Sebastian Brant: the key to understanding Luca Penni's 'Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins.'

Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier

The Florentine-born painter Luca Penni (1504?-1556/7) was at least in his mid- to late twenties when he made the most critical decision of his career: to travel to France and enter the service of King Francis I.(1) Possibly as early as 1530 he sought employment on the royal work site at Fontainebleau. Like Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio, the masters under whom he toiled and who both left an indelible imprint on his art, Penni ultimately chose to make France his definitive home. Like Rosso and Primaticcio, too, Penni became one of the most diligent propagators of the new Franco-Italian art. Many of his personal creations have perished over the centuries; hence his production has been reduced, almost exclusively, to drawings and especially prints made after his designs. As it can be reconstructed today, his personal brand of Mannerist art largely corresponds to the dominant model. A majority of his protagonists, cast in the elitist Fontainebleau mold, are drawn from ancient history and classical mythology; others play roles in seemingly traditional religious scenes. While Penni's oeuvre has attracted the attention of a number of Renaissance specialists, many scholars have apparently felt that his art pales in the shadow of Rosso and Primaticcio, deemed his more inspired peers.(2)

Yet Penni's remarkable series of eight prints, Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins, etched by Leon Davent around the mid-sixteenth century, deserves more serious consideration.(3) Historians have often reproduced these etchings, but no one has scrutinized them systematically or attempted to decipher the messages that Penni's nervous and conflict-ridden imagery conceals. This essay, centered around a detailed, contextualized examination of the prints, will present the artist in a different, more compelling light. Penni's Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins, created toward the end of his life, shows the courts-trained artist working, I contend, in a heretofore unsuspected critical mode. Middle-class moralizing, of German inspiration, is at the core of these prints, oriented as they are toward an urban clientele. In this complex enterprise, Penni was taking a simultaneously progressive and repressive stance on a number of the most significant and hotly debated issues that agitated mid-sixteenth-century France, from pauperdom and the accumulation of wealth, to prostitution, alcoholism, the role of the Church in society and the nature of "true" religion, social insecurity, and law and order. Penni's own fears and convictions must have contributed to what I interpret as an elaborate visual plea in favor of the early modern state, with its fundamental corollary, a patriarchal reordering of gender relations and the family.

Vasari (IV, 647, and V, 171) tells us that Luca Penni, the son of a Florentine weaver, received his early training in the Roman circles of Raphael where his brother Gianfrancesco had already excelled. The same author also claims that family connections account for the younger Penni's later presence in Genoa, where Perino del Vaga's prestigious decorative schemes for the palace of Andrea Doria were under way; and through Perino, the Roman, Raphaelesque, and henceforth Mannerist roots of Penni's art were fortified. After his peregrinations in search of work led him to Fontainebleau, royal accounts attest to Penni's initially well remunerated presence among the teams of artists working under Rosso and Primaticcio until, it would seem, nearly the end of the reign of Francis I (1547).(4) The precise reasons for the definitive departure of this undeniably talented artist from the royal work site about a decade before his death remain unclear; some have speculated that artistic rivalries were to blame. Employment did continue for many, including even more recently arrived Italian immigrants, while Penni's long-term dependency on courtly circles came to an end. By no later than 1544, Penni had become involved in the preparation of drawings for printmakers, the earliest recorded of the free-lance activities that assured his economic survival in Paris in the 1550s, if not before.(5) Suzanne Boorsch has recently suggested that Penni's collaboration with the etcher Leon Davent led him into Protestant Germanic lands by 1546.(6) Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins would have been produced after this trip, during the final Parisian phase of Penni's life, in the early to mid-1550s. My reading of their iconography leads me to conclude that deep-seated ideological incompatibilities led to Penni's distancing himself from the court.

Only toward the end of his life do archival documents finally allow us to conjure up a relatively clear image of Penni, parisien.(7) While the bachelor artists Rosso and Primaticcio tended to ape the self-indulgent aristocratic life-styles of the sophisticated and libertine court at which they were employed, Penni, quite differently, takes on the contours of a respectable bourgeois family man. In the will he had notarized in 1556, we learn of his desire to be interred alongside his apparently French wife, Marguerite, already buried in the cemetery of their parish church of St.-Paul in the Marais. Penni had chosen to live in a respectable new neighborhood, and Italian compatriots and fellow artists, trustworthy neighbors, came forward to assume responsibility for Penni's children when he died in late 1556 or early 1557. He himself had prepared his son's career as an engraver, apprenticing Laurent to Rene Boyvin, while a longstanding friend and successful artistic peer, Scibec da Carpi, saw that his daughter, Ysabeau, was soon married to a master goldsmith. The intent was clearly that both of Penni's children remain members of the self-esteeming artist-artisan class with which their father had come to identify.

Additional information can be gleaned from the postmortem inventory of Penni's possessions - a unique document for sixteenth-century Italian artists who had immigrated to France, as Catherine Grodecki has pointed out.(8) Right from the start, the importance of the prints under examination here is made absolutely clear. The eight copper plates representing Justice and the "sept peches mortelz" appear as the first item assessed, followed immediately by 2,226 prints made from these plates. Taken as a whole, they constitute by far the artist's most valuable possessions. It is this inventory, combined with the etchings themselves, that makes it possible to reconstruct the cultural milieu of an artist whose creative identity historians have found especially hard to define.(9) Of particular importance here are the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer and Hans Holbein that Penni owned; they testify to a penchant for German art, which Lucille Golson was the first to note. Essential, too, are the sixty-seven French, Italian, and Latin books appearing as the final item of the inventory; though not listed individually, these allow us to discern the humanistic education that the weaver's son had managed to acquire.

The Stultiferis navis, a Latin translation and adaptation of Sebastian Brant's original 1494 German edition of Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), was no doubt one of the unspecified Latin books which Penni owned.(10) Several years ago, Sara Matthews Grieco realized that Penni's representation of the deadly sin of Sloth relied on a woodcut from Brant's publication.(11) Borrowing, per se, is nothing remarkable, of course; virtually all Renaissance artists proceeded by scrutinizing and eventually incorporating into their own creations elements taken from the works of others. Indeed, I will show - without making any claims to being exhaustive - that Penni also sought inspiration from sources other than Brant. Nevertheless, this single, seemingly isolated reference to Brant's woodcut of Sloth is but a sign: the link between the sophisticated Franco-Italian prints and Brant's text and illustrations is a close one. Penni's homage to the German satirist is so extensive, in fact, that I take the bond between their works to be revelatory of Penni's own ideological stance. Whatever their geographical and historically determined differences, the two men shared a common framework of reference, one that, in line with the dominant patterns of humanism, was strongly classical and strongly biblical at the same time. According to my reading, both also harbored a deep-seated conviction that only a powerful centralized state (imperial, for Brant) could bring order to what they respectively deemed the troubled, hate-filled, covetous societies that, from their bourgeois vantage points, they perceived as disintegrating before their eyes. Finally, Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins sheds new light on Brant's popularity in mid-sixteenth-century France. A few of Penni's depictions are scarcely comprehensible without reference to the Ship of Fools, indicating that the artist knew he could count on his clientele's familiarity with that text.(12)

The "incomparable Brant," as Erasmus called him, had been portrayed in Ghent the year before his death in 1521 by Durer, the artist considered responsible for a good number of the woodcut illustrations of the first Basel edition of Das Narrenschiff(13) - and the artist so admired by Penni, too. Brant's Strasbourg origins had helped define the burgher world view inherent in his life-style and his writings. His grandfather had been a member of the wine-dealers' guild and had sat on the Great City Council no fewer than eight times. His father, the owner of a famous local inn, married Sebastian to the daughter of a cutler. Sebastian himself, after successful university studies, brilliant teaching, and the achievement of international fame as an author in Basel, returned to his hometown at the beginning of the sixteenth century to become an active and respected legal adviser to the city. The lineage evolved admirably from the contemporary patriarchal point of view, for Sebastian's oldest son, Onuphrius, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, would eventually be elected to the Great City Council.(14) The Ship of Fools gave vivid expression to the moralizing ideals of conduct prevalent in Brant's middle-class milieu. In this most famous of his writings, he vehemently denounced the fools, that is, the impudent sinners of his "fraudulent age," shown donning their traditional caps with ass's ears and bells in the widely appreciated comic imagery accompanying the text; the illustrations were deliberately inserted to spread the author's urgent message beyond the traditional literate audience. Though seemingly playful in their satirical garb, the fools were in actuality a practical tool for propagating the harsh combat led by the respectable civic authorities of the age against "sin and crime in the name of God."(15) When Penni, profoundly marked by Brant's masterpiece, drew abundant inspiration from it, he chose not to carry the gay jester's garb over to his protagonists. Instead, he retained only the stern pessimistic edge, the gestures and acts illustrating the minor failings and major sins that, for the salvation of mankind, he too felt compelled to denounce. Jean Delumeau refers to Brant's Ship of Fools as his "poeme sur le peche,"(16) and that is unquestionably how Penni interpreted it, too. For both creators, man's sins were steering the ship of earthly fools along a highly perilous route.

Henri Zerner was the first to suggest that Penni's eight etchings, which bear Leon Davent's monogram on the first state of the Justice print ("a sort of frontispiece"), were not made at Fontainebleau. Thanks to Boorsch's careful study of School of Fontainebleau watermarks, proof has since been furnished that their origins were actually Parisian.(17) Furthermore, the fact that the original etchings were completed and reworked by an unidentified engraver for wider commercialization indicates, at a different level, that Penni was targeting a broader, urban-based clientele.(18)

Each print devoted to a specific sin includes five separate depictions: one central oval image, containing the principal message, and four subordinate but related illustrations, each set in a small corner tondo. For convenience, since the prints themselves indicate no particular hierarchy, the tondi are read here from left to right, the upper register first. Although nothing assures us of the order in which Penni expected the seven sins to be viewed, one thing is certain: the first must be Pride, traditionally the root of all sin.(19) And, to set contemporary priorities straight from the start, Pride was a woman - she too, in Christian dogma, the root of all sin.(20)

Superbia

"Orguel est royne des vices, et mere et nourrice"(21) (Pride is queen of the vices, and mother and nurturer)

In this print [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], Penni singled out those acts which he saw as challenging the basic laws set forth by an omnipotent God, those which guaranteed the social coherence of the society in which he lived. In the large central oval, his approach to the sin of Pride proves to be double-edged: each of the winds that blow angrily from the top of the image is given a separate, gender-determined message to relay. A distinction made in Piers Plowman allows us to identify the wind directed toward the male figures as that of the world, blowing with covetousness; the other, directed against the lascivious "queen of the seven sins," is that of the flesh, emitting gusts filled with "likings and lust."(22) To begin with the latter, the armband, uncovered breasts, and bared right leg of the toppling female beauty suggest that Penni conceives of the standard allegorical figure of Pride as a "wench" with "vile intent."(23) Only a moment before, it seems, the voluptuous woman was seated on a raised throne (now lowered from its pedestal and set prosaically on the ground) where she had been admiring her provocatively costumed self in the mirror; now she turns back to look at the wind of vainglory that has been delegated to blow her and her consorts into the gaping crevasse of hell below. The diagonal of Pride's fall reiterates that of the winged Lucifer, beneath whose body tumble a nude Adam and Eve; the link is direct, for Pride, the daughter of Lucifer, sometimes referred to as Lucifera, was explicitly credited with an instrumental role in the fall of man.(24) Similarly, to emphasize and explain Eve's active and culpable responsibility for the fall, her hand has been positioned within the throne of Pride, while her arms parallel the movements of her sister in sin above; the curls of her long, undone hair (visible proof, for contemporaries, of her lasciviousness) even evoke the flames of hell into which she descends. The intent of the strange gesture of the left hand of Lucifer, the pivotal figure who looks toward the beholder with mouth agape, seems to be to warn the implicitly male viewer that he too could be cuckolded by "the wench."(25) Significantly, the lower (baser) part of Lucifer's body is wedged in between Pride and Eve, while his more noble head is positioned toward the male protagonists in the scene.

Pride was perceived as a sin against God himself, and the Fall of Lucifer, the Prince of Pride, constituted one of the most common medieval associations. In Penni's classically inspired world view, the Fall of the Angels has been merged with the Fall of the Titans. To the far left of the image, a powerful colossus surges forth, rising up and out of the dramatically lit, Manneristic surface jumble of the downward-bound crowd. Although the rebellious figure is still actively defying the gods, the wind sent from above is disempowering the aggressive blade of his sword. Lucifer's "unwillingness to accept his proper place in the divine order" is the theme of the entire left side of the oval,(26) where eloquent pictorial disorder reigns. Fallen angels or fallen giants, these predominantly mature men are guilty of insubordination, and, in the strongly hierarchical, corporate society of the time, this amounted to no less than a crime against God himself. Men, on the one hand, perceived to be the active protagonists of society, were expected to acquiesce in their allotted place in God's universal order. Women, on the other hand, were to forsake the snares of licentiousness - and haughty prostitution(27) - and seek, more properly, the honor equated with a humble and chaste wife; such is the binary opposition spelled out explicitly by Brant in his chapter 92, entitled "Presumptuousness of Pride." In the final analysis, though, Penni created a telling hierarchy within his central image: Lucifer's lewd daughter, queen of the vices, has been positioned highest in space, closest to the source of the destructive gusts of God's angry winds.

With great coherence, the framing tondi all continue to treat the theme of Pride as a refusal of the order God has ordained from on high. For three of them, Penni set about creating his images with one of Brant's woodcuts directly before his eyes. Brant's chapter 86 is in fact entitled "Of Contempt of God," and Penni drew upon the corresponding German woodcut [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] for his upper left-hand roundel. Yet despite unmistakable formal similarities, the original intentions of the two authors seem to have diverged; no wonder, really, for this was an era of radical and fast-paced religious change - precisely the subject that Penni is treating here. In Brant's illustration and text, a fool dares to mock and malign God, grasping and pulling at his beard. Divine punishment is already being meted out in the form of projectiles falling from the sky: "His thunder God on him will vent," the text explains. Penni has deleted both the specifics of the landscape surrounding Christ and the signs of God's chastisement. More important still, the fool has been transformed into a soldier with drawn sword, yanking at Christ's robe. The issue no longer seems to be punishment for a generic lack of respect for God, but rather persecution for one's beliefs, just as Jesus had been persecuted for his. Perfectly oblivious to this threat of violence, the resurrected Christ strides calmly toward the beholder: his message cannot be suppressed.

