- A Mattress Maker’s Daughter: The Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza by Brendan Dooley
Historical biographies dedicated to early modern Italian men and women have been enjoying a good deal of fortune in the last few years, considering the wide output of titles available in libraries and book shops. Compared to other means to disseminate scholarly research, historical biographies capture the attention of a larger audience, ranging from scholars of humanistic disciplines to non-specialized readers. This genre allows to investigate the past through the eyes of contemporary protagonists, transformed by words and narrative into flesh and blood, into people animated by universal feelings. As such, it allows us to feel the past much closer to our own experience. Brendan Dooley’s last book clearly belongs to this genre. The volume aims at reconstructing “the Renaissance Romance of don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza,” as the sub-heading states. Their fascinating love story developed in Florence, Venice and the Friuli between 1608 and 1621, when Giovanni’s death eventually put a tragic end to it. During these years, the two protagonists had to overcome social prejudices as well as fierce opposition from the Medici family, which objected the union for dynastic and economic reasons. In fact, although illegitimate, Giovanni was nevertheless the son of Cosimo I de’ Medici, while Livia was only the daughter of a modest Genoese mattress maker. Having already contributed on Giovanni de’ Medici in his “Art and Information Brokerage in the Career of Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” in ‘Your humble servant’: Agents in Early Modern Europe, ed. Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus (Hilversum 20068)1–95, and in particular in his Amore e guerra nel tardo rinascimento: le lettere di don Giovanni de’ Medici e Livia Vernazza (Florence 2009), here Dooley has further investigated the subject in a more literary fashion.
Instead of a strict chronological order, the red thread of Dooley’s narration are the (probable) thoughts, worries and hopes shared by the two main characters. This approach, which approximates a history of the feelings, might in fact be the right strategy to win an even larger audience to the appreciation of early modern history; however, the overall result, shows that there is still scope for finding a more appropriate balance between literary fiction and documentary history.
One of the main problems that emerges in the volume is the uneven availability of sources for different stages of Giovanni’s and Livia’s lives, something which inevitably affects the consistency of the narration strategy. While some passages of the book are rich in details and allow the reader to follow the protagonists’ movements and state of mind almost on a daily basis (see for instance the chapter on Giovanni’s military campaign in Friuli, 100–150), other events and issues are overlooked, although they are not necessarily [End Page 229] of secondary interest. The author is usually very keen to investigate Livia’s feelings, to the point of asking himself whether she might have thought of “her head splitting like a melon with a soft thunk on the piazza” (66), when she apparently tried to throw herself out of the window from her father’s house, aged twelve; however, he does not argue for instance under which circumstances Giovanni and Livia first met in Florence, if not to try to dismiss any suspicion of prostitution, and makes only generic references to her relationship with her long awaited only son, whose hostile conduct troubled her last years. Of course, if there is no documentary evidence, we cannot create it at our pleasure. Nevertheless, in this case a methodological reflection on the nature of the sources at hand, on their trustworthiness, on what they say and what they omit would have been useful and instructive. In this regard, the considerations on the plausibility of the reconstruction of Giovanni’s and Livia’s love story entrusted to the Post-scriptum, which is unusually organized as a dialogue between the author and...