Body Politics: The Criminal Body between Public \u0026 Private

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DOI 10.1215/10829636-2830004 © 2014 by Duke University Press

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Body Politics: The Criminal Body between Public and Private

Nicholas TerpstraUniversity of TorontoToronto, Ontario

The rituals surrounding executions through the early modern period in Italy became ever more elaborate, frequently projecting various forms of punish-ment onto the body of the prisoner and adapting the places and spaces of execution to political ends. Mutilation and exhibition of the body followed codes that called particular attention to the parts of the criminal’s body that had carried out the crime, as well as to those physical extensions of the body politic (city gates, public places, town halls, etc.) that had been criminally violated. In Italian cities where lay confraternities took an active role as the comforters of condemned prisoners, the tools and methods of confraternal comforting facilitated an elaborate theater of execution, which blurred the prisoner’s private and public identities as it manipulated distinc-tions between the prisoner as subject and the prisoner as object.

Through the lens of confraternal comforting, this article consid-ers the prisoner’s body in three dimensions: as a sacramental object, as an artistic and literary object, and as a political object. These were not sequen-tial or competing identities. Their interaction varied between prisoners, comforters, places, and times. Paul Friedland has suggested that comfort-ing confraternities “helped to imbue the execution of death sentences with an aura of pronounced religiosity.”1 The reality is not quite so vague. From the fourteenth century, formal comforting by laymen integrated executions into civic religion using traditional images drawn from clerical and lay piety. Comforters focused on transforming the condemned from a criminal into a convert and even a martyr — both in his own mind and in the mind of a wit-nessing populace — in order to win his or her eternal salvation. By the later fifteenth century, comforters began introducing new and puportedly more subjective tools into the comforting process. New poems and songs indi-vidualized criminals with emotion and humanity, and some of this literature

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8 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 45.1 / 2015

would later help shape popular accounts that romanticized some criminals and their executions. More immediately, this newer individuality and sub-jectivity then helped write the script for the progressive dramatization of execution through the course of the sixteenth century, with careful concerns for how the place of execution and the way of handling the condemned’s body could better demonstrate particular political lessons. The evolving reli-gious languages and meanings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were transvalued in the sixteenth in a complex layering of one over the other. In this semantic palimpsest, each new layer took a good part of its meaning from what shone through from beneath, even as it altered details in small but critical ways.

Comforting was frequently adapted, moderated, and suspended. It was not simply a spiritual supplement to the main event; rather, it was the dimension of the theater of execution that took the prisoner’s physicality and individuality most seriously, and it provided a ritual language that facilitated further changes. Comforting thus mediated some of the key developments around early modern executions. The examples discussed below are drawn from Bologna and Florence, though they speak to realities across central and northern Italy.

The prisoner’s body as sacramental object

On a Friday evening in October 1560, Pier Giacomo Ruggieri and Franceso Duglioli enter into Bologna’s prison of the Torrone to meet with Messer Giovanni Paolo Stuffolino from Rome. The large cell holds a number of men, and possibly some friends and family, so they remove Stuffolino to a private room within the prison and begin to talk with him.2 The Roman attracts attention in the Torrone, since he is there for having killed his blood cousin Petronio, and by this time tomorrow he will be dead. Ruggieri and Duglioli wear the white robes of the Compagnia di S. Maria della Morte, one of Bologna’s largest and wealthiest confraternities, responsible for main-taining one of its largest shrines, holding an important annual procession, running a major hospital located just off the Piazza Maggiore, and for offer-ing charity to prisoners and the condemned. The two men are representa-tives of a system of charity found almost nowhere else in Europe, by which laymen attended condemned prisoners through their last night and to the very point of death.3 This charitable act of comforting (conforteria), and the social and civic religious apparatus that surrounded it, was the greatest factor making executions in Italy different from those elsewhere in Europe.4


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Terpstra / Body Politics 9

Italian confraternal comforters took on roles filled by clergy else-where: entering the jail cell on the night before an execution to sit, pray, and sing with the condemned, to catechize him or her, and to provide what-ever pastoral support might improve the chances of the condemned having a “good death” as that was understood in contemporary Catholic spirituality. Comforting confraternities emerged across the north and central parts of the peninsula from the 1330s in independent republics and communes like Bologna, Florence, Perugia, Ferrara, Venice, and Milan.5 Like so many new confraternal devotions, comforting brotherhoods followed in the wake of a dramatic sermon cycle by an itinerant friar, in this case the Dominican Ven-turino da Bergamo, who inspired laymen to perform this charitable work in Bologna in 1331 and established S. Maria della Morte as the first formal comforting confraternity there in 1336. Confraternity members entered the prisons with psalters and spiritual aids in one hand, and food, wine, bed-ding, and firewood in the other. They helped all classes of prisoners deal with the physical and psychological pains of imprisonment, particularly poor prisoners bereft of family, friends, or other resources. The lay brothers gave meals and mattresses, helped prisoners celebrate the feast day of their patron saint Leonard (November 6), and sometimes paid the fees that could keep a prisoner behind bars even after he or she had been formally released of charges by the courts.

But not all prisoners were released, and it was with those con-demned to death that the confraternity’s charitable work became far more intense. Comforters like Pier Giacomo Ruggieri and Francesco Duglioli meant to help the prisoner navigate that very last dark night of body and soul, then the next morning’s passage through city streets to the gallows, and finally the ultimate passage through purgatory to heaven. Confraternal comforters worked intensely to save the souls of thieves, rapists, murderers, counterfeiters, assassins, and the like. This, too, was a departure from prac-tices elsewhere. Adriano Prosperi has shown that in many parts of Europe, particularly Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, the strong belief persisted that capital criminals had forfeited the privilege of receiving last rites. Jean Gerson helped promote the French royal edict that in 1397 finally authorized priests to hear the confessions of those awaiting execution, and as late as 1569 Pope Pius V was ordering Spain’s Philip II to lift the royal prohi-bition on sacraments for the condemned.6 In some places, state officials spe-cifically forbade priests from offering them, and in others the priests them-selves refused. Dying out of grace, and buried in unconsecrated ground, the executed offender was effectively condemned not just to death, but also to


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hell. By contrast, most Italian communes and city states, and certainly those with comforting confraternities, assumed that they could condemn the body but not the soul. If anything, having condemned the body, they had to do everything in their power to ensure that the soul had a chance of salvation, and so a rich literature of manuals and other aids trained comforters for this work.7 The result certainly can seem almost schizophrenic, because even as the prisoner entered public space as the lead actor in an increasingly dra-matic theater of punishment, key members of the supporting cast semmed to be making strenuous efforts to separate him from the main action.

When Pier Giacomo Ruggieri and Francesco Duglioli took Giovanni Paolo Stuffolino to a private cell, they were seeking more than peace and quiet to do their work. The Morte’s training manual suggested that comforters tell family members, “[D]o not have anything further to do with him, that is, with our brother.”8 The comforters, as spiritual kin, were effectively supplanting the prisoner’s blood kin as his closest family, and tak-ing exclusive possession of him. The name of this new brother, the criminal, would be written into the confraternity’s Book of the Dead as a sign that he had effectively joined the brotherhood. He might be buried in the cemetery attached to their hospital. The confraternal brothers had to expropriate him, removing him from his family, before they could appropriate him as one of their own. An image from a fifteenth- century Bolognese comforters’ manual underscores this new relationship by placing the condemned together with two comforters in what looks like a small niche representing the private cell (see fig. 1; see also fig. 2 upper left- hand corner). It was spiritual kin, a god-father and godmother, who at the baptismal font had ushered the infant Giovanni Paolo into the Church decades earlier; similarly, it would be spiri-tual kin, his confraternal brothers Pier Giacomo Ruggieri and Francesco Duglioli, who at the scaffold would catechize, comfort, and usher Giovanni Paolo to his eternal reward.

Removing the prisoner from his own network of family and friends was the preliminary step of separation before he could be incorporated as a new member into the confraternal brotherhood. The liminal stage between the prisoner’s old and new identity came in the comforting that was carried out in the prison cell on the night before the execution. His old identity was not just as brother, father, son, or friend, but also as thief, murderer, or coun-terfeiter — that “old man” in the Pauline sense who would still have to suffer public punishment. Comforting aimed to add the fresh and private identity of a “new man,” a convert, a Christian, and even a martyr onto this old one. In this sense, comforting was less the liminal passage from one identity to


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Figure 1.Two comforters with a prisoner (late 15th cent.). From the Bolognese Comforters’ Manual, Archivio Arcivescovile, Bologna, Fondo Archivio Consorziale del clero urbano, MS IX.B.1, fol. 2v. Reproduced by permission of the Archivio Arcivescovile, Bologna.


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another than a layering of a new over an old. He was still a criminal and would still suffer a painful death. Yet that death would have a dual mean-ing — it was indeed the judicial execution of that criminal “old man.” But comforters also fashioned it as potentially the martyrdom of the “new man,” the convert and confratello, who like the good thief Dismas crucified next to Christ could enter directly into paradise if he accepted his sentence without complaint and appealed directly to Christ for mercy.

This dual identity of old man and new man, of criminal and convert, shaped the mechanics of comforting and of punishment as they unfolded in the hours leading to execution. Comforters had to focus their prisoner’s mind on his future after death. They did not revisit the justice or injustice of the sentence or attempt to free him. They looked ahead, pledg-ing to bury his body in consecrated ground and to say masses for his soul, as they would for any of their brothers. They used miracle stories to set his mind at ease about his family on earth, assuring him that God would care

Figure 2.Comforting (top left), processing from prison to the Palazzo del Podestà (bottom), and public reading of the sentence and execution at the ringhiera (top right). Biblioteca Commuale di Bologna, MS B2329, fol. 151r. Used by permission of the Biblioteca Commuale di Bologna.


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for his mother, wife, or children. They told him about the saints who would be awaiting him in heaven, and used small painted panels called tavolette to illustrate their lessons (see figs. 1, 2, 3 [bottom center panel], and 4). They very directly compared his coming fate to the executions of early Christian martyrs. In this way, they aimed to minimize his coming pain by telling him of the far greater pain that these other martyrs had suffered. They sang to him, and possibly with him, drawing on the spiritual laude that confra-ternities were famous for and that like the biblical psalms functioned at one and the same time as prayer, poem, and devotional song.

