PREGNANCY AND POULTRY IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

Author(s): Jacqueline Marie Musacchio

Source: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Winter 1997), pp. 3-9
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 PREGNANCY AND POULTRY IN RENAISSANCE ITALY
Jacqueline Marie Musacchio
Historians of Christian art find a universe
of symbols in the field of ornithology. A
dove descends on the Virgin Mary as the
Holy Ghost in scenes of the Annunciation.
The Christ child plays with a goldfinch,
whose bright red feathers and attraction to
thorny vegetation make it a symbol for
Christ's Passion and crown of thorns. The
pelican pierces her own breast to nourish
her young, alluding to Christ's sacrifice on
the Cross. Even the much-debated hanging
egg in Piero della Francesca's Montefeltro
Altarpiece is a bird-related symbol signify
ing the resurrection of Christ.1 These
birds—and this egg—are standard religious
symbols. But birds can also be seen as real
istic expressions of domestic, secular expe
rience. In this role, they are just as signifi
cant and revealing as the religious and
metaphorical birds cited above. In fact, the
depiction of cooked fowl in Christian art
can and should be contextualized in terms
of lived experience.
Fowl was not a particularly rare comes
tible; many Florentine inventories contained
an accounting of the pollaio, or henhouse,
usually on the roof and often inhabited by
various kinds of birds.2 Poultry dishes had
been recommended since antiquity as food
for the infirm, and Renaissance account
books enumerate multiple purchases for
male and female patients.3 Fowl had certain
nutritional characteristics that made it es
pecially appropriate for the ill. In fact, the
fourteenth-century chronicler Marchionne
di Coppo Stefani included chicken sellers
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with his list of professions that profited
from the devastation wrought by the Black
Death, putting them in the company of
pharmacists, doctors, and grave diggers.4
Poultry was also considered a delicacy suit
able for elaborate festivities. For example,
to help celebrate his wedding in 1416, An
tonio Chastellani bought 127 partridges and
80 chickens to feed his 88 guests.5 Painted
representations of banquets, like scenes of
the feast of Herod, often include poultry.6
Poultry also appears as a common fea
ture in many Italian Renaissance represen
tations of both the birth of the Virgin and
that of John the Baptist.7 For example, a
wing and attached breast is borne effort
lessly by the graceful maiden descending
the stairs in the fresco of the birth of the
Virgin attributed to Paolo Uccello in the
cathedral of Prato (Fig. I).8 Such paintings
illustrate the nativities of two of the most
important protagonists of Christianity. One
reason for the popularity of these images
may have been their special appeal to
women, who could understand and relate to
the portrayal of a nativity in devotional art.
The numerous housewares and accessories
included in the scenes helped make the con
nection to the everyday world especially
tangible. Many of these props correspond to
actual objects listed in contemporary inven
tories and account books, like the special
sheets and pillows, and the particular trays
and bowls used during confinement.9 De
nunciations by contemporary preachers in
dicate that wealthy Renaissance homes
 4

Fig. 1 Attributed to Paolo Uccello, Birth of the Virgin

(detail). 1436. Duomo, Prato

were often overflowing with such luxurious
ephemera.10 Artists could be criticized for
enforcing a materialistic ethos by including
too many extraneous or extravagant fea
tures of this sort in sacred art." Yet it is
clear that such features permitted viewers
to identify immediately with the event. By
recognizing these objects, a Renaissance
woman could easily enter the scene, recall
ing her own domestic sphere and thus an
choring her devotion to concrete, personal
experience. The Renaissance trend to more
particular and less abstract art helped make
such rich representations possible. But
surely a perceived need to encourage direct
identification with the holy narratives moti
vated the development of these detailed im
ages. Popular texts at the time, such as The
Golden Legend and The Meditations on the
Life of Christ, encouraged a personal and
often intimate relationship with the sacred
stories by fabricating material details like
food and drink.12 The most naturalistic as
pects of the paintings tend to be in these
subsidiary material details, where the artist
had the freedom to compose at will from the
domestic objects that surrounded him in
daily life.13
The inclusion of poultry, prepared in a
variety of ways, helps to further elucidate

