Creative partners: the marriage of Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati *.

Laura Battiferra came into the world as the daughter of Giovan' Antonio Battiferri of Urbino, a wealthy career prelate, and Maddalena Coccapani of Carpi, his concubine. (2) The document of Laura's legitimation, signed by Pope Paul III on 9 February 1543, identifies her father as a papal "familiar" and "scriptor of apostolic briefs" at the Vatican. (3) His biographical sketch in an eighteenth-century encyclopedia of Urbino tautly intimates the daughter's paternal background:

He was a Count Palatine and Apostolic Protonotary. From Archpriest of Barberano in the Dioscese of Viterbo, where he stayed for seven years, he passed to the dignity of Provost of Fossombrone. He lived in the Roman court, where he was held in high esteem for his great learning. Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, who was extremely fond of him, accorded him the broadest privileges for creating honorary Apostolic Protonotaries, bestowing doctorates, and legitimizing bastards. In fact, in our archives there are documents of legitimation of bastards and notaries created by him in 1543 and at other times. (4)

This pre-Reformation churchman must have been adept at negotiating the competitive, lucrative environment of what Pietro Aretino called "The Court" by antonomasia. Patronized by a powerful protector, the Medici cardinal who later became Pope Clement VII (1523-34), he enjoyed "privileges" from his honorific titles that guaranteed him a supplementary flow of fees. (5) The Apostolic Chamber, his place of work, was both a court of law and the office that conducted Vatican financial business. It was a wide-reaching network that included oversight of the Roman mint, control of Rome's food supply (annona), collection of income from monasteries and churches throughout Europe, administration of the Papal States, and conferment and taxation of benefices (annates). Like other positions, that of scriptor was venal. In other words, Laura's father would have purchased it in exchange for a substantial annual return on his investment through payments for legal work or for the correspondence that he drafted, corrected, and en grossed in the form of Latin briefs. (6) Sometime before 1527, near the Vatican in the fashionable neighborhood known as the Borgo, Battiferri built a house that must have been an eye-catching structure, to judge from the tantalizing glimpse in Vasari's 1568 Lives of the Artists. As was the custom for well-to-do homeowners, the apostolic scriptor had its facade decorated with paintings. What made his special was that for their design, he turned to a personal friend, his compatriot Raphael. Executed by Raphael's follower Vincenzo da San Gimignano, they were meant not just to embellish the dwelling, but to emblazon dynastic power with a mythological program allusive to the surname Battiferri ("iron pounder," "blacksmith"):

[Vincenzo] did his best always to imitate the style of Raphael of Urbino. That is evident again in the Roman neighborhood of the Borgo, across from the Cardinal of Ancona's palace, in the facade of the house that Messer Giovan' Antonio Battiferri of Urbino built. Because of his close friendship with Raphael, he got from him the design for that facade, and he got through his mediation at the Vatican Court many benefices and hefty income. Now in this design, which was then carried out by vincenzo, Raphael, by way of allusion to the Battiferri lineage, put the Cyclops, who are forging lightning bolts for Jove; and in another part, Vulcan, who is turning out arrows for Cupid; along with some very beautiful nudes and other stories and very beautiful statues. (7)

From what facts survive about Giovan'Antonio, it is clear that Laura Battiferra was born to culture, social position, and cosmopolitan wealth, all of which would launch her into the courtly life as a woman of letters and a political asset to her spouse. Grandson of a university-trained master of liberal arts and doctor of medicine, her father was a personage of secular life style, a humanist educated in Latin and Greek, and probably a student of canon law. Although in holy orders as a cleric, he boasted a conspicuous house in the latest style, profited from contacts in high places, and collected multiple income-rich preferments -- papal familiar, apostolic scriptor, count palatine, protonotary and chaplain in the chapel of Innocent VIII at St. Peter's Basilica, not to mention plural benefices and landed property in both the territory of Urbino and Rome. (8) He fathered three known children and took care to pass on to them what he had accumulated materially (9) as well as the Battiferri family heritage of lear ning. Biographical tradition credits him with Laura's education, signalled by her beautiful Italian chancery script and evident in her literary familiarity with Latin, a love of the vernacular classics, and her companionship with the bible.

The lives of Laura and Bartolomeo may have first intersected in Urbino, patria of the Battiferri, in the late 1530s or early 1540s before her first marriage to the court organist Vittorio Sereni, who died in early 1549. (10) Ammannati was then employed by Duke Guidobaldo della Rovere for work at the Villa Imperiale in nearby Pesara and in Urbino to assist on a tombstone for Guidobaldo's father. (11) After Sereni's death, Laura would have left Urbino for one of the Battiferri houses at Rome, probably not the Borgo residence with Raphael's scenes of Olympian smithies, but another dwelling "at the Portuguese Arch" in Campo Marzio, a district across the Tiber from the Vatican that rose in importance after the 1527 sack of Rome. (12) Laura's widowhood coincided with the period of Ammannati's professional debut in Rome. There, whether as old friends or recent acquaintances, they came together through mutual connections in Vatican circles. By April 1550 the twenty-six-year old Laura was already remarried to Bartolom eo Ammannati, a match that seems to have been made in heaven but was surely brokered by her worldly father.

Her dowry, unusually generous, gives further measure of the Battiferri family position. An object of legal contention after Laura's first husband's heir refused to make restitution, this money is the focus of many family documents. Set initially at 1,000 scudi, it was to be raised at the suggestion of the duke of Urbino to 2,000 scudi, an enormous amount in a period when the bride typically brought only about a tenth as much. For example, Battiferra's contemporary, the widowed poet Chiara Matraini of Lucca, likewise became embroiled in a struggle to regain control of her dowry. At stake was a sum of only three hundred scudi, but that would have been enough to allow Chiara to live independently, had her son consented to release it. The dimensions of Laura's patrician dowry become more meaningful if we recall that in 1554 Giovan'Antonio bought an entire farm north of Rome in the Bracciano area for 525 scudi, and for much of the sixteenth century the annual rent for the Battiferri townhouse at the Portuguese Arc h in Rome was 35 scudi. Finally, the very fact that Guidobaldo della Rovere, the duke of Urbino, had intervened in negotiations for Laura's marriage to the musician Sereni hints at Battiferri connections to court. In fact, she was the fourth generation to enjoy this association, which had begun with her great-grandfather Jacopo, a consulting physician to Federico da Montefeltro. (13)

Bartolomeo Ammannati, Laura's elder by a dozen years, came from a humbler background. Orphaned at twelve, he had inherited his father's parcel of land in the village of Settignano, above Florence, where other Ammannati relatives continued to practice their craft as scarpellini, or stone carvers in the local quarries. Unlike them, however, he ventured down to the city on the Arno after his father's death and apprenticed in the bottega of Baccio Bandinelli, not just a busy sculptor, but a man of letters and an educator who would eventually become one of the founding members of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno. In the 1530s, Ammannati spent crucial formative years in the Veneto, where as an assistant to Jacopo Sansovino he came into contact with important representatives of Venetian humanism. Commissions of his own in Padua and in Vicenza during the forties placed him in the homes of highly cultured patrons with whom he would have planned iconographically complex projects. Far transcending his origins, Amman nati belongs like his early master Bandinelli and his colleague Vasari to that Renaissance circle who redefined the artist's professional identity, elevating it from the status of a manual to a mental activity, from the mechanical to the liberal arts. (14) In this new conception, Art can be the peer of Poetry An artist can marry a poet.

Late in 1548, not long before the death of Pope Paul III (and Vittorio Sereni), Ammannati arrived in the Eternal City, a Tuscan bachelor in his late thirties hoping for papal patronage. Although he came preceded by letters of introduction to influential cardinals from his Paduan patron, the jurist Marco Mantua Benavides, (15) his success in winning employment on the Roman scene was surely helped by Giovan' Antonio Battiferri, so advantageously positioned at the Vatican for promoting the family bannered on his house in the Borgo. February of 1550 saw Ammannati among the crew of artists who built decorations to celebrate the coronation of Paul III's successor, Julius III (1550-1555). The talented sculptor progressed rapidly, for by March that newly installed pontiff, the former Giovanni Maria del Monte, nudged by Michelangelo, had hired him to work on tomb statues for his family chapel in the church of San Pietro in Montorio. On April 17, Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati were married at the Casa Santa in Loreto, one of the most venerated shrines of all Christendom.

By a small miracle of history, there survives an eye-witness account of the ceremony that joined Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati in matrimony. It freezes the image before us, an isolated moment salvaged from oblivion. The man to whom we owe this "wedding picture" was a sculptor and metal caster born into a family of craftsmen in those sister arts. His name was Girolamo Lombardo, and he was working at the time in Loreto:

Herewith I, Hieronymus de' Lombardi of Venice, a sculptor in the casa of Loreto and an inhabitant of Recanati, finding myself as it chanced in Loreto on the 17th of April in this current year 1550, was requested by Messer Gioan Antonio Battiferro to be present at a marriage between Madonna Laura, his daughter, and Messer Bartolomeo Amanati, the Florentine sculptor. And so together with ... Nicolo Casale he led us ... before the chapel of the Tabernacle ... accompanied by the said Bartolomeo. And when he had led us to that place, he spoke and called his daughter ..., Madonna Laura, and lead her into our presence. And Messer Gioan Antonio, with words customarily used for such occasions, asked the aforenamed Madonna Laura if it pleased her to take for her legitimate spouse and husband the said Bartolomeo, and she answered yes. And then he asked the said Messer Bartolomeo if it pleased him...to take for his spouse and wife the said Madonna Laura. Messer Bartolomeo answered yes. And in such manner each took the ot her's hand, faithfully promising and mutually consenting in sworn words before witnesses, as I have seen people do when they contract a marriage. Wherefore at present, by request of the aforenamed Messer Bartolomeo, I have made the present statement in my own hand. (16)

Why did Laura and Bartolomeo not marry in Rome, the city where they lived and courted? And if not Rome, which would have had the advantage of convenience, then why not Urbino, where Laura, as a subject of the duke of Urbino was officially expected to marry? (17) Personal considerations, distinct but overlapping, prompted the decision. The bride, the groom and her father -- who presided at their nuptials -- were drawn to Loreto by its power as a Marian pilgrimage center, its administrative history in the Papal States, and the ambitious building projects that made it a meeting place for artists throughout the Cinquecento.

Loreto owes its existence to the Casa Santa, reputed to be the "Holy House" of Mary herself, where she lived in Nazareth and received Gabriel at the Annunciation. As legend had it, angels spirited this structure away from the grotto against which it stood in 1291, when the fall of Acre forced crusaders to withdraw from the Holy Land, and on the night of 10 December 1293, they deposited it on a hill of laurels (whence the name "Loreto") near the Italian town of Recanati. Around the spot where it made a final landing -- carried by crusaders, not heavenly movers, and reassembled brick by brick -- there sprang a small community that soared in importance as a pilgrimage site. (18) In the second half of the fifteenth century, the enormous domed Sanctuary of the Madonna of Loreto was built to enfold increasing throngs of pious visitors and to hold the Nazarene trophy, set just behind the high altar at the crossing of nave and transept, and consecrated as the Chapel of Mary. Apace with the growing cult of the Madonna of Loreto, the Casa Santa received over a seventy-year period in the sixteenth century a magnificent marble casing, or rivestimento, covered with guardian rows on all sides of sibyls and prophets who had predicted Christ's coming, relief panels depicting the life of the Virgin, and the wonderful story of the house in its aerial travels.

What surely drew Bartolomeo Ammannati to Loreto, beyond beckonings of faith, was a professional wish to study the splendors sown in those precincts by his peers. Some of the sculptors called to work on the rivestimento would have been familiar to him by reputation, others as friends, acquaintances and collaborators. One who arrived in the first wave to dress in stone the Santa Casa was Baccio Bandinelli, a Florentine of crotchety personality, at least, in Vasari's ungenerous characterization. In 1518 he began his panel of The Birth of the Virgin but stirred up trouble with the project director before he could finish and was forced to move on about a year later when the bursar stopped paying his rent money. (19) We can imagine that Ammannati, apprenticed in Bandinelli's workshop on the Arno as a teenager during the 1520s, would have heard the older man tell of Loreto. Another craftsman who came in those early years and who was still there as of 1541, working on the decorative friezes and prophets under Antonio da San Gallo, was the stone carver Simone da Michele Cioli da Settignano. He, too, must have been personally known to Ammannati since both were from the same village. His relative Vincenzo Cioli (a son?) would later assist Ammannati between 1561 and 1564 in creating Italy's first sculpture gallery, a collection of ancient Roman statues given by Pope Pius IV to Duke Cosimo de' Medici and displayed in ten marble-faced niches in a room designed especially for them at the Pitti Palace. (20) Antonio da San Gallo, who took charge of the fabbrica at Loreto in 1528, brought other fellow Florentines whose work Ammannati knew -- Antonio's younger brother Francesco, Michelangelo's follower Raffaele da Montelupo, and Niccolb Tribolo, clever as an innovator in the creation of formal gardens armed with amusing water games. (21)

In light of this roster, it seems surprising that the sculptor called to witness Laura's marriage was not a Tuscan, but a northern Italian. Girolamo Lombardo, also known by his toponymic as Girolamo da Ferrara (1504-1590), had been working at Loreto since 1543, when he first appears in the documents as the recipient of a deposit of 50 forms in cash for a prophet. Between then and 1548, Girolamo produced three more Old Testament visionaries, an Ezechiel, Moses, and Malachai. Records of his remuneration continue to appear, down to the last major expenditure for the rivestimento, 920 forms "for an Amos prophet" on 31 December 1579. Why did Giovan'Antonio Battiferri want Girolamo da Lombardo to witness the ceremony? Girolamo states that Giovan'Antonio called him, but it was Ammannati who asked for the written account of the ceremony and with whom, in fact, the Ferrarese prophet carver had a long-standing friendship. Both sculptors had worked together during the early 1540s under Jacopo Sansovino, the architect re sponsible for a majestic urban renewal plan in Piazza San Marco at Venice. Ammannati produced a large statue of Neptune (now lost) for the balustrade of Sansovino's Library, and together with several other sculptors, including Girolamo, he contributed to the reliefs, still visible today, carved in the vaulting of the Marciana portico along the square. In the corners, as Jacopo's son Francesco Sansovino described them, were "old men with vases pouring water that signify rivers" and on the keystones "alternating heads of men, of women, and of lions." Vasari, commenting on Girolamo's life, tells of his stint on those Venetian reliefs in his Vita of the master, Jacopo Sansovino:

Girolamo da Ferrara, called Il Lombardo, whom we mentioned in the life of the Ferrarese Benvenuto Garofalo, was also Jacopo's disciple; he learned his art from the first Sansovino [Andrea] and from this second one in such manner that beyond the marble and bronze things in Loreto, which we have already talked about, he has worked many pieces in Venice. Although he happened to come to Sansovino at the age of thirty, without much training in disegno, even though he had fashioned some things before in sculpture, he was more a man of letters and a courtier than a sculptor. Nevertheless he attended to the craft in such manner that in a few years the profit he took from it became evident in his medium-relief works on the projects of the library and the loggia of the San Marco campanile. He did such a fine job on those works that then, all on his own, he could make the statues of marble and the Prophets that he fashioned, as we said, at the Madonna of Loreto [italics added]. (22)

Fleeting but revealing, Vasari's characterization of Girolamo as a courtly man of culture departs from more colorful stereotypes of the artist as an idiosyncratic solitary or bohemian sort. He seems to have pursued his craft at a leisurely pace, being already thirty years old when he teamed with Sansovino -- rather late for a sculptor to find his maestro. He did not acquire independence in his craft until he was nearly forty and left Venice for Loreto, where work on the housing of Mary's chapel would occupy him for most of the next thirty-five years. Yet traits that Vasari implies conflicted with his career development must have counted in his favor with Ammannati and both the Battiferri. He and Bartolomeo were near contemporaries, seven years apart in age; at the time of their reunion in Loreto in 1550, they had been friends ten years, sharing a craft and a teacher. Doubtless it was Ammannati who introduced his colleague to his future father-in-law and wife, cultivated persons at home in courtly circles who would have been appreciative of the Ferrarese sculptor's mature courtesy and literary inclinations.