Comforting condemned prisoners had the same agenda and many of the same tools as the late medieval “art of dying well.” It worked with the same assumption that one’s spiritual disposition at the moment of death would determine whether angels or devils would seize the soul and take it either to heaven or hell. Encouraging stories, calming prayers, and hopeful songs all worked to bring the dying one to a complete confidence that he or she was heaven bound. But such comforting ministry could happen more easily in a bedroom than a jail cell, and that was only the beginning of the challenges facing the prisoner and his comforters. On the morning of his execution, the prisoner had to walk out through crowds — stone silent or jeering — to a public reading of his sentence, and then move on through yet more crowds to the place of public execution. This was the most difficult stage of his passage into a new identity. Bologna held most of its executions on Saturday mornings when markets brought many visitors into the city.9 In an attempt to preserve his spiritual state, the comforters wrapped him in a sensory cocoon: flanking him on both sides to sing and pray in his ear and block out all other sounds, and holding a small tavoletta on a stick directly before his eyes (see figs. 2 and 3).10

This focus on the soul of the condemned shaped Italian rituals of execution and helps explain why those republics and communes with comforting confraternities engaged less often in the staged mutilation of the condemned that was common elsewhere in Europe. This puzzled and even amused other Europeans. As Montaigne noted on his Italian journey, Italians willingly performed these rituals — cutting off hands, cutting out tongues, branding, etc. — but usually on the executed corpse and seldom on a living prisoner.11 A young doctor from Piacenza, who worked in Bologna’s Ospedale della Morte and kept a record of those buried in its cemetery, drew in the margins of his records images of some of those who were executed. Stefano de’Corvi’s drawings include men who had been quartered (see fig. 5) or burned (see fig. 6), but his accompanying descriptions confirm that they


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Figure 3.Filippo Dulciati, Execution of Antonio Rinaldeschi (1502). Museo Stibbert, Florence, Italy. Alfredo Dagli Orti / Art Resource, New York.


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Figure 4.“Storia di Ippolito Buondelmonte e Dianora Bardi.” Woodcut from Paul Kristeller, Early Florentine Woodcuts (London: Chiswick Press, 1897), 22. Image courtesy of the Thomas Fischer Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.


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were hanged first.12 The comforters kept the prisoner in his or her sensory cocoon right up to the top of the gallows ladder or the executioner’s block so as to preserve his spiritual equilibrium and with it the spiritual fiction that he was a martyr. Corporal punishment before the execution would quickly dispel that fiction, submerge the prisoner in pain, despair, and anger, and thus drive him to hell. There is no shortage of examples in which executions were indeed preceded by torture or mutilation. Yet this is not to say that Italian executions routinely followed this ritual script. On the whole, such cases were rare.

Montaigne was right to puzzle over such tender concern for main-taining a condemned man’s spiritual equilibrium — he had never seen the like in France or in his travels. While there were comforting confraternities in southern France, they sang, prayed, and exhorted the prisoner as partici-pants in the final procession to the scaffold, while leaving the pastoral work of spiritual comfort to clergy.13 What motivated Italian laymen to take on this work? Pier Giacomo Ruggieri apprenticed as a disciple comforter who helped reactivate Bologna’s conforteria in 1540, becoming a master in 1555 and serving at fifty- one executions before dying in 1586. When Francesco Duglioli joined him in comforting Giovanni Paolo Stuffolino, he had been a disciple in the conforteria for only seven months, yet in that time he had already assisted at five other executions. He would be promoted to the rank of master less than two months later, and serve eight more years before his own death. Both men remained active members until the end of their lives, suggesting a deep spiritual commitment and not simply time served on the confraternal cursus honorum.14 Their work certainly gained them currency in heaven, but it also paid benefits on earth. The dynamics of civic religion ensured that comforters were as invested in the prisoner’s body as in his soul. That physical body was a public liturgical object, and its public status also shaped the rituals around comforting. Those rituals of presentation, procession, and public prayer brought prominence to the confraternity of S. Maria della Morte and honor to its members. They expressed the often- forgotten reality that pre- Tridentine Catholicism was a deeply lay religion framed around local myths, social structures, and spiritual traditions. One of civic religion’s greatest challenges was that most of Catholicism’s spiritual and sacramental powers were in the hands of ordained clergy; confrater-nal rituals sometimes aimed to bridge this divide. Conflicts then erupted when confraternities and civic religious rituals imitated or usurped clerical charism, as they did in the practices of comforting condemned criminals.


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Figure 5.Quartering of Refino da Refeno (July 15, 1559). BCB, Bologna, Fondo Ospedale, MS 7, fol. 53r. Used by permission of the Biblioteca Comunale di Bologna.


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Figure 6.Burning of Gaspare Garolzare of Bologna (Jan. 24, 1560). BCB, Ospedale, MS 7, 69v. Used by permission of the Biblioteca Commuale di Bologna.


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For all their concern with the prisoner’s private soul, confraternal comforters took possession of the prisoner and squeezed the most out of his public body as a ritual object. The procession with the prisoner out of the jail cells to a public reading of the sentence and then on down city streets to the site of execution was not just a rite of passage for the prisoner (fig. 2). It was a key ritual for brotherhoods whose own public profile had long rested largely on the many processions with which they commemorated saints’ days, pub-lic feasts, and memorials in the brotherhood. They were themselves the sub-jects of these communal processions, particularly if they flagellated, sang, or prayed for the relief of their fellow citizens as they walked through a famine- or plague- torn city. Sometimes they brought the subject with them when parading an icon of a saint or of the Virgin Mary through the city so that the citizens could see their protector and the saint could see the suffering sup-plicants and be moved to act. Processional routes connected resonant places like churches, shrines, gates, and bridges that memorialized past miracles and offered hope for future cures. Italian lay confratelli did all they could to accentuate their own patronage of saintly power by processing in their black or white flagellants’ robes and hoisting the icons high so that their saint with eyes wide open could take everything in.

Processions with prisoners took up, adapted, and even inverted this ritual language. Celebrative, penitential, or intercessory processions that took an icon or image around town treated the iconic object as a living sub-ject.15 By contrast, confraternal execution processions treated a living subject as an iconic object. While wooden icons were believed to have their eyes and ears open, the living prisoner had his artificially closed off. The sensory cocoon of songs, prayers, and tavolette that his lay confraternal comforters wrapped around him was meant not just to keep his soul calm, but also to keep his body as still as a wooden statute or icon. Spinning this cocoon was made easier when, as in Florence, the procession to the gallows took place not by foot but on the raised and stable stage of a cart large enough to hold the criminal and comforters. Florence’s comforting confraternity of S. Maria della Croce al Tempio, known locally as “the Blacks” (i Neri), directed the prisoner’s cart out from the Podestà’s Palace and on an extended route that passed by the Palazzo della Signoria, the Mercato Nuovo and Mercato Vec-chio, the archbishop’s palace, and numerous outdoor shrines to saints who had been executed or who had offered charity to prisoners, before heading eastward past the church of S. Croce and down the Via dei Malcontenti. The procession entered the confraternity’s own church halfway down this street, where they were met by a second line of members carrying a cruci-


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fix. The two groups joined together and moved to a corner a short distance down the street to a tabernacle with a fourteenth- century frescoed image of the Madonna and Child with Saints Peter and John the Baptist. The prisoner was allowed to pray before these two executed saints, and then the lengthy procession moved on toward the place of execution outside the city gates.16 Private devotion reinforced the confraternity’s public role, and by maintaining sober decorum in the procession the lay brothers projected a key spiritual fiction: insofar as the condemned could be fashioned as a mar-tyr, his corpse could be fashioned as an icon. The confraternity mediated this transfer of meaning, rich in paradox, which used popular religion and the example of Dismas to counter orthodox theology on sinners, martyrs, and the passage to paradise.

Confraternities fought passionately with clergy over patronal rights, because even patronage of sacramentals — those material objects or spiritual acts which did not confer grace but which prepared an individual to receive it — lifted them to a special and even quasi- intercessory role in civic religion. This was one motivation for confraternities to use robes, prayers, icons, and other sacramentals to boost their own symbolic roles in civic religious ritu-als while keeping their ordained priests on a tight rein. In processions of the condemned, it is important to remember that confraternities needed the prisoner as much as he needed them. Appropriating the condemned as their own kin, conducting him around town, and caring so aggressively for his soul brought them possession of his body. The implicit pact was that if they pastored, comforted, buried, and memorialized the prisoner, they could also use his body for their own purposes in the body politic. In the case of pris-oners who had converted or who clearly had the sympathies of the crowd, they could use this popular response to turn the prisoner’s body itself into something like a sacramental — objectified, resonant, and possessing a spiri-tual power that required careful handling. By the later sixteenth century, clerics would start to find this threatening, but before this time their greater worry was the desire of many laypeople to grab bits of the hangman’s rope or the prisoner’s body after execution as sacramentals for popular magic or the popular cult. This was one reason why the ashes from Savonarola’s burn-ing were dumped in the Arno after the fire was spent. Having the prisoner’s body in the confraternity’s hands ensured its safe disposal.

Who joined these groups and why? Fra Venturino da Bergamo attracted artisans in the fourteenth century, and so it remained until local elites realized that infiltrating and controlling confraternities was one of the necessary ways of managing republicanism. So Cosimo de Medici promoted


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and funded many confraternities, while Lorenzo de’ Medici actually joined some of them from the 1470s, including the conforteria of S. Maria della Croce al Tempio.17 Bologna’s patricians would do the same a few decades later, and by the late sixteenth century Bologna’s comforters were no lon-ger silk merchants like Pier Giacomo Ruggieri but senators, professors, and aristocrats.18 This certainly helped their efforts to defend their role against clerical intrusion, particularly by the Jesuits and the Capuchins. Some indi-vidual comforters were clerics, but in most parts of Italy the lay monopoly of confraternities was preserved, and the ranks of comforters also included those with a stake in the judicial system, such as notaries and local political authorities. The exceptions were Rome, Naples, and Milan; in the latter cit-ies Spanish overlords turned the work over to clergy in the 1580s (primarily Capuchins and Jesuits), because they felt the confraternities had politicized it. As indeed they had. What in those cities had become a means of resis-tance against the Spanish authorities, in other Italian cities became a means of securing the power of local elites and the authority of civic justice.19 Using spiritual lessons and promises to shut down all protest and gain the prison-er’s quiet acquiescence, cutting off his senses so that he would not hear or see the crowd, and refusing to let him address it — all these actions suggest that by the late sixteenth century, comforting had as much to do with preserving political and judicial order as it had to do with saving prisoners’ souls. This was particularly the case as more political prisoners mounted the scaffold.

