Meredith K. Ray
In the preface to a popular sixteenth-century collection of alchemical, medicinal, and cosmetic recipes entitled the Secreti della Signora Isabella Cortese (1561), the author admonishes a correspondent not to waste his time and money trying to uncover the secrets put forth by traditional alchemical authorities, who write in coded, intentionally obscure language.
… se vuoi seguir l’arte delle Alchimia, et in quella operare, non bisogna che più seguiti l’opere di Geber, né di Raimondo, né di Arnaldo, né d’altri filosofi, perché non hanno detto verità alcuna i libri loro, se non con figure, et engimati, con sincopi … io ho letto e riletto e non trovo se non favole, e ciancie.
(…If you wish to learn and practice the art of Alchemy, there is no need to follow the works of Geber, nor Ramon, nor Arnault, or any other philosopher, any longer, for they reveal no truths in their books, except through figures, and enigmas, with syncope … I have read and reread them, and found nothing but tall tales and rumors …)2
Better, she insists, to place one’s faith in practice and experiment, as she has done herself, and as she now reveals to her audience. To be a successful alchemist, Cortese advises following a few simple rules: learn the properties of all metals and materials; use strong, well-made earthen or glass vessels for laboratory experiments; know how to regulate the flame; and keep a bellows at the ready. Most importantly, find a trustworthy assistant and keep him always at your side; reveal the work to no one; and give thanks to God – and alms to the poor – when the work is complete.3
Replete with recipes not only for effecting the transmutation of metals, but also for treating a range of physical ailments and producing a host of cosmetics, soaps, and perfumes, Cortese’s work raises important questions about the practice of alchemy in sixteenth-century Italy. First, her instructions suggest – and recent scholarship has demonstrated – that alchemy was not the arcane province of an élite few, those with the tools to access the hermetic works of ancient authorities. Rather, it was a vibrant arena of scientific investigation accessible to the layperson as well as the initiate, one based on observation and trial and applied broadly and profitably to a range of quotidian problems.4 Indeed, Cortese’s emphasis on the tested nature of her recipes situates her work – and others like it – solidly within an early modern culture of empiricism that increasingly privileged praxis over theory, as William Eamon has noted.5
Second, and of particular interest here, Cortese’s book of “secrets” – the only such collection to be published under a woman’s name in this period6 – provides a useful starting point for thinking about the engagement of early modern women with alchemy, both as readers and producers of alchemical texts, and as practitioners of the “great work” in their daily lives. Part of a wave of printed libri di segreti, or “books of secrets,” that characterized much of sixteenth-century print production,7 Cortese’s volume is dedicated to a specifically female audience. Its recipes, which include rouges, waters, soaps, and perfumes along with others for calcinated mercury and potable gold, are deemed useful to “every noble lady” (“ogni gran signora”) and meant to reflect the range of uses that Renaissance women made of alchemy.8 While there is no dearth of printed sources against which to compare Cortese’s recipes when considering their provenance (indeed, the intertextual web created between books of secrets, alchemical texts, medical treatises, herbals, and other such works was vast and complex), many of the recipes offered by Cortese also found their inspiration in women’s incorporation of alchemical practice into aspects of their everyday activities.9
Recent scholarship has begun to stress the active role of women throughout early modern Europe in the “patronage, theory and practice of alchemy,”10 pointing to examples such as Anna Maria Zieglerin, an alchemist in early modern Germany, or Marie Meurdrac of France, author of a seventeenth-century chemistry manual for women.11 Not only did women engage in the quest to produce alchemical gold, but they also incorporated alchemical practice into their lives, most especially with regard to the management of the household and the care of their own bodies and their family members. As an examination of manuscripts and printed books – including Cortese’s manual – reveals alchemical ingredients and processes commonly underlay instructions for the preparation of medicines and cosmetics and for the preservation of food and wine, areas closely associated with women’s duties and activities. Women practiced science on a daily basis: as Lynette Hunter notes, the “non-formal” nature of this practice and its location within the domestic sphere has traditionally led scholars to undervalue or ignore it, but the kinds of work carried out in the home – cooking, gardening, tending the ill – involve aspects of physical and organic chemistry, as well as “all aspects of preventive medicine and pharmacy.”12 Books of secrets increasingly reflected this activity as they began to target a growing audience of women.
This essay examines one manuscript, probably begun in the late fifteenth century but transcribed in the early sixteenth, that offers compelling evidence of the uses of alchemy by early modern women and presages in many respects the range of recipes described in the Secreti di Isabella Cortese as well as that work’s pragmatic approach to alchemy. Compiled by Caterina Sforza (1463–1509), this rich collection of recipes entitled Experimenti (Experiments) is a vivid record of Sforza’s engagement with scientific culture.13 Most noted for her role as a political leader, Sforza also had a documented interest in medicine and alchemy, one that has received far less attention from scholars. Throughout her life, she sought out and circulated recipes and remedies, maintaining a close relationship with her own speziale (apothecary) in Forlì and sending to Mantua and other cities for ingredients and instructions regarding medicinal and alchemical preparations. This essay explores what Sforza’s Experimenti can tell us about gender and alchemy in early modern Italy. What kinds of recipes did Sforza collect, and how did she obtain them? How did her efforts to compile and test these recipes establish her within a network of other alchemical adepts, and what role did gender play in the dynamics of this network? How did Sforza’s interest in alchemy relate to her political position? Finally, how do the experiments described by Sforza relate to later, published representations of similar recipes in works such as that of Isabella Cortese?
To contextualize my discussion of Sforza’s work, I will begin by considering the role of alchemy in the libri di segreti tradition in sixteenth-century Italy, along with the place of gender within such texts. Who was the audience for such works, and how did this condition their content and presentation? In the second part of the essay, I will move on to a discussion of Sforza’s alchemical activity as reflected in her Experimenti as well as in her epistolary exchanges with male and female contacts who aided her in the staging of such experiments.
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Over the course of the sixteenth century, Italy saw a proliferation of printed vernacular texts devoted to popular medicine, the production of cosmetics and perfumes, and the dissemination of “secret” recipes and remedies aimed at enhancing personal health, facilitating the management of the household, and effecting the transmutation of metals. As Deborah Harkness has argued, receipt books, with their exhaustive and sometimes contrasting remedies, may be seen as a product of a “culture of therapeutics” that derived from a broader curiosity about the self and the body characteristic of the early modern period.14 Along with a focus on the physical body, books of secrets also display a great interest in uncovering and reproducing the workings of the natural world, together with an optimism that such knowledge might be manipulated to better the time spent in this life.15 The earliest printed Italian work of this kind, Eustachio Celebrino’s Dificio delle ricette (New Work Entitled the House of Recipes, 1525), for example – a kind of “general household recipe book”16 – combines, in an accessible vernacular format, medical and chemical information of various kinds. In addition to sections devoted to health and personal hygiene, the Dificio delle ricette includes perfumes, culinary recipes, and even marvelous parlor tricks (such as making a candle burn under water, or writing on paper without ink).17 Emphasizing the empirical nature of his information, Celebrino is careful to note that his are “tested recipes, which will teach you about many wonderful secrets.”18 Similarly, the influential Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese (1555),19 with more than 100 editions and numerous translations, offers treatments for ailments ranging from skin rashes and rotting teeth to impotence and infertility; recipes for face creams and rouges; and methods for preserving food and wine, removing stains from linens, and dyeing fabrics. While, as Eamon notes, Alessio’s recipes are clearly aimed at an upper-class reader most likely to make use of his soaps and pomanders as well as his medicinal recipes, his Secreti constitute an “alternative pharmaceutical tradition” made accessible to a broad audience – a new approach to science and medicine gleaned from “surgeons, empirics, gentlemen, housewives, monks, and ordinary peasants … anyone but representatives of the medical establishment.”20
The audience for early modern secrets-books included not only an élite, highly educated public, but also a wider bourgeois audience that was becoming increasingly literate in Italian.21 This reading public included a growing number of women, a shift that did not escape the attention of authors and publishers. As an examination of sixteenth-century medical manuals and secrets books reveals, many of these works overtly targeted this public of female readers. In an effort to earn their attention, they honed in on issues such as feminine beauty, domestic management, and women’s health; offering, among other things, numerous remedies for problems with menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation.22 Especially with regard to cosmetics, such collections offered a pragmatic and neutral alternative to the decidedly negative approaches to feminine adornment that abounded in prescriptive works such as Leon Battista Alberti’s I libri della famiglia (On the Family) (where the use of cosmetics is linked to moral as well as physical decay) or in a well-known passage from Ariosto’s Cassaria that similarly derides women’s pursuit of beauty.23 Many books of secrets overtly addressed this female audience in their titles or dedications as well as their content. In addition to Cortese’s work, directed to “every great lady,” Timoteo Rossello’s Summa de’ Secreti (1565) singled out “men and women of great intellect” (“huomini e donne, di alto ingegno”); while Celebrino’s Opera nuova … per far bella ciaschuna donna (New Work … For Making Every Woman Beautiful, 1551), opens with a sonnet that addresses female readers directly, Donne che desiate farve belle (“Ladies, who wish to make yourselves beautiful”). Another sixteenth-century work, the Notandissimi secreti dell’arte profumatoria (1555), a collection of recipes devoted solely to perfumes and cosmetics, was introduced by a letter addressed to “those most virtuous ladies who enjoy the art of perfume” (“le virtuosissime donne le quali si dilettano de l’arte profumatoria”).
