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The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Jewish Culture and Contexts) - Hardcover

Katz, Dana E.

 
9780812240856: The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Jewish Culture and Contexts)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812240855 ISBN 13: 9780812240856
Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Renaissance Italy is often characterized as a place of unusual tolerance and privilege toward Jews. Unlike England, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, the princely courts of early modern Italy, particularly Urbino, Mantua, and Ferrara, offered economic and social prosperity to Jews. When anti-Jewish hostilities created civic tumult in this region, secular authorities promptly contained the violence.

Yet this written record tells only one part of the story. Pictures tell another. In The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance, Dana E. Katz reveals how Renaissance paintings and sculpture became part of a policy of tolerance that deflected violence to a symbolic status. While rulers upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, they simultaneously supported artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews. The economic benefits Jewish toleration supplied never outweighed the animosity toward Jews' participation in the Christian community.

Katz examines how particular forms of visual representation were used to punish Jews symbolically for alleged crimes against Christianity, including host desecration, deicide, and ritual murder. The production of such imagery testifies to the distinctive Jewry policies employed in the northern Italian princedoms, republican Florence, and imperial Trent. The book provides new insights into famous masterworks by Andrea Mantegna, Paolo Uccello, and others, placing these paintings within a larger discourse that incorporates noncanonical, provincial works of art.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dana E. Katz teaches art history and humanities at Reed College.

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Introduction

Princes, Jews, and the Rhetoric of Tolerance

Before the calm night sky and peaceful rolling hills of a northern Italian landscape, a Jewish moneylender, his wife, and two young children are burnt at the stake in Paolo Uccello's 1468 predella panel for the Corpus Domini Altarpiece in Urbino. Renaissance paintings in other northern Italian cities resemble Uccello's panel in that they portray Jews as deviant outcasts of Italian society. In Mantua's Santa Maria della Vittoria, a Madonna and Child altarpiece depicts the Jewish moneylender Daniele da Norsa who allegedly desecrated a Christian image. In Ferrara's Augustinian refectory at Sant'Andrea, a fresco represents the slaying of Synagoga, the personification of Jews and Judaism, despite St. Augustine's prophetic policy on Jews in Christendom: "Slay them not, lest they forget your law." Placed within ecclesiastical and monastic spaces for Christian consumption, these paintings are images of punishment, commissioned or approved by the despotic rulers of Italy to humiliate and deprecate Jews.

In contrast to the antipathy toward Jews portrayed in painting, contemporaneous written documents suggest that the Renaissance was a period of unusual tolerance and privilege for Jews. Marquis Francesco Gonzaga, for example, stated in a grida (proclamation) dated 2 March 1515 that the recent popular uprising against the Jews in Mantua greatly displeased him. The grida explains that Jews are tolerated by the Roman Church and must also be tolerated in the Gonzaga dominion by the marquis's subjects. Accordingly Francesco declares, "no one under any condition, now or in the future, can dare presume to injure or displease any Jew in any way under penalty of three pulls of the cord [i.e., the rope hoist, an instrument of torture]." The marquis explains that the penalty is irreversible and will take place immediately. Moreover, if the offense committed against the Jew is particularly egregious, the marquis will adjust the punishment to fit the crime.

Scholars, influenced by the rhetoric of contemporary state letters, princely decrees, and notarial registries, have portrayed the Renaissance as a period of unusual princely toleration for Jews and the Italian principalities as a safe haven for Jewish difference. Cecil Roth in his History of the Jews of Italy speaks of an idealistic toleration of Jews in fourteenth-century Italy, free from religious and sociopolitical persecution by the Italian princes, prelates, or populace. Roth writes:This period of expansion was from some points of view the golden age of Italian Jewish history. In the south, the ruined Jewries were being nursed back into life; in the north, there was steady growth, general prosperity and a ferment of intellectual activity. A flow of immigrants arrived from abroad, new centers were established in almost unbroken succession, the older ones constantly expanded . . . . Only in Italy did the Jews enjoy general well-being. A few setbacks are chronicled, but they are isolated and exceptional. If, during civic disturbances, the Jews may sometimes have suffered more than their neighbors, this did not betoken a persecutory spirit among the people.

