The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy

The famous call, made nineteen years ago by Appadurai and Kopytoff, that students of material culture should study the ‘social life’ of things has, until now, had a limited effect upon students of the Italian Renaissance. The essays in this book – part of the recent burgeoning interest in Italian Renaissance material culture – rise to Appadurai and Kopytoff’s challenge, examining the ‘lives’ led by objects in late medieval and Renaissance Italy: their creations, lives and subsequent after–lives. Situating objects and their biographies in their cultural, social and economic contexts, the contributors discuss the ‘social lives’ of a range of objects in late–medieval and Renaissance Italy: maiolica, sculpture, artists′ autobiographies, plate for the table, cassoni , glassware, prostitutes’ jewellery, miraculous painted images, choir–screens, chapels, and antiquities. An introductory essay discusses the forms of evidence at the disposal of students of material culture and their relationship to the objects whose lives they seem to illuminate.

Note from the Series Editor. Preface. Introduction: Toothpicks and Green Hangings: Nicholas Penny. Part I: The Creation of the Object : Patricia L. Reilly. What You See Is What You Get: Colour In Italian Renaissance Istoriato Ware: Steve Wharton. ‘Sculpsit Cellinius Neptunam’: The Biography of the Neptune Fountain in Cellini’s Vita : Victoria C. Gardner Coates. Part II: The Life of the Object : Rupert Shepherd. Banquet Plate and Renaissance Culture: A Day in the Life: Valerie Taylor. For Use and Display: Selected Furnishings and Domestic Goods in Fifteenth–Century Florentine Interiors: James R. Lindow. Fragments from the ‘Life Histories’ of Jewellery belonging to Prostitutes inEarly–Modern Rome: Tessa Storey. Part III: The After–Life of the Object: Roberta J. M. Olson. The Icon of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome: An Image and its Afterlife: Kirstin Noreen. One Pontile, Two Pontili : The Choir Screens of Modena Cathedral: Dawn Cunningham. The Afterlife of an Early Medieval Chapel: Giovanni Battista Ricci and Perceptions of the Christian Past in Post–Tridentine Rome: Ann Van Dijk. The Scrittoio Della Calliope in the Palazzo Vecchio: A Tuscan Museum: Andrea M. Gáldy. Index.

Roberta J.M. Olson is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She has worked as Curator of Drawings at the New–York Historical Society for seven years. Patricia L. Reilly is Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College. She is currently finishing a book on Raphael, Giorgio Vasari and the development of what she terms the ‘Florentine Visual Vernacular’. Rupert Shepherd is based in the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum. His previous employment included two years as a research fellow at the University of Sussex, working on the collaborative project The Material Renaissance: Costs and Consumption in Italy c.1300–1650.

“All in all, this is a useful, at times thought–provoking, and never less than informative collection of essays.” ( Sixteenth Century Journal , Winter 2008)