Download PDF | Leah R. Clark - Courtly Mediators_ Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World-Cambridge University Press (2023).
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COURTLY MEDIATORS
In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the centre of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark’s volume provides a multisensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance Art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.
LEAH R. CLARK is Associate Professor of History of Art in the Department for Continuing Education and Fellow of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-editor, with Kathleen Christian, of European Art and the Wider World, 1350-1550 (Manchester University Press, 2017).
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In 2020-2 when I was writing this book and putting the final edits to it, four major global incidents occurred: COVID-19, Brexit, Ever Given (a container ship’s blockage of the Suez Canal) and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The COVID-19 pandemic will likely be remembered for decades, even centuries to come, demonstrating just how quickly a pandemic can spread in a world so intricately connected by airplanes and the rapid movement of people and things. Brexit — the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union — gave rise to serious tensions and conflicts within families and between friends. Open borders and access to European trade, for some, underscored Britain as a place for multiculturalism and tolerance.
However, tolerance and mixing also gave rise to xenophobia and a fear of ‘British traditions’ becoming so multicultural they would no longer be recognised as ‘British’. Ever Given is not likely to have a considerable impact on the collective memory, but the 400-metre-long vessel’s blockage in March 2021 of the Suez Canal, an artery that makes up 12 per cent of global trade, did have a lasting effect, with oil prices soaring and delays to global shipping for the months that followed. The Suez connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and provides the shortest sea link between Asia and Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put further pressure on oil supplies and had economic ramifications around the world, not to mention the loss of lives and culture. All of these issues — a pandemic, access to shipping routes, war and contested ideas of identity — also figured prominently in the Renaissance. Globalisation is not new, but the politics and technologies as well as the fad for certain goods have, of course, changed since the Renaissance. While this is a book about the past, it should resonate with the present.
The seeds of this project began in 2007, when I first began archival research in the Archivio di Stato di Modena for my PhD thesis on the exchange and collection of objects in the Italian Renaissance courts (later published in 2018 as my first monograph). I was interested in the collections of Eleonora d’Aragona, Duchess of Ferrara, and I spent months toiling through her account books and inventories. I meticulously recorded most of her collections but did not transcribe her entire inventory. Looking mostly for paintings in her collections, my concerns were around intertextuality and the religious preoccupations of afemale collector. A few years later, in 2009, looking for global connections, I became aware that I had overlooked so much rich material that did not fit into the normative story of the Italian Renaissance. I returned to my transcriptions and discovered one of the largest collections of Chinese porcelain in the fifteenth century. That inventory became the starting point to reconsider Renaissance collecting from a global perspective.
My interests in this area have been enriched through conference presentations and discussions, as well as numerous scholars whom I have encountered along the way. At the Open University (OU), where I worked from 2013 to 2021, I was part of a team writing a new module called Art and Its Global Histories. Together we had to think about how to teach a global perspective of Western European Art. I am grateful to Kathleen Christian for this journey together (my co-editor on the first textbook), but also many of my other colleagues at the OU who worked on the module.
During that time, I also founded Open Arts Objects, an online platform dedicated to widening participation and providing free resources for the teaching of Art History, particularly in schools. This project made me particularly aware that art historical concerns are ones that must engage with today’s world. Under the rubric of ‘impact’, this project was much more than just a Research Excellence Framework (REF) case study, but rather a way of understanding the important role Art History has in everyone’s lives, and that what we do in the academy has ramifications for the outside world. This was also particularly clear during my exhibition for the British Academy’s Showcase festival in 2019, where I encountered a range of people — from judges to ambassadors to visitors off the street — who engaged with the multisensorial exhibition and who raised interesting parallels between Renaissance global trade and today’s world (thanks to Helen Coffey and Katie Ault for their help with this exhibition, and to all the wonderful people at the British Academy).
The fabulous colleagues at Open Art Histories, the Association for Art History, Art History in Schools, Art History Link Up and the numerous A-level teachers I worked with, as well as the numerous museums where we filmed (including education teams such as Clare Cory at the Ashmolean), are all inspiration for finding new ways to make Art History relevant and accessible. However, these projects have also brought attention to the ethical consequences of writing Art History and my own reflection on what and how we study the art of the past.
I am also indebted to members of the OU’s Medieval and Early Modern Research Group: our annual conferences, sensory experience seminars and discussions have greatly informed this book. I am particularly grateful to Helen Coffey for our regular conversations on sensory experiences over wine, coffee and tea. I am also indebted to numerous conference and session organisers and audience members for their feedback when presenting this material; there are far too many to name. Particularly important for my work on Naples has been the growth of interest in this crucial city through the foundation of The Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities at La Capraia, Naples (a partnership between The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History and the Capodimonte Museum). Particular thanks go to Sarah Kozlowski who has been such an important connector for anyone working on Neapolitan material, as well as to Francesca Santamaria who has been a huge help with working on the collections at the Capodimonte Museum. My work with Nancy Um and the authors on the special volume of the Journal of Early Modern History in 2016 has also informed my ideas on diplomacy and gifts.
I am also indebted to the funds that have supported this research: The Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada allowed me to first access the archives in Italy during those PhD years; the British Academy supported the more recent archival research and trips to Italy and Spain; the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded the Mobility of Objects across Boundaries project (led by Katherine Wilson and myself); and the Gulbenkian in Lisbon hosted me as a visiting fellow for two weeks (particular thanks to Jessica Hallett). I am also indebted to the Italian Art Society, the Association for Art History and the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford for covering the image subventions and copyright fees. I must include a note on images here as I received some funding for image subventions, but publishing a book of this kind is an expensive endeavour. I could not include all the images I needed, and very few are in colour.
A book like this needs multiple sides of one object with different lighting to really support the argument, something I haven’t been able to do. Some museums and institutions were extremely generous, providing all images for free, for which I am extremely grateful, while others still charge a ridiculous amount of money for one image and reproduction fees. Ultimately, we art historians are the ones who will further the research in museum collections; what we can afford to publish in our books will also condition the future canon. The links to online images in the footnotes will hopefully overcome the limitations of the images published in this book. This book wouldn’t be possible without all the amazing collections I have consulted around the world, from the archives across Italy to the museums and libraries in the UK and further afield. Special thanks go to all the people working in these institutions, from the cleaners to the archivists. Thanks, too, to my editor Beatrice Rehl who supported the endeavour from the start, to the two thoughtful reviewers who put time into providing constructive feedback, and to the wonderful team at Cambridge University Press.
Friends and family who have supported me are far too many to name here, but a few do require a mention. I thank, in particular, my Poppy Loves book club friends who are always ready for a laugh, an adventure and a stimulating conversation. Morgan Phillips has been an amazing producer, friend and a listening ear for any new discoveries I find; Katie Baldwin Kirtley, a stalwart friend for all things Art History and not — a friendship ignited at the Courtauld so many years ago. Other art historian friends and colleagues who have provided support and intellectual stimulation include Susanna Brown, Sara Knelman, Melissa Chatton, Camilla Auriol Roy-Bry, Anuradha Gobin, Krystel Chéhab, Sonia del Re, Olivia Wolf, James Clifton, Bronwen Wilson and Angela Vanhaelen, among many others.