Many of the medicinal recipes detailed in vernacular books of secrets rely on procedures and ingredients associated with alchemy, an area of scientific experimentation that was intricately intertwined with the practice of medicine in the early modern period and, increasingly, applied to cosmetic and “marvelous” secrets as well.24 Celebrino’s sonnet cited above, for example, interweaves alchemical practice with the feminine arena of cosmetic enhancement by evoking distillation – the “primary procedure” of alchemy25 – in the preparation of rouges and face creams. Celebrino elaborates, “Here are colors white and red/ Diverse concoctions of waters distilled” (“Quivi beletti son blanche e vermigli/Varie composition d’acque stillate”).26 A 1563 work spuriously attributed to the physician Gabriele Falloppio, the Secreti diversi et miracolosi (Diverse and Miraculous Secrets) describes various “healthful waters” (acque molto salutifere) likewise produced through distillation.27 A recipe for women’s rouge (“rosso per la faccia”) calls for mixing several ingredients in a clean glass alembic, a central component of the alchemical laboratory, and allowing them to rest for two days before boiling them until all the ingredients have dissolved, a kind of cosmetic transmutation. A recipe to enhance the beauty of women’s hair (a far belli li capelli) also calls for the prolonged distillation of ingredients in an alembic.28 The Secreti of Isabella Cortese, which professes itself a compilation of “things mineral, medicinal, alchemical, and artificial,” applies alchemical procedures to the domestic economy that was so central to women’s world (laundering clothing, manufacturing perfumes, preparing and preserving food and wine), as well as to turning base metal into gold. In addition, many of the recipes offered by books of secrets rely on the kinds of ingredients commonly present in alchemical experiments, for example minerals such as antimony, silver, and gold, or the Paracelsian tria prima of salt, sulphur, and mercury. Cortese’s instructions for a soap capable of removing any kind of stain, calls for a mixture of calcinated alum and pulverized tartar pounded in a bronze mortar – ingredients, preparations, and vessels familiar to the alchemist.29 Underscoring this link to alchemy, works including Cortese’s Secreti and Celebrino’s Dificio delle ricette are accompanied by illustrations depicting a series of interconnected vessels being heated at the hearth – images that explicitly evoke the alchemical laboratory.30 Indeed, books of secrets often devoted entire sections to alchemy, as in Book II of Cortese’s Secreti, or Alessio Piemontese’s chapter on alchemy and metallurgy in his Secreti that contains detailed technical descriptions of working with alchemical materials.31 Thus alchemy is seen to underlay a range of activities that encompass the medical and the cosmetic as well as the purely alchemical, thereby extending itself to the broader household economy in which women were central players.
Fig. 6.1 Alchemical vessels, from I secreti de la Signora Isabella Cortese, ne’ quali si contengono cose minerali, medicinali, arteficiose, & alchimiche, & molte de l’arte profumatoria, appartenenti a ogni gran signora : con altri bellissimi secreti aggiunti. (Venice, Bariletto, 1574). Courtesy of the Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
If sixteenth-century books of secrets capitalized on a growing female audience for these kinds of recipes, women had long been collecting and experimenting with such information. When Caterina Sforza – the “Madonna of Forlì,” as she was called by Machiavelli32 – died in 1509, she left a record of her own pursuit of alchemical, medicinal, and cosmetic secrets in the form of a manuscript compilation of Experimenti, as well as in her correspondence. Sforza’s example offers insight into the ways in which early modern women incorporated alchemical experiment into their daily lives – a frequent, if often unremarked, companion in the quest for physical health, beauty, and (in Sforza’s case), the creation of wealth and the increased political stability to which such riches might contribute. Sforza’s example also suggests that the pursuit of such knowledge resulted in the creation of a kind of alchemical network composed of both male and female practitioners who exchanged recipes with one another and kept each other informed of new discoveries, as attested to by her correspondence.33
The daughter of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan and his mistress Lucrezia Landriani, Sforza was raised and educated in her father’s household. At age 14 she was married to Girolamo Riario, a nephew of Pope Sixtus IV whose fortunes were on the rise. Sforza followed Riario to Rome and then Romagna, where the couple was invested with the control of the towns of Imola and Forlì. Destined to become one of the most well-known women of the Renaissance, Sforza was regarded by her contemporaries with both admiration and trepidation for her fierce occupation of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome in 1484 following the death of Sixtus IV as well as for her tenacious governance of Imola and Forlì after Riario’s assassination in 1488.34 Especially legendary is the story of Sforza’s defense of the Rocca di Ravaldino, the main fortress of Forlì, in the wake of the coup against Riario, wherein she successfully outwitted her enemies by overturning their expectations of her as a female ruler. Machiavelli, who had occasion to treat with Sforza on behalf of Florence, famously relates the story in his Discorsi, describing how Sforza, in response to her foes’ threats to kill her hostage children, lifted her skirts, pointed to her genitalia, and retorted that she could make more.35 While, as Julia Hairston has demonstrated, Machiavelli’s account is rather more theatrical than contemporary chroniclers of the incident describe, his portrait of Sforza served to cement the enduring public image of her as a Renaissance virago who had defiantly preferred losing her children to losing her state.36
Fig. 6.2 Portrait of Caterina Sforza, Giorgio Vasari. Courtesy of Art Resource.
