One of the great mysteries in my life is why the blog “William Turner and the RenaissanceGarden” gets three times as many hits as anything else I have written. Since this suggests that you out there enjoy reading about Renaissance gardens, here is an updated version of the paper, Caterina Sforza and "Gli Esperimenti"   I gave to the Nature Council in Assisi ten years ago. In fact although I was getting over cancer and was a bit gaga at the time and although it was originally written on an Amstrad 9512, hence the wonky footnote numbering, there was less to revise than I anticipated.

I suppose the most  important revision concerns Caterina and the Florentine attitude to her. I had seen Caterina de Medici, the wife of Henri IInd unfairly credited on a number of touristy web sites with many of Caterina Sforza’s cosmetic and pharmaceutical preparations. These products are now sold world wide, most notably by the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella.. I put this neglect of  Sforza’s work down to typical Florentine mean-spiritedness and xenophobia (and after years of foreign occupations and four centuries of foully  behaved grockles despoiling their streets, who can blame them?)  The welcome they  had accorded poor Caterina when she arrived in their city, broken by the appalling treatment meted out to her in the Borgia dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo, was far from unanimous[1].  No one resented her presence more than Lorenzo de Popolano de Medici, her brother-in-law.  Few will deny the ability of the Fiorentini to bear a grudge in the long term, but carrying it on to the present day by ignoring her contribution to their economy in favour of one of their own, seemed somewhat excessive even by their standards. This impression was in no way dispelled by the staff at the London outlet of the Farmacia of Santa Maria Novella who adamantly refused  to discuss Caterina Sforza’s role in the formulation of their preparations. They were  equally determined not to name any archivist within the organisation who could shed some light on it. Doubtless they thought that I was an industrial spy. Fortunately my hypothesis of some long-standing Florentine grudge turned out to have  no validity  and I am happy to say that  the misapprehension appears to have originated in a single inaccurate web site admittedly posted by an Italian but not by the farmacia itself whose web site is still in the course of development . The inaccuracies  have spread out like ripples in a pond to many other sites  usually those of  Americans who should, but unfortunately don’t know better[2].  That this springs from ignorance rather than deliberate sourness is suggested by the text which may be original or a link in the chain “Molte essenze e profumi sono ancora realizzati con formule studiate nel 1500 per Caterina de' Medici. Curiosa la storia dell'Acqua di Colonia portata da Caterina a Parigi con il nome di Acqua della Regina.” In fact  the Caterina de Medici  who married Henri and went to Paris wasn’t even born until 1519  though it should be noted that during  1500  Caterina Sforza was incarcerated in Sant’Angelo and didn’t arrive in Florence until after her release in the summer of  the following year.Apart from the discrepancy in dates, there were other differences between the two women, the Milanese Caterina Sforza was stunningly beautiful and regal,  whereas  Caterina de’ Medici was plain and referred to by the French as “the merchant’s daughter”,  not something that would have gone down too well with the socially conscious Fiorentini, notwithstanding that  their home-grown daughter had hooked a royal bridegroom. Moreover the pair were associated with different sides of two feuding branches of the Medici.  This arguably reached its culmination when Duke Alessandro of the senior branch was murdered by Lorenzino of the Popolani branch (thus Caterina’s great nephew by marriage) in 1536.

Leaving aside Caterina’s son, Giovanni delle Bande Neri, reputedly a thoroughly nasty piece of work, her descendents through the next four generations were avid horticulturalists, Cosimo II not only  suggested setting up the Farmacia of Santa Novella  to market Caterina’s products in 1612 but played a major part in the establishment and success of the Pisa Botanic Garden, so the Florentines got what they wanted after all.