Finally, I could not have done this without the support of my family. My family in England have continued to encourage me on my art historical adventures, especially Charles and Liz Clark whose home is always full of fine meals, rich conversations and encouragement. My own identity is due to my interactions with other cultures and my own sense of unboundedness: my British father was born in Peshawar (what was India but is now Pakistan) and immigrated to Canada as a teenager, where he met my Canadian mother. My parents brought me up on a tall ship, sailing around the world where I was introduced to a wide range of cultures from remote islands in the South Pacific to the high-rises of the eastern seaboard of North America. I thank my parents for encouraging an open mind and engraining in me that knowledge comes not only from books but also through travel.
They have been instrumental in endorsing encounters with the unknown as a way to understand our world and our place in it. To my four sisters, I am forever indebted — Julia Smith, Rachel Clark, Christina Clark-Kazak and Esther Clark — they are beacons of hope and inspiration for not just me but also my ten nieces and nephews. Finally, I owe my sanity to my Siamese cat, Simla, who saw me through months of solitary lockdowns while I wrote and thought about this book, and to the beautiful English countryside that provided me with daily walks to refresh my mind.
INTRODUCTION Courtly Mediators
Pa eine da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study, from around 1475, presents the viewer with a curious architectural setting in which a wooden studio or desk showcases a global range of objects (Plate I). The framing device of the exterior architecture acts as an Albertian window, from which the viewer is invited to enter the scene.’ Two birds (a quail and a peacock) along with a metal barber’s basin, occupy a liminal space, between the exterior world of us, the viewer, and the fictive interior world of the painting.” Our eye crosses the threshold onto Valencian (or possibly Neapolitan) blue and white tiles to another liminal space: a ledge accessed by three steps, where Jerome has taken off his shoes before climbing the stairs. Placed here on this second liminal ledge are two blue and white pots with plants and a cat, accompanied by a towel and pen case hung on the ‘wall’ above. We now move into Jerome’s space — that of the studio — where he sits on a cathedra chair and reads a book. On the shelf directly above Jerome’s head appears a short albarello, a receptacle used to store spices and medicines from the ‘East’, while beside it another ceramic vessel in blue and white glistens with lustre. The blue and white motifs found on these ceramics and floor tiles — probably a mix of Middle Eastern wares, Spanish imports, local Italian manufacture and maybe even Chinese porcelain — were the result of a global circulation of ceramics. Metalware, some likely decorated with damascene motifs, litter the shelves nestled beside beautifully bound books, indicating the scholarly activities that occurred there, the pages opening up a new world of learning and adventure for the armchair traveller, and by extension, the viewer of the painting.
The Renaissance studiolo was like an entrepot, where diverse objects from around the world converged, encountered one another and often, were dispersed again as they were given away, sold, transformed or reinstalled somewhere else. While such objects could create narratives of a harmonious interconnected world, they could also unsettle, asking the beholder to interrogate and question his or her place in the world.* The Renaissance studiolo can thus be seen as a metaphor for port cities such as Naples, which brought in galleys from across the Mediterranean laden down with all sorts of goods and operated as a nexus of ambassadorial interchange. Naples has often been seen as a periphery within art historical narratives dependent on coherent styles within a Vasarian paradigm, but when considered within the geopolitics of trade and diplomacy, it instead becomes an important node in a network, setting the cultural standard for smaller states.* This centre was a ‘mixed place’, bringing together cultures from across the Mediterranean, and in this sense, it was a space and place where the transcultural flourished.
Antonello da Messina was a Sicilian who likely trained in Naples, where he probably learned the techniques of oil painting, and then travelled and lived in Venice for some time. Antonello thus represents numerous geographic painting traditions coming together, from the Netherlands to Naples to Venice. However, the work itself points to the ability of paintings to stage fictive geographies of their own.” More commonly, fictive spaces are alluded to through the use of landmarks, architecture or clothing that locate the pictorial space in a particular geographic location, such as Gentile Bellini’s paintings for Venetian scuole, where the viewer becomes immediately aware of whether they are looking at a scene based locally in Venice or further afield such as Alexandria.° More importantly for this study is Antonello’s use of transcultural objects as a means to signal geographies. These objects point to trade routes and diplomacy, conduits for these artefacts, which often travelled much further than the viewer of a painting, and eliciting a sense of ‘somewhere else’. The numerous doors and openings, such as the windows to either side of the studio, giving distant views of landscape with small boats, also underscore this movement of goods and people, and places an emphasis on the near and the far.
The particularly small format of the work requires the viewer to get up close, encouraging an intimate relationship, inviting us to explore the fictive spaces of the painting, and as such, offers a virtual pilgrimage for contemplation. It thus allows the viewer a form of meditation through looking, much like the activities associated with the physical studiolo; a place for contemplation and the acquisition of knowledge. If the viewer was unable to travel to the Holy Land on pilgrimage, the objects on display instead present an itinerary of global things, similar to those artefacts brought home by pilgrims and merchants from the Levant or exchanged as diplomatic gifts across Mediterranean courts. The barely visible crucifix above the left shelves facing Jerome evokes a vision, and suggests that through contemplation in such a space, spiritual transformation could also take place.
The discarded shoes and the cardinal robes worn by Jerome also imply a physical engagement. As Niccol6 Machiavelli famously noted before entering his study, he ‘put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, for which I was born’.’ However, many courtly studioli were not only dedicated to conversing with ancient courts, but contemporary global ones. Such spaces, although often considered to be quiet places of self-reflection were also sociable spaces, and particularly in the courtly setting, they had secular as well as religious concerns at their heart. The objects collected ranging from antiquities to Chinese porcelain rendered the distant into the present, whether it was making present the ancient past, bridging a geographical divide or conversing with the heavenly sphere.
Machiavelli’s metaphor of tasting food as intellectual nourishment corresponds to the convivial meals that sometimes took place within these spaces, such as those in the camerini of Alfonso d’Este explored in Chapter 4. The sweet-smelling herbs placed in pots on windowsills along with aromatics in albarelli or drug jars, incense burners and odiferous waters, examined in Chapter 5, highlight the sensorial engagement of these objects. Antonello da Messina’s strange architectural configuration populated with a wide range of artefacts thus acts as a pictorial reflection on the types of multimedia and multisensorial experiences such spaces engendered. The painting invites us to consider the multiple geographies at work as well as the multiple ‘surfacescapes’ and ‘objectscapes’ to use Jonathan Hay’s terminology (explored further in Chapters 2-4).° The display of these objects within a studiolo marks just a moment in their itineraries, as they were traded, gifted, exchanged, copied and in turn, inspired new objects.” This book is concerned with these very experiences and itineraries: how such objects started off as diplomatic mediators or cogs in the wheels of trade, how they made their way into collections or courtly domestic spaces, and how in turn, they inspired creative responses. Taking the Italian Renaissance courts of Naples and Ferrara as case studies, this book investigates the complex relationship between the objects in these collections and the larger diplomatic entanglements of Italian courts with those nearby of the Mamluks and Ottomans (the political and diplomatic landscape is explained in more detail in Chapter 1).