While serving as regent, Sforza continued to solidify her power through a combination of force, diplomacy, and the fostering of public works in the territories she controlled. She had relationships with (and probably secretly wed) Giacomo Feo and, after Feo’s death (also by assassination), Giovanni de’ Medici of Florence, with whom she had a son, the renowned condottiere Giovanni delle Bande Nere (father to Cosimo I, the first grand duke of Tuscany). Besieged by Cesare Borgia, who had his eye on the conquest of Imola and Forlì, Sforza was taken as a prisoner to Rome in 1500, where she was eventually charged with having attempted to poison Pope Alexander VI, Cesare’s father. After a year of solitary confinement in the same Castel Sant’Angelo she had occupied so defiantly years earlier, Sforza was compelled to renounce her titles to Imola and Forlì. Released in 1501, she made her way to Florence. There she remained until her death in 1509, when she was buried in the convent of Le Murate, of which she had been a patron.37
While Sforza is well known for her importance as a political figure, her interest in alchemy and medicine has received less scrutiny.38 However, Sforza’s Experimenti, a repository of recipes for everything from dying dark hair blond and creating beauty waters and creams to curing ailments such as asthma, cancer, and sciatica and turning base metal to gold, can indeed be interpreted as a “foundational text in the history of pharmacology,” not to mention that of alchemy.39 Sforza was not the only woman to experiment with remedies and recipes in this way, incorporating medical and alchemical knowledge to meet the needs of daily life. According to Monica Green, the “collecting of family remedies” was by the sixteenth century a common feminine pastime; certainly, Italian archives are filled with numerous such compilations. While many of these are anonymous and therefore their female authorship cannot be established with certainty, their attention to women’s health and beauty suggests at the very least a female audience.40 Sforza’s own manuscript also presents some philological problems, for the original manuscript of the Experimenti, said to have been passed down by Sforza to her son Giovanni delle Bande Nere, has been lost. A contemporary transcription of the work by Lucantonio Cuppano, a colonel who served under Giovanni, survives in a private collection; it was published in the nineteenth century by Sforza’s biographer Pier Desiderio Pasolini, who termed it the “most complete and important known document on medicine and perfume” of the early sixteenth century.41 Cuppano’s preface refers repeatedly to Sforza as the work’s author, and to himself as the transcriber of her original, handwritten instructions. He takes care to underscore that he works from an autograph copy of Sforza’s manuscript, thus emphasizing her direct engagement with the volume as both author and medical/alchemical practitioner:
In nome de Dio in questo libro se noteranno alcuni experimenti cavati da lo originale de la illux.ma madonna Caterina da Furli Matre de lo illux.mo S.re joann de medici mio S.re et patrone et per essere lo originale scripto de man propria de dicta madonna … non me curarò durare fatiga a rescriverli ….
(In the name of God in this book you will find some experiments taken from the original by the most illustrious madonna Caterina of Forli, mother of the most illustrious signor Giovanni de Medici my lord and patron; and since the original was written in said madonna’s own hand … I will not mind the fatigue I undergo in copying them …)
Because the original manuscript is no longer extant, we cannot compare the hand in which it was composed to Sforza’s own. We are forced to rely on Cuppano’s testimony as to the work’s authorship in his preface and at several points in the body of the text where the copyist again reiterates Sforza’s ownership and mastery of these recipes: for example reminding the reader that a recipe for calcinated talc (a mineral used in many alchemical and cosmetic preparations) must be carefully followed, “just as Madame of Furlì used to do it.”42 As we will see below, however, letters attesting to the enduring business relationship between Sforza and her speziale in Forlì, along with others addressed to her that provide or request assistance with alchemical, medicinal, and cosmetic recipes, offer convincing evidence that she was actively involved in the collection of such recipes and support the proposition that she was compiling such a work before her death. A valuable cultural artifact, the Experimenti suggests that alchemy, in its many configurations (medical, chemical, cosmetic), was a central and continuing pursuit for Sforza, one that occupied her attention even amidst her most pressing political battles and up until the end of her life.43
Sforza’s manuscript bears striking resemblances to the kinds of published collections of “secrets” discussed above, including that of Cortese, suggesting that, in some cases, such works may have found their models in quotidian practice. Certainly, the Experimenti shares with these later printed books of secrets an interest in experimental methodology. The brief foreword added to the Experimenti by Cuppano emphasizes that these are recipes that Sforza personally tried and tested; therefore “one must assume [all the recipes] to be effective, for they have been proven so by this great lady.”44 Like many printed books of secrets, Sforza’s compilation is plain in style and devoid of narrative framework or flourish. Its recipes are often general in nature, assuming some prior knowledge or familiarity on the part of the user.45 The recipes are presented as tools for navigating daily life and daily problems; some of the more overtly alchemical recipes seem to derive from Sforza’s particular concerns as a ruler of two territories in need of financial backing (for example alchemical recipes for coloring or adding weight to metal so that it appears to be gold). Occasional asides inserted into the recipes underscore the collection’s function as a practical manual. One such note, for example (whether Cuppano’s or Sforza’s own is unclear), explains that extra space has been left in the manuscript following a recipe for talc water so that anyone who discovers additional uses for the mixture can write them in for the benefit of future readers.46 Indeed, the note elaborates, it would be “a mortal sin to keep such treasure [i.e., knowledge] hidden.”47 The tension revealed here between the secrecy and obscurity traditionally associated with alchemy, and the practical imperative to disclose and share information, especially (but not only) when it relates to health, is also characteristic of the printed books of secrets that Sforza’s collection prefigures. Works such as the Secreti di Isabella Cortese must constantly negotiate the conflict between maintaining the privileged nature of the recipes even as they reveal them to the reader and ensure their still wider diffusion through print (seeking to maintain this aura of secrecy, Cortese, for example, cautions that to reveal a secret causes it to lose its power48). Further contributing to a veneer of secrecy is a handful of Sforza’s recipes that are offered in Latin rather than Italian. These recipes are for the most part related to the transmutation of metals – the Latin intended to signal their particular gravity and importance, both in terms of their alchemical content and their possible significance as a political tool for the creation of currency (or perhaps simply to indicate their provenance from another source). Several of the alchemical recipes – particularly those that describe techniques rather than ingredients or uses – are partially presented in code, the key to which is provided on the manuscript’s first page.49
Like Cortese’s Secreti, Sforza’s Experimenti encompass health, beauty, and alchemy. Of the 454 recipes she records, the majority are primarily medicinal in nature (358); while the others are divided among cosmetic and alchemical recipes.50 However, it is difficult to draw real distinctions between the types of recipes, for here, as in the printed books of secrets discussed above, cosmetic and medical recipes rely heavily on alchemical ingredients and processes. Among Sforza’s medicinal recipes, for example, are a number of distilled waters, unguents, and elixirs, produced through alchemical procedures such as multiplication, a kind of progressive distillation whereby a substance assumes greater and more diverse powers during the course of preparation. A “marvelous secret unguent” (“una untione mirabile segreta”) for gout, sciatica, and nervous tension, for example, involves boiling meat and salad leaves in wine for eight hours, then draining the mixture and adding additional ingredients such as rosemary and other herbs over an additional period. To make a truly marvelous unguent, Sforza adds, leave the mixture outside for a month, so that it may gain force from the heat of the sun.51 More general panaceas described by Sforza include an elisir vitae, an elixir capable of conferring perpetual health and youth – a principle goal of therapeutic alchemy: “… it causes a person to regain his youth and brings the dead back to life, and if someone were so ill as to have been abandoned by his physicians as an incurable case, it will restore him to health.”52 To create this elixir, Sforza advises mixing spices, flowers, herbs, fruit, and sugar in a pestle, then distilling the mixture with water in a tightly sealed glass alembic.53 After two days the mixture is stirred over slow heat until the water changes color from clear to white. These stages recall the principle stages of the alchemical process as described in theoretical alchemical texts, in which the phases of transformation are marked by corresponding changes in color (rendering the use of a glass vessel of central importance to the alchemist).54 Similarly, an “acqua mirabile et divina” (“a miraculous and divine water”) produced from a mixture of spices, flowers, wine, and other ingredients improves memory, treats toothache, earache, and melancholy, and can even cure leprosy, paralysis, and other grave illnesses. Distilled over a period of several days, this recipe, like the elixir, also results in three separate stages of liquid, each more powerful than the last: here, the third stage produces the deep red color prized by alchemists and capable of bringing a patient back from the brink of death: “… the second [liquid] is better than the first but the third is the color of blood, and better than all the rest.”55 Sforza includes many other medicinal recipes to treat everything from lice and colic to wounds, poison, cancer, and plague, and even one for a powerful, opium-based surgical anesthetic that places the patient in a drug-induced sleep.56 As befitting a ruler in a Renaissance court, Sforza also records recipes for poisons and their antidotes, along with others for invisible ink and the like.57
