Everyday Renaissances by Sarah Gwyneth Ross

Author:Sarah Gwyneth Ross [Ross, Sarah Gwyneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Italy, Renaissance
ISBN: 9780674969971
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

LIVING EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL MOBILITY

I have been arguing that Longo offers a more lyrical approach to his final will and that his claims to cultural legitimacy followed an ethical less than an instrumental program, at least compared with Massa or Superchio. Humanistic studies gave him models that helped him cope with the blows of fortune and that he bequeathed to his beneficiaries and heirs hoping that they would be similarly edified and comport themselves honorably. We have not seen Longo hector his sons about career success, even as he does share with colleagues an insistence on certain virtues, above all independent accumulation of merit. But no human being, however philosophically inclined, exists in a vacuum. Part of the conception of merit obtaining in Longo’s family involved education and the opportunities it opened for upward mobility. Longo had experienced that trajectory, even if he did not press his sons to go further, and that experience informed his precepts as much as Plutarch did. Coming from an artisan family, but inhabiting after his university studies a professional zone of metaphorical “nobility,” Longo confronted in literal ways the negative assumptions about social climbing. He thus had even more reason to situate himself within the world of abstract merits and be unconcerned with building financial capital beyond that necessary to support his family.

Francesco Longo’s father, Pietro, had earned a good reputation as an apothecary and proprietor of a pharmacy called the Testa d’Oro (The Golden Head) in Venice. While Pietro died before Francesco matriculated at the University of Padua, he must have devoted considerable effort and expense to his sons’ educations. Both Francesco and his brother Girardo had received sufficient training in Latin to go on to university at the usual ages. Pietro Longo, then, had evidently hoped to position his sons at a higher socioprofessional level than he could occupy.

According to the friends and colleagues who testified on behalf of Francesco Longo’s matriculation into the Sacred College of Philosophers and Physicians at the University of Padua in 1530, Pietro Longo had owned a pharmacy in the Campo San Bartolomeo in Venice’s Rialto district, the focal point for buying and selling in the city.43 As a mercantile hub, the Rialto had both the promise and the taint of commerce. Here the city was enriched, but here, too, money changed hands, foreigners mixed freely with citizens, and cultural boundaries blurred. Selling products was compromising enough in terms of social status, but making products of any sort meant classification as a manual laborer and thus exclusion from privileges, including membership in university colleges. Pietro Longo’s friends and his son’s supporters therefore attempted to classify the elder Longo as a merchant and not an artisan. One witness, a merchant named Acharius Stat, conceded that Pietro Longo began his career as a sort of worker (tanquam factor) at one apothecary shop in Venice at the Sign of the Golden Apples but later became something like the owner (tanquam patronus) of another at the Sign of the Golden Head.44 Pelegrino,

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