The Friendship and Rivalry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

 

In 1950s America, women were not supposed to be ambitious. In fact, women were respected for not pursuing their own careers and instead focusing their attentions on the home and family.

 
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were born into this cultural moment and reached their formative years when this ideology of the dutiful woman was at its height. When Plath graduated from Smith College, her commencement speaker, Adlai Stevenson, praised the female graduates and pronounced that the purpose of their education was to help them become intelligent, interesting wives.
 
But in 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met for the first time at a poetry workshop run by Robert Lowell at Boston University. They were both aware of the challenges facing them as aspiring writers trying to get ahead and be successful in a male-dominated literary discipline. For this short period of time, a matter of months, the two women’s lives collided.
 
On a Tuesday after class Sexton would drive them to The Ritz-Carlton in her old Ford to drink three martinis and talk intensely about life, poetry, suicide, and death. Pulling up in a Loading Only zone, Sexton would yell “It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!” Then, over dishes of free potato chips in the hushed, red hotel bar they would pile their books and papers on the table, and talk. Both understood the tensions and challenges of trying to negotiate their way through the world balancing their desire to be wives, mothers, and writers. Both had a strong sense of social rebellion and a belief that women were more than entitled to their own careers.
 
This extract adapted from my book, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz begins to explore some of these tensions and how Plath and Sexton found their lives a juggling act between the personal, domestic, and professional.
 
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There are two items in the Plath and Sexton archives that evoke a sense of social rebellion. Their address books.
 
Plath’s is a green snakeskin-patterned pocket-sized book filled mostly with her immaculate handwriting, notes, and annotations. The front cover has the word Addresses on it in embossed gold lettering. The black ink is shiny in places, almost wet looking. Sexton’s is a loose-leafed vibrant red folder that still retains an odd odor. When the archive storage box is opened, it exudes a faint smell of musty nicotine. The plastic cover is sticky to the touch. The front page has a vague imprint of the word Telephone engraved around the bottom of a square plinth holding a picture of what looks to be a once-gold tele- phone. This item was left on the top of Sexton’s filing cabinet by her desk at the time of her death.
 
Like Plath, Sexton’s address book was important to her, so important that she wrote a poem about it called “Telephone,” beginning with a clear, accurate description: “Take a red book called TELEPHONE, / Size eight by four. There it sits. / My red book, name, address and number. / These are all people that I somehow own.”
 
While the poem then muses upon all the “dear dead names” that “won’t erase” from the book, what we can see in Sexton’s list of contacts is how closely family, therapists, psychiatric hospitals, suicide hotlines, and pharmacies sit side by side with journals, editors, poetry prize committees, and university contacts. As with Plath’s address book, Sexton’s showed the range of people she was dealing with and the almost double life of housewife-poet, or, as she put it, “I do not live a poet’s life. I look and act like a housewife” until the point when a poem has to be written and then, she writes, “I am a lousy cook, a lousy wife, a lousy mother, because I am too busy wrestling with the poem to remember that I am a normal (?) American housewife.”
 
The tension of these two areas running alongside each other, the housewife-mother and the professional poet, was one that both women felt throughout their careers. But it was a position that was frowned upon at the time. Women were expected to sacrifice their careers to ensure a stable home. In fact, in more affluent homes, if women chose to work when the paycheck was not needed, they were regarded as selfish for putting their own needs before those of the family. Marriage and children were part of the national agenda and regarded as one feature that made America superior. Operating within the Cold War agenda, stay-at-home mothers were contrasted favorably with mothers in communist Russia who worked in dismal factories and left their children in cold day-care centers. American wives could be well-groomed, focusing on orderly homes and tending to all their children’s needs. As a result of this propaganda, by the 1950s marriage rates were at an all- time high, and women were getting married younger.
 
Despite the power of this message, neither Plath nor Sexton could fully accept this cultural norm. In 1962, in a candid letter to the sculptor Leonard Baskin, Plath admitted that she was only able to cope with being a wife and mother and all the domestic chores that came with it because she could also write, “which is my life blood & makes it possible for me to be domes- tic & motherly, which latter is my nature some of the time, & only when I have the other consolations & reprieves.” Sexton, too, records on numerous occasions the tension of being a woman as both poet and mother and how she felt displaced among other suburban housewives of the time. And yet neither could, at first, fully reject the societal expectations that formed part of their upbringing. Neither was there really a precedent yet that would support their breaking away from such domestic ideals. That would come too late for Plath, who died just months before the advent of second-wave feminism, a movement that surprisingly did not sweep Sexton up to the extent one might expect.
 
What Plath and Sexton did try to achieve was a subversive rebellion that increasingly became an open rebellion as they found their voices and their platforms from which to speak. If in 1950s America women of a certain class were supposed to sacrifice their own careers for those of their husbands, Plath and Sexton were having none of it. Both became increasingly outspoken in their poetry, prose, interviews, and correspondence while somehow balancing this against staying fairly conventional in their home lives. Marian Foster, a Devon neighbor, recalls how Plath insisted on going to the Sunday church services in town even though she despised them. When Foster asked her why she persisted, Plath admitted that she was concerned about what people would think if she didn’t attend. Yet Plath’s poems at that time are markedly hostile to religion, and her 1962 short story “Mothers” does little to disguise the local vicar whom Plath exposes as misogynistic and hypocritical. In a letter to her mother she was even more open about the “ghastly sermons” and the rector for whom she was full of “scorn."
 
Yet she still planned to have her children christened there. This rebellion and conformity ran in uneasy conjunction, often bumping into each other. In September 1962, when Plath invited the Fosters to her home for genteel afternoon tea and homemade cakes, they had no idea that that morning she had been furiously writing her infamous Ariel poems.
 
Sexton was slightly more daring than Plath in her rejection of conventional ideals and domestic chores. She sometimes tried to bake cakes with the children, but they often went wrong. Kayo, her husband, did most of the cooking. She employed a cleaner and someone to do the laundry. While Sexton occasionally expressed some guilt about this seeming domestic aberration from the expected norm, she also had the courage to stand by her belief that she deserved the time to write and would take it and use it.
 
What Plath and Sexton established was a position that would last for the rest of their lives and afterlives—that of women who refuse to be silent. Their voices were not just asserting some louder version of the oppressed female experience; their voices were confrontational and started to open up a space for women to express anger, disgust, frustration, and dissatisfaction. Rage became legitimized. They also began writing about the female body in a way that caused genuine shock and revulsion among male editors and critics. Plath’s poems, such as "Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “The Applicant,” and “Fever 103°,” were regarded as dangerously extreme. Sexton’s poems, such as “The Abortion,” “Menstruation at Forty,” and “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator,” sent some male critics into apoplectic rage—rage and criticism that Sexton then took on and replied back to in her poems, which presumably left the critics even more paralyzed with fury.
 
The result was that Plath and Sexton were, and still are, regarded as both troubling and troublesome figures in society. Their work is subjected to the kind of misogynistic critique rarely heaped on other writers. And this gendered attitude filters down to their readers too. Young women are told they’ll “grow out” of reading Plath, that they lack any critical faculties, merely worship at the shrine of a suicide death goddess, and so on. They become objects of humor, no longer proper or serious readers, but rather devotees. Goths and emos who wear black with a death fixation.
 
Although both died young, Plath and Sexton have never really gone away. This presence is around in a number of ways. Their books remain in print, and their poems anthologized, ensuring their disruptive voices are still heard. They were, and remain, relatable women, if extraordinarily gifted poets.
 
 Adapted from Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz  : The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton by Gail Crowther, published by Gallery Books.
 
 
The inside story behind the parallel lives of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. By Gail Crowther. Fortune, April 24, 2021.