This image is undoubtedly related to the increasing tensions between Protestants and Catholics which afflicted French society in the last decades of Penni's life. As early as 1534-35, the Affair of the Placards - when Reformist-instigated broadsheets denouncing "the idolatry of Mass" had surfaced all over Paris and in the Loire Valley, where one was brazenly affixed to the door of the king's chamber - had triggered a "prolonged and savage," perhaps predominantly Parlement-inspired persecution, and some thirty odd people suspected of heresy were burned. By 1543, the king had granted to both secular and ecclesiastical authorities the power of search and arrest; "inquisitors of the faith" would henceforth be actively at work for decades, if not centuries, to come. The printing trade was particularly prone to persecution. In 1535, in an attempt to curtail heresy, printing per se had been temporarily outlawed; in the 1540s, a number of Paris booksellers and printers were tortured and burned. When Etienne Dolet was sent to the stake in 1546, he died proclaiming his faith in Jesus Christ.(28) Under Henry II, Parlement created the infamous chambre ardente, a special chamber which took over the marshaling of the crusade against religious dissent; among the "Lutherans" imprisoned were now goldsmiths, silversmiths, musicians, and even a sculptor. If religious borders were as yet not firmly defined in mid-sixteenth-century France, apprehension undeniably filled the air. Was Penni - if not a full-fledged Protestant, at least an evangelical humanist of the likes of Erasmus, Rabelais, and Marguerite de Navarre - taking a stand against the uselessness of the repression unleashed on a portion of the urban humanistic elite with which he interacted and identified? Both the evangelical humanists and the Protestants harbored a deep-seated conviction that truth would prevail; resistance against, even disdain for, persecution characterized their attitude, from Rabelais's prophetic riddle in Gargantua to the bloody massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Night.(29) Analysis of the next two tondi, and of some of the other prints, will add weight to my interpretation of this image.

When Brant verbally tackled the subject of the blindfolding of Justice in his chapter 71, entitled "Quarreling and Going to Court," he was taking a stab, on the one hand, at the complexities and cost of litigation, which he saw as serving mostly to keep the purses of judges, attorneys, and other judicial authorities full, and, on the other, at the fools who nonetheless made a practice of going to court with monetary gain rather than justice in mind. Penni took over the corresponding satirical image [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED! and redirected it, once again, to his own purpose. Brant's unmistakably urban setting has evolved into a more noble, palatial one - Penni has royal justice in mind - while, from a formal point of view, it is Davent's exquisite stippling that catches the eye. The sword of the soldier seen diligently blindfolding Justice emerges symbolically from behind her scales of impartiality: Penni renders force, not greed, responsible for the transgression of Justice, the latter, as we shall see, divinely ordained.

In the third tondo, cohorts of the first two soldiers are seen most indecorously dumping Minerva - that is, Wisdom - headfirst into a sack. The soldiers, this time, have replaced the fools in a woodcut which first appeared in Locher's Latin edition of Brant's work, accompanying a chapter entitled, in a sixteenth-century French translation, "De la commendation ou recommendation de philosophie" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. The text explains that "Wisdom is the mother of Faith and Justice," confirming the existence of a genuine tondo trilogy here; "without her, neither prince nor king can duly govern his scepters and dominions."(30) Penni's call is for reasoned rather than impetuous action, tolerance rather than repression, with true justice lying on the side of those who are being rashly prosecuted and persecuted for their belief in Christ. The soldiers of all the preceding tondi must be acting in contempt of God, for this is the sin of Pride.

The final tondo is not directly related to the other three but rather illustrates a specific, inadmissible act of rebellion against the social order instituted by God. If a prototype exists, it is not in Brant, but perhaps in one of the innumerable contemporary representations of Tarquin and Lucretia. The scene, like that of Tarquin and Lucretia, is one of rape, but the aggressor is not a noble Roman but rather a peasant, identifiable thanks to his hat,(31) who has dared to break into the distinctly upper-class bedchamber of a lady. The lowly rapist has his dagger in hand, and his knee is already between the highborn victim's thighs; clearly, the lady's gesture of refusal will never be sufficient to stave him off. Guido Ruggiero's study of rape in Venice allows for an understanding of what is taking place here. Rape per se was generally considered a rather minor crime; as Ruggiero puts it, "the victimization of women was just not significant enough to warrant serious concern." This no longer held true, however, for "rapes that crossed social boundaries upward." In such instances, punishment could be exemplary, to say the least: Ruggiero cites one example where the perpetrator was to have his hands cut off and suspended around his neck on a chain, before later being hanged with the very same chain.(32) The conclusion is that not rape but social stratification is the fundamental issue being addressed here. The provocative nudity of the noble lady, contrasting with the full peasant costume, implies that, consenting or not, it was her lustful nature that brought the problem on. The insubordinate pride of the peasant, indicated by the hat worn defiantly on his head, leads him to commit a formidable act of contempt against the honor of the lady's male kin - such is the explicit conviction of the age - and the divine order of the universe.

Put into positive terms, Superbia, when taken as a whole, propounds that men should accept the social rank bestowed upon them at birth and behave accordingly; that contemporary authorities should respect new expressions of genuine faith; and that women should combat their inherently libidinous inclinations by leading chaste and respectable lives.

Avaritia

Generally speaking, Avarice, like Pride, had the reputation of being the root of all evil in Penni's mercantile age.(33) The Ship of Fools proclaims that "gold alone is deified" by virtually all the social strata (chapter 46, entitled "On the Power of Fools"); and the Avarice print [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED! demonstrates amply that Penni concurred. In this particular instance, though, rather than basing his critical imagery on depictions with satirical intent, Penni undertook the deliberate sabotage of an "orthodox" image created by Nicolas Beatrizet, an artist from Lorraine then working in Rome, the seat of Western Christian tradition. Beatrizet's signed Virgin of the Rosary [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED] develops a favorite Dominican theme,(34) that of the roses (shown being dropped from heaven by the angel in the upper right) which were traditionally used for making garlands to crown the Virgin and had evolved into the rosary itself. The vertical oval at the center of Beatrizet's sheet shows the Virgin and Child raised high on a pedestal and holding rosaries out to a large crowd of devotees, the latter arranged according to social rank. On the central axis, flanking the pope, kneel the temporal defenders of the Church: emperor first, then king and - barely identifiable in this instance - doge. Behind this first row come cardinal, bishop, and nobleman. Standing beside them is a seemingly visionary friar, the sole nonsacred figure with rosary in hand; two younger members of the formidable Order of Preachers are shown behind him. The status of the rest of the male crowd is hard to define, although the figure to the far left is clearly of some means. Obviously ancillary to this dense foreground cluster are the members of the "subordinate gender." Empress and queen, though kneeling close to the Virgin and Child, are nonetheless set back in space; minuscule nuns stand farther back still in some ill-defined middle ground; and in the distance, a number of other properly veiled women, with or without progeny, emerge from what could well be a church. Beatrizet has devised an image of a tightly knit, thoroughly devout society led in unison by church and state, with the precious assistance of a preeminent, inspired Dominican order.

It comes as something of a shock, then, to discover much the same crowd, egged on by the assertive intruder Cupidity, explicitly designated as Blind Lust, kneeling in adoration no longer of the Virgin and her rosary but of the wealth and power of a treacherous Mammon instead. In this instance, Penni has assumed an overtly biting edge. Worship itself seems to have become more intense; papal vestments mimic more thoroughly those of the emperor, with a subtle but incontrovertible insistence on the material weight of precious stones. One of the Black Friars has given way to a peasant, his tool for working the land in hand; the remaining pair have raised their hoods over their heads, but their involvement has not decreased even though the leader's rosary is gone.(35) Other middle-class and peasant heads of household take their places in front or to the left of a stabilizing column, much as Beatrizet had them do; and even the light source remains virtually the same. Christ (Matt. 6:24) had declared that "Ye cannot serve God and mammon," and Penni's image leaves room for no ambiguity whatsoever. Mammon, moreover, proves to be none other than the devil in woman's guise, horns and claws protruding from beneath her lavish garb. The queen of riches holds forth a fine dish full of coins where once the Christ Child had sat; her dress is remarkably similar to that of the highest representatives of church and state kneeling "piously" at her feet, and all the major forms of wealth in Penni's age are scattered about her throne. Displayed on her pedestal are the trappings of princes: ewer and amphora, chalice and dish filled to the brim with coins, a heavy gold chain, like the one hanging around her neck, and jewels galore. Resting on the ground are the drawstring purses, money bags, and a money chest associated with middle-class trade; sacks of grain (which in Brant's chapter 30, entitled "Of Too Many Benefices," signify prebends) lean against the pedestal as well. Gender segregation has been intensified by Penni, for all those theoretically denied economic control have this time been confined to the top of the stairs or to the tiny group of figures emerging from the new vista with a city gate beyond. To Beatrizet's matrons and mothers Penni has added bare-breasted beauties, toward one of whom two little children gesticulate, as if in protest. Did Penni wish, peripherally, to allude to women who sell themselves for the riches of Mammon? At any rate, the well-lit city gate against which the male child's left arm is offset was one of the traditional sites of prostitution during the Renaissance;(36) and toward the end of the century, Spenser continued the tradition of pairing Avarice and Lechery in his Faerie Queene.(37) Furthermore, Cupid-Cupidity is now entrusted with establishing the visual pivot between the male-dominated foreground and the female-dominated middle ground.

The central image would make it seem that Penni was leaving the respectable urban elite, his peers, relatively unscathed. The two upper tondi, however, are specifically directed at the egotistical accumulation of wealth for its own sake by merchants of the middle class. For the first tondo, Penni once more found direct inspiration in Brant, who had reverted to the traditional representation of the poor Lazarus for the illustration of his chapter 17, entitled "Of Useless Riches" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED]. Whatever the changes effected by Penni, the interdependency of the two images is clear. The elderly beggar lying outside in the street holds the same walking stick, the same empty dish; his tattered clothes remain unable to cloak his chest fully; the humped back of the first dog licking his wounds, and the parting of the beggar's knees are carried over, like a quotation, from the German image to the French. Although the architecture of the comfortably furnished abode is grander and the fool has become a merchant, the meaning remains the same: "Lord Lucre leads the greedy on." As a beggar starves, the wealthy man stealthily counts his coins by the light of a lamp before stowing them away in a purse, a money bag, a money chest, or a coffer with triple lock. The issue of pauperdom was actually a very complex affair (see the discussion of Pigritia below), but the notion of Christian charity made it difficult for pious members of the middle class such as Brant and Penni to stomach the hoarding of "useless riches" as the poor died in the streets.

The tondo on the upper right returns to the problem of the money hoarder to confront it from a different angle. Brant's chapter 106, entitled "Refraining from Good Works," begins with the eminently capitalistic notion that God gave money to mankind with the intent that it "fructify":(38) he who refuses to use his money to acquire more will be condemned on Judgment Day. A woodcut [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED], not present in the original Narrenschiff but later added to Locher's Latin edition, shows the devil striking down a fool engaged in burying his treasure in the ground. Penni offers a variation on the image in which a wealthy burgher - virtually identical to the miserly one who appeared in the preceding roundel - is shown, hoe in hand, preparing to inter his money bags, dishes filled with coins, and fine money chest. The dead tree placed in an open landscape brings to mind one of Brant's passages: "Some trees do burn in hell below / On which good fruit would never grow."(39) Finally, the rosary which Beatrizet had exalted with such zeal has now been hung, subversively, alongside the merchant's purse. A passage added in the 1495 edition of Das Narrenschiff, and therefore absent from the Brant translation used here, affords the explanation: "I say in truth that neither Jews, nor pagans, nor gypsies, nor Tartars are as infamous in their practices as we the Christians, who are so proud of being Christian but prove it so little through pious works."(40) These two tondi share the same sharply satirical spirit, indeed, with the willfull attack on the rosary bringing the spirit of the Reformation to mind.

The third tondo, however, takes us into a totally different realm: the crucial domain of dowry practices in the Renaissance. Brant's woodcut [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED] illustrating his chapter 52, entitled "Marrying for the Sake of Goods," places an elegantly dressed "marriage-for-money fool" directly between the rear end of an ass and a finely shod but unappealing old woman, viciously characterized in the text as "a sorceress: an angry, scolding, nagging shrew." With his provocatively positioned sword aimed at the ass's rump while he holds its tail in the air, the fine youth turns to the unappealing woman to take possession of the contracted funds. Alas, the money bag is filled not with coins, as anticipated, but with "dung and filth"; in the long run, the money-mad dandy will receive nothing but "quarrels, woe, and pain." Fashion and architectural styles have changed in Penni's day, but the message, relating ill-fated greed and the notion of the ill-matched couple to a major institutionalized practice of the time, has remained the same. Behind the misogynous images, too, lies a widespread desire to curb the relative freedom of widows while rerouting their funds to philanthropic ends.(41)

In the final tondo, Penni chose to depict a grain speculator who hanged himself, thereby confronting the viewer with one of the most highly controversial and destabilizing facets of the society in which he lived: the ever-recurring problem of grain speculation during times of crisis. Brant had devoted his chapter 93 to "Usury and Profiteering," and his corresponding woodcut shows a fool and a merchant unabashedly speculating on wine and grain in the streets of a town. Elsewhere (269), he launches an attack on well-to-do peasants, imagining that revolts will punish them for their greed. Apparently, it is just such a wealthy peasant speculator whom Penni chose to denounce (as we have seen, he added a peasant to the group of Mammon worshipers in the central oval). Sacks of grain and measures are positioned in a granary, alongside a speculator who has hanged himself from the rafters after prices plummeted. The general context calls to mind an anecdote recounted in Castiglione's then-popular Book of the Courtier:

[A miser] in desperation after he had refused to sell his grain for a good price, and then seen the price tumble, hanged himself from a rafter in his bedroom; however, a servant of his heard the noise, ran in to see his master hanging there and quickly cut the rope, saving him from death. Subsequently, after the miser had recovered, he insisted that the servant pay him for the rope.(42)

Yet, far from Castiglione's courtly universe of entertaining stories, Penni's tondo affords a depiction of just retribution. Brant had set the tone when he launched the ultimate insult at these Christian profiteers (whom he too imagined as ultimately hanging from a rope), by describing them as "more usurious than the Jew" (303). Penni's attack, however, invokes not the infidel without, but what he judged as hypocritical behavior within the Church itself: once again, the loathed rosary hangs from the protagonist's belt, on prominent display. In mid-sixteenth-century Paris, the impassioned middle-class debate surrounding the accumulation of wealth was inextricably interconnected with antagonistic religious world views. The Council of Trent had been convened before Penni began to produce these prints, and one of its prescriptions would be intensified emphasis on the recital of the rosary.(43) Penni was manifestly at odds with this traditional devotion.

Invidia

The sin of Envy, rather ill defined in France prior to the mid-fourteenth century, grew in significance and took on more specific meanings only in the fifteenth century, as the mechanisms of capitalism developed and the upper middle classes began to play a more assertive role. By Penni's time, Envy had evolved to encompass the traditional notion of slander, linked to envy of one's superiors in a strongly hierarchical society, and that of covetousness - the coveting of the riches of the more numerous and more ostentatious well-to-do; and the notions of envy and hatred were more or less equated,(44) as the title of Brant's chapter 53," Of Envy and Hatred," suggests.

