Valeria Finucci. The Prince’s Body

The Prince’s Body: Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine analyzes key episodes in the life of Vincenzo Gonzaga (1562–1612), fourth Duke of Mantua, within the framework of the history of the body, medical history, and colonial explorations in search of new drugs. Opera lovers will be familiar with Vincenzo’s reputation for sexual exploits from Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto. Originally the libretto featured the French king as lead character and only later reverted to Vincenzo in order to avoid censorship; the choice of the Duke of Mantua, however, says a great deal about his contemporary and posthumous fame. Valeria Finucci aptly reminds us that the historic Vincenzo, however, was not simply a foolish womanizer as in Verdi’s opera but also an obsessive and discerning art collector, a lover of music, and patron of Claudio Monteverdi. The four chapters reveal the many facets of Vincenzo’s sexual and medical life, exploring bizarre courtly procedures, male anxieties, and elite medical and surgical practices around 1600. Life and sexual practices at the Gonzaga court have been studied in a number of historical essays, transcriptions of relevant archival documents, and works such as the recent volume edited by Costantino Cipolla and Giancarlo Malacarne, El più soave et dolce et dilectevole et gratioso bochone: Amore e sesso al tempo dei Gonzaga (2006). Finucci has expanded this body of scholarship and made it available to English readers, joining archival research with a reliance on more recent historiography that provides a vivid and unforgettable picture of Vincenzo’s preoccupations with his body.

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