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 3

this personal connection.14 Consider the

whole roasted bird cooling by the hearth in
a late fourteenth-century northern Italian
fresco of the birth of John (Fig. 2). This
bird is rendered with a specificity too pre
cise to signify generic food. Whether they
are roasted, boiled, or fried, whole or in
identifiable parts, cooked fowl are consis
tently depicted in these paintings as satisfy
ing a new mother's postdelivery hunger
pangs. But a decapitated chicken or roasted
drumstick is neither a standard sacred sym
bol nor a recognizable part of the religious
narrative.
To understand better the poultry repre
sented in Italian nativity scenes, we should
examine childbirth in the Renaissance. It
was certainly a common enough event,
given the strong desire for a male heir and
the failure of contemporary contraceptives.
But there was a great deal of danger asso
ciated with it. Regardless of wealth or so
cial standing, a Renaissance woman ran a
high risk of dying from birth complica
tions.15 The typical childbirth was con
ducted by a levatrice—literally, "lifting wom
an"—in most cases a well-trained woman
with a great deal of empirical knowledge.
Although she was fully capable in average
situations, the levatrice was helpless in a
serious crisis. She was often assisted by a
group of female relatives and friends acting
in tandem with the guardadonna, or "wom
an watcher," who cared for the pregnant
woman both before and after her delivery.
This female care is frequently depicted in
nativity scenes in Renaissance art. Fathers
were relegated to the outer rooms to wait
for the results with a friend or two. This ar
rangement is represented in contemporary
paintings, where it was often facilitated by Fig. 2 Northern Italian, Birth of John the
the tripartite format of the altarpiece. Such Baptist (detail). Late fourteenth century. Santa
a division creates a separate room for the Maria dei Ghirli, Campione d'ltalia

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 6

waiting father. In the central panel of an
early fifteenth-century altarpiece of the
birth of Mary by the Osservanza Master,
for instance, a richly gowned attendant car
ries in a dish of poultry to Saint Anne,
while the father, Joachim, sits in the waiting
area to the left (Fig. 3).
The expenses incurred through pregnancy
and childbirth were paid for by these wait
ing men. Many fourteenth- and fifteenth
century account books list, in copious de
tail, the high costs associated with birth.16
As a result, husbands were very familiar
with the requisite nourishment and acces
sories. Expenses added up quickly at the
speziale, or pharmacist, who was the
source for the many necessary sundries,
edible or otherwise. Among other items, the
speziale sold bedside urinals, rose water,
aniseeds, almonds, and the festive candies
called confetti. The reason for many of
these objects remains a mystery today
largely because they were not present in
visual representations. An artist would have
found it difficult to paint a recognizable
handful of aniseeds or to indicate their me
dicinal properties.
Despite their modern obscurity, these

Fig. 3 Osservanza Master, Birth of the Virgin (detail). 1440s. Museo d'Arte Sacra, Asciano