Christian tradition and the Renaissance passion for classical antiquity account for the specific elements depicted in Penni's central oval [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED]. In accord with the standard gender association, the female personification of Envy displays her no less standard attributes. Cadaverous in her old age, her terrifying breasts hang unnaturally from her emphasized rib cage, pointing toward the flames of hell that blaze forth to engulf her; the treatment of her hair makes it clear that the raging diabolical flames also inhabit her from within. Throughout the Middle Ages, Envy was conceived as a sin against the Holy Ghost.(45) Penni's rendition of this concept has been classicized: Envy has now seized Jupiter's flaming thunderbolts, a precious booty which she displays to the beholder, holding them firmly in her muscular arms. Her fate, nonetheless, is that of Lucifer and his demons after pride and envy had led them to defy the Almighty.(46) And as the Prince of the Devils had done during his fall, she looks in the direction of the heavens, toward her paradise lost, rage visible in her eyes, the venom of the lies inspired by hate made manifest by the serpent of envy held between her teeth.(47) Lucifer's male acolytes, shown transporting or welcoming Envy into the seething abyss of Hades, represent the traditional admixture of animal and man. Three of them, their huge mouths open, screech gloatingly. The fourth manoeuvers Pluto's fork along the central axis with the clear intent of dragging Envy down toward the sharp-toothed, vicious heads of Cerberus, the beast shown guarding the classically arched entrance to the underworld. Common hounds appear to the far left, on a desolately barren terrestrial plateau; aided and abetted by a swarm of carrion crows, they pick away at the meager remains of an animal carcass, engaged in destruction to the bitter end. Above, a glimpse into Jupiter's ether is afforded through a bright opening in the dark, somber, perhaps pestiferous clouds. Through this opening, Penni has portrayed delicate young women (a personification of the Clouds themselves?) who, in sharp contrast to the envious fury below, seem to be dancing a stately round. Their number, however, is the fateful eleven, Saint Augustine's "coat of arms of sin"; accordingly, their apparent calm masks potential disorder, conflict, violence, rebellion, even the revolt of the angels once again.(48) Envy has received her cue from an all-female dance of Discord. The potent forces of ill will and hatred have thus colored the earthly realm with a marvelously diversified but consistently grim and deadly gray.

In the accompanying tondi, we see how Envy "put[s] her evil plans to test" (Brant, 185).(49) In the upper left, Penni chose to illustrate envy and hatred between kin through recourse to Christendom's archetypal scene of murder. To evoke the early stages of the history of mankind appropriate to the book of Genesis, Cain is shown beating his brother Abel to death with a rustic wooden club, and both are garbed in primitive animal-skin tunics. Two unequal altars, and their respective positioning in space, reveal the nature of the contention at hand. To the left, smoke pours forth from the distant raging flames which have consumed Cain's rejected sheaf of corn, devouring the fire burning around Abel's still visible lamb which God had preferred. Like Brant (185), Penni was convinced that "A kinsman oft will hate some other / Far less than he may hate his brother."

Throughout the Middle Ages, "envious and angry men" were equated with "hounds that bark and bite," and in allegorical representations Envy was often shown riding on a dog. In the tondo on the upper right, Penni, more pointedly, chose to invoke Aesop's fable of the Ox and the Dog.(50) A dog is shown growling spitefully at a hungry and tired ox that has come to eat some of the hay that the dog had been lying on. An envious person, the moral proclaims, prevents others from enjoying even something for which he/she has no real use. Interestingly, although this precise tale has left no specific traces in modern-day French, the English expression "dog-in-the-manger" continues to convey Penni's intent.

The lower left tondo brings to mind the acrimonious scene of vengeance against Ajax which Rosso had treated in the Shipwreck of Nauplius in the Gallery of Francis I at Fontainebleau. More directly, though, it proves to be a composite image in which two of Brant's successive metaphors of envy (185) have been combined:

Dame Envy only laughs when she Has sunk a foe's ship out at sea, When Envy gnaws with eager bite, She eats herself alone for spite. Etna consumed itseLf alone ...

Penni's burning island-rock must represent Etna consuming itself in a fire of raging hatred. Envy, all the while, is delighted to have sunk the two vessels that foundered, like Ajax's ships, while trying to reach the shore in the foreground.

Finally, in the fourth tondo, Penni returns to the clearly topical theme of the jealous enmity of kin, selecting the episode from the seventeen-year-old Joseph's dreams which led his brothers to rid themselves of their father's favorite son (Gen. 37:1-11). In the foreground, Joseph sleeps in the field of his dream where he, his father, and his brothers, all outlined against the horizon, had been binding sheaves. Directly behind the reclining dreamer, eleven of the harvested bundles lean inward in deference to his sheaf (note that the fateful number recurs). The sun, the moon, and the eleven stars that he saw bowing to him appear in the sky overhead. In the figures visible against the light sky, Joseph and his father are clearly set off to one side. To the left, one of the ten brothers thrusts out his arm in denunciation of the youth's desire to lord it over them all. Envious hatred, of course, will soon incite them to eliminate the rival they despise.(51)

In an interestingly contradictory manner, although the main protagonists of the more abstract central oval are female, in these more concrete tondi, envy clearly evokes bestial behavior and male antagonism in Penni's mind. Men tended to hold economic, social, and political power, so, the artist implies, men tended to be caught up in the envy-driven enmities which ensued.

Gula

The tensely critical spirit permeating Penni's print of Envy, its ugliness even, is carried over into his representation of the sin of Gluttony [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED]. In the manner of the woodcut [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED] accompanying Brant's chapter 16, "Of Gluttony and Feasting," which inspired its central oval, Penni's work is aimed at denouncing the evils of the tavern.(52) The artist has created additional images and rendered them more overtly repulsive for the Parisian market, but for the reputable burghers that both Brant and Penni aspired to be, the basic issue was the same: reasonable moral conduct was at stake. Occupying center stage here are the "coarse fools," "the foulest swine," whom Brant disparagingly classifies time and time again as "peasants"; they illustrate by omission that proper manners, moderation, honesty, chaste behavior, and respectable and pious speech have become absolute values for the bourgeoisie.

In Penni's variation, the pithily rendered German unruliness has taken on a more elaborate and sophisticated, yet bitterly fierce, Italian edge. Rustic stools have been reborn as fashionable, even elegant seats; those figures now literally shown as peasants wear classically inspired Phrygian hats and tunics or long barbarian pants; genteel drinking cups and goblets, ewers and urns abound. Space, too, has been treated in a more masterful way. Yet it serves to make room for more numerous - and more vile - protagonists involved in a decidedly more horrendous scene, direct quotes from and many similarities to the woodcut notwithstanding. The rowdy nature of the tavern crowd has been accentuated, the link between gluttony and bestial behavior stressed and brought to the fore. Noise, discord, and even stench can be imagined as filling the air. On the central axis, Penni has pointedly added a retching peasant set amidst four dogs. One of the beasts (another dog-in-the-manger?) snarls at an unpleasant-looking drinker; two fight over bones; and a fourth laps up the vomit still cascading to the floor. And, who knows, perhaps the knives on the table had previously been used to flay a cat, as Brant, who therefore preferred to eat with his fingers, suggests!(53)

The precise nature of the brutes that Penni associates with this den of sin warrants elucidation. Peasants, again to be understood in the depreciative sense inherent in the sixteenth-century upper-class view of the world, overindulge in food and drink alongside a company of almost exclusively mature and aging men (the male sex alone is targeted here).(54) Among the most degenerate in appearance are those with shaved heads and strange marks above an ear. Could this be the artist's manner of signaling criminal presence in the curtained-off room? To be sure, the perception of the tavern as "a thieves' ditch" coincides with both longstanding ideology and historical fact.(55) In reference to Penni's era, the tavern has been described as a place where common citizens mingled with the delinquent constituency of the town. Eleven tavern owners, for example, have been noted among the people indicted in the town of Arras between 1529 and 1548; punishment could include outlawing the frequentation of said sites; and under the influence of alcohol imbibed in taverns many a crime was committed - on or off the premises.(56) Since criminals were sometimes branded so that their wickedness would be perceptible to all, it could well be that Penni's odd but repeated "blemishes" allude to this ignoble social condition.(57)

There can be no doubt that Penni's depiction deals with a highly topical, eminently controversial theme. Around the time of the artist's death, the French king Henry II intervened to curtail the heavy alcoholic consumption in the many taverns of his realm.(58) Women were said to have rejoiced at the closing of what Penni clearly portrays as a male preserve, and the reformation of taverns was equated with no less than "the destruction of Gluttony" itself.(59) Such jubilation was, of course, premature. Vineyards encircled the capital and were dispersed throughout it as well; the wine press had even made its way onto the Ile-de-la-Cite. Wine production and trade were essential to Parisian prosperity and the French economy as a whole. Traditionally, the major producers were ecclesiastic and aristocratic landowners, while both urban and royal taxation was heavily dependent upon the harvesting of grapes and the making and consumption of wine.(60) Paradoxically, therefore, all the people who considered it their vocation to reprove overindulgence in food and drink stood to profit from the production, sale, and taxation of wine. Clerics could continue to castigate the sin of gluttony as they had done for centuries; the king could henceforth issue decrees in response to public outcry, as the responsibility for active social repression was shifting to him. Meanwhile, middle-class polemicists such as Brant and Penni could give verbal and visual expression to their aversions, reassuring themselves and their audiences, if nothing else, that they, the well-educated, in no way resembled the repugnant lower-class "fools" the writer and artist took it upon themselves to evoke. In this spirit, Penni went on to use his four tondi to depict both reprehensible dupes prone to gluttony and the nefarious effects of the sin.

In the upper left tondo, Penni creates a street scene around the common association of a corpulent monk and a hog or sow.(61) The negative qualities which Christian tradition attributed to this animal were rooted in the biblical tale of the casting of the demons into swine (Luke 8:26-33).(62) Brant's lengthy chapter 72 makes much of the parallel between "coarse fools" and sows, one of which figures prominently in the accompanying woodcut. And in an age rife with satire against drunken monks,(63) both wine and monks bear much of the brunt of Brant's attack (238-41). A little over two decades prior to the Reformation, he had even gone so far as to state (245): "Far better close the orders all / Than monks that into sinning fall." As for Penni's monk, his unsightly, bloated figure rides a sow about town, indecently displaying his no doubt "brimming glass of wine" and skewered food, a gourd hanging suggestively between his legs.(64) By the mid-sixteenth century, evangelical humanists, including both Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre, had launched truly ferocious attacks against monks, and monasteries and convents had been closed in Protestant lands.(65)

The upper right tondo and its social implications have been analyzed extremely well by Matthews Grieco. Here, the predominantly male-oriented sin of gluttony lends itself to a discourse on drunkenness and the female sex. A young woman, who really ought to be in her proper place at home, is seen parading dissolutely about town as she avidly guzzles wine from one gourd and holds another ready at hand. Bare breasts, a slit gown, and long, lust-evoking hair spell out the specific gender-related dangers menacing the woman who drinks too much: drunkenness leads to loss of self-control and a woman's all-important chastity is instantly at stake. Hence the conviction of Penni's contemporaries that intoxication is more indecent for women than for men.(66) Tellingly, Penni's allusions to the connection between drunkenness and sexuality are limited to the ecclesiastic and female spheres, in spite of the interrelation of male-patronized taverns and prostitution.

In the two lower tondi of the Gluttony sheet, Penni concentrates on the physical discomforts caused by intoxication. In the one on the left, he repeats more or less, but in reverse, the vomiting figure of the main oval. Alone now at a table with a pitcher and a beaker of wine, and thus in a private rather than a public place, the drunkard faces the dog that has come to lick up his spew. Medieval bestiaries are consistent in pointing out that dogs return to their vomit, and Brant, with biblical references in mind, uses the image as a metaphor for the sinner (277). The inclusion of a comparable scene is standard in representations of gluttony at this time; see, for example, Bosch's and Bruegel's well-known representations of the Seven Deadly Sins.

In the lower right tondo, Penni depicts a somewhat dignified protagonist for a change. A figure dressed in deshabille with his head wrapped (hangover obliges) reclines on fine furniture in an imposing interior. Propped on an elegant set of pillows, he rests his aching head on one hand. Rather than satirical of the repugnant "other," this warning about moderation seems to be directed at the respectable middle-class male. This particular sufferer might even have inspired indulgence, given what historians consider to be the poor quality of much of the wine then sold and consumed; according to Brant (328), it was liable to contain saltpeter, sulphur, bones of the dead, potash, milk, mustard, and deleterious herbs.

Ira

The exacerbated tension visible in the two preceding illustrations of deadly sins extends, albeit differently, to Penni's Wrath as well [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED!. The main image is dedicated to war, "the ultimate form of anger,"(67) evoking in Penni's mind no doubt the anger of Mars, but especially, and more generally, the wrath of God which the populations of the period so deeply feared. Brant twice alludes to God's destruction of Jerusalem, and it appears that Penni chose to depict an episode of the siege and destruction of the Jewish capital in the spirit of Brant's text.(68) The Ship of Fools, written in the final decade of the fifteenth century, gives voice to the common fear that, with the year 1500 approaching, God's patience with man's sins was coming to an end and the world would soon be destroyed; by Penni's time that year had come and gone, but the conviction that divine punishment was in the offing had not waned.

Penni's large oval depicts a scene of execution which can be situated during the siege of Jerusalem thanks to the two-forked beards of the condemned elders, designating them as Jews, and the role played by the clearly identifiable Roman army. Caesar (Titus) commands the scene from his elevated throne, his canopy of authority and oversized plumed helmet calling attention to his person. Setting fire to the town in the background and the summary decapitations in the foreground are both presented as acts of justice, for Penni took care to position to either side of Titus six lictors, shown holding their fasces as emblems of his power as a magistrate. Sequentially from back to front, two of the lettered elders, dejected in their defeat, are brought before Titus, whose baton, caught by the nervous light, is lowered in judgment as another aging Jew is violently thrust before his eyes; a man is forced to kneel with a view to his imminent decapitation, while another holds his head out to be severed by the disconcertingly muscular executioner's long, sharp sword. Finally, blood streams from the now-dead body and decapitated head of the sixth captive Jew, deliberately located in the left foreground plane to stress the violence wrought when the judgment of the state and the ire of God take their toll.

