Arnold Esch has produced a masterwork on quattrocento Rome that ranks with those of Richard Krautheimer and Robert Brentano in its comprehensive vision. The nineteenth century had provided two grand institutional narratives for medieval and early modern Rome: Ludwig von Pastor's papal history and the search for order and Ferdinand Gregorovius’ history of communal freedom. Both deployed a tri-polarity of competing power: empire, papacy and commune.
The twentieth century deployed social and Marxist analysis: Rome as part of a pan-European history of revolution and class conflict. In 1974 Robert Brentano’s Rome before Avignon plumbed the fragmentary notarial archives to create a determined anti-narrative, to show us Rome on the ground, in the minds of its citizens, and how they created their own multipolar structures, networks of affiliation, negotiation, power, symbol. Richard Krautheimer's Rome: profile of a city, 312–1308 (1980) set the standard for medieval Rome's visual representation. Taylor, Rinne and Kostof's Rome: an urban history (2016) offers a diachronic synthesis.
Over the past generation, divergent approaches and methodologies have explored the same question: what made Rome different? Much recent scholarship has rejected universal themes and considered Rome simply an under-developed example of central Italian communes, its forms of property holding, family and clientage, social order, external relations debilitated by local conditions. These structural approaches inform the work of scholars at the Istituto Storico and the École Française, including Carocci, Hubert, Modigliani, Passagli, Rehberg, Toubert and, with more cultural emphasis, Massimo Miglio. Among younger Anglophone scholars, Carrie Beneš fits Rome into this trecento communal context; Alizah Holstein addresses Roman myth, memory and civic identity during Avignon; and James Palmer synthesises broad socio-economic and cultural strains after Avignon. Anthony D'Elia examines the Porcari conspiracy and republicanism in the quattrocento.
Arnold Esch's book reflects a lifetime of work on Rome, and its scope includes all of the above. His first four chapters offer a general topographical, political and structural introduction to the city in about 1400. He analyses the relationships among the Roman commune, the papacy and barons; the impact of the Great Schism and Conciliarism; the (negative) influence of Naples on both the secular and papal city; the (positive) impact of Florence on Rome's economy, letters and arts; Cardinal Vitelleschi's brutal regime and the effective end of Roman self-governance. Esch cautions us that nepotism, while repeatedly condemned by the Conciliarists, was considered essential to survival by popes emerging from schism with a fractured college of cardinals, no effective bureaucracy and no one to trust except their own relatives. Without nepotes, Esch seems to conclude, governance itself would have been impossible through much of the quattrocento.
Chapter v begins with Romans’ testimonies for the canonisation processes (1440–53) of S. Francesca Romana. These reveal Roman society as a collection of great and lesser families bound together by material, social and cultural affinities and by the ruin of communal aspirations. This chapter also surveys women's spiritual life within monastic and mendicant third orders and as nearly independent bizocche. Chapter vi accompanies Rome pilgrims: their high spiritual – often apocalyptic – expectations nurtured by the mythic Mirabilia brought down to earth by housing costs, food and wine supplies and the effects of repeated jubilees on the city's economic renewal and urban plan. Esch reminds us (pp. 116–17) that, despite realities, both Romans and pilgrims continued to consider the ideal Rome their true home; and in 1450 foreign visitors like John Capgrave could ignore the innovations of Renaissance humanists and artists and still see only the Mirabilia of their medieval guidebooks (pp. 210–12). Chapter vii visits Rome's foreign communities: populations, social and infrastructure networks, trades and professions, economic impacts.
Chapters viii–xiv follow the reigns of successive popes to highlight various aspects of the city's emerging cultural structures. Nicholas v brought both Florentine humanism and a definitive end to communal governance after the Porcari conspiracy (1453). Chapter ix probes the role of the humanists in the Curia and at the two studia – the Curiae and Urbis – offering a delightful coda on international music at the papal court. Chapter x provides an indispensable review of one of the major differences between late medieval and humanist attitudes toward Rome's ancient remains. Esch gathers and compares three accounts of the Oculus atop the Pantheon (pp. 208–10) to demonstrate changing perceptions around 1450. Nikolaus Muffel of Nuremberg relies on the medieval Mirabilia to explain it as a pinhole expanded by the devil to debase the magical space. The humanist Flavio Biondo surveys classical texts and inscriptions to determine its dating, construction and use. The Florentine merchant, patron and Leon Battista Alberti's friend, Giovanni Rucellai, provides detailed architectural measurements.
