A Renaissance Court: Milan Under Galeazzo Maria Sforza.

Lubkin's fascinating book presents the first full-length portrait of Renaissance Milan in English since that of Cecilia Ady in 1907, and the most fully documented description of any fifteenth-century Italian court yet to be published in this country. As such, the book fills a large lacuna in Italian historical studies. A vivid picture of everyday life at the court of duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza, son of the military strongman and self-made duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, Lubkin's work is the product of fifteen years' labor in the city archives of Milan, Mantua, Modena, and Florence.

A Renaissance Court chronicles the rise and fall of Galeazzo Maria and his reign over the course of a decade, from his investiture as duke in 1466 at the age of twenty-two to his assassination in 1476. The book's nine chapters present a chronological narrative of the last decade of the duke's life, though each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of Milanese court life. Chapter 1 presents an overview of the duchy: its geography and agriculture, its prosperous cities and towns, its chief industries (luxury cloth and armaments), and its history of regicide and civic upheaval. This chapter also gives a comprehensive picture of what appears to have been the highly consultatory, corporate nature of government under Galeazzo. A body of twenty men known as the Privy Council - composed of leading jurists and physicians, generals and churchmen, landed gentry and scholars - sat above all other ducal councils, whether civic or military.

Chapter 2 focuses on the ducal household in which daily life was organized first, according to rituals of proximity to and distance from the king's body; and secondly, around goods and services and their distribution. A permanent staff of about two thousand persons including camerieri (chamberlains), footmen, a personal cupbearer, a personal carver, kitchen stewards, and stable masters waited on the duke and duchess in their principal residences in Milan, the Castles Corte d'Arengo and Porta Giovia (now Castello Sforzesco), while a more select staff accompanied the royal couple on excursions to their other castles in the realm. Chapter 3 describes how Galeazzo worked to project an image of dynastic power and legitimate rule by various means early on in his regime: he established a regimen of rituals, pageants, and sacred festivals at which he himself presided, godlike, at the center of things; he set about to restore the ancient castles of the Visconti; he commissioned frescoes depicting the Sforza and their servants and displayed the ducal family's coat of arms in public places throughout the city. Chapters 4 and 5 depict the opulent lifestyle of the duke and his inner circle (whose chief interests were tennis, gaming, hunting, feasting, and traveling), while only hinting at the plight of the duke's dependents and the absolute control he exercised over their lives. Chapters 6 and 7 describe Galeazzo's (for the most part) failed courtship of the rich and famous, the hundreds of thousands of ducats he expended in an attempt to obtain a legitimate title to the Milanese throne from either the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor, both his and his wife's longterm extra-marital affairs, and his other time-consuming sexual relationships (which, Lubkin emphasizes, were alternately hetero- and homoerotic in nature). Chapter 8 describes the bloody scene of Galeazzo's assassination and its even gorier aftermath, events Lubkin views as the inevitable consequence of the deterioration of almost all the duke's relationships in his last years - relationships that at the outset of his reign he had taken such pains to sow and secure with ceremony and decorum. Chapter 9 reassesses the longer-term effects of Galeazzo's reign, emphasizing the administrative innovations of his regime and his patronage of music and the visual arts, both of which developments set the stage for the golden age of Milan under duke Lodovico (Il Moro) Sforza (1480-1500). Lubkin also provides detailed genealogies of the Visconti and Sforza lineages, a floor plan of Pavia castle describing the function of each room, eighty-four pages of notes which guide the reader through a labyrinth of archival sources, and four separate appendices containing lists of Galeazzo's guests, his travel companions, and his itineraries from 1468 to 1476.

All in all, the book is a welcome reevaluation of the life of a Renaissance prince who has traditionally been characterized as wildly profligate, tyrannical, and self-serving. In Lubkin's hands, Galeazzo emerges as one of the important monarchs of his age, comparable in some ways to Lorenzo de' Medici, Ercole d'Este of Ferrara, and Edward IV of England (246). In a period relatively free from major wars or upheaval, his reign furnished a model of early modern corporate bureaucracy for subsequent rulers to follow. At its best the Milanese court under Galeazzo could be seen as the microcosm of a well-ordered, stable society in which every member had a role to play and was compensated in kind. At its worst the court was a theater for the whims, excesses, and cruelty of its signor.

DIANA ROBIN University of New Mexico