CATERINA SFORZA, A RENAISSANCE HEROINE[3] REVISITED

A.G Lyman-Dixon

            Caterina Sforza, an illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Sforza, the tyrant of Milan, governed the Papal cities of Forli and Imola during the last quarter of the fifteenth century.  During this period not only did the Papacy endeavour to bring its nominal possessions under centralised control, but also non-Italian powers invaded  the peninsular in pursuit of territorial claims. With a savagery only equalled by her opponents' determination to destroy her, Caterina held on to her tiny state against all odds before finally being brought down by the combined forces of the French and Papal armies. In between complex political and amorous distractions, she found time to write "Gli Esperimenti'

            Although they comprise one of the greatest collections of medicinal lore to be gathered during the Renaissance, the five hundred odd formulae which make up "Gli Esperimenti" today lie virtually unread.    This is surprising, for the breadth of the wisdom contained in the compilation is almost boundless.  The fact that an unusual number of the formulae were actually made up in her speziale's own laboratory and then tested, rather than being a repetition of hearsay, render them virtually unique in their period. Further rarity is bestowed upon them by being written by a woman whose formal education ceased at sixteen and during a period when the humanist and ecclesiastic academics who dominated medicine were finding common cause in misogyny.

By definition "Experimenti" are tried and tested remedies that have stood the test of time[4], used from the very origins of human consciousness by sufferers in need of a "quick fix" rather than a load of academic mumbo jumbo. Thus Caterina's collection is refreshingly free from tedious theorizing about maladjusted "Humours" and the quantitative values of the plants needed to remedy them. Caterina was too driven, too busy to suffer fools gladly. She hunted, she fought, and she reared children in spite of suffering indifferent mental[5] and physical health. To her, Hippocrates dictum that empirical medicine based on experience alone, was of negligible value  would have appeared to be the very height of stupidity. Caterina was clearly writing for people who shared her attitudes and so often the recipes are endorsed by statements such as "and this one works" and "this one does wonders"[6]

            Therefore, to explain the neglect of "Gli Experimenti" by dismissing them as "derivative" and no more than an ill-educated dilletante's dabbling in matters she could not understand, suggests that the majority of her detractors have both failed to recognise the value of the collection and omitted to read her original script.

Interestingly, because modern society has been compelled to address, if not to accept, the ideas of universal suffrage and feminism, Caterina's character gives rise to greater controversy now than it did amongst her contemporaries. Quattrocento men, in rejecting the ideas that a woman should have a life outside the home, and that if abused might retaliate, gave her "masculine" behaviour a unanimously bad press. Consequently, although chroniclers expressed a  grudging admiration for her courage and beauty, it  was tempered by general condemnation of her ruthlessness.  "Femina quasi virago crudelissima e di gran animo" wrote Marino Sanuto, and, according to Guicciardini,"essendo d'anima virile e feroce", a sentiment echoed by Mallett in 1969 when he described her as a "violent vengeful woman whose activities are often mistakenly taken to represent the typical behaviour of all the vicars". On the other hand Fusero in 1972, not much later than Mallett but at a period when "Womens Lib" was making significant advances, refers to her as "The toughest, bravest, most splendid female figure in all history". These opinions owe much to the fact that she was mentally, a medieval figure living in the early Renaissance, a woman who had consciously set out to emulate her Visconti forebears, whose grip on Milan was secured by a spectacular reign of terror. For Caterina, ancestor worship was no fashionable conceit peddled by court sycophants such as Ariosto was to provide for the D'Este in Ferrara, but an anchor in an uncertain world. With her brother allegedly poisoned by her favourite uncle and her father and two husbands butchered by assassins, it was inevitable that her mental outlook would reflect these events. One only has to compare her behaviour with that of the coldly dutiful Florentine wives, for instance, to see how successful she was in the pursuit of her role models and how far removed her conduct was from the standards of that of her peers.[7]  The common masculine sanction against women who overstepped the prescribed bounds of their sex was to accuse them of witchcraft, irrespective of their status. This accusation was given extra authority by the bull "Summis desiderantes" in 1487.[8]   Gomrich may well pooh-pooh Vasaris and Guicciardini's nostalgic vision of the Italians living in a Golden Age consequent to the Peace of Lodi, but it says much for Caterina's authority and for Italian sophistication that she was never charged with sorcery, even after allegedly trying to poison the Pope.  Therefore it may be argued, with considerable justification, that Caterina deliberately distanced herself from the standards of contemporary society and that she was mentally unbalanced. Her violent swings of mood which left no one safe in her presence, her constant cries of poverty, her complex about her "timidity", her obsession with her looks, the cunning by which she outsmarted even Machiavelli and her suicidal recklessness all point to a terrible depression.

