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Women on the margins: the ‘beloved’ and the ‘mistress’ in Renaissance Florence

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The marginality of these women is defined by their exclusion from marriage. The chivalric ideal of chaste love existed side by side with the reality of clandestine affairs, foundlings deposited in the middle of the night at the gate of the Foundling hospital, and the separation of mothers from children.   Woman’s virtue lay in her virginity or chastity, without these, other roles such as wife, mother, widow, daughter, sister, all defined in relationship to male others, were worthless. Husband, father, widower, son, brother, these roles were arguably secondary to merchant, banker, prior, rentier; a man’s virtue was never, except sometimes in hagiography, dependent upon sexual continence. The family in Renaissance Florence can be seen as a building block of the state. Those who lived outside the structure of the family structure (with the exception of the religious, who themselves used the language of the family to maintain structures: brother, sister, mother, father) were marginal and by creating parallel families or structures, were also subversive. However, both men and women were offered numerous alternative narratives in novelle, romances, painting, even hagiography. These fictional constructs were in direct opposition to the lives women had to lead in order to be socially accepted. Some women, such as Lucrezia Donati, Simonetta Vespucci, Ginevra dei Benci could flirt with romantic love outside marriage without serious peril to their status; for others, however, sexual involvement brought marginality and life-long exclusion from social normalcy. The Florentine Renaissance city state is hardly historically unique in this, but the contrast of socially accepted, even lauded, poetic constructs with lived illicit relationships, of courtly narratives with bourgeois family structures is particularly accute here. The lives of some of these women who formed a liminal social group in Florence can be reconstructed; it is time do so.

This essay first appeared in Pawns or Players?: Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women and is re-published with the kind permission of Four Courts Press

Notes

[1] Gene Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study (New York, 1971), 42. The case is rendered even more interesting by the record, also reported by Brucker, which showed that in 1379 Porcellini had been injured by an intruder who had raped his wife, Anastasia (Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence, 97).
[2] Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980).
[3] Ewin Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981).
[4] Robert C. Davis, ‘The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance’, in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London, 1996), pp.19-38.
[5] Sharon Strocchia, ‘Gender and the Rites of Honour in Italian Renaissance Cities’, in Brown and Davis, Gender and Society, 39-60.
[6] Patricia Simons, ‘Women in Frames: the Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture’, History Workshop Journal 25 (1988), 2-29.
[7] Anderson, Bonnie S. and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol.1 (Harmondsworth, 1988), xv.
[8] Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London, 1987).
[9] Helen S. Ettlinger, ‘Visibilis et Invisibilis: The Mistress in Italian Renaissance Court Society’, Renaissance Quarterly, vol.47, no.4 (1994), 770-792. See also Chad Coerver, ‘Donna/Dono: Chivalry and Adulterous Exchange in the Quattrocento’, in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cambridge, 1997), 196-221.
[10] Thomas Kuehn, Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence (Ann Arbor, 2002).
[11] Maria Serena Mazzi, Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan, 1991); Richard C. Trexler, The Women of Renaissance Florence, Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence, vol. 2 (Asheville, 1998).
[12] Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Chicago, 1997). Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros:Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1985).
[13] Iris Origo, ‘The Domestic Enemy: Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Speculum, 30 (1955), 321-66.. A. Zanelli, Le Schiave orientali a Firenze nei secoli XIV e XV (Florence, 1885).
[14] Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Women in the Streets. Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore and London, 1996).
[15] Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence.
[16] Gene Brucker, Giovanni e Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, 1986).
[17] David Alan Brown, Virtue and Beauty. Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women(Princeton and Oxford, 2001). Also important for Renaissance ideals of beauty is Ames-Lewis.
[18] Joan Kelly, ‘Did Women have a Renaissance?’, Women, History and Theory: the Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago and London, 1977), 19-50.
[19] Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1980), 73-4.
[20] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London, 1980), 579. It is worth quoting de Beauvoir’s views of the mistress as object, or hetaira, ”In the hetaira men’s myths find their most seductive embodiment; she is beyond all others flesh and spirit, idol, inspiration, muse; painters and sculptors will want her as model; she will feed the dreams of poets; in her the intellectual will explore the treasures of feminine “intuition”.’ (581).
[21] Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ (Princeton, 1992).
[22] Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love, 82.
[23] Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love, 88.
