INTRODUCTION
At the dawn of the sixteenth century, the precocious student Pomponio Gaurico (ca. 1482–1530) devoted a Latin dialogue entirely to sculpture. This extraordinary endeavor merited justification.Footnote 1 He therefore recounted the text's origins in Padua when dedicating it to Duke Ercole I d'Este (1431–1505):
Nothing seemed more worthy of being sent to you than this book on sculpture, as no one has yet been able to write exhaustively on this topic, and because nothing was more noble and suitable to celebrate your immortality than this art. I thought therefore to explicate for you the entirety of this art, but chance impeded me from doing so. As I was in Padua last summer, I enjoyed a visit with Raffaele Regio, an exceptional professor of Greek and Latin. . . . One day, having come to find me in the άγαλματουργίῳ—this is the name for a studio in the home—he saw certain works in bronze and marble, and we promptly began discussing sculpture. As the conversation was varied and multifaceted, I thought it worthwhile to recount it for you.Footnote 2
The ensuing dialogue was the product of self-interest, not a record of conversation. Gaurico's De Sculptura (1504) represented a presumptive bid for support from a preeminent patron of humanists and artists, but any such aspirations were foiled by Ercole's death one month after the text went to press. Publication meant it still found Renaissance readers, who would have noticed Gaurico's leveraging of his situation in the university city of Padua. An amateur sculptor, Gaurico set his Ciceronian dialogue in a workspace populated with sculptures to validate his fusion of classical erudition with empirical knowledge.Footnote 3 The dialogue was remarkable for invoking Virgil, Pausanias, Pliny, and others alongside Gaurico's own heuristic expertise in testing different recipes for sculptural molds for bronzes.Footnote 4 Straddling the vanguards of humanist learning and bronze casting, Gaurico conjured a distinctly Paduan means to join workshop and studiolo, artisanry and scholarship, praxis and theory.
But is the ambitious De Sculptura a reliable window onto sculptural production in Renaissance Padua? Past scholarship has explored the text's treatment of perspective, physiognomy, and other principles in relation to sculptors who worked in Padua, including Donatello (1386–1466) and Tullio Lombardo (ca. 1455–1532).Footnote 5 Among the artists mentioned in the De Sculptura, only Andrea Briosco (known as Riccio [ca. 1470–1532]) earned Gaurico's designation as his friend.Footnote 6 Riccio is renowned for his surviving bronze sculptures, and this biographical detail has helped sanction scholars’ longstanding association of him with humanism and antiquities collecting.Footnote 7 These affinities gain credence through the classical subjects of Riccio's bronze commissions and patronage ties with humanists such as Pietro Bembo (1470–1547).Footnote 8 Riccio's perceived artistic parity with antiquity was even immortalized on his tomb epitaph.Footnote 9 It therefore seems fitting that Riccio has recently been declared “the epitome of the humanist sculptor.”Footnote 10
The enduring alignment between Riccio and humanism has been productive but risks becoming prescriptive. The application of the term humanist to artists can overdetermine assessments of their output by limiting their perceived sources and strategies, as Stephen J. Campbell has recently shown for Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506).Footnote 11 Approaching humanism through its philologically rigorous revival of classical antiquity, this article recognizes it not as Riccio's singular lodestar but as one of several traditions reconciled through his work.Footnote 12 Padua was home to a thriving bronze industry since Donatello's time, and Riccio heralded later generations of sculptors who produced bronze statuettes that invoked this ancient genre.Footnote 13 In sixteenth-century Italy, small bronze sculptures became a fixture of elite household collecting endeavors, especially in studioli.Footnote 14 Riccio's statuettes stood apart for outstripping antique sources rather than straightforwardly emulating them. This was recognized in 1962 by Eugenio Battisti, who claimed that Riccio tapped into a local, bygone lore of Renaissance fables and fantasy outside Greco-Roman influence.Footnote 15 Battisti subsequently gestured toward an affinity between Riccio and the innovative Paduan writer Angelo Beolco (known as Ruzante [ca. 1494–1542]), dubbing them “heroes of the Antirenaissance.”Footnote 16 While Battisti's oppositional framework minimized Riccio and Ruzante's debt to humanist achievements, his association of them merits revisiting. No scholars since have devoted sustained, relational analysis to Riccio and Ruzante, even though both recognized the possibilities afforded by the interplay of vernacular dialects in Padua. The city long fostered connections between painting and different literary languages, as Michael Baxandall and others have shown,Footnote 17 but bronze sculpture, plurilingualism, and theater have been sidelined from this history.Footnote 18 Taking a wider view of Paduan culture in a pivotal moment of geopolitical upheaval, it becomes apparent how Riccio transformed the possibilities of Renaissance bronze statuettes by empowering them to address the interrelated linguistic, literary, and social conflicts that governed Ruzante's writing.
BRONZE AND THE POSTBELLUM PASTORAL
It has recently been established that Riccio's brother owned a manuscript of Ruzante's earliest play, La Pastoral (ca. 1517–18). This sole extant version of La Pastoral was transcribed in 1521 by the Venetian Stefano Magno (ca. 1499–1572) from an antigraph copy he had obtained in Padua while his father was captain of the city.Footnote 19 On the basis of an inscription in the manuscript, Francesco Piovan convincingly identified the lost antigraph manuscript's owner as Battista Briosco di Ambrogio (d. ca. 1531), Riccio's sibling and a goldsmith himself.Footnote 20 As Riccio and his brother lived most of their lives under one roof or in adjacent homes, La Pastoral would assuredly have been known to Riccio.Footnote 21 Scholars have identified Riccio's sculptures of shepherds, goats, and satyrs with the pastoral, given its associations with an idealized rural setting and livestock herding.Footnote 22 This discovery, however, necessitates consideration of what it meant for Riccio to have access to Ruzante's claims for the pastoral in a text that joined multiple vernacular dialects. The foundational ancient pastoral sources, Theocritus’s Idylls and Virgil's Eclogues, had long spawned Renaissance commentaries and imitations across languages.Footnote 23 There was no accepted definition of the pastoral in Riccio and Ruzante's era, and the discrepant theoretical literature aiming to define it largely postdated their output.Footnote 24 Riccio and Ruzante used the pastoral's pliancy to their advantage, renegotiating not just what it was but how it could be used.
The title of Ruzante's play signaled a polemical stance toward the pastoral, a literary battleground that Riccio's bronze statuettes accessed through subject matter. The mythological deity most closely associated with the pastoral, the half-goat Pan, was vital to Ruzante's play and Riccio's bronze production. Statuettes of human-caprine figures are closely identified with Riccio and his workshop, surviving in abundance and variety.Footnote 25 Whether interpreted as the ancient Greek god Pan, his attendant satyrs, his Roman counterpart Faunus, or Faunus's concomitant fauns, such hybrids were productive in the Renaissance as characters evocative of the pastoral.Footnote 26 Virgil situated Pan in Arcadia and pioneered a practice of confronting political and linguistic matters through the pastoral, and Riccio and Ruzante followed suit partly by invoking such emblematic, cloven-footed beings. Pan and company's hybrid nature placed them at the nexus of what Peter Burke deemed a mutually reinforcing “hybridization” of languages and media in Renaissance Italy.Footnote 27 It was precisely this linguistic interchange that Gaurico resisted in his De Sculptura: its studious Latin aligned with his vehement opposition to sculptures of unreal hybrid beings, including satyrs.Footnote 28 Scholars have struggled to reconcile this polemic in Gaurico's text with his friend Riccio's prolific output of satyr statuettes, which is resolved by recognizing Riccio as an independent thinker capable of engaging critically with the content and plurilingualism of La Pastoral.
