Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy

Abstract

The history of consumption and material culture has attracted great interest during the past two decades. Studies have resulted in a wide consensus that consumptive practices gained force across wider sections of the European population during the Renaissance. As a result, this period is now often credited with the ‘birth’ of a restlessly consuming and anxiously competitive self, rather than a Burckhardtian birth of confident individual males in North-Italian cities. Whereas initial studies of consumption focused on competition through investments in architecture and interior designs, a new generation of historians began to contextualize why Renaissance rulers and elite families spent so much on dress. Instead of charting changes in styles, they continue the efforts of the best costume historians to understand how items of dress, ranging from gowns to pearls, became loaded with political and social meanings. They have demonstrated how central the performance of adorned bodies was to establish and uphold as well as to negotiate gendered and ethnicized behavioral practices. Adornment and comportment constituted affective communities. Most recently, historians are beginning to focus on how central the sourcing and processing of global and local materials that created adornments was for Renaissance economies and artisanal innovation within them. Much of elites’ desire for ‘rare’ innovation turned on the acquisition of new accessories and dye-tones, which were performed at key political events, such as weddings. Expenditure on velvets consistently ranked at the top of courtly expenses. As a result, no ruler or aristocrat delegated decisions about what to wear. Renaissance elite men constantly concerned themselves with fraught decisions about how to adorn themselves and entire households, including all employees.

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