Girolamo Lombardo's payments give insights into the fiscal system that supported the artists. They were administered from Rome beginning in 1507 by the office responsible for the Papal States, none other than the Camera Apostolica. (23) The office in Rome, which handled the finances, converted some of the grain it received (perhaps in payment for taxes) to cash that was then disbursed to the artists. If Laura's father Giovan'Antonio Battiferri was already at work in the Camera Apostolica during the first decades of the Cinquecento, as seems likely, he may well have been responsible for briefs emanating from that bureau with dispositions concerning Loreto, a part of the Papal State. From this early period, moreover, the Auditor of the Chamber was particularly close to affairs at Loreto. In 1510 the person serving in that position was Antonio Ciocchi del Monte da Sansovino, who in the following year became the Cardinal Protector of Loreto and may have played a role in importing his countryman Andrea Sansovino t o head the workshop in 1513. Antonio's portrait in stone still reclines over his tomb in San Pietro in Montorio, just as the newlywed Bartolomeo Ammannati sculpted it in the 1550s by order of the cardinal's nephew, that same Giovanni del Monte who became Pope Julius 111. (24) Perhaps the commission, which was an important turning point in Ammannati's Roman period, owed something to Giovan'Antonio Battiferri. Documents spanning many years give evidence of the prelate's efforts to assure the material well being of his children: he acquired domiciles and income-bearing property destined for them; he legitimized them to assure their right to inherit; he provided his daughter with a huge dowry and a classical education; in his will he disinherited the son who had disappointed him, and he bequeathed his entire estate to Laura. (25) Once she had been left a widow in 1549, it was his responsibility to see her remarried, and to put that match on the most solid ground, he would have naturally set to work behind the sce nes on behalf of the newest man in the family. Through the Cardinal Protector of Loreto the apostolic scriptor could well have had entree to Julius, one of the popes whom he thanks in his will for favors bestowed, and through him found an avenue for advancing his able son-in-law. Reasons for a wedding in Loreto begin to multiply. If he had never been there before, Laura's father must have wanted to see the place that churned so much correspondence (and expenditure) through the Camera, and he could have been charged with conducting some business in Loreto, conveniently near Urbino, where the travellers surely stopped for Bartolomeo to meet Battiferri relatives.

As for Laura, her interest in the Casa Santa is quite in keeping with her paternal heritage and her pious personality. From childhood she was steeped in the culture of Catholic Rome, a background that was to prepare her for translating into Italian the Penitential Psalms (1564), for composing dozens of spiritual sonnets, and for her charities as a Jesuit patron late in life. The intensity of her religious emotions vibrates most stunningly in her "Oration on the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ," a medition on the Christmas creche inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. (26) Alessandro Allori's portrait of her in old age depicts a woman who clasps what looks like a small prayer book and kneels devoutly before Christ in the dramatic moment of a Gospel miracle (Fig. 1). In 1550, approaching her twenty-seventh birthday, she may have had a more private reason for visiting this Marian shrine, where she and Bartolomeo exchanged their wedding vows at the altar before the marble casing around the Sant a Casa, just beneath Andrea Sansovino's masterful scene of The Annunciation. Her first marriage, which could have lasted as long as five or six years, had been barren. Perhaps she now prayed to the Madonna for a child. If so, her hopes went unanswered. (27)

After five years of married life in Rome, the Ammannati were uprooted by the death of Bartolomeo's patron Julius III. Laura did not want to leave, but Vasari helped her husband find a new patron in Cosimo I de' Medici, and in 1555 she and Bartolomeo moved to Florence. This difficult passage in her life precipitated some of her most beautiful lyrics. They can be found in her First Book of Tuscan Works, a carefully constructed anthology of 187 poems (including 41 by male correspondents) that she published at Florence with the Giunti press of 1560. (28) After preliminary salutes to princely readers and other notables, her sonnets take an autobiographical turn, sharing meditations that wrestle with the move. In poem 36, the poetess addresses the serene Roman skies under her pastoral alias, Daphne. The nickname, which appears here for the first time in her canzoniere, had become a key feature of Laura's poetic iconography. Often playfully invoked by her partners in sonnet exchanges that she anthologizes, the code name enfolds her in a flattering literary family, a descendant of Petrarch's elusive mistress and, before her, the nymph beloved of Apollo, god of poetry. This new Daphne, uncontrollably raining down teardrops on the banks of the Tiber, fears a dire threat to her happiness. Exactly what it is, she does not tell, but it seems to involve severance from her city. The next poem confirms that suggestion, for now the moment has come when she must leave Rome:

     Ecco ch'lo da vol, sacre alt rume,
anzi da me medesma, ahi crudel fato,
pur mi diparto. Or lassa in quale stato
il mio grave dolor trovara fine?
     O voi, anime sante e pellegrine,
a cui si largo don dal ciel fu dato,
che 'n pregio del valor vostro beato
siate or lasuso eterne cittadine,
     fate, s'umil preghiera e in cielo udita,
mentre lontan su l'Arno in cieco orrore
stara vivo sepolto il mio mortale,
     che 'l mio nome sul Tebro, il mio migliore
ch'or con voi resta, scevro d'ogni male
fra' vostri altri testor rimanga in vita. (29)

Behold, sacred tall ruins, I take leave of you after all, nay of myself, ah, cruel fate! Now, alas, in what state will my heavy sorrow come to an end?

O you, holy and roving spirits, to whom so fine a gift was given by heaven that you are there on high, eternal citizens, as a reward for your blessed worth;

see to it, if a humble prayer is heard in heaven, that while far away on the Arno, in blind wilderness, my mortal part shall be buried alive,

my name -- the better part of me that now stays with you, severed from every ill -- shall remain alive on the Tiber among your other treasures.

Enforced departure from Rome is a splitting of her very self. The result will be a living death in Florence, an uncivilized, unenlightened place ("blind wilderness") by comparison to the metropolis she must leave and metaphorically the tomb that will receive her body. As she prepares to depart, the poetess asks the blessed souls whirling above with the stars and the planets to intercede on her behalf, that her name might be remembered among monuments surviving through time and the great people ("treasures") who over the centuries have given Rome its glory.

Loosely structured, the confessional narrative continues in the Prime, libro. Once transplanted to the Tuscan countryside, Laura cannot forget her beloved southern city in spite of the beauty in the landscape that now keeps her company:

     Alto monte, ima valle e dolce piano,
freschi antri, chiusi orrori e fiorite erbe,
e voi, frondi del sol verdi e superbe,
contra alle qual non puo Cesar ne Giano;
     quante volte m'udiste, e sempre in vano,
nell'ore piu mature e nelle acerbre,
chiamar lei, di cui sola par che serbe
memoria il cor, sia pur presso o lontano!
     Siate voi testimoni a dir come io
tutta dentro e di fuor mi vo cangiando,
ne pero cangio il saldo pensier mio
     che quando i sette alteri colli, e quando
le sacre valli e 'l bel terren natio
vado sotto altrui forme contemplando. (30)

Tall mountain, sunken valley, and sweet plain; cooling grottos, enclosed wilderness, and flowering grasses; and you, boughs of the sun green and stately, which neither Ceasar nor Janus can harm;

how many times have you heard me, in the maturest hours and in the unripe, and always in vain, call out to her, who seems to be my heart's only memory, whether nearby or far away!

May you be witnesses to tell how all of me goes on changing, inside and out; yet I do not for that change my steadfast thought, except when, as if I were someone else, I go contemplating the seven lofty hills, and the sacred valleys, and my fair native land.

Bucolic surroundings of Florence provide the setting for Laura's nostalgic musing. On the one hand, this is a real landscape northeast of the city near Fiesole, in Maiano, where the Ammannati enjoyed a country house, as we know from letters Laura sent to Benedetto Varchi, dated at that retreat. (31) On the other, it is a literary place, filled with those essential props that formed the backdrop for Petrarch's endless strolls, solitary arid far from human concourse, to meditate on his lady Laura -- a hill, a valley, a meadow, a grotto. Only one kind of tree grows here, the laurel, as green in January as in July and as Petrarchan as the rest of the poem's vocabulary. Morning and evening, wherever she may be, Laura Battiferra is obsessed with one fixed thought. She, like Petrarch, yearns for a "woman." The object of her desire, revealed in the last verses of the sonnet, is Rome personified as a female. Relief only comes, allowing her to forget her unhappiness, when she can transport herself mentally, in fantasy, to "contemplate" those southerly "hills" and "valleys." In fact, they are the very features that define the ancient city, heralded by the geography at the beginning of her poem ("tall mountain, sunken valley"). Chiastic structure emphasizes the most characteristic elements of each site in the first and final verses. Rome's "seven hills" and "valleys" form a sequence of descriptive terms that culminates with a last qualifier, "my fair native land," this one personal rather than public and presumably a reference to Urbino, where she was born. In its movement, the sonnet follows the path of her imagination, from an outer to an inner landscape; from married life to early family memories, from Florence to Rome, and from Rome, backward in time to the Apennine jewel that was the place of her birth. (32)

The lovely Maiano poems, which find their literary space between a universal Petrarchan landscape and topographic particulars (Mount Cecero and the valley of the Mensola River, here present allusively but elsewhere openly named), have allowed Battiferra to survive across the centuries in smatterings of lyrics from time to time reprinted. They represent a single period in her life, a time of personal distress. The demands of her husband's career, which at first dismayed her, would prove congenial to her creative vein. Touched by nature's majesty in the silences of her new setting, this woman from the Roman hub must have suffered real loneliness and homesickness. Why did the Ammannati chose tiny Maiano, an isolated hamlet, for a second residence outside the city? It nestles in the hills northeast of Florence midway between Fiesole and Settignano, Ammannati's ancestral village. A prolific clan of his collateral relatives still lived there, nephews and their children descended from his father's brother. They were kin within walking distance whom he acknowledges in a ricordo and remembers in his will. Like its neighbors Fiesole and Settignano, Maiano was a place of quarries, and Bartolomeo may have reconnoitered professionally that whole area for great building projects under way in the city below. Stones were not all that the Fiesolan hills yielded. It was terrain rich in poetry, birthplace of a Tuscan pastoral tradition that had flourished under Lorenzo the Magnificent and descended from Boccaccio, whose Ninfale fiesolano recounted the myth of the Mensola River's origin. Although detached from her paternal home, Laura could here connect intellectually to cultural roots in an Italian vernacular idiom. (33)

Florence and its encircling hills were not such a "blind wilderness" after all for Daphne. Neither was it her fate to be "buried" alive there, because by 1560 she had assembled nearly 200 poems, enough to fill a substantial anthology and dedicate it to the Medici duchess, Eleonora da Toledo. If toward the beginning of her First Book of Tuscan Works she recounts in a Petrarchan code how she was forced from Rome to Florence, in a penultimate sequence often sonnets -- the most extended cycle on a single individual -- Laura affectionately honors her spouse. Just as the Petrarchan Laura is known poetically as "Daphne," so her husband has a nickname in arte suited to his identity as a sculptor in the classical style. He is Phidias. The nickname equates him with the most famous sculptor of Greek antiquity, a maker of colossi whose masterpieces included an enormous Athena for the Parthenon and a gigantic Zeus enthroned. Ammannati's early reputation was, in fact, built on his success as a sculptor of colossi, beginnin g with a wondrous Hercules for the courtyard of the Paduan jurist Marco Mantua Benavides (1544). An image circulated in an engraving by Enea Vico, published in 1549 to coincide with his arrival on the Roman scene. Contemporaries like Pietro Aretino expressed their admiration, and Benavides, who probably first suggested Ammannati's nickname as Phidias, proudly announced it in a letter to the Florentine archbishop, Antonio Altoviti, then resident in Rome: "The colossus gives the world a hint that this man has it in him to outdo every other sculptor of fame and renown if God grant him a few years of life and he does not lack for opportunity; and this alone bears witness to that, for no colossus has been made since antiquity until now except for his, with such artifice that it is a marvel." Not to be bested by Mantua Benavides, the pope wanted his own display of Ammannati's special art, as the sculptor could report in a letter of 29 September 1554, back to his Paduan benefactor: Julius has asked him for "two colo ssi with two horses similar to the statues by Phidias and Praxitiles on Monte Cavallo, to set in a fountain." (34) They were never realized because several months later the Holy Father died, and not long after, Ammannati took his reluctant wife to Florence.

Well before the culminating sequence for Ammannati, Laura expresses her wifely affection in the First Book with a trio of sonnets centered on her "Phidias." In the first, likening herself allusively to the bride in the Song of Songs, she arises at daybreak filled with desire for her beloved, whom she loves as a "new bright sun." In the third, a mythologically coded prayer, she asks Phoebus (Apollo-Christ) as god of medicine to bring his curative powers to "the one who has the better part of me," that is, to Ammannati, who has fallen ill. The central poem of the group honors her spouse for his art:

     Cosi sempre Arno, in te sian chiare l'onde
cul le ninfe e i pastor danzino intorno,
e verdeggin, o scemi o cresca il giorno,
di fior carche e di frutti ambe le sponde;
     cosi ti sia dell'onorata fronde
l'umido crine eternamente adorno,
e d'Acheloo ti ceda il ricco corno,
e spirin 1'aure al corso tuo seconde;
     e `l Nilo e l'Istro e l'Indo e gli altri fiumi
e `l Mar Tirreno e 'l gran padre Oceano
con tutti i liti lor ti dian tributto;
     come piu chiaro tra contanti numi
sarai, merce dell'arte e della mano
del mio Fidia novello oggi veduto. (35)

Thus always, Arno, may your waves be clear, that nymphs and shepherds may dance about them, and whether day wax or wane, may both your shores green under their weight of flowers and fruit;

thus may your moist locks be decked eternally with the honored bough; and may the rich horn of Achelous yield before you; and may favoring breezes blow your currents;

and may the Nile and the Danube and the Indus and the other rivers and the Tyrrhenean Sea and the great father Oceanus with all their shores pay tribute to you,

for among so many divinities you will look new, the brightest, thanks to the art and hand of my Phidias.

In this and in other verses that celebrate her husband, Laura alludes to specific commissions, here plausibly Ammannati's service after the terrible Arno flood of 13 September 1557, which damaged Ponte alla Carraia, destroyed Ponte Santa Trinita, and left much of Florence buried in tons of mud. It was Ammannati who, as the Duke's engineer, designed a plan to clear the mess by moving the river's deposit into earthen bulwarks. He quickly reconnected the city, divided by the loss of two central bridges, with repairs to Ponte alla Carraia, begun 6 October 1558, and completed 1 November 1559. Laura addresses Arno, wishing it "clear waters" in her first verse and setting up a double meaning that emerges in the final tercet, when the adjective "chiaro" returns, but now in the sense of "bright" or "renowned." Of all the great world rivers that Arno will surpass, first in the catalogue is Achelous, the mythical archetype of a fluvial god in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the Roman poets account of his tale, which explains h ow these deities came to be anthropomorphic beings associated with the cornucopia, Achelous reveals to his guest Theseus that he is capable of dreadful flooding:

do not entrust yourself to my greedy waters. The current is wont to sweep down solid trunks of trees and huge boulders in zig-zag course with crash and roar. I have seen great stables that stood near by the bank swept away, cattle and all, and in that current neither strength availed the ox nor speed the horse. Many a strong man also has been overwhelmed in its whirling pools. (36)

To evoke the catastrophic Florentine flood of 1557, a true counterpart of Ovid's vivid fiction, Battiferra establishes historical context through both syntax and literary allusion. Underlying the hortatory grammar (May your waters flow clear and calm; may your banks grow green with vegetation) are all the contrasting things the river has recently been: muddied, angry; storm driven, its banks black with slime. Her neatly constructed sonnet is at once praise for Ammannati's invaluable civic contribution and a plea for Nature to withhold the devastating forces that can send Father Arno, like his ancestor Achelous, over his banks and wreak havoc on the land.