The commonalities between Riccio and Ruzante's work reflect their responses to tumult in Padua that unsettled humanist learning and gave urgency to local vernacular culture. The city's inhabitants honored its ancient preeminence by studying and collecting remnants of the classical past, particularly following its domination in 1405 by Venice, an urban republic of medieval origin believed to have been founded by Paduans. Padua briefly flirted with independence during the War of the League of Cambrai (1508–16).Footnote 29 The invading League's forces overthrew Venetian rule in May 1509 and fostered Padua's short-lived republic, which was quashed by Venetian reconquest within two months. Padua's humanist accomplishments were no match for frenzied battles and military occupation, and its storied university shuttered for nearly the war's entire duration.Footnote 30 The conflict interrupted Riccio's most significant bronze commission, his Paschal Candelabrum (1507–16) for the Basilica di Sant'Antonio in Padua, known as the Santo (fig. 1), said to have borne a lost inscription noting the martial cause of its delayed making.Footnote 31 Ruzante directly mentioned the war at the beginning of La Pastoral, raising the implied question of how local creative enterprises could persist after military horror.Footnote 32 The subsequent scenes of La Pastoral responded by giving voice to multiple vernacular dialects through characters who confronted acute suffering in the aftermath of the bloodshed.
Figure 1. Andrea Riccio. Paschal Candelabrum. 1507–16. Padua, Basilica di Sant'Antonio. Scala / Art Resource, NY.
While Ruzante addressed violence via speech, Riccio did so through metal. His statuettes were inherently bound to war because of their medium, as bronze was the engine of conflict through the production of artillery.Footnote 33 The Venetian republic operated a foundry in Padua known as the Maglio, which had been used for making different bronze objects but was directed in the sixteenth century to cast artillery and produce gunpowder.Footnote 34 The metallic medium put statuettes and weapons in a zero-sum game: tin, a principal ingredient of bronze, was essential for well-functioning artillery, and Venice's authorities passed regulations requiring that the highest-quality tin be used for its guns, not bronze objects for private clients.Footnote 35 Indeed, during the War of the League of Cambrai, Venice conspicuously forewent the medium of bronze when erecting equestrian monuments on the tombs of its fallen mercenary captains; instead, the monuments were made of wood.Footnote 36 Operating on an intimate scale, Riccio's bronze statuettes formed Padua's postbellum riposte, recasting a material of military subjugation into a means of local valorization. This was a delicate matter, however, as not all Paduans supported independence at the price of Habsburg control, and after Venetians rebuffed the Habsburg imperial forces’ attempt to reclaim Padua in September 1509, Venice's grip on the city tightened definitively.
Confronting the aftermath of this conflict, Riccio and Ruzante used the pastoral to play a double game, celebrating Padua's achievements in humanist learning, artisanal knowledge, and popular vernacular traditions without necessarily alienating Venetian patrons and sympathizers. Venice regularly used economic levers to domineer its mainland holdings, which intensified in postwar Padua. The Venetians confiscated Paduan rebels’ property and in 1517 began a comprehensive survey of all Paduan land holdings for taxation purposes.Footnote 37 As the son of Padua's Venetian captain responsible for this endeavor, Magno (the copyist of Ruzante's manuscript held by Riccio's brother) exemplified the cities’ intertwined financial and cultural endeavors.Footnote 38 Venetian hegemony permeated Paduan creative expression, including in architecture, public speech, and writing.Footnote 39 For example, a vernacular poem in a propagandistic, pro-Venetian pamphlet about the siege of Padua staked its truthfulness on recounting the realities of victory in captivating detail, obviating its audience's need for entertainments including satyrs, fauns, sylvans, and “nymphs with their enchantments.”Footnote 40 Yet satyrs were precisely the type of creature through which Paduans could best respond to the devastating war. The lost Edenic countryside inhabited by Pan and his retinue contrasted with the city's surroundings, riven by war and freshly demarcated along property lines.Footnote 41 Pan was no pacifist, however: his trademark panic not only inspired intellectual ecstasy, but it also represented martial disorder historically exploited by tacticians.Footnote 42 Indeed, Pan's bellicosity could be channeled into bronze, as in a sixteenth-century Paduan culverin cannon with a satyr-like mask for its vent (fig. 2).Footnote 43 When Riccio rendered a caprine man into a bronze statuette, material and subject were redirected toward peaceful aims. His artisanry implicitly recast the biblical adage of swords to plowshares as cannons to statues.
Figure 2. Giovanni da Sant'Ursula (designed); Vincenzo Grandi (possibly modeled and cast). Culverin Cannon. 1577. London, The Wallace Collection. © Wallace Collection / Bridgeman Images.
Padua and Venice's mutual desire not to host the theater of war explains the viability of Riccio and Ruzante's output in both cities. Analyzing Riccio's statuettes under the rubric of pastoral sculptures, Jodi Cranston has demonstrated how they could adorn the homes of Venice's elites to match a greened imaginary of the unscathed lagunar city.Footnote 44 Ruzante, too, found success in Venice by performing for individuals whose riches partly derived from his mainland hometown.Footnote 45 Ruzante navigated the triangular relationship between Venice, Padua, and the Paduan countryside by setting La Pastoral in the latter while orienting it to urban audiences. It is not known where or if La Pastoral was performed,Footnote 46 but Venetian and Paduan audiences would have been equally invested in its representation of the Paduan rural poor, a group largely supportive of Venice during the war.Footnote 47 Rural peasants gained a voice in La Pastoral, which incorporated the pavano dialect of Padua's surroundings to reframe the pastoral around local concerns through spoken versus written vernacular dialects. The text's languages were associable with different places, but their Paduan convergence was a circumscribed phenomenon that reconciled the city's plurilingual literary traditions and wartime reality. Just as Ruzante revolutionized the young genre of vernacular pastoral literature, so Riccio transformed the genre of small bronzes by endowing archetypal pastoral characters with usable containers designed to address language. When equipped with an inkwell or quill holder, Riccio's satyrs forced the issue of language by actualizing the choice of whether to preserve words in ink. In an ambit where one's language choice—whether classical or a vernacular dialect—met the heightened stakes of civic identity, the pastoral output of Ruzante and Riccio shared a plurilingual utility. Usage and language were mutually reinforcing features of these men's theater and sculpture that audiences could access at different material, conceptual, and political levels. In postwar Padua, the uses of Ruzante's plurilingual play were controlled through its manuscript transmission and oral performability, while the linguistic associations of Riccio's usable bronzes multiplied through their deployment for writing and shared conversation. Riccio's satyr statuettes were not straightforward illustrations of a motif lifted from La Pastoral. Rather, they were an evolution in his sculptural designs of a pastoral subject that actualized the play's timely linguistic and textual lessons.
