The Festival of San Giovanni: Imagery and Political Power in Renaissance Florence.

In this work Heidi Chretien describes and analyzes the political meaning and significance behind the celebration of the festival of San Giovanni in Renaissance Florence. Specifically she wants to examine how and why an ostensibly republican festival that celebrated the city of Florence and its relationship with its patron saint evolved into a Medicean propaganda vehicle that increasingly marginalized popular participation, diminished the ritual importance of San Giovanni, and emphasized the history of the Medici. The high point of this political and ritual evolution occurred under Duke Cosimo I (1519-1574), when "the festival ceased to be a vital, animating identity-generating force in Florentine public life" (95). While the city had once sponsored the joust held in honor of San Giovanni, now he sponsored it. While the calcio match played in honor of San Giovanni had once included mostly lower-class players, now just the aristocracy played.

For background Chretien first describes the origin and significance of the cult of San Giovanni at Florence; she then examines the origin and development of the festival and shows how interconnected it was with the republican identity of the city. Next she examines the initial changes and evolution made in the ceremony during the period of Medicean rule under Cosimo pater patriae and his immediate descendants. Since these Medici needed to hide authoritarian rule behind the guise of republicanism, they had difficulty appropriating the festival for their own purposes. Nevertheless, they succeeded well enough at this by introducing more pagan themes (such as the triumph of Aemilus Paulus) into the float and parade portion of the ceremony to draw visual connections for the audience between the glories and eternity of ancient Rome and those of the Medici. In addition, elements of Medicean history began to appear in the ceremony; for instance, the 1513 celebration honored the election of a Medici Pope and the 1516 celebration commemorated Lorenzo di Piero's success on the battlefield. Cosimo I, however, did not have to hide the nature of his rule, and he was free to alter the festival to suit his authoritarian needs, an alteration that Chretien sees depicted in the frescoes in the Room of Gualdrada in the Palazzo Vecchio, the new ducal residence. Chretien concludes this work with a comparative study of the festival of San Jacopo in Pistoia with that of San Giovanni in Florence and shows how and why the festival of San Jacopo never developed the civic meaning that San Giovanni did for Florentines.

According to the back cover, this book purports to be "an original, interdisciplinary" approach to the study of the festival of San Giovanni. It is not. First, misspellings and typographical errors abound throughout the text, notes, and bibliography. Second, there is little that is new here. Anyone who has read Richard Trexler's Public Life in Renaissance Florence (1980) will instantly recognize both the narrative and the analysis, though in Chretien's hands these come off poorly. Chretien depends too heavily on secondary sources to say anything that is original here. Her virtual exclusion of archival sources is another problem too. Lastly, and most damaging, Chretien's scholarship is sloppy. Footnotes 8 (28) and 24 (98) refer the reader to Christine (sic) Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (1985); but the citations are inaccurate, probably giving the wrong page number, for what Chretien paraphrases from Klapisch-Zuber is not in Klapisch-Zuber's text at the cited page numbers. Elsewhere, footnote 20 (59) cites Trexler's Public Life (452 n. 184); yet this has nothing to do with the point she is making. Chretien's paraphrases of Trexler's material on pages 33-34, 39, and 65 are, at points, almost word for word from Public Life (249-51), (261), and (513). The only quotation from Trexler on page 33 that she denotes as a quotation is a misquotation. Her sloppy and poor paraphrases of Trexler's words lead Chretien to some other errors. Regarding Florentine women as spectators during the celebration of San Giovanni, she claims: "These ornamented creatures became living testaments to their husbands' ability to dress them well; relics of their masters' wealth and power" (33) In Trexler's Public Life the phrase "relics of their masters' wealth and power" (249) refers to the goods displayed by artisans during the mostra, not to the wives of the Florentines.

Although this synthesis could have been useful for those interested in festivals, its sloppy scholarship, errors, and other problems (her connections between the paintings in the ducal palace and the festival of San Giovanni are weak and her comparison of Pistoia's and Florence's celebrations is forced) make me question the value of this book for Renaissance scholars.

LOUIS HAAS Duquesne University