[24] Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love, 83.
[25] Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love, 85.
[26] Alessandra Macinghi negli Strozzi, Lettere di una gentildonna fiorentina del secolo XIV, ed. C. Guasti (Florence, 1877), p.385. Bartolomea Nasi was, according to Guicciardini, the lost love of Lorenzo de’ Medici. His affections had lasted many years bench� non fussi formosa, ma maniera e gentile. He considered her marriage to Donato Benci to be a cosa pazza a considerare che uno di tanta grandezza e riputazione e prudenzia, di etˆ anni quaranta, fussi s“ preso di una donna non bella e giˆ piena di anni (Francesco Guicciardini, Storie Fiorentine, ed. Alessandro Montevecchi (Milan, 1988), 178-9.
[27] Dante, Par.iii.
[28] Vincenzo Fineschi, Memorie Storiche degli Uomini Illustri del Convento di S. Maria Novella (Florence, 1787; reprint Rome, 1977), 26.
[29] Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art. Gender, Representation, Identity (Manchester, 1997) 88-9
[30] Mary Garrard, ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Female Portraits, Female Nature,’ in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York, 1992), 58-85.

[31] Ginevra herself was probably named after her grandmother, Ginevra Peruzzi. For Peruzzi’s marriage with Giovanni Benci see Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 8, 194-6.

[32] Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art, 73
[33] Luca Landucci, Diario Fiorentino del 1450 al 1516, ed. by Iodoco del Badia (Florence, 1883), 22.
[34] Judtih Bryce, ‘Performing for Strangers: Women, Dance and Music in Quattrocento Florence’, Renaissance Quarterly, vol.54, no.4.1 (Winter 2001), 1074-1107 (1076).
[35] Bryce, ‘Performing for Strangers’, 1077. Strozzi-Guasti, Lettere, 470.
[36] Isidoro Del Lungo, Women of Florence, trans. by Mary C. Steegman (New York, 1908), 206.
[37] Del Lungo, Women of Florence, 200.
[38] Guasti-Strozzi, Lettere, 595.
[39] Heather Gregory, Daughters, Dowries and the Family in Fifteenth-Century Florence’ Rinascimento, ser.2, 27 (1987), 215-37 (235). Del Lungo, Women, 205.
[40] Guasti-Strozzi, Lettere, 586. See also Lorenzo Fabbri, Alleanza Matrimoniale e Patriziato nella Firenze del ‘400: Studio sulla Famiglia Strozzi (Florence, 1991), 48.
[41] Giovanni Rucellai, Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone – I Il Zibaldone Quaresimale’, ed. by Alessandro Perosa,  Studies of the Warburg Institute, 24 (London,1960), 57.
[42] Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family and Women: Toward A Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London, 1991), 161.
[43] Susannah Foster Baxendale, ‘Exile in Practice. The Alberti Family in and Out of Florence 1401-1428’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991), 720-756 (746).
[44] Niccolini di Camugliano, The Chronicles of a Florentine Family, 1200-1470 (London, 1933), 68.
[45] Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, Cronica Fiorentina, ed. by Niccol˜                Rodolico, Rerum Italicum Scriptores, 30.i. (Cittˆ di Castello, 1903), 228.
[46] Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence, 163-6. See also Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 99-100.
[47] Kuehn, Illegitmacy, 99-100.
[48] Dizionario Biografico Italiano, I:77, and I:86.
[49] Donato Velluti, Cronica, 147-50.
[50] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 179.
[51] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 101.
[52] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 149.
[53] See Trexler, Florentine Women; and for Venice, Ruggiero and Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice (London, 2002).
[54] Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze,8 vols (Florence, 1957-1973)IV, iii, 33.
[55] Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence, 209.
[56] Mazzi, Prostituti, 133. See also the case of ser Piero di Lippo Puccetti who was convicted in 1434 of having gone to the monastery of S. Maria della Neve in via San Gallo and there having had sexual relations with the nuns and of having committed many nefarious acts. (Mazzi, Prostituti, 136).
[57] Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence, p.192.
[58] Trexler, Women, p.64.
[59] Mazzi, Prostituti, 401.
[60] Mazzi, Prostituti, 136.
[61] Trexler, The Children of Renaissance Florence: Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence, I (Asheville, 1998), .20.
[62] Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi, 106, 264. Milanesi-Vasari, II, 634.
