The Family Imaginary

Florentines seem to have reflected more on family life in the fifteenth century than at any other time, an impression that may derive from the survival in larger numbers from this period of that quintessentially Florentine genre, the memoir or book of ricordanze. But even within the genre there was heightened concern with the nature of family relations and their affective dimension. Ricordanze began in the fourteenth century chiefly as records of property accumulation and mercantile activity, and then expanded to include genealogies, records of marriages and births, and comments on emotional bonds, typically combining family history, civic chronicle, and personal memoirs with advice and admonition to children and heirs.242 From roughly the midfourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, scores, perhaps hundreds, of such books have survived from both the elite and upper ranks of the popolo, and, together with private letters, they constitute the most important sources for the history of upper-class families. But increasing attention to the family is also evident in government policies and legislation that addressed a variety of problems faced by Florentine families. Paradoxically, Florentines of this era both idealized the family and looked to government to resolve its deficiencies.

Perceptions, even the very meaning, of family varied enormously across the social spectrum. Within the elite, “family” could mean different things: the assemblage of all those bearing the same surname, including lateral branches, often called, in a curious metonym, the “casa” (house), or “consorteria”; the agnatic lineage, or patriline, limited to the branches whose descent from a common known ancestor was recent and well established; and the household, the domestic residential unit of those who lived under one roof, but which also had a number of variations, including the nuclear family of parents with minor children, the patriarchal family of elderly parents and grown children (possibly already married), and the joint-fraternal family of brothers.243 Despite their primary focus on agnates, Florentines were also intensely aware of cognatic kin (through their mothers) and affinal kin (acquired in marriage alliances). Donato Velluti reconstructed the precise relationships of all descendants, both men and women, of his great-grandfather Bonaccorso and also traced his cognatic and affinal kin, naming wherever he could the children (who belonged of course to other lineages) of Velluti women and extending his research to the marriages and children of the in-laws he acquired through his wife, Bice Covoni. Buonaccorso Pitti likewise emphasized the antiquity of his patriline, which he traced back eight generations, and like Velluti he too recorded the lineages with which Pitti men and women had formed marriage alliances. Even as his attention to cognates and affines was mostly limited to his and his father’s generations, he still managed to name almost 400 persons as he surveyed ninety-four marriage alliances (parentadi) with seventy-four lineages (including several into which the Pitti married more than once), thus providing his children with a list of families on which he believed they could rely for help.244 That quite distinct notions of family relations could coexist, for different purposes, in the consciousness of the same person emerges from the contrast between two lists compiled by Giovanni Rucellai: a reconstruction of “the descent of our family” over thirteen generations, embracing 197 persons, mostly men, with only occasional mention of the women who married into the Rucellai and produced all those men; and a record of the patriline’s marriage alliances, beginning with the generation of his paternal grandfather, including not only the women who married the men of the patriline but also these women’s siblings and the siblings’ marriage alliances, altogether a list of 462 persons (345 men and 117 women) that highlights the extensive horizontal networks generated by marriage alliances.245

Such an expansive sense of family relations was possible only for large elite lineages with many marriage alliances. The popolo could try to emulate but could not match elite family histories and genealogies. Giovanni Morelli found among his family papers a notarial act redacted in 1170 in the name of an ancestor identified as Ruggieri son of Calandro son of Benamato son of Albertino. What he wrote about these distant ancestors was pure guesswork, but the precious document allowed him to extend the skeleton of the patriline back hundreds of years. Ruggieri was the father of Morelli’s great-greatgrandfather Giraldo, about whom he knew only that he was born in 1199, exercised the dyer’s trade, and (unlikely as it seems) married a woman from the elite Barucci family. Of his great-grandfather Morello he says that he accumulated wealth and left a greater quantity of documents, joined the Wool guild, and became a consul in 1334. Even about his grandfather Bartolomeo, Giovanni could only say that he was a successful merchant who bought land and married Dea Cigliamochi and had seven children with her. Indeed, Morelli identified the families of the wives of his direct ancestors going back four generations. But information about ancestors down to and including his grandfather was limited in each generation to direct progenitors: except for occasionally acknowledging that there were siblings, he has nothing to say about them or any of their descendants. It is only with his father’s generation that he suddenly gives a wealth of detail about uncles, aunts, cousins, and their spouses and children. Until this point, his historical family is a pure and thin patriline: an unbroken succession from one progenitor to the next.246

