Toledo, 1543 (oil on wood, 46 x 59, Narodni Galerie, Prague)

For his promotion as the rightful ruler of Florence and whole Tuscany Cosimo chose the first grand public occasion staged during his long reign, the

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festivities organized for the celebration of his wedding to Eleonora of Toledo, a daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, the Viceroy of Naples and one of the most powerful noblemen in the Spanish world, in June 1539. The young duke Cosimo understood the role of civic pageantry and spectacle as powerful means of representation of the majesty of the state he governed, reflected in his princely persona, to its citizens and to the foreign visitors alike. These festivities have not received enough scholarly attention yet,² although they deserve more detailed research into their iconography that combined the images featured in Charles V's entries into Italian cities after his coronation in Rome in 1530 [7] and new, original, inventions as a continuation of the project of creating of the Medici iconography, undertaken by Cosimo's predecessor on the Florentine throne, Alessandro de' Medici.

It should be noted here that the Italian civic pageantry was the richest of the late Renaissance, with its aesthetic and intellectual wealth, its creativity and political reasons that were the result of the unique variety of civic institutions. It served as a stimulus to creation of political symbolism and allegory of which the civic pageantry has been made, as a rule. Artists made attempts to create unified, synesthetic, works that would establish closer connections between otherwise fragmentary elements of visual structures of urban architecture and stage design, linking them to literary and musical compositions in allegorical structures of unique richness and invention.³[8]

The fifteenth-century Europe witnessed a focusing upon formal behavior unparalleled in earlier European history, and at the center of this impressive attempt to regulate language of discourse stood European courts whose codes of decent behavior had a profound impact on those who witnessed their mores.[9] Florence proved no exception to this trend, but having no prince and no aristocracy of its own, it focused on the reception of foreign princes, around whom the Florentines affirmed their cohesion and honor. In addition, it was clear, from the onset, that these were not always to be observed in the same fashion, but that their programs were to depend on the "quality of the times" and "of the personages",⁴ that is on the social positions and importance of the visitors.[10]

What started during the fifteenth century as a record of the practices designed to honor foreign dignitaries visiting Florence, ended with Florence adoring its own product, the Medici family. As of 1512, the year of their return to the city (which they were forced to leave in 1494), a decisive change had taken place in Florentine ceremonial lore and sensibilities, as the Medici now returned as foreign dignitaries fully accepted by the feudal and aristocratic world of Europe.[11] The ceremonies differed according to ranks and political

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and social statuses of the visitors. The most elevated ones, the Medici included, the secular lords, were greeted by the citizens of Florence, and there were dinners and feasts organized by the most prominent citizens and the Signoria, and similar. However, although these were described in Manfidi's Libro cerimoniale, in which the festivals that took place in Florence between 1475 and 1522,⁵ were described in some detail, we do not have enough data to reconstruct the apparati and decorations that adorned the streets. Most of them, most probably, were the festoons and tapestries. There were no sumptuous decorations such as those commissioned by duke Alessandro de' Medici for Charles V's entry into Florence in April, 1536, and his daughter's, Margaret of Austria's entry into the City in June, 1536, and which were put in charge of Giorgio Vasari, who described these festive occasions in his letters to his Venetian friend Pietro Aretino.[12]

We would like to note here that the change from the fifteenth-century spectacle and practices related to festivities in Florence to the new visual and allegorical language that developed during the first decades of the sixteenth century was not slow and gradual. It was, rather – we propose – sudden, and we can mark the line that divided the two traditions: the one that preserved the images of the civic and republican order, and the other that largely relied on the language of the promotion of personal princely identity. The one responsible for this remarkable change was duke Cosimo I de' Medici, as he was resolved to represent himself as the rightful ruler of the city to both his subjects and his new relations, the house Spanish branch of the Habsburgs.

Cosimo set to introduce the Medici iconography that served dynastic purposes, as well as the images of the relations between the Medici and the members of the Holy Roman Empire, and of the role played by the Medici (especially by the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII) not only in the history of Florence, but of the Holy Roman Empire as well.

These images were not prominent only in the sumptuous decoration of the streets that were completely transformed by festoons, tableaux vivants, ephemeral architecture, monumental sculpture and relief, and similar: these images were also prominent in the apparati that decorated the facade of the Palazzo Medici at Via Larga, its interior, as well as its inner courtyard, the secondo cortile. This courtyard was transformed into theatre in which a comedy was performed during a banquet held in honour of the bridal couple, Cosimo and Eleonora of Toledo. Its auditorium was turned into a powerful vehicle of the Medici princely display adorned with representations of the history of the family from early fiftieth century, the time of Cosimo il Vecchio, on.⁶

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