In 1950s America, women were not supposed to be ambitious. When Sylvia Plath graduated from Smith College in 1955, her commencement speaker, Adlai Stevenson, praised the female graduates and pronounced the purpose of their education was so they could be entertaining and well-informed wives when their husbands returned home from work. The postwar ideals of domesticity, the nuclear family, and the white middle-class woman who stayed at home dominated American thought until the mid-1960s. For those with enough privilege, a woman’s place was ensuring that a strong family unit would mean a strong, united society. Women were respected for not pursuing their own careers or ambitions. So, they had a lot to look forward to then.
 
Six years after graduation, when she was writing The Bell Jar, Plath satirized this viewpoint with the memorable lines: “What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” But subversively, Plath’s narrator, the sassy and wry Esther Greenwood, declared, “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.”
 
Far from planning to be a well-informed and interesting wife, Plath’s protagonist wanted an ambitious and varied future on her own terms. She rejected gendered double standards in all their forms, declaring that if men could do what they wanted and have sex with whom they wanted, so could she. One can only imagine how men must have withered beneath her gaze. Upon her first glimpse of male genitalia, Esther Greenwood pondered, “The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.” (Hetero)sexual liberation had its drawbacks.
 
In 1959, when Anne Sexton won a fellowship to study poetry under the greatly respected American poet Theodore Roethke, she wrote sarcastically to her poet friend Carolyn Kizer that he probably wouldn’t like her work and she’d be left sobbing in her “cave of womanhood.” More seriously, though, Sexton described the frustration of “kicking at the door of fame that men run and own and won’t give us the password for.”
 
But in 1950s America, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met for the first time. Both were emerging poets, and both were hugely ambitious women in a cultural moment that did not know how to deal with ambitious women. They realized that to pursue their desire to be writers would require determination, energy, and resilience. Operating in a male-dominated discipline was not easy, and their rebellion against the status quo seethed just below the surface.
 
Curiously, Plath and Sexton both grew up in Wellesley, a suburb of Boston, but never met during their teenage years. When their paths did finally cross, Plath was 26 and Sexton was 30. Their meeting was dramatic and literary,  in a writing workshop at Boston University run by the well-known poet Robert Lowell.
 
Throughout the spring of 1959, on a Tuesday afternoon between 2 and 4 p.m., Plath and Sexton shared the same seminar space, room 222 at 236 Bay State Road. This room still exists today: tiny, with creaking wooden floors, a book-lined wall, and three airy windows offering a glimpse of the Charles River. It is a space that seems too small to have housed the personalities of Lowell, Sexton, and Plath. Sexton described it as “a dismal room the shape of a shoe box. It was a bleak spot, as if it had been forgotten for years, like the spinning room in Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
 
The two women spent hours reading their poems, listening to about 18 other students, and taking advice from Lowell about what they were working on. The atmosphere was mostly awkward silences, slight terror at having their poems chosen for discussion, and equal terror at having them ignored. Poet Kathleen Spivack, who attended these classes as an undergraduate student, wrote, “The experience of being there was nerve-racking.”
 
Lowell dominated with one question he repeated again and again, “But what does the poem really mean?” Often long, uncomfortable silences would follow, and students would make embarrassed eye contact with each other or shift nervously in their seats. Sometimes, for Sexton, the silences would get too much “so I act like a bitch… [H]e will be dissecting some great poem and will say ‘Why is this line so good. What makes it good?’ and there is total silence. Everyone afraid to speak. And finally, because I can stand it no longer, I speak up saying, ‘I don’t think it’s so good at all. You would never allow us sloppy language like that.’”
 
Students also observed Lowell’s moods and manic depression with some alarm, noticing how during certain seminars he simply seemed, in Sexton’s words, “so gracefully insane.” Insomuch as he was a brilliant poet-critic, he could be distracted and vague, and would become increasingly obsessed with the same point during his manic phases. He could lash out at students if they said the wrong thing or irritated him. One April afternoon, he was so agitated that they became convinced he was about to throw himself out the window. In fact, immediately after the class, he was admitted to McLean Hospital on the outskirts of Boston, where Plath had already been a patient and Sexton would eventually become one.
 
Although during these sessions Plath and Sexton tentatively circled each other, Lowell finally paired them up. Perhaps he saw a similarity that neither woman could see. Perhaps he saw thematic connections in their work. Or maybe it was just chance. Whatever it was, the two women were then connected and forced to work together, and from this point on their friendship took a different turn. Plath had a grudging respect for Sexton and was ambivalent in her praise. Her journal notes that Lowell had “set me up with Ann [sic] Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff.”
 
Sexton, on the other hand, was keen to indicate that she was the trailblazer whom Plath, and other poets, followed: “She heard, and George Starbuck heard, that I was auditing a class at Boston University given by Robert Lowell. They kind of followed me in…”
 
What Sexton’s casual claim overlooks was her insecurity and fear at asking to be admitted. Her exchange of letters with Robert Lowell reveal a nervous, apologetic-sounding Sexton admitting that she is not a graduate, has not been to college, and has been writing for only a year. Included with the letter are manuscripts of “The Musicians,” “Consorting with Angels,” “Man and Wife,” and “Mother and Jack and the Rain.” Lowell responded warmly, assuring Sexton that of course she qualified for the course and that he had read her poems with admiration and envy. An elated Sexton replied, saying she planned to frame his letter and would require no further praise from anyone for “possibly a month.”
 
As with all small literary circles there was competition and jealousy among the same people applying for the same prizes, fellowships, and publishing opportunities. Literary life in the cobbled streets of the Beacon Hill area of Boston brimmed with poets: Plath, Sexton, Lowell, Starbuck, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and W. S. Merwin. Plath immediately felt direct competition and rivalry over awards such as the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, an award she coveted (but much to her fury finally went to George Starbuck).

 
Students who audited Lowell’s class recalled the polar differences between Sexton and Plath, who each in her own way created an atmosphere of awe. Sexton was often late, all breezy and open, jangling with jewelry, wearing brightly printed dresses and glamorous hairstyles, and chain-smoking. According to Spivack, Sexton was a soft presence in the class, observing keenly with her green eyes behind cigarette smoke. She used her shoe as an ashtray. Her late entrances were dramatic as she stood in the doorway, dropping books and papers and cigarette stubs, while the men in the class jumped to their feet and found her a seat. Her hands shook when she read her poems aloud.
 
Plath on the other hand was mostly silent and often turned up early. Spivack would find her already seated at the table when she arrived, astonishingly still and perfectly composed. Her pencil would be poised over a notebook, or she would be reading and paying no attention to the comings and goings, the chair scrapings and nervous coughing. Occasionally Spivack found Plath a little restless and preoccupied, pleasant but noncommittal, with an intent, unnerving stare.
 
In contrast to Sexton’s appearance, Plath wore her hair pulled severely into a bun and owned a range of sensible buttoned-up shirts and cardigans. Her camel hair coat would either be carefully folded over the back of her chair or wrapped around her shoulders. She mostly took the seat at the foot of the table, directly opposite Lowell, and was the only student there who was not out intellectualized by him. None of his obscure references were obscure to Plath; she was impeccably educated. When she did speak it was often to make a devastating comment about somebody else’s work, though she could be equally brilliant at analyzing structure, rhythms, and scanning.
 
Most students were afraid of her. While outwardly Plath seemed self-contained and critical, those sharing the room with her could not have known the doubt, agony, and longing she was pouring into her journals: “I have a vision of the poems I would write, but do not. When will they come?” she asked plaintively in March 1959.
 
At this early stage in their writing careers, both Sexton and Plath were married, seemingly living the conventional lifestyle expected of white, middle-class, heterosexual American women lucky enough to have a certain level of privilege. Sexton’s husband, Alfred Muller Sexton II, known as Kayo, worked in her family’s business selling wool samples. Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, was an increasingly well-known poet whose success at that stage easily eclipsed Plath’s. But running alongside this surface acceptance of the dutiful housewife was an underlying rejection of suffocating gender roles and expectations.
 
