From Carnival to Pious City: Scenes of Urban Life in Leandro Bassano’s The Months

This work examines the urban environment depicted by Leandro Bassano in his cycle of the Twelve Months during February and March, and the notable iconographic shift it presents with respect to the typical imagery of farming labours. Leandro represented the themes of Carnival in February and Lent in March, breaking up this otherwise agricultural calendar to introduce the division of time according to civic and religious rhythms. It is argued that this transformation in iconography occurred at the intersection of the reformed Roman Missal and the emergence of the commedia dell’arte. Finally, this article explores what the dialogic relationship between Leandro’s February and March conveys about the deeper cultural and seasonal experience of the Veneto city in the post-Tridentine context.

Plague Time: Space, Fear, and Emergency Statecraft in Early Modern Italy

Michel Foucault argued famously that early modern European governors responded to plague by quarantining entire urban populations and placing citizens under minute surveillance. For Foucault, such sixteenth- and seventeenth-century policies were the first steps towards an authoritarian paradigm that would only emerge in full in the eighteenth century. The present article argues that Foucault’s model is too abstracted to function as a tool for the historical examination of specific emergencies, and it proposes an alternative analytical framework. Addressing itself to actual events in early modern Italy, the article reveals that when plague threatened, Florentine and Bolognese health officials projected themselves into a spatio-temporal dimension in which official actions and perceptions were determined solely by the spread of contagion. This dimension, “plague time,” was not a stage on the irresistible journey towards Foucault’s “utopia of the perfectly governed city.” A contingent response to a recurrent existential menace, plague time rose and fell in response to events, and may be understood as a season.