For most artisans and laborers, family “history” involved little more than grandparents and their descendants, especially among the majority who lacked a surname and whose patronymics provided a cumbersome way of establishing descent over at most a couple of generations. For these classes the living reality of the family was generally limited to the immediate household, which, as in all classes, could be more or less extended. But working-class households tended to be small. In the quarter of Santo Spirito in 1427, the 357 households with one or more workers in the woolen cloth industry averaged 3.9 persons, and 30% of these residential units consisted of one or two persons, in the latter case usually a childless couple.247 The lack, or weakness, of extended family ties, by whatever definition, may have isolated artisans and workers as much as, or more than, their poverty did. The famous tale of The Fat Wood-carver, in which a group of friends (including the architect Filippo Brunelleschi) play a cruel practical joke in 1409 on a woodcarver called Grasso, persuading him that he is not himself and driving him in despair from the city, presupposes for the success of the prank that Grasso lacked family members to reassure and protect him. There was an actual Grasso, and although both his father and grandfather had served on the priorate (in 1380 and 1369), they were apparently dead by 1409. In the story, Grasso lives with his mother, during whose temporary absence from the city he is isolated and vulnerable to the scheming of his friends.248 Where were the other members of his family? A similar absence of extensive family support networks is evident in the well known real-life story of Lusanna, an artisan’s daughter, who in the 1450s took her claim that she had legally married Giovanni della Casa to the court of Archbishop Antoninus. Noteworthy is the meager presence of Lusanna’s family in her emotional ordeal. Although she had four brothers, one of whom was very much engaged in the legal proceedings, and two half-brothers and a half-sister from her father’s second marriage, the only family members present at the alleged marriage, and later among the witnesses testifying on her behalf, were her stepmother, the one brother and his wife, and some neighbors. Lusanna’s father was an immigrant from Dalmatia, which suggests that recent non-Florentine origins, whether from the contado or elsewhere, contributed to weak or fragmented family ties among artisans and workers.249

In the age of consensus politics and civic humanism, official rhetoric surrounding the Florentine family was all idealization. The matrimonial bond was described in utopian terms. Bruni praised Dante’s decision to marry, and marriage in general, by claiming that “nothing can be perfect where this is lacking, for only this love is natural, legitimate and permissible.”250 Palmieri similarly insisted that “of all the kinds of love of human pleasures, none is greater or more solidly joined by nature than love in the marriage bond,” a “natural” love reinforced by reciprocal affection and by the practical benefits that the partners bestow on one another.251 Similar praises of mutual affection between husbands and wives were expressed by the Venetian humanist Francesco Barbaro and the popular Franciscan preacher Bernardino da Siena. Filial and paternal love was even more lavishly lauded. Although Morelli was not yet three when his father Paolo died, he idealized him to the point of doubting that he could do justice to his father’s “great deeds” and “virtues.” Lamenting his loss, he remarked that among the great injuries suffered by orphans is that of having to exchange “the love and charity of the father toward the son, which is infinite, for that of outsiders, whether relatives or friends.” In remarkable pages of emotional self-examination over the death of his oldest son Alberto at the age of nine, Morelli acknowledged overwhelming love and grief, but especially guilt over never having adequately shown Alberto the extent of his love: “you loved him,” he reproached himself, “and never did you let him be happy in your love.”11 In mid-century Giovanni Rucellai, who, like Morelli, lost his father before he could know him, wrote in his memoirs, the Zibaldone, that “it is said that the greatest love there is, is that of the father for his son.”252 253