Plath mostly vented these frustrations in her journals, complaining about herself, her husband, her writer’s block, and her fury at rejections and failed applications. Sexton took lovers, and in the spring of 1959 she began an affair with her classmate George Starbuck. He, too, was an emerging poet and a junior editor at the publishing house Houghton Mifflin. The poet-editor Peter Davison recalls Starbuck being “all knees and elbows, tall as a crane with great shadows under his eyes, and a slow melancholy, throw-away manner of speaking…”
 

This affair developed under the watchful and disapproving eye of Plath, who decided the best way to deal with it was to turn it into a story: “Here is horror. And all the details.”
 
The affair was almost certainly sparked by the after-class drinking that Plath, Sexton, and Starbuck started soon after encountering one another. Following the seminar, the three of them would pile into the front seat of Sexton’s old Ford Saloon and drive through Boston to the Ritz-Carlton on the edge of the Public Garden. Here, Sexton would pull into a loading-only zone, yelling at bemused hotel workers, “It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!”
 
Then Starbuck would hold out his arms and Plath and Sexton would take one each and drink, in Sexton’s words, “three or four or two martinis” in the lounge bar of the hotel. Sexton recalled the hushed quiet, plush, dark-red carpeting, leather chairs, and white-coated waiters serving the best of Boston. The three young poets hoped they might be mistaken for Hollywood types with their books, poems, and fiery conversations.
 
The two women must have realized at this point the many ways in which they were linked and the sensibilities they shared. Poised at the magnificent door of the Ritz, it is tempting to look back through a ghostly history to imagine the conversations that must have taken place over martinis and free potato chips. Both women were demonstrative and enthusiastic talkers, becoming relaxed and louder as they drank more alcohol. If, as Sexton claimed, the conversations were fiery, they must have been talking about things that mattered to them. What might those topics have been? We get tantalizing glimpses and memories, details here and there from journals and letters.
 
Although they came from very different economic backgrounds, both women had overbearing and emotionally demanding mothers. From a young age, both were ambitious in a subversive gendered way, thinking and acting in a manner that was regarded as unusual for women at that time. Neither accepted the double standards regarding sexual pleasure, relationships, marriage, children, and careers. They could only cope with domestic and social expectations if they gave priority to their own time and ambitions. Women were not supposed to even think this in 1950s America, nor were they supposed to leave their husbands waiting for them at home while they went out to drink martinis with friends and lovers in the middle of the afternoon.
 
Family, poetry, husbands, sex, and Boston gossip in general were all fascinating topics. But Plath and Sexton shared an experience that overshadowed all other conversations that took place at the Ritz bar: they had both survived suicide attempts and mental illness.
 
“We talked death with burned-up intensity,” said Sexton. Yes, they knew, in Sexton’s phrasing, that it was “sick,” but they felt death made them more real. Plath had survived a suicide attempt six years earlier when, at age 20, she hid away in a crawl space of the family home and took a large quantity of sleeping pills. Although this was a determined effort to die, Plath took too many pills and vomited them back up. She gradually came to consciousness two days later with a nasty gash under her right eye where she had repeatedly banged her head on the concrete ground. Sexton had survived numerous suicide attempts, all overdoses, some more serious than others.
 
These death conversations were treated as scandalous gossip, swapping stories in loving detail under the mostly silent gaze of George Starbuck. “It is a wonder we didn’t depress George with our egocentricity,” wrote Sexton. Both women were seeing therapists, and Sexton was completely open about this. Her daughter Linda observed that her mother had no sense of privacy, so if death and suicide were on the table, it seems likely therapy would be too.
 
After their afternoon drinking at the Ritz, they would weave through the streets of Boston to the Waldorf Cafeteria on Tremont Street for a 70-cent dinner and then Sexton would drive to an evening appointment with her psychiatrist in the city. Plath was in weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Ruth Beuscher, who had treated her immediately following her suicide attempt in 1953. Sexton recalled during these death-suicide talks that they would fix their eyes intently on each other, soaking up the gossip and the details while devouring dish after dish of free potato chips. Aware that this was unusual, that people could not understand the fascination, Sexton was always asked “Why, why?” She tried to answer in her poem “Wanting to Die.” “But suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.”
 
Which tools, she said, was the fascination.
 
These strange conversations formed the basis of their brief but intense friendship, a friendship based on rivalry, respect, and admiration. Now, years later, the poets are long gone from the Ritz, and the martinis consumed. But the aftermath of those conversations ripple uneasily through time and space. This is partly because both poets trouble what society and culture does to women. Their voices disrupt dominant ideals as their poems tear apart unfaithful men, gender expectations, the difficulties of marriage, how it feels to be a mother, a woman, a woman who menstruates, suffers miscarriages, who enjoys masturbation and sex.
 
On those springtime Boston afternoons during their confessional drinking, Plath and Sexton were more radical than they realized. They began to pave the way for the rest of us. For although Sexton felt as though they were kicking at the door of fame waiting for men to share the password, in the end, the two poets kicked the door down anyway, no password needed, and found their own fame, on their own terms. We, at this later point in time, are lucky to see what is on the other side of that door.
 
Excerpted from Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton,  published by  Gallery Books.
 
On the Friendship and Rivalry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. By Gail Crowther.LitHub, April 28, 2021.
 

Emily Van Duyne  talks with her friend Gail Crowther, about her book Three Martini Afternoons At The Ritz. Gail’s book is a dual biography of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and looks at their lives and work through the lens of rebellion. Plath and Sexton were rebels in pencil skirts raising babies and writing some of the best poems of the 20th century, and Gail’s book explores that with vigor and joy.  Van Duyne and Crowther discuss Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes, the Rosenstein papers, sexism, and why it’s necessary to distinguish between Sylvia Plath and “Sylvia Plath.”.
 
Gail Crowther: Three Martini Afternoons Interview. Loving Sylvia Plath  , April 22, 2021

Sociologist and author Gail Crowther joins Zibby Owens  to talk about her latest book, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton, and the incredible history behind it. Gail shares the ghostly experience she had while conducting archival research, why she wants to argue against stereotyping these two poets as crazy women, and the story of how she first fell in love with Sylvia Plath.
 
Gail Crowther, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz. Moms Don't Have Time To Read Books, April 22, 2021.

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s poetry class in Boston are the stuff of lore, fostered by Sexton’s rollicking report, including how she would park in the loading zone of the Ritz and say it was okay because they were going to get loaded. The tales in Plath biographies about the raucous roundelays of these two poets are supplemented by Kathleen Spivack’s first-hand, sensitive account about their classroom behavior in With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz & Others (2012). Gail Crowther, author of The Haunted Reader and Sylvia Plath (2017) and co-author of These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath (2017), has not only mastered the literature in which both Plath and Sexton appear but has also done her original archival research and consultations with one of Sexton’s daughters and with Plath’s friend, Elizabeth Compton Sigmund. The result is an engrossing book that challenges the very limits of what we think we know about Plath and Sexton.

 
Part of Crowther’s purpose, although she does not state it is to continue the mission evident in Heather Clark’s Plath biography of situating these poets in the pressures of their cultural contexts, showing how alone they remained as they challenged the notions of what women could accomplish as writers, wives, and mothers. They were quite different personalities and poets. There is a kind of looseness in Sexton that is her greatest strength and limitation, writing as a poet of the viscera that is bold and inevitably called “confessional.” Sometimes she does not know when to quit and accept the perfection of verse that Plath achieved with such vigor in her final poems, overcoming her earlier tendency to stifle spontaneity in a quest for formal precision. For all their differences, however, these rivals inspired and pilfered from one another in mutually beneficial ways.
 
Both ended as suicides in desperation and despair, but also in an excruciating understanding of how their lives had reached their limits. Both readily talked about suicide in their Ritz revelry. They were dead serious about the right to annihilate themselves. They “felt death made them more real,” Crowther notes. Were they wrong to think so? Crowther does not pose such a question, but it is worth answering in so far as acknowledging they both keenly wanted the attention of posterity and therefore how they died, and when they died, was of signal importance to them.