Sforza’s recipes, like most medicinal preparations of the time, rely extensively on familiar herbs, spices, and foodstuffs, as well as on more exotic ingredients thought to contain magical and curative properties, such as heliotrope (a variety of quartz).58 Many of them suggest that she subscribed to the law of similars, according to which a substance is thought to share a common characteristic with the disease it is used to treat (for example, using goat’s spleen to treat the spleen) or, alternatively, to impart its characteristics to the patient (for example, egg whites to whiten the complexion).59 A few of Sforza’s recipes retain the mixture of pharmacy and astrology that also characterizes some books of secrets, as in her instructions for a preparation of blessed thistle (“cardo Benedetto”), that cures headache when eaten in salad, body aches when taken with red wine, and, when distilled into a liquid during the months of May or August, rids the body of all “cattivi humori” (“bad humors”).60 Where did Sforza obtain the herbs and other ingredients for her medicinal recipes? Her correspondence indicates that she depended on her speziale, Lodovico Albertini, an apothecary based in Forlì, to supply her with what she required. When Sforza died in 1509 she owed Albertini more than 587 florins, a debt amassed during her years in that city. Sforza’s third husband Giovanni de Medici also died owing Albertini money, suggesting that he probably participated in his wife’s experiments as well.61
Like her medicinal remedies, Sforza’s cosmetic recipes make similar use of herbs and plants distilled in alchemical vessels, as well as minerals, precious stones, and metals. Many recipes focus on smoothing and lightening the skin: a recipe to protect the complexion against unsightly spots (“A fare un acqua mirabile a conservare il viso contra ogni macula”), for example, suggests distilling a mixture of fennel, betony, endive, roses, and white wine. Over a period of days, the recipe will produce, in turn, “rose water,” “silver water,” and, finally, “golden water” or “balsam” – a precious panacea often named in books of secrets.62 Her instructions recall similar recipes included in later, printed books of secrets, including a Ricettario galante dating to the early sixteenth century that likewise offers a recipe for a water distilled in three stages (here, the first water, a cosmetic remedy, removes freckles; the second cures fistulas; the third, the strongest, cuts iron).63 Some of Sforza’s cosmetic recipes are simple and straightforward, for example relying on egg whites or fava flowers distilled with water to whiten the skin.64 More complex recipes, however, revolve around alchemical ingredients and procedures to produce multifaceted remedies akin to that described in the Ricettario galante. One such recipe for removing marks from the face is based on pulverized silver litharge dissolved in vinegar, a process that involves heating and distilling.65 An “acqua perfettissima per far bella” (“perfect beauty water”) requires mixing “argento vivo,” or mercury – a central alchemical ingredient – in a rounded flask with sage and then pulverizing it in a stone mortar with a pestle made of walnut, followed by various stages of boiling.66 Some of the most elaborate beauty recipes, such as one for “acqua di talcho” (talc water), demonstrate how tightly intertwined are cosmetics, medicine, and alchemy for Sforza. Calcinated and then slowly heated, this water can make a woman of 70 appear to be only 20 (“se una donna fuse de sesanta anni la fara parere de vinti”). Truly an alchemist’s dream (“el disiderio de li alchimisti”), the substance not only confers youth and beauty, but in powder form and mixed with white wine it serves as an antidote to plague or poison, while the water itself can cause inferior pearls to increase their luster and even their size.67 While this recipe describes the various cosmetic, medicinal, and alchemical uses of talc water, another recipe explaining how to actually produce the water is partially encoded, suggesting a deeper level of secrecy associated with the actual technique of alchemy, as noted above.68 As Joyce DeVries notes, physical adornment and cosmetic enhancement functioned as part of Sforza’s broader strategy of self-fashioning (an effort that also included actions from charitable works to the casting of portrait medals in her image). Just as the surviving inventories of Sforza’s luxurious wardrobe suggest her concern to dress the part of power, so do her cosmetic recipes attest to a corresponding interest in achieving and maintaining the ideal of feminine beauty.69
If Sforza’s medical and cosmetic recipes draw on elements of alchemical practice, the Experimenti also include 30 recipes that are overtly alchemical in nature: for example instructions for coloring metals, dissolving precious stones, calcifying mercury or converting it to water, and preparing various tinctures of gold. A recipe for a water that promises to “dissolve iron and any other metal and congeal mercury” as well as serve a medicinal use as a substitute for precious balsam is offered entirely in Latin, as are several others for turning tin to silver or silver to gold.70 One particularly valuable recipe adds a reddish tint to any metal, giving it the appearance of 24-carat gold.71 As Pasolini has noted, Sforza’s is a particularly practical sort of alchemical interest. Rather than seeking to create true alchemical gold, Sforza focuses largely on recipes for making metals and lesser coins appear to be more valuable than they are. A recipe for “adding greater weight to a scudo or golden ducat” (“A dare gran peso a uno scudo, o ducato de oro”), for example, calls for salt nitre distilled in water with “filings of Saturn” (“limatura de Saturno”), then calcinated and distilled again in an alembic. To add weight to the coin, it must merely be dipped in the mixture and weighed; and dipped again until it reaches the desired weight.72 It is with a curious note of self-consciousness that this recipe is specified as one that allows the user to commit this fraud without pangs of conscience (“senza carigo de conscientia”). This is a seemingly important distinction, suggesting an awareness not only of any moral implications of such an action, but also the penalties that were associated with such fraud.73 Other similar chemical recipes include instructions for “lending color to ducats” and coloring copper and pewter. All rely on the ingredients and processes of alchemy, demonstrating that Sforza saw the potential for the application of these theoretical practices to the realities of her own life, in which the need for money was presumably a constant burden.
Sforza’s personal correspondence corroborates that she actively sought out and circulated recipes such as those included in her Experimenti. Indeed, surviving letters to and by Sforza show that the pursuit of alchemical, cosmetic, and medical secrets established her within a network of others, women and men, who called upon her for the same.74 A letter written to Sforza in 1502 by Luigi Ciochi, for example, makes reference to a secret recipe, compounded from egg and saffron, that her correspondent has gleaned from the Mantuan court – one too precious to describe in a letter, but which Ciochi promises to reveal to Sforza in person. Ciochi’s letter demonstrates not only that he was accustomed to seeking out such recipes for Sforza – often from the same source, for example the “Madona Costanza” named here, from whom he also obtains an unguent for the face and hands – but also that he had an established interest in performing experiments with Sforza. Insisting that he wishes to be present when Sforza tests the recipe, Ciochi describes himself as an indispensable accomplice, possessed of all the requisite qualities of the alchemical adept:
Ma zuro a Vostra. Exellentia di portarvela se ben dovesse venire aposta perchè io anchora mi voglio trovar presente a tanto experimento et a una tanta satisfactione.. et anche Vostra Exellentia non trovaria mai homo simile a mi perché c’é bisogna animosità, zoe non temere spiriti, fede, zoe credulo, secreto, zoe non se scoprire con homo del mondo et haver li istrumenti necessarii a tanta opera che né in el studio di Bologna né in Ferrara né in Parigi né a Roma non furono mai simili a li mei …
(I assure your Excellency that I will bring you the recipe myself because I wish to be present for so great an experiment and so great a satisfaction … and besides, your Excellency would never find another man like me, because courage is required (that is, he can’t fear spirits); faith (that is, he must believe); secrecy (that is, he can’t disclose anything to anyone); and [he must] have the instruments necessary for such a great experiment and there are none in the laboratories of Bologna, nor Ferrara, nor Paris, nor Rome, similar to mine …)75
The qualities Ciochi praises in himself – courage, faith, discretion – are among those traditionally prescribed for the alchemist. Cortese’s Secreti, for example, stresses these very attributes when describing the ideal alchemical assistant in the preface to Book II mentioned at the beginning of this essay: “a servant who is faithful, discreet, and courageous in spirit” (“un servitor fedele, e secreto, e buono d’anima”).76
A second letter from Ciochi to Sforza similarly underscores his role as a procurer of recipes – this time a potent medical remedy – and a participant in the experiments performed by the Lady of Forlì. Like the other, this letter too reveals the links forged by Sforza with other noblewomen through her pursuit of marvelous secrets, as Ciochi passes on the same madonna Costanza’s request for certain perfumes and “powder of cypress” (“polvere di cipri”). Ciochi urges Sforza to comply, so that Costanza may later have occasion to reciprocate (as, in fact, she does), and signs himself Caterina’s “servant and faithful partner in undertaking all the experiments in the world.”77
Sforza’s other correspondents likewise provide her with a variety of cosmetic and medicinal remedies. A certain “Anna Hebrea” (Anna the Jewess), for example, sends, at Sforza’s request, a black unguent for the complexion, capable of removing age spots and softening the skin – just the kind of cosmetic recipe that appears with great frequency in Sforza’s own Experimenti as well as in virtually any printed book of secrets. Anna gives detailed instructions on how the cream is to be applied (at night, and rinsed off in the morning), along with a price list for her various products, of which she is certain Sforza will order more.78 Frate Bernardino di Gariboldi sends Sforza another remedy that commonly appears, in various formulations, in printed books of secrets: three small flasks of “acqua celeste,” a liquid capable of curing a range of maladies. As Bernardino explains, the first flask is for treating headache and stomachache; the second for the liver; and the third to protect against plague. Bernardino further promises to provide an oil, which he has not yet finished producing.79 Remedies for all these complaints are included in Sforza’s Experimenti, often in numerous forms, although which of these, if any, corresponds directly to the remedy furnished by Bernardino is impossible to tell.
