Ada Palmer
Friends, let's visit the largest, most famous disability access ramp on Earth...
with a twist! About how our feelings about a bit of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s POV, but what questions we ask 1/?
(Countdown to "Inventing the Renaissance"
Ada Palmer
The famous Cosimo had to have servants carry him through his own home, and used to shout every time they neared doorway. When asked, “Why do you shout before we go through a doorway?” He answered “Because if I shout after you slam my head into the stone lintel it doesn’t help.” 3/?
Ada Palmer
Florence’s Medici had a family curse: an agonizing hereditary medical condition causing torturous joint pain and severe mobility restrictions, so it was agony to stand, walk, or even hold a pen. Yes, Renaissance Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, was run by disabled people from a sickbed. 2/?
Ada Palmer
This is why the Vatican has so many weirdly shallow staircases—popes are old so the Vatican was a palace expecting to always host a disabled monarch, so it’s full of built-in accommodations, the most complex and fascinating accessible architecture case study in the world. 18/?
Ada Palmer
The long interior descends at a gentle grade with minimal turns and staircases, mostly stair that a horse can climb—horse ramps and riding horses or donkeys *indoors* at a walk was another proto-wheelchair disability tool, one architecture had to plan for with things like horse stairs. 17/?
Ada Palmer
Books where the Medici are the bad guys (tyrants who corrupted the republic!) will make this incident proof of Piero’s haughty decadence. But I know can’t do those stairs on a pain day, and we could equally call it a disability accommodation. He’s still called “Piero the Gouty” to this day. 15/?
Ada Palmer
Speaking of disability accommodations, eventually the Medici built a ramp. This ramp. It connects from the floor where the priori were, passes through the bureaucratic offices and all-important guild HQs, sloping at an easy grade down to the living-quarters level of the family palace. 16/?
Ada Palmer
You couldn’t be carried (Princely! Ambitious!) you had to go on foot. Once Lorenzo’s father Piero on a really bad pain day when summoned asked if, for once, the priors could visit him. There were riots, and an assassination attempt. How dare he *summon* the senators like a duke his servants! 14/?
Ada Palmer
Lorenzo’s pain was likely worst in the family, since bone examination suggests , on top of the family condition, he also had acromegaly, the growth hormone overproduction that makes your bones keep growing & swelling at the joints. 2x debilitating arthritis! 12/?
Article: https://buff.ly/4axdTyo
Ada Palmer
And if you remember my post about the very, very tall towers of the Renaissance, imagine with me the agony of answering the summons to visit the Priori (ruling council). A great honor! But a good floor higher than the tower I lived in that was up 111 steps! 13/?
Ada Palmer
…collapsing back into their beds & servants’ arms (period wheelchairs) the instant the door closed. It was carefully stage-managed agony, and accounts from visitors describe Lorenzo walking alongside their horses, joining dances and parades—performance of fitness to hide his increasing weakness 11/?
Ada Palmer
Mature Medici—Cosimo, Piero, Lorenzo, Lorenzo’s mom Lucrezia Tornabuoni had it to—all had to save their endurance for *performing fitness* in the streets, being seen walking to or from the cathedral or church or the Palazzo Vecchio where wary eyes judged them… 10/?
Ada Palmer
One had to be seen in the city always walking (riding or being carried was too princely), greeting peers in the street, bowing to each other—are you wincing by now? Imagining walking those stone cobbles while every joint in your body feels like it’s on fire? And going up tall stone staircases? 8/?
Ada Palmer
Add the fact that Europe’s diplomatic class at the time was all nobles, so every envoy is at least the son of a baron and must be greeted with obsequious bowing and scraping, and walking along beside his horse leading it to where he’ll be staying as an act of symbolic servant-like humility. Ow! 9/?
Ada Palmer
Now, gout in the modern sense is an agonizing joint pain condition caused by buildup of uric acid in the joints, but when a period source says “gout” they could mean any condition that cause swelling, inflammation, and/or pain, from basic arthritis through coeliac to rarer things. 6/?
Ada Palmer
In my earlier post on Clarice Orsini’s *extremely illegal* hat, I stressed how vital it was for Medici men like her husband Lorenzo to perform humility. Florence had killed/expelled its nobles, it was a merchant republic and demanded merchant dress & merchant comportment. https://buff.ly/3EeZ2N8 7/?
Ada Palmer
Most texts call the condition “gout” a word with the stigma of the “rich man’s disease” caused by gluttony—a reputation less borne out by modern science. Diet does affect it, mostly alcohol which *everyone drank all the time* and avoiding seafood and organ meat. It isn’t caused by overeating etc 5/?
Ada Palmer
We have a visitor’s account of visiting Palazzo Medici in the days of Cosimo the elder (1440s) and meeting Cosimo and both his sons lying side-by-side three in a bed in pain “each as cranky as the last” using their sickroom as their office as they directed staff in running the republic. 4/?
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