The context of a confraternally driven civic religion expanded the meanings and shaped the forms of executions in Italian republics and communes. These remained acts of civic justice. The procession by which lay confratelli brought condemned criminals to the scaffold was a key rit-ual within confraternal civic religion. The broader practice of comforting underscored the continuities of divine and civic justice, but also the continu-ities of divine and civic mercy. This mercy did not eliminate execution — the good thief crucified with Christ still had to die, as indeed Christ himself had to die. Yet civic mercy put the criminal’s death into the broader narrative of salvation. More to the point, it put the lay confraternity members into that same narrative as civic- religious liturgists acting something like lay priests. As the comforted prisoner became a quasiliturgical object on the level of a sacramental, his confraternal keepers became the lay celebrants of a trans-formative civic religious ritual that protected his body so as to preserve his calm and accepting demeanor and thus save his soul. Their liturgical role distinguished public from private in the criminal body, while still putting both at the service of the civic body politic.


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The prisoner’s body as artistic and literary object

In his final moments, a man like Giovanni Paolo Stuffolino, who was sen-tenced to hang, would be hauled backwards up a ladder leaning against the gallows by the executioner, who took the loose end of the noose and tied it to the cross beam. The crowd around would fall silent. Right behind this pair either Pier Giacomo Ruggieri or Francesco Duglioli, robed head to foot in the white comforter’s robes, would hold a tavoletta on the end of long stick putting the image right in front of the condemned man’s eyes (fig. 2). He would lead Stuffolino in a prayer which, in that moment of silence, could be heard by those gathered most closely around the scaffold:

Virgin full of every grace and praise;Reach out in help if you once again would;Loosen every knot that is my due.

So that when I recall from this hour and onwardMy crimes and old offenses;As I lie cold and wretched on the ground

Be mild, for in you alone I hope,And give me grace enoughTo see you appear in the burning flamesand pull me up into the holy confraternity.20

With a firm twist, the executioner shoved the condemned man off the lad-der. The comforter continued holding up the image and continued calling the prayer, louder now, until the condemned man finally died — an excruci-ating process of asphyxiation that could last twenty minutes or more.21

Confraternal comforters aimed to construct a sensory cocoon around the condemned man that would preserve his spiritual transforma-tion. This was hard labor, both physically and emotionally. Manuals for comforters offered spiritual stories and songs with which they could drown out the sounds of the crowd, and their storerooms held collections of tavo-lette which could completely block the condemned’s sight. But putting these tools to work with someone who was within hours of dying took stamina and skill. More importantly, it required reshaping that prisoner’s own identity so that the prisoner would control himself or herself in the face of execution. The improbable goal of helping a condemned man or woman to achieve a good death meant helping them identify with the good thief Dismas cruci-fied with Christ, or with martyrs who had been executed for the faith. If he


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could achieve and maintain this new identity to the very moment of death, the confraternal comforters could echo Christ’s promise, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

Fashioning prisoners into martyrs was a complicated exercise in identity formation that blurred the lines between objectivity and subjectivity and between the physical and psychological. Comforters’ arsenals of visual and aural tools modeled submission like that of early martyrs and saints. Allie Terry has noted that adding the taste of the Eucharist and smell of candles, incense, and sweat to the ritual practice of comforting produced a complete somaesthetic experience, one in which the criminal became alert to his experience through all his sensory being.22 Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, comforters’ tools become more individual and identi-fiably contemporary and local. They also became more overtly subjective, though the subjectivity at play is ambiguous. New poems, songs, and prayers ventriloquized confessions purportedly written by the recently executed, and particularly by those who were highborn. In most cases, these texts and accounts were lightly or heavily fictionalized. They blurred the distinction between subjective and objective, both feeding into and fed by an expand-ing market for “scaffold literature” that grew as executions across Europe became more deliberately staged and dramatic.23 They were also fed by and in turn fed the more theatrical and emotive executions of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The tavolette were the main visual tools used to capture senses and emotions. These portable wooden panel images came in different shapes and sizes, displayed different subjects, and could be used at different stages in the process. Until quite recently, it was thought that only a few very late examples had survived, but the art historian Massimo Ferretti has located at least seven fourteenth- century panels, including some that were likely among the very first used by Bologna’s comforters.24 The fifteenth- century Bolognese manuscript image noted earlier shows a comforter in the prison cell using two hands to hold up to the prisoner a large rectangular panel subdivided into smaller squares that told the story of a saint’s martyrdom (fig. 1). Comforters also used smaller tavolette held by a handle at the bot-tom, which could be thrust into the prisoner’s face (figs. 2, 3 [bottom cen-tral panel], 4). These often depicted a martyr’s tortures on one side, and her or his heavenly bliss on the other. Gripping the handle, the comforter could rotate these tavolette quickly in order to show both suffering and reward. There were tavolette images corresponding to almost every form of exe-cution possible — hanging, beheading, flaying alive, and burning. Jacopo


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Voragine’s Golden Legend provided the characters and script. While almost all saints and martyrs were from the period of the early church, their depic-tion followed the imagery of late medieval spiritual literature and imitative piety. The historical lesson was always refracted through the present reality: martyrs, saints, and soldiers were often shown in contemporary dress to help the prisoner identify with his exemplars. The Bolognese Comforters’ Manual instructed the brothers on what to tell the prisoner: these martyrs bore the same tortures as you, or even worse, and they did it without com-plaint; so should you. The explicit promise in both the manual and tavo-lette was straightforward: confess your sins completely, accept the penalty without complaint, forgive all those around you, and in a few short hours or minutes, you will in heaven.25

Tavolette bearing images of the prisoner being presented in heaven by, with, and in certain instances as martyrs conveyed a promise: God could and would forgive any sin. Yet the promise was conditional. The condemned had to confess fully and accept his fate without complaint as God’s will for him at that moment, just as the martyrs had. He had to leave the attach-ments and concerns of his former life behind in order to take up this new spiritual identity. The saint who most exemplified this thorough conversion was Mary Magdalen, and Allie Terry argues that in Florence it was the Mag-dalen more than the martyrs who served as the chief model in the tools and rituals used with prisoners. A Florentine condemned prisoner’s last night was spent in the Chapel of S. Mary Magdalen in the Podestà’s Palace, convers-ing with the comforters and looking at the frescoed cycles of the saint’s life and of the Last Judgment. When the procession to the scaffold paused in the confraternity’s church of S. Maria della Croce al Tempio on Via dei Mal-contenti, the criminal lay prostrate before Fra Angelico’s altarpiece of the Lamentation which emphasized the Magdalen’s grief.26 A comparison of cit-ies shows that comforters worked flexibly with distinct and sometimes quite dissimilar saintly models, responding no doubt to the very different kinds of criminals they engaged with and aimed to convert. Effecting conversion was a complicated process that brought the criminal into a paradox: he or she had to remember and to forget at the same time — remember to confess sins, but forget the life and relationships in which they had been committed. The comforters’ visual tools worked together with oral tools as confession and promise: songs, prayers, smells, and tavolette reflected on sin and voiced despair, while giving a vision of paradise ahead.

Some songs and prayers were drawn out of the rich tradition of con-fraternal laude, and the prisoner may first have sung them years earlier as a


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child in the company of parents and neighbors while hearing a mendicant preacher or on procession through the city streets.27 Others, like the one quoted above, were vivid first- person confessions addressed directly to Mary or Christ, and set into the immediate context of impending execution, such as “Into your arms, Virgin Mary”:

Succour me, my mother, and don’t leave me,In you I put my hopeMake it so that at the point of my passingMy soul you take awayAnd set before the sight of the one Father.Give me strength in this my punishmentAnd pray for me at this my final endSo that my spirit and soul pass on well.

If your helping hand does not reachTo my tired and battered little boatThen every effort,that to the depths of my soul I have endured,will be lost and in vain.28

Another example is from “Have Mercy O highest eternal God”:

. . . I pray that your compassiondoes not want to abandon me on this final dayBut in deliverance will gather my spirit.

Be pleased to forgive my failings;In thousands of ways I have offended youAnd not observed your commandments.

Ah Lord, inflame my heartSo through your passionI can bear this burden with strength.

You forgave that thief on the crossWho, crucified with you, on your rightTurned to you with devotion

Forgive me too, since I have lived wronglyfull of sins; defend my soulfrom the great enemy and deep abyss.


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Defend me with your grace aboveAccompany me at this bitter pointAnd with your hand, take my spirit

See that I am wholeheartedly contriteA true Christian and your creatureAnd I hope, at the end, to be united with you

Don’t leave me, Lord, in fearOf my harsh enemy at this final momentBut keep faith in you strong in my heart.29

Songs and images worked in tandem as vividly personal and direct confes-sion and promise.

It was one thing to achieve this transformed identity in a private cell at nighttime, but quite another to maintain it on the busy streets and squares where comforting took place as the prisoner processed to his death in the early morning hours. As we saw, the contemporary art of dying well taught that the soul could only rise to heaven if it was in the proper disposi-tion at the very point of death. Anger, self- pity, fear, or despair could tip even the best- prepared soul into hell. What of a man or woman condemned for murder, who saw their soon- to- be- orphaned children and heard the jeers of neighbors? Or a paid assassin who saw his victims’ families and wondered whether God could forgive even him? Having sat up all night with their prisoner, the comforters began the most exhausting stage of their work as they escorted the prisoner to the reading of the sentence and on to the scaf-fold. Contemporary images show them positioning themselves in front or back, or on either side, singing and praying continually at a higher volume in an effort to drown out all other noises (fig. 2). Some now switched their simple tavolette for larger portable triptychs whose extendable arms could block out the prisoner’s peripheral vision.30

The laude used in this public procession could be more incantory, like the drum- beat call for “Misericordia!” found in the song most frequently copied in Bolognese comforting manuscripts, “Have Mercy, Oh God Most High”:

Have Mercy, oh God most HighWith heart and mouth I call you,To help me at this dread time.