PADUA AND THE USABILITY OF BRONZE
Riccio would have approached Ruzante's La Pastoral with awareness of how his own art was impacted by and responsive to war. Riccio's small bronze satyrs leveraged his longstanding attunement to relations between form, function, and fabrication, as his training and initial career as a goldsmith gave him experience crafting usable items such as cups and buttons.Footnote 48 Transitioning to bronze amid illness later in life, Riccio translated his goldsmith's skills across scale for his 3.85-meter Paschal Candelabrum for Padua's Basilica di Sant'Antonio. Commissioned on the eve of the War of the League of Cambrai in 1507 and completed in 1516 at the war's end, this monumental sculpture stacked nine registers of pagan and Christian imagery to elevate its operative candle heavenward. The bronze designs gleamed when the candle was lit for liturgical rituals, lambently activating a metaphorical circuit connecting Christian ritual, ancient sacrifice, and bronze's material properties.Footnote 49 While the Candelabrum's imagery has long been considered via humanists linked to the commission,Footnote 50 the martial circumstances that impacted its making informed its reception and Riccio's subsequent production.
A hollow, tapered, tubular bronze receptacle leading to a burst of flame, Riccio's Candelabrum could be read as a verticalized cannon, its liturgical use for celebrating Eastertide rebirth an antithesis to artillery's functional destructiveness. This contrastive comparison was reinforced by Renaissance processes of founding such large-scale, similarly shaped objects. Venetian artillery foundries regularly cast artworks, including candlesticks.Footnote 51 Buonaccorso Ghiberti (1451–1516) drew candelabra between sheets of cannon designs in his Zibaldone,Footnote 52 and Vannocchio Biringuccio (ca. 1480–ca. 1539) interspersed casting instructions for large objects, which could include candelabra, between chapters on making cannons in his De la Pirotechnia.Footnote 53 While Riccio could have made recourse to an artillery foundry to cast the Candelabrum, his design of forty-five separate pieces enabled more intimate production.Footnote 54 Maximizing the Candelabrum's independent parts contravened the structural logic of cannons, which needed an integral cast to avoid exploding during shooting. Cannons would have been much on the mind of Paduans who saw the Candelabrum after the war, given that such artillery was essential for the Habsburg forces’ victory upon sieging Padua in 1509, as well as Venice's subsequent reclamation of the city.Footnote 55
Given the vitality of artillery during the war, the Candelabrum's metal made it vulnerable to being melted into cannons. An extraordinary document recounts that Riccio was compensated for clandestinely protecting it amid the war, when he had to “transport back and forth said unfinished candelabrum first to San Giovanni di Verdara and then to his house, and another time to San Francesco, and then to his own house, and a further time to the Santo and then to his house, to watch over and safeguard it from soldiers, with whom his house was full every time the encampment entered Padua.”Footnote 56 This history did not fade in postwar memories. A year after the Candelabrum's completion, an entry in the Santo's account books lauded its design and manufacture in relation to its martial disturbances.Footnote 57 The entry related these features of the Candelabrum to the glory of Padua, indicative of the civic associations of the Santo, where it was installed.Footnote 58
Bronze itself held civic import in Padua, evidenced by the Candelabrum's associability with an earlier monumental sculpture on the Santo grounds: Donatello's equestrian monument of Erasmo da Narni (1370–1443), known as Gattamelata (1447–53, fig. 3). A condottiero (mercenary captain), Gattamelata had ruled over Padua as podestà (chief magistrate) on behalf of the Venetian republic, and by memorializing a foreign mercenary captain in the earliest surviving Renaissance equestrian monument, Donatello bestowed Padua with a bronze emblem of Venice's military dominion.Footnote 59 While local humanists penned epitaphs praising the statue, it also inspired resentment, as in an anti-Venetian poem of the mid-fifteenth century that lampooned the Gattamelata for memorializing “the disgrace of the city of Padua.”Footnote 60 Instead conceived by a local artist, Riccio's Candelabrum upheld Paduan honor in the aftermath of a war led by condottieri. The cannon-like form of the Candelabrum would have resonated with the conspicuous cannonball under the front hoof of Gattamelata's horse, a bellicose detail that guaranteed four contact points for stability. Riccio's Candelabrum also alluded to the Gattamelata through four protruding centaurs with unfettered hooves (fig. 4), creatively transmogrifying the Gattamelata's equestrian components into hybrid miniatures. Such details presaged Riccio's capacity to outstrip other sculptors through independent bronze statuettes, a genre in which Donatello reputedly never worked.Footnote 61
Figure 3. Donatello. Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata. 1447–53. Padua, Piazza del Santo. Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Figure 4. Andrea Riccio. Paschal Candelabrum (detail of centaurs). 1507–16. Padua, Basilica di Sant'Antonio. © Alinari Archives / Art Resource, NY.
Riccio's Candelabrum became both a template for his small freestanding bronzes and a famous civic reference point for their local owners. A later edict forbade the taking of molds from the Candelabrum and other sculptures in the Santo, safeguarding Riccio's inventions and enabling him to capitalize on their designs.Footnote 62 Most generative for Riccio's small bronze production was the quartet of bound satyrs on the Candelabrum, with prime visibility near eye level (fig. 5). From these designs he went on to elaborate numerous freestanding bronze satyr statuettes, including a trio of Drinking Satyrs (fig. 6), all widely accepted as autograph.Footnote 63 Riccio subtly differentiated the Drinking Satyrs not only in surface treatment but also in details rendered in wax (and subsequently lost in casting), such as hair, genitals, horns, ears, and lobes beneath the chin. Such discrepancies affirm Riccio's laborious individualization of his statuettes when replicating them, a principle affirmed in the Candelabrum's four satyrs, which are unidentical and bear noticeable variances in facial hair and horns. The norms of how to depict a satyr were not fixed in this period, and Riccio used such leeway to variegate this hybrid creature's appearance with unrivaled creativity.
Figure 5. Andrea Riccio. Paschal Candelabrum (detail of satyr). 1507–16. Padua, Basilica di Sant'Antonio. Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Figure 6. Andrea Riccio. Drinking Satyr. Ca. 1520. Padua, Musei Civici, Museo d'Arte Medioevale e Moderna. Su concessione del Comune di Padova – Settore Cultura, Turismo, Musei e Biblioteche.
Incorporating containers to foreground sculpture's relationship to usability, all satyr statuettes with tenable attributions to Riccio hold vessels of some kind. His three Drinking Satyrs (ca. 1520) use bowls to satiate themselves, and one has a hole in its hand that may have supported a candleholder.Footnote 64 These statuettes have a similar body type to Riccio's Bargello Seated Satyr (1520s, fig. 7), which carries a shell with a widened siphonal canal punctuated by a hole to serve as an oil lamp, as well as a small vase understood to have been an inkwell.Footnote 65 A creative redesign of this figure type is Riccio's Striding Satyr (1520s, fig. 8), which lofts a similarly muscled torso onto narrow legs that flaunt the tensile strength of brilliantly equilibrated bronze.Footnote 66 The Striding Satyr grasps accoutrements matching those of the Bargello Seated Satyr, likewise usable as a lamp and an inkwell to accommodate scribal and social pursuits in the studiolo.Footnote 67 Riccio made other types of studiolo bronzes, including elaborately decorated oil lamps featuring satyrs within bacchic friezes (fig. 9),Footnote 68 but his statuettes exploded the plastic potential of such relief designs into freestanding figures.
