Seeing a scholar such as Carolyn Springer,
a professor of Italian language and literature at
Stanford and not an expert in arms and armor, give serious
attention to this field is extremely gratifying. Likewise,
the premise of Springer’s Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance—that
sixteenth-century anxieties about the body and masculine
authority were played out in the increasingly disempowered Italian nobility’s
commission of elaborate decorative and parade armor—is interesting
and valuable. Springer performs the much-needed task
of bringing arms and armor research into mainstream academic
discourse and thus, and while this book remains somewhat unsatisfying
to a historian with an interest in arms, armor, and their
use, it is nonetheless an important step forward for the
field.
Springer’s fairly short monograph is logically organized. The first
half considers the rhetoric of the armored body in three sections: the
first considers the “classical” (inviolate, naturalistic) body
best represented by armor all’antica in imitation of ancient Roman
and Greek armors; the second on the “sacred” body, comprising,
to Springer, any armor with a Christian decorative or apotropaic motif;
and the third on the “grotesque” (compromised, monstrous) body,
best represented by the fanciful creations of sixteenth-century armorers.
Her goal therein is to establish a taxonomy of armor, largely based on
Bakhtin’s interpretation of Rabelais’ ideas of the “grotesque,”
which she employs in the second half of the book.
This latter portion is comprised of three
chapter-long studies in “self-fashioning,”
with one chapter each devoted to Guidobaldo II della
Rovere, the Emperor Charles V and his son Phillip II, and Cosimo I de’ Medici.
Her task in each of these chapters is to show how each of her subjects
deployed armor as part of their overall public-relations scheme. For instance,
she tentatively connects Guidobaldo’s enigmatic “batwing armor,” now
in the Bargello, to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (even though
the latter is usually more associated with the d’Este of Ferrara).
Likewise, Springer (unsurprisingly) connects Leone Leoni’s marvelous
statue of Charles V with its detachable armor to an overall propaganda
scheme likening the Emperor to his Roman predecessors. Charles V might
seem an odd choice, given that he was not Italian, not as politically
vulnerable as lords of the various city-states, and was in fact himself
the cause of quite a lot of cisalpine anxiety, but Springer uses him well
as a foil both for the Italians and for his son Phillip II. For Charles,
armor was an “extension of [the] self”
(131); for Phillip, armor was a “place to hide” (131).
From the perspective of a scholar interested
in the sociocultural meaning of arms, armor, and their use, Springer’s
approach is somewhat unsatisfying. First, she often uses theoretical and
methodological terminology and approaches (i.e., postmodern) that
leave non-initiates out in the cold—which
is unfortunate, since experts in arms and armor would do well to start
thinking about their subject in the ways Springer suggests. Second, Springer
mostly focuses mainly on relatively few well-known and well-published armors,
and to describe the actual pieces in question, she tends to rely on works
by authorities such as Boccia and Pyhrr, often only minimally engaging
with the objects themselves. (Indeed, many of the works Springer discusses
by Filippo Negroli and his contemporaries were exhibited at the Metropolitan
Museum in 1998–99 and appear in the exhibition catalogue.) Notes
[ 1 ] While this is certainly a reasonable approach
for a non-specialist, much of the depth and richness
that could have come from a “close reading” of the pieces themselves
is thereby lost.
In these first three chapters, Springer also
often leans too heavily on only one or two textual primary sources, which
are not always well-chosen. For instance, she makes the thirteenth-century
Dominican, Jacobus de Voragine, key to her chapter on the “sacred body.” Voragine’s Golden
Legend was the jumping-off point for many medieval retellings of the
lives of the saints but provides little insight into
fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth-century spiritualities. To cite another
example, with the motif of Medusa’s head in her third chapter on
the grotesque, Springer turns from a broad background of Medusa in myth
to a dialogue with contemporary interpretation with only a passing reference
to Medusa in emblem books. However, emblem books and elaborations on the Hieroglyphica were
a major means by which the early modern elite communicated with its peers.
Springer thus does not explore what the sixteenth century has to tell us
about its own motif. It is as if her gaze glances off the armor and deflects
towards the modern marketplace of ideas rather than hitting her mark. In
my opinion, the chapters would be of more use those interested in the culture
of arms if Springer has centered on a discussion of contemporary commentaries
on these ideas, as well as their interpretations of common motifs.