War and its cruelties are eminently male affairs, and Penni has carefully excluded any identifiable female from the scene. Nonetheless, a careful reading of Flavius Josephus's description of the siege of Jerusalem,(69) certainly known to the erudite Brant and Penni alike, sheds light on the immediate cause of the wrath of God and creates a suggestive link with the two upper tondi of the same sheet. According to Josephus, the Roman decision to destroy Jerusalem followed a pathetically tragic event, which moved and appalled many of the sixteenth-century educated elite to the core.(70) As the Romans were starving the inhabitants of Jerusalem in order to force them to capitulate, a rich and noble Jewess, pressured constantly by the enemy troops until the famine without had reached her door, decided to spare her infant son from slavery and satisfy her own hunger by killing him for food. Josephus presents this instance of infanticide as having allowed Titus to proceed with a clear conscience,(71) a point of view that seems to inform Penni's scene. Moreover, an illumination adorning King Charles VIII's copy of Antoine Verard's 1493 vellum publication of Josephus's De la bataille judaique proves conclusively that, during this period, the infanticide was interpreted as cause, the destruction Jerusalem as effect.(72)

If the wrath of God was felt to be awesome in mid-sixteenth-century France, the wrath of women was legendary, too.(73) In his chapter entitled "Of Bad Women," Brant (214) predictably invokes the infamous Medea to illustrate his assertion that "No wrath can evermore mount higher / Than such a woman's boiling ire." In the upper left tondo of Ira, again engraved with a fine stippled effect, an elegant trot obviously licentious matron is seen calmly, obstinately, butchering two children with a knife. In the tondo to the right, another, less insistently licentious female (the slit in the gown has been suppressed, the lust-evoking locks of hair have disappeared) boils detached body parts with the same, but now almost gay, determination. Could it be that we have Medea to the left,(74) and the noble Jewess to the right (with her little boy first shown hacked to pieces on the ground, then, one more time, being thrust into the cauldron above)? The rampant flames of the second tondo, representing the fire stoked for the cooking of human flesh, accord well with those of the siege nearby; the smoke looming over the woman functions as a sign of the nascent wrath of God. Seen through the eyes of Penni's contemporaries, both the Jewess's ultimately less reprehensible desperation and hunger, and Medea's vindictive jealousy, hatred, and thirst for revenge had pushed them to commit one of the two female crimes which were not remissible in sixteenth-century France.(75) That Penni devoted not one but two tondi to the issue attempts no doubt to his own and his male peers' convictions regarding the potential ire of women, linked to a general horror of infanticide.(76) His physical presentation of Medea, too, is in keeping with the spirit of sixteenth-century writers, for whom the sexual appetite of women was at the root of what was in actuality a highly problematic crime that magistrates were reluctant to confront.(77)

In hopes of placating God's furor at infanticide, the justice of the age was exemplary, to say the least. In 1530, a woman in Arras, convicted of three infanticides, was whipped, then dragged on a hurdle, and whipped again before being burned, with the knife of her crime hanging around her neck.(78) In the same decade, the calcinated body of a woman burned for killing her child was exhibited in the street alongside a wooden statue of the child and a painting of a murderer.(79) Once again, Penni's vision of the deadly sins has thrown us into the heart of one of the most volatile issues of his day. In fact, the exemplary punishment just discussed was not deemed persuasive enough. In 1556, around the time of the artist's death, Henry II issued an edict on marriage and infanticide which extended the death sentence to all secret pregnancies and clandestine births or burials of the newborn. Penni's two tondi, like this decree, argue that - for the salvation of mankind - women and their sexuality had to be fenced in. It is becoming clear that the Ira sheet presents not the emotive "chaude colle" of the letters of remission studied by Natalie Zemon Davis, but a series of warnings about what God the Almighty simply would not tolerate.

The lower left tondo shows a robust older man preparing to kill an unarmed youth, visibly caught off guard. Only Brant's text provides a plausible key to the heretofore enigmatic scene. In both his chapter 90, entitled "Honor Father and Mother," and his chapter 94, one of the examples invoked is that of David and his son Absalom, whose story is recounted at length in the second book of Samuel (13-19). The intriguing and rebellious Absalom had usurped his father's place on the throne. In spite of David's forgiving nature, Yahweh was determined to "bring disaster on Absalom." One day, after the father's troops had defeated the son's, Absalom was accidentally caught in a great oak tree, where Joab, David's commander in chief, struck him first and then Joab's soldiers finished him off. Penni, like Brant, seems to have imagined a drastically condensed rendition of this complex Old Testament tale. The tondo scene retains only the site of the murder (symbolically depicted as a sturdy mature tree positioned alongside a feeble upstart) and the core of the conflict: defiant youth defeated by age, as God has willed. This manifestation of the sin of Wrath must reflect the resolve of the (male) powers of the age to reinforce paternal authority, and therefore order, in an increasingly troubled society.(80)

The lower right tondo, presenting an illustration of regicide, probably takes its cue from Brant yet again. When compared with its pendant to the left, the age roles are seen to be inverted, for now it is the young who kill the old; yet the moral relayed by both tondi, despite this transposition, turns out to be virtually the same. In two significant passages, Brant furnishes his interpretation of another Old Testament story, that of Sennacherib, while linking it not only to the tale of the ill-fated Absalom (294) but also to the wrath of God and the destruction of Jerusalem (288), thereby associating three of the themes of the Ira print. The corresponding biblical narration culminates in the death of this king of Assyria (2 Kings 19:36-37), which Penni, like Brant (294), seems to have reduced to its essence: Sennacherib's two sons Adrammelech and Sharezer "struck him down with the sword." Crime against one's superior kin does not pay, however, and the two villains gained nothing but exile to another land while a third brother succeeded their father to the throne. Brant invokes these tales to make his contempt for the unwary father perfectly clear.

The interrelation of all the images of each single plate, underlined by the shadows cast consistently from left to right, is never clearer than it is here. Equally limpid are the male fears, felt to be divinely authorized, of the fateful power of women and the potential hostility of progeny. The strident tone of Penni's etching indicates that the plea for masculine dominion over the family was motivated by a heartfelt conviction indeed. Only respect for patriarchal hierarchies, Penni and his peers were arguing, could assuage God's destructive wrath.

Lussuria

In Early Christian times, when it was the desert monks who were establishing the nature of the Seven Deadly Sins, the sin of Lust was relegated to the very end of the list. By the late Middle Ages, a drastic change had occurred. Fornication outside of marriage, or even a libidinous glance, it was claimed in the 1490s, could constitute a greater sin than homicide itself.(81) Of the sixteenth-century prints depicting the Deadly Sins that Matthews Grieco examined, over 40 percent represent Lust. With the rise of trade and the consolidation of the merchant class, middle-class morality had moved to the fore, insisting that sexuality was perforce confined to marriage and procreation. Brant, recognized as one of the most outspoken and influential propagators of this stern moral code, left an indelible mark on the Franco-Italian Penni one more time, when the latter approached this theme [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED].

Penni's central image draws a number of its features from the "Dame Venus" woodcut associated with Brant's chapter 13 entitled "Of Amours" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED]. Brant equates his Venus's illicit loves with prostitution,(82) which he describes as infesting the streets of modern towns; the unchaste woman of his woodcut explicitly refers to her innumerable captives as "clients," and many of these, of biblical, mythological, or historical origin, are named. Penni turns the woodcut's ambulant street Venus into the seemingly very dissimilar protagonist of an Italian triumph, enthroned on a chariot of lechery.(83) Chariots of Lust actually existed in sixteenth-century Italy, though, and Penni may well have been familiar with the one pulled around Rome during the carnival of 1525 for the purpose of exhibiting the aging courtesans of the capital to the crowd. Prostitutes who had infringed the law or who were syphilitic were sometimes forced to appear on or behind these contraptions as well.(84) Times had changed, however, and Brant's claim (89) that "When Cupid strikes, Amor ignites, / So that the fire his vitals bites," no doubt rang loudly in the ears of Penni and his contemporaries, who had become painfully familiar with the scourge of syphilis. Venereal disease, in fact, had begun to overrun Europe around the time that the popularity of the Ship of Fools was at its height; significantly, Penni supplies his Venus with a wildly flaming torch.(85) Simultaneously, the gleeful skeleton preparing to seize the woodcut's buxom dame from behind has been raised by Penni onto Venus's elevated throne, and - its own frightening bones apparently no longer imperious enough - its extended left hand now presents the uninterested, almost faceless Venus with an additional skull. The death's head, the vitals-biting fire, and the ominous croaking carrion crow flying above the procession reinforce the lethal message with all its new ramifications for both the prisoners below and the prisoners to be. For the latter, Venus's desirable body is twisted forward at the hips, as was standard in Penni's age, and is not less well lit than the flame itself.

Brant, his woodcut artist, and Penni all strove to hammer in their contention that, in addition to being fatal, illicit love was sinful, foolish, blind, and bestial. A "morally vile and aesthetically hideous" ape,(86) notorious for its inability to resist sexual temptation and a commonly perceived reference to the Fall of Man, is positioned in the left foreground of the German image. In the language of the time, her presence alone - for the tailless ape was identified as a female(87) - was sufficient to make it clear that Dame Venus's captives were "prisoners of their sensuous appetites." Penni chose to give even greater prominence and legibility to the Ship of Fools' beast by shifting her to the central axis and placing an apple in her hand. As such, the association with Eve, who bears the initial responsibility for the fall of each of the fools chained to Venus's lust, becomes inescapable.(88)

H. W. Janson considered the ape to be an image of the fool,(89) and in the German woodcut, Brant's main protagonist crops up twice, to either side of Dame Venus, roped in just like the ape-fool below. In Penni's "Triumph of Venus," a fool with enormous ass's ears leans in against the back of the chariot, thus making his one and only irruption into the Deadly Sins etchings. In the more sophisticated sixteenth-century image, Venus keeps the fool in tow with an elaborate chain, while his fellow prisoners of love have grown in number considerably. The woodcut's single monk reassumes a primary role, to be sure;(90) but men from all walks of society suffer the same fate. To be found among those who grimly advance are also, now, a pathetic old peasant on crutches; a pope and perhaps a bishop (the lowly friar, in accordance with actual fact, no longer has to bear the brunt of religious satire alone); at least one gentleman with his plumed cap; and, leading the licentious fools on the far side, a ridiculous bespectacled (middle-class) scholar declaiming from a book.

Fools they are, and brute beasts, too. Tersely, the woodcut artist encircles his monk with an ape, a fool, and an ass. The more expansive Penni enlarges his menagerie, too. Proud swans, with heads and wings erect, pull the chariot of Venus as tradition wills; but tradition also held that swans were beguiling (for they supposedly hid black flesh under their snow-colored plumes) and ominous (for their sweet song was but a prelude to death).(91) The ignoble bear, "identified with male sexuality since pre-Christian times,"(92) and the savage wild boar, which Venus had been known to ride,(93) precede the subaltern monk and the vulgar peasant. The stupid ass, positioned so that his ears are more or less aligned with those of the fool's cap, serves as transition to the more noble, sexually potent beasts, suggestively set closer to those fools that Penni deemed nobler, too. A bull, symbol of male generative powers since time immemorial, leads in the "lustful" stag, wild with desire when the mating season comes around,(94) in turn followed by a stallion, whose unbridled libidinous desire bestiaries proposed to control by cutting its mane. Cupid, perched at the front of his mother's chariot, remains undistracted by Penni's motley troop; with consummate skill, intently, he shoots his arrow straight ahead.

Syphilis aside, where did the urgency of the message of the central oval of Lussuria come from? As Jean-Pierre Babelon puts it, prostitution prospered in Paris, thanks to the distress of the destitute and the episodic presence of the court. Francis I's first wife, Claude of France, had stepped in as early as 1518 to see that the brothels located at the heart of the city, on the Ile-de-la-Cite near the cloister of Notre-Dame, were abolished. Yet as in Venice - the prostitution capital of sixteenth-century Europe - the sites of prostitution knew no bounds: the harlot's trade was plied defiantly around monasteries and the University of Paris, at the same time that it strode proudly (sin number one) into the elegant spaces of the king's castle in nearby Fontainebleau. The tide of opposition continued to rise, and, this time, the (ineffectual) repressive royal edict appeared in 1561, a few years after Penni had been laid in his tomb.(95)

The artist's complexly belabored central image, of Christian and pagan inspiration alike, is pungent and powerful. It thus differs strongly from the anecdotal tondi scenes framing it, which harken back to the Ship of Fools in a particularly systematic way.

The tondo in the upper left takes up the theme and, very loosely, the imagery of Brant's chapter 33, "Of Adultery" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED!.(96) The German's claim, basically, is that his era was full of promiscuous men who held adultery to be "a trifling thing." His stance on how authority was to be restored is perfectly clear: "Men now ignore a woman's stain / And mete no punishment or pain." Penni, for his part, whether or not he was referring to one of the myriad biblical, historical, or mythological examples listed in his source, elected to gibe unabashedly - costume and setting leave no doubt - at the practices of the mid-sixteenth-century well-to-do. Moreover, age difference is factored in as sociologically pertinent. A young man and woman fondle one another, while she, married to the older man seated at the table, seems to enjoin her gray-haired spouse to partake of the banquet; like Brant's fool, the husband pretends to see nothing through the gaps between his wide-open fingers. It is hard to imagine Francis I or Henry II savoring such an image, and this is perhaps one of the instances in which Penni's estrangement from the court and its mores can best be discerned.

The respectable burgher could no more tolerate the rowdy nightly outings in his city streets, which prevented him from getting a good night's sleep, than he could the more private license of the affluent. The tondo in the upper right is much more directly dependent than usual on the corresponding image illustrating Brant's chapter 62, "Of Serenading at Night" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED]. The general disposition of figures and street scene coincide, while the elegant (noble?) lute player duplicates the pose of Brant's lute-playing fool. In woodcut and roundel, rocks are thrown and chamber pots are emptied onto the crowd in an attempt to keep the nighttime noise pollution down. Brant's text suggests that the serenader's wife will be busy cuckolding him while he is out gallivanting; and in a similar vein, in both of the images examined here, while the female figure is shown as a disgruntled recipient of the serenade, she is nonetheless portrayed in the nude. This is an age in which any situation can be turned against women, for it is in their nature, the claim goes (and the central oval so ponderously demonstrates), to lead men to their perdition.

For the period, however, Brant was but a mild misogynist who considered that a woman could be of good stock as well as bad; and to judge from Penni's choice of subject matter for the two lower tondi, it would seem he concurred. In actuality, the problem for the burgher class, given what it considered to be the high degree of risk involved, was to select the proper wife. Penni's third tondo is incomprehensible without reference to Brant's chapter 32, "Of Guarding Wives." The English translation of the caption of the accompanying woodcut [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 18 OMITTED] reads: "He guards grasshoppers 'neath the sun / Pours water into wells for fun, / Who guards his wife as 'twere a nun." This accounts for the illustration,(97) but only the text proper allows the reader to penetrate Brant's, and consequently Penni's, intent (emphasis added):

They harvest folly, sheer despair, Who always watch their wives with care, For site who's good will do the right, And she who's bad will sin for spite And manage well to perpetrate Her evil plans against her mate. For e'en a padlock placed before The entrance, be it gate or door, And many guards about the house Can't keep her honest toward her spouse.

Penni simplified his rendition considerably, retaining only the notion that to try to guard a woman is like pouring water into a well. His gentlemanly husband has not just a single pitcher of water at his disposal, but two buckets full; nonetheless, his "bad" wife sits at her window complacently, her bodily form (unlike that of the "good" wife in the fourth tondo) tellingly revealed, while an insistently noble figure, sword at his side, courts her in the light of day.

Although none of the Brant woodcuts corresponds to the final tondo, other verses in the same chapter seem to provide the crucial clue to its meaning. At Brant's prodding, if my interpretation is correct, Penni introduces, at last, a route to salvation for women - chaste women, of course. Though locked up in a tower, Danae had still managed to conceive a child (Jupiter in this reading gets off scot-free); nonetheless:

Penelope was loose and free, And many suitors did she see. Yet twenty years her husband strayed, Still chaste and pure she always stayed.

Appropriate advice then follows:

A pretty wife on folly's course Is like unto an earless horse. The man who plows with such a nag, His furrows oft diverge and sag. A wife who would be modest found Should cast her eyes upon the ground And not coquet what'er she can And not make eyes at every man.