Two final examples demonstrate still more clearly Sforza’s real interests in the practice of alchemy, not only for the production of medicines and cosmetics, but for making alchemical gold. A letter from an unidentified correspondent who signs himself only “That faithful servant” (“Quel fidel servo”) alludes to an exchange of secrets the two parties have agreed upon. For his part, Sforza’s correspondent supplies a special cream for the face (“quel lustro del volto”) that he has promised her, obtained through a lady of the Gonzaga family. In return, he fretfully awaits Sforza’s recipe for making “eighteen- carat gold”: “I beg Your Excellency to attend to that which you promised me; that is to send me that recipe for making eighteen-carat gold, and to send me the complete recipe and as soon as possible …” (“prego che la Vostra Exellentia me voglia attendere ad quel che la me promisse, cioè de mandarme quella ricetta da faro oro da xviii carati, et mandarmela intieramente et al più presto …”). His anxious tone and insistence that Sforza should immediately provide the recipe in its entirety, with no part left out, speaks both to the difficulty and the excitement of the experiment he seeks to undertake, and suggest that Sforza was known for performing such experiments herself. Indeed, as noted above, her Experimenti provide several recipes for tinctures of gold.
A second, more obscure letter is addressed to Sforza by a Lorenzo de Mantechitis, a correspondent who was imprisoned after playing a trick on one of Caterina’s auditors in which he pretended to perform an alchemical operation:
… perchè non intendesse quello che se lavorasse, como da la Signoria Vostra hebbi in commissione; pure a l’ultimo li disse che non era nulla, immo non credeva fusse possibile ma che faceva per dare ad intendere al maestro, el quale era pertinace che non se potesse fare arzento né fusse possibile affarne per questa via alchimica, dove che monstrandoli questo argento calcinato et in sua presentia redurlo in corpo cum sapone negro, salnitrio overo borace, che in simile forma pare cenere, che lui remanerà stupefacto a vedere che quella polvere sia reducta in arzento.
(… I was careful … that no one should know what we were doing, just as Your Ladyship advised me; even at the end I said it was nothing, and that I did not believe it was possible but that I was trying to show the master, who was certain that it is impossible to make silver or to make it by alchemical means, so that in showing him this calcinated silver and reducing it, in his presence, with black soap, salt nitre or rather borax, which in that form seems like ash, that he would be amazed at seeing that powder reduced to silver.)
Lorenzo pleads with Sforza to be freed and returned to her service, insisting he carried out the prank only to please her. Lorenzo seems to suggest that if indeed he were a successful alchemist, he would not find himself in these present straits (“… et non seria quasi in extrema necessità como sonno se havesse tale vertù”). At the same time, however, he also seems to refer to some prior success in this area, mentioning a little book that now constitutes the sum total of his activity in this area and promising to use his knowledge of alchemy only in Sforza’s service.
Quando ancora la Signoria Vostra o vero messer Jacomo [Feo] vorano che se faza alcuna prova de quelle cose che io ho, quale tengo per bone, se farà; et maxime circa quanto se contiene in quello libretto … perché ultra di quelle mai più intendo sopra ad ziò affaticarmi.80
(If Your Ladyship or indeed messer Jacomo [Feo] should wish for some proof of those things I have, which I consider useful, I will provide it; and especially with regard to what is contained in that little book … because I have no intention of ever trying anything beyond that again.)
While difficult to interpret without further information about Lorenzo and his relationship to Sforza and her second husband Giacomo Feo, mentioned in the passage, the letter suggests that Sforza had a strong interest in experiments but also that she prized secrecy and discretion in their undertaking. As noted above, such experiments – especially the transmutation of base metal into gold or silver – would have held particular appeal for one in Sforza’s position, as well as considerable risk. Indeed, the dangers of alchemy were not only legal or moral but also physical: a century later, for example, the Jewish writer Leone Modena would describe his son’s death from the noxious fumes produced by his efforts in the alchemical laboratory.81 No longer practical or domestic alchemy, with this kind of experiment Sforza was undoubtedly seeking – no matter the risks – tools that would help to strengthen her rule. Thus she seeks recipes to create precious metals, or at least to simulate them, without succumbing (as specified in the Experimenti) to any pangs of conscience.
***
The example of Caterina Sforza offers important evidence regarding the use of alchemy by women in Renaissance Italy as well as its uses in a Renaissance court. Both her collection of Experimenti and her epistolary exchanges over the last decade of her life demonstrate that the pursuit of beauty, health, and wealth through alchemical means was an ongoing and central focus for Sforza even in the midst of political and personal turmoil. The recipes collected by Sforza offer valuable insight into the role of scientific inquiry in the lives of early modern women and provide important information regarding the specific ingredients and processes used in treating illness or performing experiments. They also shed light on the relationships and networks established while doing so, which in Sforza’s case involved both men and women from her immediate circle and farther afield, for example Mantua; and from the highest echelons of society as well as from marginalized communities such as the Jews. The bonds of scientific community – not to mention the corresponding financial obligation – could run deep. When Sforza succumbed to quartan fever in 1509, not only did she leave behind a substantial debt to Lodovico Albertini for the materials she had used in her experiments, but she also left her apothecary with a great sense of sadness for the partner he had lost. In a letter dated 3 June, 1509, Albertini shared his grief with one of Sforza’s Riario relatives, writing, “… never did I feel greater sorrow, along with Bastiano and my whole family, and never again will I be content for I have lost my sweet mistress and I grieve all the more because I was not there at the end ….”82
Sforza’s example is also important in contextualizing the wave of printed books of secrets that flourished throughout the sixteenth century. Her Experimenti confirm that the therapeutic and cosmetic solutions offered in such works did in many cases find their models in quotidian practice, and that even some of the more strictly chemical recipes had roots in women’s everyday lives and in the household economy (and Sforza’s political position clearly lends still another facet of significance to her alchemical experiments). While the female authorship of a work such as Isabella Cortese’s Secreti may make it an anomaly among sixteenth-century, male-authored libri di segreti (indeed, some have suggested that this was just a marketing ploy to draw increased attention83), its dedication to a readership of women deemed likely to find its recipes useful attests to the real effort it made to reach – and to reflect – a specifically female audience. The similarities between the types of recipes offered by Cortese and those recorded by Sforza further underscore the links between books of secrets and women practitioners of alchemy and medicine.
From Machiavelli’s day to the present day, Caterina Sforza has served as a central character in efforts to understand the political contours of the Renaissance court and the role of women in relation to it.84 From her military and diplomatic strategies to her strategies of self-fashioning as a female prince, Sforza’s history has been profitably examined from many angles. Her alchemical activity, however, has remained largely in the background, a supporting actor in the larger story of her political significance. As this essay has shown, Sforza’s experiments in the laboratory are not wholly separate from her political identity, but rather attest to the important and ongoing role of scientific culture in Sforza’s life. Indeed, as Pasolini pointed out, even as Sforza was preparing for seige by Cesare Borgia – a pivotal moment in her political life – she was thinking of her next alchemical experiment. A letter addressed to her confessor, Francesco Fortunato, asks him to send her a series of glass vessels made to particular specifications, along with other ingredients known for their medicinal – and potentially poisonous – properties, as soon as possible. The letter is dated 2 November 1499 – only a few weeks before Borgia’s conquest of Imola.85
To restore Sforza’s activity as an alchemical practitioner and a collector of alchemical, medicinal, and cosmetic recipes to the broader picture of her historical importance allows us to see her in a more nuanced way. The resulting picture is one that integrates Sforza’s political significance with her involvement with early modern scientific culture. It is also, as I have suggested here, one that can help to deepen our broader understanding of women and science in early modern Italy.
