Mobilizing the Macabre: Rosso, Rovezzano, and Rustici and the Language of Transgression, 1500-1530

This dissertation argues that the macabre, an estranging language of death-based motifs involving somatic doubling between uncorrupt body and putrefying corpse, was polemically employed during the first three decades of the sixteenth century to oppose, to subvert, and to satirize the idealizing mythography of the Medici, which has itself long held sway over Florence's history and historiography. Part one discusses Benedetto da Rovezzano's marble cenotaph (1505-1512) for Piero Soderini, Florence's premier and sole gonfaloniere a vita. I argue that the triumphal crown on the tomb's monumental skull satirizes the heraldic device used by the Medici and by the Rucellai - Soderini's deadliest enemies - and that the memorial's proliferating and foliated skulls recast the Medici's dynastic metaphors of an eternally regenerative Golden Age as the unnatural rule of revenants. I further demonstrate how Benedetto used the macabre to present Soderini's tenure as the embodiment of a just and lawful Republican government, and thereby the antithesis of previous Medicean regimes. Part two argues that the hellish banquets produced by the Companies of the Cauldron (Paiuolo) and the Trowel (Cazzuola) during the Medici's de facto rule of 1512 to 1527 served as macabre reflections on the Medici's triumphal spectacles, and that their deadly re-interpretations of Medici magnificence echoed contemporary criticism of the Medici and their feste. Death was employed to characterize the experience of living under Medicean rule, and to expose the Medici's fraudulent propaganda of peace and prosperity. The conclusion examines Michelangelo's Medici Chapel (1519-1534) and Antonfrancesco Grazzini's final novella of the Cene (1540s) as the respective "afterlives" of Soderini's cenotaph and the companies' festivities. I detail how the chapel's frenzied masks echo Benedetto's screaming skulls in ridiculing Medicean ambitions, and how Michelangelo similarly subverts Medicean temporal metaphors of dynastic renewal. I then evince that Grazzini's use of the Cazzuola's Maestro Manente for the victim of a sorcerous Lorenzo de' Medici's malicious beffa demonstrates the macabre's enduring appeal for expressing dissent, and underscore the affinities between the dining sodalities and the transgressive Academia degli Umidi (1540-1541). Whether conveyed through marble or through meals, the macabre proved an ideal means to oppose Medicean supremacy.