Gusto for Things

A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome

By Renata Ago, BRADFORD BOULEY, COREY TAZZARA, PAULA FINDLEN

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-01057-1

Contents

Foreword: Early Modern Romans and Their Things, by Paula Findlen………..ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xxxvA Note on Roman Coins and Money……………………………………..xxxviiIntroduction………………………………………………………1PART I. THE NATURE OF GOODS…………………………………………131. The Function of Goods……………………………………………152. Reflecting on Things…………………………………………….41PART II. MATERIAL GOODS…………………………………………….633. Furniture………………………………………………………654. Furnishings and Clothing…………………………………………95PART III. IMMATERIAL THINGS…………………………………………1235. The Great Collections……………………………………………1256. Paintings………………………………………………………1397. Ostentatious Things……………………………………………..1598. Books………………………………………………………….187Conclusion………………………………………………………..215List of Abbreviations………………………………………………227Notes…………………………………………………………….229Bibliography………………………………………………………287Index…………………………………………………………….305

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Function of Goods

According to Mary Douglas, goods serve to communicate, to give meaningto the world. Later scholars of material culture agree with her. But goods,even consumer goods, can also be exchanged and can thereby fulfill a differenttask: not to fix meanings, but to make exchange possible.

The nature of goods varies according to their function. First, as objects forexchange, goods constitute a pure means to an end. They are only an instrumentfor obtaining other goods. Their value in this situation is essentiallyeconomic and coincides with that of exchange; they are dollar-equivalentgoods. Second, as objects for exchange, goods can nonetheless constitute aninstrument not for obtaining other goods but for procuring services, that is,for repaying the work done by other people. In this case their value continuesto be essentially economic, although there is often a relational value involvedas well; that is, they help create a relationship that is realized through theexchange. Third, as objects “kept temporarily or permanently outside theambit of economic activity, subject to special protection,” goods constitutean end in themselves. Here the purpose of acquisition is not exchange, butpossession. Their value is essentially symbolic and does not necessarily coincidewith that of exchange, from which it may often be remarkably detached.And last, even these objects can be transformed again into commodities andreenter the market through circulation. More often, however, they do sounder special conditions that reflect their preceding status and differ fromthe rules that regulate the exchange of other goods.

Historically, it is well known that these various functions existed simultaneously,as they still do. Nevertheless, the specific prevalence of one or anotherfunction has varied over time due to changes in the social and economicstructure of society. The connection between the nature of goods and thedevelopment of a monetary economy is an important factor. The diffusionof money and its ever-expanding capillary circulation has liberated goodsfrom their function as a means of exchange. This development has permittedsocial actors to give greater attention to the symbolic characteristics ofthings, to their secondary function of creating meaning and objectifying theidentity of their owners.

The scarcity of money, especially small coinage, and the problems derivingfrom a limited circulation of currency were facts of life for preindustrialEurope. Even in early modern Italy, complaints never ceased about”the shortage of specie and presence of regions (geographic or social) inwhich the shortage of money was chronic.” Only a small part of a state’smonetary production was in bullion or copper, that is, in small change.As a result, most of the population was excluded from participating in thecirculation of money. Speculation and secret devaluations also affectedthe physical circulation of money, which one avoided handling directly soas “not to risk subjecting oneself to want, or falling prey to dim-wits andflimflams.”

The scarcity of money did not impede the functioning of the market,however, which developed because of actors’ ability to find multiple waysof dealing with this bottleneck. The most widespread and important ofthese expedients was probably the recourse to credit. From the greatestinternational bankers to the most modest local artisans, all mercantilecircles learned how to circumvent the problems with monetary circulationthrough the creation of convenient networks of debt and credit, in whichassets and liabilities were settled on paper according to a complex system ofcompensation.