 
For very different reasons, as Crowther shows, both needed support systems that men took for granted and that allowed men to weather their depressions. For a time, in their marriages—however fraught—these women did have a kind of infrastructure of home and family, although Plath was much better at organizing herself, her husband, and their two children. In fact, she was so good at organizing that her husband Ted Hughes, as Crowther shows, was quite bereft without her, even though he left because he did not want to be organized!
 
Crowther deplores the pathographies that see in every sadness and depression warning signs of demise. To be sure, the signs are there, but so is the evidence of Sexton’s and Plath’s ebullience and power. They both knew how to eat men like air. But men were not their only problem. As Crowther notes, “both women had overbearing and emotionally demanding mothers,” and try as they might, these poets also found it difficult not to be “overbearing and emotionally demanding.” Did they discuss as much at the Ritz? Crowther can only speculate: “It seems unlikely Plath and Sexton would not talk about their mother-daughter relationships.” Both women also liked to talk about the men in their lives. Crowther asks: “Did they gossip about their husbands and dramatic marriages over their third martini at the Ritz while these very husbands were at home waiting for them to return?”
 
Crowther gets at what was going on inside these poets, what they were like, by piling up the material evidence. So she compares their address books, Plath’s “neat and self-contained”; Sexton’s “wilder and more flamboyant.” Yet both books “have in common . . . the merging of the domestic with professional.” The lives of these women were full of business of all kinds and certainly more than their husbands were capable of, who did not have to balance, in Crowther’s words, “rebellion and conformity.” Women were taught to be perfect at everything that Plath especially took to heart. It was a reaction to “learned behavior,” not “neurosis,” Crowther points out, that provoked these women’s breakdowns.
 
In a horrifying chapter about mental illness, Crowther delineates the malpractice of medical professionals who prescribed untested drugs and delivered unproven therapies like insulin shock that made for no discernible improvement. To be institutionalized deprived these women of the support they received from women friends. Crowther reports: “Connie Taylor Blackwell, a Boston friend of Plath’s, described how they would often meet and drink sherry and talk about ‘the void.’ It was a big topic, claimed Blackwell, because at the time, in the 1950s, women were being pushed in so many directions that the attraction of nothingness for them was very real. Women, quite simply, got exhausted by it all. . . . There is a reason why more women than men are diagnosed with depression. There is a reason why most people diagnosed with depression who are given drugs are women.” Sexton and Maxine Kumin, a mother with young children at home, spent hours on the phone critiquing their poetry. Kumin grounded Sexton and yet kept their collaborations “relatively secret because they feared people would lump them together and see them as alike. It was a struggle for separate identities in a literary world that was hostile enough to women.” The Kumin effect is evident in Crowther’s account of a joint interview during which Sexton “‘waxes lyrical about female friendship . . . ending with ‘I think I’m dominating this interview.’ Kumin replied dryly, ‘You are, Anne.’”

 
Crowther is a sociologist by training, and that background adds a good deal to her understanding of biography:
 
  “Of course, once they died, Plath and Sexton immediately became statistics, slotting into the cultural pattern and story of who was dying where, when, and how. The week Plath died in February 1963 there would have been at least ninety-nine other suicides, and an extra twenty-five to fifty who did not make the official lists. In 1974 when Sexton died, she fell into the category most prone to kill themselves, forty-five to sixty-four-year-olds. This impersonal information shows that sadly, there was nothing unique or doomed-genius-woman-writer about their deaths. They were, along with many other people, too desperate and wrought to continue living.”
 
Crowther does not ignore psychology or the material conditions of her poets’ last days, showing how difficult it was for them to retain equilibrium without marriage, although she does not argue that being single is the cause of their deaths. Instead, she returns to an evocation of how much it took for them to live, as evidenced in
 
  “the endless manuscripts they left behind, worked, and reworked; thousands of letters, teaching notes, business contracts, household bills, bookkeeping. But also, as Plath said, in the lares and penates of a woman’s life: lipstick smears on envelopes, cigarette burns on letters, coffee cup rings on poetry drafts, their personal libraries, recipe books, and in their perpetual struggle against the male-dominated discipline they were so determined to succeed in.”
 
Three-Martini Lunches at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. By Carl Rollyson.  Simply Charly, April 26, 2021.
 

More on the book on Gail Crowther’s website. And here. 

Sylvia's Death
 
for Sylvia Plath
 
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about raising potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?
Thief —
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?
(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,
how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy
to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,
and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,
and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides
and I know at the news of your death
a terrible taste for it, like salt,
(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,
what is your death
but an old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?
(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to sing!)
O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!
 

Poem by Anne Sexton 

The Beauty and the Terror, The Italian Renaissance

 

When I came to write The Beauty and the Terror, my alternative history of the Italian Renaissance, one of the questions I wanted to explore was: why is it that the big names of Renaissance art are all men? Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael... women scarcely get a look in.

 In his The Lives of the Artists, which established the canon of Renaissance art, Giorgio Vasari devoted only one chapter to a female artist. That was the Bolognese sculptor Properzia de' Rossi, whose chapter also had to accommodate his comments on Plautilla Nelli and Sofonisba Anguissola as well as a brief mention of the much lesser-known Madonna Lucrezia.

 The question of how far women had a Renaissance (in the cultural sense) has long prompted debate. There were clearly individual exceptions, like the patron Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, who purchased and commissioned numerous works from writers and artists. Yet as the evidence is reconsidered, it's become apparent that women were active not only in the visual arts but also in the world of literature.

 One barrier to the participation of women in the art world was access to training. That accounts for the large proportion of them who came from artistic families, among them the Bolognese portraitist Lavinia Fontana and, in the seventeenth century, Elisabetta Sirani.

 Sofonisba Anguissola was an exception to that rule. The daughter of a nobleman from Cremona, near Milan, she was educated from the age of about 14 in the house of a local painter, Bernardino Campi. The portrait of her sister as a nun, painted in 1551 when the artist was just 16, shows her early promise.

 She benefited from the patronage of the elderly Michelangelo who showed her 'honourable and thoughtful affection', praising her work. Her images of domestic warmth and informality were novel, and she went on to serve as a lady-in-waiting at the Spanish court, where she continued to work as a portraitist.

 Numerous women were active in the literary world of sixteenth-century Italy, even in the face of sexism and oppression. Vittoria Colonna, member of a prominent noble family, was a poet who broke new stylistic ground, writing eloquently of the traumas of war. Yet even while praising her achievement in 'equalling the most widely esteemed and wisest men', her contemporary Paolo Giovio felt the need to add a detailed paragraph on her 'most delicate cleavage' and breasts 'swelling with heavenly nectar'.

 

That was the polite version. An anonymous satirist claimed that after her husband's death in the Italian Wars had turned to religion only because she couldn't find a lover (or, as the writer put it, 'a pestle to grind her mortar'). As if that wasn't bad enough, her interest in religious reform attracted the notice of the Inquisition (these were the early years of the Reformation), and she was under investigation for heresy when she died in 1547.

 The ferment of religious change in the mid-sixteenth century combined with long-running wars to shake up gender roles as many men went off to war, leaving women to manage at home.

 The climate favoured experimentation. Chiara Matraini saw family members imprisoned and executed after a rebellion in 1533; widowed in her 20s, she embarked on a scandalous affair with a married poet and wrote extensively on that most masculine of topics: war, making the case for the superiority of learning over the military arts.

 Matraini was only one of the women writers of these years whose personal relationships fell outside the conventions of marriage. Tullia d'Aragona, bastard daughter of a cardinal, was mistress to the richest man in Florence, Filippo Strozzi, and author of Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, a radical defence of women's sexual and spiritual desires. She was exempted from a ban on prostitutes wearing luxury clothing thanks to her 'rare knowledge of poetry and philosophy'.

