Painting with violence: The representation of Jews in the Italian Renaissance courts

According to modern historical literature, Italian Renaissance princes such as Duke Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino and Marquis Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua protected their Jewish subjects, maintaining amicable relations with Jewish moneylenders, merchants, and scholars. Although written documentation in the form of state letters, princely decrees, and notarial registries portray the Renaissance as a period of unusual princely toleration for Jews and the Italian principalities as a safe haven for Jewish difference, paintings of Jews in the Italian Renaissance courts convey a very different social reality. Placed within ecclesiastical and monastic spaces for Christian consumption, these paintings are images of the punishment of Jews commissioned or approved by the despotic rulers of Italy. This dissertation seeks to explore the different nuances of meaning embedded in the concept and practice of tolerance in the Italian courts by examining the written history of Renaissance Jews documented in Italian archives and interpreted by historians and the visual history recorded in painting. The Renaissance principalities of Urbino, Mantua, and Ferrara are the focus of this study because of their relatively prosperous Jewish populations and because all three city-states shared regional and political affinities as northern Italian territories and as hereditary principalities governed by a single despot. I examine the three princely states as case studies in order to determine how the Renaissance term "tollerare" acquires local meanings depending on cultural context and how the dynamics of tolerance inevitably are linked to civic identity, particularly the identity created by and for the Christian prince.