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Have mercy! Oh my sweet LordBy your grace and pityReaching out to me at this awful time.. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Have mercy! I call youTake my spirit in your handsNot looking at my faults.. . . . . . . . .

Have mercy! With great compassionDefend me from this bitter passWhere the evil enemy stands ready at my side.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Have mercy for I’m in my last hourAnd then I say, into your hands, my Lord,I commit my soul and my spirit. . . . . . . . . . .

Mercy on my grave sinsMercy to keep me from hellI need you to help me nowAnd to give me the whole of eternal paradise.31

Comforters employed images and songs until the very end. The manual used to train Bologna’s comforters advised them specifically on how to stand on the ladder so as not to prevent a clean launching of the criminal, or how to position themselves in front of the chopping block so that the pris-oner would not have to strain to see the tavoletta and end up turning in such a way that the executioner would not get a clean cut.32

Allowing the executioner a clean cut was about as close as the com-forters came to intervening on the prisoner’s behalf. Comforting had strict limits. Comforters were not to entertain any complaints about the injus-tice of the proceedings from the prisoner or his family, and they were not to advocate or intervene to have his sentence dropped. In Giovanni Paolo Stuffolino’s case, Pier Giacomo Ruggieri and Francesco Duglioli did man-age to persuade the papal vice- legate to commute the sentence from hang-ing to the far more honorable — and quicker — decapitation, and then they arranged for him to be buried in the cemetery of the Morte hospital, two


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actions suggesting that Stuffolino enjoyed the social status of a gentleman.33 Comforters might also aim to ease the prisoner’s anxiety by offering to send his personal possessions to family members, or to arrange for extra masses to be said for his soul.34

While comforters could not normally intervene in the judicial pro-cess, they could offer prisoners the hope of a miraculous liberation. If the hangman’s rope broke, the prisoner was set free. Saint Anthony Abbot was a favored image on tavolette because according to legend he saved unjustly con-demned prisoners by holding them up so that the noose could not tighten. Other saints might ensure that an undeserved noose would break, and the fall to the ground would liberate the prisoner. This kind of miraculous inter-vention was frequently memorialized with ex votos, and the idea that God or the saints would intervene directly to save the unjustly condemned was used quite deliberately to give hope to those who insisted that they were innocent.

Generally however, comforters were not to show much pity or encourage hopes for last- minute deliverance, since this might confuse the prisoner and keep him mired in the worries and angers of his past life. The Bolognese Comforters’ Manual counseled:

steel yourself and show in your speech that one should pay no heed to the body. . . . if you began to feel sorry for him, and indulge him, you would be courting the danger of softening yourself. The result would be that instead of comforting him, you would make him uncomfortable; and when you should be reliev-ing him of this pain, you would make it overwhelm him. On the contrary, avoid using pitiful words and compassion as much as you can.35

The conceit of martyrdom functioned to shut down all protests. If the sentence had been deserved, the condemned should model himself on the good thief and seek forgiveness. If undeserved, he should model himself on Christ and the martyrs, the victims of sham trials, painful tortures, and unjust executions, who had freely accepted death as God’s will. God could certainly will the miracle of a broken rope for those who were innocent. Yet an early death, and even more an unjust, painful, and violent death, could be God’s gift of sure salvation and eternal life. The martyrs, knowing that they were about to die, had the singular gift of being able to prepare spiritu-ally for death. By acquiescing quietly and forgiving their tormentors, they earned quick transit to heaven. A sudden death without confession was one


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of the great dreads of the time, so to die fully prepared was a gift, and to die young even more so as it left less time to accumulate sins.

The conceit of martyrdom imposed a limit of another kind: com-forters rarely invoked the threat of hellfire and damnation. No extant tavo-lette depict hell, songs seldom describe it, and the manuals say very little about it. Even purgatory is downplayed; the Bolognese manual mentions it only twice, once as a reminder of what awaits those who fail to confess, and once to claim that this earthly life is itself a purgatory.36 Hell certainly hovered at the edge of consciousness. Florentine comforters worked under a fresco of the Last Judgment. When the condemned person who had been prostrate before the Lamentation altarpiece in the confraternal church of Il Tempio stood up and turned to exit, he or she saw frescoes of heaven and hell on the east and west walls, and one of the Magdalen straight ahead.37 Comforters could use all three to draw the prisoner in with the promise of conversion and a new life in heaven.

Were conforters successful? The poems and images with which sixteenth- century comforters ventriloquized the prisoner’s experience cer-tainly assumed so. While most of them presented what were ostensibly the very words of one set of prisoners as models for others’ attitudes and actions, we cannot be certain that prisoners actually accepted the voices of others as their own. A set of fifteen poems by Giovanni Marco Pio and Andrea Viarani, executed for their involvement in a plot against Borso d’Este in 1469, turns up in many copies of Bolognese comforters’ manuscripts of the sixteenth century. The later comforters clearly wished to use these poems by men facing execution in their own work with prisoners.38 In one of these, “If the blind, false, and treasonous world,” Viarani confesses his guilt and acknowledges that his eternal fate is clearly in his own hands. He then shifts from catechism to confession at the close:

Ah! Don’t wish to abandon your soul,being diffident of eternal grace,for it never is tired of gatheringhe who, repentant, so asks.. . . . . . . . .

This is enough, more than in a thousand cardsfor you to firmly believe that you can save yourself,it is up to you alone if you want it,your life and death depends on you.. . . . . . . . . . . .


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Be absolutely certain than an hourof bitter tears is enough for your salvation,if you are as contriteas accords your serious failing.. . . . . . . . . . .

For each wrong committed ask forgiveness:in you my life, in you my deathrelies, amen.Do with me, Lord God, what you will,

as you are my good and eternal peace.39

Two other examples from early sixteenth- century Florence show confessions being both manufactured and undermined, and underscore above all the immediate political contexts in which this ventriloquizing could take place. In 1501, a minor aristocrat, Antonio Rinaldeschi, threw dung at an image of the Virgin Mary, angered after losing at dice. He was hunted down, tried, and condemned in a late- night trial; he was allowed comforting, and then was executed before daybreak by being hanged from the windows of the Podestà’s Palace. The politics of the Savonarolan move-ment complicated the case, and Florentine authorities clearly wanted to dem-onstrate their civic religious diligence by firmly punishing this desecration of the Virgin’s image. Yet Rinaldeschi had not committed a capital crime, ren-dering his summary and secret execution illegal. Authorities covered their tracks by commissioning a narrative panel from the artist Filippo di Lorenzo Dolciati, whose nine images trace the story from Rinaldeschi’s gambling and act of desecration, through his flight and capture, and to his confession and salvation (see fig. 3). The final image shows his corpse hanging from a window of the Podestà’s Palace with a confraternal comforter extending a tavoletta, while two angels successfully beat off two demons and save his soul (a miniature and naked Rinaldeschi kneeling in prayer) for its ascent to heaven. Dolciati wrote Rinaldeschi’s final words — Dismas’s confession on the cross — beside the hanging corpse to underscore that this gambling blasphemer and desecrater of a holy image, who had even attempted sui-cide to evade capture, would be with Christ in paradise that same day. And what a day. A written caption at the bottom of the image states underscores the lesson and may also explain the authorities’ haste: Rinaldeschi’s conver-sion and execution occurred on the vigil of the feast of Mary Magdalen, the model convert. Chronicler Luca Landucci noted that “at night they hanged


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[Rinaldeschi] from the windows of the Podestà, and the next morning was the feast of Saint Mary Magdalen (a double feast). All Florence came there to see.” The authorities’ rapid action turned what could have been a trou-bling story of summary (in)justice into a pious narrative of conversion and redemption. Rinaldeschi was buried on the Magdalen’s feast day and cel-ebrated as one whose confession, conversion, and acceptance of execution had secured him a place in heaven. The desecrated image of the Virgin was moved to a public church where Dolciati’s panel also was put on display.40

Dolciati’s panel is pure spin, an unabashed effort by authorities to write a narrative that gives a happy ending to summary justice, and creates the kind of story and tavoletta that comforters could use in their work in prisons. The incident can be juxtaposed with accounts of another execu-tion a little more than a decade later. Luca della Robbia wrote of the last hours of Pier Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, two patricians executed for their involvement in a plot against the Medici in 1512.41 Della Robbia’s account is remarkable for the humanity and stoic calm with which Boscoli in particular faces his death. He sends Florence’s comforters of the Com-pany of the Blacks to a corner of the jail cell and asks them to hush their distractive caterwauling of spiritual songs while he confers with della Rob-bia and with a Dominican friar drawn from the ranks of the Savonarolan movement. The other remarkable thing about the account is that there is no sure evidence for when it was actually written, or whether della Rob-bia was indeed its author. The earliest extant manuscript dates from fully a century later, and like the Rinaldeschi panel, its depiction of unjustly executed patricians accepting their fate peacefully may represent later agen-das more than contemporary realities.42 Yet it is noteworthy that both these propagandistic efforts present themselves as personal narratives, with the della Robbia account conveying the very words of the prisoners themselves. Della Robia’s account brought the values of humanist friendship into com-forting, though this was hardly an instance of secularization, as Boscoli and Capponi were firm Savonarolans. Viarani’s poems and della Robbia’s memoir were used to train comforters and assist prisoners, and Dolciati’s Rinaldeschi panel may have been used in this way as well, particularly since it portrayed the comforters so prominently and positively.

Comforting continued to the end of the ancien régime, and the deliberate creation of new comforting images and stories underscores how secular and religious authorities recognized and appreciated the comforter’s role Old manuals were recopied and new ones written, and new tavolette and songs emerged to reflect changing tastes and values. Yet the forms and


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purposes of this literature were also shifting and the audiences expanding. The new texts portrayed upper- class victims, and their greater subjectivity blurred older distinctions between literature produced in manuscript for a small group of comforters and prisoners and broadsheet texts produced for a wide audience. Comforting literature and comforting images took on the more immediate and emotive tones of popular ballads, plays, songs, and paintings.