1 Research for this essay was supported by a 2008–2009 fellowship from the Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Research Seminar and a 2009 Research Grant from the Renaissance Society of America.
2 Isabella Cortese, I secreti della Signora Isabella Cortese, Chicca Gagliardo, ed. (Milan: La Vita Felice, 1995), p. 31. First published in 1561 (not 1584 as incorrectly noted by Gagliardo), Cortese’s work had seven editions by 1599 and was translated into German. On this work and its publishing history see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 136–7; see also Claire Lesage, “La litterature des ‘secrets’ e ‘I secreti d’Isabella Cortese’” in Chroniques italiennes 36 (1993): 145–78.
3 Cortese, Secreti, p. 32.
4 The literature on alchemy in early modern Europe is extensive. Among recent studies, see Lawrence M. Principe, ed., Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2007); Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Kathleen Perry Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), ch. 4; Allen Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (revised edition, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002); William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, ed., Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001); Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge From Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2001); Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Piyo Rattansi and Antonio Clericuzio, ed., Alchemy and Chemistry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Dodrecht: Kluwer, 1994); Gareth Roberts, The Mirror of Alchemy: Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (London: The British Library, 1994); Alison Coudert, Alchemy: The Philosopher’s Stone (Boulder: Shambhala, 1980).
5 Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 4. Many books of secrets privilege experiential knowledge in this way: see for example, the dedication to Timoteo Rossello, Della summa de’secreti (Venice: Bariletto, 1565, unnumbered), which shares similarities to Cortese’s text (on this relationship, see Lesage, pp. 162–4); see also the well-known preface to the Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese (Venice, 1555).
6 There is some debate over Cortese’s female identity, based primarily on a lack of biographical documentation about her; the debate is detailed in Lesage.
7 The most extensive study of early modern books of secrets is Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature; see also Allison Kavey, Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England 1550– 1600 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). Nancy Siraisi notes that, “From the early Middle Ages to the high Renaissance, medicinal recipes” – a major element of the content of books of secrets – “were the commonest form of medical writing,” Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 141.
8 As Penny Bayer notes, “A published book of alchemical receipts for a female readership is evidence that women might wish to undertake or supervise alchemical work, a point reinforced when the author is named a woman” (“From Kitchen Hearth to Learned Paracelsianism: Women and Alchemy in the Renaissance,” in Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture, ed. Stanton J. Linden [Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, Inc., 2007]), p. 369.
9 On the possible printed sources for Cortese’s work, see Lesage. Siraisi (speaking of medical writing in general) states that recipe collections, along with other related texts, “may be a better guide than more sophisticated medical literature to the kinds of medicines most frequently prescribed” (Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, p. 148).
10 Tara Nummedal, “Alchemical Reproduction and the Career of Anna Maria Zieglerin,” Ambix 49 (2001): 56–68 (57).
11 On Zieglerin, see Nummedal, ibid.; on Meurdrac, see Lucia Tosi, “Marie Meurdrac: Paracelsian Chemist and Feminist,” Ambix 48.2 (2001): 69–82.
12 Cf. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton, eds, Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society (Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 1997), p. 2; and in the same volume, Hunter, “Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570–1620,” p. 95.
13 Experimenti de la Ex[ellentissi]ma S]igno]ra Caterina da Furlj Matre de lo inllux[trissi]mo S[ignor] Giovanni de Medici; see n. 40 below.
14 Cf. Deborah Harkness, “Nosce teipsum: Curiosity, the humoral body and the culture of therapeutics in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England,” p. 188: “Receipt books represent an important artefact of the culture of therapeutics in which many different accounts of illness, as well as many different therapeutic prescriptions and regimes, are often juxtaposed in a single text.” In Curiosity and Wonder From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, R.J.W. Evans and Alexander Marr, eds. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 171–92. Harkness’ focus is on the context of early modern England, which she sees as distinct from that of Europe, but her comments here are applicable to books of secrets more widely.
15 Cf. Lesage, p. 146, “… les auteurs des “Secreti” ont une vision positive de la réalité, univers mouvant plein de mystères, mais qu’on peut façonner et, peut-être, apprivoiser, afin de améliorer le passage de l’être humain sur terre” (“… the authors of the “Books of Secrets” have a positive vision of reality, a living universe full of mysteries, but one which can be shaped, and maybe tamed, in order the ease the passage of the human being on earth”). Much work has been done on nature and the marvelous in the early modern period: see for example Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone, 1998); Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture, Peter G. Platt, ed. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999).
16 Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 127.
17 Eustachio Celebrino, Opera nova intitolata dificio de ricette; I consulted the 1528 edition published in Venice by Giovanni Antonio e Fratelli da Sabbio. Eamon calls this work the “best known and most popular title in what eventually grew to be a large family of Italian all-purpose manuals for household use” (Eamon, ibid). On Celebrino see Giovanni Comelli, Ricettario di bellezza di Eustachio Celebrino, medico e incisore del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1960) and Stanley Morison, Eustachio Celebrino da Udene Calligrapher, Engraver, and Writer for the Venetian Printing Press (Paris: Pegasus Press, 1929); see also Eamon, Science, pp. 127–30.
18 “…varie sorte di ricette experimentate, le quale te insegnaranno di molti bellissimi secreti…” (Celebrino, Dificio de ricette, aii–r).
19 Some critics speculate that the real author of Alessio’s Secrets was Girolamo Ruscelli, author of his own such work, the Secreti nuovi (Venice, 1566). Others take a more circumspect position (see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, pp. 134–51; Eamon and Françoise Peheau, “The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli. A Sixteenth-Century Italian Scientific Society,” in Isis 75 (1984): 327–42; see also Lesage, pp. 160–62).
20 Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 144.
21 Carlo Dionisotti has argued that the linguistic openness of the period between 1545–1563 engendered by the emerging primacy of the vernacular in Italy fostered the entry into the literary arena of marginalized groups with limited access to formal education, including women; but see Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. xx–xxi and 82-4, for a critique of Dionisotti’s periodization. On literacy rates in this period see also Paul Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300– 1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
22 Efforts to appeal to a female readership extended across genres, for example to letter collections, which sometimes incorporated aspects of the libri di segreti; see Ray, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 10–11, 67–8.
23 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Illinois: Waveland Press, 1994), Bk. III, pp. 84–5. Giannozzo’s comments to his wife about the corrupting effects of cosmetics are based on the real dangers presented by arsenic, an ingredient commonly present in remedies for the complexion, but he explicitly links them to the moral character of the user. Ariosto’s Cassaria, V, III (Venice: Zoppino, 1538), despairs of women: “Spendono queste femine pur assai tempo in adornarse, mai non vengono al fine … hor col bianco, hor col rosso, metteno, levano, acconciano, guastano …” (“Women spend so much time making themselves beautiful, they are never done … now with the white, now with the red: they apply, they remove, they prepare, they ruin …” [my translation]). Ariosto also composed a more general satire entitled the Erbolario that targets not women specifically, but rather the charlatans that hawked useless remedies, cosmetic and medicinal, to men and women alike (Satire e rime, nuovamente ordinate e corredate di note con in fine: L’erbolario, Le lettere, Le poesie attribuite all’autore e I carmi latini, Trieste: Sez. letterario-artistica del Lloyd austriaco, 1858).