Courtly Mediators investigates the processes and outcomes of exchanges of a range of materials and objects including Mamluk metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain and aromatics. These goods, and the people who exchanged them, are central to understanding what constituted the Renaissance court and how we consider the ways that courts defined themselves in relation to one another through the trade, acquisition and use of material objects. Thus, there were multiple actors at play within what has conventionally been described as the ‘Italian Renaissance’ as well as multiple modes of interconnection. Uncovering this expanded geography and field of interaction through materials and objects transforms our assessment of how the Italian courts, such as Naples and Ferrara, were entangled with courtly powers beyond the peninsula. This book concentrates mostly on the latter part of the fifteenth century with most examples drawn from the Aragonese period in Naples (1442-95) and the tenure of Eleonora d’Aragona as Duchess in Ferrara (1473-93). Chapters 4 and 5, however, venture into the sixteenth century to trace the survival of Eleonora d’Aragona’s porcelain under her son Alfonso d’Este or to draw on surviving sixteenth-century documents where there are none extant for the preceding century.
The emphasis on ‘mediators’ in the title of this book underscores the different actors at play — people, materials and things — that mediated in and between courts in the fifteenth century, from the objects exchanged as brokers in diplomatic negotiations to the ambassadors who travelled and gifted them on behalf of their state. In Giovanni Florio’s A Worlde of Wordes (1598), ‘mediator’ is provided as the definition for an intercessor, ‘that goes between’, suggesting a position between two states.'° Many of the objects featured in this book reflect this ‘in-betweenness’, not only as objects that moved between two courts, but which also reveal multiple cultural traditions. In addition, many objects represent a liminal state in terms of material, such as porcelain that was framed in metal mounts, or damascene motifs found on leather and ceramics, borrowed from metalwork. Mediators thus also refer to ‘mediation’, which has an etymological link to media, pointing to the intermediality and transmateriality at work, and the way in which patterns and motifs were replicated and adapted across media. Other objects performed an evocative material mimesis, such as ceramics that employed lustre to convey a metallic sheen (see Figure 6, Chapter 2) or glass that was made to look like porcelain, a rhetorical enterprise which was far from a simple counterfeiting. This book is particularly attentive to fresh perspectives to characterise and reconsider these objects, which move beyond geographic categorisations. Indeed, it takes an art historical approach that deviates from binaries, linear trajectories, monolithic categories of identity and hierarchies of genres.'' As explained further below, terms such as transcultural, transmedial, composite and croisé are employed to move away from Eurocentric categorisations, underscoring that no object is a product of one singular culture nor are cultures ever stable or singular to begin with.
The first two chapters provide a form of frame for the chapters that follow, identifying the diplomatic players and the categories of gifts exchanged, as well as the vocabulary used to describe these objects. The remaining chapters are case studies, showing how the frameworks of interaction and translation identified in the first two chapters play out in very specific scenarios and for particular categories of objects. In Chapter 1, the focus is on the role that gifts played in brokering the often-fraught relations between Italian courts and the Ottoman and Mamluk sultans in the fifteenth century. First, the objects of exchange are examined as mediators, active agents that enabled states to communicate or negotiate, sometimes at a distance and sometimes as part of public and private ambassadorial receptions. Second, the chapter looks at how these objects were put on display, after the initial ritual of gift-giving. The mutability of such gifts once they become domesticated into their new court setting provides a metaphor for the fragile and often short-lived, temporal quality of peace negotiations. This first chapter also examines how, after the initial moment of gifting, these objects featured as part of stately visits to a palace where ambassadors and fellow rulers were taken on tours of courtly spaces. These tours were certainly an extension of diplomacy, and their detailed accounts in letters and other humanist texts point to a particular literary and artistic culture around display, linked to ekphrasis.
Chapter 2 addresses how the mobility of objects gave rise to the mobility of particular motifs and scrutinises what language contemporaries used to describe these objects, their motifs and their origins. Far from being straightforward, the lexicology of object descriptions often refers to style, designs or patterns, or even the place of purchase that carried geographical connotations, which might be misleading for us today. Taking inventories, ambassador reports, letters and humanist texts, the chapter analyses how vocabulary varied depending on who was doing the describing. Terms such as damascena or maiolica were intricately linked to the trade in objects rather than simply their origin of manufacture. Descriptions of objects from ‘somewhere else’ might be pointing to mobility itself as a category of value, which places emphasis on circulation and exchange rather than a beginning and an end, opening up new ways to categorise objects that go beyond geographical boundaries. In addition, this chapter addresses ornament, as the motifs on such objects were often key in their descriptions, but “ornamental objects’ also featured in humanist treatises. Thus, it addresses ornament in two senses: ornament as a decorative motif and objects as ornamental. By addressing the historiographical consequences of ornament (and the ‘arabesque’ in particular), the chapter considers how the decorative arts have traditionally been treated as ‘lesser’ in Art History and challenges the prejudice of ornament as void of meaning in comparison to more dominant forms of European representational modes. Engaging with ornament on three-dimensional objects, instead, as Chapter 2 argues, underscores its haptic as well as visual qualities, highlighting the intellectual and political potential of ornament.
In the third chapter, attention is turned to a little-known collection of porcelain, and yet one of the largest in Italy in its time, examining it through the lens of mobility, material engagement and collecting practices. The Medici of Florence have long been recognised as having the largest collection of Chinese porcelain in the fifteenth century, but Eleonora d’Aragona, Duchess of Ferrara, surpassed the Medici collections with over 170 pieces. Taking Eleonora’s collection as a case study, the chapter examines the European reception of porcelain, with particular attention to how contemporaries understood the different material and sensorial qualities of porcelain. In fifteenth-century Europe, porcelain did not come directly from China, but rather took a circuitous route along the Silk Roads, and then made its way into Italy through trade and diplomacy with other courts. Once in Europe, it was also often gifted again, sometimes set in mounts with dedicatory inscriptions or in etui (customised leather cases). These framing devices are examined as ways of making local a global commodity, arresting porcelain’s mobility temporarily. Porcelain is thus examined here as a novel collector item, which contributed to new approaches to collecting and the material world. Eleonora’s collection in Ferrara is also studied as an example of a portable pathway of goods from Naples to Ferrara and reveals how objects exchanged first-hand with the Ottoman and Mamluk courts in Naples might have made their way into smaller courts through familial networks.