Italian broadsheets about execution tended to present happy end-ings of reconciliation or miraculous rescue, but sometimes they retold the crime in verse using popular stereotypes of brave bandits, nefarious Jews, or thwarted lovers. One of the broadsheets by the Bolognese balladeer Giulio Ceseare Croce describes the case of a Jewish man, Manas, tortured and exe-cuted in April 1590 together with his lover, Lavinia Bandadei, for the mur-der of her brother- in- law. Another tells of Ippolita Passarotti and Lodovico Landinelli, young lovers in Bologna who murdered the girl’s father when he refused to allow them to marry. Landinelli was an apothecary, a fact which may explain both the opposition of Ippolita’s patrician father to the match and also the source of the poison with which the young lovers dispatched this obstruction to their happiness. Thousands had filled the city’s Piazza Maggiore on a chilly January morning in 1587 to witness the decapitation of Ippolita and Lodovico and the hanging of their servant and accomplice, Giovanni Antonio dal Tolle. Croce describes Manas’s torture in cruel and mocking detail, while the fate of Ippolita and Lodovico is told as a romance. And he was not the only one. Virginia Cox has uncovered an astonishing outpouring of over a hundred Petrarchan poems written in the days and weeks following the execution of the young lovers. Roughly half these poems defended them, and the rest castigated them; there is no indication whether any were later used to comfort prisoners.43 A more happy version of a simi-lar tale allows two young lovers from warring Florentine families to unite. Ippolito Buondelmonte is discovered after curfew carrying a rope ladder with which he means to enter the bedroom of his lover Dianora Bardi. He concocts a story of theft in order to save her honor, and when he is then con-demned to death requests that the procession to the gallows pass the Bardi home. Dianora runs to him and confesses all, whereupon the authorities order the couple to marry. The story supposedly dates to the late thirteenth century, but is frequently updated through the fifteenth century, when one version features a woodcut that shows Dianora bursting in to stop a gallows procession that includes comforters and their tavoletta (see fig. 4).

The new art and literature invented new subjectivities: Filippo Dol-


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ciati cast Antonio Rinaldeschi as a conventional Christian convert moved by the example of martyrs; Luca della Robbia cast Boscoli and Capponi as ancient Roman patricians calmly facing a politically motivated execution; Giulio Ceseare Croce, Petrarchan poets, and Florentine woodcut artists cast the Bolognese couple Ippolita Passarotti and Lodovico Landinelli and the Florentine lovers Ippolito Buondelmonti and Dianora Bardi as Romeo and Juliet couples frustrated by traditional adult values and rivalries. Where the older tools of comforting had reinforced the condemned’s identity as a civic- religious ritual object, the newer ones used stereotypes from romance to turn criminals into models of unjust sacrifice, honorable death, or deserved punishment.44 Together with the very popular broadsheets, this “scaffold literature” was teaching the condemned how to die honorably and spectators how to respond. And it emerged just as more of its upper- class subjects were mounting the scaffold.

The prisoner’s body as political object

In 1393, a young well- born Florentine, Tommaso di Guccio di Dino Gucci, was bundled into a cart for the ride to his execution, rumbling from the Podestà’s Palace of the Bargello along Via dei Malcontenti and through the Gate of S. Croce to the gallows. Tommaso never got there. Crowds of his supporters clogged the way and forced a detour before tearing Tommaso from the cart and spiriting him off to the nearby Franciscan church of S. Croce for sanctuary. Civic officials went in after him and brought him to the communal palace. As armed troops dispersed the crowds, Tommaso was handed over to the executioner to be returned to the Podestà’s Palace for his execution. As all this was happening, a few hundred boys assaulted Tommaso’s family home, breaking in and attempting to set it on fire while calling out for the blood of Tommaso’s mother, whom they blamed for trig-gering the series of events that led to her son’s execution. Tommaso had been imprisoned earlier through the collusion of one of his brothers and had responded by arranging that brother’s murder, thereby securing his own trial, conviction, and death. According to a chronicler, there was such gen-eral disgust with the family that without the podestà’s personal intervention, those assigned to carry the body away for burial would have thrown it into the family palazzo.

The ancient Podestà’s Palace was the center of Florence’s judicial system. It was where the podestà lived and held court, where torturers exer-cised their craft, and where executioners performed their duties. Many con-


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demned were hanged within its courtyard like Tommaso Gucci, or from its windows like Antonio Rinaldeschi. Yet Florence, like many other early mod-ern cities, also conducted executions in a number of different places. Hang-ings, decapitations, or mutilations could occur at the place of the crime, in a prison or on the main square, or at an execution ground located either just within or just outside the city walls. In 1361, Florentine authorities gave the comforting confraternity of S. Maria della Croce al Tempio a plot of land outside the gate and near “the place of Justice” [vicino al luogo della Giustizia] to build a chapel where the condemned could hear Mass and be buried, and this became the place for all but exceptional executions.45

Comparing Florence and Bologna through the course of the fif-teenth and sixteenth centuries, we can see how developments in contempo-rary politics and shifts within local justice systems resulted in changes to the places and spaces where political prisoners were executed. As judicial systems became more politicized in both cities, the places and spaces of political executions moved, as did the uses of the prisoner’s body. One reason for this was to obtain greater security, as the case of Tommaso Gucci demonstrates. Political symbolism also played a part, as in the case of Pier Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi. Authorities also aimed to fashion an unjust execu-tion into a stage- managed conversion, as with Antonio Rinaldeschi. As has been shown, executions were key rituals of Italian civic religion, with confra-ternities turning the prisoner’s body into a quasiliturgical object suggestive of a sacramental. As the state itself became a sacral body, the “civic” and the “religious” came into tension, and the places and spaces of execution became more carefully chosen for their potential to communicate specific messages. The increasing theatricality of the texts and images involved in comforting helped to mediate this shift toward more staged and theatrical executions. Comforters could work to ensure that in this evolving drama of capital pun-ishment, more of the condemned would die like Pier Paolo Boscoli than like Tommaso Gucci.

Tommaso Gucci’s execution followed some Florentine conventions: he was tried publicly and sent in public procession to a place of execution in the company of guards, confraternal comforters, and hundreds of spec-tators including the many dozen supporters who nearly spirited him away. After police reinforcements wrestled him out of the Church of S. Croce, he returned to the Podestà’s Palace where he could be executed without specta-tors and without incident. Late medieval public justice was messy, unpre-dictable, and open to challenge. Over the next two centuries, as authorities aimed to increase security by adapting the places and spaces of execution,


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comforters worked hard to ensure that gentlemen of the standing of Tom-maso Gucci would know how to die.

Only a fraction of those committing capital crimes ever suffered death. Commutation, composition, acquittals, or similar forms of private peacemaking halted many trials before they had run their course. Andrea Zorzi has shown that executions in Florence were steadily declining through the Renaissance, from eleven to thirteen per year in the late fourteenth century to seven or eight in the fifteenth, and even fewer in the early six-teenth. This may be a function of record- keeping. Since chroniclers typi-cally reported only exceptional crimes or executions, statistics drawn from civic chronicles seriously underestimate actual executions.46 Zorzi also high-lights shifts in the Florentine judicial system that parallel those elsewhere in Europe. Under older communal systems, parish watches had maintained public order, initiated charges, and sent criminals to specialized tribunals headed by foreign judges like the annually appointed podestà. From the early fifteenth century, new tribunals emerged which were staffed by citizens who had been appointed by civic authorities and who were more answer-able to political masters. Zorzi notes, “Thus, the older system, rooted in the representation of component parts of society and embodying the communal ideal of judicial equality, was replaced by a more impersonal institutional structure, controlled by the new ruling oligarchy and aiming at consensual composition of conflicts.”47

Yet “consensual composition” was not in fact the consistent goal. Nicholas Scott Baker has traced the politicization of Florentine judicial sys-tems further forward into the mid- sixteenth century, showing that while executions generally may have been declining, the execution of political opponents like Agostino Capponi and Pier Paolo Boscoli was on the rise from the 1470s to the 1560s and beyond. Before this time and up until the later fifteenth century, republican regimes frequently exiled political oppo-nents during intense conflicts rather than killing them. They maintained the polite fiction that only tyrants executed their opponents, and more prosai-cally understood that executions could trigger vendettas which would desta-bilize an entire ruling class. Hence in Siena, Venice, Genoa, and Bologna shifts of power within oligarchies were more often marked by the expulsion of enemies from the city than by their arrest, trial, and execution.48 Baker’s point is well taken, though of course in some of these same cities, particu-larly Bologna and Genoa, patricians sometimes cut out the judicial middle- man and took matters into their own hands by murdering their opponents directly.


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In Florence, the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478 marked a turning point. The oligarchical conspirators employed murder as a political tool when they plotted to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici, something hitherto not as commonly done in Florence as elsewhere. In response, the Medici dra-matically expanded the execution of their political enemies, both in number and in sheer theatricality. Eighty conspirators were summarily executed on April 28, 1478, and denied the services of the conforteria, a public means of cursing them to hell.49 It was a significant departure from earlier practice. Through the violent disputes of the first half of the fifteenth century as the Medici consolidated their power, only six men were executed while many dozens were banned and exiled. By contrast, from 1480 to 1560, sixty- two men were executed for political reasons or, as the records put it, “per lo stato” [for the state]. Some were beheaded behind the walls of the Podestà’s Palace, but others were hung from its windows, their bodies dangling in a deliber-ately humiliating display.

This move from exiling to executing political opponents emerged from changes in the political and judicial systems of Renaissance republics. But what effects did they have on the rituals surrounding execution? Flor-ence continued executing murderers, counterfeits, infanticides, and lowborn criminals in the open and public space just outside the eastern city walls. As politically appointed judicial magistracies condemned more political oppo-nents to death, they also shifted the location and the rituals surrounding these executions. The most important step was bringing political executions within the city walls. A functionalist reading of this move might suggest that it was simply a practical step aimed at preventing riotous efforts to spring prisoners like Tommaso Gucci, and this was undoubtedly a factor. Yet given Florence’s general aversion to holding executions within the city walls, there was more at work here.

Executions had traditionally been the ultimate step in a series by which a criminal was progressively removed from civil society: the arrest by neighbors or civic authorities was the first step, trial by a foreign judge the second, removal beyond the city walls the third, death the last. Those who died were those whom the community had not rallied around to save and reintegrate through commutation, composition, informal peace agreements, acquittals, and the like. This was one reason why many of those executed were precisely young foreigners — those with few connections who had not really belonged in the first place. They were clearly in the society but not of it, and their physical death was simply the last physical expression of this exclusion.