Penni seems to have illustrated the moment when Ulysses, after finally returning home, slew the suitors that the good Penelope had shrewdly and persistently repelled; one of the twelve servants later punished for infidelity to their master can be seen hanging under the portico of the palace behind.(98) As Ulysses fights a very sixteenth-century duel in the foreground, where he is shown clearly getting the better of his adversary, his fully clothed, honorable, and caring wife despairs for his life from within her proper place, the (palatial) home. This is the Renaissance, too. Despite the black flesh of the swan, and the ape within, a woman can accede to the status of a respectable human being provided she assents to her mature role as a virtuous and submissive wife.(99)

It is noteworthy that the main male protagonists of all five representations of the sin of Lust are mature or aging "fools." The issue of age and lust is a fundamental one. The lecherous man is a man past his prime, virtually by definition; in the Neoplatonic discourse of a Castiglione, the sexually venturesome youth is only asserting his natural, God-given constitution. The more moralistic Brant is less lax, but he still allows for an age-determined distinction (19):

Clandestine love in every race Is foolish, sinful, black disgrace; Such love is still more foolish when It seizes older wives and men.

Pigritia

The similarities between Penni's and Brant's depictions of Sloth [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 19, 20 OMITTED] are both formal and ideological.(100) The contours of the sin of pigritia had been fashioned by the Church and the noble class with the necessarily productive third estate from whom their wealth derived in mind; and accordingly, both of these images are directed against members of the lower ranks of society, made to bear the brunt of the satire at hand. Firmly entrenched in the ascendant work ethic, like many of their urban peers, both Brant and Penni extricate themselves from any personal involvement in the "very serious sin" of Sloth,(101) associating it with those a notch or more below them socially while accusing the destitute of refusing to work. In fact, the burghers of Brant's and Penni's eras saw throngs of unemployed vagrants pour into their towns. Their mounting obsession with Sloth was directly related to the fear experienced by those who had something to defend from the potentially disruptive and ever-growing numbers of urban poor.(102) Brant's chapter 63, "Of Beggars," subjectively associates the unwillingness to work with the lawlessness plaguing the towns the author knew best. For him, "beggars rarely fast"; "they're young and strong, their health is good"; it is out of choice that they haunt the dens of thieves.

When appropriating the Brant image for his central oval, Penni developed a simpler and more rudimentary scheme into a considerably more ambitious one, in his customary way. The German's seemingly rather well dressed but indolent female servant and male peasant reappear, but more visibly aged and wearing insistently tattered garb. The woman is still falling asleep, instead of stoking the fire and working at her distaff as she should.(103) The ragged peasant, in Brant's print shown looking distractedly toward the sky instead of concentrating on the task at hand - sowing seed - here seems more busily engaged in his work; the latter is a mere illusion, though. A marginal note in Locher's expanded Latin translation of the Ship of Fools, which Penni was relying on, focuses attention on an unexpected component: Sloth is compared to the seed which induces sleep - the seed contained in the opium-producing poppyhead seen, on close examination, to have infested Penni's newly luxuriant landscape. In reality, our "diligent" peasant is busy sowing indolence; and, as the Latin text proclaims and the clothing displays, Sloth, like sleep-inducing opium, can generate only poverty and ruin. Additionally, the same Latin passage likens this sin to an annoying smoke that obscures the light of day. Penni developed this metaphor boldly into the enormous, threatening curl seen rising out of the fire of damnation into which the sluggish servant is about to fall, distaff and all, her untouched kitchen implements and firewood lying accusingly by her side. The fire she should have been watching over lurches forth to engulf her, body and soul.

A parallel for the shabby garments of Penni's impoverished folk can be found in the woodcut which accompanies Brant's chapter entitled "Of Beggars," and the cluster of Penni's ragged little boys seems to have popped out of the beggars' basket depicted in the same source, too. "Their children in their youth they train," is one of Brant's favorite refrains. "What you do, that your child will do, / In evil children copy you, / Break jars, your child will break them, too," reads the caption introducing his chapter 49, "Bad Example of Parents." Under this spotlight, Penni's intentions become clearer, and the future announced in his oval acquires a distinctly nightmarish ring. Through the principle of imitation, five healthy and active but indigent peasant boys are destined to grow up not as God ordained, to labor in the fields, but instead to roam dangerously about the streets of, say, the artist's and his audience's already explosive town.

Now, while it is true that both of Penni's adult figures must endure the consequences of their improvidence in the fragile late stages of life, the sowing peasant has subtly crept farther into the background of this later rendition. A rationally justified application of the "modern" laws of perspective places the burden of responsibility on the woman in the foreground, and it is indeed her portion at the fire that the boys eagerly copy. Her general appearance certainly evoked Brant's category of "healing women old and gray" (189) those women who, as the key figures in the transmission of popular culture, were by now under vehement attack by the official authorities in Germany and France alike. The witchcraft craze, like Penni's fire, was beginning to cloud the continent's skies. And the artist's reshuffling of blame in the central image accords with his overall presentation of the framing tondi which, for the first time, are devoted exclusively to women and/or animals.

Generally speaking, the depiction of Sloth on an ass must have presented a theme legible to all. In medieval times, Sloth, along with the other "daughters of sin" cited in the Miroir de l'homme, had proceeded to her marriage on an ass, the animal best known for its lethargy, lack of intelligence, and tendency to resist command.(104) Penni made his unattractive animal too lazy to lift its stupid head: torpor seems to flow through its veins right down to its drooping tail. The blatant absence of reins speaks of the ass's stubborn unwillingness to obey - a fine parallel for the indocile urban poor but also, more specifically in this case, the suspiciously "masterless" female that legislation in both Germany and France was trying desperately to control.(105) As a buxom Sloth rides forward, displaying the bare feet of indigence, she extends two unusual bandaged arms. These have been interpreted as the sign of her continuous inactivity; and she could well be like the faineantes (idle women) in Bruegel's engraving Sloth who are simply unwilling to "cook, spin or sew."(106) Jean Adhemar, however, interpreted the bandaged hands as a sign that they had been cut off, and the arms are indeed abnormally short. Depicted in an age when torture and cruel punishments were commonplace, such stumps recall both the longstanding association of Sloth with theft and the horrendous bodily mutilations incurred for what amounted to one of the most severely punished crimes.(107) Just as her ass lacks a bridle and reins, she, a useless woman adrift, needs to be pressured by responsible male authorities or wards to return to her socially assigned tasks. Behind her, the sole tree in the tondo bears no sign of life;(108) correspondingly, the trees in the central oval, echoing their nearby adult protagonists, seem to be on the decline. The indolent, like the fruitless trees of the Doctrinal de Sapience, deserve to be cut down and thrown into the fire.(109) Nonproductivity, especially female; is condemned through each and every detail, underlining the remarkable coherence and multiplicity of Penni's images. In a backhanded way, women's genuine contributions to the economy of the time are being acknowledged, too.

The conviction that idlers place themselves in a "more vile situation than that of the beasts, for the latter are allowed to eat,"(110) was general by the time that Penni was devising his Sins. It thus comes as no surprise to discover that a bear in a cave, shown busily licking its paw, figures in the upper right tondo of Sloth. To interpret the image fully, however, it is necessary to turn to another of the Brant woodcuts [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 21 OMITTED!, the one introducing his chapter 70, "Not Providing in Time." The caption makes the underlying intention clear: "Who'll never glean in summer's heat, / In winter he'll have naught to eat / And like the bear lick hands and feet." The contemporary bourgeois ideal stipulated the need for hard work and cautious planning ahead.(111) If only all the destitute hordes (which Brant's single barefoot fool represents) were farsighted and frugal. . . .

Penni retains Brant's improvident paw-licking bear and his strange notion of hibernation, which Penni develops by adding a "slothful" animal of his own choice: the chameleon. Pliny's Natural History describes this hibernating animal as never closing its eyes and being the sole creature never to eat or drink, nourishing itself on air alone.(112) An almost contemporary representation of the beast [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 22 OMITTED] indicates that Penni was not alone in thinking that the chameleon hibernated in a tree.(113) His trees, however, in keeping with the spirit of the other images on the same sheet, are desolately infecund; inactivity is equated with nonproductivity, one more time and more obviously still, in this ever more production-oriented early modern society.

What will become of the person who, like the chameleon, believes it possible to live on air alone, recklessly squandering any acquired assets? Brant seals this fool's fate in his chapter 67: "When he's tattered all and bare, / He's stabbed by penitent despair." As for Penni, his fourth tondo depicts a lonely, destitute, but apparently healthy young woman, crouching beneath a shoddy and inadequate lean-to in the now routinely bleak landscape; a single broken bowl by her side, she (note the gender change) has effectively sunken into "penitent despair."(114) The French proverb 'Fille oisive a mal pensive" (an idle girl's thoughts turn to mischief) is beyond a doubt applicable here; Penni has twisted the figure's emphasized breasts toward the spectator and provocatively raised her left leg, already inadequately covered by her ragged dress.(115) The despondent damsel represents but one of the many undernourished, chronically poor young women of the Renaissance who were forced by necessity into theft or prostitution.(116) As seen through Penni's eyes, however, she is one more idle woman who has refused to take her life into her own hands and whose dire poverty, suffering, and innate lust threaten society at large. A little over a hundred years earlier, another Florentine by birth, Leon Battista Alberti, also convinced that women were slothful by nature, had tendered what he considered to be one valid means of control: husbands were entrusted with the task of making sure their wives did not succumb to this sin.(117) Yet Alberti's solution restricted itself to the private sphere. By the mid-sixteenth century, the public sphere was being summoned to intervene: magistrates were now expected to assist men in asserting control over wives, other potentially unruly and/or unproductive female kin, and children (of both sexes).

Justitia

The Justice print [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 23 OMITTED], consistently cited first in this series of etchings, has been wrenched out of its standard introductory position in order to serve as concluding evidence of the artist's highly deliberate, socially oriented aims. Throughout the height of their thematic popularity in the Middle Ages, the Seven Deadly Sins, classified and reclassified ad infinitum - but then, too, conceived as concrete expressions of the evils of the day - were denounced vehemently as expressions of insolence against God and his holy agents. Right into the sixteenth century, forgiveness and salvation tended perforce to pass through God himself, the sacrifice of Jesus, or his more accessible mother, Mary.(118) Penni, however, redirects the ever-present fear of incurring God's wrath toward what was potentially a more secular realm. From a strictly formal point of view, the artist seems to have paid homage, to some extent, to his own Roman Renaissance roots. Echoes of the pose and the backdrop of Christ in Raphael's Disputa in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican have been transferred to a figure given the attributes and identity of the nearby Allegory of Justice, located amidst clouds on the vault of the same room.(119) From an iconographical point of view, Penni chose the latter subject instead of the former: a virile allegorical figure of Justice was designated to lead the combat, alone, against the Seven Deadly Sins. With one covered and one uncovered breast, she sits in fierce command, Amazon-like,(120) with God on her side: it is his hand which unravels above her head the scroll containing a reference to the book of Psalms; it is the divine light associated with Christ the Judge which illuminates her way. Her left foot boldly reposes on the top of a globe - just over Europe in fact. In mid-sixteenth-century Paris, the traditional crown hovering between her head and the biblical scroll could only evoke the formidable roi justicier, the sole authority now deemed capable of vanquishing the Sins dispersed along the edge of the semi-oval below. To either side, disempowered by the shadow of royal Justice and chained (as their cohorts) to her formidable breast, sit the treacherous beauties: on the right is Pride, who in the dark still manages to admire her own stunning self; and on the left is Lust, almost a carbon copy of the formerly triumphant Venus but now with legs meaningfully crossed as her disarmed son Cupid, blindfold raised, is made to look the glory of Justice in the eye. The blaze of Justice's erect sword nullifies the once omnipotent torch of the goddess of Love, henceforth forced into retreat; the chains which were previously an agent of Venus's victory serve to subdue her instead. Closer to the foreground, the light of Justice shines brightly on the five lowly, unbeauteous Sins, bringing them out of the darkness where they might otherwise continue to lurk. If an obese Gluttony, his right arm comfortably resting on a barrel of wine, continues to ingurgitate food and drink, heedless of the chain clamped around his throat,(121) his pendant across the way, a slothful servant sporting her unutilized distaff and unnervingly bandaged arms, lowers her head - in sleep perhaps, but in submission, too. Finally, like Justice herself, the three centermost sins bring to mind Rosso Fiorentino's sometimes barbarous forcefulness: the horrors of Pandora's Box have clearly seeped into Penni's soul.(122) A Michelangelesque Avarice may still clutch her money bags avidly, but her awful drooping breasts signal her decline; hers are certainly no match for the firm, youthful breasts of Justice. Wrath, depicted as a voracious, bestial Saturn, is contortedly arched over the child he devours, his dagger perhaps stilled by the blinding light of Justice's day. The child at his mercy thrusts an arm toward Justice in a final act of desperation, as if knowing that eventual salvation lies in this regal, divinely inspired figure alone. Finally, an awesome Envy, the Sin physically occupying the most space, throws open her legs to encompass a portion of the body of Wrath; her withered breasts and wild stare confront the spectator directly as she bites into the venomous snake, her attribute, which in turn is about to plant its fangs in one of her muscular arms. As with Avarice, the potentially lethal strength of the horrific aging female has been underscored; in fact, the potency of Envy seems only partially harnessed in Penni's eyes. I cannot help but feel that the intensity of artistic rivalries and Penni's struggle for economic survival explain the formal prominence he chooses to accord Envy here. She appears to be the least subdued of the various Sins, the one least likely to perish at Justice's sword.(123) On the issue of ruthless competition, the interventionist Henry II could emit no royal decree.

In the final analysis, one innocent little male child, twisting in anguish, is nearly engulfed by two (lowly) male, but especially by five (young, old, lovely, hideous) female, Deadly Sins. Only an impersonal, iron-willed, centralized Justice is in a position to succour the babe as his doom draws near. In the power of his inspiration, Penni has clearly equated the fate of this wretched little boy with that of the order of society, and the future of society, at large. However alien the life-style of the court proper may have been, Penni and the urban elite of Paris, his prospective clients for this series no doubt, had become indefectible supporters of the sacred sword of Justice wielded by their king.