 Another of Strozzi's mistresses, however, gave an insight into the reality of such relationships when she complained that Strozzi expected her to sleep with his friends and had made her an 'object of contempt'. Veronica Franco, who also combined the careers of courtesan and writer, warned that the life of a courtesan 'always results in misery'.

 Yet for all the trauma of war, widowhood and exploitation faced by these authors and poets, they had their triumphs too. In 1556 the distinguished writer Cassandra Fedele, then aged 91, was invited to give a public oration to welcome the queen of Poland to Venice, praising the Queen's 'admirable mind amid the winds of war'.

 The year 1559 saw the publication of Europe's first collection of women's poetry, featuring 53 authors. Across the arts, there was much more to the later Renaissance than simply 'Great Men'.

 The beauty and the terror: an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. By Catherine Fletcher.

Art UK , March 18, 2020.

The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020) is a new history of a familiar era. Focusing on the years 1492-1571, it covers topics including developments in art and literature, the early years of European colonialism, the Italian Wars of 1494-1559, and the impact of the Reformation and religious change. It suggests that the Italian Renaissance was far stranger and darker than many of us realise, and that sex and sexuality played an important role in this unsavoury side of the sixteenth century.

 NOTCHES: In a few sentences, what is your book about?

 Fletcher: I’m trying to do two things with the book. One is to give people who come across the work of the ‘famous names’ of the later Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael or Machiavelli—some context. The other is to bring together a series of narratives that are often treated separately: the Reformations, the rise of European empires, later Renaissance culture and the Italian Wars of 1494-1559.

 NOTCHES: How do we know about sex and sexuality in Renaissance Italy? Are there any problems with/ limits to the surviving sources?

 Fletcher: We have a good range of sources, from law and trial records to letters, literary sources (including plenty of satire), and visual culture. These are often mediated via government officials or elite writers: we don’t hear so much from lower-ranking people or from women.

 NOTCHES: Many people will associate the Italian Renaissance with salacious stories of high-class courtesans and papal ‘nephews’- but is that an accurate representation of how things really were?

 Fletcher: There’s definitely a ‘courtesan culture’ in sixteenth-century Italy and examples of women like Tullia d’Aragona who combined that role with a career as a writer. You have the tale of Pope Julius III (r. 1550-1555) making his lover a cardinal, and plenty of noblemen had mistresses and illegitimate children. But that’s only part of the bigger picture: it’s a bit like focusing only on the expensive end of escorting in a study of the sex industry today. There was also a great deal of official harassment: for example, prostitutes were often required to wear a symbol of their status, such as a yellow scarf.

 NOTCHES: We also associate this period with nude paintings. Was there a lot of sex/ nudity in Renaissance literature and art, and if so did this reflect changing attitudes/ behaviours?

 Fletcher: There’s certainly nudity in Renaissance art and literature, though not always in sexual contexts: it’s a notable element of religious painting too. In her book on the Italian Renaissance Nude Jill Burke has explored the rise of the female nude in the context of changing attitudes towards beauty. As printing became more widespread with it came printed pornography, including the notorious I Modi, published and banned in the 1520s, which depicted a series of sixteen sexual positions without a classical gloss to give them respectability. Series showing the Loves of the Gods were more acceptable, and the decoration of the Palazzo Te in Mantua, the summer palace of the city’s rulers, likewise drawing on ancient myth, is explicitly sexual.

 NOTCHES: Some of the stories in your book suggest that Renaissance sexual attitudes benefitted men (especially powerful men) far more than women. Would it be fair to say that the Renaissance (or at least this aspect of it) was more fun for men than woman?

 Fletcher: In short, yes. Women’s honour was focused very much around their chastity and to ignore that risked severe social censure. Men had a great deal more sexual freedom. On the other hand we do hear of women who broke the rules, like the writer Chiara Matraini, who as a widow had a very public affair with a married poet.

 NOTCHES: You mention that sex between men was extremely common in parts of Italy during this period. Why was this, and was everyone happy about it?

 Fletcher: The attitudes towards sex between men were contradictory. From a Christian point of view sodomy (a term that incorporated all sorts of non-procreative sex) was a sin. On the other hand certain types of sexual relationship between men could be socially acceptable, especially where these were between older/higher status active partners and younger/lower status passive ones. Gary Ferguson’s recent book on Same Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome deals with the case of a group of migrant men who had sex with men, and raises important questions about the greater risk of persecution facing marginalised communities.

 NOTCHES: How much impact did syphilis have on Renaissance Italy?

 Fletcher: The ‘pox’, often identified as syphilis, was first noted in Italy shortly after the French invasion of 1494, hence the name ‘French disease’. In its initial phase it seems to have been particularly pernicious and was exacerbated by poor harvests, a severe winter and the presence of troops (which put further pressure on supplies); it was often seen as God’s punishment for ill-living. Numerous well-known figures fell ill, including the duke of Ferrara and the future pope Julius II. Good personal care, which wasn’t available to all, helped the wealthy survive: the marquis of Mantua lived for twenty-three years after his initial symptoms.

 NOTCHES: Did you find anything that particularly surprised you? And/or did you come across anything particularly interesting which you had to leave out of the book?

 Fletcher: As I went through the biographies of the leading military commanders, I was struck by just how many of them were also accused of domestic violence or rape. That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise given that we know that rape was widespread in the Italian Wars, but it’s a part of the story that hasn’t featured in the literature. I would have liked to dig down more but decided that would have to wait for an article.

NOTCHES: How (if at all) are Renaissance ideas about, and experiences of, sex relevant today?

 Fletcher: Those issues around interpersonal violence and military violence, and rape as a weapon of war, are still very present in conflicts today. Some of the arguments about clerical celibacy that came to the fore with the Reformation are still going on in the Catholic Church. And I’m interested in the parallel between the fairly routine acceptance of same-sex relationships in some Renaissance circles and how young people are thinking about sex now.

NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?

Fletcher: Immediately after my first degree (which wasn’t in History) I was elected convenor of what was then the National Union of Students Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Campaign. I learnt a lot informally about the history of sexuality in that role, and although it’s never been a primary focus of my academic research I do keep coming back to it in different contexts.

 NOTCHES: What are you working on now that this book is published?

Fletcher: At the risk of becoming a “Sex and Violence” cliché, I’m close to finishing a couple of articles that build on the book’s discussion of gun culture, and have more work still to come on aspects of the Italian Wars.

 The Beauty and the Terror. Notches, March 6 , 2020. 

History Hack discusses The Beauty and the Terror with author Catherine Fletcher.  HistoryHack, April 10, 2020

The historian Catherine Fletcher has a well-deserved reputation as a specialist in 16th-century skulduggery and intrigue. In Our Man in Rome (2012) her subject was Gregorio Casali, a wily Italian fixer who served as Henry VIII’s ambassador at the papal court during the crisis of the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. In The Black Prince of Florence (2017) she recounted the brief and lurid career of Alessandro de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of a Medici duke and a Moorish maidservant, who jockeyed to power as the first hereditary ruler of Florence, married a daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, and was murdered in the course of an adulterous liaison at the age of 26.

 These are lively, well-researched books built round an interestingly dodgy central character. Her latest offering, The Beauty and the Terror, has a much larger canvas, covering a whole sweep of 16th-century Italian political and cultural history. She begins in the 1490s – an exciting but deeply turbulent decade: the “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, the French invasion of Lombardy, Girolamo Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper in Milan, the election of the libertine Borgia pope, Alexander VI.

 The decades that followed were ones of almost continuous warfare. External military threats – French, Spanish, Ottoman – were counterpointed by endless internal squabbles among the principalities and city-states of the peninsula. Fletcher tracks through a complex and dismal story of alliances, betrayals, sacks, sieges, famines, assassinations and gruesomely ingenious tortures.

