Weaponized Images of Roman Virtue and Vice

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 starts by explaining how the papal claims to the imperial legacy of Rome were also legitimized with a claim to the moral legacy of Rome, triggering positive images of Rome as the City of Virtue by means of a narrative of moral reform. The chapter then examines the way in which “outsider” parties exploited negative counter-images of Rome as the City of Vice to undermine these claims, and how they used linear templates to suggest virtus romana (Roman virtue) had moved elsewhere. The chapter argues that the focus on Rome’s morality as foundation for political and religious authority, and the rhetorical uses of image and counter-image in claiming and contesting this authority, sharpened the divide between insiders and outsiders. Not only distinguishing more radical reformers from those who upheld the Roman church, it also deepened the divide between Italy and Northern Europe, regions that were also driven apart in the cultural domain. This chapter enters into discussion with scholarship on early modern (proto-)nationalist identities and tries to bridge the divide that is still visible between scholarship on Renaissance Rome and Italy until the Sack of Rome (1527), on the one hand, and on Reformation Europe, on the other.