The age, we know, was one of demographic growth and rural crisis; all over Europe, the mobility of paupers was perceived as a threat to the stability of towns. Legislation testifies directly to the pervasive urban-based fear of the lower classes in the decades immediately preceding the publication of Penni's Seven Deadly Sins. In 1531, Francis I's major adversary, the Holy Roman Emperor, had promulgated an edict outlawing mendicancy;(124) the imperial subject Sebastian Brant would no doubt have been pleased. France was in the process of doing the same.(125) In 1544, the king placed the "superintendence of the order of the poor" under municipal control, an act which has been said to signal "the maintenance of the law of one class versus the disorder of the other."(126) Henceforth, at least in theory, Penni and his fellow citizens would pay a tax to maintain a Bureau des Pauvres. Simultaneously, the entire judicial system of France was undergoing drastic reform. The king alone would be able to insure the security of the roads beyond the city ramparts that were essential to urban life and trade. The year 1520 had seen Francis I appoint thirty royal prosecuting officers, the fear-inspiring prevots des marechaux, responsible for a newly effective policing of provincial roads.(127) It was in the 1530s, however, that the scales had shifted definitively in favor of the judicial authority of the king. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets, issued by the king in August 1539, instated "modern criminal procedure," regarded as "the triumph of public law."(128) Inquisitorial procedure was legalized; torture became a standard instrument of justice; felonies were punished with flogging, mutilation, execution. The city of God, judging itself besieged by the devil, could imagine nothing more desirable than to be defended by the prince's blazing sword. The measures undertaken by royal provosts and nobles of the robe elicited urban support for the monarchy. Those poor who were genuinely unable to work were to be designated by a yellow and red cross worn on the right shoulder;(129) more persuasively still, as part of the rituals of exemplary justice, a ring of executed bodies henceforth encircled the towns, reassuring those with possessions that holy royal Justice truly held sway. The engravings of Luca Penni studied here can only be seen as an active tool in what Robert Muchembled has named a "pedagogy of fear." "With iron scepter you will break them" is the injunction that Penni's Justice receives explicitly from the hand of God above.(130)

One final point. That Justice was sacred Penni's image leaves no doubt. But the precise nature of the sacred was itself one of the fundamental preoccupations of Penni's age. Can a direct relationship be discerned between satire, the critical edge shared by both the Ship of Fools and the French prints, and the "heretical" religious stances that pullulated during the Renaissance? The question is conceivably premature for Penni and Brant, both discontented humanist creators who lived in different lands and produced the works examined here approximately half a century apart, yet each in a climate of tension which would ultimately degenerate into religious wars.(131) In both cases, however, the firstborn son, the beloved heir, would choose to align himself with Protestant reform. My personal hunch is that Penni, with his hatred of all that the rosary, stood for, his gaze turned toward Germanic art, his 'work apparently undertaken in Protestant lands, and his conviction that the truth would prevail, was at the very least leaning toward the Reformation.

Documents dated before and just after Penni's death in late 1556 or early 1557 throw light on the successes and the failures inherent in the life he had led. Satin and velvet clothing, a lute, and an ample personal library testify to the artist's cultural achievements and his social pretensions. The relatively meager possessions mentioned in the postmortem inventory confirm, however, that this former painter to the king, residing in Paris rather than at court, had never become truly rich. His own close collaboration with the printmakers Leon Davent and Jean Mignon must have led him to deem engraving the most accessible lucrative trade for his son, Laurent, apprenticed significantly, no doubt, to a Protestant engraver. A lucrative trade when things went well, perhaps, but a step down, nonetheless, from the status of peintre du roi.(132) And while Primaticcio had been able to program the glorious social ascension of his nephew, his designated heir, the precariousness which had plagued Penni's existence was ultimately aggravated in that of his son. Luca's own route had led north, encompassing at least Florence, Rome, Genoa, Fontainebleau, then Paris, and perhaps beyond. Laurent, inversely, left France at the end of the 1550s; his passage through Geneva and Basel, at one time or another, is a sign of his religious leanings; his documented presence in Milan, Piacenza, Modena, and Bologna tells of the difficulties that the engraver encountered in finding stable employment after he went south. Penni the father invoked unbending Justice as a solution to the sense of insecurity that had seeped into his bones. Sub pennis eius tutus ero reads the inscription above his name on the image of Justice: with a scholarly play on words, he proclaimed confidently "Under her wing I shall be safe." Paradoxically, it is precisely Justice that sealed Laurent's doom. Spurred on by Avarice and Envy, the engravers and publishers employing him in Modena dared to replace his name with theirs on the plates that he had engraved. When the young man objected to this assault on his career and his self-esteem, his employers retaliated by denouncing him as a heretic. Justice in Modena was no less holy than the Justice that Luca had envisaged, au contraire: it was that of the Holy See. As such, however, it was also more traditional; for sinning against God, Laurent was condemned to a galley for the standard symbolic religious sentence of seven years. Thereafter, he sank into oblivion, burin and all.(133) Something in Luca Penni's ideological equation had been miscalculated, for it was Holy Justice herself, not Wrath, who got his male child in the end.

Penni had identified with this series of prints right down to his death, and the eight etchings were probably an important component of his economic survival toward the end of his life. I contend that they have transmitted to later generations the most commanding expression of his highly personal artistic achievement, shedding a unique light on the hostilities and strains which were both tearing apart and recomposing the society in which he lived. While Penni shows himself to be a consistent and intellectually ambitious creator, at the same time he comes across as a thoroughly Renaissance man. A fear of the unharnessed power of women resurfaces sheet after sheet in these bleak but captivating works. And while Lust is denounced zealously, the court-trained creator, the man, could not refrain from twisting the female body in space and disclosing, for the pleasure of his moralizing male peers, even a murderous mother's desirable breasts. Two-faced messages aside, though, the general early modern warning is crystal clear. A daunting middle-class ideology was being molded in alliance with the king. Throat clamps were being forged for women of all walks of society, for the younger generation, for the poor, and the uncouth - and even, ultimately, for the noble class itself.

1. My infinite thanks to Celeste Schenck for her careful readings of my text and her unfaltering support; special thanks to Suzanne Boorsch, for an in-depth exchange on prints and Penni, and Marc Pelen, for the Latin translations and corresponding references. Thanks, as well, to my encouraging readers Michel Melot, Janet Cox-Rearick, Sara Matthews Grieco, and Jean Underwood, and to my tough, perspicacious revisers, Chris Condit, Nancy J. Troy, and Mary Laing.

2. For the first detailed study of Luca Penni, see M. Roy, "Les Trois Freres Penni et Francesco di Pellegrino," in Artistes et monuments de la Renaissance en France, II, Paris, 1934, 436-43. Though G. Milanesi (Vasari, IV, 643 n. 2) arrived at the conclusion that Luca had not yet been born in 1504, most historians, in the face of imprecision, continue to situate his birth somewhere between 1500 and 1504. It has been postulated that Luca arrived in France as early as 1530, "at Rosso's behest" (L. Golson, "Lucca Penni: A Pupil of Raphael at the Court of Fontainebleau," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, I., 1957, 17-36), or around the same time with Scibec da Carpi (P. Vanaise, "Nouvelles Precisions concernant la biographie et I'oeuvre de Luca Penni," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, LXVII, 1966, 79-90). Vasari (v, 171) places him at the beginning of his list of painters working under Rosso on the Gallery of Francis I. Documents, however, only confirm his presence there between 1537 and 1540, when "Lucas Romain" appears amidst a long list of painters as Rosso's best-paid assistant in the gallery-related royal accounts for Fontainebleau (L. de Laborde, Les Comptes des batiments du Roi (1528-1571), Paris, 1877-80, I, 135). See also L'Ecole de Fontainebleau, under Penni; and on Penni as painter, Beguin, 1987.

3. On the definitive identification of "Master L.D." as Leon Davent, see C. Grodecki, "Le Graveur Lyon Davent, illustrateur de Nicolas de Nicolay," in Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XXXVI, 1974, 347-51. On the relation between Penni and printmaking, see J. Adhemar, "Sur une gravure d'apres Luca Penni au Cabinet des Estampes de la Bibliotheque Nationale," Tresors des bibliotheques de France, Paris, XXV, 1942, 107-11; Zerner, XV-XVI, with an analysis of the confused nature of Vasari's assertions; XXV on Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins; XXVII-XXVIII, and XXX for the privileged relation between Jean Mignon and Penni; in his "L.D. 92" commentary, Zerner suggests that Penni engraved the plate of Sloth himself, but the idea has been rejected by later authors; L'Ecole de Fontainebleau; prints section; under Boyvin; Delaune, Ghisi, Maitre L. D., Mignon; G. Albricci, "Luca Penni e i suoi incisori," in Raccolta delle stampe A. Bertarelli: Rassegna di studi e notizie. Castello Sforzesco, x, Milan, 1982, 69-166, esp. 102-5; S. Boorsch and M. and R. E. Lewis, The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, 27, nos. 17, 21-23, 27; Grodecki, 261-62, with an important discussion of Penni's relation to the Parisian engraving market; and, most recently, Boorsch, esp. 86-91. For the Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins etchings, see the following catalogues: Bartsch, XVI, 417-22, nos. 104-10; F. Herbet, "Les Graveurs de l'Ecole de Fontainebleau: I. Catalogue de l'oeuvre de L.D.," Annales de la Societe historique et archeologique du Gatinais, XIV, 1896, nos. 65-72; Adhemar, 292-93; Zerner, nos. 85-92; and Albricci (see above), 71-72, nos. 26-33.

4. Penni is mentioned at Fontainebleau for the last time in royal accounts which are imprecisely dated between 1540 and 1550 (Laborde [see n. 2!, I, 191). These relate, however, to the decoration of the Gallery of Ulysses, which J. Guillaume believes was begun only in 1546 (S. Beguin, J. Guillaume, and A. Roy, La Galerie d'Ulysse a Fontainebleau, Paris, 1985, 62). See below, however, for Boorsch's hypothesis (88) that Penni and Leon Davent were temporarily in Germanic lands by this date.

5. His other recorded independent activities included painting religious works for an important Parisian apothecary; portraiture; making drawings for goldsmiths and military-related uses, such as fortifications, war engines, armor, and swords (see Beguin; and Grodecki).

6. Some of the watermarks of Davent's prints after Penni are from Nuremberg and Basel (Boorsch, 88, 92 n. 29).

7. Roy, 437-39; and Grodecki, 270-73.

8. Grodecki, 259.

9. E.g., in the most informed study of the artist's painting legacy, Beguin commented: "sa personnalite d'artiste n'est pas encore bien claire."

10. Brant's pupil Jacob Locher published the first Latin edition in 1497, but another, by Josse Bade, was printed in Paris in 1505; both were issued a number of times. See Dollinger, 7; and Zeydel, chap. 5, on the editions, reprints, translations, adaptations, and various derivations of Brant's original text. See Zeydel, 92, 94-95, for the nature of the Latin versions. See also D. O'Connor, "Sebastien Brant en France au XVIe siecle," Revue de Litterature comparee, VIII, 1928, 309-31; and K. Manger, Das "Narrenschiff," Darmstadt, 1983, 88-90; D. Russell, Emblematic Structures in French Renaissance Culture, Toronto, 1995, 96-100.

11. Matthews Grieco, 300.

12. We know that even Francis I had integrated into his personal library the illuminated copy of a 1497 verse translation which Antoine Verard had offered to either Charles VIII or Louis XII (U. Baurmeister and M.-P. Laffitte, Des Livres et des rois: La Bibliotheque royale de Blois, Paris, 1992, 122-23).

13. E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer, Princeton, N.J., 1971, 21, speaks of a silverpoint portrait which Durer may well have done for himself. F. Winkler, Durer und die Illustrationen zum Narrenschiff, Berlin, 1951, in the most complete study undertaken, attributed 73 of the 106 different wood blocks to Durer's hand. Panofsky, 29ff, states that about one-third of the woodcuts were by Durer. See also W. Strauss, Albrecht Durer: Woodcuts and Woodblocks, New York, 1980, 64-81, no. 13.

14. Zeydel, 19, 30, 52-53.

15. For an analysis of the "urban values and norms" involved, and the words quoted from a mid-15th-century declaration of the town council of Basel, see Pigeaud, esp. 40. On the image of the fool per se, see the extensive literary study by J. Lefebvre, Les Fols et al folie, Paris, 1968.

Brant's concerns paralleled those of many 16th-century Reformation towns - Augsburg, for one. In 1546, the town council, under threat of Catholic attack, invoked the "dangerous times, which are without doubt caused by our sins and transgression" (L. Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg, Oxford, 1991, 25). As a result, a new campaign was launched against "an excess of eating, drinking, gormandizing, disputing, beating, indiscipline, blasphemy, and vices of this kind against the common man." Roper deems this an instance of "Reformation guild-influenced moralism" (27), and notes features which will be pertinent here: pessimism about human nature; the need for strong authority in order to create a moral citizenry; and the will to punish evildoers (57).

16. Delumeau, 234. In the same vein, Pigeaud, in her analysis of Brant's book, asks, "What exactly are the fool's sins?" and she answers: "They amount in fact to the seven deadly sins" (47). On the development of the Sins out of a "dark mass of [Hellenistic] beliefs," and their evolution from "capital" to "deadly" during the 15th and 16th centuries, when they spilled out of the world of sermons into satirical literature, see Bloomfield, chap. 1; Delumeau, chap. 7; and E. Male, L'Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Age en France, Paris, 1969, 328-40.

17. Boorsch, 89-90. The only known first state of these etchings - that reproduced here, unless otherwise specified - was printed on paper with the Parisian fleur-de-lis watermark.

18. See Zerner, XXV, for a discussion of the two "very different" states of this series. Only Lust and Sloth remained unchanged from one state to the next. Zerner concluded that an unidentified engraver completed Davent's Lust, engraved Sloth entirely, and reworked all of the other plates. The commercial implications are discussed at length by Grodecki, 261.

19. The order established by Gregory the Great was: superbia, ira, invidia, avaritia, acedia, gula, luxuria (Bloomfield, 72); that of the Jesuits and modern catechisms, evolving out of a 13th-century tradition: superbia, avaritia, luxuria, ira, gula, invidia, accidia (ibid., 86). Herbet (see n. 3) followed the latter for the first three, inverted invidia, gula, ira, and terminated, like the Jesuits, with pigritia (accidia). Zerner followed Herbet, except that he displaced lussuria and pigritia, positioning them at the end, presumably in accordance with his theory of chronological execution. For lack of convincing evidence of Penni's intent, 1 follow the order of Zerner's catalogue.

20. Delumeau (268) commented: "La 'reine des vices' au sommet des arbres du mal, c'est sans doute la superbia, mais n'est-ce pas aussi plus simplement la femme? Dans le Pelerinage de vie humaine redige par Guillaume de Digulleville, le voyageur qu'est chacun d'entre nous rencontre autant de femmes que de peches." He also pointed out that in 16th-century engravings, five or six of the sins are usually shown as female figures.

21. F. Chavannes, ed., Le Mirouer du monde: Manuscrit du XIVe siecle, Lausanne, 1845, 31.

22. For the reference from Piers Plowman, Bloomfield, 200; for the winds of vainglory or pride, 230.

23. The terms are borrowed from Brant's analogous chapter 92, "Presumptuousness of Pride."

24. "Pride is the deueles eldeste doughter" (W. N. Francis, ed., The Book of Virtues and Vices: A Fourteenth Century Translation of the Somme le Roi of Lorens d'Orleans, Oxford, 1942, 12); Spenser refers to her as Lucifera in his Faerie Queene (Bloomfield, 241-42). To illustrate her role in man's fall, Bloomfield (230) refers to Lydgate's translation of the Pelerinage de la vie humaine. Brant (301), like Penni, cites Adam along with Lucifer in his chapter on pride.

