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 “gentleman” was beginning to be applied to members of the urban patriciate.
Well over half of the names of villa owners in La Villa appear in two lists of “gentlemen,” one beginning on page 98 and the other on page 109. At first glance it may seem that Taegio used the term gentilhuomini to distinguish the villa owners of the knightly order from those belonging to the urban patriciate; at least nine of the one hundred and forty-six “gentlemen” he lists were counts. Concerning only three of the “gentlemen” villa owners did Taegio say anything about their participation in public life. Only twice in the entire dialogue are city dwellers referred to as gentilhuomini, and then the tone is ironic. In one instance city dwellers are called ociosi gentil’huomini (lazy gentlemen); in another they are said merely to consider themselves to be gentlemen. Closer examination, however, reveals that Taegio’s gentilhuomini are not exclusively knights or counts. Nine of those listed are known to have been podestà, three were senators and one was a president of the Senate; they certainly belonged to the urban elite. Nor do the lists of “gentlemen” include all of the villa owners who might have been knights; only one of the ten villa owners Taegio called cavallieri and fewer than half of those he identified as counts are included. The fact that Taegio did not equate “gentlemen” with feudal nobility suggests that by the time La Villa was written differences between the two aristocracies in Milanese society had already become less marked than they had been at the beginning of the century.
During the course of the sixteenth century the urban patriciate became increasingly exclusive, imitating the feudal nobility in its reliance on lineage more than education or service to the state as the primary condition for admission to its order of society. At the same time as the aristocrats were closing ranks, a wealthy class of commoners, purchasing titles and fiefs from the Spanish government, were challenging all claims to nobility on hereditary grounds.67 This “new nobility of mercantile origin” competed with the patriciate “in the refined passion for villeggiatura.”68 While the villa owners mentioned by Taegio comprised both kinds of the old aristocracy, they apparently included none of these newly titled bourgeois.
The Agricultural Context
La Villa is an early example of the type of “villa book” that was popular in Italy toward the end of the sixteenth century. Taegio responded to a demand for a new kind of writing in the Renaissance, “the essay, letter or dialog on villa life,” which James Ackerman calls “an innovative literary genre.”69 La Villa is typical of the genre, in that it reflects its author’s familiarity with farming and gardening practices in the region of the upper Po River valley. However, Taegio’s dialogue differs from other books on villa life written before and after it, in two important respects: it emphasizes the aesthetic value of gardens and farmland, and it treats the villa as a place of leisure devoted to intellectual activity.
Ackerman includes Bartolomeo Taegio among the four “North Italian agricultural authorities” whose works “offer the greatest insight into villa society,” and he says that Taegio is the only one of them who represented the villa as a setting for the pursuit of scholarly and philosophical otium.70 Besides Taegio, the other three “agricultural authorities” whose writings Ackerman discusses are Alberto Lollio, Giuseppe Falcone, and Agostino Gallo. Lollio was from Ferrara, Falcone and Gallo from Brescia. The earliest of their works is the Lettera di M. Alberto Lollio, nella quale rispondendo ad una di M. Hercole Perinato, egli celebra La Villa et lauda molto l’agricoltura …, which was published in Venice in 1544. It describes the practical advantages of life in villa over life in the city. Falcone’s La Nuova, vaga, et dilletevole villa was first published in Brescia in 1559, the same year as Taegio’s La Villa. Of all the Renaissance authors on country life, Falcone is the closest to the ancient Roman authorities, Varro and Columella, in his conviction that the villa owner should be tireless in his commitment to the full-time supervision of his estate. In contrast to Falcone, Gallo’s work emphasizes relaxation and diversion as benefits of life in the country. As originally conceived, Le dieci giornate della vera agricoltura, e piaceri del La Villa, was published first in Brescia in 1564, and then in Venice in 1566.71 A revised version, with the title Le venti giornate …, came out of Turin in 1580 and Venice in 1584. Like Taegio, Gallo was a jurist, and like La Villa, Le dieci giornate and Le venti giornate were written in dialogue form. Ackerman identifies several other agricultural treatises produced in northern Italy in the sixteenth century, including Trattato dell’agricoltura (Venice, 1572), written by the Paduan Africo Clemente, and Ricordo d’agricoltura (Mantua, 1577), written by Camillo Tarello, a Brescian. Ackerman’s list does not include the verse treatise on agriculture, La Coltivazione, by the Tuscan, Luigi Alamanni (1495–1556), which was published in Paris in 1546, and which Sereni calls “the most important agronomic poem of the sixteenth century.”72
Nor does Ackerman mention two earlier authors of agronomic literature whose treatises were precedents for the type of the sixteenth-century villa book. They are Pietro de’ Crescenzi, the Bolognese lawyer whom Taegio called one of the “more recent” authorities on the nobility of gardening, and Michelangelo Tanaglia, the Florentine author of a verse treatise in three books called De Agricoltura, which was written in 1490 but not published until 1953. Sereni refers to Crescenzi as the “restorer of the science of agronomy in communal Italy.”73 Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium commodorum, written around 1305 and published numerous times, was well diffused throughout Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. Taegio could have known it in the Italian translation published in Venice in 1542. Although Crescenzi’s book was written much earlier than La Villa and reflects the author’s knowledge of a northern Italian agricultural landscape less intensively cultivated than it would become in Taegio’s lifetime, the two works have some features in common. Like Taegio, Crescenzi made use of ancient sources such as Cato, Varro, and Columella. He also provided lists of purely ornamental trees, aromatic herbs, and flowers, thereby implying (although without linking horticulture with the liberal arts and philosophy as Taegio would) that a garden could be appreciated not only for its usefulness but also for its beauty.74
Crescenzi wrote his treatise at a time when gradual but dramatic changes were beginning to take place in the agricultural landscape all over Italy, owing to population growth and increased opportunities for individual initiative in farming in