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 7
goods were very popular, and speziali must
have profited greatly from this branch of
their pharmacopoeia. Nevertheless, these
profits may have been eclipsed by those of
another merchant, the pollaiuolo, or
chicken seller. Poultry was considered es
pecially beneficial for pregnant women and
new mothers. Michele Savonarola, who
practiced at the Este court in Ferrara during
the mid-fifteenth century, is the author of
several obstetrical and gynecological texts.
He enthusiastically advocates poultry con
sumption for pregnant women, noting that
"the flesh of hens, capons, chickens, fran
colins, pheasants, partridge and young pi
geons is suitable [for pregnant women] . . .
with such meals, who wouldn't want to be
pregnant?"17 When describing the proper
regimen for new mothers, he further states,
"At first, confined women want to eat . . .
easily digestible and nutritious food, like
fresh eggs, capons, hens, and, for the
wealthy, partridge, pheasants, francolins,
and the like."18
Contemporaries seem to have agreed with
Savonarola's advice. In association with his
wife Lucrezia's confinement in 1456, Carlo
Strozzi paid out 6 lire 16 soldi to a pollai
uolo for four pairs of capons and two pairs
of fat chickens, which was almost equiva
lent to the cost of keeping an infant at the
wet nurse for two months.19 In fact, for
every box of candies purchased at the local
speziale, the new or about-to-be father
doled out an even greater sum to the neigh
borhood pollaiuolo for capons, pigeons,
chickens, or geese. Tribaldo de' Rossi made
up a list of the expenses he incurred for his
pregnant wife, Nanina, in 1490, which in
cluded the cost of three bushels of millet to
fatten the seven birds he kept in the pollaio.
Nanina quickly consumed these birds,
prompting Tribaldo to buy two more.20
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Three years later, to keep track of the costs
of Nanina's next pregnancy, Tribaldo enti
tled a page of his account book, "capons for
Nanina's delivery of Alessandra." This
time, he purchased eight capons as well as
two bushels of grain to feed them.21
Poultry was both a special meal to fortify
the mother-to-be and a celebratory food in
tended for postpartum feasting, so the num
ber of birds associated with one birth could
be quite high. Girolamo, a Florentine no
tary, writes, "I record how on the 18th of
September 1473 at about the 23rd hour my
wife Caterina's labor began. For this reason
I bought . . . one fat pigeon."22 Poultry was
special enough, and costly enough, to be
noted with some regularity, whereas the
purchase of more inexpensive, everyday
food was rarely specified.
Contemporary documents like the ones
cited above give explicit descriptions of this
practice, making it obvious that poultry was
considered especially appropriate for preg
nant women and new mothers, and verify
ing Savonarola's precepts as actual prac
tice. A letter of 1444 from Contessina de'
Medici to her son Giovanni assures him
that she is tending to matters at home in his
absence; to illustrate this, she explains, "I
have had capons given to the women, and
spices, and saffron, and sweetmeats for
their confinement."23 Poultry was consid
ered so important for pregnant and birthing
women that even a servant might be offered
its restorative power. In fact, the account
book of Bartolomeo Sassetti enumerated the
expenses he assumed for his servant
Francesca in 1476, when she became preg
nant and miscarried. He paid for various
pills and syrups, a blood letting, one woman
to deliver Francesca's aborted fetus, and
another to care for Francesca during the
miscarriage.24 As a result of her miscar
 8
riage, Francesca required a twenty-day
hospital stay at Santa Maria Nuova, which
Bartolomeo paid for out of her salary; how
ever, he made special note that he did not
deduct from her salary the cost of the
"bread and wine and young chickens and
pigeons she used during her birth."25
Painted representations, medical tracts,
and documentary sources indicate the sig
nificance of poultry as appropriate food for
NOTES
A version of this paper was presented at the confer
ence "Private Life: Practice and Representation" at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, on 23
April 1994. I am especially grateful to Mary Berg
stein and Lynn Laufenberg for editorial comments
and suggestions.
1. A list of the pre-1980 literature on the egg de
bate is in D. W. Brisson, "Piero della Francesca's
Egg Again," Art Bulletin 62 (1980):284 n. 1.
2. An inventory of Giovanni di Bernabe's home
in 1488 includes a pen of capons on his loggia. See
Archivio di Stato, Florence (henceforth ASF),