Beyond the great rivers of the world that Battiferra wittily catalogues la Petrarque to announce what fame Ammannati will bring to the Arno -- and perhaps not just for the bridge, but for a growing list of accomplishments -- in other poems she varies the stock repetoire by singing of the Metauro and Isauro. They are the rivers of Urbino, the city of the Battiferri. Like the poems for Phidias, they assert her personal identity and belong to the distinctive iconography she developed as poetess. Her voice is a literary counterpart to the sculptural hand of her husband. One of Laura's favorite devices, for example, is to imagine her rivers personified as ancient fluvial gods. That is how she stages Arno and all his aqueous relatives in the sonnet above, as bearded old men wearing a laurel garland who recline propped on one elbow as if in the wet river bed, their attributes a huge vase from which they pour forth their waters and a cornucopia of fruit and flowers to symbolize the life their shores nourish. The conc eption, which has its literary source in Ovid's Achelous myth, would have also been familiar to her from the visual arts, and in examples that could not have been closer to home: the many representations of rivers and watery spirits wrought by her own husband, a master in that mixed genre -- part sculpture, part architecture, and part hydraulic magic -- the Renaissance fountain. Ammannati, who may have visited Rome as a student of antiquities before he went down from the Veneto to find his fortune in 1549, studied the colossal statues of river gods that had survived in the Urbs from antiquity as well known landmarks and subjects of popular legend. Earlier in the sixteenth century, with the publication of Andrea Fulvio's Antiquitatis urbis (1527) they were properly identified as the Tigris (nicknamed "Marforio"), Tiber, and Nile. He took inspiration from those models to sculpt many personified rivers, from the portico reliefs by the Marciana Library and in Piazza San Marco at Venice, where he worked side by si de with Girolamo Lombardo supervised by Jacopo Sansovino, to a nymphaeum for the team of architects that made a Roman villa for Julius Ill, to an Arno in his first commission for Cosimo, the Fountain offuno. It is not an accident that Battiferra's poetry so often stages these sculpturesque male personalities. (37) Would husband and wife not have discussed their mutual projects and compared notes on choices to be made in matters of style and content?

By 1560, the couple fresh from Rome five years before has climbed to the apogee of the Florentine cultural scene. The Petrarchan poetess sits to Agnolo Bronzino for a portrait that was soon the subject of witty sonnet exchanges in their literary circle. She dedicates her canzoniere to the Medici Duchess Eleonora da Toledo, "not because I think [my poems] worthy of Your Highness," as she writes her patron in a prefatory letter, "but to show you as best I could, that I am if not completely grateful, at least mindful in part of the many and very great benefices that you and the Most Illustrious Lord Duke have given and continue to give every day to me and to Messer Bartolomeo, my husband, who desires nothing other, and I with him, than to be able to continue faithfully and worthily serving you."

In the same year that Ammannati began carving the great Neptune statue for Piazza della Signoria, work began to his design on a new courtyard for Palazzo Pitti, and by July, 1561 Ammannati had stepped into his longterm role as chief architect for the renovations to the building, which Eleonora had purchased for a family dwelling. (38) Laura may have chosen Eleonora as her dedicatee (rather than Cosimo) partly for reasons of gender, from a wish to speak woman to woman, as she would again in her second book on the Penitential Psalms, which she offered to the duchess of Urbino. From the timing of her volume and its dedicatory message, however, it is clear she aims more practically to thank the duchess for her support of Ammannati in major competitive commissions and to promote him for possible future awards. In consonance with that agenda, she speaks as a Medici partisan, imposing a political design on her canzoniere. Her First Book of Tuscan Works hails Cosimo de' Medici for the conquest of Siena, a city he was awarded as a fief by Phillip II in 1557 and claimed with a formal triumphal entry on 28 October 1560. Laura's Primo libro, published that November, culminates with a sonnet to the Duke, inviting him to enter the city as its new sovereign:

     Glorioso Signor, cui teme ed ama
in un, non pur la vostra Etruria bella
ch'a ragion Duce e Padre suo v'appella,
ma Italia ancor che d'obedirvi brama;
     deh, se la dove alta virtu vi chiama,
che 'n voi fiorio fin dall' eta novella,
vi scorga amica e graziosa stella
di gloria carco e d'onorata brama,
     movete alla bell' Abria vistra il piede,
ove statue, colossi, archi e trofei,
vedrete eretti al vostro altero nome;
     e mille cigni udrete eterna fede
cantando fare al mondo tutto, come
loco vi serba il ciel fra gli altri dei. (39)

Glorious lord, at once feared and loved not only by your fair Etruria, who rightly calls you Duce and Father, but by Italy too, who longs to obey you;

pray, if high virtue, which flourished in you from your youthful age, calls you there where a friendly and gracious star might guide you with your weight of glory and honored longing,

step forward to your fair Arbia, where you will see statues, colossi, arches and trophies raised to your lofty name,

and you will hear a thousand swans singing eternal fidelity tell all the world how heaven reserves a place for you among the other gods.

As often in Laura's poetry, the river speaks for the city. The "statues, colossi, arches, trophies" Cosimo will find, all erected in his honor, are none other than the ephemera for his triumphal entry that her husband had built as the duke's chief architect and sculptor. While Bartolomeo was commuting between Florence and Siena earlier in 1560 to supervise the decorations for Cosimo's entrata, Laura was completing her book of poetry and overseeing its production at the house of Giunti. (40) Together they must have often spoken about their related projects, each undertaken with the same purpose, to celebrate Cosimo's lordship over Siena in the exciting context of his expanding territorial power.

In 1564 loss was to elicit creative activity from Bartolomeo and Laura in tandem. The occasion was the divine Michelangelo's death, for which the Florentines orchestrated a magnificent and solemn tribute. Under the aegis of the recently established Accademia del Disegno, the city's artists produced decorations, lead by an organizing committee whose members were the painters Giorgio Vasari and Agnolo Bronzino, and the sculptors Benvenuto Cellini and Bartolomeo Ammannati. Descriptions survive of this memorable event in which all of Florence participated. The church of San Lorenzo was filled with narrative paintings that lined the nave, and in the center was raised a huge multi-tiered catafalque. To it were attached poems composed for the public funeral, among them an Italian canzone on the death of Michelangelo by Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati. It survives, a rare example of her poetry in this longer lyric genre. (41) Michelangelo, artist and poet, was a friend to both the Ammannati, whose joint contribution s to his funeral would have been sincere expressions of loss.

Ammannati had a professional relationship with Michelangelo dating from the early 1550s, when he was getting his start in Rome. The powerful senior artist liked and promoted him. (42) In 1558, Ammannati, by now in Florence, began corresponding with Michelangelo in Rome about a staircase Duke Cosimo wanted built in the Laurentian Library. Michelangelo made a model for Ammannati to use in constructing and installing the elegant new stairs at San Lorenzo. Laura's father was to transport the model from Rome to Florence, but another courier had to be found because when the time came, Giovan'Antonio was out of town. Giovan'Antonio's brief appearance at this point in Michelangelo's correspondence hints at Battiferri's role on the family team and the continued close relationship between Laura and her father after she moved to Florence, where he must have occasionally visited. The Vatican secretary must have been himself an art lover, a likelihood supported by what we know of his friendship with Raphael, the art on th e facade of his house in the Borgo, the death inventory of his possessions, (43) and by the fact that he married his only daughter, handsomely dowered, to an artist.

Through Michelangelo, whom Ammannati also consulted about his design for the new Ponte Santa Trinita, we gain insight into how Laura's husband helped publicize her work. In April, 1561, several months after the appearance of her Primo libro, Ammannati wrote from Florence to Michelangelo in Rome, apologizing for not yet having sent a copy of the book that everyone must have been talking about (Fig. 3, Appendix 1): "I didn't send the book of my wife's poems before, as I promised Your Lordship, because I was waiting for her to write some spiritual rhymes, as she has done. I thought Your Lordship would appreciate them more than the others, and so I have put them at the end of the book." These latter must be the spiritual sonnet sequence that Laura would publish in 1564, tucked into the back of her second book, The Seven Penitential Psalms of King David ... together with some spiritual sonnets. Although the poems Ammannati sent do not survive in manuscript form in Buonarroti's papers, others by Laura can still be read among the many lyrics in his notebooks. (44) Bartolomeo's wish to share his wife's poems with Michelangelo, himself a master of the sonnet, bears witness to the great respect he had for her verse if he thought it worthy of the venerated genius, now a man in his eighties. Those lost copies destined for the aging giant in Rome, surely transcribed by Laura herself, suggest that Bartolomeo Ammannati may have taken pleasure in delivering her work to others as well in his professional community.

This supportive moment contradicts the historical tendency to regard Ammannati as a manual artist without much of an intellectual bent. Better acquaintance brings more polish to that rough image. Although his name is attached to only one literary artifact, the well known Letter to the Academy of Design (1582) with an urgent plea to his colleagues to reject pagan nudities in favor of a chastely pious art, he was the recipient of sonnets by his wife and their friends. He also purchased books. An account list of some that were brought into the house over a period of about six months late in 1564 and early in 1565 includes just the kind of mixture we should expect in this talented couple's library: "an Architecture by Leon Battista Alberti, one by Piero Cattaneo, one by Sebastiano Serlio, and one by Cosimo Bartoli," Vannoccio's Pirotechnia, Battiferra's Seven Psalms, "a new Selva," a copy of the Dialogues by Giovan Andrea Gilio, a Pietro Crescentio, a Valerius Maximus, and "Le rime by Madonna Laura." The first fi ve titles, all by architects, clearly reflect Ammannati's professional interests, but others, although less technical, belong to the broader humanistic areas of knowledge that an excellent architect was expected to acquire. As Pietro Cataneo had written in his treatise, an architect must possess not only talent ("ingegno") but also "scienza," learning in such disciplines as mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and "hisroriography." Both the collection of Memorable Sayings and Deeds compiled by the Roman writer Valerius Maximus and the "new Selva," probably Carlo Passi's supplement to Paolo giovio's histories, belong to the last category: With its Quattrocento translation into Italian, Pietro Crescentio's early thirteenth-century De agricultura had become a Tuscan classic, essential for any gentleman farmer who wished to follow Cicero's advice and enjoy the pleasures of a villa, as both Ammannati did. To the extent that Crescentio also describes the best settings for building a farm house, ideal materials for con struction, and how to plan associated structures such as aqueducts, fountains, and wells, he offers practical advice consonant with a thoughtful architect's concerns. The Ammannati shared curiosities as readers that dovetail in Gilio's witty pair of Dialogues (Venice, 1564). Drawing on a marvellous store of anecdotes, historical and contemporary, Gilio pits proponents of ancient versus modern culture for conversations first on the ideal poet-patron relationship and then on the problems of representing history in painting. (45)

At the end of 1565, Cosimo de' Medici's son and heir Francesco married Giovanna of Austria. As one part of the elaborate constructions readied to decorate Florence for her formal entry, the single monument most associated with Ammannati in his popular reputation -- less for better than for worse -- first took its place in Piazza della Signoria, a colossal Neptune. The commission had gone to Ammannati back in 1560, when he beat Benvenuto Cellini and Giambologna in a competition to carve the marble already quarried by his old master Baccio Bandinelli, who had died before being able to work the piece. (46) Because the marble was not big enough, Ammannati was unable to represent his subject with arm raised to quell the winds and drive them back in their caves, an imperious gesture suggested by Aeneid I, although the sea god riding the waves in his chariot, trident in hand, does faithfully follow Virgil. Its cramped standing pose earned Neptune the derisive label of "il Biancone" [Big Whitey] and a mocking jingle: "Ammannato, Ammannato, / che bel marmo hai sciupato" [Ammannati, Ammannati, what a fine marble you have spoiled!]. That criticism must have stung. Bartolomeo's loyal wife responded with a sonnet in defense of the statue, so fine that he will now produce another much like it.

The new sculpture would honor Chiappino Vitelli, a military man who had risen to high command in maneuvers against the Turks, led troops of cavalry and infantry in the war against Siena, and served Cosimo as an ambassador to the imperial court in Brussels. Resident in Florence for some twenty years before Phillip II transferred him in 1567 to assist the Duke of Alba in the Low Countries, he was married to the poetess Leonora Cibo de' Vitelli. Vitelli and his wife crop up repeatedly in the lives of the Ammannati, their contemporaries and evidently their friends. One of Chiappino's houses was in the Via Romana, quarters where until 1563 the sculptor had a workshop. A Zibaldone with notes and sketches by Ammannati contains drawings for a garden like that of the Medici at Poggio a Caiano for "Signor Chiappino." Other documents confirm that Ammannati worked as an architect for Vitelli at a country house he owned in the neighborhood of Santa Maria Novella. Chiappino, in turn, seems to have supported Bartolomeo's bi ds for commissions from the duke, especially 1559 to 1561, when both the Neptune and Pitti Palace were awarded, and when Ammannati prepared for the Medici entry into Siena with a triumphal arch at the beginning of the parade route that paired Cosimo (as Caesar) and Chiappino (as Theseus). Frequently at court, Vitelli was also in correspondence with Battiferra. (47) In the Primo libro of 1560 Chiappino and his wife receive six sonnets and an eclogue, more poems than any other single individual -- except for Bartolomeo Ammannati. Battiferra continued to dedicate sonnets to the Vitelli, as attested by the following piece datable to about 1565/66. It survives in a single manuscript copy, never before published:

      Or c'ha pur I'alto valor vostro invitto
vinta l'empia di Dio nemica gente,
ed al rio predator dell'oriente
d'acerbo telo il cor punto e trafitto,              4
     di quei ch'ornaron gia Roma e l'Egitto
alti colossi, a voi novellamente
erge, chiaro signor, 1'eta presente,
si come fu nel ciel di voi prescritto;              8
     ed or simile al suo nettunno altero,
ch'a gli avversari di virtute ha tolto
le forze e'nposto lor silenzio eterno,              11
     opera del mio buon fidia e magistero,
un nuovo Alcide ch'aggia in fuga volto
     gl'infidi mostri, a voi sacrar  discerno. (48) 14

Now that your noble invincible valor has conquered even the wicked people, God's enemy, and with a bitter lance stabbed and pierced the heart of the evil predator from the East,

the present age, bright lord, newly raises to you noble colossi like those once adorning Rome and Egypt, as it was forewritten of you in heaven;

and now similar to his proud Neptune, who took away his adversaries' powers of strength and imposed on them eternal silence,

I discern consecrated to you a new Alcides, who has put to flight the infidel monsters, the work and clever art of my good Phidias.

Laura salutes Chiappino for crushing the Infidel, "God's enemies," and announces that her Phidias plans to sculpt him as Hercules (a descendant of Alceus, hence "Alcides"). Vitelli had already seen action in skirmishes with the Turks in the 1550s on the shores of Tuscany, at Port'Ercole, Piombino, and in the Maremma, but the Herculean labor here commended was heroism at a more momentous engagement. It took place 21 September 1565, when the imperial fleet of Phillip II broke a Turkish stranglehold on the Knights of Malta, blocking the enemy advance northward to the European continent in a thunderous victory celebrated by all Christians. (49) Among the ships were galleys outfitted by Cosimo de' Medici, who five years before had commissioned the Neptune Fountain to celebrate his young navy. Now, on an epic scale, Vitelli would be immortalized in the tradition of ancient colossi and Ammannati's proud sea god silencing his howling enemies. As Virgil had dramatized the conflict, the enemy leader was Aeolus, who at Juno's request unleashes on the fleet of Aeneas his allies Eurus and Notus, winds that blow angrily from the east and from African shores -- the very positions from which Europe was menaced by the Turk at Malta. Laura logically links both sculptural monuments, the already existing Neptune and the projected Hercules, since each one asserts Christian dominance over a diabolical enemy. In the process she polemically defends "Big Whitey," elevates Chiappino to Olympian godliness, and elegantly pairs him with his prince, much as Ammannati had teamed the two for the Medici entrata into Siena in October, 1560. (50)

Upon his return from Siena in summer 1561 Ammannati turned his attention to the Pitti Palace. Many documents survive that chronicle his long involvement in this ambitious undertaking. Among them is a letter addressed to Duke Cosimo, which begins: "For the benefit of the fabbrica del Pitti, it seemed necessary to me to write this memorandum to your Most Illustrious Excellency so that I can proceed in accordance with your orders" (Fig. 5A and 5B, Appendix 3). Speaking as a good administrator, Ammannati expresses his concern about the bookkeeping, which he wants to improve with systematic annual accounting procedures, and he makes recommendations about monthly pay for the workers. The letter is signed, "Most Devoted Servant of Your Most Illustrious Excellency, Bartolomeo Ammannati." A reply by Tommaso de' Medici, the ducal secretary who penned notes in a heavier point on the folio with Cosimo's terse dispositions, carries the date 11 October 1568. Ammannati must have sent it sometime after 25 March 1568, the Flo rentine "new year" he mentions as the occasion for introducing changes in the method of record keeping. What is remarkable about this communication, otherwise quite routine is the identity of the person who transcribed it, until now unidentified. Signature to the contrary; the amanuensis was not Ammannati.