            Predictably, the woman herself has overshadowed her writing so that apologists and detractors alike have exploited her note books more as a means of advancing other arguments rather than as important research tools in their own right.  Collison Morley used them in an attempt to show a softer side to the Virago's character whilst Portigliotti crudely titillated his readers by quoting a single formula from amongst the five hundred, that of the Ricin-based   "veleno a termine".  The publishers of Pasolini's  definitive nineteenth century biography evidently regarded the notebooks as being of such trivial importance that they were left out of the English edition entirely. Today, with the revival of interest in herbal medicine and in the re-creation of historically accurate gardens, it is an opportune moment to reassess the notebooks. As a supplier of authentic physic garden plants, my interest lies primarily in the plants Caterina cultivated and her reasons for doing so.

The content fixes the notebooks firmly in their time and place.   They are recognizably Medieval in their compilation of simple medical facts "that every housewife ought to know", and a strong Arabic influence is reflected in the formulae, principally in the uses of rose water[9] and burning aromatic gums[10], a very nasty one for gout[11], the familiar one for toothache worms smokes and madness[12].  The fame of the Arabic medical school at Salerno lasted for centuries after the Kingdom of Naples had come under ostensible Christian rule and respect for its practices spread far into Southern Germany. In the centre of this field of influence lay the Romagna and the Lombard plain. Here the ruling families intermarried with those to the North and South and their households acted as essential agents in the process of cultural diffusion.  In Caterina's case, her stepbrother was married to Isabella of Naples and her stepsister to Maximilian the Holy Roman Emperor.  However, the format of Gli Esperimenti differs widely[13] from the "Tacuinum Sanitatis" attributed to Ibn Cassim, arguably the most influential medical text of the period and of which there was almost certainly a copy in her family's Milanese library. This is indicated by Caterina’s lack of interest in the protracted therapies modifying life styles and the correcting of unbalanced humours.  Again, in spite of this Arabic influence, references to astrology which were to confound practitioners of the following centuries are few, one exception being her enthusiasm for using scorpions as an antidote for poisons supposedly empowered by the sign of Scorpio[14]. Admittedly she comments frequently on the beneficial effects of the waxing moon in potentising remedies but this is a belief common to many cultures irrespective of any general acceptance of astrology[15]

A more positive source was probably Albertus Magnus whose instructions, written two hundred years earlier, still remained the standard text on the establishment of laboratories. Albertus' influence must have extended directly or indirectly to the operation of Lodovico Albertini's laboratory in Forli, which was run primarily for Caterina's benefit.

            These clearly exerted a greater sway over her than the "robust Christianity" ascribed to her by biographers, a desultory correspondence with Savonarola notwithstanding.  Indeed few women in history can have turned their backs on the ten commandments so resolutely. Fewer still have demonstrated the nonsense of the orthodox view propounded by Aquinas a couple of centuries previously, but still extant, that women were an aberration of the reproductive process. Rather than writing in celibate isolation, Caterina's own experiments demonstrated to her the inadequacy of the monastic herbals of Northern Europe, with their stylized illustrations, inaccurate and mindlessly recopied texts and their reliance upon unproven Christian dogma. Where Christianity[16] does intrude into the formulae, it is very much in the form of "hedging one’s bets" so that if one technique fails the other might save the patient. This no more demonstrates a lack of confidence in a remedy than the cocktails of antibiotics prescribed by those modern practitioners who claim that one drug may enhance the effect of others. Alternatively, a prayer could be used as a last resort when all else was known to be useless, as in the case of suppurating breasts[17]. Other traditional remedies appear, like the fennel eye-bath whose powers were supposedly based on the similarity between the words "occhio" and "Finocchio"[18], but here again Caterina plays safe by incorporating Rue, the traditional sight restorative in the mix[19] Much of Caterina's material is inevitably derived from Roman writers, some of whose formulae were apparently copied verbatim.  One example is the ingredients of Ovid's face pack.  Pliny, whose compilation of fact, rumour and superstition in his "Historia naturalis", so similar to her own work, makes him a firm favourite. Her enthusiasm for cabbage, for instance, is a reflection of Pliny's praise for its properties. The use of a dead man's tooth to alleviate tooth ache[20]  probably originated in Pliny's repetition of a similar cure for diseased gums in Appollonius.

