Taglia, 'Death of the Child Valerio Marcello', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9505
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9505-taglia-death
@@@@95.5.11, King, Death of the Child Valerio Marcello
Margaret L. King. The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 484 + 20 halftones. ISBN
0-226-43620-9
Reviewed by Kathryn Ann Taglia --
University of Northern British Columbia
On January 1st 1461 eight-year-old Valerio Marcello, the scion of a noble
Venetian family, died. While the death of a child was not an uncommon
occurrence in Renaissance Italy or even in the Marcello family (Valerio's
sister, Taddea, died only a four months later in April 1461), the effects
of Valerio's death were quite unusual. Valerio's father, Jacopo Antonio
Marcello, was inconsolable over the death of this son. To comfort this
sorrowing father a series of consoling literary works were sent to him by
various humanist authors, but instead of accepting these consolations,
Marcello decided to use them to fashion a literary monument to his dead
son and his living grief. By the end of 1463, more than two years after
Valerio's death, Marcello had selected fifteen works for his book --
fourteen consolatory texts and his response to his consolers. This
project was planned not only as a monument to a father's grief and a son's
death, but also as a gift to Rene d'Anjou, whose literary friendship was
valued greatly by Marcello even when his native Venice and Rene were at
loggerheads. This book was never given to Rene as Marcello died and the
project remained unfinished.
>From this corpus of consolations (both those included in the book and
those excluded), Margaret L. King has fashioned her own book about Jacopo
Antonio and Valerio Marcello. The title of this book, The Death of the
Child Valerio Marcello, is misleading, for this is more than a book
about the child Valerio and his death. While the story of Valerio's death
is the starting point of King's investigations, King sees this book as a
four-part investigation studying the history of childhood, the trajectory
of Jacopo Antonio Marcello's career, the role of patronage in Renaissance
culture, and Renaissance attitudes towards death. King has collected a
wealth of information in order to pursuit these four goals. This
abundance of information at times overwhelms or supplants King's
arguments. The discussions about childhood and attitudes toward death
tend more toward the descriptive than the analytical, yielding few new
insights in these areas. More interesting and more strongly argued are
the sections dealing with the intersections between Marcello's career, his
literary patronage activities, and his attempts to refashion himself.
Here King has provided us with a fascinating study of man who attempted
through word and image to push the "psychological limits imposed by
classical, by Christian, and contemporary moral thought" (195).
In her first chapter, King skillfully combines the various sections of the
consolation literature that deal with Valerio's life and death to provide
us with a unified narrative and touching portrait of this promising child,
who was his father's favorite. This chapter provides little criticial
analysis of these texts or the story of Valerio's life which the authors
wish to promulgate. Instead the chapter simply sets up the story of
Valerio's short life as Marcello and his various consolers wished it
framed, emphasising Valerio's outstanding potential and the special
relationship between the father and son.
In the next chapter King begins to show us how this portrait gradually
becomes a conscious creation of both the humanist authors and their
patron, Jacopo Antonio Marcello. Here King exhaustively traces the
histories of the various humanist authors who sent consolatory works to
Marcello, discussing not just the authors whose works were included in the
final project, but also the excluded authors. Originally humanist authors
sent their consolatory letters to Marcello out of sympathy and also as
bids for attention to one who had been a literary patron and could be one
in the future. But Marcello's grief did not lessen and he did not find
consolation from the measured sentences offered to him. Sometime within
the second year after Valerio's death, he instead conceived the idea of
creating a literary monument to his son and to his grief. Instead of
passively accepting consolations, Marcello began actively to solicit them,
perhaps even circulating a "fact sheet" to guide would-be consolers. Some
of the spontaneous earlier consolatory works also were reworked or
translated from Greek to Latin or circulated as exempla to others. But
this project was to be more than a collection of consolations, eulogies,
and funeral orations -- it was also to be a monument to the father's grief
for his dead son. Marcello had his response, his Excusatio,
produced by Giorgio Bevilacqua, his secretary, under his close
supervision. In this text Marcello called upon Rene d'Anjou to serve as a
judge between him and his would-be consolers, who for all their learning
failed to understand the grief that tormented Marcello's soul. Thus
Marcello transformed his collection of consolation literature into a
dialogue revealing cultural tensions between the male individual who
wished to grieve freely and the Renaissance social norm which demanded
from its male members at the very least a stoic public acceptance of
death.
The tensions between Marcello's desire to express himself freely and
societal expectations over what constituted normal behavior had a long and
complex history King argues in her next two chapters. Long before
Valerio's death, Marcello had been at war with Venetian culture,
struggling to define himself against the role he was expected to play as
male member of the patrician class. These two chapters are particularly
strong as King carefully delineates the history of Marcello's career in
service to Venice and how he chose to have that career portrayed. While
Marcello was a loyal public official, serving the government of Venice in
various capacities for almost 30 years, especially as a
provveditore (a Venetian governmental supervisor of a military
force), he deliberately refashioned himself as a warrior, a bold
condottiere, not as a self-effacing public servant. Venetian
patrician culture demanded that the individual be effaced and subsumed
into the polity--reserve and understatement were the hallmark ideals.