[63] Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi, 106.
[64] Maria Pia Mannini and Marco Fagioli (eds)., Filippo Lippi: Catalogo Completo (Florence, 1997), 148. However, Geoffrey Ruda states that although they were no longer living under religious vows there is little evidence to suggest that they married. Geoffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi (London, 1993), 40. Milanesi states that they were released from their vows by Pius II. Milanesi-Vasari, II, 638.
[65] Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi, 106, 265. Filippino Lippi’s will, dated September 21st, 1488, identifies his mother as Lucrezia (the anonymous complaint had named her as Spinetta) and his sister as Alessandra.Milanesi-Vasari, II, 638.
[66] For the situation in Venice, see Laven, Virgins of Venice, pp.23ff.
[67] Luigi Passerini, Genealogia e Storia della Famiglia Altoviti (Flroence, 1871), 30-1.
[68] Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, Ma., and London, 1994) 68.
[69] Molho, Marriage, 171.
[70] Molho, Marriage, 173-5.
[71] Niccolini di Camugliano, Chronicles, 130.
[72] Christopher Kleinhenz, “Texts, Naked and Thinly Veiled: Erotic Elements in Medieval Italian Literature,” in Sex in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. by Joyce E. Salisbury (New York, 1991), 102.
[73] Laven, Virgins of Venice, 166.
[74] Lawrence Stone, The Past and Present Revisited (London, 1987), 351.
[75] Mazzi, Prostituti, 136.
[76] Vittore Branca, Boccaccio:The Man and His Works (New York,1976), 71
[77] Origo, ‘Domestic Enemy’, 347.
[78] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 145-6.
[79] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 188.
[80] Mazzi, Prostituti, 218.
[81] Gaetano Pieraccini, Le Stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo, 3 vols (Florence, 1924-5), vol.1, 309. una donna de’ Gorini sua amica. Il detto Lorenzo lo and˜ a vedere e diede poi alla cura del medesimo Antonio, dove stette fino al settimo anno. Detto figlio aveva nome Giulio..’
[82] Giulio figliolo del M.co Giuliano de’ Medici nato add“ 6 di marzo 1478 (s.f.) che fu poi papa Clemente VII. Giuliano sopra detto fu morto nella Congiura dei Pazzi. Antonio da Sangallo, che stava nei Pinti, dette notizie al Magnifico Lorenzo di questo bambino nato da M.a. Ant.a del Cittadino, donna libera, il qual bambino fu tenuto a battesimo da detto Ant.o per far cosa grata a Giuliano. Lorenzo lo raccomand˜ a detto Antonio da Sangallo fino a sette anni;
[83] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2 (fg.161) f.80.
[84] Gene Brucker, Florence: The Golden Age: 1138-1737 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1996), 264; Pieraccini,La stirpe de’ Medic,I, p.309.
[85] ‘ sulle leggi della ereditarietˆ biologica; il sapere se la Fioretta era figlia di nobili o di plebei pu˜ avere importanza, ad esempio, per riconoscere la ereditˆ di particolari raffinati talenti o disposizioni (come il gusto estetico), presumabilmente pi� sviluppati nelle classi superiori fiorentine che nelle inferiori. Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici, I, 309.
[86] Pieraccini, Medici, 1:310.
[87] Giuseppe Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine Divise ne’ Suoi Quartieri, 10 vols (Florence, 1754-62),VI, pp. 142, 294.
[88] Howard Hibberd, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (Harmondsworth, 1974), 144.
[89] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 162.
[90] Mazzi, Prostituti, 345.
[91] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 145.
[92] Vern L. Bullough, ‘Prostitution in the Later Middle Ages,’in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, ed.Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (Buffalo,1982), 176-86 (185).
[93] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 193.
[94] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 142.
[95] Molho, Marriage, 244.
[96] Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi the Carmelite Painter, 283.
[97] Niccolini da Camugliano, Chronicles, 181.
[98] Andr� Rochon, La Jeunesse de Laurent de M�dicis (1449-1478), (Paris, 1963), 26.
[99] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 144.
[100] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 148.
[101] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 118.
[102] Niccolini di Camugliano, Chronicles, 181.
[103] Molho, Marriage, 96.
[104] Molho, Marriage, 93.
[105] Molho, Marriage, 245.
