Defining "Italian" Culture during the Crisis of the Early Sixteenth Century

In one of his more vicious character sketches, the prominent humanist Paolo Giovio (1483–1552) wrote of a rival, Pietro Alcionio, that “although he suppressed the names of his two cities, he confessed himself a hybrid.” This slur points to the persistence of identification with particular locales, even at a moment vaunted for the elaboration of a shared “Italian” identity. Starting in 1494, French and Spanish invasions of the peninsula did in fact prompt humanists to view their own time as a watershed, with cultural efflorescence giving way to a decline that in turn reinforced their collective identity as the oppressed. Historians have tended to reify the humanists’ narratives of a distinctly “Italian” Renaissance that ended in the 1520s. But in so doing, they have undervalued not only the local, but also the ways that some localities (notably Naples) were already sites of Mediterranean cultural blending. The present paper centers on a dialogue by Giovio that assesses contemporary perceptions of decline in three spheres — learned culture, military prowess (and therefore masculinity), and the morality of elite women — that he viewed as closely interrelated. His survey proceeds geographically, moving from city to city; but throughout, he also describes Italians collectively and defines them with respect to foreigners. The dialogue thus provides a basis for re-evaluating current constructions of “Italian” identity to take into account hybridities — a more useful category of analysis than Burckhardt’s “illegitimacy” — that made sixteenth-century culture far more complex, and far less anticipatory of the Risorgimento, than the term italianità might lead us to believe.