Marcello, King argues, tried to create an image of himself that was
radically different from this cultural norm. His country home, Monselice,
was an "illicit symbol of power and status" (66), while the humanist works
on his life that he commissioned attributed to Marcello military deeds of
great valor, often exaggerating his role in various campaigns in the
Lombard wars. He also commissioned illuminations for various literary
projects which presented images of himself as a warrior and as a patron of
the arts equal almost to Rene d'Anjou, the Duke of Anjou, Count of
Provence, and would-be king of Naples.
Yet Marcello deliberately did not include within this portrait the story
of his service for Venice between 1446 and 1454, the peak of his military
career. Indeed, after 1454 this would-be condottiere retreated
almost totally from Venetian public service until 1462, the year after
Valerio's death. These two events -- Marcello's refusal to include his
military career from 1446 onward and his retreat from public life after
the peace of Lodi in 1454 -- are not unrelated, King argues. What joins
them together is the friendship and admiration that Marcello had for Rene
d'Anjou and Francesco Sforza, the condottiere who became duke of
Milan. In those early years of Marcello's service (1439-1442), Marcello
often served as provveditore to Sforza's forces as they fought for
Venice against Milan. It was Sforza who brought Marcello to the attention
of Rene d'Anjou, asking that the Venetian senate appoint Marcello as an
ambassador to Rene in 1442 (103). But the fortunes of war found Marcello
and Venice on one side and Sforza and Rene on the other by the late
1440's. Marcello's response to this unhappy situation, King argues, was
twofold. He gradually retreated from public service and threw his
energies into private efforts -- such as literary patronage and the
raising of his son, Valerio. Marcello not only changed careers, moving
from public service to private patronage, but he had his life rewritten,
stressing (or more exactly exaggerating) his early exploits and remaining
silent on those troublesome later years. His retreat from public life was
not a retirement, but a deliberate choice to build a new life within the
humanist literary culture and through "the rediscovered medium of words"
(118).
Valerio, that special son, was born in 1452 just when Marcello was
deciding to retire from public service and was refocusing his energies on
learning and the arts. In chapters five and six King again returns to
examine the bond between Valerio and his father which resulted in the
father's inconsolable grief and refusal to accept the reality of his son's
death. Valerio, crudely put, was born at the right moment in his father's
life, at a time when Marcello had the time, the energy, and the interest
to expend on a son. Within the narrative that Marcello ordered created
after his son's death, father and son formed an exclusive pairing within
the large and extended Marcello household. The exclusivity of this
pairing is seen in the complete effacement of Luca, Marcello's wife and
Valerio's mother, from the narrative. Marcello assumed all aspects of
Luca's maternal role -- even figuratively becoming "pregnant" with visions
of Valerio before the child's birth. Valerio, even as an infant,
instantly recognized that his affection belonged wholly to his father. He
rejected his nurse's breast from the moment he saw his father. Father and
son in this narrative become as one -- the wonder is not that Marcello
mourned, but that his consolers would think that his grief could cease.
In this story of father-son bonding, Valerio was the perfect child,
intelligent, beautiful, respectful, kind, brave. The litany of virtues is
endless and it is no wonder that God should call such an angel back to
heaven. As he was a perfect exemplar of the puer senex, so he also
was the perfect practitioner of ars moriendi. He faced his death
with a cheerful steadiness, peaceful in his conscience. When his father
stood by his bed, weeping almost hysterically (and showing no more
restraint than a woman), Valerio urged his father to control himself. At
the moment of death the roles were reversed, and it was son who instructed
the father now in that most difficult task of how to accept death calmly.
But Valerio's father was not as apt a pupil as his son had been and he
refused to accept the lesson his son and his consolers tried to teach him.
Marcello again defied the expected community standards--but this time
instead of choosing the hyper-masculine role of the warrior, he became
the hysterical griever. King argues, "It was a violation of social order
so radical as to amount to an inversion of sexual roles: an abomination"
(137). But Marcello in "his" Excusatio refuses to heed his
consolers' attempts to reintegrate him back into cultural order,
proclaiming his right to defy the gender expectations and push the social
and psychological boundaries to their limits.
Although the body of this book accounts for only 200 pages, King has
managed to condense into these pages a great mass of information about
many subjects, ranging from the histories of various humanist authors to
the complete architectural evolution of Monselice, Marcello's country
home. There are an additional 129 pages of appendices which trace the
genealogy of the Marcello family, describe important monuments mentioned,
list the texts written for or to Jacopo Antonio Marcello, and give a
detailed chronology. Such a wealth of historical facts, images, names,
and stories at times drown King's arguments and would make this a
difficult book for an undergraduate or a non-specialist. Nonetheless,
anyone with an interest in Renaissance humanist culture and its production
of meaning will find this an interesting study.