25. For examples of the importance of the theme of cuckolding during the age of Francis I, see N. J. Vickers, "The Mistress in the Masterpiece," in N. K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender, New York, 1986, 19-41; and K. Wilson-Chevalier, "Women on Top at Fontainebleau," Oxford Art Journal, XVI, no. 1, 1993, 34-48.

26. Bloomfield, 382 n. 16. See also ibid., 9, 75.

27. It is quite possible that Penni's overt intention was to denounce the courtesan and/or prostitute in this figuration of a sexually provocative Pride (the theme of prostitution is discussed at length below). G. Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance, New York/Oxford, 1993, 235, n. 34, notes that "[Renaissance] literature . . . provided many cautionary tales based on complaints about the airs that courtesans had taken on and their overweening pride" (my emphasis). He goes on to state that a well-known poem relating the "gang rape" of the Venetian courtesan La Zaffetta presented the aggression as "a justified joke played on an overly proud prostitute."

28. See R. J. Knecht, Francis I, Cambridge, 1988, 248-52, 397-400; J. Jacquard, Francois Ier, Paris, 1981, 269-71, 371-73; B. Volle, Paris, son Eglise et ses eglises, Paris, 1982, I, 122; and J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century, London, 1975, 87-89.

29. Gargantua interprets the lines of his riddle, "How praiseworthy he / Who shall have persevered even to the end!" as signifying "the continuance and steadfastness of Divine Truth" (quoted from the translation by J. M. Cohen, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, London, 1955, 163). For a lengthy assessment of the Protestants' attitude during the 1572 massacre, see D. Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthelemy: Un Reve perdu de la Renaissance, Paris, 1994.

30. La Grand Nef des folz, Lyon: Francois Juste, 1529, Bibliotheque Nationale, Res.: "Sans elle [Sapience] prince ou roy ne gouuerne deuement ses sceptres et dominations. Car elle est mere de la foy et mere de Justice.... Parquoy vous saiges acoures et defendez vostre minerue. Car le mauuais peuple vulgaire trude et gecte partout ses enseignemens en ung sac. Ainsi appert que sapience est moult noble et que ceulx qui mectent sa doctrine en ung sac, cest a dire qui la scayuent et la taisent ou qui loyent et la deprisent sont vrays folz dignes de gouuerner la nef." An alarming parallel to this image can be found in the (traditionalist) Parisian Cordelier prior's proposal, in 1533, to sew Marguerite de Navarre into a sack and throw her into the river Seine (J.-P. Babelon, Paris au XVIe siecle, Paris, 1986, 407).

31. See Davis, 9, on the hat as the symbol of male honor in the peasant class. Penni uses both the Phrygian cap and the contemporary hat as distinguishing signs for male peasants.

32. Ruggiero, 96, then 92. Is it the class distinction which explains the slightly more assertive resistance of this lady when she is compared to her counterpart in Penni and Davent's Tarquin and Lucretia (Zerner, L.D. 71)? In the latter, the rape involves two members of the same social class.

33. On the rising importance of the sin of Avarice in the trade-oriented Europe of the later Middle Ages, see Bloomfield, 74-75, 90 91, 95, 358 n. 43.

34. Bartsch, XV, 252, no. 28; A. P. F. Robert-Dumesnil, Le Peintre-graveur francais, Paris, 1835-71, IX, 147, no. 22; and A. Linzeler, Bibliotheque Nationale: Departement des Estampes. Inventaire du fonds francais. Gravures du XVIe siecle, Paris, 1932, 79. The lower cartouche reads: "Purpureas prebete rosas floresq. Marie ut. uobis fructum prebeat illa. suum" (Offer flowers and purple roses to Mary, so that she will offer you her fruit). On Beatrizet, see S. Bianchi, "Contributi per l'opera incisa di Nicolas Beatrizet," Rassegna di studi e notizie: Castello Sforzesco [Milan], no. 9, 1981, 45-145. Beatrizet's earliest dated plate is from 1540.

35. For characteristic instances of criticism of the Dominican order associated with the rise of Protestantism in Germany, see J. C. Hutchison, Albrecht Durer: A Biography, Princeton, N.J., 1990, 177-78. There can be no doubt that Penni's attack was head-on, for the rosary eliminated from this central oval has migrated to play a prominent and resolutely antagonistic role in two of the tondi on the very same sheet.

36. On Mammon as woman in disguise, see Matthews Grieco, 278-81; on the sites of prostitution, Pigeaud, 41.

37. Bloomfield, 242. Bruegel's female allegorical figure of Avarice actually wears a crescent-shaped headdress, associated with the procuress, Avarice violates honor and decency for the sake of money" (H. A. Klein, Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder, New York, 1963, 102, no. 40, with illustration). Note, too, that Penni has left little room for youthful men among his worshipers of Mammon; on the association of avarice and old age, see Bloomfield, 437, n. 198.

38. The term is borrowed from Azpilcueta's 16th-century questioning of Aristotle's theory on the sterility of money, and his statement that the merchant's money fructifies like seeds that have been sown (Delumeau, 250).

39. In his slightly later engraving of Avarice (see n. 37), Bruegel approached the same concept differently by placing a pot of gold inside a dead, hollow tree.

40. Dollinger, chap. 111 ("Du Carnaval"), p. 296; my translation.

41. See J. Poumarede, "Le Droit des veuves sous l'Ancien Regime (XVIIe-XVIIIe siecles) ou comment gagner son douaire," in Femmes et pouvoirs sous l'Ancien regime, ed. D. Haase-Dubosc and E. Viennot, Paris, 1991, 64-76; and O. Hufton, "Donne, lavoro e famiglia," in Storie delle donne in Occidente dal Rinascimento all'eta moderna, Rome/Bari, 1991, 49. However, at the same time: "For a young printmaker with no capital, nothing was more advantageous than to marry a widow who could provide the wherewithal to set up a business as well as an inherited stock of trade"; see M. Grivel, "Printmakers in Sixteenth-Century France," in The French Renaissance in Prints from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, exh. cat., Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Los Angeles, 1994, 32-57, esp. 48.

42. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. G. Bull, London, 1976, 176-77.

43. Pointed out by Ruggiero [as in n. 27], 103. For a Protestant image (Erhard Schon, Satire against the Clergy: God's Lamentation for his Vineyard, ca. 1532) that includes the rosary among other objects of Catholic devotion shown hanging on dead trees which God is uprooting, see G. Bartrum, German Renaissance Prints, 1490-1550, exh. cat., British Museum, London, 1995, 96-97, no. 84.

44. According to Bloomfield, 59, it was "perhaps because of its connection with property" that invidia had not been included among the sins that preoccupied cenobites and hermits. On this topic, see Delumeau, 236-38, in particular, who bases his conclusions on M. Vincent-Cassy, "L'Envie en France du XIIIe au XVe siecle," Ph.D. diss., University of Paris-IV, 1974. On Penni's representation, see Matthews Grieco, 255-56.

45. Bloomfield, 191. Penni's sheet is reproduced here (Fig. 10) in the second state, in which the etching has been reworked with a burin.

46. According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, as cited by Delumeau, 236.

47. Commonly referred to during the Middle Ages as an envenoming adder or asp (Bloomfield, 103, 149, 183, 189, 197, 231).

48. J. Chevalier and A. Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, Paris, 1987, 704-5: "armoiries du peche." Brant was also fully aware of the ominous character of the number eleven ("Of Too Many Benefices," 131): "But now one oft gets dispensation, / Which causes some men false elation, / Who think that they are safe, although / Number eleven be their throw."

49. Bartsch, XVI, 420, no. 107, identifies correctly two of these tondo scenes: Cain and Abel and Joseph's Dream.

50. For specific references to the innumerable associations of dogs with envy, see Bloomfield, e.g., 89, 130, 145, 149, 167, 181, 195, 196, 231, 372, n. 227, 422, n. 283. The tale is recounted in Les Fables d'Esope raises en francais (1801), Paris, 1985, Fable LXVII, 141.

51. Numerous differences distinguish Penni's depiction of Joseph's dream from the fresco treating the same story that Raphael had painted in the Vatican Logge. Yet Raphael had used the form of the tondo to render Joseph's dreams, in general, and for the specific "dream" depicted in the upper right of his Joseph Explaining His Dreams to His Brothers, with its bowing sheaves. Penni may have been thinking of Raphael's precedent here, as Suzanne Boorsch suggests (oral communication). Two engravings could have been known to Penni: an anonymous one "in the style of Bonasone," and another by Beatrizet (see G. B. Pezzini et al., Raphael Invenit: Stampe da Raffaello nelle collezioni dell'Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome, 1985, 74, "Logge," nos. 14, 15).

52. On both the traditional ecclesiastical association of Gluttony with the tavern, and the condemnation of the latter as "the school of the devil," "the chapel of Satan," and the like, see Bloomfield, 126, 129, 162-63, 183-84, 223, 431 n. 75. He cites (199) an English mural dating from ca. 1400 in which Gluttony is already shown as a tavern gathering.

53. Dollinger, 294.

54. When discussing the famous Cabaret Guillot in Amiens (frequented by the aldermen of the town and where Francis 1 dined in 1517), A. Lefranc, La Vie quotidienne au temps de la Renaissance, Paris, 1938, 154-56, notes the presence of prostitutes and gamblers, both excluded here. The absence of children from the scene, however, is in keeping with custom and law.

55. Bloomfield, 184.

56. Muchembled, 46, 94; the heightened aggressiveness of tavern owners is linked to "professional risks" (28). On this topic, see also Davis, 101, 107, 193, 197, 198, 225, n. 44.

57. Muchembled cites the case of a woman branded on the left cheek (100); nine instances of branding as punishment for theft (103), which he refers to as "monnaie courante" in the 16th century (117); and the existence of a branding iron made in the shape of a rat holding a provost's baton (113). An alternative hypothesis is that these marks on shaved heads simply indicate a degenerate physical state.

58. By 1457-58, there were no fewer than three hundred in Paris alone, most located near Les Halles, the Putt de Greve, along the main routes, and at the city gates; see J. Favier, Francois Villon, Paris, 1982, 176; and P. Thibault, "Les Parisiens et le vin a la fin du XVe siecle," Paris et Ile-de-France, XXXV, 1984, 239.

59. Davis, 189, 225, n. 44.

60. Thibault (as in n. 58), 232, 248-49, 252.

61. The figure is female according to Bartsch, XVI, 420, n. 108, and Matthews Grieco, 364, 470 n. 197. Adhemar, 292-93, considered it to be a male ecclesiastic.

62. Bloomfield, 151. See also ibid., 223, for gluttony and the hog related to Matthew's reference (7:28) to swine.

63. For a pictorial analogy, see C. Cutler, "Bosch and the Narrenschiff: A Problem in Relationships," Art Bulletin, LI, 1969, 272-73; and H. Adhemar, Le Musee national du Louvre, Les Primitifs flamands: I. Corpus de la peinture des anciens Pays-Bas meridionaux au quinzieme siecle, V, I, Brussels, 1962, 20-25.

64. Cutler (as in n. 63), in his study of Bosch's satirical Ship of Fools, which targets the Franciscan order as well as a Beguine (or simply a nun, according to H. Adhemar [as in n. 63]), noted the of gluttony and sensual pleasures.

65. See Rabelais's chap. 40 (as in n. 29), entitled "Why Monks are shunned by the world, why some have bigger Noses than others" (the second part of the title being a sexual innuendo), or, Friar John's assertion that the monks St.-Genou are merrily cuckolding the pilgrims as the latter piously pursue route (chap. 45). This coincides with what was coming out of Protestant in 1555; see, e.g., quotes from the huguenot, cited in J. Garrisson, Les au XVIe siecle, Paris, 1988, 53-54.

66. Matthews Grieco, 363-64. The respectable Christine de Pizan, for one, was convinced that nonsober women "se desnaturent" (Davis, 189). Davis notes that contemporaries point to a female penchant for wine, and she suggests a link between drunkenness and the vulnerable and discontent. She concludes (189) that men in 16th-century France were able to invoke "I'yvrognerie" as an extenuating circumstance in crime, whereas it was in a woman's interest to refrain from doing the same.

67. The expression is borrowed from Klein (as in n. 37), 108, no. 43; Bruegel's very different engraving of Wrath (ibid., 109) focuses, effectively, on the horrors of war.

68. On this theme, see, e.g., Ruggiero, 109-13; and Pigeaud, 39-43. To single out but one of the many examples from the reign of Francis I: in the wake of the defeat of the French army in Italy in 1524, when fire raged through the city of Troyes, the "Bourgeois de Paris" commented: "Il semble que ce soit pugnition de Dieu" (quoted in C. Terrasse, Francois Ier: Le Roi et le regne, Paris, 1945, I, 291). In an attempt to appease God and the population at large, several boys between the ages of twelve and fourteen were hanged. Such a drastic measure did not, however, prevent panic from overcoming the inhabitants of Paris, too.

69. Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. J. Thackeray, Cambridge, Mass./London, 1989, VI, 201-18.

70. On this theme, see K. Wilson-Chevalier, Fontainebleau et l'estampe en France au XVIe siecle: Iconographie et contradictions, exh. cat., Chateau de Nemours, Nemours, 1985, 219-21, no. 166.

71. Josephus (as in n. 69), 439.

72. Paris, Bibl. Nat. Res. Velins 696. See Baurmeister and Laffitte (as in n. 12), 104, for a reproduction.

73. See Davis, 173, for fascinating evidence.

74. Adhemar, 292-93.

75. Davis, 180-83. The other nonremissible crime was witchcraft, and Medea was deemed guilty of that, too.

76. Muchembled, 57, insists on the "very intense moral and religious dimension of infanticide" during this period, which set it apart from other crimes.

77. Davis, 183. Unleashed female desire was held responsible for the unwanted births; then shame was seen to be the driving force behind a woman's desire to eliminate her progeny. The magistrate was charged with the uncomfortable task of distinguishing between stillborn births and intentional suppressions. Attesting to the contemporary fascination with the theme of Medea are the twenty-six engravings made by Rene Boyvin, after drawings by Penni's contemporary Leonard Thiry. In the episode dedicated to her murder of her children (Robert-Dumesnil [as in n. 34] VIII, 44, no. 63), she is shown more than half undressed - a visual conformation of Davis's contention that infanticide was linked to unleashed female desire - and, while egged on by Envy, wildly possessed by Wrath.

78. Muchembled, 95.

79. Davis, 182.

80. For what I consider to be a manifestation of this theme at Fontainebleau, see Wilson-Chevalier (as in n. 25), esp. 42-43.

81. Delumeau, 238-39.

82. Boccaccio, long before, had associated Venus with prostitution and the creation of bordellos: "ella invento, come dicono, il pubblico meretricio e istitui i postriboli" (De mulieribus claris, ed. V. Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, Verona, 1970, 55).

83. Bloomfield (145, 402 n. 197) uses the term in his discussion of N. Bozon's poem "Le Char d'Orgueil."

84. See G. Padoan, "Il mondo delle cortigiane nella letteratura rinascimentale," in Il Gioco dell'Amore, 64, 70, no. 28.

85. Bloomfield, 242, points out that in Spenser's Faerie Queene, the burning heart held by Lechery is presumably an allusion to the male Lechery's venereal disease.