Elite Florentines cultivated idealized images of their lineages as well. A cult of genealogies emerged toward the end of the fourteenth century and blossomed in the fifteenth. Rucellai began the Zibaldone with a meticulous genealogical survey of all the family’s branches and a history of the entire clan, emphasizing the family’s political unity. Celebrations of lineage history, solidarity, and glory found expression in both paintings and buildings, and in what has been defined as not only a “cult of ancestors” but a cult of the transgenerational clan, including its past, present, and future members. Upper-class families typically clustered their separate residential units in the same quarter or neighborhood, maintaining ties, influencing local politics, and enhancing the image of the clan as a community bound by affection, loyalty, and common interest.254 Even marriage alliances were idealized. In the Vita civile Palmieri theorizes the emergence from extended patriarchal families of independent lineages and entire consorterie: “At first the whole family [casa] consists in these [sons and grandsons]; then, when they have multiplied and can no longer be suitably gathered in one house, the lineages and large families [le schiatte, le consorterie e copiose famiglie] grow and spread out.” These lineages, he adds, “give and receive in legitimate marriages, [and] through their marriage alliances and their love [toward each other] encompass a good part of the city, whence, being related by marriage, they charitably assist each other, conferring upon each other advice, favors, and assistance, which, in the course of life, result in benefits, advantage, and abundant fruits.”255 Palmieri, who did not come from a great lineage, here fashions a view of “a good part” of the city (even as it excludes most of the population) as an interlocking network of great families, idealizing the marriage alliance as the social institution holding “the city” together and as the source of the love that induces citizens to treat one another as members of one huge civic family.

Most famous among idealized views of the Florentine family is the ambivalent perspective of Leon Battista Alberti, the illegitimate son and grandson of exiles. The Libri della famiglia, written in the 1430s, contain some of the most lyrical and fulsome expressions of love, unity, and solidarity within a great family. Alberti was no doubt representing the ideology and rhetoric of the elite families, but just as surely he injected ironic contradictions and tensions into these representations. At the beginning of the dialogues, as [Leon] Battista’s father Lorenzo is dying, his kinsman Adovardo says that he sees “clearly that you [Lorenzo] want all the others of our house to show the same love for each member of the family, the same concern and active care for the welfare and honor of the whole family, that you yourself have always shown.” He then reassures Lorenzo of their intentions in this regard and begs him not to have doubts: “We want everyone to see that we are good and faithful kinsmen, in all that pertains to the needs and honor of the least member of this house no less than to your sons, who are not the last among those we love.” The irony is that Alberti struggled unsuccessfully against the family for his father’s inheritance; in the autobiographical Vita anonyma, he complains bitterly of his ill-treatment at the hands of relatives. Indeed, the fact that the Alberti spent a long generation in exile is itself ironic commentary on the many statements throughout the Famiglia about the honor that their performance of civic duty and devotion to the patria had earned them among their fellow citizens. Hundreds of similar statements throughout the dialogues have too often been read at face value, as if they were uncritical reflections of Florentine social attitudes and practices and of Alberti’s approval of them. He was indeed reproducing the rhetoric and idealized images of the Florentine family, but also showing that family and civic life regularly contradicted and subverted those images, in which he was by no means a complacent believer.256

Idealized images were one thing, reality another. Florentine families were beset by problems that were not essentially new (a century earlier Dante had already complained, through the voice of Cacciaguida in Paradiso 15.103-8, of rising dowries and sexual practices that kept houses “empty of family”) but that were exacerbated by demographic and marriage patterns after the Black Death. By 1400 Florence was a city of declining population, small households, and large numbers of widows, unmarried men, and illegitimate and abandoned children. As men postponed marriage, the perception at least that homosexual relations were more prevalent became a source of controversy and social anxiety. As political authority became self-consciously paternal, government intervened in a variety of ways to deal with the perceived dysfunctions of family and private life. The results were a combination of welfare legislation and policing of morality. Laws were passed and institutions created to protect orphans, shelter abandoned children, make it easier for fathers to provide dowries for daughters, and adjust inheritance law to help lineages preserve wealth and property. At the same time, government undertooK initiatives to supervise prostitution, expand the prosecution of sodomy, monitor sexual misconduct in convents, and establish a firmer control over confraternities. Although these measures were aimed at different problems and were certainly not parts of a coordinated policy of reform, they emerged from widely held assumptions about the responsibility of the elite ruling class to act as collective and common fathers to the civic family. For the first time, most Florentines accepted that government’s legitimate agenda went beyond war, justice, public order, and taxation to family issues and “private” matters that the political “fathers” of Florence saw as urgent public business. The humanist discourse of social and political virtue coincided once again with the aims of consensus politics, this time to produce an ideology of moral rectitude and conformity that it was government’s duty to oversee and enforce.