Roth's historical approach to Italian Jewry searches for periods of social and intellectual exchange, moments of harmonious symbiosis, between Jews and Christians, as he frames his study of the past in relation to the present-day context still recoiling from the Holocaust. For Roth, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought socioeconomic prosperity to the Jews in Renaissance Italy, whose well being incited anti-Jewish hostilities, particularly in northern Italy where venomous sermons against the Jews by the influential Observant Franciscans gave rise to periodic social disorder. Such turbulence, according to the author, was momentary, and was not tolerated in the Italian courts or the republics such as Venice, where rulers "ordered protection to be given to the Jews throughout their territories."

Roth's reconstruction of Italian Jewish life, however uncritical, elucidates the general attitudes of toleration characteristic of Renaissance Italy, specifically the northern Italian principalities. Indeed, relative to the virulent aggressions against the Jews in contemporary Spain and to the Jews' loss of rights and ghettoization beginning in the sixteenth century in certain Italian cities including Venice and Rome, the Italian Renaissance courts stand apart in their tolerance of Jews. But what is toleration in the early modern context? How do derisive paintings of Jews participate in the promotion of Renaissance tolerance? In this study, I seek to explore the different nuances of meaning embedded in the concept and practice of tolerance in the Italian courts by examining the written history of Renaissance Jews documented in Italian archives and interpreted by historians, and the visual history recorded in sacred painting. This book provides an extensive study of the relations and negotiations between Jewish cultural history and the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance, a period in which art flourished and forged new societal values and behaviors. I investigate how the Renaissance term "tollerare" acquired local meanings depending on cultural context and how the dynamics of tolerance inevitably were linked to civic identity, particularly the identity created by and for the Christian prince.

The Renaissance principalities of Urbino, Mantua, and Ferrara are the focus of this study because of their relatively prosperous Jewish populations and because all three city-states shared regional and political affinities as northern Italian territories and as hereditary principalities governed by a single despot. I examine the three princely states as case studies and contrast them to republican Florence and imperial Trent. An analysis of the Florentine and Tridentine contexts provides salient contrast to my investigation of the Italian courts, placing in relief the unique character of the Jewish-Christian encounter in the Renaissance principates. Whereas the rulers of Renaissance Urbino, Mantua, and Ferrara initiated similar Jewry policies, the manner in which each prince executed such policies differed depending on the nature of the prince's political hold on his territory and his subjects. I analyze how each of the Renaissance court rulers distinctively upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, while simultaneously supporting artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews. In particular, I explore how the different forms of representation used to depict Jews in Italian Renaissance court painting, such as narrative, portraiture, and allegory, both induced the limited persecution of Jews and helped to maintain the Jews' safety. Though the effects of this pictorial language may appear contradictory, I argue that the symbolic violence targeted against local Jews in the princely courts ultimately sought to unify the larger community and foster civic harmony.

Toward a Definition of Tolerance

The notion of tolerance discussed in this study is not synonymous with the Enlightenment call for religious acceptance put forth by John Locke (1632-1704) in his Letter on Toleration of 1689, nor is it analogous to the modern theories of liberalism and skepticism elaborated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Benjamin Constant, and John Stuart Mill, who advocated tolerance of individual thought and speech, acceptance of non-Christian belief systems and rejection of religion, and the right to privacy and personal liberties. For not only does this discussion of tolerance predate its theoretical conceptualization beginning in the late seventeenth century, it approaches the varying contours of toleration from a social historical point of view, rather than...

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Verlag
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812240855
ISBN 13 
9780812240856
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
228
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

Doelen 72
Breda
4831 GR
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