At the level of social practice, what little information we possess confirmsthat money was scarce and reliance on credit was very common. Forinstance, a study of London’s mercantile community at the end of the seventeenthcentury—and therefore of the social group that enjoyed the greatestaccess to genuine money—has demonstrated that transactions in currencyamounted to only a fifth of the value of credit transactions. Another piece ofevidence comes from documents regarding the world of things. The study ofa large number of postmortem inventories from various parts of seventeenth-centuryEngland has shown just how small the reserves of currency kept inthe household were, and above all their rarity: only one inventory out of two,and in some regions only one out of three, mention any money. Analogousevidence comes from the sample of seventy-six Roman inventories on whichmy research is based: in only eight cases was currency mentioned, while atleast one piece of silverware was present in thirty-three cases and one of goldin twenty-eight cases.

Furthermore, money was not the only means of payment. Ruggiero Romanoand Ugo Tucci have long ago dismantled the notion that there was astrict opposition between the direct exchange of things and exchange mediatedby money. The natural economy and the monetary economy are notmutually exclusive but have existed and continue to exist together in complicatedways. For instance, not only agricultural wages but urban ones as wellwere often paid partly in money and partly in kind. Analysis of the modesof payment current in the cities of the ancien régime shows that the samewas true for many kinds of commodities. Even an operation of high financecould base itself on objects rather than on money, at least in part: accordingto Federico Chabod, a loan contract stipulated in 1559 between the Dukeof Sessa and the Genoese banker Leonardo Spinola called for 180,000 lirein currency and 70,000 lire in silk cloth.

This last example demonstrates how objects can function directly asmoney. In many cases they can also constitute a reserve of wealth, either touse as is or to convert into money in times of need. This implies that to giveaway, sell, or pawn a material object are easy operations and that there isa market for secondhand goods able to absorb them fairly quickly. But inthese cases one must also be prepared to get rid of such objects without toomuch hesitation. Anthropological studies, such as the now-classic Trousseauas Treasure by Jane Schneider or more recent scholarship on northwesternIndia, have shown how this works with women’s goods. In Sicily as in India,dowries and dotal jewelry constitute the most widespread form of savingsbecause of their capacity to be transformed quickly into cash, especiallythrough pawning.

The little that we know about the circulation of women’s goods in preindustrialEurope fully confirms this evidence. It is not difficult to find womenwho in their last wills and testaments asked their executors to redeem jewelrydeposited in the Monte di Pietà, or husbands who requested the same thingwith their wives’ dotal jewelry, or women who left pawn tickets to their heirsfor lack of better options.

Credit therefore was an obvious means of counteracting the scarcity ofmoney, but so too was the monetary use of things, whether agriculturalproducts or manufactured goods. In these cases, it was easy to change thesocial valence of a transaction, transforming it from a necessary payment toan act of liberality. Renaissance writers were well aware of the fact that thegift of an object usually constituted a payment. In his five brief tracts on theuse of money, for instance, Giovanni Pontano attentively reviewed all thepossible ways of giving gifts and noted that the virtue of liberality “consistsin employing the right measure in giving money and cannot exist withoutchoosing wisely, [which in turn consists] of considering accurately what onegives, how much one gives, and when, how, and why one gives.” Citingthe example of Alexander the Great, Pontano likened the gifts of moneydistributed to soldiers to the food distributed to the people, showing clearlythat he did not distinguish between gift and payment. In De splendorePontano alluded explicitly to the use of objects as payment when he notedthat “movable goods must be acquired by a splendid man for honest uses,so that he can avail himself of them when necessary and also, when reasonso counsels, give them away, sometimes in great quantities.”

Goods as Money

Objects can thus serve to buy other objects, repay a service, or obtain moneyon credit. The documents I have looked at show how all three of these possiblefunctions were exploited in Renaissance and baroque Rome. Private correspondence,postmortem inventories, and account books prove that manypayments were made in kind and that many objects were used primarily forobtaining money.