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Political executions were even more clearly an excising from the urban community. If the main issue were security, then on a purely practical level there was nothing to prevent the highborn condemned being executed in a more secure place outside the city walls, or in a liminal space like the Fortezza da Basso, which was built into the circuit of Florence’s walls in 1535 – 37. It was a logical choice more consistent with longstanding Floren-tine practices of execution outside the city. By keeping its political prisoners close and executing them within the city walls, Florence was giving their death a different symbolic value. These were, precisely, insiders — men of the highest rank, exceptional cases, whose execution had to resonate locally. These were the ones whose execution was noted as being “per lo stato,” for the state, and hence their execution had to take place in a resonant space “in lo stato,” or in the state.

Most “internal execution” that the Florentines practiced took place in three or four different spaces around the resonant building that had been built as the first home of the Signoria and had then served as the Podestà’s Palace. It became the seat of the Consiglio di Giustizia when the office of the podestà was abolished in 1502, and then transitioned into the prison of the city’s chief police official, the Capitano del Giustizia, in 1574. This last move gave it the name by which it became and remains most commonly known, that is, the Bargello.50 Private beheadings and hangings took place within the courtyard of the Bargello. This recognized the honor and stand-ing of the one being killed. A second place of execution left the condemned hanging from a window frame or an iron bar high up on the exterior walls, as happened to the 1478 Pazzi conspirators and to Antonio Rinaldeschi. The execution itself might take place in the dead of night, but the Bargello’s towering walls provided a stage for greater public humiliation if the body was left hanging for a day or more. The third place of public execution was a scaffold erected in the Piazza S. Appollinaire that bordered the Bargello to the south. In what would become a common form of political execution, the condemned was led directly on to the scaffold from a door in the walls of the Bargello that gave access to what had once been the courtroom.51 But when did this first take place?

Florence’s comforting confraternity of the Croce al Tempio recorded that of the sixty- two men executed for political reasons from 1480 to 1560, thirty were dispatched within the Bargello and twelve in the Piazza S. Appollinaire located right beside it. Most of the rest were executed in out-lying towns like Pisa and Livorno, with a few executed in other places in the city. The sites of thirteen are not listed. Of these sixty- two, eight were


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executed by one of the two republican regimes of 1494 – 1512 and 1527 – 30, while fifty- four were executed by the Medici.52

Nicholas Baker argues that the shift toward more political execu-tions was a move by the Medici to assert not just their brute power and gifts for survival, but their princely authority. The number of executions increased at a time when they were withdrawing from even the minimal involvement in public offices that had marked the family’s strategy under Cosimo il Vec-chio and Lorenzo il Magnifico. They might seem to be abandoning republi-can pretenses in order to assert noble honor and prerogatives, yet the choice to execute close to the traditional spaces of authority and judicial power suggests a more nuanced strategy. The republican regime’s opponents had to some extent shown the way: they executed five Medici supporters in 1497 within the Bargello, and then shortly after throwing out the Medici again in 1527 conducted a symbolic execution of Medici supporter Jacopo Alamanni from a stage in front of the communal palace — arguably the most politically resonant space within the city.

Executing political opponents at the Bargello was a powerful sign of the Medici dukes’ deliberate occupation of Florentine republican life and space.53 Taking over the former Podestà’s Palace was consistent with Cosimo I’s action of taking over the public Palazzo della Signoria, extensively remod-eling it as the private ducal palace, and then moving there in May 1540. It is worth noting that the first public executions in Piazza S. Appollinaire beside the Bargello were ordered by Duke Cosimo within months of his taking power. Eight patricians who had rallied troops against the eighteen- year- old duke, and whom he defeated in July 1537, were executed there in August 1537. Cosimo was deeply aware of the resonance of place and space, and seems to have deliberately moved many political executions outside the closed quarters of the Bargello into the more open and public space of Piazza S. Appollinaire — a new space where his justice could be made manifest as both continuing but also superseding traditional podestarial justice. This piazza put the scaffold in sight of the Palazzo della Signoria, particularly before the offices (scrittoio) at the rear once occupied by Duke Cosimo’s father, the very popular mercenary Giovanni delle Bande Nere. An open terrace above these offices would have given the duke a prime view of the scaffold. Grand Duke Ferdinando I later replaced this wing with a towering addition whose heavily rusticated blocks of pietra forte more directly echoed the Bargello, and whose corner windows still gave a view of the scaffold. Whether or not Medici dukes actually observed — and were seen to witness — public executions from that corner of the old Palazzo della Signoria, it was


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the one part of the old palazzo most firmly associated with their partic-ular branch of the Medici family, and one which Ferdinando I’s renova-tions turned into an imposing monument to the family’s authority.54 From 1554, Piazza S. Appollinaire became the place for all political executions, beginning with three patricians who had fought with Sienese troops against Cosimo, and carrying on with his son Francesco, who used the place more selectively, but who executed a would- be assassin there in 1577. The heads of decapitated criminals were displayed on pikes at this corner, and by the seventeenth century torture in the form of the strappado was carried out publicly from a pulley fixed high up on the corner. Executions were accom-panied by the tolling of a bell in the Bargello’s tower, the Montanina, which had once been used to summon public assemblies or mark meetings of the podestà. It now rang through the course of executions, stopping only when the last of the condemned had been hanged or beheaded. 55

The ones actually ordering these tortures, executions, and public displays — and hence working with place and space — were the political magistrates appointed by the Medici dukes. If civic judiciaries across Italy were becoming more politicized throughout this period, can parallel move-ments be seen in the place and space of executions elsewhere, where the political dynamic is different? A second urban example illustrates some of these dynamics. Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also saw a distinct politicization of justice with effects on the places, spaces, and ritu-als of execution.56 The quasi- signorial Bentivoglio family gained power at a time when political assassinations were common, and only narrowly averted ouster in a 1488 conspiracy headed by their former allies, the Malvezzi. The five decades which followed witnessed an unprecedented number of assas-sinations and politically motivated executions, particularly after the ouster of the Bentivoglio in 1506, and it appears likely that even the conforteria of S. Maria della Morte ceased operation for a time, though we cannot tell when this may have happened. In 1535 the office of the podestà was for-mally replaced with the Rota, a Roman- style panel of five “foreign” judges, appointed by the senate, and holding judicial authority for five years. Three years later, the conforteria was formally reborn, and systematic records of all executions in the city begin from that time (1538).57

Through the fifteenth century, the Bolognese had carried out most executions at the Piazza del Mercato just inside the city walls at the north end of the city where the conforteria had a chapel dedicated to S. Giovanni Battista. In the bloodbath of retribution following the expulsion of the Ben-tivoglio, political executions moved to a set of iron bars projecting above a


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window of the Podestà’s Palace on Piazza Maggiore or on scaffolds erected in front of it; the young doctor working for S. Maria della Morte sketched many examples of those hanged alone or in groups, and also of those beheaded with the small guillotine- like implement called a tagliadura that was used in Bologna (see figs. 7 and 8). As in Florence, many of these took place at night without the reading of the sentence or the ringing of the palace’s bell that marked all other public executions.58 The location at the Palazzo del Podestà was certainly more secure, but as at the Bargello in Florence it was likely the possibilities for ritual humiliation rather than security alone that governed the choice of this public building. Yet within a few decades, and after the appointment of the Rota in 1535, political executions once again returned to the Piazza del Mercato. It could be that local oligarchs were more confident of their ability to maintain public order. Yet the return to the traditional site was also sensitive to the politics of place and space. Like Duke Cosimo I, Bologna’s senatorial oligarchs built their legitimacy on the pretense of con-tinuing or co- opting republican traditions rather than replacing them. It was important to move executions away from the place associated with tyranny and to return them to the older “communal” site.

Bologna certainly continued with executions in Piazza Maggiore, including the dramatic decapitation of Ippolita Passarotti and Lodovico Landinelli in 1587. Yet this particular execution underscores that consider-ations of theatricality more than security now governed the choice, reflecting Piazza Maggiore’s increasingly frequent use as a civic festive space through the ancien régime.59 The Bolognese theater of execution also came to include ever more executions of two, three, or more at a time (see fig. 9). In each of the six decades from 1540, more than half of those executed were dispatched in groups of two or more, with the 1580s having both the highest number of executions (231) and the smallest proportion of those executed singly (30.31 percent). The remainder died in groups as large as eight or ten at a time, the largest being the mass execution of twelve rebels on January 31, 1587.60 This was at the height of Sixtus V’s war on banditry, though executions of five or more at a time had already begun in the 1560s and carried on into the 1590s.

Each man or woman executed as part of a group received the ser-vices of an individual comforter, and the basic rituals of comforting con-tinued with tavolette, processions, and public prayers. Yet the contexts were shifting by the end of the sixteenth century: comforters came from higher social strata, including aristocrats and patricians, university jurists, and high curialists. They served for shorter terms and comforted fewer people. They enlarged and improved their private room in the prison in 1588 – 90, and


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Figure 7.Hanging of Jacome de I Sancti (Feb. 3, 1560). BCB, Ospedale, MS 7, fol. 70v. Used by permission of the Biblioteca Commuale di Bologna.


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Figure 8.Hanging of Francesco Hoste, Girolamo Frarese, Prino da Bologna, Alixandro de Tugna; Decapitation of Aleo da Monte Unbrara (Mar. 29, 1560). BCB, Ospedale 7, fol. 100v. Used by permission of the Biblioteca Commuale di Bologna.


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began inviting friends to witness the comforting process. They no longer emphasized their kinship with the condemned. From 1588, executed crimi-nals were no longer buried in the confraternal hospital plot or written into the main confraternal Book of the Dead. The pretense of brotherhood was itself now dead, though comforting remained very much alive.61

Bolognese oligarchs and Medici dukes shared a need to demon-strate their political legitimacy, and a good part of this rested in the ability to maintain law and order. That maintenance depended in part on the practi-calities of policing, and in part on increasing political executions far beyond earlier levels. But changing practices dramatically risked further disruption, and so rulers in both cities had to adapt the rituals surrounding justice and above all understand the resonances of local traditions well enough to be able to co- opt them strategically. Comforting was one of those rituals which was progressively transvalued. While their political needs were similar, local political contexts sent the Bolognese oligarchs and the Medici dukes in dif-ferent directions when it came to the symbolics of the place and space of

Figure 9.Seven Men on the Gallows, unknown (Bologna School, ca. 1630). Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008.24. Used by permission of the J. Paul Getty Trust.