The fourth chapter builds on the collecting practices articulated in Chapter 3 but situates porcelain collections in the next century at Ferrara, including the discussion of a previously unknown yet important Stanza delle Porcellane (Room of Porcelain). By starting with Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, made as one of the Bacchanals for Eleonora’s son, Alfonso d’Este, the chapter argues that a narrow art historical focus on these paintings and their literary interpretation and programme have ignored the role of material culture (including porcelain) across the rooms. While commissioning the paintings (many by Titian) and objects for his camerini, Alfonso was also busy building a spezieria or pharmacy and decorating it with glasses and ceramics designed and procured by the artists Titian and Dosso Dossi. This chapter thus pays attention to Alfonso’s interests in technological innovation, including his pursuit of manufacturing ‘counterfeit’ porcelain, arguing that an emphasis on materials and their transformative qualities was a theme running throughout the paintings, but also in the objects of display, and in the larger interests of Duke Alfonso. The inclusion of porcelain in Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, as Chapter 4 reveals, is not simply a representation of Alfonso’s porcelain collections and his interests, but rather sets up a complex relationship between reality and fiction, and the metaphoric capabilities of material culture. The chapter contends that Alfonso d’Este utilised the material, sensorial and pictorial conditions of the camerini to explore broader understandings of disegno.
The fifth chapter expands on the previous chapter’s reference to the court pharmacy by looking closely at the drug jars or albarelli and other aromatic vessels that graced the shelves of court interiors. The chapter explores what these vessels and their contents can tell us about the everyday sensorial practices of men and women at court. The very sociability of these jars was activated as they were taken off the shelf in the palace’s spezieria, mobilised through the carrying of the vessels to other rooms, which in turn activated courtly social and medical practices. Spices, aromatics and their receptacles were also commonly given by the Mamluk and Ottoman sultans, carrying with them sensorial practices, which reveals a ‘shared culture’ of fragrance, incense and aromatics across the Mediterranean and yet, adapted to serve particular theological and social practices. By interrogating new primary sources such as a previously unpublished inventory of the spezieria in Ferrara as well as contemporary descriptions of the Neapolitan spezieria, the chapter sheds light on how these spaces were integral to daily practices at court. Indeed, the physical proximity of the court spezieria and collecting spaces reveals that both were closely associated with news, knowledge and intellectual pursuits. The employment of the metaphor of the pharmacy in art of memory texts, as well as in other cultural references as a place of knowledge, had close ties to the concept of the studiolo and the later spaces of collecting such as Alfonso d’Este’s camerini. This chapter demonstrates that aromatics and spices — and their receptacles — were ubiquitous at court, not merely medicinal: they carried symbolic metaphors, which varied depending on where they were used, from the court chapel to the studiolo.
The concluding chapter takes surviving tiles in Naples as a case study, pursuing how the mobility of motifs found on ceramics examined throughout this book were made local and more static by their incorporation into the architectural structures of Neapolitan palaces and churches. In the 1440s, Alfonso I d’Aragona shipped a large quantity of Valencian tiles to decorate his palaces in Naples: these were of course not ‘foreign’ for Alfonso and his Catalan court, rather they referenced his Spanish roots. Valencian tiles could also be found in the palazzo of Diomede Carafa, a prominent Neapolitan courtier, diplomat and humanist. Transported into Italy, these tiles reflected the larger cultural exchanges taking place in Naples and how designs circulated through transportable objects, eventually led to local production. Extant Neapolitan examples still in situ from the Caracciolo chapel in San Giovanni a Carbonara and the Cappella Pontano show how the use of Valencian tiles by the ruling family soon gave rise to a taste for similar tiles by the local nobility and courtiers in the service of the Aragonese. This concluding chapter articulates how transfer and translation occurs — both visually and textually. Pontano’s chapel provides a particularly provocative example, where inscriptions underscore an emphasis on the written word, providing a complex relationship between text, media and translation. Inscribed with Pontano’s signature, the tiles become a medium through which Pontano articulates his social virtues in textual, material and visual form, forging a complex relationship between patron, author, artist and creator. The use of these tiles in spaces commissioned by humanists such as Diomede Carafa and Pontano asks us to reinterpret familiar humanist tropes. Pontano’s writings for example, demonstrate how he incorporated his experience of a global material culture in Naples, such as lustred ceramics, with traditional humanist approaches to splendour. This final concluding chapter emphasises one of the main remits of this book, that what has often been seen as quintessential examples of Renaissance revivals of a local antiquity — Pontano’s chapel or Carafa’s palazzo for example — need to be resituated within larger global visual cultures.
A GLOBAL RENAISSANCE?
Literature on the ‘global Renaissance’ (and more broadly on the Mediterranean) tends to sit between two trajectories, that of bazaars and battlefields.’~ On the one hand, scholarship argues for a Renaissance that was open, fostering creativity and cultural interchange, and on the other, a clash of civilisations, often between Christianity in the West and Islam in the East. The types of transcultural objects studied here can underline the interconnectedness of the world, revealing that there never really are ‘pure’ or authentic cultural traditions and products.'* However, a celebration of transculturality can also hide the bleaker realities of cross-cultural relationships in this period, where power dynamics were often unequal and resulted in forced conversions, colonial domination and little room for negotiation. Warfare and conflict were not uncommon within and between states across the Mediterranean and thus, a more nuanced approach needs to be taken.
The use of the terms ‘Renaissance’ and ‘global’ together can also appear as a persistent Eurocentric approach. I use the term Renaissance here in two ways: first, as a term for a period that roughly stretched over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and secondly, to engage directly with and challenge the Eurocentric understanding of the ‘Renaissance’ as being a revival of a local classical antiquity. As has been argued, there were numerous Renaissances, moments of particular flourishing in centres that brought together arts, intellectual inquiry, sciences and innovation.'* Renaissance courts tend to still be studied as closed entities, with scholars concentrating on one court and one ruling family, insisting on categorisations of regional particularities. Italian scholarship on courts often relies on detailed archival research, which offers in-depth studies on individual Italian courts but little information on their transcultural nature or interaction with other courts, although Naples’ relationship with the wider world was often addressed in nineteenth-century scholarship.'> This book is not a global survey of courts in the Renaissance, which might risk a flattening out of the complex and unique encounters. Admittedly, this book focusses on the European courts of the Italian Renaissance, but it situates them within a larger global intersection of connections and interchange rather than as individual, solitary or closed courts. The primary sources I rely on are also mostly drawn from Italian archives and the sources are thus one-sided. Readers might ask why I have not chosen to study all courts — Ottoman, Mamluk and Italian — in the same depth. Comparative approaches can sometimes lose sight of the richness of individual cases and instead, I have chosen to focus on very particular studies at Ferrara and Naples. However, throughout the book I have tried to draw on a broader global scholarship, to consider how the reception of these objects in Italian Renaissance courts might have been informed or differed from their global counterparts.