Wills offer the clearest evidence for this phenomenon. Often, the testatorordered that all of his or her most precious movable goods—furniture, silver,jewelry, and more—be quickly sold and the revenue immediately invested invenal offices, credit bonds, shares of the public debt, or other titles of credit.For instance, when the merchant Attilio Casini composed his will in 1623, heordered that all his silver and other valuables be sold and that with the yield”one buy the office of Knight of the Lily for my son, Signor Carlo Casini, sothat he too can have an office similar to the ones which my other two sonshave.” For their owners these objects served above all to substantiate ormaterialize economic value. They represented a treasury to be transmitted tofuture generations not as objects laden with symbolic and emotional valuesbut as monetary equivalents.

Bequests of this type were made by people of differing status and socialcondition: respectable women and courtesans, artisans and merchants, lawyersand public officials, commoners and aristocrats, patriarchs and individualswithout children. All of them intended to guarantee the future of theirheirs by converting objects, superfluous in the final analysis, into solid financialreturns. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, even the MarquisVincenzo Giustiniani, who as a collector and patron of the arts nourished aspecial reverence for artistic goods such as paintings, sculptures, and tapestries,nonetheless expressed disdain for the furniture, silver, and jewelry hehad accumulated in the course of his life. In his 1631 will he ordered thatright after his death his heirs should sell “all the silver … in my own roomsand those of my consort, Signora Eugenia, and in all the other rooms of mypalazzo.” In addition, they were to sell

all my furniture, furnishings, and household goods … including mytapestries, silk, and gold cloth as well as my curtains, bed palls, tents,covers, rugs, and drapes … of gold, silk, wool, linen and cotton, andmy mattresses, and also my leather wall hangings, pavilions, and nettedbed curtains, and stuff of all kinds and of differing value.

Finally, he requested that they sell “all my jewels and noble vases.”

These precious fabrics and furnishings did not acquire any special valuedespite having been used by their owner and having been right in front ofhis eyes for so many years. Exceptions to this general rule occurred only toprevent the family palace from being left unfurnished. The palace, unlike itscontents, was clearly invested with a value that was more than economic.Giustiniani exempted from sale “all hangings of silk, leather, or other materialthat are in use or affixed to the walls of the palace … and all the leatherchairs, sideboards, and walnut tables … lest my palace be left empty andnaked.”

Almost a century later, another aristocrat as cultivated and art loving asGiustiniani did not hesitate to pawn or sell most of his young and elegantdaughter-in-law’s jewelry. A list of the “different jewels pertaining to theportion of the most illustrious Marquise Maria Isabella Vecchiarelli Santacroce,”enumerating the necklaces, pendants, rings, diamonds, pearls, andother precious stones of the young woman’s dowry, reveals their fate in thefew years between her marriage (1699) and the death of her father-in-law,Antonio Santacroce (1707). We learn that a diamond cross worth 300 scudi”was unmade, and six large diamonds and ten small ones were removed toput around a bracelet given to the Marquise Davia, daughter of the MarquisFilippo Bentivoglio, on the occasion of her nuptials,” that a pair of pendantswith two diamonds each was pawned to the Monte di Pietà, and that a “rosetteof nine diamonds was sold to the buyer of the Monte di Pietà, wherethey had been pawned.” Many other jewels were sold, given, or pawned tothe Monte: of the twenty-seven pieces specified in the list, only eight were stillin the possession of their original owner. The same fate befell two candlestickholders, an inkwell, some articles for her dressing room, and various otherpieces of silver given in the dowry.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Santacroce family wasdefinitely not in decline. An uncle had just been named cardinal and madegovernor of Viterbo, and the heir of the family patrimony—Maria Isabella’shusband—had been appointed “intimate councillor of state” to the emperor,for which he spent three years in Vienna and participated fully in the life ofthe court. The sale of some of Maria Isabella’s dowry goods was thereforenot a sad consequence of grave financial difficulties. As I noted earlier, a basicfunction of dowry goods was rapid conversion into money, thereby permittingthe payment of debts or the launching of new investments. Evidently,this also applied to personal objects that were not laden with the kind ofemotional values that prompted one to preserve them as long as possibleand thus exclude them from the market. Even so, at least in the case of theSantacroce family, this cold-blooded rapport with one’s personal effects orindifference toward their value as objects was not universal but characterizedabove all those individuals who, like the father-in-law who receivedjewelry in his custody, enjoyed only a distant relationship with these things.In contrast, the young daughter-in-law offers one of the best examples of adifferent attitude, as I will discuss much later.