 The conquest of the Romagna by the pope’s warlord son, Cesare Borgia, was swift and vicious. It was closely observed by a Florentine diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, who made it a case study in his book The Prince, written about 1512 and published posthumously 20 years later. This laconic breviary of amoral realpolitik – memorably described by Bertrand Russell as a “handbook for gangsters” – is the keynote text of these wartorn years. The impact of the Lutheran Reformation and the retrenchment of the Counter-Reformation add further dimensions of religious ideology to the conflicts.

Fletcher navigates this difficult terrain with great skill. She creates atmosphere and drama without any surrendering of clarity. Those with only a vague knowledge of the League of Cambrai or the Council of Trent will find them crisply explained and contextualised. She also has some trenchant chapters on the sexual politics of the era – as evidenced in the enforced seclusion of women in convents, and the glorification of rape in the pornographic poetry of Pietro Aretino and his followers.

 This is a powerful book, but it is also one with an argument or agenda to pursue, and in this aspect it is less satisfactory. The argument is signalled by Fletcher’s ambitious subtitle, which promises us an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. The orthodoxy she challenges is the view of the Renaissance as an unbroken vista of exquisite art and aspirational inventiveness: a new dawn that flooded the superstitious murk of medievalism with the bright light of reason. As she points out, this somewhat utopian view was essentially a 19th-century invention, formulated in works such as Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and endorsed by eloquent Victorian aesthetes such as Walter Pater. For the majority of those who actually lived and worked in this supposed golden age, the reality was grim: they knew it as a time of terror more than beauty. In his Art of War (1521) Machiavelli argued that the cultivation of courtly art was a weakness. Looking back to the first French invasion of 1494, he criticised the complacency – the “splendour and deceit” – of the Italian princes. “They were preparing themselves to be the prey of whoever assaulted them,” he wrote, and from this arose “great terrors, sudden flights and miraculous losses”.

 Burckhardt’s idealistic view of the Renaissance has long since been challenged – the Marxist historian Arnold Hauser dismissed it is an anachronistic attempt to “provide a genealogy” for 19th-century liberalism – but in Fletcher’s view it remains entrenched as a convenient cliche, and a whole lorryload of guidebooks to Italy could be cited to confirm she is right.

 So the argument of her “alternative history” is that this celebratory rhetoric “masks the brutal realities” of war, corruption, oppression and misogyny that are the facts of life in Renaissance Italy. So far, so good. But is it also true, as she asserts, that the great artistic achievements of the period are in themselves complicit in these brutalities and injustices? Her key example, heavily flagged up in the publisher’s promotion, concerns that most iconic of Renaissance artworks, The Mona Lisa. Here is the pitch: the woman portrayed in the painting, Lisa Gherardini, “was married to a slave trader”.

 This “backstory”, she believes, puts a new and very negative perspective “on the Mona Lisa’s famous smile”. Given the apparent gravity of this charge against Lisa’s husband, the silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, it is as well to state the facts behind it. Fletcher’s source is a recent discovery published in Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti’s Mona Lisa: the People and the Painting (2017). It shows that the archives of Florence cathedral record 11 baptisms sponsored by Francesco between 1487 and 1500. It is indeed likely that these people – 10 females and one 12-year-old boy – were slaves, being brought to the baptistry to be converted to Christianity: three of the women are described as “Moors” and another has an African-sounding name, Cumba. It is certainly significant that well-to-do households in Renaissance Italy had trafficked Africans among their servants; and it’s regrettable that Leonardo did not vet the moral purity of his clients more carefully. But to call Francesco a “slave trader” on the basis of 11 baptisms in 13 years seems more like a soundbite than a genuine argument.

In a similar vein she discusses the possibility that the Venetian courtesan Angela del Moro, AKA “La Zaffetta”, was the model for the languidly reclining nude in Titian’s Venus of Urbino of c1534. She had earlier been the victim of a gang-rape, an episode lubriciously described in a poem by Lorenzo Venier, “Il Trentuno della Zaffetta” (1531). Thus, the argument might run: Titian’s Venus is implicated in the endemic sexual violence of the era, though as the identification of La Zaffetta as the model is highly speculative, this is once again a kind of special pleading. These notes of 21st-century disapproval – however justified – run counter to the clarity of historical vision that is otherwise a feature of this fine book.

 The Beauty and the Terror by Catherine Fletcher review – the dark side of the Italian Renaissance

By Charles Nicholl. The Guardian,  March 12, 2020.

We still use the word “medieval” as a term of opprobrium: all sorts of things, from Islamist terrorism to faulty plumbing, are described as such when we want to signal a range of negative aspects. Something “medieval” is archaic, life-denying, sub-rational, obstinately ill-informed or incompetent, and so on. And by contrast, “renaissance” is usually a sunnier word. It evokes exuberance and creativity, intellectual freshness. A “renaissance man” (and it usually is a man) is someone endowed with an almost superhuman galaxy of qualities and skills.

 As many scholars have pointed out, this odd bit of chronological snobbery is largely a 19th-century creation, from the days when the Renaissance was seen as the precursor of the Age of Reason, the moment somewhere around the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century which saw the beginnings of Western civilisation’s liberation from dogma and bigotry. It is not news for historians that the story is more complex than this – or that it was also a period (particularly in Italy) of ceaseless and destructive warfare.

 The publishers of Catherine Fletcher’s book have described it as an “alternative history of the Italian Renaissance”, but it is in fact a finely-written, engaging and clear essay in rather straightforward narrative history. It is none the worse for that, but is it really the case that we have failed to notice the “stranger and darker” side of Italian politics in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as they suggest?

 Professor Fletcher’s introductory chapter quite rightly notes that we are familiar enough with the stereotype of violent and corrupt machinations in Italian courts of the period (thanks to historical soaps about the Borgias and the Tudors), and that we need to penetrate more fully those systemic aspects of the society that colluded with or promoted slavery, sexual exploitation and the like. This book succeeds admirably in highlighting some of the features and figures of the period that have indeed slipped below (or never been spotted on) the radar.

 Fletcher is particularly good, for example, on the initially surprising fact that women were more likely to wield political influence in princely states than in republics (think of the formidable figures of Lucrezia Borgia or Isabella d’Este). Elections in republics reflected classical prototypes that gave no public role to women. Elective rule typically produced a whole cohort of male leaders, in contrast to the princely state where a ruler’s spouse was expected to pick up the reins when her husband was away at war. Princely and aristocratic wives who ran their husband’s domain in their absence or after their death constitute a formidable cohort of influential rulers.

 More broadly, the opportunities offered by war are a major theme in Fletcher’s narrative: we learn a great deal about the developments in military technology that changed the face of conflict in Italy over the period covered by this book. Fletcher traces very skilfully the way in which the creation of more sophisticated firearms for soldiers encouraged greater pay differentials, which placed some strain on small Italian states heavily dependent on mercenary troops for their perennial conflicts over territorial advantage and dynastic security.

 This, in its turn, increased the attractions for Italian states of searching for powerful foreign allies who could afford standing armies of their own and were only too eager to go in search of power and profit in Italy. One of the most important shifts in Italian politics between the relatively peaceful situation in the mid-15th century and the blood-soaked chaos of the first half of the 16th, is the scale of foreign intervention. This began with the French attempt to secure the throne of Naples in the mid 1490s, when the ruler of Milan and the Pope encouraged the French king (Charles VIII) to supplant a Neapolitan monarch to whom they were hostile. It was a fateful start to decades of opportunistic foreign involvement in local Italian conflicts.

 Italy’s political history in the Middle Ages had seen a fair amount of this already, especially in the conflict between pro-papal states or groups and the supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor, but the emergence of strong local dynasties in many Italian cities had stabilised things somewhat in the 1400s. By 1500, however, the stage was set for the peninsula to become a battlefield for European powers (especially France and Spain) to conduct their struggles, at an enormous cost to lives and resources.