Many of the objects that are the focus of this book fall under the category of ‘Islamic art’ and are part of larger debates about the discipline of Art History, which has long been divided between those who work on European or Western art and those who work on ‘Non-Western’ art; categories that are becoming increasingly tenuous. Many artefacts in museums are due to the legacies of European colonialism when many of these collections were formed and thus, bound up in particular colonial ideologies and agendas. The global turn in Art History is both a welcome and an unwelcome one for scholars who work on ‘Islamic art’. Comparative studies that frame a new Renaissance arguing for interconnections across the Mediterranean, for some, still speak to a wholly Eurocentric agenda, which places Islamic works of art within a neo-Orientalist frame.'° These works of art are often still understood within Western categories, applying Eurocentric paradigms and criteria.'’ There is a tendency to focus primarily on the Mediterranean, thus still serving a Western agenda: we incorporate bits of the Other in our own established narratives of collecting practices, neglecting other parts of the world where such intercultural dialogues and exchanges may have been taking place long before the ‘Italian Renaissance’.'* There were certainly numerous other places of transcultural encounter, particularly around other bodies of water such as the Indian Ocean or the Arabian and Red Seas. Although critics will say this book focusses on the Mediterranean, and still even a narrower field of the courts of Ferrara and Naples, it aims to offer new theoretical frameworks, vocabularies and methodologies to address the global circulation of objects, which I hope can be adopted for any region of interchange and applied more broadly to transcultural objects. In addition, the book sheds light on objects that, although central to many Renaissance collections, have been overlooked and thus, offers a new way to conceive of Renaissance collecting, which tries to overcome the discipline’s nineteenth-century Eurocentric origins.
The Italian courts studied in this book were small players when put into perspective with global courts. The works in these collections were not necessarily pillaged colonial items but gifts from much more powerful empires — those of the Ottomans and Mamluks. While Italian understandings of foreign courts were embedded in often racist and religious ideologies as well as awe, power often rested in ‘non-European’ courts and thus, these courts need to be studied within their own political and historical frameworks, not within nineteenthcentury Orientalist or colonial paradigms.'” The power and strength of courts was evidenced in the quality and quantity of diplomatic gifts. For example, the Mamluks received Chinese porcelain from Yemen in the hundreds (400 or 500 in some lists) but when regifted to European courts, the Mamluks rarely exceeded thirty pieces at a time.” Placed in perspective, European access to these goods was rather limited. It is also important to underscore the brutal realities of the circulation of goods, which are often left out of the stories of these fascinating objects, but are still an essential part of their biographies and itineraries. Chinese porcelain for example, was made by potters, painters and enamellers who were reportedly beaten by their masters if they made mistakes. In the early fifteenth century, four thousand craftspeople attempted to flee Jingdezhen, but soldiers dragged them back to work.*' One Song poet indicated the hardships and inequalities that were part of the potters’ life:
Pots cover every inch of space before the door
But there’s not a single tile on the roof.
Whereas the mansions of those who wouldn’t soil their fingers with clay Bear tiles overlapping tightly like the scales of a fish.**
Once such goods made their way onto ships bound for ports, the cargo and crew were subject to piracy, where sailors could be enslaved and forced to convert, often leading to warfare or diplomatic rows. The word porcelain, as explored further in Chapter 2, is derived from the term for cowry shells, which were used as currency to purchase things as wide ranging as porcelain (the ceramic) and enslaved peoples, underscoring how the circulation of luxury goods was also tied up in the purchasing of human flesh, setting into motion the terrible realities of the slave trade for centuries to follow. Along with spices, enslaved people were also shipped; along with new discoveries or territorial expansion came power struggles and occupation.
Italian courts’ relationships with other courts were part of a longer history of incessant warfare within the Italian peninsula and within Europe. Naples was the site of constant struggles of ‘foreign’ domination: the French Angevins in the fourteenth century, the Catalonian Aragonese in the fifteenth century, the brief French occupation in 1495, then followed by Spanish domination again ruled by Viceroys, who stayed for two centuries. Finbarr Barry Flood’s Objects of Translation provides an important model to study the transcultural interactions and cosmopolitanism of the premodern world, based on a ‘reconfiguration of premodern cultural geography’, which moves away from ‘static taxonomies’ and ‘linear borders of the modern nation-state’.-* While Flood’s study concentrates on medieval South Asia, similar overlapping economic zones and trade networks can be found in the Mediterranean in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the focus of this book. A similar approach has been taken for the Ottoman Empire, where “Transottomanica’ has been employed as a term to move away from a fixed geographical entity and instead refers to a changing set of entanglements, flows, transfers and networks between the Middle East and Europe. My study of Italian Renaissance courts, and in particular Ferrara and Naples, builds on anthropological studies, which consider identity not as bounded, but rather a ‘nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject’ or state.’ The Aragonese court in Naples, for example, was an urban centre made up of the ruling family (who were of Spanish/Catalan origin), as well as merchants, courtiers and barons who may have come from elsewhere, had conflicting political loyalties and who interacted with other courts regularly, while the larger city was host to a range of people who might have identified with a gamut of nationalities and religions. With regular embassies from Mamluk, Ottoman, Tunisian, Burgundian, Hungarian and other Italian courts, where resident ambassadors often stayed for months, Naples was certainly a shifting place of encounters.
Naples thus plays a prominent role in this book, a court and imperial city that is often left out of histories of the Renaissance because of its heterogenous character.°° What made it an important centre of culture in the fifteenth century, drawing in artists, luxury goods and cultural practices from Catalonia, the Netherlands, France, Burgundy, Dalmatia, Damascus, Istanbul, Tunisia, Cairo, Alexandria and other Italian regions, has also made it unfavourable within a Vasarian tendency to privilege homogenic centres of production, such as Florence.*’ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Naples was recognised by scholars such as Walter Benjamin for its ‘porosity’, but in a derogatory sense, a sort of formless precivilised Other.** If we consider a site of exchange like Naples, outside a Vasarian paradigm as Stephen Campbell has suggested, we instead encounter a capital and port city that brought together multiple cultural traditions, setting the standards for other lesser courts such as Ferrara.’ Building on social and cultural theories of networks (or even better ‘meshworks’), Naples is studied here as an important node within larger global and local networks, creating a web of connections around it through marriage and military contracts, diplomacy and trade.*° These networks were not stable, but shifted and adapted as needed, where some players became central, and others faded from view.
It would be as anachronistic to suggest that this centre of interaction did not have frictions, as it is to suggest globalisation is new. Flood rightly underscores the need to not celebrate premodern processes of interaction as modern multiculturalism but rather understand how these exchanges could prove both productive and destructive, and were constantly shifting.*’ Indeed, frontiers are places where similarities and differences are often identified, and that difference itself can often be the source of identity construction.*~ When confronted with fragmentation, individuals can often look for cohesion or tradition. The more that globalising processes take root, deep divides can occur, as individuals either embrace stasis or advocate for assimilation and change.