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political executions. In Florence, by initiating the new space of the Piazza S. Appollinaire next to the former Podestà’s Palace, the Medici demonstrated publicly their appropriation and occupation of republican justice. In Bolo-gna, by returning political executions to the traditional site of the Piazza del Mercato, the oligarchs aimed to obscure the political changes which installed an authoritarian regime made up of papal governors and appointed senate, and projected instead the pretense of defending the old republican regime. It is no coincidence that both the personnel and the cultural tools of comforting evolved at the same time. More elite comforters approached upper- class political prisoners with texts and images that projected the expe-rience of patricians who had been executed by earlier regimes and who died quietly and honorably.

• • •

Comforting rituals and tools mediated change by underscoring continuity. The new regimes in sixteenth- century Florence and Bologna needed to proj-ect their own legitimacy as the heirs and defenders of longstanding tradi-tions, particularly when using political executions to eliminate those who attacked that very legitimacy. They drew on and transvalued rituals that had been developed through the previous century, particularly by comforting confraternities which had turned the prisoner’s body into a liturgical object so as to underscore their own agency as critical lay liturgists of the local civic religion. Over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth century, the rituals surrounding those executions would come to resemble more closely those in other parts of Europe, with public officials taking possession of the prisoner’s body and turning it into an object lesson rather than a liturgical object. Place, space, and ritual thus carried critical symbolic resonances that were as important as noose or axe in securing these new rulers’ power and authority.

Through this process we can see that the “spectacle of justice” shifted significantly from the sixteenth century. Rituals of confraternal com-forting did far more than “imbue the execution of death sentences with an aura of pronounced religiosity.”62 They mediated new uses of the body of the condemned — in civic religious ritual, in literature, and in the justice system itself — that blurred distinctions between private and public and between object and subject. Almost all changes of the period were incremental adap-tations that deliberately projected a continuity of tradition. In their trans-valued shape, the rituals of comforting provided both the forms of continu-ity and the language for change. Change came as a layering of new religious,


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cultural, and political meanings that did not develop in a clear sequence but that accumulated in paradoxical interrelation.

Comforting provided the first context for treating the criminal as an individual when it focused on the body in order to preserve the soul. It used highly subjective forms to transfer identity and to recreate the condemned as a new subject who had left his past behind and embraced new brothers, new identities, and the very words of others as his own in order to frame a new identity. Comforting rituals demanded a rich set of cultural forms (texts, songs, and images) that were the more effectively manipulative for being deeply emotive. Early comforting literature had aimed to persuade ordinary criminals to see themselves as spiritual converts prepared to die like martyrs: calmly, submissively, and hopeful. As more political prisoners mounted the scaffold, a more specialized literature emerged that taught them how to die honorably: calmly, submissively, and hopeful. In their evolution through the sixteenth century, these cultural forms would facilitate the more public and theatrical uses of the prisoner’s body in dramatic spectacles of capital punish-ment. Even as the forms evolved, the institution of confraternal comforting guaranteed a continuity and religious legitimacy which regimes reinforced with their local adaptations to the places and spaces of execution.

a

Notes

1 Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 105.

2 Stuffolino was executed October 12, 1560. “Descrizione di tutte le giustiziati di Bolo-gna nel 1540 per tutto il 1740,” Biblioteca Arcivescovile di Bologna (hereafter BAB), Aula 2a, C.VII.3. In 1549 Bologna’s senate approved a private room where S. Maria della Morte could conduct its comforting; this was built by 1551 and then expanded from 1558. Archivio di Stato, Bologna, Senato Partiti 6 (1549 – 55), fol. 9r; “Catalogo delli autori,” BAB, Aula 2a, C.VI.3, p. 16.

3 A “Totenbruderschaft” was founded in Vienna in 1638 under the spiritual supervision of a Roman archconfraternity. It assisted criminals and documented every execution. It also published sermons, dance- of- death literature, and memento mori works during the Baroque era, which is explored in ABaC:us — Austrian Baroque Corpus, ed. Clau-dia Resch and Ulrike Czeitschner, Institut für Corpuslinguistik und Texttechnologie, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, http://www.oeaw.ac.at/icltt/abacus. See also: Claudia Resch, Trost im Angesicht des Todes: Frühe reformatorische Anleitun-gen zur Seelsorge an Kranken und Sterbenden (Tübingen: Francke A. Verlag, 2006).

4 Mario Fanti, “La Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte e la Conforteria dei condan-


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nati in Bologna nei secoli XIV e XV,” in Confraternite e città a Bologna nel medioevo e nell’età moderna (Roma: Herder Editrice, 2001), 120 – 74. Nicholas Terpstra, “Theory into Practice: Executions, Comforting, and Comforters in Renaissance Italy,” in The Art of Executing Well: Execution Rituals in Renaissance Italy, ed. Terpstra (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2008), 118 – 58.

5 On the early history and cultural contexts for Italian comforting confraternities, and for some speculation on why they were common in Italy but rare elsewhere, see Adriano Prosperi, “Il sangue e l’anima: Ricerche sulle compagnie di giustizia in Ita-lia.” Quaderni storici 51, no. 3 (1982): 959 – 99; Vicenzo Paglia, La morte confortata: Riti della paura e mentalità religiosa a Roma nell’età moderna (Roma: Edizione di Sto-ria e Letteratura, 1982); Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1985); Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 217 – 23; Giovanni Romeo, Aspet-tando il boia: Condannati a morte, confortatori e inquisitori nella Napoli della Controri-forma (Firenze: Sansoni, 1993). See also two complementary Italian and English essay collections: Adriano Prosperi, ed., Misericordie: Conversioni sotto il patibolo tra Medio-evo ed età moderna (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007); and Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra.

6 Adriano Prosperi, “Consolation or Condemnation: The Debates on Withhold-ing Sacraments from Prisoners,” in Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra, 98 – 117, at 111 – 15. Prosperi sets this into broader context in Delitto e perdono: La pena di morte nell’orizzonte mentale dell’Europa cristiana; XIV – XVIII secolo (Torino: Einaudi, 2013).

7 Prosperi, “Il sangue e l’anima.” The most widely diffused and influential manual was prepared in Bologna, and is translated by Sheila Das with notes by Nicholas Terpstra in “The Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” in Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra, 183 – 275. This particular manual remained in manuscript, but other manuals were appearing in print by the seventeenth century, including Marcello Mansi, Documenti per con-fortare i condannati a morte: Di Marcello Mansio Prete della Religione de’ Padri Minis-tri de gl’Infermi, detti del Ben morire; Opera utilissima per ogni tribolato (Roma, 1625; and Fra Zanobi de’Medici, OP, Trattato utilissimo in conforto de condennati a morte per via di giustizia (Roma, 1565). A Bolognese author who worked in Parma and Piacenza before returning to serve as a comforter in Bologna was Gio. Battista Gargiaria, who wrote Conforto de gli afflitti condannati à morte (Piacenza, 1650), published in three parts. My thanks to Meryl Bailey for these references.

8 “The Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” trans. Das, 249; see also 195 – 96.9 Donata Mancini calculates that Saturday executions comprised 60 percent of the

total in the sixteenth century, rising to 69.27 percent in the seventeenth, and then 54 percent in the eighteenth. Sundays had the fewest executions, and major feast days were also avoided. Donata Mancini, “Giustizia in Piazza: Appunti sulle esecuzioni capitali in Piazza Maggiore a Bologna durante l’eta moderna,” Il Carrobbio 11 (1985): 144 – 49, at 149 n. 8.

10 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment; and Larry J. Feinberg, “Imagination All Com-pact: Tavolette and Confraternity Rituals for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy,” Apollo 161, no. 519 (2005): 48 – 57.


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11 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Let-ters, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 941. For more on mutilations in Italy, which did sometimes precede execution, see Giancarlo Angelozzi and Cesarina Casanova, La Giustizia Criminale in una città di antico regime: Il tribunale del Torrone di Bologna (secc. XVI – XVIII) (Bologna: CLUEB, 2008), 415 – 24.

12 Biblioteca Comunale, Bologna (hereafter BCB), Fondo Ospedale, MS 7, fol. 53r (a quartering of Refino da Refeno performed on Jul. 15, 1559) and fol. 69v (a burn-ing performed on Gaspare Garolzare of Bologna on Jan. 24, 1560). Dr. de’Corvi also noted the clothing left behind by all those executed, as this was usually distributed to the poor in the hospital.

13 Friedland, Seeing Justice Done, 103 – 7.14 In 1560 Duglioli served at executions on Feb. 3, Apr. 20, Apr. 26, Jul. 27, Aug. 7, and

Oct. 12. He was promoted to the rank of master Dec. 1, 1560, last served in 1568, and died in 1569. Pier Giacomo Ruggieri last served in 1585 and died in 1586. C. A. Mac-chiavelli, “Descrizione di CXIV Maestri Ordinari della Conforteria di Bologna,” BAB, Aula 2a, C.VI.8. For more on the comforters’ origins, organization, terms of service, and ecclesiastical and political connections, see Terpstra, “Theory into Prac-tice,” 140 – 54. For the Morte’s comforting role as a means toassert prestige over the older and equally prominent confraternity of S. Maria della Vita, see Black, Italian Confraternities, 110.

15 The two classic works on Italian civic religious processions are Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980); and Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). For these dynamics in Bologna, see Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

16 Massimo Conti, Delitti e castighi: Itinerari nella Firenze dei crimine e della giustizia tra il XIII e il XVIII secolo (Firenze: Centro Di, 2007), 166 – 67.

17 Konrad Eisenbichler, “Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Confraternity of the Blacks in Florence,” Fides et Historia 26, no. 1 (1994): 85 – 98.

18 Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 140 – 54.19 Romeo, Aspettando il boia. The Capuchins sometimes worked with laity and some-

times on their own. A Capuchin Bonaventura da Reggio promoted establishment of a comforting confraternity in Fermo in 1564, and another friar, Mattia Bellitani, wrote a manual Utili ricordi e remedij per quelli che dalla Guistizia sono condannati alla Morte (Salò, 1614). My thanks to Christopher Black for these references. In Bolo-gna, the only threat to the lay confraternal monopoly on comforting came when the papal legate aimed to install the Capuchins in 1586. The prior of the confraternity of S. Maria della Morte lobbied hard to win back its privilege, and won support of Bolo-gna’s senate which challenged all intrusions into local authority. The Morte’s privi-leges were finally confirmed, for a fee, by Pope Clement VIII in 1592. Terpstra, “The-ory into Practice,” 150 – 52.