 This cost was intensified by new technology; it is poignant to read about contemporary campaigns (and even legislation in some Italian states) to limit the production and use of new varieties of firearms, and laments at their evil effects in warfare. The Spanish were noted for their reliance on firepower, and although it is possible to exaggerate the role of firearms in the subjugation of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America, some Italians – and others like the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne – were not backward in characterising the Spanish campaigns there as barbaric, precisely in their use of overwhelming firepower against underequipped opponents.

 Against such a background, it is not surprising to learn that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were in demand for their services as military engineers no less than as artists. Both were involved in large-scale projects, and da Vinci famously left designs for assorted weaponry, including what is often described as a machine gun. It was certainly the case that artists were expected to have a good basic grasp of engineering, and that the boundaries between art, architecture and engineering were very fluid.

 The stereotype of the “renaissance man” is accurate to the extent that the culture of the age characteristically did not favour specialisation, but the record of actual achievement is patchy. Some of da Vinci’s military designs were more or less feasible, others were not; the elegance and flair of his sketches should not mislead us into thinking that all these projects represented some visionary anticipation of modern machinery, and it is better to see them as brilliant thought experiments in solving engineering problems rather than exact designs.

 

****

 All this underlines the immense power of the Renaissance myth: from the 16th century onwards, the image of the tormented multifaceted genius, soaring ahead of the conventions of the age, has left us with a rather lopsided view of figures such as da Vinci. Giorgio Vasari’s famous Lives of the Artists (which first appeared in 1550) helped to fix the image of the inspired creative spirit – and to create a story in which Italy (and especially Florence) is the epicentre of all that is noble and truly humane in the rebirth of civilisation after centuries of barbarity. It was Vasari’s narrative that was embraced so eagerly by 19th-century European cultural historians.

 It continues to mould our understanding not only of the history of the period but our sense of what an artist and a genius really should be, and it would have been good to have in this book a slightly fuller account of how Vasari shaped the cultural “soft power” of the Italian Renaissance across the centuries – as described by Fletcher in an insightful final chapter. The Renaissance model of genius becomes a kind of witness to the sublime nature of Western civilisation as a whole; 16th-century Italy joins Periclean Athens or Marcus Aurelius’s Rome as a paradigm of timeless and universal human excellence.

 The force of Fletcher’s narrative is not so much in offering a radical new evaluation of Italian Renaissance civilisation as in insisting that we see it as a cluster of cultural strategies and techniques within an exceptionally turbulent political milieu. This does not mean for a moment that we relegate da Vinci or Michelangelo to some dramatically inferior position, but it might prompt us to greater caution about the way in which the Renaissance myth has served a rather dubious geopolitical agenda.

 Fletcher spells out at many points the role of Renaissance Italy in the great drama and tragedy of the age: the beginnings of the subjugation and enslavement of indigenous peoples on both sides of the Atlantic – through finance, seafaring expertise and, not least, by way of the legitimation given by the Papacy to various aspects of the colonial enterprise. As her final paragraph puts it, we need to be aware of where the great works of the period come from, and how their initial reception was “curated” by figures like Vasari.

 Recognising artistic excellence is not an excuse for failing to see the political and economic factors that make it practically possible – and this is bound to be shot through with a degree of moral shadow, where those factors include slavery and exploitation. A great achievement is not necessarily a timeless ideal; we can admire and even be astonished by the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without using it or its designer as a universal measure of human creativity.

 If we demythologise the Renaissance a little, we may learn to do more justice to what preceded it. Professor Fletcher has a brief discussion of scientific advances in the mid 16th century, especially in anatomy, navigational skills and botany – the latter two spurred on by the fresh stimulus of colonial travel and discovery. But the fact that this treatment is relatively brief and relates to a period rather later than the “high Renaissance” should give us pause if we are inclined to think of this as an epoch of spectacular scientific progress.

 Many scholars have pointed out that the 15th and early 16th centuries are a rather stagnant period in many areas of natural science compared with some parts of the Middle Ages, when astronomy, mechanics and logic made substantial advances. The great 16th-century exception, Copernicus’s treatise of 1543 on the circulation of planets around the sun, was not a dramatic and total rejection of earlier astronomical method based on new scientific evidence, but a refinement designed to clear up the mathematics of charting the heavenly bodies. It was received with interest and some enthusiasm at the time, but was clearly not seen as a radical departure from the principles of Aristotle. Only with slightly later figures like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) did actual observation of the heavens play a decisive part in the argument.

 The uncomfortable truth is that the age of the Renaissance contributed very little to innovation in science. This was largely because the revival of classical learning and languages concentrated attention on what was called humanitas – literary and rhetorical accomplishment (hence our designation of some academic subjects as “humanities”) – rather than on empirical observation or technical skill in logic and mathematics.

 Later medieval philosophy had become achingly technical, and the recovery of classical literature offered a welcome relief. The writings of the medievals were mocked for their stylistic awfulness; and the exhilaration and enthusiasm for the Platonic tradition that arose in the later 15th century was, as much as anything, an enthusiasm for a philosophy that more obviously promised moral and spiritual insight, rather than the virtuoso analysis of concepts. So might a 20th-century student have felt on reading Jean-Paul Sartre after an unbroken diet of logical positivism in undergraduate philosophy.

 ****

 For good and ill, the Renaissance as an intellectual phenomenon was not a revolt in the name of “reason” or “liberty” or any such Enlightenment motive. It was an excited recovery of the ideals of formal elegance and proportion in writing and building. It was also the flowering of a sort of New Age fascination with ancient and hidden wisdom. The great strength of Professor Fletcher’s book is that it helps us keep the Renaissance in proportion, rather than seeing it as either the decisive foundation for Western modernity (it was in many ways backward-looking, its energy linked to models of revival and recovery rather than advance), or a melodrama of Olympian geniuses and (literally) Machiavellian villains.

 To learn that Lucrezia Borgia owned a mozzarella factory is somehow a useful corrective to the melodrama; to know that some of da Vinci’s supposed inventions were Heath Robinson fantasies balances the myth of universal genius.

 Reading this engaging book helps us to appreciate the undoubted exuberance of the period without signing up to a distinctly shopworn narrative of some triumphant awakening from dogmatic slumbers, destined to change the face of global humanity – whether global humanity liked it or not.

Breaking the Renaissance myth :  Culture and the universal genius were not the only things to thrive in this supposed golden age – so too did slavery and warfare. By Rowan Williams. New Statesman, May 27,   2020

 

As Catherine Fletcher notes at the outset of her new book, The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West, millions of tourists flock to Florence every year to gaze at the architecture and art of the Renaissance jewel box. They photograph the Duomo topped by Brunelleschi’s dome, wait in long lines to see Michelangelo’s David, fight their way across the Ponte Vecchio, and savor gelato. Such is the “beauty” of the title. Yet there is also “terror” shadowing these beauties, which Fletcher aims to bring to light in order to provide a richer account of the Italian Renaissance. In her introductory chapter, she highlights three examples: the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader; one possible model for Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a famous Venetian courtesan, was gang-raped; and the Florentine Republic symbolized by Michelangelo’s David came to an end in 1530 with the sack of the city and ensuing slaughter of thousands. The beauty and the terror.

 In addition to informing admirers of the artistic and other familiar achievements of the Italian Renaissance of the often less-than-beautiful political and social context in which they were produced, Fletcher wants to contextualize the history of Italy during the period within larger trends across Europe and indeed the world, as indicated in her book’s subtitle. The Italian Renaissance has frequently been characterized — or caricatured — as the birthplace of modern Western civilization, or rather the rebirth (renaissance) of this civilization with the rediscovery of classical learning and art. In this interpretation, Italy is the source of the literary, artistic, and scientific movements that then spread throughout Europe and ultimately across “the West.” While she recounts the achievements of the Italian Renaissance and their influence, Fletcher puts as much emphasis on how the larger European and international context shaped the political, social, religious, economic, artistic, and intellectual currents in Italy during the period.