24 Many scholars note the linked nature of alchemical and medical practice in the early modern period: see for example, Chiara Crisciani, “From the Laboratory to the Library: Alchemy According to Guglielmo Fabri,” in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, A. Grafton and N. Siraisi, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 295–319; and Katherine Park, “Natural Particulars: Medical Epistemology, Practice, and the Literature of the Healing Springs,” in ibid. 347–67.
25 Cf. Bruce Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 11.
26 Celebrino, Opera nuova…per far bella ciascuna donna, unnumbered.
27 The empiric Leonardo Fioravanti (author of his own book of secrets) was likely the real author behind this work (cf. Eamon, Science, p. 166).
28 Secreti diversi e miracolosi. Raccolti dal Falloppio… (Venice, Zaltieri, 1588), pp. 315–6.
29 Cortese, Secreti, p. 93.
30 Celebrino, Opera nova, p. 16v.
31 As Eamon points out, Alessio included some particularly valuable information here, including instructions for refining borax, which was imported to Europe via Venice, “thus violating an important trade secret” (Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 146).
32 See Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe (ed. Luigi Firpo, Turin: Einaudi, 1984), chap. 20.
33 The exchange of recipes was common in many Renaissance courts, from that of Elizabeth I of England to those of the Empress Maria of Spain and Catherine de Medici of France. See Alisha Rankin, “The Practice of Pharmacology and Laywomen,” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England, Diana Robin, Anne R. Larsen, and Carole Levin, eds. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Inc., 2007), p. 265.
34 The major biographies of Caterina Sforza remain Pier Desiderio Pasolini, Caterina Sforza (Rome: Loescher, 1893) and Ernst Breisach, Caterina Sforza: A Renaissance Virago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). See also the essays collected in Caterina Sforza: Una donna del Cinquecento (Florence: La Mandragora, 2000).
35 Cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi III, 6, modified in Istorie fiorentine VIII, p. 34. Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 20, cites Sforza as a (negative) example with reference to the usefulness of fortresses to rulers under seige.
36 Specifically, Caterina’s lifting of her skirts would appear to have originated with Machiavelli. See Julia Hairston, “Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza,” Renaissance Quarterly 53.3 (2000): 687–712. On the incident at the Rocca di Ravaldino and Machiavelli’s reworking of it, see also John Freccero, “Medusa and the Madonna of Forli: Political Sexuality in Machiavelli,” in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 161–78; and Francesco Bausi, “Machiavelli and Caterina Sforza,” in Archivio storico italiano (1991), disp. IV: pp. 887–92.
37 On Sforza’s patronage of this and other institutions see Joyce DeVries, “Casting Her Widowhood: The Contemporary and Posthumous Portraits of Caterina Sforza,” in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison Levy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 77–92 (88).
38 With some exceptions: see, in addition to Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. III: Umberto Foschi, Fantasia e superstizione delle ricette di Caterina Sforza…, Bollettino economico. Organo ufficile della C.C.I.A.A. di Ravenna, 43.2 (1988): 31–6; Natale Graziani and Gabriella Venturini, Caterina Sforza (Milan: Dell’Oglio, 1988), pp. 141–9; Mario Tabanelli, “Ricette di medicina dal libro “Degli experimenti” di Caterina Sforza,” La piê 39.4 (1970): 195–8; and Ricettario di bellezza. Introduzione di Luigi Pescasio (Castiglione delle Stiviere, 1971). See also the essays contained in the exhibition catalogue, Caterina Sforza: Una donna del Cinquecento. None of these works, however, deals in any great depth with Sforza’s interest in alchemy.
39 Cf. Julia Hairston, “Out of the Archive: Four Newly-Identified Figures in Tullia d’Aragona’s Rime della Signora Tullia di Aragona et di diversi a lei (1547)” in MLN 118 (2003): 257–63 (259).
40 Cf. Monica H. Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), p. 20. See also T. Adolphus Trollope, A Decade of Italian Women, v. 1, 264: “The practice of forming and preserving such collections seems to have been a common one among the ladies of that time” (London: Chapman & Hall, 1859). A Ricettario galante dating to the sixteenth century contains alchemically derived cosmetic recipes attributed to Isabella D’Aragona, wife of Gian Galeazzo Sforza (Caterina’s half-brother) and Elisabetta Gonzaga, wife of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro of Urbino (Ricettario galante. Del principio del secolo XVI, ed. Olindo Guerrini, Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1883, see below). Raffaele Ciasca, L’arte dei medici e speziali nella storia e nel commercio fiorentino dal secolo XII al XV (Florence: Olschki, 1927) cites several such manuscript compilations at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze (pp. 350–53). Recent scholarship also shows that the nuns of Italy’s many convents produced and dispensed pharmaceuticals and ran their own apothecaries; see Sharon Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
41 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, p. 601. The manuscript is now in a private archive (Archivio Pasolini) in Ravenna. Luca Antonio Cuppano appears as an interlocutor in the Rime of Tullia d’Aragona (see Hairston, “Out of the Archives,” p. 259). On Cuppano, see Carlo Coppi da Gorzano, “Il Conte Lucantonio Coppi detto Cuppano, ultimo condottiero delle Bande Nere e dimenticato Governatore Generale di Piombino (1507–1557),” Rivisita araldica 3 (1960): 87–105.
42 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, p. 618, “il vero modo de calcinarlo sie questo, como usava madama da Furlì.”
43 Trollope’s speculation that Caterina compiled the whole of her Experimenti only during her final years in Florence seems unlikely, although she was certainly collecting recipes until the year before her death. Pescasio surmises that the recipes were compiled over course of her life (Ricettario di Bellezza di Caterina Sforza, p. 5).
44 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, p. 617, “se deve extimare tucti li altri essere veri per essere experimentati da cusi alta madonna.”
45 In her study of cookery and “household physick” books in early modern England, Elizabeth Tebeaux emphasizes the role of technical writing as a memory aid meant to supplement women’s existing knowledge: “The fact that these books … gave less emphasis to exact quantities than to ingredients and placed little emphasis on precise instructions for the making and then using [of] foods and folk medicines implies that women readers had a basic knowledge of cooking which they learned through oral transmission and from demonstration” (“Women and Technical Writing, 1475–1700: Technology, Literacy, and Development of a Genre,” in Women, Science and Medicine, p. 37).
46 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, p. 618. Regardless of how much blank space was available, readers were likely to make their own notes in the margin regarding the success of the recipe or any adjustments that should be made to it. A 1535 edition of the Triumpho di ricette & secreti bellissimi composto per Giovanbattista Verini Fiorentini at the Newberry Library, for example, is annotated throughout in this fashion.
47 Ibid., “… è mortale peccato tenere ascoso tanto tesoro.” Highlighting both the secrecy and the utility of Sforza’s secrets, Cuppano again adds that the recipes were “written down in [Sforza’s] own hand, and so as not to keep these marvelous secrets hidden I now leave a record of them (Ibid., p. 617, “experimentati da cusi alta madonna e scripti de sua propria mano et perché questi mirabili secreti non siano ascosi per me se ne tira memoria …).
48 Cortese, p. 32, “il revelare de secreti fa perdere l’efficacia.” On the traditions and strategies of secrecy associated with alchemical texts, see for example Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship.
49 The key reads b f h p x for A E I O U (cf. Pasolini, p. 615). It was not unusual to highlight the particular value of a recipe by providing it wholly or partially in code.
50 Cf. Fabrizia Fiumi and Giovanna Tempesta, “Gli ‘Experimenti’ di Caterina Sforza,” in Caterina Sforza: Una donna del Cinquecento, p. 140.
51 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, p. 669.
52 Ibid., p. 639, “… fa regiovenire la persona et de morto fa vivo ciò e si una persona fusse tanto gravata de infermitate che li medici labandonassino per incurabile et morta la reduce a sanità ….”
53 Ibid.
54 See for example William Newman, “The Homunculus and His Forbears: Wonders of Art and Nature,” in Natural Particulars, p. 319–45.
55 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, p. 622, “… la seconda è meglio che la prima ma la terza è de color de sangue, e sopra tutte.”
