Performing the Bridal Body in Fifteenth‐Century Florence

Abstract

In 1427 San Bernardino da Siena proposed a striking metaphor linking the body to a merchant's sign:How does one recognize when a woman is good? From her appearance. How does one recognize the shop of the wool-merchant, from his sign . . . That on the exterior reveals the interior. From the extrinsic you can understand the intrinsic. And regarding this I want to say that the woman who wears meretricious clothes ± I don't know the intrinsic, but those extrinsic things seem to me to be filthy signs. 1 Bernardino's negative reaction to corporeal decoration, and his association of such ornamentation with women, is representative of a very large body of opinion. In European culture, the debate over the morality of decorating the body has been consistently linked to gender. Bernardino, using a mercantile metaphor, also links the decorated body to the world of commerce and exchange in which true and false appearances mark the line between honest business and trickery. In so doing, he accepts this terrain of appearances and deception. In what follows, he does not suggest scrutiny and modification of what he calls the`intrinsic'; on the contrary, he asks his auditors to alter their extrinsic appearance. Bernardino does not conceive of the body's exterior as a mirror of an intrinsic given. Rather, he construes the exterior as a craftable icon communicating information about the interior. In what follows, I shall consider such corporeal crafting as a performance in which exterior and interior are conflated in a communicative act.I suggest the metaphor of performance for two reasons. Firstly, the notion of performing gender' opens up a space for active female subject positions in the past. 2 And secondly, it denaturalizes the body. Via the metaphor of performance, I can address more directly the signifying, constructed and communicative aspects of the body and its representation in the visual arts.The following study presents a reading of a particular corporeal production: the body of the bride in fifteenth-century Florence. The ideology of body and decoration is examined in a specific case study of bridal jewellery and of a particular staging of gender within the intricate socio-economic and symbolic exchanges that constituted marriage. Despite the ground-breaking researches of historians Christiane KlapischZuber and Diane Owen Hughes, marital gifts and their meanings have received little

The Donati-Ardinghelli Wedding of 1465: A Closer Reading of Braccio Martelli's Letter of April 27 to Lorenzo de’ Medici

“…76 See, for example, Luca Pulci, 94, and Luigi Pulci, 1986, 64, stanza 7, line 8. 77 See Luigi Pulci, 1986, 47, lines 89-91, and, for thoughts of suicide, Luigi Pulci, 1986, a response to a suggestion by the poem's narrator in lines 144-45. On the realities of divorce, see Seidel Menchi and Quaglioni.…”

“…More generally, see Klapisch-Zuber, esp. 218-28;Kirshner;Randolph, 1998;Bestor;Frick, 128-31. 64 Welch;Frick, 191-97.…”