Figure 7. Andrea Riccio. Seated Satyr. 1520s. Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Figure 8. Andrea Riccio. Striding Satyr. 1520s. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, gifts of Irwin Untermyer, Ogden Mills, and George Blumenthal, bequest of Julia H. Manges and Frederick C. Hewitt Fund, by exchange; and Rogers and Pfeiffer Funds, 1982.
Figure 9. Andrea Riccio. Lamp. Ca. 1516–24. New York, The Frick Collection. Copyright The Frick Collection.
Small bronze statuettes of classically inspired subjects constituted a young genre in Renaissance Italy, emerging only in the late fifteenth century and closely linked to humanist inquiry into ancient literary and sculptural prototypes.Footnote 69 Riccio's nuanced redevelopment of the utility of bronze statuettes is easily taken for granted, given the sea of later derivations of his designs and the critical disfavor of bronzes grouped into categories such as “applied arts” or, in Italian, “objects of use” (oggetti d'uso).Footnote 70 Recent scholarship has productively interrogated what is meant by objects’ “use” and “function,” showing how these properties are not singularly fixed but, rather, conceptually generous in revealing a history of use itself.Footnote 71 Through creative poses that featured quotidian interactions with functional attributes, Riccio's sculptures complicated the relationship between statuettes and antiquity, particularly as conceived in the work of Riccio's famous contemporary employed at the Gonzaga court in nearby Mantua: Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, known as Antico (ca. 1455–1528). Appropriate to his name, Antico miniaturized numerous ancient sculptures into small bronzes without functional attributes (fig. 10).Footnote 72 If Riccio's bronzes carried plurilingual utility through their usefulness for textual activities and evocation of multiple linguistic traditions, a satyr like that by Antico did the opposite, summoning a singularly classical lexicon while concentrating use on purely aesthetic and tactile dimensions. Such differences also emerged through facture: the meticulous smoothness of Antico's bronzes spoke a lustrous, uniformly antique vocabulary, whereas Riccio's satyr statuettes juxtaposed polished surfaces with rough, ball-peen-hammered passages and unchased hair and facial features. In Padua, this multiplicity of textures in Riccio's bronzes could evoke coarse local dialects confronting the burnished Tuscan literary vernacular, as in La Pastoral.
Figure 10. Antico. Pan. Modeled by 1499, cast ca. 1519. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Picture credit: KHM-Museumsverband.
Riccio's statuettes likewise unseated the legacy of his local rival, Severo da Ravenna (1465/75–before 1538), by renegotiating bronze's relationship to classical models. Severo had been active in Padua since the turn of the century but left during the war, resettling in Ravenna between 1509 and 1511.Footnote 73 He and his workshop were known for making Kneeling Satyrs holding various implements (fig. 11).Footnote 74 Just as Antico had copied antiquities, Severo's Kneeling Satyrs recreated a pose that was directly based on ancient bronzes dating to the fifth century BCE (fig. 12). Severo's choice to add functional attributes could have been inspired by ancient satyr bronzes with vessels, and another precedent includes medieval figural bronzes of men holding candle prickets.Footnote 75 Like Antico, Severo miniaturized ancient motifs into statuettes, bringing Padua's bronze industry into alignment with the classical past, which likely explains Gaurico's commendation of Severo at the end of his treatise.Footnote 76 But Gaurico tempered his praise of Severo by signaling that he was not literate.Footnote 77 This judgment about Severo's linguistic shortcomings indicates tacit awareness that his bronzes were limited by a recycling of classical motifs that spoke a hollow language of antiquity.
Figure 11. Severo da Ravenna. Kneeling Satyr. Ca. 1500–10. Rome, Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia. Su autorizzazione del Ministero della Cultura – Istituto VIVE – Vittoriano e Palazzo Venezia.
Figure 12. Greek. Kneeling Satyr. 480–60 BCE. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum. Digital image courtesy of Getty's Open Content Program.
As Padua's postwar successor to Severo, Riccio repurposed Severo's utilitarian achievement by endowing his own satyrs with a playful, motivated relationship to their implements. The range of objects held by Severo's Kneeling Satyrs makes their utility seem incidental, even perfunctory, whereas Riccio's satyrs have individualized stances and a singular humanity that break the mold of ancient prototypes.Footnote 78 Severo and Riccio both made bronze satyrs holding shells, which have been associated with Pan terrificus and his act of blowing the conch to combat the Titans,Footnote 79 but the jocularly supported shell and vase of Riccio's Bargello Seated Satyr create an iconographic superfluity that frustrates a singular identification. This is also achieved through usability, because once the shell on the Seated Satyr's shoulder is recognized as an oil lamp, it humorously negates the capacity to be blown for sound. Whereas Severo's Kneeling Satyr looks outward vacantly, Riccio's Seated Satyr trains a supplicating gaze upon its owner, its gently furrowed brow and parted lips offering a pathos-laden invitation to share the resources it carries. More ambitiously, Riccio's Striding Satyr supersedes its antique forebear—the famed upright Della Valle Satyr marbles (fig. 13)—by replacing their supportive architectural function with freestanding, sculptural usability.Footnote 80 The Striding Satyr's vessels wittily proffer imaginary wine pressed from the grapes carried by the Della Valle Satyrs, but such containers’ usage for bacchic activities is sublimated to its owner's needs for an inkwell or oil lamp. While scholars have associated Riccio's satyr statuettes with intellectual traditions including Aristotelianism, natural mythology, and alchemy, their humanized designs forced practical concerns about the functions of their vessels when writing, reading, and socializing.Footnote 81 Isolated from a clear narrative context, Riccio's satyrs could redirect the obstreperous, provocative connotations of these pastoral characters into the similarly disruptive realm of contemporary dialect literature that traversed oral and written communication, as Riccio would have known through La Pastoral.Footnote 82
Figure 13. Roman. Della Valle Satyrs. 2nd century CE. Rome, Capitoline Museums. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY.