Many samples of his writing survive, among them the painstakingly copied letter of 1561 to Michelangelo with Laura's First Book of Tuscan Works and her latest spiritual rhymes (Fig. 3, Appendix 1). The care with which Ammannati penned that is evident in comparison with a more hastily composed business receipt from the same year (Fig. 4, Appendix 2). In general, the sculptor's hand is legible but not beautiful. It tends to wander up or down slightly as the words proceed across the page, there are few conventional abbreviations, the letters do not all have the same slant, and they vary in their degree of openness -- sometimes cramped, sometimes much more relaxed. As if going more by sound than sight, he habitually connects words that should be separated ("daSetignano," "alavorare," alevare," "equali") and sometimes separates words that should be a single unit ("pro messi"). These traits are what we should expect in one without the experience of much early formal education. Like Michelangelo, his revered mentor, Ammannati seems never to have been quite comfortable in the act of putting pen to paper. By contrast, the hand of the letter concerning the Pitti is neat and regular, an elegant Italian chancery (Fig. 5A and 5B, Appendix 3). It is unmistakably Laura's. The identification can be confirmed by comparison with her surviving autograph papers: notes in family records, letters to Benedetto Varchi, sonnets sent to other literati, the holograph of her First Book of Tuscan Works, and her petitions to the Duke of Urbino. These last are excellent examples of her formal business-writing style. One, a signed summary of nine years' frustrated efforts to recover the dowry money from her first marriage, refers to the inconvenience both she and her present husband have suffered because her first husband's heir has failed to return it (Fig. 6A and 6B, Appendix 4). (51)

Vividly condensed evidence of graphic differences between Laura and Bartolomeo appears in their signatures. They occur together one after the other, his first then hers, in the record of a land transfer of 14 April 1564, probably part of a family agreement that allowed her to regain the dowry by cashing in paternal property (Fig. 2). Among five witnesses in Florence to the sale of an Urbino farm, they affix their names with the usual formula, "I affirm that the above [is true] ." Tellingly, Ammannati misspells the verb, but his wife does not: "Io Bartolomeo Amannati afermo quanto di sopra"; "Io Laura Battiferra affermo quanto di sopra." (52)

As long ago as 1869, Niccolo Contucci published two of Ammannati's letters, one with his description of the decorations he made in Siena in 1560, the other proposing a program of relief panels to decorate the base of the obelisk in Piazza Santa Trinita. In the first, Contucci recognized an autograph, but the hand of the second communication was unknown to him. He speculates that it was composed by some "man of letters" (uomo letterato). Odds are, however, that the letter about the obelisk came not from the hand of a male humanist, but the secretary to whom Ammannati was married. Other correspondence that does survive confirms, in fact, that it was not unusual for Laura to transcribe his letters to personages of special importance. Of the five letters in Michelangelo's correspondence from Ammannati, four are in the hand of Laura Battiferra. The one exception is the cover note Bartolomeo sent with his wife's poems, a personal effort the more touching in light of their arrangement, which took advantage of her su perior scribal skills. (53)

Laura's wifely assistance in Bartolomeo's business correspondence raises another possibility. The Renaissance humanist secretary -- not coincidentally also her father's job description -- did more than merely copy documents. It was the segretario's role to compose them, too, often elegantly expanding, or "engrossing," from rough notes in a condensed version ("la minuta"). Did Laura Battiferra lend more than just a passive hand to these letters she wrote out for husband? Might she also have drafted the prose, suitably cadenced for the duke?

Another example of her hand in a letter signed by Ammannati suggests that on occasion she could have played an active part in rendering the prose. Dating from 1574, two years after Cosimo's death, its addressee is the Grand Duke Francesco, successor to power in the dignity garnered by his father in 1569, less than the kingship Cosimo had angled for, but still a step up from mere duke in the ranks of the ruling European aristocracy. This document is a petition for unpaid money that had been promised by Cosimo as a gift, badly needed to satisfy demands of a landlord who had suddenly raised the rent by a shocking amount, the architect claims, and slapped his tenant with a fat property tax bill to boot. Since Ammannati says that he is threatened with eviction if he does not come up with the money, Laura would understandably have had a practical motive for drafting such a persuasive and legible plea for help. (54) In physical appearance as well as argumentation, this resembles the petition she had addressed back i n 1558 to the duke of Urbino, asking him to help her in legal efforts to obtain restitution of her dowry money from Vittorio Sereni's heir, his brother Altobello degli Organi (Fig. 6A and 6B, Appendix 4). Yet in spite of the urgency they allege, one cannot help wonder if in 1574 the Ammannati are experiencing need all that dire. By this time Laura has come into a substantial inheritance from her father (d. 1561), enough for her to support the Jesuits' new Collegio in Rome and to subsidize heavily the project that provided the Order with a church in Florence.

San Giovannino, the church of the Jesuits in Florence, survives as the married couple's most monumental collaboration, one that occupied them for the better part of their last twenty years together. The first small group of Jesuits had arrived in the Arno city in 1551, invited by the Spanish Duchess Eleonora da Toledo. In 1554, Cosimo gave the community the Gothic church of San Giovannino with attached buildings for a Collegio on the Via Larga, next door to the Palazzo Medici. In response to the need for remodelling that complex, the Ammannati offered their support. Finally, after seven years of discussions between headquarters in Rome and the local rector, on 1 May 1579, the first building materials were purchased with a gift of 35 scudi from Laura, and Ammannati set to work as architect-in-chief. On 11 January 1582, the cornerstone was laid by a nephew of Pope Gregory XIII, a pontiff enthusiastically supportive of the Jesuits. Laura and Bartolomeo's joint commitment to the order's foundation in Florence con tinued until she passed away in 1589, and during the years he survived her, in correspondence between the architect and Rome concerning the design of the facade. (55)

Pope Gregory XIII (Ugo Buoncompagno, 1572-85) was himself another focal point in this creative's couple's activities. In the first year of his pontificate, he had commissioned Ammannati to sculpt figures in the Camposanto at Pisa for a tomb for his nephew, the jurist Giovanni Buoncompagno. Ammannati's creation, with Christ standing between Justice and Peace, lacks the grace of his earlier work, but it so pleased the pontiff that he awarded a bonus to the artist, who reports in his Letter to the Academy of Design of 22 August 1582, what moral satisfaction he drew from the undertaking. (56) When several years later news of Gregory's death reached Florence, Laura eulogized him with a sonnet:

     Lasciato il manto, ambe le chiave e 'l regno
ond'io si chiaro andai fra tanti eroi,
oggi, Signor, divoto a' piedi tuoi
qual servo umil, qual peccator io vegno.
     E se mancai nel tuo d'alto onor degno
commesso offizio, merce chieggio, poi
ch'alla mortal condizion di noi
non va col buon voler l'opra ad un segno.
     Io ben cercai d'ogni piu estrema parte
del mondo addurre al tuo romano ovile
Indiana greggia, a farlo ampio e perfetto.
     Mandagli or tu 'n Pastor che 'l mio difetto
con maggior senno adempia e maggior arte,
e sia la terra tutta al ciel simile. (57)

After leaving the mantle, both keys, and the kingdom, which sent me bright among so many heroes, today devoutly I come to your feet, Lord, as a humble servant, as a sinner.

And if I failed in the high honor-worthy office you entrusted me, I ask mercy, since in this mortal condition of ours, actions go not apace with good intentions.

I really did try to draw the Indian flock from the world's remotest reaches into your Roman fold, to make it ample and perfect.

Send them now a Shepherd, who can with greater wisdom and greater skill amend my fault, and may all the earth be like the heaven.

No tears or funereal crepe hang over the vignette that Laura paints with her words. Instead, her dignified tribute grants the deceased a ghostly privilege, to speak from beyond the grave (in an idiom borrowed from Petrarch) and assess his life, marked by great missionary zeal, at the moment he meets his Maker.

The Ammannati as they appeared in old age can be seen in the parable of Christ and the Canaanite Woman painted about 1590 by Alessandro Allori for their funeral chapel in San Giovannino, where it still hangs today, darkened by centuries of votive candle smoke (Fig. 1). He stands in the guise of St. Bartholomew at the center of the panel, across from Christ, a bearded old man leaning on a crook whose downward gaze embraces two female figures, the suppliant Canaanite mother (Matt. 15; Mark 7) and a kneeling woman at far right. She is Laura as an elderly matron, her face now drawn and wrinkled, but still recognizable when compared with Bronzino's more famous likeness of her as a younger poet. In the earlier pose, she held a manuscript open to a pair of sonnets by Petrarch; in this more somber context, perhaps a posthumous portrait, she clasps a little devotional volume. (58) Allori's painting captures the couple not only physically but spiritually, as participants in a Gospel miracle. They embody the intense, st ricter religious faith that flourished in the post-Tridentine era and that had dictated Ammannati's letter of 1582 to the Accademia del Disegno, a statement in which we have to suspect that Laura herself may have had a hand. The sense of piety, alive in both husband and wife from the time of their wedding pilgrimage to Loreto forty years before, now deepens, renewed by a shift in the cultural climate after the Council of Trent.

If Bartolomeo Ammannati commissioned Allori's painting as a memorial of his marriage, it accompanies another final expression of love. With the help of a Jesuit scribe, the grieving widower wanted urgently to publish Laura Battiferra's life work. Before Laura died, that corpus had already been partially transcribed by a Jesuit into a manuscript that was to serve the typesetter, and now that she was gone, Bartolomeo wanted the father general in Rome to provide another amanuensis to finish the project. The incomplete manuscript, which breaks off abruptly at the beginning of Laura's epic on the early Hebrew kings, still survives at the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, with marginal instructions to the printer that seem to be in her own hand. Why was it never finished? Some six months after an exchange of letters with Claudio Acquaviva, the general in Rome who had promised help from another Jesuit scribe, Ammannati suffered a stroke and fell into a coma. In spite of the prayers of the attending Jesuits and the med ical care of the best doctors in Florence -- even the grand duchess's personal physician -- on the fourth day of that mortal sleep, 13 April 1592, his life came to a dose. Since then this remarkable manuscript has lain all but forgotten. From a period when Laura's literary activity was thought to have ceased, it is an unsuspected trove of several hundred poems, many of them deeply spiritual and never seen by the public, before or since. What a great distance separates the final collection from her canzoniere of 1560, unabashedly political in its agenda, resonates in this passionate credo:

     Quel che la terra feo di nulla e 'l Cielo,
e poi dal Ciel per noi discese in terra,
la bassa terra unendo all'alto Cielo,
con gran stupor del Cielo e della terra;
     per portar questa terra insin' al Cielo
e gl'onori del Ciel dare alla terra,
morto e sepolto in terra, al fine in Cielo
salendo aperse il Cielo a questo terra.
     Gl'indegni della terra, e piu del Cielo,
tu, gran Signor del Cielo e della terra,
tolti da terra avar riporti in Cielo;
     stupisci meco, Ciel; stupisci, terra,
poiche vedi la terra ir sopra 'l Cielo,
e per me terra il Ciel porto sotterra. (59)

He who made earth and Heaven from nothing, and then descended from Heaven for us to earth, uniting the lowly earth to the high Heaven, to the great astonishment of Heaven and earth; in order to carry this earth as far as the Heaven and give Heaven's honors to earth, after He was dead and buried on earth, He rose in the end to Heaven, opening Heaven to this earth.

Those unworthy of earth and more, of Heaven, you, great Lord of Heaven and earth, take from the miserly earth, carrying them back to Heaven.

Be astonished with me, Heaven; be astonished, earth; for you see the earth go above Heaven, and for me earth Heaven carried beneath the earth.

Vibrant with awe for the great Christian mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, the verses are a metrical tour-de-force. A single pair of rhyme words, semantic opposites, structures the entire sonnet. Each rhyme pair occurs once in each verse, in alternating order (terra-cielo; cielo-terra) and in alternating rhyme position (cielo-terra-cielo-terra), except for the last, where "Heaven" is framed at the center by two occurrences of "earth." The effect of this keyword interweaving is a tremendous concentration of cosmic tension and salvific energy within the tiny confines of the sonnet -- a miniature form tightly pressed into the space of fourteen lines and 154 syllables. It declares a mighty compenetration of heaven's glory and our humble clay, which mingle even as the body descends to the grave. Surely such thoughts as these inspire the meditations of Allori's kneeling poetess, partner to the man remembered for his penitential letter of retraction to the Accademia del Disegno. The Casanatense manu script reminds us of what would have been Ammannati's own last project, the publication of a book of Christian poetry. His anxious efforts are a loving tribute to the woman who had been his life's companion, teammate in his projects as he had been in hers. With this gesture of spousal piety, the old man bids his wife farewell and knocks on a door to heaven.

The lives of Laura Batriferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati, when cross-examined in their creative partnership, unfold as a joint chronology that recreates moments of their marriage, casts light on his commissions, and offers commentary on her lyrics. Both worked within traditions from powerful models. For Ammannati, there was the towering figure of Michelangelo; as a reader, he studied treatises from Vitruvius to Alberti and Serlio, and he often worked within the constraints of team projects (Villa Giulia in Rome) or pre-existing structures that he remodelled and expanded (Palazzo Pitti in Florence). For Battiferra as poet, Petrarch was the paradigm, with Sanazzaro, Bembo, Della Casa, important connecting links in the vernacular lyric tradition. She clearly knew her Dante, too, as well as Vittoria Colonna, Tullia d'Aragona, and Chiara Matraini as Virgil, Ovid, and the bible. Yet while each followed influential precedent, each also developed variations on that inherited body of tradition, the space of a recognizab le individual idiom and style. Much of her poetry, beneath a decorous Petrarchan surface, is autobiographical and occasional. As personal history emerges from the generic code language, like words in invisible ink materializing on the page, it discloses Laura's intimate relationship with Ammannati's career. His art and her verse ideally form a single body. When we think of creative couples, modern examples come readily to mind -- George Eliot and George Henry Lewes; Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Dashiell Hammett and Lilian Hellman; or, among the Italians, Eleonora Duse and Gabriele D'Annunzio, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina. (60) We have nor thought so much about who and where these duos were in earlier eras, even though the 'power couple' has existed at least since the time of Pericles and Aspasia, under whom the original Phidias flourished. The Ammannati are the most prominent such couple of the Italian sixteenth century (61) and on e of the earliest in Europe.

Appendix 1

Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Archivio Buonarroti, vol. 6, fol. 14r:

Mag[nifi]co sig[no]r mio osser[vandissi]mo

Come io fui arivato in Firenze feci aconciare lastanza e col nome de Dio cominciai alavorare sul marmo del Netuno, dove sento piu la pasione d'avere alevare poco marmo ch[e] no[n] mi dafatica elevarne asai. Esono per questa cosa intanto fastidio ch[e] ne sospiro ogni ora

non ho mandato prima elibro delle rime di mia moglie, come pro messi a V[ostra] S[ignoria], perche aspetavo che ella ne facessi certi spirituali come ella afatti: iquali pensavo avesino aesere phi grati a V[ostra] S[ignoria] ch gli altri Ecosi gli o messi nell'ultimo delibro havero piacere che aquella gli sieno di contento. V[ostra] S[ignoria] no[n] stia arispondermi altrimenti, per no[n] avere quella noia. Ame ebene asai enela priego che mi tenga in sua buona gratia. Esenza fine mia moglie edio cele racomandiamo di Firenze agli 5 daprile del [15]61

Di V[ostra] S[ignoria] amorevole

Ser[vito]re

Bartolomeo Amannati

My Magnificent Most Worshipful Lord

As soon as I arrived in Florence, I had the room set up, and with the name of God I began to work on the Neptune marble, where I feel more passion about having little marble to remove than I do in the labor of taking away a lot. And this thing is so upsetting to me that I sigh about in all the time.

I didn't send the book of my wife's poems before, as I promised Your Lordship, because I was waiting for her to write some spiritual rhymes, as she has done. I thought Your Lordship would appreciate them more than the others, and so I have put them at the end of the book. It brings me pleasure to think that they may make you happy. Your Lordhip need not send me an answer so as not to have that disturbance. For me all goes very well, and I pray you keep me in your good graces, and my wife and I commend ourselves endlessly to you. From Florence, 5 April 1561.

Your Lordship's Loving

Servant

Bartolomeo Amannati

Appendix 2

ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fol. 20r:

a di 15 di novembre 1561

Io Bartolomeo Amannati ho receuto da Rafaello di Rafaello daSetignano scudi quaranta quatro doro equali mi a pagati p[er] avergli riscossi p[er] mi conto da monsignore Julio Sauli elquale pago aldetto Rafaello peruna compagnia d'ufitio ch[e] io ho col ditto monsig[no]r Sauli edi tanto fo fede questo di 15 dinovembre 1561 in Firenze.

