The Courtesans

The fearsome Medici may have locked Florence in their iron grip, but they in turn were disarmed by the feverish embraces of the city’s courtesans, a demimonde of redoubtable cultural and political power, according to historian Lynne Lawner.

“These women’s lives are filled with a swashbuckling quality and a passion that made them alive,’ says Lawner, who spent 15 years in Italy studying them for her Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance (Rizzoli International). “There was a cult of erotic passion at the time that had been developing for centuries, and the courtesans made themselves custodians of it.  There was a very brutal side to Renaissance life—rapes, internecine warfare of the Italian states, civil strife—and I think some of the men’s relationships with women were very crude.  But there was this concept of rebirth through beauty and love of knowledge, love of form, of the human body, proportion and symmetry.  I believe a great deal of that entered into relationships between men and women, suffused with fantasies of the ideal.”

Propelling the modern imagination over the distance of such idealized ardor is a task eased by Lawner’s sensuous detail: In her jewel-box setting, the courtesan and her lover lay on silk sheets, the pillowcases “embroidered with gold and silver thread and decorated with pearls and jewels…every empty surface was piled with brocade, velvet, and satin cushions.” A volume of Petrarch as well as other works would be prominently displayed.

“It was above all in the boudoir that the courtesan had the responsibility of exciting the senses and plunging her visitor into an irresistible atmosphere of luxury and sensual pleasure.” Lawner goes in her book: “Beds were inlaid or painted, sometimes with scenes from mythology or romances, and satin canopies billowed over them.  The ceiling of the room could be decorated with appropriately lascivious depictions…”

The point Lawner makes is that the senses and the intellect fused in a unique, incendiary moment.

“Our society doesn’t encourage that kind of synthesis,” says a regretful Lawner, an intellectual siren who admits to having been drawn “not to the cloistered or ladylike types” but to a more flamboyant, expansive type, women who lived as well as wrote” (as many of them did).  “The emphasis is on production—making things, making money.  Here, love is a commodity; then there’s the Mayflower Madam’s managerial side of love.

“There’s no romance, idealism, spirituality,” she continues. “We have to go back and study the history of love.  There are many lessons to be learned.  It’s a disciplined; it leads to unexpected pleasures.”

Lawner, a Fulbright scholar, says she struggled to shimmy down from the ivory tower with her looks, brains and emotions intact. The lure for the academic—“those of us who love books, love libraries, love archives”—is to burrow, to never come out to see the daylight.

“But I was vain enough as a woman, interested in love and people,” says Lawner, who claims she does identify to a limited extent with the Renaissance courtesans.  One of the most outstanding of Lawner’s subjects is Beatrice of Ferrara, the probable sitter for Raphael’s “Fornarina”, mistress of the infamous dissolute Lorenzo de Medici, the subject of an anonymous poem extolling “a neck of snow-white alabaster” and “secret parts” that “are even more beautiful,” and reported model for I Modi, the uncompromisingly graphic Renaissance sex-manual.

“I wouldn‘t call them feminists in any way,” she says, “but no one more than they were aware of the pitfalls and extraordinary possibilities of advancing themselves in a world of men.  They were among the first modern women to be supporting themselves who had independent spirits.  What distinguished the most prominent of the honest courtesans—as opposed to the legions of street prostitutes—is that they chose their lovers.  And the lovers had to live up to certain standards, or they’d be dropped

So they instituted taste,” she continues.  They were didactic: there was nothing crude or crass about them.  They were dressed in the most lavish materials—they were the showcases for the Venetian republic.  And these women were so powerful that they could influence the courts to send noblemen to jail.”

And just how adroit were they in bed?

“Well, we have evidence that very delicate complex emotions were felt.  From Gaspara Stampa’s poetry,” she continues, “referring to the famed Venetian courtesan, “we have beauty, and evidence that something in the human heart was felt and expressed.  We have ardor…we have burning.”

“A Woman of Letters Takes a Passionate Approach to Life and Literature”

There are more than 400 bridges in Venice, linking small islands that were once worlds unto themselves. During the Renaissance, there were enclaves for noblemen, fishmongers, and nuns; for shipbuilders and Jews and gondoliers. Divided by birth and occupation, Venetians were linked by their bridges. Non-Venetians know only a few by name: There’s the Rialto, its markets still bustling centuries after Shakespeare mentioned it in The Merchant of Venice. Then there’s the Bridge of Sighs, where prisoners on their way to the miserable cells connected to the Doge’s Palace got one last look at a city that can take your breath away.

To get to Lynne Lawner’s favorite bridge, you need to walk through a quiet neighborhood in the city’s San Polo section. Leave the main shopping thoroughfare, walk down a narrow street shaded by a low sun, then another, turn the corner, continue along a canal lined with pale-gold buildings, and there it is-a simple, beige-stucco span called Ponte delle Tette. In Italian, it means “Bridge of the Teats”. It was here that the celebrated courtesans of the Renaissance gathered to display their charms and their cleavage.