The numerous embassies in Naples were precisely because of warfare, territorial struggles, piracy and competition over the monopoly of trade routes. Who the Other was and who the ‘enemy’ was often changed rapidly. For example, during King Alfonso I d’Aragona’s triumphal entry into Naples, various ‘nations’ staged thematic processions (later made permanent through their representations on the Aragonese triumphal arch and across visual culture).*? Since Alfonso’s right to rule was questioned and he knew successful rulership would only be found in the coercion and cohesion of his vast kingdoms across the Mediterranean, Alfonso sought to underline a unified state through a staged procession, which reflected a large and encompassing empire that included political and mercantile dominion: Florence represented other Italian states and his peaceful negotiations with those states; the barons represented Neapolitan support; the Catalans signified the Spanish contingency and Alfonso’s roots; and the Tunisians stood for his trade and mercantile relations with North Africa and other Islamic polities. For the part of the procession overseen by the Catalans, there was a staged battle between Spanish knights, who held lances with the insignia of Alfonso and individuals dressed as ‘Moors’ who wore turbans and carried scimitars. The battle actually began as a form of dance alla moresca but when the choreography reached its apogee, it transformed into a mock battle, which ended with the Spanish conquering the ‘Moors’. This was a tradition inherited from Spain, where battles between infidels and Christians accompanied by the Cardinal Virtues are recorded in the celebrations of 1414, when Alfonso’s father was made king and Alfonso was knighted.**
After the initial entry, every year, an annual triumphal procession was staged to commemorate Alfonso d’Aragona’s triumphal victory into Naples. In 1453, the procession began with eight men dressed in ‘Turkish’ costume, who held the standard of Saint George, decorated with a red cross and accompanied by 210 confratri of the confraternity of Saint George, who were led by King Alfonso. The procession, while commemorating Alfonso’s triumphal victory over Naples, was, as the chronicler tells us, to publicise a Crusade against the ‘Grand Turk’.*? When relations between Alfonso and Giovanna d’Aragona (the then Queen of Naples) became fraught in the early 1420s, pageantry soon reflected animosity. In 1423, the Aragonese had prepared a large wooden elephant on wheels accompanied by musicians and singers dressed as angels, as well as men with clubs dressed as wizards and Turks. Mounted men dressed as devils from the rival Neapolitan camp in the Capuana neighbourhood were to engage in a mock battle with the Aragonese in the guise of Turks. Since tensions between Neapolitans and Spaniards had been growing, the festivities were to soon materialise into a real battle, only to be stopped at the last moment due to a death of a high-ranking official.°° Thus, the ideological enmity between Christians and Muslims was often used as a foil to conceal the real and more immanent threat, that of the friction between Aragonese/Catalans and the Neapolitan barons (who would continue to rebel throughout Aragonese rule). While these staged processions thus posited the ‘infidel’ against Christians, these performances were ideological constructions that did not necessarily reflect actual relations. Rather, it seems that Aragonese relations with numerous states were fraught, and by merely examining these interactions as binaries, we hardly achieve a nuanced view of Alfonso’s empire, which was constituted by confrontation and negotiation. Alfonso appears to have used the Ottoman threat and the idea of Crusade as a way to negotiate relations with the papacy and other Italian states. While many scholars have stressed Alfonso’s anti-Turk and pro-Crusade policies, it has also been noted that Alfonso’s long relationship with Islamic polities both in Spain, in North Africa and in the Levant was central to much of his political career.*” Like Flood, this book seeks to historicise these transcultural encounters through the people, things and materials that created dynamic relationships and mediated between confrontation and consensus, continuity and change, alterity and identity.**
In recent years there has been a plethora of edited journal volumes, books and conferences in Renaissance studies concentrated on the mobility and circulation of objects, with a particular focus on global exchanges.*” In Art History, this is largely the result of two major changes in the discipline: the ‘object’/material turn and the global turn. These interventions in the field, however, have not approached the material in the same way, and some have been more successful than others in addressing the benefits as well as the shortcomings of these approaches. These contributions have allowed the field to test the waters, push the boundaries of particular theories and have led to more nuanced approaches. The recent emphasis on the circulation of goods and the mobility of objects, nevertheless, risks losing sight of the contestations and struggles that occurred in the early modern period. A celebration of the world of goods and consumption habits might simply be a return to, or a recasting of, Jacob Burkhardt’s celebration of the Renaissance as the birth of the modern (and now global) individual. As the field unfolds, scholars have already begun outlining the problems with these approaches.*° Cultural ‘exchange’ can sometimes be straightforward, but it rarely is. Along with translation, as anyone knows who has learned a new language, there are often misunderstandings. Entangled or crossed histories thus also recognise that there is often misapprehension, anxiety, misinterpretation and sometimes outright rejection of other cultural forms, which also need to be taken into consideration.
FRAMES, COMPOSITE OBJECTS AND OBJETS CROISES
Naples as a periphery in art historical discourse and geographically at the edge of the Italian peninsula resonates with the metaphor of the frame or parergon, adopted throughout this book.*' The frame — such as a metal mount framing a porcelain piece (Figure 1; see also Figures 16 and 19 and Plate IV, Chapter 3) — rather than an unimportant side line often confronts the viewer and becomes central to interpretation and engagement with the work itself. Naples, while geographically on the periphery of Italy, became one of the main conduits for embassies and luxury goods into Italy from empires across the Mediterranean, such as the Mamluks and the Ottomans. At the centre of shifting relations, Naples resisted stasis and boundedness, particularly when it came to cultural production. This could serve to both articulate a particular Neapolitan identity, as it confronted ‘Other’ cultures, while it also gave rise to an early modern form of cosmopolitanism, found for example in the range of goods from around the world located in Aragonese palaces and those of courtiers and barons closely associated with the court.
If the Neapolitan court was already transcultural, what then happens when an object from the Neapolitan court is gifted to the Ottoman court? Is this seen purely as a Neapolitan object reflecting the “Neapolitan court’ for the Ottoman court? What about Chinese porcelain gifted from the Ottomans into Naples? How can such objects be categorised? The idea of composite objects provides a means to move beyond geographic boundaries and instead places emphasis on exchange, circulation and metamorphosis. For example, a bowl now in the British Museum (Figure 1), but once belonging to the Ottoman collections of the Topkap1 in Istanbul, provides a provocative example of a composite object.” The bowl was made in the sixteenth century in the famous kilns at Jingdezhen in China, where porcelain was produced in great quantities and shipped around the world. The porcelain vessel is white with light blue roundels on the exterior, with the cavetto or interior sporting blue symbols of the eight treasures of Buddhism, deriving from early Indian ceremony. Already a composite object reflecting Chinese and Indian cultures, after it arrived in the Ottoman Empire, it is likely that local goldsmiths carefully adapted the object, by enhancing it with gold metalwork and gems.** Unlike some mounts, which were used to repair broken pieces or to alter the object’s function or shape, such as adding spouts, feet or handles, these additions were purely ornamental but not void of meaning. Delicate gold leaf patterns provided additional decorations, enhanced with gold florets containing rubies. The base is inscribed in Chinese characters translated as ‘May ten thousand blessings gather together’. The British Museum’s catalogue reflects the difficulty of modern terminology and classification systems to pinpoint the specific ‘culture/period’, which the museum lists as ‘Ottoman dynasty (mount); Jiajing (probably (bowl))’.** Indeed, the mounts have transformed what was a Chinese bowl into something Ottoman on the exterior, obscuring the Chinese decorations. In the interior, the decorative Buddhist motifs are derived from Indian culture, demonstrating a complex interlacing of cultures and styles into this one object. The bowl defies categorisation in the way that art historians have long been used to, or trained to, classify works of art in collections in terms of national schools.**
Such blue and white wares made in China were eagerly sought by rulers in the Middle East, North Africa and in Europe, and as they travelled across the globe, not only were they manipulated like Figure 1, but they left traces on the production of local wares, providing an interchange of motifs, techniques and materials. This is evident in drug jars or albarelli, which held associations with the ‘East’, not only because of the spices they held, but also their design and decoration as explored in Chapter 5. A drug jar in Paris (Figure 2), dating from the first half of the fifteenth century demonstrates this fusion of motifs.