PADUA AND PAVANO, PAN AND PAN
La Pastoral was Ruzante's first play, its title signaling an ambition to redefine a genre that was notably undefined. To claim dominion over the pastoral's nebulous parameters, Ruzante had to respond to classical and coeval precedents. La Pastoral therefore bears allusions to expected ancient sources, but it is primarily structured as a Paduan rebuttal to the pastoral's most important text in an Italian vernacular: L'Arcadia. Penned in Naples by Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530) in multiple phases beginning in the fifteenth century, L'Arcadia circulated widely after its first official printing in 1504.Footnote 83 L'Arcadia was not just popular but poignant. Naples had suffered brutal takeovers by the French in 1501 and by the Spanish soon after, giving L'Arcadia a political urgency that it had not been initially conceived to accommodate. The internal sociopolitical logic of L'Arcadia can therefore seem ambiguous, as Sannazaro situated Arcadia near his native Naples both to criticize and to praise his homeland.Footnote 84 When writing in the fifteenth century, Sannazaro used the pastoral to address Neapolitan cultural politics as a vernacular product of humanist achievements in the Aragonese court.Footnote 85 But when the text was expanded for its 1504 editio princeps, its dedication invoked geopolitical crisis as Naples was “finding itself now deformed by the upheavals of wars.”Footnote 86 Conquest and Sannazaro's real-life accompaniment of the Aragonese king into exile heightened the text's melancholic tinge, and its use of elegy could be read as a lament for a humanistic paradise degraded by warfare. Still, because L'Arcadia unfolds within a locus amoenus (idyllic place), its detachment from the realities of conflict surely felt unsatisfactory from Ruzante's vantage point in postwar Padua. Accessible via many printed editions, L'Arcadia was thus a model of political pastoral ripe for critique.Footnote 87
Language was the weapon of choice in Ruzante's pastoral contest with Sannazaro. The 1504 edition of L'Arcadia largely imposed a Tuscan literary vernacular aligned with Bembo's strictures (although a sprinkling of Neapolitan words recalled its initial reliance on Sannazaro's native vernacular dialect).Footnote 88 The monolingual veneer of L'Arcadia honored Naples by asserting ties to a refined humanist network linking Italian urban centers. Its dedication even yoked linguistic revision and politics, declaring L'Arcadia “liberated” through publication.Footnote 89 Ruzante's comedy reenacted this strategy in order to depose it through plurilingualism. Set in the Paduan countryside, the first half of La Pastoral stages a predictable pastoral encounter between shepherds and the nymph Syrinx speaking in a Tuscan literary vernacular. The plot is overtaken midway, however, when non-traditional characters marred by the hardships of war arrive speaking vernacular dialects.Footnote 90 The instigator of this narrative shift is a villano (lit. villager) named Ruzante who uses the pavano dialect of Padua and its environs, the antithesis of the shepherd narrator of L'Arcadia, who was a surrogate for Sannazaro.Footnote 91 La Pastoral nuances its plurilingualism with scenes incorporating a Bergamasque doctor and his servant, whose dialect demarcated the westernmost edge of Venice's territorial holdings. Not only did Ruzante foreground a local Paduan language, but he also set himself as heir to the city's plurilingual heritage; indeed, since the fifteenth century, Padua had been an epicenter for macaronic textual production, and La Pastoral also bears clear debts to Paduan folksongs, local marriage poems known as mariazi, and other sources in pavano.Footnote 92 These were distinct from the plurilingual conventions of Padua's subjugator, Venice. While the pavano used by Ruzante thrived through its contrast to Tuscan, it also stood in implicit opposition to Venice's superdialect and cultural hegemony.Footnote 93 In the aftermath of war, Ruzante asserted the creative resilience of Padua by combining humanist and local vernacular traditions, given that La Pastoral proved the vitality of both through a humorous mismatch of humble characters speaking at cross-purposes with arcadian shepherds.
While numerous characters lend their voices to the plurilingual cacophony of La Pastoral, it is Pan who sanctions the linguistic reimagining of its titular genre. This was achieved through overt subversions of Sannazaro's text. As the governing deity of the pastoral, Pan appears with his retinue of satyrs in L'Arcadia as a mythological marker to denote the idyllic space. A climactic scene of L'Arcadia is the encounter of the shepherds with the altar of Pan in chapter 10, where a sculpture of the horned god presides over tablets inscribed with laws of pastoral life.Footnote 94 Pan governs the language of shepherds, and near the statue rests his sampogna, described as the panpipe fashioned from his beloved nymph Syrinx.Footnote 95 This instrument appears throughout the text, most forcefully at the end of L'Arcadia through an ode “to the sampogna,” which laments the loss of classical Arcadia such that “there are no longer nymphs and satyrs in our woods.”Footnote 96 The final sections of L'Arcadia provide a metatextual discourse about the act of writing by linking sonic and inscribed forms of language.Footnote 97 Ruzante reprised this by featuring Pan and his associates in La Pastoral, reviving Syrinx as a character at the beginning of the play only to supplant her with ignoble characters bearing coarse speech. Sannazaro's altar of Pan is similarly recreated as a destination for Ruzante's characters: La Pastoral reaches its narrative apex before an altar to the god, although the ensuing oration to the deity does less to honor his sovereignty than amusingly question his power in the face of linguistic difference.Footnote 98 Through his plurilingual innovations, Ruzante enriched Pan's associations with speech and text.
Ruzante's literary polemic crystallizes in the figure of Pan at the fulcrum of La Pastoral, when the villano Ruzante arrives in scene 11 to encounter the shepherd Arpino. The comedy's pair of prologues in pavano and the Tuscan literary vernacular build anticipation for this moment, when a crucial misunderstanding emerges after Arpino—speaking Tuscan—ruefully begs for Ruzante's help to bury his friend. This prompts confusion from his famished interlocutor. Getting nowhere, Arpino laments, “O sacred Pan, pity upon your servants,” to which Ruzante replies in pavano: “You want to give me some bread [pan]? Come on, let's go.”Footnote 99 The homonymic humor of the deity Pan mistaken for bread heightens a fundamental misalignment between Tuscan and pavano through the simplest of words: pan.Footnote 100 It also mockingly tightens the proximity between an invocation to Pan and an offer of bread early in Sannazaro's L'Arcadia.Footnote 101 Pan and pan are alliteratively similar to the word Pavan, which could refer to both the pavano dialect and the rural area outside Padua. Place was written into this vocabulary, as pavano derives etymologically from Pava, the word for Padua in this dialect.Footnote 102 Ruzante summoned this linguistic nexus by praising pavano in La Prima Oratione, a text of his that exploits a humanist genre famous for Ciceronian Latin prose: “do you know what Pavan means? Pavan means as much as to say ‘go to the bread [va’ al pan]’: without bread one cannot live, and who wants to live goes to bread; and who wants bread, goes to Pavan. Pavan, an?”Footnote 103 This linkage of Pan-pan-pavano was thereby essential to Ruzante's linguistic polemic, distilling into text the interchange between written and oral communication that made him famous.Footnote 104
As La Pastoral progresses, the character Ruzante's voracity for bread comically threatens to consume the plot, and by using humble bread to depose the symbolic authority of Pan, the author Ruzante grounded his text in the tumult affecting rural communities around Padua. La Pastoral acknowledges bread's necessity to the livelihoods of villani, indicative of Ruzante's wider response to the economic and political hardships arising from the War of the League of Cambrai.Footnote 105 One could see Ruzante's text as social advocacy on behalf of the rural poor, which would align with his modest origins, but La Pastoral was nonetheless written for urban audiences stirred by mockery of villani for their speech, hunger, and manners.Footnote 106 Ruzante's insertion of himself in the character of a villano was less an act of sympathy than of his authorial privilege to flaunt linguistic prowess. In this way, Ruzante participated in a broader literary exploitation of the status of the poor around Padua following the war. This is exemplified by an anonymous frottola (a popular form of secular poetry) transcribed by the same copyist of La Pastoral, Stefano Magno.Footnote 107 Labeled the “frottola of the Paduan prostitutes,” the poem opens with the stanza: “What will you do now prostitutes, / given that the soldiers are gone? / now it's fitting that you go / begging door to door for bread.”Footnote 108 By rhyming the addressed prostitutes (putane) with bread (pane), the frottola draws an equivalence between its subject's low station and famished situation. The implied narrator is a man of means, taunting the Paduan prostitutes by forbidding them access to his fields (prati), no longer terrain for footmen but for “notable citizens with famous courtesans.”Footnote 109 As part of a manuscript bearing the date 1520, the poem is contemporaneous with La Pastoral and reflects the larger renegotiation of the pastoral after wartime, as its placement in the manuscript fits within a section of bawdy frottole following a pair of eclogues.Footnote 110 The point is not that this poem was necessarily written with La Pastoral in mind, but, rather, that it partook in a shared Paduan literary culture that generated entertainment from the aftermath of conflict.