Similarly, Springer’s digression on
medieval religious ideologies and practices in the second chapter, though
well read, also disappointingly does not mention such scholars as Richard
Kaeuper and Maurice Keen, who have written extensively on religion and
knighthood and might have suggested other ways in which to engage with
the (male) body combative.[2] Furthermore, the objects she describes seem somewhat
out of place: Springer by and large discusses fourteenth-century
armor and early sixteenth-century field pieces—practical armors, with practical
religious motifs etched into them with the intent of keeping their wearers
physically and spiritually safe—that are very different from the
sixteenth-century dress armors, decorated in sumptuous repoussé,
that she considers in the first and third chapters. In the same way, Charles
V’s use of religious themes in his armor, which Springer discusses
in her fifth chapter, was more propaganda proclaiming him the defender
of the Church than apotropaism (defense against harm), as it is in the
pieces she has chosen to illustrate the “sacred”
body.
Springer rests her discussion of the “grotesque” and “classical” body
in the first and third chapters on the shoulders of one of the giants of
modern academia: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World (1965),
which treated with the grotesque and carnivalesque in
late medieval popular culture but succeeded in redefining “grotesque” for modern
scholarship. We thus get a primer of modern thought on the “classical” and
“grotesque,” but not enough focus on what elite Italian contemporaries
of the great French writer might have thought about what
their classical and grotesque armor meant. Still, the pieces Springer has
chosen as illustrative examples do harmonize with a Rabelaisian idea of
the grotesque, and so, despite the above-mentioned faults, her arguments
are valuable.
The second half of Springer’s work,
showcasing the various case studies, allows the author to engage with
specific personages, objects, and works of literature. Her arguments thus
find purchase. Even so, as with the first section of the book, one wishes
here that Springer had engaged with a wider variety of published and archival
sources and chased her references back to the original documents (besides
the ubiquitous Vasari).
I must also take issue with Springer’s
assumptions and conclusions. Armor was not obsolete on the battlefield
in the sixteenth century—a
“vestigial cultural form,” as she puts it (161)—but rather
the fantastic creations of the Negroli and their colleagues
coexisted with very practical (and bulletproof) field harness.[ 3]
The same is true of tournament armor, which, like the tournament itself,
served a very important practical, political, and rhetorical role. Springer
unfortunately discusses jousting and tournaments very little, though, as
Noel Fallows recently showed, these remained not only but politically important
but a spur to innovation in armor-making well into the sixteenth century.[ 4 ] Likewise, the ruling class of sixteenth-century
Italy negotiated their social roles in a variety of creative
and successful ways, from marriage alliances to civic festivals to taking
service in foreign armies. Therefore, the rhetoric of mastery was indeed
part of the image of the armed man—but it was not an image exclusive to Italy (as Springer
seems to imply by her title) any more than was grotesque armor or armor
all’antica, which was being made throughout western Europe, albeit
perhaps most skillfully by the Negroli.
Armor, and the image of the armed man—as portrayed everywhere from
fifteenth-century religious iconography, to the death-dealing nude figures
in sixteenth-century fencing treatises, to official portraits of an armored
Louis XIV in the seventeenth century—had a pan-European social resonance
that went far beyond the “petty,” “subordinated,” and “marginalized” Italian
nobility “appropriating the imagery of dominance,” as Springer
states in her conclusion (160). Depending on time and
place, it could be at once a statement of social class, virility, fashion,
enfranchisement, political allegiance, faith, ancestry, taste, and prowess,
amongst other attributes. It also had much to do with artistic production
and the migration of techniques and motifs from Italy north of the Alps.
What Springer does successfully show is that the field of arms and armor
scholarship, far from being mere antiquarianism, has the possibility of
informing contemporary academic concerns about masculinity, the body, and
the rhetorical fashioning of the early modern body politic. However, such
concerns must be tempered with an understanding of milieu. It is because
of this, more than anything else, that I found myself growing frustrated
with this book: Springer has chosen a worthy topic, but sees it through
a narrow disciplinary ocularium. Her observations in the case studies are
often intriguing and hint at a potential for broadness; one wishes that
the potential in this work had been fully realized. Nonetheless Springer
has done us a valuable service by being the first to don harness and enter
the lists, and I hope that this is a subject that will be revisited in
the future by scholars who eschew remaking armor to fit the latest intellectual
fashions.
Notes
[1] Stuart Phyrr and Jose A. Godoy, Heroic Armor
of the Italian Renaissance: Filippo Negroli and His Contemporaries (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999).
[2] Richard Kaeuper, Holy Warriors: The Religious
Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press,
2009); Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1984).
[3] See on this, for instance, Tobias Capwell, The
Real Fighting Stuff (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums Publishing, 2007).
[4] Noel Fallows, Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance
Iberia (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010).