[106] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.1, f.33. The Registers have been scanned (not transcribed) onto the internet at http://www.operadelduomo.it. The relevent opening is indicated by ‘fg’. In this case f.33 is found at fg.65. Other examples include Anna ‘della schiava di messer Piero da Iesi’, baptized 9th March 1451, s.f. (Reg.1, f.35v (fg.71);
[107] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.63v (fg.128). See also ‘Anna e Maria schiava di Bongianni Gianfigliazzi d’etˆ d’anni 22 o circha’, ibid., f.69v (fg.140); ‘Maria e Jacopa schiava di Lionardo di Michele Pescioni d’etˆ d’anni 20 o circha’, ibid., f.70v (fg.142); ‘Horetta e Maria schiava di Dietisalvi Neroni d’etˆ d’anni 19 o circha’, ibid., f.71 (fg.143); ‘Domenico della schiava di Bernardo Mellini’, Reg.1, f.41v (g.82); ‘Antonio della schiava di Ser Gherardo’, ibid., f.44v (fg.88);
[108] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.59 (fg.119). See also ‘Giovanni e Ambrogio della Maddalena schiava fu di Piero Bonaguisi’, ibid., f.76 (fg.153); ‘Margherita e Benedetta dell’Anastasia schiava di Piero di Simone dello Sarto’, ibid., f.78 (fg.157); ‘Bartolomeo e Giovanni della Chaterina schiava di Gerozzo de Pilli’, ibid., f.80v (fg.162);
[109] The records do frequently state that a child is illegitimate, but in those cases the mother’s name is not given, for example ‘Nofri di Piero di Nofri non legittimo’, baptized on 9th April, 1452. Opera di S.Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.1, f.38v (fg.76); see also, ‘Pulisena e Lisabetta di ser Benedetto di Agnolo di Stagio non legittima’, ibid., Reg.2, f.71v (fg.144); ‘Piero e Bernardino di Giorgio di Piero di Riccio non legittimo’, and ‘Zanobi e Bernardino di Miniato di Giovanni non legittimo’, ibid., f.74 (fg.149); ‘Zanobia d’Andrea di Cresci non legittima’, Reg.1, f.42 (fg.83); ‘Maria e Caterina di Bartolomeo Serragli non legiptima’, Reg.1, f.39 (fg.77); ‘Francesco e Girolamo di Marco degli Asini non legittimo’, Reg.2, f.64 (fg.129); ‘Lucretia e Antonia di Bernardo di Cristofano Bonaguisi non legittima’, ibid., f.66 (fg.133); ‘Filippo e Bartolomeo di Agnolo di messer Giannozzo Manetti non legittimo’, ibid., f.80v (fg.162); ‘Caterina di Giovanni Sapiti non legittima’, Reg.1, f.46 (fg.91); ‘Galeotto di Giuliano Gondi non legittimo’, ibid., f.45v (fg.90); ‘Lionardo di Uguccione de’ Pazzi non legittimo’, ibid., f.34 (fg.68); However, Carlo di Giovanni di ser Lodovico della Casa, born illegitimate in 1453 (Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, 78) is not listed as illegitimate at his baptism, 3rd February, 1453 (Reg.1, f.10 (fg.16). There are frequent entries where the registrar states that he does not know the child’s parents, for example, ‘Virgilio non si sa di chi si sia’, baptized on 14th April 1452. Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.1, f.39 (fg.77). See also ‘Maddalena e Giovanna no so di chi’, baptized 19th November 1462, Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.59 (fg.119), ‘Bartolomeo e Giovanni non so di chi’, ibid., f.61 (fg.123); ‘Maddalena e Maria non so di chi’, ibid., f.62v (fg.126); ‘Caterina e Giovanna non so di chi’, ibid., f.67 (fg.135); ‘Girigoro e Domenico non so di chi’, ibid., f.68 (fg.137); ‘Maria e Jacopa non so di chi’, and ‘Gerardo e Francesco non so di chi’, ibid., f.74v (fg.150); ‘Francesco e Domenico non so di chi’, ibid., f.75 (fg.151); and others at f.78v (fg.158); f.79 (fg.159); Reg.1, f.45 (fg.89);
[110] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.1, f.38v (fg.76). See also ‘Bartolomeo e Benedetto della Giuliana balia di Michele del Grasso Capponi’, Reg.2, f.81v (fg.164).
