At Home in Renaissance Italy

"This is a beautiful book that was published in connection with an exhibition that took place in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2006. The title – At Home in Renaissance Italy – suggests immediately the attempt of the curators to ground what we think of as being the Renaissance within the concrete environment of the home. This isn’t the traditional exhibition that shows you great works of art, masterpieces, oil on canvas – it’s not that kind of exhibition at all. It’s an exhibition that brings to centre stage people’s possessions – clothes, beds, chairs, chests, cupboards, armour, lighting, mirrors. It shines particular light on women – for example, the contents of the Renaissance marriage chest. (When a woman got married, she took to her new home and to her husband literally a great big chest, what we might call the trousseau, which was full of white chemises, table linen, napkins, sheets, and so on.) And so it gives a really good sense of the different value of these possessions in a different age. It also spotlights children – usually left out of the history of the Renaissance. In this book you will learn all about a Renaissance babywalker. One of the things I really like about this book is that it brings women and children into the picture. That’s a good question! We’re talking about the noble home – and in fact, the exhibition which this book came out of actually recreated the piano nobile – the noble floor or main storey – of a Renaissance palace. Not entirely specific, but probably either in Venice or in Florence, or with mixtures of the two. And I suppose, much as I love the project and much as I love the book that came out of it, if I wanted to push the story a step further, it would be out of the elite home, out of the noble home, and into the more ordinary Renaissance home."