 Fletcher’s introduction — titled simply “1492” — provides a good illustration of her goal. That year witnessed three events that would have greater ramifications than those who lived through them could have appreciated. First, there was the death of Lorenzo “The Magnificent,” the head of the Medici family that effectively ruled Florence for the previous 60 years and an important patron of learning and art. In retrospect, Lorenzo’s death destabilized not only Florentine politics, for just two years later his heir would flee the city and the republic would be restored, but also the delicate balance of power in the Italian peninsula, opening the door for foreign armies to invade Italy and make it the battleground of Europe for the next 40 years.

 The second event of 1492 was the final reconquest of Spain with the fall of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors, followed in short order by the flight of the Jews. Apart from the dislocations caused by the event itself, the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella was representative of the formation of what would become the modern state in Spain, France, and elsewhere, a development that made Italy vulnerable to invasion and plunder, with its own unification having to wait nearly four more centuries. The third event was the discovery of the New World in October of that year, by a Genoese captain sponsored by their most Catholic majesties of Spain, to be followed a few years later by, among others, a Florentine merchant and navigator who lent his name to these newly discovered lands: Amerigo Vespucci. Soldiers, priests, and other adventurers followed, seeking the gold that soon flooded Europe, leaving behind smallpox while bringing back such unknown items as tomatoes and corn, without which Italian cuisine would be unrecognizable today.

 In short, as Fletcher shows in this chapter, the direction of influence between Italy and Europe (and the world) ran in both directions. Fletcher persuasively illustrates that understanding the Italian Renaissance requires understanding the larger context of the early modern world, and vice versa.

Beginning in 1492, with some glances backward to consequential incidents such as the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, Fletcher ends her account with the defeat of the Ottomans by the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Her reasons for choosing this end date are unclear. But it has the effect of extending the usual treatment of the “High Renaissance” beyond the customary terminus point of the end of the Italian Wars with the sack of Rome in 1527 or the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1530. In terms of art, this makes some sense, lengthening the account through the first part of the “Late Renaissance” period. After all, Michelangelo would live for another 30 years after the fall of Florence (whose fortifications he oversaw), spending most of the rest of his life in Rome executing such projects as painting The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and overseeing the building of St. Peter’s Basilica. The dating choice makes less obvious sense otherwise. As Fletcher herself notes, the later period saw a decline in Italy’s fortunes as, paradoxically, the relative peace that succeeded the Italian Wars also effectively sidelined the peninsula politically and militarily.

As an overview of Italian Renaissance history in the continental and international context from 1492 to 1571, Fletcher’s book is largely successful. The 26 chapters are generally thematic, most being devoted to political or military events in Italy across the period, giving the book a coherence dictated by chronology. Other chapters, interspersed within this framework, take up such subjects as literary or artistic figures and movements, the discovery of the New World, women’s role in society, the Reformation, the Index of Prohibited Books, and the Inquisition. Fletcher’s coverage of political, military, social, intellectual, and artistic issues is impressive, and she generally does an admirable job tying together these diverse subjects. The sheer number of people and events she covers is sometimes dizzying. Such coverage has a few drawbacks, however. Fletcher seems to want to tell a good story when she has one, and while I enjoyed many of the anecdotes she relates, sometimes they felt forcibly inserted into the narrative. There is also considerable repetition, and while it is useful to be reminded who someone is upon their most recent appearance, I did not need to be told over and over that Lucrezia Borgia and Isabella d’Este were sisters-in-law or reminded four times that Francesco Maria della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, murdered Cardinal Alidosi. At any rate, as someone fairly well versed in this history, I did not have difficulty keeping up with all the people, places, and events, but I did wonder how someone less familiar with the subject would fare.

 Fletcher’s more substantive aim of exhibiting the “terror” lying behind the “beauty” of the Italian Renaissance is in my view less successful. First of all, although awestruck tourists might marvel at the beauty of Italy’s art and architecture without much sense of the blood and suffering that accompanied it (unless, of course, they watched Showtime’s series The Borgias, in which case they would have a sensationalized view), no scholar of the period would be surprised. In this regard, Fletcher is jousting with something of a strawman, or at least a largely mid-19th-century gossamer version of the Renaissance. Moreover, to recur to the three examples she gives of terror lurking behind beauty in her introductory chapter, I am not clear on how my view of the Italian Renaissance should be affected. The first example is the alleged fact that the subject of the Mona Lisa, Lisa Gherardini, was married to a slave trader. When we finally get to the story, we learn that he was a merchant involved at some small remove from the transatlantic trade, and that he had several enslaved people baptized in Florence, which does look suspicious. More surprisingly, given Fletcher’s initial statement and the marketing materials for the book, we are informed that he was “very likely” a slave trader. This is not the smoking gun we had been promised. (Incidentally, I believe Mona Lisa was Lorenzo del Giocondo’s third wife, not his second.)

The second example Fletcher gives is that a potential model for Titian’s Venus of Urbino, the courtesan Angela Zaffetta, was gang-raped by 31 men (a ritual punishment for courtesans). This time Fletcher only claims the woman is a “possible” model for the painting, but while I learned more about the poor treatment of courtesans, I do not know how my view of the painting itself, much less Renaissance art, should be affected by this possibility. The third example is the fact that the Florentine Republic came to an end in 1530 with “a sack of ‘unheard-of cruelty.’” Yet that is not what happened. Florence surrendered after a year-long siege, and while the protracted fighting throughout the Florentine territories cost perhaps 10,000 lives, the surrender of the city itself was remarkably bloodless. The usual suspects among the republican leadership were rounded up — a few were executed, some tortured, others exiled ­— but otherwise it was a miraculously mild transition of power for the time. Indeed, perplexingly, Fletcher’s account of the events within her larger narrative is consistent with these facts. Her description in the introductory chapter sounds more like the 1527 sack of Rome.

 Finally, I caught a disturbing number of errors or omissions, and although I would not call any of them consequential for Fletcher’s larger aims, they did begin to undermine my faith in the details of her story. I restrict my attention to Machiavelli, since that is a subject I know something about. Writing of the French invasion of 1494 and the flight of the Medici from Florence, Fletcher characterizes Machiavelli as among the opponents of the Medici at that time. We have no evidence for such a claim, however, especially since the first extant letter we have from Machiavelli is from 1498 and also because we also know that his relationship with the family over time was rather more complicated. Later, Fletcher states that Machiavelli was released from prison due to influential friends, but his release was actually due to a general amnesty granted with the election of Giovanni de Medici as Pope Leo X. She also relays the often repeated but now discredited idea that Machiavelli was exiled from Florence during this same period. In fact, Machiavelli was in something of a “reverse exile” for he was ordered not to leave Florence and its territories for one year. Having been relieved of his official positions, he was only prohibited from entering his former workplace, the Palazzo della Signoria, and during this “exile” Machiavelli frequented the city and was even asked a number of times to return to the Palazzo to help wrap up unfinished business. Finally, Fletcher states that Michelangelo worked with Machiavelli on a 1503 plan to divert the Arno during Florence’s long siege of Pisa, whereas it was Leonardo da Vinci who did so. There are numerous readily available sources she could have consulted on this episode; the source she does cite in fact makes the same mistake with regard to Michelangelo, and itself cites as a source a mid-19th-century book (as Fletcher notes). Oddly enough, this book has nothing to say about the episode at all, in part because it occurred five years after the subject of the biography, Savonarola, had died. In turn, in her bibliography Fletcher mistakenly cites as the source a different book by the same author — a biography of Machiavelli. This is more promising, for Pasquale Villari does discuss the plan to divert the Arno — but with no reference to Leonardo, much less to Michelangelo.

These are the mistakes I caught only with regard to Machiavelli, but I fear there are more lurking in the volume. Even if they are not themselves particularly consequential, such errors are unfortunate and unnecessary, marring what would otherwise be an interesting and informative book.

 A Darker View of the Renaissance. By John T. Scott. Los Angeles Review of Books, August 6, 2020.

Catherine Fletcher  website