La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio

      FIGURE 5. Frontispiece of L’Officioso. Courtesy of Biblioteca civica, Novara.

      Over the next half-century, as French, Spanish, and German rulers competed for mastery of the peninsula, political and cultural preeminence in Italy shifted from Milan to papal Rome.⁴⁶ In 1512 the warlike Pope Julius II, who earlier, as Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, had urged the French to invade Italy, joined forces with Emperor Maxmillian II to remove them, and to install in Milan as his puppet Ludovico Sforza’s oldest son, Massimiliano. After Francis I became king of France upon the death of Louis XII in 1515, he defeated the Italian army at Marignano and negotiated the abdication of Massimiliano.⁴⁷ In 1519 Charles V was elected emperor. In 1521, with the help of Pope Leo X, he expelled the French from Milan and installed the seriously ailing second son of Ludovico Sforza, Francesco II. The 1520s, the decade in which Bartolomeo Taegio was born, was a time of political disorder, disease, famine, and devastation of the countryside. After the death of Francesco II without heirs in 1535, the duchy of Milan passed directly to Charles V and became a province of his empire.⁴⁸

      The period of Milanese history from the death of the last Sforza duke in 1535 to the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 was the first part of an era of Spanish domination, which lasted until 1714.⁴⁹ During that era, Milan was ruled by a series of appointed governors who in theory administered the state of Milan for the king of Spain, but who in practice functioned almost autonomously.⁵⁰ Charles V invested his son Philip with the office of duke of Milan in 1540. Philip was installed in 1546, the same year the emperor summoned Ferrante Gonzaga to serve as governor of Milan, which office he filled until his death in 1557.⁵¹ Between 1549 and 1555 a new ring of bastioned defense walls twenty miles in length were built under the supervision of Gonzaga’s architect, Domenico Giunti. Giunti also designed additions, including an innovative portico with superimposed orders, to the suburban villa known today as La Simonetta. Gonzaga bought La Simonetta in 1547 and later sold it to an apostolic nuncio by the name of Alessandro Simonetta, whose name appears in Taegio’s list of villa owners.⁵² Giunti’s portico at La Simonetta still stands today, as do remnants of the defenses he designed for the Spanish government. Commonly called the “Spanish walls,” they enclosed the suburbs that had sprung up in the fifteenth century outside the medieval walls, which were subsequently demolished, and they effectively doubled the area of the city. The part of the navigli (Milan’s system of navigable canals) that had been built to serve initially as a moat outside the medieval walls was thus incorporated into the city.⁵³

      In 1554 Philip took possession of the city of Milan and appointed a magistracy, which consisted of a president and nine officials called questors. The chief executive of the city was the podestà, an administrative official like a mayor, but appointed rather than elected. In 1555 Pope Paul IV made a league with France to expel the Spanish from Naples and Milan, and once more Lombardy became a battlefield.⁵⁴ Lasting peace was finally achieved in April of 1559, roughly seven months after the death of Charles V, with the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, in which France, weakened by religious wars at home, renounced its claims in Italy, and Spain retained Milan.

      The establishment of Spanish hegemony in Milan contributed to a shift in the regional economy away from manufacturing toward agriculture. The Milanese economy had begun to recover in the middle of the sixteenth century and enjoyed several decades of rapid expansion after the conclusion of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. In spite of attempts by Spain to block the export of cloth, the silk and wool industries made modest gains in the first half of the sixteenth century, as did the manufacture of leather goods, arms, and armor. The publishing trade in Milan, though relatively small with only about a dozen established firms, was profitable enough to lure Francesco Moscheni, the publisher of La Villa, into moving his business from Pavia to Milan in 1553.⁵⁵ But the sector of Milan’s economy that experienced the most remarkable progress in the 1550s was agriculture.⁵⁶ The reasons for the shift from manufacturing to farming in Taegio’s day are related to demographic growth. The population of the city of Milan was probably more than eighty thousand in the middle of the century and increasing rapidly.⁵⁷ The city was home to approximately one-tenth of the growing population of the state of Milan.⁵⁸ Prices for agricultural produce were rising in pace with the demand for foodstuffs.⁵⁹ As farming became increasingly profitable, many wealthy Milanese merchants and aristocrats invested in the acquisition, reclamation, and irrigation of land in the fertile plain of the Po River valley, and many of these new landowners built houses in the countryside.⁶⁰

      The names of two hundred and eighty-four owners of villa estates and gardens that existed in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century are listed in La Villa. These names include many of the high officials of the city of Milan in the epoch of Charles V, including nineteen (almost two-thirds) of the podestà who served between 1537 and 1567, three questors, eleven senators, three presidents of the Senate, and one high chancellor.⁶¹ Leaders of the church identified in this list include nine bishops and one who would become the bishop of Novara after 1559. Two of the villa owners named in La Villa would become archbishops (Giovanni Arcimboldo and Carlo Borromeo), and one (Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici) would become a pope, Pius IV. With the exception of the clergy, all of the villa owners named in La Villa were aristocrats.⁶²

      Two aristocracies coexisted in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century. One was the feudal nobility, who possessed hereditary titles and fiefs in the countryside. These cavalieri (knights) and conti (counts), from which the Italian word for countryside, contado, is derived, typically received most of their income from agriculture, and they enjoyed judicial and administrative authority over the peasants who worked their lands.⁶³ The other aristocracy was the urban patriciate, whose claim to the highest status in Milanese society was based on their families’ long histories of residency and political leadership in the city.⁶⁴ Conspicuous among the patricians were the lawyers, from whose ranks the senators rose, and who were recruited by the Spanish government for various bureaucratic posts.⁶⁵ At first each kind of aristocracy had its own separate sphere of influence, either the town or the country, but by the second half of the sixteenth century the distinction between the two groups was beginning to become blurred.⁶⁶

      The gradual blending of the two aristocracies is indicated by the changing usage in the sixteenth century of the word gentilhuomo (gentleman), an honorific favored by Taegio. In Milan under the Sforzas the title gentilhuomo was used to designate a courtier of high rank and income from the class of the cavalieri. In the epoch of Charles V the term lost some of its specificity outside of the princely court, although it was still reserved for the feudal nobility. By the end of the sixteenth century the meaning of the word would be broadened to include members of either aristocracy, and eventually almost anyone we would call a “gentleman,” on the basis of education and comportment more than social status. Taegio was writing in the midst of these changes, just as the term