Preface

Campbell, C. Jean

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Preface

C. Jean Campbell

The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano, 1290–1320

~IN 1287 THE COMMUNE OF SAN GIMIGNANO publicly banned the “game of courting.” The activity described in the relevant statute was properly associated in communal society with the celebration of May Day. It took the form of spontaneously organized processions through the city streets and involved the donation of “gifts of loving...

Author

C. Jean Campbell

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23578

Preface

In 1287 the commune of San Gimignano publicly banned the “game of courting.” The activity described in the relevant statute was properly associated in communal society with the celebration of May Day. It took the form of spontaneously organized processions through the city streets and involved the donation of “gifts of loving devotion” (flowers, kisses, or money) to a festive lady. This courtly game became an occasion for lavish spending and sumptuous personal display. Its vicissitudes in communal society offer a perfect example of the potentially volatile meeting between private display and public space that colored urban life in the age of Dante. The suppression of the game in San Gimignano, and other communal centers like Bologna, was undoubtedly a practical response to the civil disorder (theft and violence) that often followed in its wake. It was probably also an ethical response to the fact that when it met head-on with a public sphere ruled by a currency of money and words, the “game of courting” inevitably acquired associations with profligacy, solicitation, or outright prostitution. Yet while the commune attempted to suppress this and other forms of courtly display when they appeared spontaneously and outside their proper ritual context, it simultaneously embraced, and often sponsored, those aspects of the “game of courting” that lent the public sphere legitimacy and/or nobility.

For a time, in fact, centers like San Gimignano imagined their sovereignty in the meeting, however uneasy, between the private world of courtly ceremony and the public space of the commune. The late-thirteenth-century decorations of San Gimignano’s Communal Palace, which transform the walls of the public meeting hall into a festive court, are the most important surviving witnesses to this fascinating moment in the history of the art of the Tuscan communes. Even more precious, because they appear to be a unique survival, are the early-fourteenth-century frescoes of the podestà’s chamber in the same palace. This room, a secluded chamber inside the bell tower, is decorated with a series of erotic love stories. Over the past few decades, the frescoes of the tower room have become quite famous, appearing everywhere from popular histories of baths and bathing to Georges Duby’s History of Private Life. Despite their recently acquired fame, however, neither these frescoes nor those of the council hall are well understood as products of communal culture. By considering both fresco cycles as translations of courtly forms and themes into a civic space, I seek to recover an understanding of the cultural circumstances that gave life to these intriguing examples of communal art.

In the process, I hope to give some local coloring to the deep cultural significance reflected in the phrase with which the thirteenth-century Florentine rhetorician, Boncompagno da Signa, playfully justified his little manual on the diplomacy of courting.

words have always been more pleasing to me than deeds

for in these matters [of love]

it is better to live in hope than in facts.

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