Bartolomeo Amannati

On the day of 15 November 1561

I, Bartolomeo Amannati, have received from Rafaello, son of Rafaello da Settignano. forty-four golden scudi, which he has paid me, receiving the cash on my behalf from Monsignor Giulio Sauli, who paid the said Rafaello for a matter of business that I have with the said Monsignor Sauli, and I so swear this day 15 November 1561, in Florence.

Bartolomeo Amannati

Appendix 3

ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 240, fol. 151r:

Ill[ustrissi]mo et Ecc[ellentissi]mo S[ign]or Duca.

Per utilita della fabbrica de' Pitti, m'e parso di necessita scrivere questo memoriale a V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] acio che seco[n]do l'ordine di quella io mi possa governare. Ho detto a Tanai de' Medici, et a Benedetto Giramo[n]ti ch[e] mettino in ordine le scritture, e saldino tutti i conti, affine che gli possino rendere co[n] giustificazione, perch[e] qua[n]do si cominciorono tenere, ma[n]dai Benedetto a m[es]s[er] Filippo dell'Antella, acio si facesse mostrare il modo co[n] che si tengono, e cosi mi credo che habbia semp [re] seguitato. V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] si degni dire a chi essi han[n]o a dare detti libri. si dieno elibri al Co[n]cini cheli vegga eli saldi et referisca

Et hora se le pare che per lo nuovo anno, sia data instruzione a i medesimi delle scritture, co[n] com[m]essione di rimettere ogn'anno i conti, come fan[n]o gl'altri ministri; io mi sono co[n]sigliato innanzi il principio dell'an[n]o qual fusse miglior modo delle scritture, a mettere in polize ogni cosa, e poi raguagliare a buo[n] co[n]to i buo[n] conti; e le spese minute, a spese di tegnami, e ferramenti, come s'e fatto sin hora. et m'e stato detto che sta meglio fare i ma[n]dati a ciascuno, sottoscritti da me, e di tutte le spese, e di essi tenerne la copia; et anco[r]ch[e] le robbe le quali si recevano, o si co[n]sumino, p[er] piccola ch'ella sia, si scriva do[n]de venga, e dove serva, ho ha servito. e ta[n]to ordinai ch[e] si facessi il prima giorno dell'an[n]o, questo si risolvera visto econti

Et per poter mettere creditore al libro Benedetto, e Franc[esc]o suo fratello, V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[Illustrissima] segni qua[n]to ella vuole ch[e] sia la loro provisione; Io non ho rimosso nulla di quello ch[e] fu loro ordinato prima; bene e vero ch'io feci dare a Benedetto un scudo di piu il mese; sop[r]a i quattro di prima, a co[n]to della cava, qua[n]do si cavavano i filtaretti, e le lastre. et ancora p[er]ch[e] si lame[n]tava, gli misi in mano le scritrure della fontana, cot co[n]senso di Franc[esc]o di Serjacpo, et egli supplica[n] done hebbe rescritto ch'al fine sarebbono pag[a]te le sue fatiche, talch'egh veniva haver sei [fot. 15lv] scudi il mese, come desiderava, e come ha chi tiene le scritture d[e]l Ponte, ch[e] fa rasegna, et soteccita. Hora no[n] have[n]d'egli piu quello scudo della cava, V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] sia co[n]tenta di segnargli qua[n]to la vuote ch'egli habbia, e di piu gl'oblighi suoi, acio ch'io sappia quello ch'io gli ho da com[m]andare. lel(?) terminata p[er]altro memoriate

A Franc[es]o suo fratello, mi pareva che se gli co[n]venisse scudi 5 il mese, e me[n]tre ch'egli seguitera di far bene a lui, et agl'altri, ch[e] saran[n]o utiti a dar fine alla fabb[ric]a di Pitti, saro P[ad]r[on]e, servo, e schiavo, perch[e] veggo il contento di V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] e al lode di tutta questa citta, insieme co[n] l'altre ta[n]te belle fabbriche ch[e] vi sono. e questa stata, et sempre sara la mente mia, e l'ardire ch'io pigliaro intorno agl'huomini di tal fabb[ric]a sara medesimame[n]te per utile di essa, et no[n] per altro mai, et co[n] questo m'inchino humilme[n]te, et racc[oman]do a V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] prega[n]dole ogni felicita.

diaseli s[cudi] cinque ilmese

Di V[ostra] E[ccellenza] Ill[ustrissi]ma

Thom[m]aso demedici... (?) xi d'otto[br]e [15]68

Divotis[si]mo Ser[vito]re

Bartolomeo Amannati

For the benefit of the Pitti building project, it seemed necessary to me to write this memorandum to your Most Illustrious Excellency so that I can proceed in accordance with your orders. I told Tanai de' Medici and Benedetto Giramonti that they should put the paperwork in order and pay all the bills, so that they can be returned to you justified, because when we started keeping them, I sent Benedetto to Messer Filippo dell'Antella so he could be shown how they are kept, and I believe that he has always continued doing so. May your Most Illustrious Excellency deign to say to whom they should give these account books let the hooks be given to Concini so he can see them and pay them and report

And now, if it seems acceptable to you that for the new year they should be instructed concerning the paperwork and charged to turn in the accounts every year, as the other administrators do, I considered before the beginning of the year what might be the best way to handle the paperwork, whether to derail everything, and then report on the payments when they are paid, and the individual expenses, for expenses of lumber and hardware, as we have done up to now. And I was told that it is better to give everyone his instructions, underwritten by me, and to keep a copy of them and of all the expenses; and likewise for the things that are received or used, no matter how small, to write down where it comes from and where it is to be used, or has been used. And I gave orders that such be done the first day of the year. this will be resolved once the bills have been seen

And in order for me to put down Benedetto as a creditor in the book, and his brother Francesco, would Your Most Illustrious Excellency indicate how much you want their commission to be. I have taken nothing away from that which was allocated to them before; in fact, I had Benedetto given one extra scudo per month, on top the four he was getting before, toward the quarry account, when the "filtarette" and the paving stones were being quarried. Moreover, since he was complaining, I put in his hands the paperwork for the fountain, with the approval of Francesco di Seriacopo, and after he petitioned for it, he got a written response that his labors would be paid for, so that he came to have six scudi per month, as he wished, and as the person does who keeps the paperwork for the Bridge -- who reviews the accounts and collects the payments. Now that he doesn't have the extra scudo for the quarry, may it please your Most Illustrious Excellency to assign him as much as you want him to have, and beyond that, what his duties are, so that I can know what I should order him to do. this has been taken care of in another memorandum

For his brother Francesco, it seemed to me that 5 scudi per month would be appropriate; and while you keep on doing well by him and for the others who will be useful for completing the Pitti building project, I shall be the man in charge, servant, and slave because it is the joy of Your Most Illustrious Excellency and the pride of all this city, together with all the other beautiful building projects that are in it. And this has been and always will be my intention, and liberties I take with regard to the men involved in the building project will likewise be for the good of it and never for anything else. And with this I humbly bow and commend myself to Your Most Illustrious Excellency, praying all happiness be yours.

let him be given five soudi per month

Thommaso demedici ... 11 October 1568

Most devoted servant of Your Most Illustrious Excellency,

Bartolomeo Amannati

Appendix 4

ASF, Urbino. Cl. I, Div. G, CCXXXVI, terza parte. fol. 1172r:

Firenze

9 lug[li]o 1558

Ill[ustrissi]mo et Ecc[ellentissi] ma Sig[no]re Oss[ervandissi]mo.

M[e]s[ser] Fabio Barignani, mi ha fatto sapere V[ostra E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] vorrebbe che l'acordo che si fece l'anno del [15]54 fra M[e]s[ser] Altobello, gia mio cognato, e me, intorno alla causa della dote ch'io ho da riavere da lui, nove anni sona passati, hora andasse innanzi, per il che mi e parso co[n] questa mia ricarrere a V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] pensando al certo no[n] meno essere intesa, e aiutata da lei, merce della sua naturale bonta, che si sia egli, che mi ha tenuto il mio, e fatto litigare tant'anni, contra ogni ragione, e contra la voglia della buona me[moria] di m[e]s[ser] Vitt[ori]o che non solame[n]te voleva ch'io lo riavesse, come si sa, ma ch'io restasse sua herede, di tutta la sua parte, che no[n] la volend'io acettare, anzi farne libero dono al detto suo fratello, e di quella, e d'altro che mio era, e stato poi cagione, ch'io so[n] stata tant'anni senza il mio, ed'havere litigato seco, co[n] tanto mio danno, e dispiacere. di poi convened'io, per com[m]andame[n]to di . V[ostra] S[ignoria] I[llustrissima] a fare il detto acordo, egli no[n] solame[n]te lascio passare quel termine ch[e] ne eravamo co[n]vennuti, senza darmi il mio, ma mi lascio di nuovo ricominciare La lite, la quale il S[ign]or Montino mi disse qui in Fiorenza ch'io seguitasssi, poi ch'egli haveva mancato, e io disobligata, e vende tutte le robbe, ad'ogni'altra cosa pensa[n]do fuor ch'a sodisfar me, che dal cinqua[n]ta in qua so[n] stata maritata, senza haver d'intrata un soldo. e senza altro assegname[n]to che questo. e hora ch'io sperava riavere, la dote, e gli usufrutti miei, egli torna di nuovo a V[ostra] S[isgnoria] I[llustrissima] acio ch[e] l'acorda ch'egli no[n] lascio andare innanzi all'hora, vada adesso. et io che no[n] credo ch'ella voglia p[er] giovare a lui nuocere a me, che no[n le sono manco affezionatt[issi]ma serva, e sugetta, [fol. 1072v]: ne 'I mio marito ser[vito]re che si sia lui, ne qualunche altro, la prego che per I'Amor di dio, la lasci ch'io habbi il mio, che no[n] veggio came cosi mi possa piu stare. e vendendasi quelle robbe che mie, seca[n] do la volonta del gia detto mio marito erano. esso M[e]s[ser] Altobello habbia quello di piu ch[e] le si venderanno, che ben se ne potra contentare, havendole ta[n]t'anni godute, e me haver fatto stentare. e perch'io spero assai, nella bonta, e clemenzia di V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] che no [n] vorra che mi sia fatto torto, faro senz'altro piu dire, qui fine, pregando n[ost]ro s[ign]or Dia che la canservi longame[n]te felice. e basciandole co[n] ogni humilta le mani, insieme col mio marito me le racomando. di fiorenza alli viiij di luglio del lviij.

Di V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima] Devotiss[im]a serva

Laura Battiferra, degli Amannati:

Florence

9 July 1558

Lord Most Illustrious, Most Excellent, and Mast Worthy of Reverence,

Messer Fabio Barignani has let me know that Your Illustrious Excellency would like to proceed now with the agreement reached in the year 1554 between Messer Altobello, my former brother-in-law, and me in the law suit for the dowry that I was supposed to have from him nine years ago, which is why it seemed appropriate to me to appeal to Your Illustrious Excellency in this letter, thinking surely that I would receive no less understanding and help from you, thanks to your natural goodness, than he has, who has kept what is mine and caused litigation for so many years, against all reason and against the wishes of Messer Vittorio, God rest him, who not only wanted me to have it back, as we know, but to be his heir for all his portion, which I myself did not want to accept, but preferred freely to make a gift of it to his said brother; and that, and more due me, has been why I have for so many years gone without what is mine and been in litigation with him, to my great detriment and displeasure. Then, after I acce pted the terms of said agreement at the commandment of Your Illustrious Lordship, he not only let pass the deadline we had agreed upon without giving me what was mine, but he let me resume the law suit, which Mr. Montino told me here in Florence that I should pursue, since I was not bound because he had broken his word, sold all the estate, his mind bent on doing anything but satisfying me, who since 1550 until now have been married without having a penny of income and with nothing else in my name. And now that I was hoping to recover my dowry and the interest, he comes back to Your Illustrious Lordship again so that the agreement, which he did not let proceed then, should go ahead now. And because I do not believe that in order to help him you would wish to harm me, who am no less your most affectionate servant and subject, or harm my husband your servant too, or anyone else, I pray you that for the love of God, you let me have what is mine, for I do not see how I can go on like this. And from the sale of th ose things that, in accordance with the wishes of my aforesaid husband, were mine, let Messer Altobello have the profit, for he should be well content with that, having enjoyed them for so many years and forcing me to scrimp. And because I firmly hope in the goodness and clemency of Your Illustrious Excellency, who will not want me to be wronged, without saying more I shall here come to a stop, praying our Lord God to preserve you long in happiness. And kissing your hands with all humility, together with my husband I entrust these matters to you. From Florence the 8th of July, 1558.

The most devoted servant of Your Most Illustrious Excellency

Laura Battiferra, degli Amannati

Appendix 5

THE BATTIFERI

The Battiferri belonged to Urbino's intellectual aristocracy, a well-to-do professional class of doctors and lawyers. The first to settle in Urbino was Vincenzo Battiferri, who came into the city from the outlying town of Mercatello su Metauro. His son Jacopo (d. 1468), a distinguished physician, had two legitimate sons, Matteo, who became a cleric, and Francesco, who was born posthumously and carried on the male family line; two legitimate daughters, Francesca and Elisabetta; and two natural daughters, Ginevra and Antonia. For the genealogy, unpublished, see the wills of Jacopo Battiferri of 1468 (S.A.S.U., F.N., Not. Vanni Simone d'Antonio, vol. n. 16, [1459-1486], fols. 103r-104r) and Francesco Battiferri of 1536 (S.A.S.U., F.N., Not. Geri Francesco, vol. n. 475 [1525-1568], fols. 56r-48v). Don Franco Negroni, an Urbino scholar with extensive archival experience, believes that Giovan'Antonio (d. 1561) was born of an unknown father to this Antonia, the natural daughter of Jacopo (personal communication). If so, Vernaccia's eighteenth-century family tree (fol. 37r) is mistaken when it shows Giovan'Antonio as the son of Matteo, son of Jacopo. Vernaccia passed into print in an often cited source on Urbino history, Degli uomini illustri di Urbino comentario, 75, by the Jesuit Carlo Grossi: "Questo Matteo fu padre di Antonio, ch'ebbe per figlia la celebratissima rimatrice Laura Battiferri, onore del sesso, della patria e delle lettere italiane." Matteo did follow professionally in his father's footsteps as a doctor (see Paola Zambelli), but he seems not to have married; he became a cleric, as would Giovan'Antonio, his nephew. If clerks in the apostolic chamber were in holy orders, as Giovan'Antonio was, they were automatically papal chaplains (Partner, 1990, 12). Although documents refer to Giovan'Antonio only as "clericus" and not "presbyter," several objects listed in his house at his death suggest that he said Mass: "un camiscio con le altre fornimenti da prete eccetto la pianeta" [a shirt with other furnishings for a priest except the chasuble] and "una patena d'argento dorato" [a gilded silver paten]. Many papal familiars had not taken vows as priests (Partner, 1976, 205-6). Even cardinals were not necessarily priests. Alessandro Farnese, the future Paul III, maintained a concubine and did not enter priestly orders until after he had been a cardinal for many years (Pastor, 11, 18-21). One of Giovan'Antonio's collateral descendants in the seventeenth century, Marc'Antonio Vergilii Battiferri, recalls that this ancestor was "truly excellent in humanistic studies" (Urbino, Biblioteca Universitaria, Fondo Comune, Busta 131, Fasc. I, fol. 225r). Lazzari (see above, n. 4) reports that he was admired for his "grande dottrina." A fifteenth-century Greek manuscript now at the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria (gamma.K.7.19) once belonged to Laura's father, as an inscription on a leaf pasted inside the front attests: "Regolette greche di Giovanni Antonio Battiferro di Urbino." The codex, in an elegant and expert hand (Mioni 1 :178, no. 102), contains the Erotemata grammatices of Manuel Chrysoloras. I thank the Biblioteca Estense director, Dr. Ernesto Milano, for kindly providing information on this manuscript.