The classical writers, the Arab-influenced medical traditions of Salerno and the humanist philosophers of Florence all played a major role in Caterina's thinking, but for practical guidance she looked back to her stepmother's Milanese physic garden, maintained under the aegis of Cristoforo de Brugoro[21].

Caterina's Forlivese gardens were probably laid out after the assassination of her first husband, Girolamo Riario, in 1488 and developments continued for at least another six years. The original plantings survived only a short time and their form has to be variously deduced from the notebooks, the work of those who most influenced Caterina and her own character. During this period, the cult of the "PleasureGarden" was already well established. However, to set up gardens such as the elaborately-provided parks of Naples described by Pierre de La Vigne in 1494 would have been entirely at odds with Caterina's turbulent mind. She wanted a garden that would yield practical results in her eternal battle against the daemons that haunted her. Significant in this context is a remedy for depression "per le fanctasie fantastice spiriti et umbre", which consisted of an invocation to Saints Margaret and Cyprian whilst inhaling an amalgam of smouldering church incense, roots, herbs and deers' horn. Another anti-depressant refers to the familiar magical Arabic practice of sacrificing a hoopoe[22]   A prey to frightening swings of mood, depressed and insecure, she was driven by an obsessional and wholly unnecessary desire to enhance her physical appearance. Under the circumstances, ascribing any altruistic motives to her seems far-fetched; it would scarcely be in keeping with her well documented self-doubts that she should wish to surround herself with other beautiful women as Collison Morley asserts.  Even more absurd is his statement that her benevolence extended to the entire female sex. It may have done so on a good day, but as a generality it is refuted by the savagery she meted out to Rosaria Ghetti[23], a former favourite, whose husband had crossed her.

 Caterina suffered from physical problems too. Recurrent bouts of malaria rendered her vulnerable to attack by enemies eager to exploit any physical weakness. However, any hopes they may have entertained of bringing her down whilst temporarily sick were doomed by her remarkable stamina.  Arguably this may also have enabled her to survive the cosmetic use of huge quantities of arsenic compounds (Cerrusa & baccatta] unscathed. Her condition upon leaving the Pope's dungeons in Sant' Angelo may cast doubt on this but it obviously made a better story for Borgia's opponents to blame the pontiff rather than the lady's make-up for the breakdown in her health. 

             A clear division can be drawn between plants actually grown and whose use is described in the Esperimenti and those plants Caterina would have liked to have grown, but could not because of environmental constraints. Renaissance plant lists are often just that, a statement of an ideal rather than a scientific cataloguing of a garden.  Moreover, plant names change over a period of time and many an academic has come to grief over a failure to appreciate this[24]. Also it is true that, because there was insufficient time between civic and domestic distractions to assess empirically all of the information she collected, some ended up stored in "Gli esperimenti" untested.  With such a wide range of treatments and of sources, it is surely credible that she must have recognised some of it as mumbo jumbo and entered it from an editor's rather than a practitioner’s point of view. Breisach's claim that her primary enthusiasm was the substitution of cheap ingredients for more expensive ones reflects the almost universal Medieval fixation for substituting cheap home-grown plants for costly imports. Given Caterina's own obsession with her poverty, this must have had a greater relevance for her than for many others practising in the now-burgeoning Renaissance economy. This, of course, is only relevant when applied to the practical side of her activities. In her book, Caterina could and did, abandon herself to costly dreams of using expensive aromatics such as Frankincense and Myrrh, which for every day use were totally beyond her means and which could never be successfully grown in her gardens. As much as her supposed poverty, pragmatism must have directed the planning of her horticultural enterprises.  Obviously for "Mania" (Xixenia) the suggested alternative of ground up radish would be more easily obtainable than either dried camel brain[25]  or lion meat.  Similarly, those with an eye problem would most likely find earlier relief by picking a bunch of chamomile than by sending out someone to catch a live eel, slit its belly and hold it steady over the sufferers head for the blood to drip in to his or her eye[26] 