20 From “O alta regina de stelle incoronata,” trans. in Das, “Bologna Comforters’ Man-ual,” 279 with my own adaptation; Pamela Gravestock, “Comforting with Song: Using Laude to Assist Condemned Prisoners,” in Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra, 31 – 51, at 47, no. 74.


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21 Two recent works expand on the executioner’s experience of the rituals: Joel F. Har-rington, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013), 43 – 46, 72 – 75, 161 – 84; Friedland, Seeing Justice Done, 28 – 29, 57 – 64, 133 – 35.

22 Terry notes that somaesthetics was first developed by Richard Shusterman, which poses “the living sentient body as a locus of the mindful appreciation of art and life.” Allie Terry, “Criminal Vision in Early Modern Florence: Fra Angelico’s Altarpiece for ‘Il Tempio’ and the Magdalenian Gaze,” in John Shannon Hendrix and Charles H. Carman, eds., Renaissance Theories of Vision (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 47 – 48.

23 Alfredo Troiano, “Mirror of a Condemned: The Religious Poems of Andrea Viarani,” in Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra, 52 – 78; Gravestock, “Comforting with Song.” While this development expanded through the ancien régime, executions had simi-larly shaped and been shaped by popular theater in the fourteenth century; see Kath-leen Falvey, “Scaffold and Stage: Comforting Rituals and Dramatic Traditions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy,” in Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra, 13 – 30.

24 Massimo Ferretti, “In Your Face: Paintings for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy,” in Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra, 79 – 97.

25 In the first and older half of the manual, the Augustinian preacher Cristoforo da Bologna devoted almost a third of his lessons to these saintly examples from the early church. Das, “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” 215 – 31.

26 Terry, “Criminal Vision in Early Modern Florence,” 46, 48 – 49, 57. For more on the spaces and rituals of the Florentine Neri, see Ludovica Sebregondi, “Riti, rituali e spazi dei confortatori fiorentini,” in La Croce di Bernardo Daddi del Museo Poldi Pez-zoli: Ricerche e Conservazione, ed. Marco Ciatti (Pisa: Ospedaletto, 2005), 31 – 51. See also Filippo Fineschi, “La rappresentazione della morte sul patibolo nella liturgia fio-rentina della congregazione dei Neri,” Archivio Storico Italiano 150, no. 552 (1992): 805 – 46; Conti, Delitti e castighi, 67 – 68.

27 On laude as a distinctly lay religious musical form, see Blake Wilson, Music and Mer-chants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Patrick Macey, Bonfire Songs: Savonarola’s Musical Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); William F. Prizer, “Lauda spirituale,” New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 2nd ed., 29 vols. (New York: Grove, 2001), 14:367 – 73.

28 “In le toe braçe Vergine Maria,” in “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” trans. Das, 280; Gravestock, “Comforting with Song,” 46, no. 51.

29 “Misericordia, o sumo eterno Idio,” in “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” trans. Das, 285 – 86; Gravestock, “Comforting with Song,” 47, no. 72.

30 Terry suggests that controlling the gaze of the prisoner with tavolette during the pro-cessions put the prisoner at a disadvantage, “unable to reclaim his or her agency by disrupting the collective gaze of the crowd through the act of looking back.” Terry, “Criminal Vision in Early Modern Florence,” 50.

31 “Misericordia o alto Dio Soprano,” in “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” trans. Das, 282 – 84; Gravestock, “Comforting with Song,” 47, no. 71.

32 See “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” trans. Das, 274 – 75.


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33 Stuffolino’s name might seem to refer in some way to the word used in Rome for the baths where prostitutes worked (stufa), yet the term for a man who managed the bath was a stufarolo, and it is found rarely in the records. My thanks to Elizabeth Cohen for this information. While agreeing to commute Stuffolino’s hanging to decapita-tion, the vice- legate insisted that the executioner first slice off the right hand that had held the knife with which he had killed his cousin. Bolognese executioners did not use swords, but had a small yoke- like wooden brace called a tagliadura or man-naia which could be fitted tightly around a neck or limb, with a slot for a sharp blade which the executioner positioned carefully and then hit with a large hammer [see fig. 8]. “Cronaca delle Giustizie eseguite in Bologna dal 1080 al 1750,” ASB, Sala di Con-sultazione, MS 10, n.p. (Oct. 12, 1560).

34 Medical students raised funds to pay for additional masses for the souls of those who gave their bodies for anatomical studies, and in a number of instances Bologna’s S. Maria della Morte spent years ensuring that a condemned man’s property was returned to his family. Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 135 – 38.

35 “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” trans. Das, 260; see also 212 – 13.36 Ibid., 199, 261. Venice’s comforting confraternity, the Scuola di San Fantin, had

Jacopo Palma the Younger include images of comforters praying for the release of souls from purgatory in large ceiling paintings commissioned 1600 – 1603. Black, Italian Confraternities, 261.

37 Terry, “Criminal Vision in Early Modern Florence,” 48, 51 – 52.38 Troiano, “Mirror of a Condemned,” 72 – 78.39 Trans. in Troiano, “Mirror of a Condemned” 72 – 76; and see Gravestock, “Comfort-

ing with Song,” 50, no. 125.40 William J. Connell and Giles Constable, Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Flor-

ence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renais-sance Studies, 2005). For Landucci’s comment, see 110.

41 Alison Knowles Frazier, “Luca della Robbia’s Narrative on the Execution of Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi,” in Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra, 293 – 326.

42 Ibid., 295, 298.43 For the text of Croce’s ballads, “Caso compassionevole e lacrimoso lamento di due

infelici amanti condannati alla giustitia in Bologna” and “Lamento et morte di Mana hebreo,” see Meryl Bailey, “Public Execution in Popular Verse: The Poems of Giulio Cesare Croce,” in Art of Executing Well, ed. Terpstra, 327 – 39.

44 Adriani Prosperi, Dare l’anima: Storia di un infanticidio (Torino: Einaudi, 2005), 307.45 Eugenio Cappelli, La Compagnia dei Neri: L’Arciconfraternità dei Battuti di Santa

Maria della Croce al Tempio (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1927), 30.46 Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 121 – 22.47 Andrea Zorzi, “The Judicial System in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Cen-

turies,” in Crime, Society, and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 40 – 58, at 43.

48 Christine Shaw, The Politics of Exile in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2000).


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49 Bibiblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (hereafter BNCF), Palatino MS 454, fol. 7v: “furono impiccati e morti senza la compagnia.”

50 Conforteria records distinguish five places in, on, and around the Bargello with quite different levels of privacy or display: “alla Corte,” “sulla Porta,” “al Ferro,” “alle fines-tre,” “al Piazza,” “al Palco in San Pulinare” [i.e., S. Appollinaire]. The piazza and palco (scaffold) are likely the same. BNCF, Palatino MS 454, fols. 7r – 13v. Terry, “Crimi-nal Vision in Early Modern Florence,” 58 n. 12. There is little written on the Bargello; see B. P. Strozzi, La Storia del Bargello (Milano: Silvana, 2004), 74 n. 77. And see now A. Yunn, “The Bargello: A New History of the First Communal Palace of Florence, 1255 – 1346” (Ph.D. diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2009). The site of the modern Bargello encompasses a group of earlier communal buildings, and Yunn here reconstructs the building history of each. I am grateful to Areli Marina for this reference.

51 Conti, Delitti e castighi, 85.52 BNCF, Palatino MS 454, fols. 7v – 10v.53 Henk Th. Van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and His Self- Representation in Florentine Art

and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).54 Construction of the addition took place from 1588 to 1596, and the family paid par-

ticular attention to creating an imposing “facciata signorile.” For a chronology in doc-uments, see Ettore Allegri and Alessandro Cecchi, eds., Palazzo Vecchio e i Medici: Guida storica (Firenze: S.P.E.S., 1980), 361 – 63.

55 Conti, Delitti e castighi, 89 – 90.56 Sarah R. Blanshei, “Crime and Law Enforcement in Medieval Bologna,” Journal of

Social History 16, no. 1 (1982): 121 – 38; T. Dean, “Criminal Justice in Mid- Fifteenth Century Bologna,” in Crime, Society, and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Dean and Lowe, 16 – 39; Raffaella Pini, Le giustizie dipinte: La raffigurazione della giustizia nella Bologna rinascimentale (Bologna: Minverva, 2011); Massimo Vallerani, La giustizia pubblica medievale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005).

57 At least fifty highborn Bentivoglio allies and partisans were executed in 1507 – 8; see Biblioteca Comunale di Bologna (hereafter BCB), Fondo Gozzadini, MS 280, 129 – 40; Titzia Di Zio, “Il tribunale criminale di Bologna nel sec. XVI,” Archivi per la storia 4, no. 1 – 2 (1991): 125 – 35.

58 Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 128. The last execution from the windows of the Podesta’s Palace took place in 1605. Mancini, “Giustizia in Piazza,” 145, 149. See also Lino Sighinolfi, L’architettura bentivolesca a Bologna e il Palazzo del Podestà (Bologna: L. Beltrami, 1909).

59 Pierangelo Bellettini, Rosaria Campioni, and Zita Zanardi, Una città in piazza: Com-municazione e vita quotidiana a Bologna tra cinque e seicento (Bologna: Editrice Com-positori, 2000).

60 BAB, Aula 2a, C.VII.3. For a table of multiple executions, see Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 131.

61 In 1665, Legate Carlo Carafa limited visitors in the comforters’ rooms (BCB, MS B 3624, no. 13). The new Book of the Dead begun in 1588 ceased the earlier practice of including all those who had died in the hospital or on the scaffold, and gave only


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fully paid up members and those who had paid for a burial by the Morte BCB, Fondo Ospedale, MS 55). On shifting spiritual values and attitudes toward the poor, see Nicholas Terpstra, Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 245 – 86.

62 Friedland, Seeing Justice Done, 105.


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Body Politics: The Criminal Body between Public \u0026 Private