Against a backdrop of suffering, the defining relationship between Pan, pan, and pavan is meant to create a plurilingual abundance for its audience's gratification, a nod to the god's bacchic associations. Through the homonymic equation of Pan and pan, Ruzante derives linguistic excess from alimentary scarcity, a play on the state of indulgence proffered by satyrs, whose job was to provide an array of sensory delights for their fellow revelers. This principle is shown visually in a contemporaneous Bacchanal from the Ferrarese workshop of Dosso Dossi (1489–1542), in which satyrs furnish an assortment of foods, music-making, and other enjoyments (fig. 14).Footnote 111 With bread among the edible delectations in the foreground, the canvas gives prominence to this humble sustenance for bacchic festivities. When the villano Ruzante misunderstands Pan as bread in La Pastoral, he telegraphs a lack of knowledge not just of humanist learning but of a lifestyle of eating for pleasure typical of his audience. Just as Dossi's painting in its mythological references and citations of other artworks subsumes food into its visual erudition, Ruzante's revelry in linguistic profusion imports modest motifs into an ambit of literary privilege. This painting sheds further light on Riccio's proximity to Ruzante, because Riccio's satyrs proffering vessels could physically engage the figure's bacchic associations with feasting. As discussed earlier, Riccio's artistry not only rendered vases into inkwells and shells into oil lamps but also deployed such containers as figurative bearers of wine. Wine carried literary potency through its capacity to unlock fantasie, an association noted in La Pastoral, and its association with ink was also material, as wine was used in Renaissance recipes to make iron-gall ink.Footnote 112 When the owner of one of Riccio's satyr statuettes filled its miniscule vase with ink, each dip of the quill could partake in the type of linguistic liberality embodied by La Pastoral.
Figure 14. Dosso Dossi (workshop). Bacchanal. Ca. 1525. London, The National Gallery. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY.
Satyrs’ associations with such alimentary plentitude and the locus amoenus would have had particular resonance in relation to the fertile landscape surrounding Padua, precisely where the pavano dialect of Ruzante's plays was spoken. Just as Pan and his retinue exerted control over the pastoral world, a man with growing wealth like Riccio exerted privilege over the natural world through land ownership. Riccio knew these environs intimately, as surviving notarial records show he bought a significant quantity of land north of Padua, along the Brenta river in the village of Tavello, in 1517.Footnote 113 A formal valuation of Riccio's properties in the following year gives insight into his eighteen campi (fields) bordering the Brenta, which were classified separately as follows: two and a half campi in front without trees or vineyards, nine campi of pastures, and six and a half campi of gravelly lands and woods.Footnote 114 These different forms of land use reveal how Riccio's parcel of property could have not only yielded alimentary and recreational fulfillment but also facilitated contact with rural laborers and vagabonds. To own land in a village (villa) outside Padua was to be surrounded by villani like Ruzante's namesake character in La Pastoral. Riccio and his family members—who also had property nearby—thereby gained familiarity with pavano on the terrain of its origin, and they understood the dominion Paduan urbanites could claim over rural environs through riches.Footnote 115 Indeed, Riccio's father had owned and leased arable land with vineyards in Tavello since Riccio was a boy, and the eighteen campi Riccio bought were presumably those documented for lease to his father nearly a quarter century prior.Footnote 116 When Riccio crafted satyrs from the same metal that had scarred Padua and its surroundings during combat, he acknowledged the desire of the land's Venetian and Paduan owners to resume its use as a site of produce, pleasure, and profit. The vessels carried by the Striding Satyr or Seated Satyr could thereby allude to the wine extracted from such property, the ink that recorded its ownership, and the fount of dialect entertainment embodied by La Pastoral.
PADUA AND THE SEXUALITY OF SCRIPT
The plurilingual utility of Riccio's satyr statuettes would have been more than an invitation to pastoral indulgence and creative inspiration, as their libidinous subject also cautioned which words ought to fade with lamplight rather than survive in ink. This textual principle is evident in a key episode from the material history of Ruzante's La Pastoral. In scene 11, immediately after Arpino and the villano Ruzante elide Pan and pan, they further misunderstand one another in a dialogue notable for two blank spaces in the manuscript (fig. 15):Footnote 117
Figure 15. Ruzante. La Pastoral. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Marciano it., IX 288 (=6072), fol. 24r. Su concessione del Ministero della Cultura – Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Divieto di riproduzione.
Scholars have argued whether these blanks, read in context in the sole extant manuscript of La Pastoral, could have been prurient, a philological debate that opens hermeneutic questions about the multivalence of empty spaces. For decades, scholars noted the potential for an erotic meaning here but proposed benign words to fill the blanks, obscuring this possibility.Footnote 119 Giorgio Padoan persuasively argued that the blanks could represent the missing words manìchi (gobblers) and manize (to masturbate), respectively, as the letters “ma” notably precede the second blank.Footnote 120 The villano Ruzante's misrecognition of Arpino's insult as a proposition to gratify him sexually partakes in a game of obscene equivocations. Writing in 1978, Padoan was strikingly candid about the conceivable role of sodomy in this passage of La Pastoral, adding that when the character Ruzante concludes his masturbatory query by addressing the shepherd Arpino as a companion (compagnon), he alludes to customary means of sharing pleasure between men.Footnote 121 This prescient observation presaged recent scholarship on homosocial bonds forged through literary pursuits enjoyed among Venetian men,Footnote 122 and La Pastoral clarifies how this discourse could translate outside the republic's capital. Through his plurilingualism, Ruzante notably deployed dialect vocabulary for sodomy in his other texts, which aligns with related bodily humor found elsewhere in La Pastoral.Footnote 123 Padoan's suggestion has much to recommend it, notwithstanding its varying levels of scholarly acceptance.Footnote 124 At issue is not whether Padoan ascertained what was definitively unwritten but, rather, that the decision to leave blank spaces in the manuscript generated such erotic connotations.
The allusion to sodomy in La Pastoral was an attempt not to normalize this practice but, rather, to exploit its humorous utility for Ruzante's broader plurilingual project.Footnote 125 A blank space interpretable as obscene is markedly different from the transcription of an obscene word. Modern philological practice has tended to supply potential words when they are found lacking in an original manuscript. Gaps can emerge in manuscripts for a host of reasons, whether through scribal choices, damage to an original text, or intentional design, and the philological treatment of such spaces as lacunae is finally coming into dialogue with the theoretical richness of this concept.Footnote 126 Developments in material philology have prompted scrutiny into the reconstructive impulse common in scholarly transcriptions of manuscripts,Footnote 127 which sanctions inquiry into the postulated fillings of blank spaces in La Pastoral. Indeed, there are various other blank spaces in the manuscript of La Pastoral, raising the question of whether its scribe, Stefano Magno, was actively making omissions or following gaps first introduced by Ruzante himself. While one cannot unconditionally separate scribal versus authorial intent here, the manuscript's survival is itself informative. As Riccio's brother owned the antigraph manuscript that Magno copied, Riccio was at the textual nexus of these potentially salacious gaps. Further, given that La Pastoral was never published in print but instead circulated privately in manuscript form, Riccio was also attuned to the delicacy of its content and his family's control over its copying within a closed circuit.