Appendix 6

AMMANNATI'S BOOK PURCHASES

I am grateful to Paul Gehl of the Newberry Library for helping me identify Ammannati's note, "uno dialogi di Gioan Andrea Lilio quarto legato" as Due dialogi di M. Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano. Nel primo de' quali si ragiona de le parti Morali, e Civili appertenenti a Letterati Cortigiani, et ad ogni gentil'Huomo, e l'utile, che i Prencipi cavano da i Letterari. Nel secondo si ragiona de gli errori de Pittori circa l'historie, con molte annotationi fatte sopra il Giuditio di Michelangelo, et altre figure, tanto de la vecchia, quanto de la nova Cappella: Et in che modo vogliono esser dipinte le sacre Imagini (Venice, 1565). The first item in ammannati's account record, Architeture, was probably purchased in the translation from the Latin made by Cosimo Bartoli, published by Lorenzo Torrentino in Florence, 1550 and republished at the same press in 1565. The fourth is Bartoli's own treatise, Del modo di misurare le distantie, le superficie, i corpi, le piante, le provincie, le prospetitive, et tutte le altr e cose terrene, che possono occorrere agli huomini. Secondo le vere regole d'Euclide, e degli altri piu lodati scrittori (Venice, 1564). For Bartoli's modern biography, see Bryce. Pietro Cataneo's I quattro primi libri di architettura appeared in Venice at the Aldine press in 1554; the Bolognese Sebastiano Serlio published his seven books on architecture seriatim, beginning in 1537. The Sienese Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480-1539), who succeeded Baldassare Peruzzi as architect of the Duomo of Siena, served Italy's most powerful princes as a military engineer and arms caster. He composed the first treatise on metal casting, a book that would have been important to Ammannati not only as a sculptor who worked in both metal and stone, but also as the creator of fountains that required elaborate hydraulic conduits. First published in 1540, Biringuccio's Pirorechnia (in Ammannati's list, "Pirotemia") went through nine editions in one hundred and forty years (Biringuccio, i-xix). Carlo Passi, with whom Battiferra had a sonnet exchange, had recently republished his supplement to Paolo Giovio's history: La selva di varia istoria di Carlo Passi. La quale avanti andava attorno stampata sotto name fittitio di Annotationi dell'infortunio nella prima, e seconda parte delle Istorie di Monsig. Giovio. Dove per via di discorso s'ha pienissima info informatione di tutte quelle cose piu norabili d'istoria, e di alrre materie, che sommariamente sono state ricordate dal Giovio; rivedute, e migliorate in questa seconda impressione dall'autore. See his sonnet to her ("Donna che sete oriental fenice") and her reply ("Voi che la dove al mio pensier non lice"), Ms. Casanatense 3229, fol. 21v. The Ammannati acquired their "nuova selva" on Mar. 23, 1564 (1565 modern style). On Jan. 14, Gherardo Spini delivered Laura's recently published Penitential Psalms at a cost of 13.4 soldi, and on May 18, her Primo libro was purchased for 1 lira, meaning that as of 1565 the first edition was still in print. For the entire book purchase record, see ASF, C ony. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 241, fol. 28r. Payne's study, although somewhat over salted with modish jargon, provides a useful panorama on Renaissance architectural treatises, and she offers good evidence for the humanistic breadth of the architects' culture. For Ammannati, see also mote specifically Canali.

* This essay, part of a book in progress, was presented in a shorter version at the meeting of the RSA in College Park, Maryland, 1998. I would like to thank James Beck for encouraging me to develop the idea for publication. Rebecca West first pointed my thinking in the direction of "Creative Couples" when she invited me to participate in a session by that title with a paper on Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante for the annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1992. Much of the archival work was conducted in 1996 while I was a Visiting Professor at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Villa I Tatti, on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and sabbatical support from the University of Pennsylvania. For other help, I would like to thank Giulia Calvi, Malcolm Campbell, Philippe Canguilhem, Gino Corti, Fabio Finotti, Sheila ffolliott, Robert Gaston, Paul Gehl, Nicola Gentili, Rab Hatfield, Don Fran co Negroni, Armando Petrucci and Franca Petrucci Nardelli, Patricia Rubin, Carlo Vecce, and Geotgianna Ziegler. Gracious and patient assistance was provided at the Archivio di Stato, Urbino, by the archivists Leonardo Moretti and Giuseppina Paolucci. The generous readings of James V. Mirollo, Deborah Parker, and Paul F. Grendler, who reviewed the manuscript for Renaissance Quarterly, brought useful further suggestions. The article was revised with new findings drawn from the collection of The Newberry Library, where I was privileged to hold a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in Medieval and Early Modern Gender Studies while on sabbatical leave from the University of Pennsylvania, 20001. All translations are the author's unless otherwise indicated. For citations from sixteenth-century documents and editions, punctuation and spelling have been modernized in the sonnets but left unchanged in prose quotes and book titles.

(1.) Piero Vettori, recalling the recent funeral of Benedetto Varchi, is one contemporary who mentions them together affectionately in a letter to Mario Colonna of 3l January 1566. This missive, in a Tuscan translation possibly by

the poetess herself, heads the manuscript containing her late, unpublished canzoniere (Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, Ms. 3229, fols. 2r-5v). For the Latin original, see Vettori. Ciardi Du Pre, 1961, 1995, has commented on Ammannaris unfortunate fortuna, due partly to the fact that Vasari, perhaps for reasons of personal rivalry denied him a full vita. On Vasari's habit of occluding the accomplishments of his rivals, see Pilliod. Some of Ammannati's important work is lost (a Neptune for Piazza San Marco in Venice, Fountain of the Muses for the Gualandi of Vicenza), and some "disappeared" because it was never installed as planned (the Tomb of Mario Nari, Juno Fountain). Overshadowed historically by Michelangelo before and Giambologna in the generation after, he came to be associated m ainly with one much criticized project, the Neptune Fountain in Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Laura too has suffered in her fortuna, doubtless because of her close Ammannati connection. Her splendid portrait by Broozino became separated from the name of its sitter and was not re-identified until the twentieth century (Kirkham, 1998). Much of her poetry, including the work from her most mature years, was never published. What she did publish in her lifetime remained for the most part out of print until 2000, which saw a new edition of her Primo libro dellopere toscane.

(2.) Battiferra's biographical tradition begins in a digression from the Vita of Ammannati in the seventeenth-century lives of the artists by Baldinucci, 4:2-55. Her life has been sketched in brief notices since then, e.g., Girardi and Rabitti, the latter both in Russell, ed. and in Panizza and Wood, eds. Rabitti rather surprisingly asserts that Battiferra "left no complete canzoniere" (her Primo libro dell'opere toscane of 1560 is, in fact, an elegantly structured lyric anthology), but she rightly emphasizes the importance to Battiferra's art of her relationship with her husband (Panizza and Wood, eds. 43-44). For new biographical documentation from primary sources, including the names of Battiferra's mother and her siblings, information on her father's life and holdings, and unpublished or forgotten manuscript material, see Kirkham, 1996; 1998; 2001. The single most important collection of documents is in the Archivio di Stato in Florence (hereafter ASF), among the records of the Conventi Soppressi da Leopo ldo, filze 238-242. Some scattered documentation on the Battiferri is also to be found in Urbino, in the University Library and in the State Archive. The main source for information on the patrician Coccapani is Tibraboschi, but he only records the lives of the men. One of them, the jurist and poet Cesare Coccapani, served around 1560 as podesta in Lucca, where he became the lover of the poetess Chiara Matraini.

(3.) ASF, Cony. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 7r-8r. From that same brief of 1543, we learn that Laura had two siblings: Ascanio, her brother german (probably older); and Giulio, a half-brother by another unmarried mother.

(4.) Partner, 1990, 18, characterizes the Vatican as a "plutocratic republic." Giovan'Antonio's biographer is Lazzari (Colucci, 26:159-60), whose information is probably reliable: "Era Conte Palatino e Protonotario Apostolico. Dall'arcipretura di Barberano della Diocesi di Viterbo, dove stette per piu anni, passo alla dignita di Proposto di Fossombrone. Visse nella Corte Romana, dove per la grande dottrina fu in molta stima. Ebbe amplissimo privilegio dal Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, cui fit carissimo, di crear Protonotarj Apostolici d'onore, fat Dottori e legitimare bastardi. Di fatti nel nostro Archivio si trovano isrrumenti di legitimazione di bastardi e di Notarj creati da lui nel 1543 e in altro tempo." What he writes in a companion sketch of the daughter Laura is perfectly accurate. Documents in the Archivio di Stato, Urbino, indicate that Giovan'Antonio collected his benefices over many years: as of 1 February 1527, he was rector of the church of Sts. Peter and Stephen at San Donato in the diocese of Ur bino (S.A.S.U., EN., Not. Guiducci Federico, vol. n. 238 [1525-1529], fol. 122r); as of 19 October 1535, provost of Fossombrone and scriptor of apostolic briefs (S.A.S.U., F.N., Not. Guiducci Felice, vol. n. 772 [1529-1528], fol. 1165r); as of 14 July 1537, rector of San Biagio in the diocese of Rimini and scriptor of apostolic briefs (S.A.S.U., F.N., Not. Guiducci Felice, vol. n. 772 [1529-1528], fol. 1453r; as of 8 September 1537, rector of San Paolo in the city of Urbino and scripror of apostolic briefs (S.A.S.U., F.N., Not. Guiducci Felice, vol. n. 772 [1529-1528], fol. 1491r). Battiferri also became at some point rector of the church of San Secondo in Castelbuccione, just outside Urbino, according to a claim against his estate lodged by the priest Bernardino of that church 21 October 1564 (ASF, Cony. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fol. 203r).

(5.) Any clerk whose work brought him into personal contact with the pope or who enjoyed powerful patronage could be appointed a papal familiar, a status which conferred dignity, legal privileges, and the right to wear violet, tawny brown, or red instead of proper clerical attire. Leo X (1513-1522) had 418 familiars and 265 servants, a "family" of 700 persons. As centers of patronage, cardinals, too, maintained great households in private palaces. In 1533, under Clement VII, Ippoliro de' Medici had over 500. Partner does not say how large a family Giovan'Antonio's patron Giulio de' Medici had; his annual income at the peak of his career in 1521 was 20,000 florins. See Partner, 1976, esp. 21, 135-37, and 1990, esp. 60-61. The office of count palatine, which began in the early Middle Ages, meant someone named by emperor or pope to act on his behalf in certain legal matters. In return for payment, Leo X created many more of them among the papal secretaries and scriptors. The office gave them the right to create notaries, to legitimate bastards, and to confer doctorates. I thank Paul Grendler for this information on counts palatine. The seven notaries of the Holy See who were protonotaries, a sought-after rank, had duties related to the issue of consistorial benefices, and they took substantial fees for their notarial acts (Partner, 1990, 4, 21-22). An inventory of the contents of Giovan'Antonio's house at the Arco di Portogallo (ASF, Cony. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 57v-58r) after his death hints at his life-style: several items of red ("armisino") clothing, a "collar of blue velvet and a leash for a greyhound."

(6.) Under the Chamber's wide umbrella functioned a hierarchical college of officers who included a cardinal chamberlain, a vice-chamberlain, a treasurer, a depositary (banker), secretaries, clerks, and scriptors. Most were Italian, and many had legal training since they usually came from wealthy families who could afford to send them to university. At any given time there were in the Chamber 150 notaries, 100 solicitors of apostolic letters, 60 minor abbreviators, and 80-odd scriptors of briefs. About a third entered service in their twenties, and it was typical for them to spend many years in office, as Battiferri did. For a classic picture of the court of Pope Paul III see Dorez's magisterial study. A new papal college of scriptores brevium was created in 1503 (Partner, 1990, 12-16 and passim). At least as early as 1 February 1527 Giovan' Antonio must have been connected to Rome because an Urbino document of that date records that he appointed an agent in the Roman curia, S.A.S.U., F.N., Nor. Guiducci Fede rico, vol. n. 238, 1525-29, fol. 122r.

(7.) Vasari, speaking of Vincenzo da San Gimignano, emphasizes the prelate's wealth (3:12): egli si sforzo sempre d'imitare la maniera di Raffaello da Urbino; il che si vede anco nel medesimo Borgo dirimpetto al palazzo del cardinale d'Ancona in una facciata della casa che fabrico Messer Giovanantonio Battiferro da Urbino, il quale, per la stretta amicizia che ebbe con Raffaello, ebbe da lui il disegno di quella facciata, et in corte per mezzo di lui molti benefici e grosse entrate. Fece dunque Raffaello in questo disegno, che poi fu messo in opera daVincenzio, alludendo al casato de' Battiferri, i Ciclopi che battono i fulmini a Giove; et in un'altra parte Vulcano che fabrica le saette a Cupido, con alcuni ignudi bellissimi et altre stone e statue bellissime." This same Vincenzo, according to Vasari (3:12), decorated the facade of San Luigi de' Francesi with scenes illustrating the death of Caesar and a triumph of Justice; near Campo dei Fiori he painted the Magi following their star, and he produced "infini te other works for that city [Rome], whose air and site seem in large part responsible for inspiring people to marvellous things." Vincenzo was active in Rome 1513-1515, 1517-1520, 1525-1527 (Vasari, 3:12, n. 8).

(8.) For more information on the Battiferi, see Appendix 5.

(9.) Very little has so far emerged concerning Laura's birth and childhood. The document of Giovan' Antonio's children's legitimation states that they are entitled to inherit even if their father were to die intestate. Battiferri's will (ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 48r-49v) disinherits his son Ascanio and leaves the bulk of his estate to Laura. Since there is no mention in it of the second son named in the legitimation document, that boy must have meanwhile died. For the death inventory of his real estate in Rome and Urbino, with a total value of 8,650 scudi, see ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fol. 61r. Battiferri left debts and bequests totalling 2,624 scudi, not counting the major item he still owed-- Laura's dowry, a compromise sum of 1,500 scudi. More than the 1,000 originally contracted for her first marriage and less than the 2,000 recommended by the Duke of Urbino, it recognizes an accrual of interest on the lower figure.

(10.) Legend had it in Urbino that Battolomeo first knew Laura when, around 1538, he was working on a portal for the Compagnia della Morte [Confraternity of the Dead], only steps from the front door of her house on the Via Porta Maia (Guidi, 10, n. 13). Laura's first marriage must have begun sometime after February, 1543, because the document of legitimation still refers to her by her maiden name. Sereni's will survives, dictated in a last illness on 25 January 1549, with words of affection for the woman he was leaving (ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 9r-10v). Born on 30 November 1523 (Kirkham, 1998, n. 4), Laura was left a widow at twenty-five.

(11.) Ammannati, like his wife, still awaits a comprehensive modern biography. As an older man, around 1580, he left an autograph note with some personal ricordi (ASF, Conv. soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 242, fols. 16r-17r). His contemporaries Vasari and Borghini mention him, but the first vita of substance did not appear until about a century after his death, with Baldinucci's lives of the artists. In modern times, Fossi has contributed usefully to the subject. See also Belli Barsali, magni, and Venturi, but none is fully reliable. Welcome new information appears in the commemorative anthology edited by Rosselli del Turco and Salvi; see also Kiene's overview of Ammannati's work; the latter contains occasional factual innacuracies but offers excellent photographic documentation. On his early activity, the most richly documented studies are those by Davis; for Urbino, Kinney, chap. 6, is also helpful.

(12.) This arch, which no longer exists, was built in the time of the Emperor Hadrian on ruins of the Ara pacis Augustae. In the Renaissance it acquired the name "Portuguese" from Cardinal George of Portugal, who purchased a Quattrocento palace beside it known today as Palazzo Fiano. A commemorative marker at its former site, on the northeast corner of the Corso at the intersection with Via della Vita, announces that it was destroyed by Pope Alexander VII in 1665 to straighten the street so carriages could pass more quickly. At the time of that urge to urban renewal, some of the surrounding houses were also razed, perhaps including the Battiferri residence. Its exact location remains unknown. There is an abundant documentation on this property in Ammannati-Battiferri family papers in the Florentine archives. It records their struggle over decades to assert a rightful claim after Laura's n'er-do-well brother secretly sold it to pay off the father of a shady lady with whom he had became entangled. See ASF, Conv . Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 293r; 314r; Kirkham, 2000. Laura, who inherited the house from her father, continued to maintain it and receive rent of 35 scudi annually until her death. Over the years, Ammannati seems to have stayed there when he was in Rome on business. For Cinquecento illustrations of what the Portuguese Arch looked like, see Bober and Rubenstein, frontispiece and 228.

