Medals and Chamber Pots for Faustina Bordoni: Celebrity and Material Culture in Early Eighteenth‐Century Italy

Abstract

AbstractIn 1723, following an opera production in Florence, two sets of medals were made there in honour of the singer Faustina Bordoni. Among the reactions to these medals in Bologna were satirical poetry and a set of ceramic chamber pots that carried depictions of the medals and a scathing Latin text. The article analyses these artefacts, the various descriptions and drawings of them and reports about them for what they can tell us about the intertwined issues of celebrity, the status of (female) singers, the circulation of information and the interaction between objects and words in early eighteenth‐century Italy.