This essay explores the ways in which the middling classes of Sienese artisans and shopkeepers experienced Renaissance culture. Drawing on a range of archival documents, it examines what attitudes were expressed by people of a lower social rank towards wealth, luxury, ‘conspicuous’ consumption, and social emulation; how well informed ordinary Italians were of the cultural codes and practices that were cultivated among the Italian Renaissance elites; and what reasons other than social recognition motivated families from the artisan classes to acquire various types of material artefacts. In assessing, on the one hand, what mechanisms of acquisition were available for the local artisans and shopkeepers to get hold of a range of domestic artefacts and, on the other, what objects and furnishings were found and displayed in individual homes, the aim is to evaluate what possessions and possessing meant to those outside the ranks of the wealthy elites. The intention is to move away from exclusively social concerns of consumption and cultural objects to consider the range of motivations that may have driven local Sienese individuals and families to use and acquire material goods, in order to complicate and add nuance to our understanding of the factors behind Renaissance consumption.
ABSTRACT:Historians of early modern Italy have traditionally viewed the city's public spaces, such as streets, quarters, taverns and marketplaces, as the chief locations in which claims to identity were launched into the broader urban community. Recent studies on the domestic interior, however, have shown that the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century urban space was much more complex. In this period, private urban houses became sites for an increasing range of social acitvities that varied from informal evening gatherings to large wedding banquets. Focusing on this ‘public’ dimension of the private urban house, this article explores how the middling classes of artisans and shopkeepers used the domestic space to construct identities and to facilitate social relations in sixteenth-century Siena. The aim is to show that in providing a setting for differing forms of economic and social activity, the urban home together with its objects and furnishings may have provided an increasingly important physical location for craftsmen, shop-owners and traders to negotaite individual and collective identities within the broader communities of the city.
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