The albarello was made in Syria, most likely Damascus, and yet contains an emblem of the fleur de lis or florin, indicating it may have been created for export to Florence. The floral scrolls and flying birds are typical of Syrian wares inspired by Persian pottery and Chinese porcelain, yet the florin potentially points to Italian consumers.*° This object, in most of the literature, is thus seen as one of cultural interchange and complex customisation, perhaps ordered by the Medici. Yet, the fleur de lis was also employed by the Mamluks, raising questions about where this object was indeed intended to be ‘consumed’ and points to the confusion over origins in a global circulation of materials and motifs.
When objects circulate, they do not simply move from one location to another, but rather leave traces, altering their new settings and taking on new identities, leading to cultural transfer. Post-colonial studies have challenged the somewhat straightforward nature of understanding cultural transfer, claiming it is too Eurocentric by glossing over the dynamics of intercultural processes and transformations.*’ Translation instead has often been used to emphasise how cultural products are not just transferred but translated, and not only occur between cultures but within them.“ Criticism of the term translation has also emerged, particularly because it uses a linguistic model for the interpretation of material and visual culture, and that it implies a desire to preserve the original meaning by the new user/artist/owner.*” While the material objects in this study are central to understanding the past, the use of language in inventories and ambassador reports, for example, is also a crucial part, as explored in Chapter 2, as were contemporary debates about the value of texts and images.
The relationship between material and textual translations can be exemplified by a rare example of a basil pot dating from the fifteenth century, now in the Rothschild collections at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire (Figure 3). These sorts of pots, known as alfabeguers, also appear in paintings of the time, depicted in domestic interiors or on Italian terrazzi as markers of fine taste as well as serving curative purposes by scenting the air, such as in Antonello da Messina’s study (Plate I). The pot reveals the interlacing of numerous cultures in its material, decoration and function, as well as its name, demonstrating how composite objects reflect the complex exchanges engendered by fifteenth-century trade and travel. The word alfabeguer derives from the Arabic al-‘habac (sweet basil) becoming alfabaga in Valencian or albahaquero in Castilian.°° Already in 1397, the company of the merchant of Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini, was importing these vessels into Italy, recorded as alfabichieri.’' These linguistic mutations reflect the cultural translations of ceramics — both on a surface level of decoration as well as on a material one. As ‘foreign’ ceramics travel to a new location, they do not remain discreet ‘foreign objects’, but rather influence local production, producing new composite objects and in turn, new environments.°~
The pot is made of ceramic lustreware, a technique that was adopted in Spain, learned from Muslim craftspeople. Ceramics coming from the Middle East and further afield from China were highly admired in Europe, and gave rise to replications, imitations and transmutations. The motifs on such a vessel demonstrate an incorporation of ‘foreign’ floral patterns made local, while the addition of an Italian coat of arms suggests it was designed for export to Italy. Once in Italy, these objects might be described in inventories as alla moresca (in the Moorish style) or even alla damascina (in the damascene style), raising complex issues around categorisations and labelling, as explored in Chapter 2.
Such descriptions often reflect misunderstandings regarding provenance and sites of manufacture both for fifteenth-century viewers as well as scholars today who attempt to make meaning of primary sources. The complex water cavities built into the pot to keep the plant moist also reveal the level of technological dexterity needed to fire and assemble this pot, something collectors and users appreciated in conjunction with the decorations. Such technologies were embedded in artisanal knowledge, often learned through a mixture of hands-on experience, interaction with the objects and materials themselves, and textual or oral communication.
Such an object’s use and reception in Italy thus reveal a complex pattern of exchange over time, how materials and motifs travelled in early modernity, and how, as scholars, we approach these complex interchanges. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann have proposed the idea of histoire croisée or ‘crossed history’, which analyses both the global and local not simply from a comparative point of view, but by investigating the multilateral entanglements of multiple actors with varying viewpoints.°* This approach moves away from binary oppositions (East/West or North/South, for example) and places emphasis on frames of reference, rather than a transfer between two points, which usually implies some form of a beginning and an end.*° The use of the term croisé refers to a criss-cross, the possibility to reverse and reciprocate, which moves away from a linear process and places emphasis on intersections, whereby persons, practices and objects are intertwined or affected by this crossing process. Similarly, ‘sites of mediation’ refer to the places where dynamic processes of transcultural and translocal interactions, interconnections and entanglements take place.*°
Drawing upon sociological, anthropological and historical studies, I propose the term objets croisés as a means to examine the entangled nature of early modern objects and material culture, providing a more complex reading of cultural interaction. In post-colonial studies, and most famously in the work of Homi Bhabha, what can emerge from transcultural interaction is a third space. In the colonial context, this often arises out ofa dynamic interface between hegemonic and subordinated cultural forms, where difference is negotiated, translated and results in ‘hybrid’ identities.°’ The term hybrid is both a useful and controversial term, often criticised as an easy label to use rather than explain the complexities of transcultural relations and it also comes with derogatory colonial connotations.°* The term ‘boundary objects’ has been proposed to articulate how such objects can both demarcate and combine identities.°” For Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, who first employed the term in sociology, boundary objects ‘have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation’.°° This common ground is particularly important not only for shared objects but also common practices, such as the use of incense across the Mediterranean, which was both shared and adapted according to particular cultures and religions, examined in Chapter 5. The concept is enlightening, but the word ‘boundary’ unfortunately hearkens back to the fixedness of boundaries, suggesting boundedness and stasis, instead of highlighting how practices and objects were adopted, negotiated and renegotiated again.
For the discipline of Art History, which takes objects and images as a central focus, we also need to find particular terms to articulate the varying degrees of transculturation in material culture. The alfabeguer used in Italy is a Valencian product but with transcultural motifs and might be considered a transcultural object or objet croisé as both the technology and the motifs reflect decades of transculturation. In contrast, a Chinese porcelain cup placed in an Ottoman mount (Figure 1) or a European metal mount (see Figures 16, 19 and Plate IV, Chapter 3), has not undergone a permanent material metamorphosis, but remains framed temporarily as a transcultural object and thus, might be better referred to as composite, but the porcelain cup itself reflects transcultural interchanges of motifs.°' Its reception within its European or Ottoman context is also no longer the same as its Chinese one. A closer look at the reception of the porcelain piece might also reveal that for an Italian viewer, porcelain may have been associated with the Ottoman Empire bound up in gift exchange rather than China, also underscoring how cultural associations might be embedded into an object through a mode of exchange, which has nothing to do with the point of manufacture (something further explored in Chapters 2 and 3). To reflect the relational and multiplicity of identities as well as temporalities, anthropologists have proposed object itineraries over biographies, which move away from a linear mode of a beginning and an end.°* Object itineraries instead are ‘open-ended and multidirectional, and they include elements, fragments, transformations, and intersections with other itineraries and lines’.°? The concept of object itineraries thus entails not only the circulation of objects within shifting networks, but also their fragmentation, metamorphosis, framing and their transformation into composite objects.