Only with the new humanist sense of temporal distance between the modern and the ancient did Romans come to treat their classical ruins as distinct ‘monuments’ worthy of preservation and as venerable transmitters of cultural meaning. They became finished, physical texts just as the new humanist philologists sought to perfect written texts through the restoration and intense study of ancient linguistic forms and contexts. Flavio Biondo's Roma instaurata aptly gave formal title to this new consciousness.
Chapter xi views Rome through the Commentarii of Pius ii, both as ‘Pius’ and ‘Aeneas’, the authoritarian pope and yet the personable, open-minded humanist. In some of his most evocative passages (pp. 259–61), Esch shares Pius’ delight in exploring the Roman Campagna and its ancient remains. Chapter xii returns to economies: those of Rome's streets and of Rome as an international capital of politics, consumption and capital itself. Esch reminds us that through the pope's Florentine bankers, Rome drew on the wealth of Christendom: high and low finance, investment in business, real estate, cultural production, ritual and display made the city an enormous credit market and a magnet for Europe's excess. Chapter xiii flows from these basic premises to review urban expansion and renewal: grand papal interventions in the urban fabric (largely via papal vie), extensive palace construction by cardinals and their relatives, the patronage of the Curia and, finally, display by the remaining Roman barons, whose role Esch traces from medieval antagonists of pope and commune to new courtiers and papabili. Chapter xiv reviews the deep structures of earning, spending and investing. Here Esch reviews the thinking of Landes and Lopez (pp. 318–19) on culture as excess capital production but insists that we must consider patronage as rooted in social and cultural ideas. Michelangelo's arrival in Rome in June 1496 concludes the book.
Esch treats the Roman Church, its clergy and hierarchy several times but less as ecclesiastical institutions than as Roman political, economic and social classes. He underscores the fundamental importance of prosopography and the reality of Rehberg's networks of clientage that bound Romans together. For all his masterful use of notarial documents to illumine the workings of Roman society on the street, marketplace, dock, shop, palazzo and private home, however, Esch makes no reference to Brentano and his ground-breaking work. This is especially noteworthy as Esch very often deploys the same impressionistic, paratactic style to tease out the details of daily life and common belief from the same type of materials. Like Brentano, he cautions (pp. 47–8) that these records are incomplete and therefore less statistical than representational sources, an intellectual debt to Brentano that anglophone scholars of Rome must both continuously acknowledge and attempt to escape.
Esch makes superlative use of this relative paucity of Roman records. He weaves his grand narrative of oligarchic Rome and particular case studies with his sources, sharing with the reader the papacy's income and expense reports, the personal testimonies of the Penitentiary, the Mandati Camerali's numbers, humanist treatises and commentaries, local diarii, commercial letters, ricordanze, chronicles, fresco cycles and cartography.
Esch makes it clear that great men – especially powerful nepotes, barons and those nominal celibates in the Vatican – dominated Roman life. By contrast, he caricatures Rienzo's buono stato as the product of a ‘bizarre Roman ideology’, Rienzo himself as difficult to take seriously (pp. 17–18), republicanism as an obstacle to Rome's quattrocento flourishing. Laywomen appear marginally in a brief section on curial wives, mistresses, courtesans and prostitutes (pp. 246–7), but not as the powerful Roman patrons documented by Valone, McIver, Stollhans, ffolliott and others.
Outside of the S. Francesca Romana frescoes, women also remain invisible in his illustrations. None the less, Esch deploys his visual evidence as skilfully as his narrative and archival sources. Like Krautheimer, he integrates Rome's major monuments seamlessly into his narrative; and this edition includes dozens of urban views, illustrations of architecture, sculpture and of manuscript, paintings, drawings and other arts. Many of these will be familiar to romanisti, many of them Esch brings freshly to bear.
This book needs an English-language edition. It will be indispensable to the advanced scholar, generalist and student. If produced with the wide array of visual material of its German edition, its appeal will extend to any broader public still interested in urban history and the idea of Rome. Dedicated to his Roman friends, this book will make Arnold Esch many more.
