Glorifying War in a Peaceful City: Festive Representation of Combat in Baroque Siena

Abstract

Urban elites across early modern Europe practised a variety of playful activities that extolled martial virtues. In Siena under the Medici grand dukes, nobles played at war for an urban audience, and celebrated those among them who had experienced the real thing. Tuscan cities staged mock-combat games of mazzoscudo, organized jousts and assembled cavalcades of mounted honour-guards whose regalia evoked chivalric themes. These festivities contrasted ever more strikingly with a Counter-Reformation of decency, while the aristocracy demilitarized culturally, as well as professionally. If warlike cultures practised more warlike sports, Italian states and society as a whole demilitarized in the course of the late seventeenth century, and these pageants waned in consequence.