When Magno left blanks in such suggestive lines of La Pastoral, he rendered the type of interstices that scholars have proposed as sites for the emergence (and suppression) of queerness in premodern manuscripts.Footnote 128 These blanks are less an assertion of a sexual identity than intimations of a sexual act, making their emptiness commensurate with a broader strategy of equivocation found across La Pastoral. Just as Pan and pan in the two verses prior created allusions through repeated verbiage, this pair of blank spaces did so through repeated omission. Following Padoan's proposal, the blank in Arpino's initial line could be understood to insult the voracity of the character Ruzante, while Ruzante's response assumed same-sex eroticism, which would conceptually link gluttony and sodomy.Footnote 129 As sins based on immoderate desires, gluttony and sodomy were frequently connected in Renaissance Italy, not only by those condemning them but also in subsequent literary parodies and comedies.Footnote 130 In La Pastoral, it is suggestive that these verses follow a reference to Pan, a deity who combined voracious alimentary and sexual appetites. Such impulses dovetailed with Pan's claim over the natural world and could be used to condemn or afford sympathy to sodomy, which was defined as a sin against nature.
La Pastoral participated in competing literary cultures through which sodomy was discussed despite its criminalization in reigning Venice. The Most Serene Republic had a ruthless apparatus for prosecuting sodomy in the Renaissance, with punishments including immolation, decapitation, and exile.Footnote 131 This intensified during the War of the League of Cambrai, when sodomy was scapegoated amid Venice's martial challenges, and multiple Venetian diarists of the period condemned it for the empire's inauspicious sinfulness.Footnote 132 As sodomy had been an “unspeakable vice” since the Middle Ages, its treatment in text had to be sly. For example, the renowned humanist Pomponio Leto (1428–98) never returned to Venice after risking prosecution for sodomy, given that he had bandied openly about same-sex desire in his Latin writings.Footnote 133 Yet in this ambit, other humanists walked a finer line, and in the university city of Padua, all-male pedagogical structures could foster same-sex eros as both a lived experience and subject for literary elaboration.Footnote 134 An early seventeenth-century Scottish visitor to Padua denounced sodomy's prevalence there (as elsewhere in Italy), noting its poetic elaborations: “to them [it is] a pleasant pastime, making songs, and singing sonets [sic] of the beauty and pleasure of their Bardassi, or buggr'd boys.”Footnote 135 A student in Padua who later returned in 1521, Pietro Bembo deployed Faunus—mythologically equated with Pan—as a central character within a Latin poem that evoked same-sex eros in a pastoral setting.Footnote 136 Macaronic poetry in Padua also bridged humanist traditions related to different forms of classical eros with local vernacular language, facilitating colorful sexual allusions.Footnote 137 The classical pastoral offered prominent models for same-sex love including the male pairs of Pan/Daphnis and Corydon/Alexis,Footnote 138 a tradition that Ruzante subsumed when harnessing the genre—and Pan in particular—to address sexual politics in the Paduan present.
The misunderstandings between the shepherd Arpino and villano Ruzante in La Pastoral reflect a distinction made in Ruzante's La Prima Oratione that united concerns of sodomy and local language. Early in the text, Ruzante described the founder of Padua having first established the surrounding Pavan region before the city itself: “And our past ancestors wanted him [Padua's founder, Antenore] to apply a female name to Padua so she would always remain under Pavan and Pavan would keep Padua sodomized. And now it is happening a different way; but you will resolve this once you can do so, because it is a sin for this poor Pavan.”Footnote 139 Within his playful use of the pavano dialect, Ruzante deployed sodomy to denote a crucial relationship between Padua and its surroundings, as the word for sodomized here, sodomitù, is a punning merger of sottomettere (to subjugate) and sodomizzare (to sodomize).Footnote 140 Ruzante's origin story of the cities’ names stresses that Padua is a feminine noun in pavano, whereas Pavan is masculine. The act of the female-gendered Padua sodomizing male-gendered Pavan was especially derogatory given Renaissance attitudes toward this practice, as the subjection of a masculine figure to a subordinate position through sodomy garnered added scorn.Footnote 141 This passage in La Prima Oratione follows immediately from a description of Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) having renounced Florence for Padua, as well as an invective against the unnatural use of the Tuscan literary dialect. Florence gained notoriety in the Renaissance for the pervasiveness of sodomy, and an important precursor to La Pastoral, Poliziano's L'Orfeo (1479–80), employed the Tuscan vernacular to describe the travels of a titular character associated with the pastoral who was killed upon turning to sodomy. Ruzante's plurilingual text thereby accessed the capacity of different vernaculars to express local sexual mores.Footnote 142
The erotic and linguistic implications of the blanks in the manuscript of La Pastoral are compounded by its genre as a comedy. The text of La Pastoral makes direct reference to its mixed audience of men and women.Footnote 143 Regardless of whether or where La Pastoral was performed in front of such an audience, what matters is how its explicitly oral performance related to the content presented on the manuscript page. Ruzante directly confronted the potential difference between what was said in a comedic performance versus what was found in its textual form, writing in the prologue of one of his later plays that “many things are well in the pen, that in the scene would be bad.”Footnote 144 The reverse is, by implication, equally true. The undisclosed words left blank in the manuscript of La Pastoral were prudent, preventing risk of persecution if the manuscript arrived in the wrong hands or spread through copies. Such blanks also enabled flexibility toward charged vocabulary to suit different audiences, which meant the competing interpretations of the blanks by modern scholars could not only have been equally viable but precisely what Ruzante wished to accommodate in his text. Given his brother's ownership of a manuscript of La Pastoral associated with such blanks, Riccio would have grasped the stakes of transcribing versus vocalizing scurrilous language.