Given how easy it was to get rid of the family jewelry, there was evenless hesitation in selling one’s own clothing, especially when age or life circumstancesrendered them unsuitable to wear. In this case, too, Pontano’spotential readers knew that it was right to do so. In one of his treatises onthe social virtues he wrote,

It is not appropriate for a splendid man to let his clothes get old, becauseold things cannot be splendid. Therefore, before they lose their sheen,he must transform them into acts of generosity: he must give them tohis friends, acquaintances, or anyone else who merits recognition.

Thus in 1634 a mature widow from Orvieto entrusted a Jewish secondhanddealer from Rome to sell some of her clothing and at the same time cautionedher son, who also resided in Rome, to keep an eye on the whole affair. “If hedoes not get twenty scudi for this white garment,” she wrote in her first letter,”he could unload it for eighteen … and I reminded him to notify me whenhe manages to sell the long brocade gown” Some time later, she wanted tobe apprised “whether the white garment was sold” and asked that he makesure “that it not be lent outside [of Rome].”

In Rome as elsewhere, traces of the sale of garments are very easy to find.There is no lack of evidence regarding the purchase of secondhand clothes,even by well-off people, or more frequently of their rental, especially whendealing with special garments. Postmortem inventories or those drawn upfor guardianship often contain estimates of various kinds of clothing made byprofessionals in the field—that is, by secondhand dealers—with the avowedaim of selling them. Surviving account books, almost exclusively those ofnoble families, confirm this practice. A receipt for payment informs us that in1659 Prince Giustiniani sold forty canne of cloth, “all infested with termitesand torn in various places.” Despite their poor state of preservation, theprince received 20 scudi for them, which was a respectable sum, consideringthat that the nine-diamond rosette of the young Marquise Santacroce soldfor 56.60 scudi. Similarly, a note in the account books of the Spada familyshows that the Marquis Orazio obtained 21 scudi from the sale of a damaskpavilion.

All objects—not only precious ones—were easily sold on the market, andthey retained some financial value even when they were used or ruined.This explains the ease with which they were employed as a direct means ofpayment, without ever having been transformed into money. Currency wasstill all too rare.

The Marquis Santacroce’s payment book demonstrates how to reducethe bills of various outfitters by giving something old in exchange for a newobject. Thanks to the sale of thirty-nine pairs of used and ratty breechesand seven cloth jackets, which the Marquis evidently no longer needed, hereduced his bill with the tailor Israele di Tivoli by 20 percent, from 33.12to 26.52 scudi. The same thing happened with the carriage maker who consentedto take back old carriage seats and thus lowered the price of the newones from 52 to 40 scudi. Naturally, the same was also true for the bills ofthe locksmith, the coppersmith, the bit maker, the saddle maker, and soforth.

Agricultural goods and foodstuffs discharged a monetary function to aneven greater extent than clothing and objects. Orvieto’s widow, who soldher garments, was a landowner and as such continually faced the problemof bringing her produce to market. Her willingness to send money to herson, who practiced law in Rome, was linked to the price she could get for thegrain, olive oil, and hemp her farms produced. As she wrote in one letter, forthe moment she could not send money because “everything here is so cheapthat it is not possible to sell anything.” “Wait for the bill of exchange sothat you could send money to him,” she commented in another letter. “Andindeed today I sold 296 lire of hemp because the paoli were thirty-seven forevery hundred, although our partner will get his share of this … and I havegotten ten scudi and ninety-five baiocchi, from which tomorrow it will benecessary to give the treasurer seven scudi.” “Today I sold four jugs of oliveoil because they were selling for thirty-four giulii per jug,” she announced ina third letter. The money she was sending, she declared in a fourth, “I tookfrom the wine I sold, and also partly from the pigs that were sold.”
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