            On the links between the spiritual and practical aspects of gardening, Florence was the obvious source of precedent and information. The planting of Lorenzo de Medici's collection at Careggi was the inspiration for botanic gardens in the years to come, Pisa being the most famous inheritor of the Medicean ideal. For Ficino, the Careggi garden was more than a prime source of drugs in the search for a physical cure for depression, its spiritual ambience exerted a powerful therapeutic influence on his mind. Like Ramon Lull and several other Christian mystics, Ficino "found in trees and herbs a type of the divine potency by which the natural world might serve as a ladder to the spiritual".  The disadvantage of Lorenzo de Medici being implicated in the murder of Caterina's husband was countered by her growing friendship with Giovanni de Medici, a member of the cadet branch of the family.  This off-shoot, headed by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco,  had enthusiastically copied Lorenzo's ideas at Castello, again with the idea of capturing the harmony beween spirituality and physical pleasure. As Pico de Mirandola put it, a garden's magic "makes man recognise in himself the forces of nature and, in nature, the model of his own face. By properly inserting his magical art into nature, he can release forces that are greater than his own".  Caterina used her garden to the utmost, but its supposed magic and her own valiant spirit were no match for the hostile forces of a rapidly changing world. She married Giovannni early in 1498, but by the end of the year he was dead.  In 1495, the walls of her park had been knocked down so that the invading French could more easily be seen crossing the countryside.  Shortly afterwards, Forli was again invaded, this time by the Papal forces, and Caterina was compelled to order the destruction of her garden pavilion, her single concession to luxury, in order to give the defending troops a clear field of fire. It was to no avail; after an unsuccessful attempt to blow herself up in her powder store, she was captured and held in Rome until her allies could negotiate her release. Broken, she retired to Florence where she received a hostile welcome from the relations of her late husband. After a pitiful retirement from active politics, she died in 1509 leaving no memorial of her extraordinary life save "Gli esperimenti". Even the existing garden at Il Castello, which she won after a court battle with her in-laws is not her own, it was relaid in the 1590s and modified subsequently.

            Many of her unverified traditional remedies are still used in country districts in our own life times, burning chicken feathers for instance, as a remedy for nose bleeds.  Moreover, modern medicine has been unable to discredit all her formulae; atropine and morphine are still used in allopathic medicine, whilst herbal medicine in Western Europe increasingly employs Caterina’s remedies such as  Inula, mint, Fennel and ginger for upset stomachs[27].  The "Body Shop" sells cereal-based face packs and an off-shoot of a Florentine farmacia in London continues to sell herbal cosmetics. Sadly, in spite of their remarkably close resemblence to Caterina’s preparations,  her part in five hundred years of Florentine tradition remains unacknowledged.   In the former Eastern bloc, herbal medicine has always been strong and  again, Chinese medicine continues to employ dried worms, deers’ horn and bits of skin. It is not unlikely that there are other treatments in the notebooks, which could benefit modern society.                       

                MAIN REFERENCES

Experimenti de la Exma, Sra. Caterina da Furli, copiati dagli autografi di lea dal conte Lucantonio Cuppano, Ravenna arch Pasolini, cod cartaceo sec xvi

The majority of the numerical references in the footnotes refer to paragraphs and pages in this edition

Catherine Sforza, Pasolini trans Sylvester, London 1898

Caterina Sforza, Breisach, University of Chicago 1967

The story of the Sforzas, Collison Morley, London 1933

The Idea of the Garden in The Renaissance, Comito, New Jersey 1978

OTHER SOURCES

The Life of Lorenzo de Medici, Roscoe, 3rd edit. London 1851

Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Wind

Norm & Form, Gombrich

Il Tacuinum Sanitatis di Vienna, Johannes Von Schlosser