56 Ibid, p. 769, “A far dormire una persona per tal modo che porai operare in cirurgia quelche vorai e non sentirà est probatum.” For Patrizia Catellani, this recipe is “… forse la più considerevole di tutto il libro” (http://chifar.unipv.it/museo/Catellani/catSforza/CaterinaSf.htm).
57 Cf. in Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, several recipes for poisons and antidotes that take scorpion as a central ingredient; one of these is attributed to Pope Paul II (1464–1492) (pp. 679, 672, 673). Poison was certainly considered a real threat. Sforza herself was accused of having attempted to poison Pope Alexander IV (by sending him letters contaminated by plague), although it is widely agreed that this accusation was a mere pretext on Alexander’s part for confining her to Castel Sant’Angelo. Also included in the Experimenti are recipes for concealing and protecting written documents in various ways (for example, an “Acqua da cancelare le lettere scritte” [p. 784] and another “Acqua da scrivere che non si veda” [p. 790], both offered in Latin). Similar recipes appear in Cortese’s Secreti; see “Contra peste et veleno” (p. 17), “Olio di scorpione contra peste, et altri mali” (p. 19), “Inchiostro che in quaranta dì sparisce e non si vede” (p. 44), “Scancellar lettere senza guastar carta pergamena” (p. 45).
58 See Siraisi, Medieval and Early Modern Medicine, pp. 147–8; see also Anna Maria Guccini, “L’arte dei Semplici: Alchimie e medicina naturalistica tra conoscenza e credenza all’epoca di Caterina,” in Caterina Sforza: Una donna del Cinquecento, pp. 131–8.
59 In some cases, the affinity is merely linguistic, as in “corallo” (coral) to treat the “core” (heart). Cf Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, pp. 612–3.
60 Ibid., p. 625.
61 In a letter written by Albertini to Francesco Fortunato, Sforza’s confessor, shortly after her death and suggesting their closeness during her life, he writes that he couldn’t bring himself to mention her debt when he visited Sforza during her final illness: “non mi parse conveniente a notificarlo nequiquam parlarne, mi essere vero creditore dela prefata bona memoria di Madonna mia illustrissima de fiorini 587 et ultra in magiore somma per resto de robbe date a prefate sua llustrissima Signoria in Forli como appare uno clarissimo conto per li mei libri. Item de la bona memoria del magnifico Ziovann di Medici per robbe de la mia botega date a sua Magnificentia …” (ASF, Med. a Princ., unnumbered).
62 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, p. 621, “… fa stilare ultra modo de acqua rosata la prima e quasi argento la seconda oro la terza e quasi balsino.”
63 Ricettario galante, p. 7: “La prima acqua manda vi lentiggine del volto … la seconda acqua … spegne le fistole. La terza, ch’e piu di tutte forte … rode il ferro … raunando insieme queste tre acque, fa bello et biondoil capo come fila d’oro da la mattina a la sera.” When combined, the three waters cause the hair to turn a permanent golden color, a result also prized in Sforza’s text, which offers more than a dozen recipes for dyeing the hair.
64 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, v. 3, p. 627, “Ad idem;” “Ad idem.”
65 Ibid., “A fare la faccia bianchissima et bella et lucente, et colorita.”
66 Ibid., pp. 630–31.
67 Ibid., pp. 617–8.
68 Ibid., p. 619, “A cavare l’acqua del talcho.”
69 Cf. Joyce DeVries, “Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals: Power, Gender, and Representation in the Italian Renaissance Court,”Women’s Art Journal 24.1 (2003): 23–8, 24.
70 Ibid., p. 777, “Questa e una acqua mirabile che dessolve el ferro et tutti li altri metalli et congela el mercurio et si pone in loco de balsamo,” see also recipes on pp. 781–2.
71 Ibid., p. 782, “Aqua rubea fixa ad rubeum qua tingit omnia coloris auris sic fit 24 karatarum.”
72 Ibid., p. 620, “Quando voli dare peso alli scudi ponili drento et lassali stare un poco de poi cavali et vedi si è al peso se non mettili di novo et fa cusí finché serà al peso.”
73 Ibid. p. 620, “A dare gran peso a uno scudo, o Ducato de oro senza carigo de coscientia ….” This consideration was likely rendered more serious by the fact that alchemical fraud was punishable by law (on alchemical fraud, see Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority). As Trollope notes, Sforza’s interest in fraudulently producing “gold” is the more curious given that Forlì was authorized by papal bull to coin money (p. 265).
74 Caterina’s correspondence, and hundreds of other letters and documents pertaining to her, are recorded, and many transcribed, in Pasolini’s invaluable Caterina Sforza, vol. III. For an assessment of Pasolini’s archival findings and suggestions for further work, see Cecil H. Clough’s important critique in “The Sources for the Biography of Caterina Sforza and for the History of Her State During Her Rule, With Some Hitherto Unpublished Letters Illustrative of Her Chancery Archives,” Atti e Memorie, Deputazione di storia patria per le Provincie di Romagna, vv. 15–6 (1963): 57–143.
75 Luigi Ciocha to Caterina Sforza, 23 March 1502 (ASF, Med. a. Pr., f. 77, n. 85; Pasolini, p. 606). I have modernized accents and punctuations here but have retained the original orthography.
76 Cortese, Secreti, p. 32.
77 Luigi Ciocha to Caterina Sforza, 5 May 1502 (ASF; Pasolini, p. 607), “io la prego a compiacerla perchè anchora le ha de le gentileze de recambiare Vostra Signoria;” “servitore et partigiano fidelissimo a farne tutti li esperimenti del mondo.”
78 Anna Hebrea to Caterina Sforza, 15 March 1508 (ASF, Med. a Pr., f. 125, n. 228), “El quale unguento lo ponirete la sera et tenetelo fino ala matina e poi ve laverete con l’acqua pura di fiume … Lo unguento nero vale Carlini quattro l’oncia… Se Vostra Illustrissima Signoria ne adoperarà io mi rendo certo che continuo ce mandarete” (cf. Pasolini, p. 608).
79 Frate Bernardino di Gariboldi to Caterina Sforza, 21 January 1504 (ASF, Med. a Pr., f. 125, n. 19; Pasolini, p. 607): “… mando a la vostra Signoria tre fiaschete de aqua celeste … de le quale fiaschete et ge ne una per il malle de testa e del stomaco. L’altra si è per el figato … L’altra si è contra peste pigliandone uno poceto la matina per quelo zorno non piara peste e cosí è scrito e ligato uno breve al collo per caduana fiasceta … De li oley non o potuto lavorare, ma di curto la vostra Signoria li haverà….”
80 Cf. Pasolini, p. 609, n. 2.
81 In his Life of Judah, Leone Modena recounts his son Mordecai’s death after experimenting with transforming lead into silver, speculating that the vapors and fumes of the “arsenics and salts” used in his efforts were to blame; see the Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah, ed. Mark R. Cohen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). See also Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 399–401.
82 Lodovico Albertini, 3 June 1509 (ASF, Med. a. Princ., f. 125, n. 258; cf. Pasolini, p. 549), “… mai non [ho] sentito el magior dollore insemo con Bastiano e tuta la famiglia mia et mai più non vivrò contento perch’io ho perso la mia dolce patrona e più me dolle ch’io non me so’ ritrovato a la fine a li servitie ….” Breisach’s view is that Albertini’s grief stemmed mostly from the loss of Caterina’s financial patronage (Caterina Sforza, p. 137).
83 See for example Rudolph Bell, How to Do it: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 44.
84 On the use made of Sforza by Machiavelli, see notes 31, 34, and 35 above. A more recent example is in Joan Kelly’s influential essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” in which Sforza serves as an exception to Kelly’s argument (now problematized by many scholars) about women’s diminished roles in the Renaissance period (in idem, Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 19–50).
85 In a letter dated 2 November 1499, Sforza requested three glass balls with openings of a certain size, along with twelve sea onion bulbs (officinal squill):” “Mandatice palle tre de vetro tondo habiano il buco piccolo et che tengano doi bucali de mesura et xii cipolle marine che si chiamano schille …” (ASF, Med. a Pr., f. 70, n. 87, Pasolini, p. 606).