Magistrate) dei pupilli avanti il principato, 178,
162v. Many of the unpublished documents cited in
this article are included in my dissertation, "The Art
and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy"
(Princeton University, 1995).
3. See T. Scully, "The Sickdish in Early French
Recipe Collections," in Health, Disease and Heal
ing in Medieval Culture, ed. S. Campbell, B. Hall,
and D. Klausner (New York: 1992), pp. 132-140,
for a discussion of poultry as particularly appropri
ate food for the ill, based on its availability, di
gestibility, and compatibility to human nature.
When Tommaso Pechori fell ill in 1476, the execu
tor of his father's estate spent 10 soldi for "una
polla grossa" for the boy (ASF, Panciatichi, 51,
106v).
4. N. Rodolico, ed., "Cronaca florentina di Mar
chionne di Coppo Stefani," in Rerum Italicarum
Scriptores: Raccolta degli storici italiani dal
cinquecento al millecinquencento, ed. L. A. Mura
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pregnant and confined women. As an im
portant feature of painted birth scenes,
poultry provided a comforting connection to
the life of the viewer. Its frequent depiction
suggests that some features in Renaissance
art can be considered from a contextual,
domestic point of view rather than as relig
ious symbols. Lived experience proved just
as important as sacred precedent in the ico
nography of these nativity scenes.
tori, 33 vols. (Cittá di Castello: 1903), XXX, p.
232.
5. ASF, Acquisti e Doni, 302, insert 1, unnum
bered fols.
6. For example, the fresco of the feast of Herod
from Santa Maria dei Ghirli in Campione d'ltalia
(G. A. Dell'Acqua, II Santuario di Santa Maria dei
Ghirli in Campione d'ltalia [Milan: 1988], fig. 63).
7. This was a detail worthy of contemporary no
tice. In the late sixteenth century, Francesco Bocchi
described a small painting of the birth of a saint by
Masaccio in the home of Baccio Valori, which in
cluded a beautiful figure bearing a capon on her
head (F. Bocchi, Le bellezze della cittá di Firenza
[Florence: 1591], p. 183).
8. For the latest discussion of this fresco, see
Franco Borsi and Stefano Borsi, Paolo Uccello
(Milan: 1992), pp. 299-302.
9. At his death in 1471, Francesco Inghirrami's
home contained two sheet sets, a pair of silken pil
lows, a mantle, a box of relics, a basin, a chair, and
two trays all designated da parto (ASF, Magistrato
dei pupilli avanti il principato, 173, fols. 265v
272r).
10.1. Origo, The World of San Bernardino
(London: 1964), p. 52.
11. See C. Gilbert, "The Archbishop on the
Painters of Florence, 1450," Art Bulletin 41
(1959):75-87, for a discussion of Archbishop An
toninus's Sunima Theologica and its condemnation
of these practices.
12. Such domestic details can be found through
out these texts; see Beato Iacopo da Vorágine:
 9
Leggenda Aurea—Volgarizzamento Toscano del
Trecento, ed. A. Levasti, 3 vols. (Florence: 1924
1926), and Meditations on the Life of Christ: An
Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century,
ed. I. Ragusa and R. B. Green (Princeton: 1961).
13. See the observation on naturalism in M.
Camille, "Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Impli
cations of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," Art
History 8 (1985):42.
14. Food in general had a special meaning in the
religious sentiments and practices of medieval and
Renaissance women; see R. M. Bell, Holy Anorexia
(Chicago: 1985), and C. W. Bynum, Holy Feast and
Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women (Berkeley: 1987).
15. C. K. Zuber and D. Herlihy, Tuscans and
Their Families (New Haven and London: 1985), p.
277.
16. The account book of Antonio Maleghonele
lists some of the items he purchased from a speziale
for his wife's confinement in 1474 (ASF, Corpora
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zione religiose soppresse dal governo francese, 102
[86], fol. 3r).
17. M. Savonarola, II trattato ginecologico
pediatrico in volgare: Ad mulieres ferrarienses de
regimine pregnantium et noviter natorum usque ad
septennium, ed. L. Belloni (Rome: 1952), p. 69.
18. Ibid., p. 131.
19. Carlo's expenses are recorded in ASF, Carte
Strozziane, V, 13, fol. 55 right; in comparison, see
ASF, Panciatichi, 49, 31 r, for Francesco Pechori's
account of paying 3 lire 10 soldi each month for his
daughter's wet nurse in 1458.
20. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence,
Fondo nazionale, II, II, 357, fol. 59r.
21. Ibid., fol. lllr.
22. ASF, Corporazione religiose soppresse dal
governo francese, 111 (140), fol. 75v.
23. Y. Maguire, The Women of the Medici
(London: 1927), p. 36.
24. ASF, Carte Strozziane, V, 1751, fol. 124v.
25. Ibid., fol. 125r.