The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence.

The fifteenth-century neighborhood of the Green Dragon, one of the sixteen administrative districts into which Florence was divided, formed a triangle comprising most of the built-up area within the city walls from the river Arno at the Ponte alla Carraia south along the Via Serragli, bounded on the west by the San Frediano city gate, and on the east by the Piazza of Santo Spirito. Largely coterminous with the parish of San Frediano, the district also included the major Carmelite church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Eckstein's study, exemplary in its methodical examination of the neighborhood's secular as well as spiritual aspects, contains within the framework of its clear and simple design some subtle and imaginative analysis of a wealth of material. It also richly evokes what Ernst Gombrich described as the essence of plausible history: the experience of living people in concrete situations. The writers to whom Eckstein refers, from Boccaccio and Sacchetti through George Eliot to Vasco Pratolini (for whose Girls of San Frediano its "great heap of houses" was the setting), attest to the power of the district to stimulate imaginations from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. This very "particular" study adds depth to our perception of important general questions only recently raised and as yet insufficiently understood by historians of this city, specifically the nature of neighborhood, the experience of the working classes, and the role of religious and visual culture in the lives of ordinary Florentines. As Eckstein observes, the district of the Green Dragon had "a cultural vocabulary that was in important ways unique' (xi). This was due partly to its predominantly popolare character when compared, for example, with the largely patrician districts of the Red Lion and the Serpent, or the Golden Lion, dominated by the Medici family. In the late trecento it was strongly identified with the Ciompi; the streets of the Fondaccio and Cuculia and the area of the Badia di Camaldoli were rallying points for the wool-workers' uprisings.

Samuel Cohn has argued on the basis of statistics on residence and marriage patterns that, in contrast to patricians whose city-wide identity was apparent in their political affiliations and family alliances, the working classes looked largely to their local communities. Eckstein shows that the substance of community was as much spiritual as secular, based on participation in the life of the district's churches and the lay confraternities they housed. Fleshing out the texture of spiritual experience by exploring active community virtues like charity (the focus of John Henderson's studies of confraternities), Eckstein redresses the balance of Ronald Weissman's picture of these groups as refuges from agonistic social relations: "Drago emerges as a community whose everyday life was steeped to an extraordinary degree in religious symbol and metaphor, to the point that the sacred became indistinguishable from temporal concerns" (xxi). His portrait of the Drago artist Neri di Bicci, a leading light of the confraternity of Sant'Agnese and its celebrated performances of the Ascension play at the Carmine, is a lively contribution to our picture of the role of artist and his workshop in the life of a community finely attuned to the significance of visual symbols and deeply involved in the performance of sacred drama. It is both apt and poignant that the infiltration of the Company of Sant'Agnese by Lorenzo de' Medici and his followers should signal the invasion of the local community's identity by the growing power of the Medicean state.

DALE KENT University of California, Riverside