[111] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.65v (fg.131). See also ‘Domenico e Giovanni dell’Anna serva di Giovanni del Rosso galigaio’, ibid., f.76 (fg.153);
[112] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.1, f.36 (fg.72).
[113] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.1, f.36v (fg.73). See also ‘Domenica e Bartolomea di Mona Fiore’, baptized 9th January 1462 (s.f.), Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.63 (fg.127); ‘Maria e Caterina di mona Nanna d’Anversa’ ibid., f.69v (fg.140). If Nanna was from Antwerp she was foreign, and could possibly have been a prostitute. On the tradition of foreign women working as prostitutes in Florence, see Mazzi,
[114] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.64 (fg.129). See also Lionarda e Agnoletta della Chaterina Raugia’,ibid., f.77 (fg.155).
[115] Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.66 (fg.133).
[116] See also the baptism of Maddalena e Lucia ‘della Margherita da Pistoia’, 23rd July, 1463, Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.78 (fg.157).’Giovanni e Felice della Maddalena Raugia’, ibid., f.79 (fg.159).
[117] Baptized on the 22nd March 1462 (s.f.), Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Registri Battesimali, Reg.2, f.69 (fg.139).
[118] Ibid., f.70 (fg.141). Baptized 4th April, 1463; See also ‘Lazaro e Giovanni dell’Anastasia che sta con Tommaso Soderini’, ibid., f.72v (fg.146); ‘Alessandra e Domenica della Margherita che sta con Braccio Guicciardini’, ibid., f.75 (fg.151); ‘Lorenza e Domenica di mona Piera con Francesco Inghirami’, ibid., f.79v (fg.160); ‘Giannozzo e Chimenti della Marta sta con messer Bernardo d’Aglione’, ibid., f.81v (fg.164);
[119] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 142.
[120] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 93.
[121] Mazzi, Prostituti, 119.
[122] Molho, Marriage, 93.
[123] Kuehn, Illegitimacy. The child was raised with Davanzati.
[124] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 143. The child was raised with Del Recha.
[125] Mazzi, Prostituti, 119.
[126] Trexler, Children, 23.
[127] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 143.
[128] Megan Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi, 283.
[129] Origo, Domestic Enemy, 346.
[130] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 142.
[131] Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (London and Chicago, 1985), 141.
[132] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 148.
[133] Mazzi, Prostituti, 53.
[134] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 144.
[135] Giovanni Morelli, ‘Ricordi’ in Mercanti Scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra Medioevo e Rinascimento – Paolo da Certaldo, Giovanni Morelli, Bonaccorso Pitti, e Domenico Lenzi, Donato Velluti, Goro Dati, Francesco Datini, Lapo Niccolini, Bernardo Machiavelli, ed. by Vittore Branca (Milan, 1986), 145.
[136] Origo, ‘The Domestic Enemy’, 345.
[137] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 144.
[138] The wife of Nerone di Nigi Dietisalvi came to the Spedale degli Innocenti admitting that a child left there anonymously was the child of her slave. Giovanna, the wife of Jacopo Ardinghelli similarly came to the Spedale of San Gallo and claimed that a child there was the son of her husband and their slave (Trexler, Children, 23). Giovanni Cerretani’s slave had a child named Agata; the child was left in the Innocenti in 1445 (Origo, ‘Domestic Enemy’, 349; Molho, Marriage, 106). Vieri di Tommaso Corbinelli was identified as the father of a child belonging to a slave and deposited in the Spedale di S. Gallo in 1447 (Trexler, Children, 23).
[139] Guasti-Strozzi, 368. Fabbri quotes ASF, Carte Strozziane III, 82, p.348, ‘Maritai Caterina detta, 1467, 23 ottobre, a Giovanello Rosso di napoli, et dote f.200’. Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale, 48n.
[140] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 180.
[141] Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence, 218-222.
[142] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 99, 178.
[143] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 170, 196-7.
[144] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 170.
[145] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 159.
[146] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 144.
[147]R. Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Princeton, 1956), 3. On Ghiberti’s use of a dual identity to his advantage, and ultimately, his disadvantage when accused of illegitimacy in 1444, see Krautheimer, 3-5.
[148] Kuehn, Illegitimacy, 143-4.
[149] Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence, 59
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