Ornamentalism: the art of Renaissance accessories

Abstract

Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, edited by Bella Mirabe11a. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. 342. Hardcover $75.00.Reviewer: Erika T. LinPhysical artifacts have long been studied by art historians, but in the last decade or two, interest in early modern material culture has experienced its own Renaissance in literary scholarship as well. The thirteen essays included in this lavishly illustrated book focus on that subset of objects deemed accessories: jewelry, gloves, handkerchiefs, ruffs, shoes, veils, pearls, and many other fascinating adornments to the body. The collection demonstrates that, far from extraneous or unnecessary, these items were essential to early modern subject formation and social life. Moreover, the volume explicitly interrogates what counts as an accessory by including investigations of objects not usually understood as bodily ornaments: scissors, busks, codpieces, dildos, document seals, and even boys. Tracing the social life of things and offering new readings of both canonical and less well-known literary accounts of objects, Ornamentalism usefully explores the production and circulation of accessories and their textual representations.The book is divided into five sections. Part 1, Dressing Up, centers on questions of fashion and beauty. The opening chapter, by Evelyn Welch, studies the increasing popularity of perfumed gloves, earrings, buttons, and other scented accessories in Renaissance Italy. Historicizing smell and making a case for early modern anxiety about the permeability of the body, this essay serves as a useful introduction to the volume as a whole since it connects the study of ornament to issues that have animated recent scholarship on the senses. Eugenia Paulicelli's chapter builds on and elaborates this account of accessories by describing the history of the veil in Cinquecento Italy. Once linked to the Madonna, the veil later came to be associated not with chastity but with sexual seduction. The third and final chapter in this section takes up and extends these questions of female social status. In her account of the handkerchief in early modern England and Italy, Bella Mirabella traces the napkin's contradictory cultural meanings as both a mark of refined good taste and a receptacle for bodily fluids associated with the lower classes.Part 2, Erotic Attachments, explicitly foregrounds issues of gender and sexuality in objects that were detachable. In Busks, Bodices, and Bodies, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass describe the rigid supports inside ladies' undergarments on which verses were inscribed by men to those they courted. Women, in this account, are both the readers and the wearers of intimate love poetry. Will Fisher's fascinating examination of codpieces, originally published in his 2006 book, maps out the ideological implications of material forms. Bag-type genital coverings, he demonstrates, evoked the scrotum and were associated with earlier notions of manhood as based in reproduction and lineage, whereas later codpieces were stiffer, phallic protuberances that corresponded to emergent discourses of masculinity as requiring sexual dominance over women. Liza Blake's analysis of dildos rounds out the essays in this section by showing that early modern strap-ons were not prosthetic penises but independent instruments of pleasure, whose textual representations mirrored their material function through the literary pleasures they produced.Part 3, Taking Accessories Seriously, considers the political and emotional power of accessories. Opening this section is Karen Raber's essay, which continues the feminist investments of previous chapters by demonstrating how Elizabeth I mobilized traditional associations of pearls with chastity even as she established a subversive counterdiscourse linking them to female self-determination. Catherine Richardson usefully expands the conversation to nonelite experiences by examining the varied ways in which jewelry exchange was crucial to both social identity and interpersonal affective ties among the middling sort. …