– if not the majority – of the most famous individuals who contributed to the movement, whether they were artists or scholars (the so-called ‘humanists’).
Leading artists, including Leonardo (whose notebooks show that he also collected jokes), Raphael (whose playful cherubs have become iconic), Bronzino (whose comic poems show he was not as cold as his paintings may suggest), Giulio Romano (who made architectural jokes) and Arcimboldo (who invented visual puns), all produced images that were intended to provoke a laugh, or at least a smile. Even Michelangelo, often regarded as completely serious – either in agony or in ecstasy – had a sense of humour that was expressed in his poems (mocking himself at work on the Sistine ceiling) as well as in his art, and, according to legend, in practical jokes as well. He exchanged comic verses with the master of that genre at the time, Francesco Berni.1
Leading humanists, including Petrarch, Poggio Bracciolini, Angelo Poliziano and Pietro Bembo, collected jests. Cosimo de’ Medici, the unofficial ruler of Florence, plays an active role in Poliziano’s jestbook. Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote songs for Carnival as well as a comic poem, and Lorenzo’s second son, Giovanni – who became Pope Leo X – employed several fools to entertain himself and his court. Baldassare Castiglione discussed the nature of humour. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote comedies. Great ladies, notably Isabella d’Este, took part in games. The humanist Leonbattista Alberti presented mathematical puzzles as ‘jolly things’ (cose jocundissime). Philosophers from Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno were attracted by the idea of ‘serious play’ (serio ludere or giocare serio), while Galileo included comic passages in his lively dialogue ‘Concerning the Two Main World Systems’ (1632).2 Among the greatest Italian poets of the period, Ludovico Ariosto wrote comedies and a playful romance, Orlando furioso, while Torquato Tasso wrote dialogues about games.
Insofar as the Renaissance was a movement of cultural innovation – sometimes disguised as renovation – some observations by psychologists may be illuminating. It has been suggested that innovation is encouraged by playing with ideas, trying out alternative solutions to a given problem. Dialogue is one form of this play, and printed dialogues, as well as oral ones, flourished in Italy at this time.3
Writing about play in the Renaissance is not meant to imply that there was an absence of playfulness in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, play was a powerful presence at that time, obvious enough to anyone who reads about Francis of Assisi, for example, or looks at the margins of many medieval manuscripts, or at the gargoyles or the misericords in Gothic churches.4 There were important continuities in forms of play between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, notably in the case of Carnival, as well as forms that broke with tradition.
What is Play?
The third problem is the most complex and difficult of all. What is play? What has a fist-fight to do with a guessing game, a comedy or a parody? Among the many theorists of play who have wrestled with this question, I should like to single out three: a Dutchman, a Frenchman and a Russian.5
In his essay Homo Ludens (1938), probably the best-known study of the subject, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga examined what he called ‘the play element in culture’, ranging from war to the pursuit of knowledge. What did Huizinga mean by play? He suggested that it is an activity undertaken for its own sake, in its own times and places; that it creates order by means of its rules; and that it is marked both by tension and its relief. He also distinguished two main forms of play: mimicry and competition.6 In Man, Play and Games (1958), the French philosopher and sociologist Roger Caillois divided play into four types, adding chance and vertigo to Huizinga’s pair of models. Neither scholar discussed either puzzles or humour.7 The second of these gaps was filled by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1929) revived the ancient Greek and Roman idea of the ‘serio-comic’ and discussed what he called the history of laughter. Bakhtin emphasized the cultural importance of ‘the carnival sense of the world’ and especially the central, subversive act of Carnival, the ‘mock crowning and subsequent uncrowning of the carnival king’.8
What follows makes use of the work of all three theorists, but, unlike them, it is concerned not with universal principles of play but with its forms and roles in a specific culture in a specific period. Many games are international – more exactly, they have been internationalized. In contrast, fun or humour, like some wines, does not travel well. What is considered playful in a given culture or a given historical period may not be found amusing in another.
To avoid this problem, one might define play as a bundle or, better, a system of practices that are recognized as playful in a particular culture. The practices resemble one another like members of a family, who share various traits though any one of these traits may be lacking in a particular individual. It may be easier to recognize what counts as play by thinking about what is excluded (the process of exclusion is discussed in Chapter 6). In Renaissance Italy, playful practices were distinguished from serious ones, and play was often justified as light relief from the serious business of everyday life as well as an escape from boredom.
However, as Huizinga for one was well aware, there are no fixed borders between play and the surrounding culture. ‘The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid.’9 For example, what was a joke for the joker and the bystanders might be a deadly serious offence from the point of view of the victim. The satires of the Renaissance were playful in form but serious in content, aimed at the destruction of the person targeted. Popular protest often took place during festivals, especially Carnival, and it made use of carnivalesque forms such as cross-dressing, masks and joyous violence, but the goals of the protest were serious ones. Ambiguity was common and might even be the purpose of the game. The sixteenth-century garden of Bomarzo, to be discussed in Chapter 5, was filled with stone monsters and images of the underworld that probably provoked fear as well as laughter. One of the aims of the reformers of play was to eliminate ambiguities, drawing clear distinctions between what was playful and what was serious, as well as between what was permissible and what was not.
In our own culture, most of us recognize playfulness most of the time, though not always – hence the frequency of the remark ‘just kidding!’. In the case of other cultures, past or present, recognition is more difficult. To assist in this task, we need to study the language of play in different times and places.
In English, ‘play’ is a term that includes playing the violin, playing cards, playing the game, playing the fool, playing tricks, horseplay, child’s play, foreplay and playhouses. Even fountains play. Around this vague but central keyword (necessarily vague, like the term ‘culture’, precisely because it is central), we find diversion, entertainment, facetiousness, fun, games, jokes, mockery, pleasantries, pranks, ridicule, teasing and trickery.
The equivalent central term in Huizinga’s Dutch was spel. In the French of Caillois, it was jeu. In Italian, the central term was and is gioco, referring to a spectrum of meanings, from joy via jests, games and plays to insult and deceit, not forgetting sexual intercourse.10 The medieval Italian terms ludere and ludo were less frequent and had a more restricted meaning – more or less, ‘game’ (although the term ludicro, like the English ‘ludicrous’, reminds us of the links with humour). In this respect, Italian was the opposite of classical Latin, where ludus was the central term while the term iocus, like the English ‘joke’, was limited to wordplay.11
As in English, the Italian keyword was surrounded by a periphery of associated terms. Some of these described the effects of play, frequently mentioned in the defences discussed in Chapter 4: effects such as allegria (‘joy’),