Riccio's bronze satyr statuettes with usable accoutrements likewise could have fostered the types of associations between sexuality, linguistic debate, and scribal versus oral communication in La Pastoral. By decoupling bronze satyrs from other figures, they could regain the full range of erotic charges through potential partners of any gender, aligning with ancient satyrs’ unbounded proclivities. Riccio's bronze Satyr and Satyress, generally dated early in his career, is proof of his inventiveness in rendering an opposite-sex satyr couple.Footnote 145 Indeed, in many other artworks of the early sixteenth century, satyrs were routinely shown in male and female pairings that fixed their sexual identity: prints and plaquettes (several of the latter by Riccio himself) routinely depict male-female satyr parents with children,Footnote 146 as well as male satyrs lecherously preying upon nymphs (fig. 16).Footnote 147 Separated from female companions, Riccio's solitary satyrs successfully reclaimed their subject's longstanding potential for same-sex eros, just as La Pastoral removed the nymph Syrinx early in the narrative to create space for an array of humorous sexual intimations through linguistic play.Footnote 148 Altering sexual possibilities by separating bronze satyrs from multi-figure narratives, Riccio co-opted a technique used by the Mantuan court sculptor Antico, who cast a bronze statuette of Pan without his beloved young male shepherd Daphnis, despite the latter's presence in the antique marble group he was copying (fig. 10). While Antico's bronze had obscured this classical subject's same-sex desires by rendering Pan solitary, Riccio turned this strategy on its head through satyr statuettes that could direct their libidinous overtures to any beloved. Riccio's satyr statuettes’ vessels could themselves become erotically charged, recalling a frottola in Magno's other manuscript that used pavano dialect to celebrate the sexual allusions of household items used as containers.Footnote 149
Figure 16. Andrea Riccio. Satyr Uncovering a Nymph. Ca. 1500–10. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
The eroticism invoked by Riccio's satyr statuettes and Ruzante's play thrived on the friction between legal regulations, cultural practices, linguistic pluralism, and masculine power, which governed the lives of Venetian and Paduan men regardless of the gender of their objects of attraction. Indeed, the sexual advances to which the nymph Syrinx was subjected in La Pastoral would have echoed in Riccio's own amorous experiences in Padua. While Riccio's biography has largely been scrutinized for evidence related to his artistic commissions and humanist connections, archival documents reveal how he capitalized on the subordinate position of women in the social hierarchy of the Veneto. Legal records from Padua beginning on 4 March 1525 record a dispute between Riccio and Fiore Masarella, a woman more than ten years his junior employed in his household for a decade.Footnote 150 Seeking payment from Riccio, Masarella is identified in the documents as serving in his home “as maid and concubine.”Footnote 151 While the lack of marital bonds left concubines in the Veneto without explicit legal protections, customary practices of the period indicate that Masarella was right to expect recompense for her domestic servitude and sexually subordinate station.Footnote 152 The litigious outcome of Riccio's arrangement with Masarella is recorded in plurilingual documents, as the notary's Latin script is punctuated by a report of Riccio's spoken comment in the vernacular when authorities sought payment on her behalf: “I don't want to give her anything.”Footnote 153 Such details from Riccio's life reflect gendered dominance commensurate with the subject of the satyr statuettes he produced. Just as La Pastoral crafted entertainment by exploiting the marginalized status of the rural poor while acknowledging their indispensability, Riccio made his satyrs knowing that his male clientele could see the statuette's virility affirmed in their authority over subservient individuals.
REMAKING SATYRS AND QUESTIONING LANGUAGE
The parallel legacies of Riccio and Ruzante in postwar Padua reconcile questions posed separately by scholars of art and literature about the local evolution of the pastoral in sculpture, theater, and language. New iterations of satyrs with containers for ink and light proliferated in the sixteenth century as artisans riffed on Riccio's inventions, presumably after his death in 1532 and possibly by using his original sculptural models.Footnote 154 Repeated variants upon Riccio's Bargello Seated Satyr are perched on tree stumps and splayed on the ground, often accommodating an inkwell and candleholder.Footnote 155 In a representative version (fig. 17), the satyr bares its teeth and tongue while grimacing, a feral expression evoking a brutishness that Riccio had strained to humanize. Such a bronze signals how, as the sixteenth century wore on, satyrs were increasingly explored visually through their bestial nature rather than their multivalent potential. If Riccio recognized the dense possibilities afforded by satyrs’ lustful reputation, subsequent bronzes were often unequivocal in depicting consistently male-female eroticism, exemplified by a copulating Satyr and Satyress that served as a container lid (fig. 18). Bronze satyrs retained utility as part of functional assemblages, but as individual sculptures they lost the subtle range of semantic potential that Riccio imbued in each. Why were Riccio's ambitious satyr designs subsequently followed in Padua by an unchallenging slew of slightly varied replicas?Footnote 156 Expanded knowledge of reproductive casting technologies rendered satyrs into expedient commodities, which coincided with the growing availability of bronze in Padua as peace pervaded and artillery was less immediately vital for survival. Such statuettes gained ever more usable attributes, often added interchangeably such that their practical utility overwhelmed the chance for nuanced designs. While in sixteenth-century Padua the bronze statuette thereby waned as a leading idiom for creative experimentation, this mantle was reclaimed elsewhere, including in Florence under Giambologna (1529–1608).Footnote 157
Figure 17. Paduan. Seated Satyr. Mid-sixteenth century. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982.
Figure 18. Follower of Riccio. Satyr and Satyress. Mid-sixteenth century. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi.
Increasingly streamlined configurations of Paduan satyr statuettes aligned with the rise of systematic vernacular language in local literary discourse and the fixity of satyrs and Pan as pastoral characters. Why was Ruzante's plurilingual pastoral play featuring pavano a relative unicum?Footnote 158 Indeed, La Pastoral was his only attempt to recast this genre against immediate precedent. The Veneto region and nearby court centers such as Ferrara became a cradle for Italian pastoral theater of a different sort, with a notable shift arriving in 1545 as Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio's Egle provided the first modern vernacular rendition of an ancient satyr play.Footnote 159 Cinzio's philologically rigorous humanist endeavor sought to define satire independent of the pastoral, and the Egle brought attention to satyrs as determinate historical subjects, rigidifying their characterization in subsequent theater.Footnote 160 Further, while plurilingualism remained a defining feature of Ruzante's writings, it was eclipsed in Padua by the prominent humanist discourse about a shared Italian literary vernacular, often termed la questione della lingua (the question of language). The search for an accepted vernacular was codified by figures in Padua including Bembo and Sperone Speroni (1500–88), and it was institutionalized by the Accademia degli Infiammati (founded in 1540).Footnote 161 Ruzante, a friend of Speroni, was involved in the academy, but the experimental plurilingualism of La Pastoral was marginalized in this setting.Footnote 162 The sidelining of Ruzante's local linguistic multiplicity is exemplified by Speroni's deployment of Ruzante as a character speaking elegant Tuscan in a later dialogue of his.Footnote 163 Plurilingual literature survived the questione della lingua in various forms,Footnote 164 but Padua's growing prominence in standardizing vernacular language harmonized with the standardized designs of bronze statuettes that occupied the desks of those debating it.Footnote 165 This is exemplified by a schematic sixteenth-century bronze satyr with an inkwell, bowl, and candleholder that bears the coat of arms of the noble Paduan Capodivacca family (fig. 19).Footnote 166 While it is not possible to individuate who commissioned this bronze, at least one member of the family in this period—Francesco—had documented ties with the Accademia degli Infiammati.Footnote 167 Benignly offering ink to its high-born owner, the Capodivacca satyr presented a less provocative means for bronze statuettes to be used amid current linguistic discourse.
Figure 19. Paduan. Seated Satyr. Mid- to late sixteenth century. New York, The Frick Collection. Copyright The Frick Collection.
Ultimately, no subsequent writer approached Ruzante's zenith of incorporating pavano into comedies with multiple vernacular dialects, just as no sculptor matched Riccio's usable designs of bronze statuettes that could evoke a plurality of linguistic traditions. As the Tuscan literary vernacular gained wider acceptance across Italy, satyr statuettes grew increasingly codified in a manner that multiplied their utilitarian attributes at the expense of their plurilingual valences. With the memory of the War of the League of Cambrai fading in Padua as the city reoriented itself around academic institutions, the civic pride located in the work of Riccio and Ruzante found outlets elsewhere. Satyr statuettes would continue to proliferate in homes across Europe, but the confluence of linguistic, literary, and artisanal innovations that had inspired them was localized to Riccio's Padua.
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Raymond Carlson is Manager of Student Engagement at the Yale University Art Gallery, prior to which he was Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. His current book project examines Michelangelo's art and poetry through their interrelated social and material histories. Raymond's publications have appeared in Italian Studies, the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, and various museum catalogues.