(13.) Battiferra's first husband, like Ammannati, had been a creative person dependent on courtly patronage. Perhaps Laura's status as the legitimized daughter of a cleric (who was himself the illegitimate son of an illegitimate mother) limited her marriageability. On 24 February 1554, Giovan'Antonio, Laura, and Bartolomeo met in Rome to reach an agreement concerning the dowry payment still owed to her second husband (ASF, Cony. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 13r-14r). The 2,000 scudi recommended by the Duke of Urbino, mentioned in this summary of the matter drafted by a notary in the Apostolic Chamber, seem never to have been paid in full to Ammannati, who for many years received nothing at all from his father-in-law. Laura's dowry is still listed as an unsettled matter at the death of Giovan'Antonio Battiferri. On Chiara Matraini's legal battle with her son over control of her dowry, see Rabitti, 1994a. In his last will of 3 August 1561, Giovan'Antonio Battiferri leaves 100 scudi to the pharmacist Mar ino degli Angelini "to dower his daughter" (ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 48r-49v). Ammannati, in his will of 25 March 1587, bequeaths 100 scudi each to the daughters of Bartolomeo and Antonio Gherardi, brothers and stonecutters of Settignano, when the girls reach age eighteen, "for their dowries" (ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 4588, ser Francesco Albizzi, testamenti, 1578-1597, fols. 53r-54r). A summary of the case surrounding the Roman townhouse at the Portoguese Arch, which quotes the annual rent at 35 scudi, appears in ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fol. 314r. For Giovan'Antonio's purchase of the farm at Formello for 525 scudi, see ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fol. 27r. I thank Rab Hatfield for calling to my attention how extraordinarily large Laura's dowry was for a woman marrying an artist.

(14.) Ammannati, an autodidact who acquired his education through association with lettered artists and cultured patrons, refers in his ricordi (see above, n. 11) to his "closest relatives," the descendants of his father's brother, now in the third and fourth generations, hence his great-nieces and great-nephews and their children. He describes them as "scarpellini" from Settignano. He prefers to think of himself as Florentine, proudly affirming that Cosimo had granted him citizenship. Although Baccio Bandinelli's first known school was in Rome during the decade after Ammannati's apprenticeship, which lasted from ca. 1523 to 1527, from what the older artist reports in his memoir about his habits as a reader of the Latin classics and his production of Petrarchan poems -- two hundred of them, all lost -- he must have been the most humanistic of the teaching sculptors then active in Florence. On Bandinelli's belief in art as an intellectual pursuit ("disegno"), see Wazbinski's richly documented essay. The evolvi ng identity of the artist into a well-rounded individual began in the Quattrocento with such figures as Alberti and Mantegna. Mirollo, 5-20, discusses the new status of the artist in the sixteenth century as "an activity involving the head as well as the hand" On Ammannati and Venetian humanism, see the articles by Puppi and Lattanzi, who mention such names as Trissino, Bembo, and Palladio in the network that must have drawn in Ammannati.

(15.) Davis, 1976a, has meticulously documented the timing and logistics of Ammannati's move from Padua to Rome. Benavides, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Padua, published over forty-five books -- not only on the law, but also a commentary in both Italian and Latin on Petrarch's verse, a volume of Petrarchan sonnets, and several long novelle on the highest Boccaccian register with justice as a central theme. The house he bought in Padua, where Ammannati lived with him between 1544 and 1548, was a gathering place for intellectuals, a musical theater, and a museum known as an "the Academy of the Muses." After their extended period of close association, Ammannati and Benavides were to become enduring friends, as documented by correspondence that continues into the 1570s. Kinney, 114-19, gives biographical background on Benavides.

(16.) ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 15r-15v: "Per il presente [foglio] faccio fede io Hieronimo de Lombardi de Venetia scultore nella casa di Loreto et habitante in Racanati qualmente ritrovandomi in Loreto alli xvii de Aprille del presente anno 1550, fui richiesto da messer Gioan Antonio Battiferro di essere presente ad un sposalitio tra madonna Laura sua figliola et messer Bartolomeo Amanati scultore fiorentino. Et cosi insieme con...Nicolo Casale ei ci condusse in...dinanti alla capella del Tabernacolo...havendo in compagnia il detto Bartolomeo. Et condotti che ne hebbi in tale loco si parlo et chiamo la figliola...madonna Laura et la condusse in presentia nostra. Et con esso messer Gioan Antonio con parole solite ad usarsi in tali effetti disse alla prefata madonna Laura se gli piaceva di pigliare per suo legittimo sposo e marito detto messer Bartolomeo, qual rispose che si er dopoi disse al detto messer Bartolomeo se gli piaceva de...pigliar per sua sposa et moglie detta madonna Laura. Esso messer Bartolomeo rispose che si. Er in tal modo l'uno all'altro diede la mano in fede promettendosi et consenrendo luno all'alrro per verba de presenri si come ho visro usarsi nel contrhere di matrimonii. Onde al presenre richiesto di cio dal prefato messer Barrolomeo ho fatto la presente di mia mano." The ink has faded nearly to invisibility, and parts of the document are no longer legible. As much as could be deciphered, I owe to the expertise of Gino Corti. Girolamo personally wrote, dated, and signed his sworn statement on the 30th day of May of 1550. For the name of this witness, which varied, I have preferred the modern spelling Girolamo Lombardo, except in quotes of the period where it appears in the genitive plural, Girolamo de' Lombardi.

(17.) The fact that she did not marry in patria may have irked Guidobaldo, as we can surmise from a letter written by cardinal Alessandro Farnese in June, 1551, on behalf of the newlyweds to his sister the Duchess of Urbino, Vittoria Farnese della Rovere. Alessandro asks Vittoria to intervene and smooth things over with her husband, pointing out that Bartolomeo's talents will make him a desirable addition to Urbino, and, the groom did nor realize that he was doing anything wrong by not marrying there (Bottari and Ticozzi, 5:233-34).

(18.) Cloth fragments of the red crosses the Crusaders wore, laid between the bricks in reassembly of the Casa Santa, have been rediscovered in recent archeological exploration. On the history of the shrine, see Santarelli, 4-12; Le Marche, 414.

(19.) Vasari says in his Vita of Bandinelli (3:746) that he was critical of Andrea Sansovino, the artist in charge of the rivestimento, and that Raffaello da Montelupo finished the relief. The art historian's hostility toward Bandinelli is explained by Pilliod (39) in the context of rivalry for court commissions. Waldman (245), however, documents Bandinelli as a difficult and "tragically ineffective" personality Bandinelli was to return to Loreto, in 1537. Weil-Garris has reconstructed the sixteenth-century history of the sculptural decoration of the Casa Santa, a self-contained chapel-within-the-church measuring m. 9.52 x 4.10 (vol. 1), and she reproduces documents of payments year by year from 1514 to the artists who worked there from the master account book (vol. 2).

(20.) Beschi describes the sculpture museum in the Pitri Palace, the first such private gallery known in Europe. Vincenzo Cioli restored the antique figures, for which Ammannati designed the gallery space. The Loreto documents describe Simone da Michele Ciolli as a "scarpellino d'intaglio," that is, a stone cutter and carver (Weil-Garris, 1:52). Goldthwaite rosters the quarries around Florence, including Sertignano (223, 228). He explains the term scarpellino, which defined a guild of stone masons whose members were hewers, scapplers, and sculptors (xiv-xv).

(21.) See Vasari on Antonio da Sangallo (3:502-3) and on Tribolo (3:682-83). As a young man, Ammannati had studied Michelangelo's Medici Chapel, where Raffaele da Monrelupo executed one of the saints designed by the Master to flank his Madonna and Child Tribolo's waterworks for the grounds of the Medici villa at Castello (1537) set a challenging precedent for Ammannati, who imitated and outdid them in the elaborate Fountain of the Muses he conceived at Vicenza for Girolamo Gualdo, a wealthy poet who patronized the arts (1545-46). Ammannati would complete a fountain by Tribolo at Gasrello with his Hercules and Antaeus.

(22.) Vasari, Vita of Jacopo Sansovino (4:563): "Girolamo da Ferrara detto il Lombardo, del quale s'e ragionato nella vita di Benvenuto Garofalo ferrarese, et il quale, e dal primo Sansovino [Andrea], e da questo secondo ha imparato l'arte, di maniera che oltre alle cose di Loreto, delle quali si e favellato, e di marmo e di bronzo, ha in Vinezia molte opere lavorato. Costui se bene capito sotto il Sansovino d'eta di trenta anni e con poco disegno, ancora che avesse innanzi lavorato di scultura alcune cose, essendo piu tosto uomo di lettere e di corte, che scultore, attese nondimeno di maniera, che in pochi anni fece quel profitto che si vede nelle sue opere di mezzo rilievo che sono nelle fabriche della libreria e loggia del campanile di San Marco, nelle quali opere si porto tanto bene, che pote poi fare da se solo le statue di marmo et i Profeti che lavoro, came si disse, alla Madonna di Loreto" (emphasis added). According to Baldinucci, when Ammannati heard that Jacopo Sansovino "was working in Venice and winning fame as a great maestro," he left Baccio Bandinelli's Florentine school and journeyed to the Adriatic city. Jacopo had joined the exodus from Rome in the wake of the Sack in 1527 and by 1529, he had become chief architect to the Procurators of San Marco in Venice (Boucher, "Sansovino," 1.3). Ammannati would not have met Girolamo Lombardo, however, until a second sojourn in Venice, which may have begun late in 1540, after Sansovino had made a brief trip to Florence that could have resulted in an offer of further work. Lorenzo Lotto's account book places Ammannati in Venice in April of 1541 or 1542. Sansovino mentions in 1581 his collaboration an the portico decorations outside the Marciana Library: "Ne gli angoli de i volti, le figure de i vecchi con vasi versanti acqua sono significatiue di fiumi. Et nelle chiave che serrano i volti nel mezzo, sono teste di huomini, di donne, et di lioni interzate, le quali tutte furono scolpite dal Danese Cattaneo, da Pietro da Salo, da Bartolomeo Ammannati, e da diu ersi altri nabili et laudati scultori" (113r-v). For Lotto's record and the Sansovino reference, see Kinney (84-86). Girolamo, a disciple of Andrea and Jacopo Sansovino (Vasari 3:683), seems to have remained in Venice until 1543, when he appears in Loreto.

(23.) For these payments to Girolamo, see Weil-Garris, vol. 2, nos. 1278; 1295; 1296. On 8 February 1550, just a few weeks before Girolamo witnessed Laura's wedding, we find: "To Maestro Hieronymo di Lombardi, sculptor, 5 florins for a quantity of flour from the Casa [Santa] as partial payment for the prophet that he is making to decorate the Most Holy Chapel, against grain credited to the Casa." Other account entries, too, mention grain as a commodity in the economic chain of activity stretching from administrative headquarters in Rome to the artists at Loreto, who were paid for materials they purchased, labor, and their living expenses in the nearby towns. Receipts made out by the sculptor from Ferrara reveal the routing: "I, Hieronimo de' Lombardi sculptor, have received from the Casa Santa of Loreto 50 florins as partial payment toward what I am owed by this Casa Santa, and the accountant for said House, Messer Giovanni Battista Bandinelli, said he had got the money from the Camera Apostolica, to be deliv ered to him, through its treasurer, the Most Reverend Monsigneur of Macerata, toward payment for grain sent to the Chamber" (8 January 1558); "I Hieronimo Lombardo have received from the accountant Signor Giovanni Battista Bandinelli of Loreto 5 gold ducats, which he is paying me in the name of the Casa Santa in partial payment for what I am owed by the Casa. He said that money had been cashed by the Most Reverend Bishop of Macerata for grains sold to the Camera Apostolica, and in faith I have made the present statement in my own hand" (27 January 1558). I would like to thank Gino Corti and Nicola Gentili for helping me translate the language of the account books. In was Pope Julius II who put Loreto under Camera control in 1507.

(24.) Giovan'Antonio Battiferri must have already been resident in Rome by the second decade of the sixteenth century, based on what can be deduced from the facade design for his house. Raphael died on 6 April 1520; Vincenzo da San Gimignano, who executed his design, was working in Rome before then in 1513-15 and again in 1517-20 (Vasari 3:12). Davis, 1 976a, suggests that Battiferri may have known the Cardinal Protector of Loreto, Antonio Ciocchi del Monte da Sansovino, uncle of Pope Julius III.

(25.) Kirkham, 2000, reconstructs this stormy chapter in the Battiferri family history from unpublished documents.

(26.) "L'oratione sopra il Natale di Nostro Signore" survives in a single copy in a late sixteenth-century Jesuit hand as part of a miscellany (Macerata, Biblioteca Comunale Mozzi-Borgetti, Ms. 137). I am indebted to Carlo Vecce for obtaining a photocopy for me. See Kirkham, forthcoming, for the text with critical introduction. The portrait is discussed at the end of this essay.

(27.) Ammannati had a natural son named Claudia by "Maddalena, the Guiducci widow." He made provision for the boy during the latter's lifetime in his will of 1563 (ASF, Notarile Antecosimiano, 9344, fols. 75v-76v, ser Ioannes Baptista quondam Laurentii de jordanis notarius). "Claudio, suo figliuolo," appears several times between 1555 and 1557 in family documents as the errand boy who fetched items from the druggist (e.g., ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 241, fol. 15v). Describing an incident that took place in the fall of 1560, Benvenuto Cellini refers disparagingly to the boy: "At this time, the Duke went to make his triumphal entry into Siena, and Ammannato had gone there some months earlier to construct the arches. A bastard of his, who stayed behind in the Loggia, removed the cloths with which I kept my model of Neptune covered until it should be finished" (469). Furious that the commission for the Neptune went to Ammannati (see below and n. 46), Cellini here also insults his rival by slandering Bar tolomeo's wife with an outrageous accusation of infidelity. Mirollo, who discusses at length Cellini's Autobiography, notes the discrepancy between this outburst and the goldsmith's admiring words for Laura in his lyric poetry (111). The sonnet exchange that Cellini shares with Battiferra for her Prima libro dell'opere toscane (1560, 75), comparing her favorably with Orpheus and Petrarch, dates from after 1555 and before 1560, hence before the Neptune commission. Some hint of the reason for Laura's inability to bear a child, which her poetry suggests she regretted, may lie hidden in the long lists of items Claudio carried to them from the druggist.

(28.) For a description of the Primo libro and an index of its contents, see Kirkham, 1996.

(29.) Primo libro, 27; poem no. 37. The edition has page numbers, but it does not number the poems. I have assigned numbers to give an idea of the relative location of given poems within the total of 187 pieces. In his new edition (which modernizes the title as Il primo libro delle opere toscane), Guidi uses Roman numerals and assigns numbers only to Laura's poems. Sonnets paired in exchanges split the same number as parts a and b. I have preferred Arabic numerals and a comprehensive running count. In addition to modernizing punctuation (including accents) and capitalization in the Italian texts, I have made minimal editorial modifications to modernize spelling as follows: I eliminate the etymological h, change "et" to its modern counterparts ("e" or "ed" before a word beginning with a vowel), distinguish between u and v, change the palatal ti + vowel combination to zi + vowel (e.g., "gratia" > "grazia"), and change the archaic plural ending -ij to -i." Guidi reads in the last line of the sonnet "alti tesor"; the 1560 edition carries "altri tesor."

(30.) Primo libro, 38; poem no. 56.

(31.) Only sixteen letters survive, published by Gargiolli, ed. See Battifera, 1968.

(32.) There is general agreement that Laura was born in Urbino, and she probably spent her early years there, where she may have been convent educated. Her father travelled between Urbino and Rome, and perhaps Laura was taken to the Tiber city for Visits as a child.

(33.) One of her eclogues seems to be set precisely in this Fiesolan landscape (Kirkham, 2001). The sonnets that evoke environs of Maiano are only a fraction of her corpus. To the extent that bits have been sporadically reprinted, subjects almost always fall into three groups: religious piety, Rome, and the Maiano landscape. Luisa Bergalli's major anthology of 1726 dedicates 22 poems to Battiferra, more than any other single modern editor; apart from several addressed to women, they illustrate the typical trichotomy. The Fiori di rimatrici of 1846, 23, represents her with a single sonnet, set in Maiano, "Pria che la chioma, che mi die natura"; Croce, 361-62, remembers her with "A pie dell'onorate antiche mura," which names "Cecero"; in one of the two sonnets Flora gives her, 159-60, "Fra queste piagge apriche e chiusi orrori", Maiano, Mensola, Florence, and the Arno are all named; Baldacci, 274-76, allots her three sonnets, including again Flora's "Fra queste piagge." Baldacci defines her in the Petrarchan tr ain of Bembo and Della Casa, stemming from a tradition going back to Horace, and judges her a poet whose best efforts, still only at the level of "exercise," express her rejection of city life in favor of pastoral solitude.