86. The adjectives are those of Janson, 14; see his chap. 4 for what follows.

87. See ibid., 130, for a specific example. The Middle Ages referred to the ape as female and associated it with "almost exclusively female qualities" (109); in the same passage, Janson also noted explicitly a "strongly misogynous undertone."

88. The chain and clog added around her waist mark the ape's unwillingness to submit to discipline and bring to mind "the sinner in the chains of vice or death" (ibid., 146).

89. See ibid., chap. 7, containing an analysis of Brant's woodcut (206-7), in which Janson signals the harlot component. Elsewhere he expands (262) on the association between apes and prostitution - one more confirmation of the view presented here.

90. It should be noted that Penni's ape, after introducing the viewer to the scene, leads the eye straight to the monk.

91. See, e.g., X. Muratova and D. Poirion, Bestiarium: Facsimile du manuscript du Bestiaire Ashmole 1511..., Paris, 1984, 129-30). A fascinating parallel of the associations between the swan, prostitution, and death can be found in The Three Fates, a painting attributed to Sodoma in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.

92. Janson, 262. He also cites an example of Luxuria riding on a bear; gives examples of the war of the sexes depicted as an ape riding on a bear, 264; and cites Cornelius Bos's Triumph of Love engraving (1552), in which both of these animals appear along with Venus on a chariot.

93. Bloomfield, 230, cites an example from Deguileville's (Digulleville's) 14th-century Pelerinage de la vie humaine.

94. F. McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962, 173; and Bestiarium (as in n. 91), 89. Bloomfield (144) cites the parallel between a lecherous man and a rutting stag in N. Bozon's Contra luxurious.

95. See J.-P. Babelon (as in n. 30), 191-93; and M. Heim, Francois Ier et les femmes, Paris, 1956, 79.

96. In the Brant illustration, the wife, "as cat," "views the mice with glee"; the wife is tickling her husband's nose with a reed, which, according to Zeydel, means "lulling him off his guard through flattery" (Brant, 372 n. 33).

97. Dollinger, 309, considers the fool in the lower right to be cleaning roof tiles. Zeydel (Brant, 372 n. 32) translates huet fast, inscribed below the woman in Fig. 18, as "guard well."

98. The subject was treated in several different wall frescoes of the Gallery, of Ulysses at Fontainebleau, where Penni had been employed (see Beguin, Guillaume, and Roy [as in n. 4], no. 41, 289-90, no. 43, 293-95). Before I came across Brant's references to the good and bad wife, Penni's tondo, from a formal point of view, had always evoked the Galerie d'Ulysse scenes in my mind.

99. This is true in city and court alike, as Castiglione's exemplary Emilia Pia attests in The Book of the Courtier.

100. See n. 11.

101. The quote is translated from Locher's Latin version of Brant's work.

102. On this phenomenon, see Delumeau, 262-64; M. E. Wiesner, "Spinning Out Capital: Women's Work in the Early Modern Economy," in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. R. Bridenthal, C. Koonz, and S. Stuard, Boston, 1987, 227; and Pigeaud, 44-46.

103. Matthews Grieco, 312, n. 97. Confirmed by a quotation (ibid., 300) from the French 1529-30 edition of Brant; an elderly peasant woman "dort par si grande paresse quelle se brusle les piedz." Zeydel's translation, on the other hand, refers to a male servant. The same is true of Locher's Latin text, and of Barclay's Ship of Fools, as quoted in S. Wenzel, "The Seven Deadly Sins: Some Problems of Research," Speculum, XXXXIII, 1968, 20: "Slouthfull man is here of that nature / That if he lay besyde a fyre brennynge / For to be brent: he rather wolde endure / Than take the payne hym selfe in any thynge / For to relefe by rysnynge or mouynge." Wenzel cites two folk tales which constitute the source of Brant's literary image, both of which refer to male figures as well. The ambiguity of the woodcut figure is blatant, for the image evokes a monk; the precapitalistic tradition of sloth as accidia rather than pigritia (on this distinction, see Bloomfield, 96, 225; and Delumeau, 255-64) chastised the neglect of religious duties. During the age of the Reformation, criticism of monks as worthless, nonproductive beings was commonplace (Delumeau, 263, with a reference to Bosch's Prado panel The Deadly Sins). Bruegel's print of Sloth (made after Penni's) includes, in addition to Dame Sloth, "a stork-beaked monster in monk's garb" (Klein [as in n. 37], 114-15).

104. Bestiarium (as in n. 91), 97; McCulloch (as in n. 94), 92; and Bloomfield. 195, 422 n. 283. For the example of Spenser's Faerie Queene, in which Idleness still rides an ass, see Bloomfield, 242. The longstanding medieval tradition was still alive at the end of the Renaissance.

105. The term crimes from Wiesner (as in n. 102), 227-28, who stipulates that laws were passed to force unmarried women to stay out of the towns or, if already there, to move in with male kin or employers; widows were supposed to live with their male progeny. The phenomenon takes on importance when it is realized that single women tended to constitute, legislation notwithstanding, between one-quarter and one-third of the urban population.

106. Matthews Grieco, 300; and Delumeau, 263.

107. Adhemar, 293. For Sloth and theft, see Bloomfield, 198, 425 n. 304. Concerning mutilation, Muchembled (48-49) cites examples of female thieves who had an ear cut off or were buried alive in the 15th century. As regards the rather common "ban sur le poing," he notes an association with crimes in which blond was spilled (67). Ruggiero (115) cites this form of mutilation in Venice, as well, occurring in one instance as punishment for masturbation.

108. There is a somewhat analogous etching by Androuet du Cerceau, entitled Sterilitas (see Wilson-Chevalier [as in n. 70], no. 45), in which a disgruntled old lady, with one exposed drooping breast and hands intact, prepares to whip her spry donkey as it carries her through the barren countryside. The Latin inscription explains: "Haec infoecundo nullum aedit corpore fructum" (She [sterility] produces no fruit from her infertile body).

109. Delumeau, 263; he also invokes Calvin's statement that God does not want us to he "lasches et oysifs comme troncs de bois" (quoted from a 1604 edition).

110. Quoted from the Dominican Domenico Cavalca, who died in 1342; Delumeau, 257.

111. The woodcut [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 21 OMITTED] also includes the ant and the bee as positive models from the animal world, while Brant's text (235) states: "Learn, fool, the ant to imitate."

112. [Pliny the Elder], Pline l'Ancien, Histoire naturelle, Paris, 1952, bk. 8, chap. 33, lines 120ff. [Aristotle], Aristote, Histoire des animaux, Paris, 1964, 1, bk. 2, XI, 50ff, describes it as an animal with a long, pointed, and rolled-up tail, claws comparable to those of birds, and very large inset eyes surrounded by pockets of skin.

113. Paris, Bibl. Ste.-Genevieve MS 3401, 1566: Manuel Phile, catalogued as Recueil de pieces de vers grecs [De animalium proprietate], fol. 40. The manuscript is attributed to Ange Vergece, the illustrations - interestingly - to his daughter. For a series of other 16th-century references and emblematic representations of this popular animal, charged with the same or different meanings, see D. Russell (as in n. 10), 223, 239-40. Pierre Belon's woodcut of 1553 shows a more scientifically correct animal (W. B. Ashworth, Jr., "Marcus Gheeraerts and the Aesopic Connection in 17th-Century Scientific Illustration," Art Journal, Summer 1984, 135); the most common depiction shows the chameleon on the branch of a dead tree stump.

114. On the traditional linkage of Sloth and melancholy, see Bloomfield, 430 n. 61. For numerous, far-reaching contextual associations, including the proverb cited hereafter, see Matthews Grieco, 302-7. She reproduces [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 88 OMITTED] Du Cerceau's analogous Calamitas, with its Latin inscription: "Vestitu et tectis spoliata heu nuda relinquor" (Alas! I am left nude and despoiled of clothing and a roof).

115. C. Ripa would make an explicit link between female chastity and the necessary rejection of Sloth: "Que la Personne chaste doit estre nette de route ordure, ennemie de l'oisivete" (quoted from the French translation of 1643, Iconologie ou les principales chases qui peuvent tomber dans la pensee touchant les vices sont representees, Paris, 1987. 115).

116. Ruggieri, 154-55, speaks of the "considerable pool of 'unplaced' young women" from the lower ranks of society who were "sucked into the extensive corps of prostitutes" in Venice. The phenomenon occurred throughout Europe. On the dangers awaiting a girl from the tender age of seven or eight, see ibid., 150-52: natural parents with no viable means of subsistence, adoptive parents, masters of young servants, and employers of the widespread child labor three all constituted potential threats.

117. Quoted by Delumeau, 258.

118. Bloomfield, 203, points out that much of the lyric poetry of the 15th century continued to invoke Jesus "for help against the temptations of the world"; see ibid., 229, for poems related to Jesus' suffering on the cross. Moral support in the late Middle Ages was to be sought in the seven petitions to the Lord's Prayer (ibid., 233). William Dunbar, author of a Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins published in 1507, conceived the problem as one of sinning against the Holy Ghost and continued to appeal to Jesus' five wounds (Bloomfield, 238). Brant, too, in his last chapter, "The Wise Man" (365), expresses his deepest hope that God will place wisdom in every hand. Bloomfield, 171, notes that a process of secularization had begun in the later Middle Ages. He also briefly discusses (411 n. 94) the Protestant attitude toward the Sins.

119. Raphael, it is also worth tinting, had positioned his Justice (and her three allegorical sisters) at the center of a tondo.

120. The Virtues had been conceived as "warrior-maidens" since Tertullian (E. Male, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, New York, 1972, 98).

121. The positioning of Gluttony next to Lust is in keeping with tradition, for both were considered to be sins of the flesh (Bloomfield, 140), A potential precedent for these throat clamps and chains resides in the woodcut for Brant's chap. 81, "Of Cooks and Waiters": a fool holds a bundle of ropes attached to the necks of a number of untrustworthy servants. Suzanne Boorsch (oral communication) suggests a parallel with the "Hercules gaulois" woodcut published by Geoffroy Tory in 1529 (see A.-M. Le Coq, Francois Ier imaginaire, Paris, 1987, [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 195 OMITTED!).

122. The reference is to the well-known drawing by Rosso Fiorentino: Pandora Opening the Box (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, inv. 340); see E. A. Carroll, Rosso Fiorentino: Drawings, Prints, and Decorative Arts, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, 298-301, no. 95.

123. Suzanne Boorsch (oral communication) reminds me that Penni's fascination with this theme is also apparent in his Calumny of Apelles, engraved by Giorgio Ghisi (Boorsch and Lewis [as in n. 3], 111-13, no. 27).

124. Muchembled, 79.

125. The issue is discussed at length in G. Zeller, Les Institutions de la France au XVIe siecle, Paris, 1948, 381-87.

126. M. R. Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe, Bristol, 1979, 102. Babelon (as in n. 30). 184 85, points out that the roots of this Paris institution may in fact go back to as early as 1530.

127. Muchembled, 62; he terms them "la face sombre et terrible du roi justicier" (109).

128. Weisser (as in n. 126), 96.

129. Zeller (as in n. 125), 386; effective as of 1536. In 1546, the year before the earliest date proposed for Penni's series, royal judges were given control over hospital administration incomes (ibid., 382).

130. The text of the scroll - confringe eos in virga ferrea - refers to Ps. 2:9: "With iron scepter you will break them, shatter them like potter's ware" (Jerusalem Bible translation). The psalm begins: "Why this uproar among the nations? . . . princes plotting against Yahweh and his Anointed," and it ends: "So now, you kings, learn wisdom, earthly rulers, be warned: serve Yahweh, fear him, tremble and kiss his feet, or he will be angry and you will perish, for his anger is very quick to blaze."

131. Beguin, 248, n. 14, noted the importance of religious themes per se in Penni's oeuvre. Grodecki, 269, n. 47, raised the issue of his eventual personal involvement with the Protestant Reformation.

132 Grivel (as in n. 47), 47-50 defines 16th-century Parisian printmakers as belonging to "a modest social class."

133. Of the two signed engravings cited by P. du Colombier, "Notes et documents: Le Graveur Laurent Penni," in Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, III, no. 3, 1936, 327-29, I have seen only the one executed in Modena, after Ercole de' Setti (Paris, Bibl. Nat., Est. Ba 1, VI).

Frequently Cited Sources

Adhemar, J., Bibliotheque Nationale: Inventaire du fonds francaise. Graveurs du XVIe siecle, II, Paris, 1939.

Bartsch, A., Le Peintre-graveur, 21 vols., Vienna, 1803-21.

Beguin, S., "Luca Penni peintre: Nouvelles Attributions," in "Il se rendit en Italie": Etudes offertes a Andre Chastel, Paris, 1987, 243-57.

Bloomfield, M. W., The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature, East Lansing, Mich., 1952.

Boorsch, S., "The Prints of the School of Fontainebleau," in The French Renaissance in Prints from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, exh. cat., Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Los Angeles, 1994, 78-93.

Brant, S., The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, trans. E. H. Zeydel (1944), New York, 1962.

Davis, N. Z., Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in 16th-Century France. Stanford, 1987; Pour sauver sa vie: Les Recits de pardon au XVIe siecle, Paris, 1988.

Delumeau, J., Le Peche et la peur: La Culpabilisation en Occident (XIIIe-XVIIIe siecles), Paris, 1983.

Dollinger, P:, in L Nef des fous; trans: M: Horst, Strasbourg; 1979:

L'Ecole de Fontainebleau, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 1972.

Grodecki, C., "Luca Penni et le milieu parisien: A propos de son inventaire apres deces," in "Il se rendit en Italie": Etudes offertes a Andre; Chastel, Paris, 1987, 259-74.

Janson, H. W., Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, London, 1952.

Matthews Grieco, S., Ange ou diablesse: La Representation de la femme au XVIe siecle, Paris, 1991.

Muchembled, R., Le Temps des supplices: De l'obeissance sous les rois absolus, XVe-XVIIIe siecle, Paris, 1992.

Pigeaud, R., "Woman as Temptress: Urban Morality in the Fifteenth Century," in Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. L. Dresen-Coenders, London, 1987, 39-58.

Ruggiero, G., The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, New York/Oxford, 1985.

Vasari, Giorgio, Le Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori ed architellori . . . , ed. G. Milanesi (1878-85), 9 vols., Florence, 1973.

Il Gioco dell'amore: Le cortegiane di Venezia dal Trecento al Settecento, exh. cat., Ca' Vendramin Calergi, Venice, Milan, 1990.

Zerner, H., Ecole de Fontainebleau: Gravures, Paris, 1969.

Zeydel, E., Sebastian Brant, New York, 1967.

Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, assistant professor at the American University of Paris, has published articles and an exhibition catalogue on the art of Fontainebleau. She was one of the organizers of the 1995 interdisciplinary conference "Royaume de Femynie: Women and Power in the French Renaissance" (Chateau de Blois) [American University of Paris, 31 avenue Bosquet, 75007 Paris, France!.

COPYRIGHT 1996 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group