Just What the Medici Ordered: Gout, Spas, and Quattrocento Building

Abstract

Just What the Medici Ordered: Gout, Spas, and Qyattrocento Building Charles R. Mack Thou askest who I am, what is my name, and whence comes this hot and health-giving water that springs perennial? Once I was the loveliest nymph of these woods. Apollo loved me and gave me the power of curing all ills... But I remain unknown, no kind Muse remembered me and I waited for one to tell of my woes. Lo he comes, and here he writes a poem for me. Read it, 0 pilgrim; then thou wilt know that Amorba is the name of the nymph. The waters drive away all illness, let the sick come here and they will find health. from In Amporpham Nympham by Bartolommeo Scala, 1484 T he medical use of thermal mineral waters was no less popular in the Renaissance than it was in either antiquity or in the 'gilded age' of the late nineteenth century. Scholarship on curative bathing as an aspect of Italian Renaissance life is only beginning, however . Even less attention has been devoted to the architectural environment in which Renaissance patrons sought their thermal cures. An analysis of these bathing establishments should be of interest not only to students of Renaissance culture but also to historians of the period's architecture, for the spa buildings often illustrate the process by which the architectural aesthetics of urban centers such as Florence or Rome were diffused into the hinterlands of Italy and then applied to essentially vernacular situations.~ A case in point is the Bagno al Morbo, located in a remote mountain valley rich in sulphur springs (jig. I.). The following essay discusses the history of the Bagno al Morbo and the architectural attention it received during the fifteenth century from the "first family" of Florence. Because of the healing promises they offered, spas were the destinations of many Qyattrocento Italians, from peasant to prince and from banker to pope. Many of the numerous thermal springs on the peninsula had been known to the Etruscans and were lavishly developed by the Romans. During the Middle Ages, the structures which had supported their use deteriorated drastically and medieval users often were reduced to bathing in open-air pools and resorting to primitive lodgings. Increasingly, from the late fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century, however, these out-of-the-way and formerly rustic thermal pools of healing were the subject of renewed physical embellishment. The long association of Florence's Medici family with thermal spas is noteworthy both for the frequency of their visitations and for the family 's architectural involvement with several of the bathing centers. One must remember that, in general, the Medici were a sickly clan.2 The colossal effect of the cultural magnificence of Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-92) makes one almost forget that he died in agony at the still youthful age of 43, whether of tuberculosis, cancer, or some other ARRIS II CHARLES R. MACK Fig. I. Detail map ofTuscany showing Siena and Volterra and the location ofthe Bagno a! Morbo. ravaging disease remains undetermined. That he also had suffered terribly all his adult life from hereditary gout and the discomfort of skin rashes is well documented. His father, Fiero di Cosimo (1416-69) was even more infirm, laboring so greatly under the burden of gout that he earned the sobriquet 'il gottoso'.3 Fiero's own father, Cosimo (1389-1464), the great paterpatriae of the Florentine republic, endured the same affliction. In fact, when the Medici were not making money, pulling political strings, waging wars, forging alliances, founding philosophic academies, patronizing the arts, and generally establishing the Renaissance directions of Qyattrocento Italy, they spent much of their time traveling about to one or another of the several medically-sanctioned thermal springs of Central Italy. The same is true for the distaff members of the family.4 Lorenzo's mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni (d. 1482), had her own problems with a rheumatic condition, and his wife, Clarice Orsini (d. 1488) of Rome, also sought spa relief for a variety of ailments, including 'catarrh'. The other branches of the family seem to have been afflicted with their share of disease and were thermal bath habitues as...