Ms. Lawner likes the out-of-the-way places best, the places with an erotic edge. It has been that way for much of her unusual career. An independent scholar who lives in New York when she’s not in Italy or Paris, she takes a scholarly interest in erotic literature. She has chronicled the lives of courtesans in a glossy art book, translated Italian love poetry, written several volumes of poems herself, and published a book of rare and racy—some would say pornographic—Renaissance prints banned by Pope Clement VII in the 16^th century. Along the way, she has been a visiting lecturer at several American universities and has held a string of fellowships, including the Fulbright grant that recently brought her to Venice.

But her favorite work may be her own life. “I’m one of the last of the bohemians,” says Ms. Lawner, who has wavy hair, delicate features, and a voice that can be both flirtatious and sharp. “I’ve always been interested in love and eros,” she adds.

She has long felt an affinity with the courtesans she studies, and she sees many parallels between her life and theirs. She doesn’t mean common prostitutes, but the elegant, independent women who cultivated a distinguished clientele, ran their own salons, loved whom they wanted. “The top echelon of the courtesans took up their fate with a lot of energy and guys. I didn’t show them as mere victims of male oppression, although there was some of that, obviously.”

Like the courtesans, Ms. Lawner has had more independence than many women of her generation, she says. Her decision to lead and intellectual life abroad has given her opportunities not available to others. The courtesans lived both at the center and the edge of the society, “and that was true of my own existence.”

Ms. Lawner’s work and life have always been intertwined, she says-whether she was discussing Petrarch in a Roman café, or savoring some passionate romance, or exploring the major libraries of Europe.

Like the courtesans, she has an eye for beauty. She understands the importance of presenting a bella figura—a good face to the world. She knows how to toss a shawl over her shoulders, and appreciates a well-cut sandal. She doesn’t want to be another dowdy academic. No problem there.

Nor does she want to be another face in the crowd. No problem there, either. Upon entering a trattoria here one evening, she creates a small commotion when the owners fail to greet her warmly. After a flurry of gestures and a rapid exchange in Italian, a waiter who knows Ms. Lawner is summoned. Her frown folds into a smile as they chatter in Venetian dialect. Now the evening promises to be as light as the gnocchi, as romantic as the wine. Before long, she is holding court with an elegant young woman at the next table.

“What do you do?” the young woman asks.

“Oh,” Ms. Lawner says with a laugh, “lots of things. Let’s not define ourselves.” Later, she explains: Academics are so specialized today. When she was a doctoral candidate in literature at Columbia University, she felt free to mix art and literature and life.

“I am a woman of letters,” she says, giving each word equal emphasis. “There aren’t many of us now.”

After graduating from Wellesley College (her senior thesis was on Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady), Ms. Lawner held a series of fellowships, including a Fulbright. She lived on and off in Rome in the 1960s and 1970s, translating, writing, and mixing with artists and political figures.

She began studying Renaissance women writers, including two poets—Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco—thought to have been courtesans. That led to her book Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance (Rizzoli, 1987). It weaves together letters and poems by courtesans and their patrons, and artworks depicting them. If she glorified the courtesans, it was to add balance to previous depictions, she says.

During her research, Ms. Lawner came across a set of 16 sexually explicit, 400-year-old prints, accompanied by bawdy sonnets by a Renaissance satirist named Pietro Aretino. Known as I Modi, or “The Postures,” the prints were based on an earlier series of engravings that had been banned by the pope. (He supposedly recognized some of the people depicted)

Ms. Lawner believes that the prints she reproduced-she has never disclosed the owner-are the only ones known to remain. The illustrations and the sonnets, which she translated, were published in 1989 by Northwestern University Press in an unusual book called I Modi. The Sixteen Pleasures: An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance. Four centuries later, the images had not lost their power: Some campus bookstores refused to carry the book.

In a recent twist—Ms. Lawner’s life seems to take many of them—a Knox College professor of English named Robert Hellenga wrote a well-received novel called The Sixteen Pleasures (Soho Press, 1994). The heroine is an American art conservator who, while working in Italy, stumbles upon the erotic prints.

When first asked about the novel, Ms. Lawner says she felt as if her life had been stolen. [L.L.: Hellegna’s tale has little to do with my professional and personal life, which, if I may say so, has been much more adventurous and variegated!] Mr. Hellenga says he already had decided that his heroine would find I Modi, which he knew of because of scholarly references to it, when he learned of Ms. Lawner’s book. He says he knows nothing of her life. “Many women told me they felt I had written about them,” he adds.

Later, Ms. Lawner softens, saying the novel made her laugh. But she says she is still upset that Mr. Hellenga used her own title as his novel’s title.

Now she is working on a book about the commedia dell’arte, known for its masked characters. In a way, she has closed a circle: she went to Italy on a Fulbright grant after college, and recently returned on another.

