16th century AD

Simeoni, Luigi, "Le tombe degli ultimi signori di Canossa," Archivio Storico Lombardo, 6th ser., 51(1924): 370-78.

Tosti, Luigi, La contessa Matilde e i romani pontefici (1859), 2d ed. (Rome: L. Pasqualucci, 1887).

Notes

This article draws on and expands research in my Ph.D. dissertation, "S. Benedetto Po: Renovation and Reform," New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1991, written under the guidance of Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt. Some of the material was presented in a paper at the International Medieval Studies Congress at Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1992. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions of Jane Bestor, Andrew Morrall, Anita Moskowitz, John Paoletti, Carolyn Valone, Evelyn Welch, and the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for Art Bulletin. I would also like to thank Daniela Ferrari, director of the Archivio di Stato in Mantua, for her help in transcribing Document 3, and Joseph Salemi, for his translation of this document as well as for his assistance with the tomb inscriptions quoted in notes 34 and 64 and the passage in note 13. Unless otherwise indicated, the remaining translations are mine.

(1.) Carolyn Valone, who has found numerous examples of architectural patronage among noble women of 16th-century Rome (almost all of them widows), attributes the scholarly neglect of women's architectural patronage to mistaken assumptions about their lack of financial resources and legal independence; Valone, "Roman Matrons as Patrons: Various Views of the Cloister Wall," in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modem Europe, ed. Craig Monson (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 49-50; and idem, "Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560-1630," Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 129 and passim. For legal and social obstacles to the possession and disposal of wealth by Renaissance women, see David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochraine (Chicago: University of Ch icago Press, 1985). On the other hand, Stanley Chojnacki has noted that patrician women of Renaissance Venice controlled increasing marital wealth of their own and were freer to dispose of it. Because their definition of family was broader, encompassing natal and marital lines, women's bequests seem less hidebound to the lineal "determinism" of men's wills. The beneficiaries cited, however, still fall within the category of kin; Chojnacki, "`The Most Serious Duty': Motherhood, Gender, and Patrician Culture in Renaissance Venice," in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 137--45. For the control of substantial properties by Renaissance women (again, widows), see also Alison Smith, "Locating Power and Influence within the Provincial Elite of Verona: Aristocratic Wives and Widows," Renaissance Studies 8, no.4 (1994): 439--48. For the (Florentine) tradition of the mundualdus, or male agent, see Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 212-36. For a different view of the status and independence of women, including the assessment of the mundualdus as "a vestige of Lombard law and often a legal fiction," see Elaine G. Rosenthal, "The Position of Women in Renaissance Florence: Neither Autonomy nor Subjection," in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. Peter Denley and Caroline Elam (London: Committee for Medieval Studies, Westfield College, University of London, 1988), 369--81, esp. 377.