Matter in the Material Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement with few clear-cut distinctions between fine art and the decorative, design, and high craft.1 Alongside painting and sculpture, many crafted objects possessed a marked visual appeal. Central period concepts, such as ingenuity, civility, artful decorousness, neatness and the revival of antiquity, were explored in interaction with a new world of things skilfully produced and diversified by a range of makers. Artefacts found in cabinets of curiosities, armour, vestments, and even dress accessories such as berets and shoes therefore need to form part of any attempt to recover the ‘visual experience and disposition’ of people living in the Renaissance.2 Such objects contributed to shaping the period’s sentiments, ideas and practices, rather than just representing existing values and aesthetic ideals. Innovative uses of matter, texture and form helped to constitute contexts in which these objects took on meaning.3 Historians of Italy’s Renaissance and beyond have recently begun to explore these crafted worlds and styles which men and women were so keen to create, buy, collect and exchange.4 Bronzes, glass, majolica, cutlery, textiles, paintings, chests and other furniture in civilized Italian urban homes have been documented particularly well. Even so, as Michelle O'Malley and Evelyn Welch have pointed out, we still know surprisingly little about exactly how things were fabricated, exchanged and valued in everyday life.5 This is especially the case for many goods categorized as mundane as well as non- or semi-durable, which by definition rarely survive and are costly to conserve. These objects have often been neglected by those at the forefront of assembling and disseminating knowledge about historical artefacts: auction houses, museums and collectors.6 Historians in turn face the task of seeking out surviving and often barely catalogued artefacts in disparate collections, as well as consulting recipe and model books, manuscripts and drawings. For, as Maxine Berg has underlined in relation to a later period, the material world can only properly be understood through an engagement with ‘actual products’: ‘how they were designed and made’ and ‘what they were used for’.7