The theme of metamorphosis recurs throughout the chapters that follow, showcasing how materials and objects were received and translated in different ways according to different contexts. The frequent reception of Mamluk and Ottoman embassies in Naples and the multicultural Catalonian/Neapolitan court gave rise to transculturation. For example, Valencian tiles (inspired by Middle Eastern and North African ceramics) shipped into Naples in the 1440s resulted in local tile production, incorporating Valencian designs with local Neapolitan ones. These tiles, as explored in the concluding chapter, placed in the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano’s funerary chapel, fused local antique traditions with contemporary cosmopolitanism. This in turn was reflected in Pontano’s writings, giving rise to new interpretations of splendour and magnificence, by incorporating the global dimensions of visual and material culture. In contrast, as explored in Chapter 4, when Chinese porcelain, exchanged in Naples, made its way into the collections of Alfonso d’Este in Ferrara, a smaller court less at the ‘centre’ of diplomatic exchange, the emphasis was on material metamorphosis. Alfonso d’Este sought ways to replicate the material qualities of porcelain in his own ceramic factories, translating not necessarily so much the motifs but the material properties, underscoring how close case studies can reveal subtle differences in reception.
SENSORIAL CONDITIONS AND OBJECTSCAPES
This book is attentive to a tripartite scheme — touch, transfer and translation — which underscores the importance of sensorial conditions of cultural transfer and translation, and in particular the haptic, optic and olfactic. As the chapters that follow show, transcultural encounters occurred through the multisensorial performances of embassies or experiences of travel, as well as through the physical and phenomenological engagement with these objects in collecting spaces and the domestic sphere.
Court objects could be sites of mediation in themselves, but this mediation varied depending on status and access to objects as well as forms of encounter. Sensorial responses to objects could range from the exceptional to the more mundane. Luxury objects gifted between princely elites were put on display only for those privileged few who were part of gifting ceremonies. These might not be experienced by many but observed afar by more people. Other objects such as albarelli had a range of users, as they were displayed in apothecary shops or used at home. By paying attention to the senses, this book moves beyond art historical hierarchies and geographical categorisations, which often privilege painting and sculpture over material culture, frequently resulting in the same historical conclusions. A focus on the senses opens up new ways to investigate the interconnectedness and cultural transfer and translation of courtly objects, and their associated material, aural, olfactic and visual practices. The senses have become the subject of scholarly interest in recent years, but most early modern studies have a tendency to focus on religious experience although this is rapidly changing with a broader ‘sensorial turn’ in the humanities, which builds on the anthropology of the senses.°* Scholars have called for a more historically specific understanding of a ‘period body’, and Islamic and Byzantine studies have been particular areas of Art History providing pioneering ways of approaching the senses in relation to visual and material culture.°° While embracing a sensorial approach to the past, it is important to also note that the study of the senses is not neutral and has its own historiography.°° By focussing mostly on three-dimensional objects, I draw on innovative methodologies, particularly those of Jonathan Hay, Bissera Pentcheva, Nina Ergin and Margaret Graves, to consider how objects were craftily manipulated by artists and collectors within a three-dimensional landscape, to reveal “‘object-spaces’ or “objectscapes’, which are temporary and ephemeral.”
Objectscapes rely on a performative paradigm, where objects, materials and ornament interact with other objects, materials and ornament, demanding engagement from beholders. Engagement thus varies according to context, ranging from intellectual and philosophical to spiritual and physical. To reimagine these objectscapes is difficult for the past because they are by definition ephemeral, but by paying close attention to materials, and their phenomenological engagement, as well as treating ornament as something threedimensional rather than two-dimensional, we can facilitate new ways to look at Renaissance spaces and collections. The senses also open up the possibilities of different experiences, thus not assuming there is one ideal viewer or visitor. The archaeologist, Yannis Hamilakis, employs the term ‘sensorial assemblages’ to not only consider the pairing of a thing with a body (a hand holding a vase) but the copresence of numerous elements including bodies, things, substances, memories, information and ideas.°*
These approaches also offer new and more nuanced ways to understand transcultural encounters and transfers. Antonello’s painting hints at these complex objectscapes and sensorial assemblages (Plate I), where a space such as a studiolo brought together objects that came from various geographical locations but spoke to each other through shared and transformed motifs within a threedimensional space: Chinese porcelain that had blue motifs, which had incorporated Persian designs, which inspired Valencian ceramics that combined Islamic lustre techniques with Christian IHS monograms, which in turn referenced other media such as metals, inspiring local Neapolitan tile production. Or the Chinese—Ottoman porcelain mounted bowl (Figure 1), which was not simply Ottoman or Chinese but brought together multiple traditions from India, China and Turkey. Such objects held aromatics, incense or rose water, and would have played with light, felt cold or warm to touch, and even made sounds when interacted with. It is likely a contemporary viewer may have not been able to make out all these different media, cultural and historical references, but they would have registered the concatenation of media, motifs and materials and their effect on the senses.”?
Like the cosmopolitan cities of Naples where such artefacts travelled in and out of, these objects gave rise to interconnections and novel ways of seeing the world, mediating between nearness and distance, novelty and familiarity. Such objects might have also served an ideological function for a collector who wanted to project a worldly identity, or for a prince who wanted to show his connections to other more important, global courts. These objects were often filled with aromatics, generating olfactic experiences, while holding them up to the light, the mounts occupied a space between the beholder and the ceramic, an ‘in-betweenness’ of both form and space. The gems inlaid in gold onto the surface of the ceramic might have held symbolic associations, while the porcelain, for a European viewer, was understood to be an apotropaic and its aromatic contents could sometimes perform a similar function. Treating these motifs or ornaments as flat two-dimensional transfers of distinct cultures thus misses the point. Rather, these objects ask us to consider how identity is constructed through an encounter with the Other, which might have varying degrees of familiarity or Otherness, but is always processual and in negotiation, and sometimes found in ornament or through the physical handling of a novel object. Courtly Mediators argues that the collecting culture of Renaissance Italy, while tied to humanistic enterprises more traditionally associated with the European roots of the Renaissance, was also connected to diplomatic negotiating, trade and encounters with other material cultures. The chapters that follow prompt us to reorient our understanding of Italian Renaissance courts, as provisional and influx spaces, adapting and responding to changing landscapes (and sensescapes) made up of people, practices and things.
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