II. The life of the object

Renaissance Studies Vol. 19 No. 5 Original Article II. The life of Society the object Renaissance REST © Blackwell Oxford, 0269-0213 5 19 2005 The UK Publishing, Studies for Ltd. Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Rupert Shepherd II. The life of the object Rupert Shepherd Once created, objects took on their own existence, both independent of and intimately related to their creators and owners. Whilst this might not seem surprising, as students of the Italian Renaissance we still have to go a fair way if we are to respond to the call made by Appadurai and Kopytoff some eighteen years ago to investigate ‘the social life of things’ – that is, the ways in which objects had their own lives (and, indeed, births and after-lives).1 An examination of these trajectories would, they argued, illuminate the social and cultural contexts within which those objects lived. As revealed by the papers in this section, objects could live surprisingly mobile lives, for example participating in the processions and rituals of aristocratic dining. They might be circulated and re-used in roles similar to those for which they were initially created; recent research on the pervasiveness of the second-hand market suggests that acquiring and using ‘pre-owned’ objects was felt to be less problematic in the Renaissance than it often is nowadays.2 Even in comparatively wealthy interiors, old and ‘sad’ objects might continue to be used and re-used for a variety of reasons, including sentimental ones. Similarly, the jewels owned by Roman prostitutes – even if they were the ‘gifts’ given to them to secure their services – could also carry sentimental associations, as well as having more pragmatic significance as financial assets. Yet, in addition to these apparently passive roles, objects could have more active lives. Paul Hills has suggested that the luxurious, but extremely fragile, table-glass which was produced in Venice in the sixteenth century called for certain forms of deportment – characterised using the terms sprezzatura and leggiadrìa – if it was to be used elegantly.3 Similarly, the dining and display plate discussed by Valerie Taylor both shaped the rituals associated with elegant 1 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), particularly idem, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, 3–63 and Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’, 64–91. An interesting work that has risen to this challenge – albeit in a different subject – is Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, NJ, 1997). 2 E.g. Patricia Allerston, ‘Reconstructing the Second-Hand Clothes Trade in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Venice’, Costume, 33 (1999), 46–56. 3 Paul Hills, ‘Venetian Glass and Renaissance Self-fashioning’, in Mary Rogers and Francis Ames-Lewis, (eds.), Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art (Aldershot, 1998), 163–78; 166–7. © 2005 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 620 Rupert Shepherd dining in the Renaissance and, by their physical properties, demanded suitable deportment from those who used them; the complexities of caring for them also induced the creation of a series of administrative structures to facilitate their use. The same is true of the chests discussed by James Lindow, and the glassware and maiolica that was sometimes kept within them – necessitating a range of activities as they were moved between the sites of their storage and their use – and sometimes kept on display out of the chests. And, as we are continually reminded in today’s age of interior design, feng shui and television makeover shows, the appearance of our homes affects both how we regard ourselves, and how we live our lives. But perhaps the most striking examples of the ways in which objects could shape the actions of those who came into contact with them are found in Tessa Storey’s essay, where the jewellery which came to be owned by prostitutes was, on occasion, the impetus behind their selling themselves. Thus, we see from the essays in this section that the objects did not lead merely passive lives, as they were used and passed between owners; instead, the objects themselves came to exercise some kind of agency, influencing those who encountered them in various ways, from moving elegantly to prostituting themselves.4 Ashmolean Museum 4 This adopts the vocabulary outlined by Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998). In Gell’s terms, I am discussing cases where the index acts as agent, and the recipient as patient (Index-A → Recipient-P) – and, as Gell reminds us (32), this formula is ‘fundamental and general’. For a discussion of the agency exercised by Benozzo Gozzoli’s altarpiece for the Florentine Confraternity of the Purification and St Zenobius in precisely these terms, see Michelle O’Malley, ‘Altarpieces and Agency: The Altarpiece of the Society of the Purification and its “Invisible Skein of Relations”’, Art History, 28 (2005), 416– 41, particulary 431–7.