(34.) For Vico's engraving and the letter from Benavides to Altoviti, see Davis, 1976a; and esp., 1976b: "[II colosso] da odore al mondo che costui habbia di gran lunga superare ogn'altro scultore famoso e chiaro, se Dio gli presta vita qualche anno, e che non gli manchi occasione, et ne fa fede questo solo, che egli sia tale, non essendo stato fatto colosso alcuno fin'hora da gli antichi in qua se non da costui, con tanto artificio, poi che una meraviglia ...."; "due Colossi con due cavalli simili alle statue di Fidia, e di Prasitele poste in Monte Cavallo; da porsi in una fontana." A number of the poems in Battiferra's Prima libro, both hers and others addressed to her, refer to her husband as "Phidias." See, e.g., her "Terza Ecloga" (Rome, Ms. Casanatense, Ms. 3229, fols. 38r-42r), whose characters are Alfeo and Galatea, Dafne and Fidia, and Tirsi (Cosimo and Eleonora; Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati, and Luca Martini), discussed by Kirkham, 2001. In similar fashion, mutandis mutandi, the artist- poets Michelangelo and Bronzino reincarnated Apelles and Apollo; Parker 15; 60-61; 88.

(35.) "This trio around Ammannati occurs in the Primo libro, 40-41, as poems no. 61" Quando io veggio del vago albergo fuori," 62 "Cosi sempre, Arno, in te sian chiare 1'onde,' and 63 "Febo, per l'amoroso e caldo zelo." Guidi is, I believe, in error when he dates no. 62 to 1552 or 1553 and identifies it as a sonnet about the river gods Arno and Tiber that Ammannati sculpted for the Villa Giulia in Rome.

(36.) Theseus was on his way home from the Calydonian boar hunt when the river Achelous in flood stage blocked his route, but compensated for the inconvenience by offering hospitality and telling stories about himself: "nec te committe rapacibus undis: / ferra traves solidas obliquaque volvere magno I murmure saxa solent. vidi contermina ripae I cum gregibus stabula alta trahi; nec fortibus illic / profuit armentis nec equis velocibus esse. multa quoque hic torrens nivibus de monte solutis I corpora turbineo iuvenalia flumine mersit." In the form of a bull, Achelous was defeated by Hercules, who wrenched off one of his horns; the naiads took it and filled it with fruit and flowers (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8. 551-57; 9. 1-88). Work to rebuild Ponte Santa Trinita did not begin until 18 April 1567. The costly new bridge, much admired, was completed March 17, 1569, and by 15 September 1570, all the scaffolding had been removed; Baldinucci 349-52; Fossi 71-73. Based on an unpublished letter from Ammannari to Giovanni Caccini of 1578, Kiene, 124, believes that as of that date work on Ponte Santa Trinita was still ongoing. If so, perhaps it was for some late embellishment.

(37.) Bober and Rubinstein, 64-68. For Petrarch's catalogue of rivers, a tour de force that crams 25 of them plus the Mediterranean Sea into four verses, see Rime sparse 148, "Non Tesin, Po, Varo, Arno, Adige et Tebro." Battiferra displayed her expertise in describing river gods, specialties of her husband in sculpture, when she composed a series of five poems in which several -- Arno, Tiber, Ombrone, Arbia -- introduce themselves, perhaps in a procession or on floats, during a public Medici festival. Content suggests a dating sometime after the conquest ofSiena (1555). Unpublished and unknown in the literature on Battiferra, these poems are preserved as transcribed by Giambattista Strozzi the Younger or "ii Cieco" (155 11634) in his youth into a poetry miscellany of 459 folios now owned by the Newberry Library (Ms. Case 6a 11, vol. 1, fols. 169r-171r). At the bottom of the second poem in the series, he appends her name, "Mad. Laura Battiferra."

(38.) The exact date of Bronzino's surviving portrait of Laura (Florence, Palazzo Vecchio) is not documented. Bronzino seems also to have done another portrait of her, perhaps in pastoral costume, and it may have been this latter image, now lost, that was the subject of some of the sonnets. For issues of the dating and the rationale for assigning the Palazzo Vecchio panel to 1560-61, see Kirkham, 1998; Plazzotta offers a thoughtful discussion of the sonnets relating to Bronzino's painting(s) of Laura. Mirollo rightly sees in the portrait "a flattering pictorial essay on the significance of her name and profession" (113); Parker situates Laura and her portrait at the center of Bronzino's cultural circle, who in a singular "collective enterprise" converse about the panel in a sonnet sequence in his canzoniere (96-103). For a recapitulation of the Neptune history, see Campbell, 1985. A letter Ammannati wrote to Cosimo on 3 February 1563, says he began his supervisory work at the Pitti on 26 July 1561; Fossi, 47- 48. Laura had written less than a year before in her letter to Eleonora that she has decided to publish her "compositions" [componimenti] and dedicate them to the duchess non perche io gli credessi degni di tanta altezza, ma per mostrarlemi in quel modo, che io poteva, so non del tutto grata, almeno ricordevole in parte de' benifizii, che ella e I'Illustrissimo Signor Duca hanno fatto e fanno tutto il giorno, molti e grandissimi, a me et a M. Bartolomeo mio Marito, il quale non desidera altro insieme con esso meco, che di porere si come fedelmenre, cosi degnamente ancora, servirle" (Primo libro, A ii).

(39.) Primo libro, 121; poem no. 186. Battiferra might have been following precedent established by one of Benedetto Varchi's earlier protegees. See Tullia d'Aragona, who had dedicated her 1547 ed. of collected poetry to Eleonora.

(40.) See Kirkham, 1996, for discussion of the First Book, as an occasional anthology to celebrate the Medici conquest of Siena. Cirni describes the decorations that Ammannati built for Cosimo's triumphal entry into Siena in October, 1560. Ammannati had also been commuting from Florence to Siena to restore public structures damaged in the war and in a recent earthquake, Sembranti.

(41.) Laura's canzone, "Quanti leggiadri fiori," appears at the end of the volume published by Giunti in 1564, reprinted in facsimile with an excellent introduction by the Wittkowers. She also composed a sonnet on Michelangelo's death, which appears in the same volume, "Ragione e ben ch'i freddi e duri sassi."

(42.) Reporting on a visit to the church of San Pietro in Montorio where Ammannati was at work on the Del Monte family tombs for Julius III, Michelangelo wrote to Vasari on 22 August 1550, "I have been to see Bartolomeo, and it seems to me than he is doing as well as one possibly could. He works faithfully, and so well that he can be called the angel Bartolomeo" (Barocchi and Ristori, 4:366, no. 664; also cited by Fossi, 173-74). It had been Michelangelo, according to Bartoli (1567, 19v), who suggested that the Del Monte pope, Julius III, commission Michelangelo to do the tomb sculptures for his chapel.

(43.) The inventory includes "a canvas with a painted Deposition of Christ" and "seven bronze medals, with Messer Giovan'Antonio's seal in silver" (ASF Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fol. 57r-57v).

(44.) "The spelling of Bartolomeo Ammannati's last name has fluctuated. He usually signed "Amannati." Michelangelo's notebooks are in Florence, in the Casa di Michelangelo, with microfilm copies in the Archivio Buonarroti of the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana (Kristeller, 2:507). They contain two sonnets by Laura. One figures in an exchange with Benedetto Varchi on the death of Luca Martini ("Poi c'ebbe dell'antico Mecenate"); the other is part of an exchange with Bronzino on the death of the same man ("Sterile arbor son io, rozzo e selvaggio").

(45.) See Appendix 6 for more information on Ammannati's book purchases.

(46.) A fourth sculptor, Vincenzo Danti of Perugia, also competed. By 10 April 1560, Ammannati has already made models of wax and wood, as he writes Michelangelo in Rome, saying he hopes to submit them to the older artist for his advice; Barocchi and Ristori, eds., 5:219, no. 827. A letter by Leone Leoni in Florence to Michelangelo in October of the same year reports that Cellini is spouting poison and breathing fire" for jealousy because Ammannati had won the commission (Ibid., 5:232-33, no. 839). Installed in a temporary version for the wedding of 1565, the fountain was nor complete until 1575 with all its figures, the basin, and some seventy spouts, a marvel of hydraulic engineering (Campbell; Heikamp, 1995).

(47.) In a letter to Varchi of 11 December 1557, Laura writes; "I had letters from Signor Chiappino and from Messer Sforza, who say that my sonnet much pleased the Court; and I wanted to write this because it is all thanks to you" (Battiferra, 1968, 38-41). Which sonnet Varchi had advised her about is not clear, but it was probably one that praised Cosimo for his Sienese victory. Battiferra would dedicate the first of her Seven Penitential Psalms of 1564 to Faustina Vitelli, a natural daughter of Chiappino, who became a nun in Le Murate of Florence (Litta, vol. 15, tables 2, 3, for "Vitelli di Citta di Castello"). Chiappino's home in the Via Romana, where he hosted Ammannati until 1563, became in modern times the Museo di Storia Naturale according to Biagi, who refers to the soldier's patronage of the artist. Ammannati's sketches for Chiappino's house are in his notebook (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. Ed. Rare 120). See Cirni, 1560, for the description of the triumphal arch dominated by Cosimo and Chi appino in the Sienese ephemera of 1560.

(48.) Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, Ms. 3229, "Rime di Laura Battiferra," fol. 12r.

(49.) For Chiappino Vitelli's biography, see Promis. Speaking from a Sienese perspective, Roberto Cantagalli's La guerra di Siena gives a detailed account of how the old republican city was crushed by a besieging army, whose leaders included Chiappino, and forced to accept Medici rule. On the battle of Malta, see Blouet, 49-85. Vitelli went to Malta in summer, 1565, in the service of Cosimo, and he was among the engineers who strengthened the fortifications in 1566; Hoppen, 37. Hibberd, 267, notes that Cosimo sent galleys to the battle of Malta. Cirni, a detailed contemporary source loyal to Philip II and his allies, reports that by June of 1565, the Christian admiral, Giovan' Andrea Doria, had sent Don Garzia de Toledo to the port of Livorno with twenty-seven galleys to pick up Chiappino Vitelli, who was waiting with 4,000 Tuscan soldiers. By August, Chiappino was in Messina, and Don Garzia appointed him one of three commanders of the massing European forces. (1567, 80r-v; 104v-105r)

(50.) Where is the Hercules that Laura announces in honor of Chiappino? It cannot be the Hercules and Antaeus Ammannati sculpted for a fountain base that Tribolo had designed for the garden of the Villa Medici at Castello, a composition dated to 1559-60 (Forster; Cox-Rearick, 253). Since her sonnet postdates the Neptune, announced as already existing, Battiferra must refer to a piece that was never realized. A little more than a year after the naval action of fall 1565, in a letter of 12 February 1567, Phillip II asked Cosimo to release Chiappino for the Spanish wars in Flanders. From then on, save for a short trip to Tuscany in 1570 to accompany Cosimo to Rome when he received the grand ducal crown, Vitelli remained in the Low Countries with the Duke of Alba, and there he died in 1575.

(51.) For further discussion of Battiferra's hand with illustrations of the holograph of her Primo libro and autograph letters to Varchi, see Kirkham, 1996 and 1998. Kiene, 100, quotes the letter from Ammannati to Duke Cosimo (Fig. 5A and 5B, Appendix 3), which he says is unpublished. He gives the date of Tommaso's reply as the date of the letter. For Michelangelo's scripts, which developed from fifteenth-century mercantesca to sixteenth-century humanistic, see Perrucci, 37-38. Even though Michelangelo used writing extensively, as an old man he said that it caused him "grande affanno" (great effort).

(52.) ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 238, fols. 216r-v. The document begins, "Sia noto et manifesto a chi leggera questo presente scritto qualmente questo di 14 di Aprile 1564 io Bartolomeo Amannati et Laura Battiferra mia moglie damo vendemo et cedemo a Prospero Biccillo di Urbino la possessione che avemo nel territorio del castillo di via piana con tute le sue pertinentie et terre lavorative vignate prative sode et silve che havemo in deto luogo o altro li vicino con tutte le case." Among the witnesses was the architect and poet Gherardo Spini, the friend who carried books into their house in 1565 (see Appendix 6). The land sale document seems to be in the hand of Prospero Bicillo, purchaser and first witness, even though it is in Ammannati's voice. For the resolution of the dowry dispute, which granted Laura permission to sell Urbino property belonging to her father if Vittorio Sereni's heir did not pay, see above, n. 13.

(53.) Contucci saw the originals in Palazzo Albani at Urbino before it was dosed. The owners continue to deny scholars access. Petrucci and Nardelli, no. 40, reproduce Ammannati's letter to Michelangelo of 10 April 1560. I thank them for confirming my identification of the hand in that letter as Battiferra's. Her hand has been taken for Ammannati's in this correspondence with Michelangelo, in part because the letters carry Ammannati's name at the bottom, in part because the authoritative nineteenth-century Pini and Milanesi, 2: pl. 221, misattributed her hand to him in the sample they reproduce (the same Ammannati letter to Michelangelo of 10 April 1560 that the Petrucci reproduce). For a modern transcription of Michelangelo's correspondence, with the text of all five letters from Ammannati, see Barocchi and Ristori, eds., 5:143-44, 147, 154, 219, 250.

(54.) ASF, Conv. Soppr. da Leopoldo, filza 240, fol. 46r.

(55.) Ammannati's proposal for the main facade was considered too elaborate for the Jesuits' austere image of themselves, and the church front was not completed until 1676 by Alfonso Parigi the Younger (Kiene, 144). Named for John the Evangelist and distinguished by the diminutive from the Baptistry of San Giovanni down the street, the church (San Giovannino degli Scolopi since the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1775) and attached buildings that were the Jesuit Collegio are situated on the west side of Via de' Martelli on ptoperty that belonged to the Martelli family, just across the narrow Via de' Gori from Palazzo Medici Riccardi. The seventeenth-century biographer Baldinucci, writing with great admiration and praise, gives the fullest early account of the Ammannati's suppott of the Jesuits (2-53). Father Pirri's modern chronological reconstruction and assembly of the relevant documents remains unsurpassed. Fossi,1967, 180, places the date for the dedication of the church in 1582. Tacchi Venturi is a helpful m odern historian of the Jesuits in Florence, and for general background in a readable recent source, see O'Malley. See further Kirkham, 2000, on how Battiferra acquired the wealth that enabled her to patronize the Jesuits.

(56.) "Della qual sepoltura ne trassi piu onore, e giovamento, che di altre statue ch'io abbia fatto giammai; percio che, avendone buona relazione il beatissimo Pontefice, mi fece dona tivo di molta somma di danari, oltre ad ogni buono, e largo pagamento" (More honor and profit came to me from that tomb than from any other statues I ever made because when the most blessed Pontifex heard a favorable report on it, in addition to each good and generous payment, he gave me as a donative a sum of much money). I cite Ammannati's Letter of 1582 from Venturi, 10:2, 354.

(57.) Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, Ms. 3229, fol. 38r. The sonnet, never published, is the last datable piece Battiferra wrote. One of her earliest is a sonnet to Pope Paul III, "A un volger d'occhio, a un picciol cenno vostro," probably from late 1549 (Bib. Casanat., Ms. 3229, fol. 8v). These are the only two sonnets in her corpus dedicated to popes.

(58.) For more on the Allori panel and discussion of the Bronzino portrait with information on the related literature, see Kirkham 1998. Although Baldinucci assumes Allori painted this late image of Laura from life, Lecchini Giovannoni has suggested a date of ca. 1590, which makes it a posthumous tribute from her husband, who commissioned it.

(59.) Ms. Casanatense 3229, fols. 59v-60r. The sonnet has never been published. I follow the capitalization pattern in the manuscript for "Cielo." Ammannati speaks insistently of this manuscript in late correspondence with Claudio Acquaviva, general of the Jesuits in Rome. He was desperate to have if finished and published. Pirri rightly thought the project had never been carried out, but he mistakenly believed that the manuscript was lost since it never resulted in a book (40).

(60.) For recent studies on some of these couples, see Rose; Chadwick and de Courtivron.

(61.) Elissa Weaver informs me of a fifteenth-century Italian creative couple, both poets, on whom she presented a paper at the 2001 meeting of the RSA, "The Religious Theater of Antonia Tanini and Bernardo Pulci: A Collaboration?"

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