Venice seems an appropriate setting for Ms. Lawner. Canals reflect a scholar’s thoughts as clearly as they do the faded buildings and bobbing gondolas. Grotesque stone faces give a certain edge to the decadent façades of old palaces. One dark, narrow street leads to another, finally dead-ending in a tiny campo—the Venetian name for piazza. But streets here never really end, they just keep going. A doorway leads to a sottoportego—a vaulted passageway—that leads to an alley that leads to a bigger street that leads to a major avenue. Venice is mysterious, watery web of canals and alleys—a circle that completes itself.

It is early evening as Ms. Lawner ducks inside a tiny wine bar for a sparkling prosecco. She offers a final thought on her work. There’s an Italian expression, she says: “Chi me lo fa fare?” Who’s making me do it? Or, Why do I bother?

Why, then?

“Pure passion.”

Ron Jenkins, American Theatre Magazine, January 1999,
“Send in The Clowns: A Lush Illustrated History Resurrects Commedia”

“…fascinating collection of sketches, engravings, paintings and photographs…” — American Theatre

Commedia dell’Arte originated (probably) in sixteenth-century Italy, and has been around ever since. It has added characters and changed names with changing countries, but its basic pattern runs through painting, circus, all forms of theater, and on into cinema. It will probably reach outer space in time. The characters have become archetypes; their antics are infinitely variable, and their relationships fluid enough to give artists the to convert them into sad or merry symbols at will. Ms. Lawner’s history of the genre makes a pretty, amusing book that is also informative. — The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe Lou Adams

The Commedia dell’Arte has a long history. Invented in the Renaissance as a popular entertainment, it has survived to the present day in experimental theatre and in Punch and Judy shows. The characters of Harlequin, Columbine and Pierrot have inspired artists from Tiepolo and Watteau to Picasso and Hockney, and composers from Schumann to Stravinsky. Playwrights have also been stimulated by these fanciful characters, including Shakespeare and Moliere. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes created Petrushka and Parade – music by Satie, choregraphy by Massine – and Nijinksy danced harlequin in The Carnival in 1910. The curious interaction of the Commedia dell’Arte and the visual arts, the history of the whole strange concept and its lasting inspiration – ‘the first modern theatre’ – are closely studied in this copiously illustrated work. – Kirkus UK

“Eighteenth century marionette theatres showing Harlequin and his merry crew are rarities which frankly only turn up in the great auction houses. But in Harlequin on the Moon Lynne Lawner shows pictures of these miraculous things among 100 fine illustrations all of which present the many faces of Harlequin. For collectors, the wide-range covered by the author sets the mind reeling. Obviously, few readers will be able to afford an original Picasso painting of Harlequin – a figure he was very keen on and which he painted many times – but that matters very little since the excitement which runs like an electric pulse through this fine book shows Harlequin and friends in many different forms…. Harlequin on the Moon is so filled with inspiring things and images that it is hard to know which thing to linger over next.”

Birmingham Post, “Beauty that Lies in the Grotesque: Antiques Editor Richard Edmonds Unmasks a Wealth of Treasures”

Dancing Times magazine (UK), in March 1999 issue, describes Lynne Lawner’s Harlequin on the Moon as “erudite, but very accessible. The text is richly illustrated with varied visual imagery….This fascinating book is warmly recommended to all those who are interested in theatre and its history.”

Even if you don’t actually read Lynne Lawner’s fascinating study on commedia dell’arte, Harlequin on the Moon, there are enough pictures in this lavishly illustrated volume to keep your eyes engaged for weeks on end. The characters of Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbina come alive in a generous helping of sketches, engravings, paintings, photographs, and film stills heretofore uncollected in such a comprehensive and enlightening way. From Tiepolo to Picasso, from Hopper to Hockney, from Nadar to Marcel Carné’s “Les Enfants du Paradis”, these stock figures have captured the imaginations of many artists. But do read the text, which bristles with fascinating information and insights. — Stagebill, February, 1999

Paperback: 196 pages
Publisher: Chelsea Editions (2010)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-0972527187

Reviews

Google books: Maria Luisa Spaziani. Painted Fire. A Selection of Poems 1954—2006.

Purchase (via amazon.com)

Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Harry N Abrams;
First Edition edition (September 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-0810911949

Excerpt from the book (58 MB)

Reviews

Google books: Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts.

Purchase (via amazon.com)

Lynne Lawner will take you on a voyage back to the sixteenth century, to the lavish papal and ducal courts of Italy, and above all to the luxurious emporium and international melting-pot republican Renaissance Venice had become. At the center of a vivacious cultural life producing some of the greatest paintings and sculpture ever conceived we find the courtesans who, through their words and actions, emerge as much more than artists’ models or accomplished lovers.

Indeed, if we look closely, we will see how society itself was complicit in reviving the ancient phenomenon of the hetairai allied with the notion of “the sacred prostitute”. The law alternatively punished and protected these women, especially as the century drew to a close.