Melissa Meriam Bullard

Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy (review)

Was it lèse majesté or Cardinal Bendinello Sauli’s failure to disclose Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci’s scheme to kill Pope Leo X through the introduction of poison into the pope’s painful fistula that brought about Sauli’s downfall? Despite various contemporary and near contemporary narratives and more recent attempts to solve the mysteries surrounding the 1517 cardinals’ plot to assassinate Leo X, Sauli’s role therein will probably never be completely understood. Helen Hyde gives a thorough examination of the available evidence, including surviving transcripts of the trials and confessions, diplomatic accounts, letters, and subsequent scholarship. She leaves her conclusions to the very end in the manner of a delightful, old-fashioned page-turner.

Parallel Renaissances in the Atlantic World

Through the innovative perspective of envisioning parallel renaissances in the Atlantic World, Bullard explores cultural flowering in mid-nineteenth century Brooklyn via transmissions from Medicean Florence and William Roscoe’s urban renaissance in Liverpool. Transatlantic commerce was a conduit for European cultural norms and patronage practices taking root in early America. Packet ships such as those of the Black Ball Line between New York Port and Liverpool ferried people and ideas together with cargo across the Atlantic. Brooklyn’s progressive business and cultural entrepreneurs, many from New England, such as Luther Boynton Wyman of the Black Ball Line, combined commercial and cultural knowhow to found Brooklyn’s signature musical, literary, and arts societies that fostered community and civic identity in Brooklyn’s rapidly growing urban environment during the Antebellum, Civil War, and Gilded Age eras.

Symphony of the Arts

The Brooklyn Philharmonic Society (1857) and Brooklyn Academy of Music (1861) were brainchild of Luther Wyman and his wealthy, liberal, and civic-minded collaborators in Brooklyn Heights. The financial crisis of 1857 did not impede Brooklyn’s elite from founding a dozen signature cultural associations that characterized the city’s renaissance effort, including the Brooklyn Institute, Athenaeum, Mercantile Library, Horticultural Society, Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute, Packer Institute, and Prospect Park. The Brooklyn Academy of Music, designed by Leopold Eidlitz, became centerpiece of Brooklyn’s renaissance. The Brooklyn Eagle heralded the private patronage and assiduous fund raising that enabled these institutions and downplayed the uncertainties, social tensions, political divisions, and financial struggles accompanying them at the outbreak of the Civil War. However, well-intentioned attempts at egalitarian seating and ticket pricing sparked controversy.

Culture of War Relief

Support for the arts and bipartisan war relief activities went hand in hand in Brooklyn’s elite society during the Civil War. The new Long Island and Brooklyn Historical Society and Art Association with its planned free public gallery flourished, but the Horticultural Society faded. The Brooklyn Woman’s Relief Association aided by the men’s War Fund Committee took the lead in home front war relief efforts with their Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair which raised over

Brooklyn’s Changing Complexion

400,000 in support of the US Sanitary Commission. The Old New England Kitchen featured prominently at the Fair. Internal tensions over exclusivity continued to rankle conservative and progressive factions over what constituted proper taste in polite society and whether alcohol and raffling should be permitted at the Fair.

Sociability, Civil War, and a Diverted Renaissance

Post-Civil War Brooklyn changed in its physical and social complexion. Brooklyn’s high society found refuge in the fashionable new Brooklyn Club and subscription assembly balls, but it destabilized. Exclusivity and press reports of Brooklyn’s new wealth consciousness contrasted sharply with festering urban social problems, poverty, and waves of new immigrants. Plans for post-war commemorative monuments and Prospect Park lay mired in social tensions and local politics. Economic instability accompanied a decline in US maritime shipping. The financial crisis of Black Friday 1869 shook Brooklyn’s elite. Luther Wyman got caught in Tammany Hall’s scandalous net that stretched into Brooklyn. The ranks of Brooklyn’s early generation of renaissance patrons thinned as Brooklyn drew closer to New York City with plans for Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge over the East River.

First Steps Toward Brooklyn’s Renaissance

Montague Street around the Academy of Music marked the physical center of Brooklyn’s renaissance. The Academy promoted sociability in a public space and became Brooklyn’s meeting house during the Civil War. As Brooklyn’s monument to civic as well as cultural pride, it helped smooth over political divisiveness among Republicans and Democrats over slavery. However, programming and seating remained flashpoints of local contention. The introduction of Italian opera and controversy over prose theater broadened polite tastes. Civil War and the Draft transformed the Academy into Brooklyn’s center for war relief activities. Luther Wyman took under his wing the 48th Regiment of New York Volunteers at Fort Hamilton. Brooklyn’s elite attempted to balance war relief, social reality, and their continued commitment to the civilizing potential of the arts.

A Fading Renaissance

How does an urban renaissance happen and in 1850’s Brooklyn? Bullard examines bourgeois Brooklyn’s self-expectations and its developing communitarian ethos. Rivalry with nearby New York City added fuel to Brooklyn’s rapid renaissance and emerging civic identity. Commercial networks bred social connectivity, as did Luther Wyman’s experiences with Unitarianism and early sacred music societies. Practiced affiliators, Wyman and other prominent Brooklynites, including A. A. Low, Alexander M. White, Judge Greenwood, and several dozen more patrons, many of them New England transplants, spurred themselves to marshal private resources to found fine arts and educational societies imbued with a civilizing purpose. Financial crises, political divisions between Whigs and Democrats, and even a congregational singing controversy played themselves out in the Brooklyn Eagle, the city’s mouthpiece.

Black Ball Business and Commercial Networks

Entering the post-Civil War Gilded Age, Brooklyn’s renaissance energies began to fade. Brooklyn drew closer into New York’s orbit with the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and plans for political consolidation. The arts had achieved a physical center around the Academy of Music. And several new associations were founded, notably the Academy of Design and the Botanic Garden, soon, with the Philharmonic Society, consolidated under the Brooklyn Institute. But new financial panics in 1873, together with changes in the Atlantic maritime world, and Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed-connected scandals afflicted the arts and their patrons, weakening Brooklyn’s civic fabric and public trust. Luther Wyman’s death and nearly forgotten legacy showed not the power of memory, but rather revealed the effect of forgetting how commerce, culture, and community had once combined to make The Brooklyn Renaissance happen.

Impact on the Arts

Bullard explores the commercial networking and associational business culture that lay behind nineteenth-century patronage of the fine arts. Increased communication in the Atlantic World built upon business correspondence, techniques of risk management, and accounting methods rooted in Italian Renaissance mercantile practices. The history of the Black Ball Line of New York–Liverpool packets illustrates the rise of regularized transatlantic shipping and the private wealth it generated for owners and investors, especially Baring Brothers & Co. merchant bankers through Barings’ Liverpool branch and including American agents Thomas Wren Ward in Boston and Jonathan Goodhue and Captain Charles Marshall in New York. The chapter follows Luther Wyman’s early career from a Massachusetts farm to bathing house proprietor, clerk in an Erie Canal towboat company, to merchant with the Black Ball Line.