Jacqueline Marie Musacchio

Although we live in an era when vast sums of money are lavished on wedding festivities, we are not unique: in Renaissance Italy, middle- and upper-class families spent enormous amounts on marriages that were intended to establish or consolidate the status and lineage of one or both of the respective families.  This lavishly illustrated book explores the social and economic background to marriage in Renaissance Florence and discusses the objects—paintings, sculptures, furniture, jewelry, clothing, and household items—associated with marriage and ongoing family life. By analyzing urban palaces and their furnishings, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio shows how families interacted with art on a daily basis. This began at marriage, when the bride brought a dowry and the groom provided the home and its furnishings. It continued with the accumulation of objects during the marriage and the birth of children. And it ended with the redistribution of these same objects at death. Through the examination of art, documents, literature, and more, this lively book traces the life cycle of the Florentine Renaissance family through the art and objects that surrounded them in their home.

Childbirth in Renaissance Italy was encouraged, celebrated, and commemorated with a wide range of objects, from wooden trays and bowls and maiolica wares to paintings, sculpture, clothing, linens, and food. This groundbreaking book examines for the first time the appearance, meaning, and function of these childbirth objects. It also describes the social and cultural context in which they were created, purchased, and bestowed. In doing so, the book offers many insights into Renaissance daily life.  Jacqueline Marie Musacchio draws on surviving works of art as well as contemporary and largely unpublished inventories, diaries, and letters, to illustrate the strong bond between the art and rituals of childbirth in Renaissance Italy. She describes a family-centered society seeking to rebuild itself in the wake of the catastrophic population decline wrought by the Black Death. Birth objects were symbols of fertility that encouraged pregnancy. But they were also rewards for procreation that congratulated the new mother. To demonstrate this, Musacchio investigates how objects were given, lent, bought, or commissioned as part of marriage and birth rituals, and how particular images and objects were regarded as aids to pregnancy and birth. For a variety of reasons, she concludes that childbirth objects served as necessary mediating devices between the real and ideal worlds.

George Eliot’s Romola (1863), a carefully researched work of historical fiction set in Savonarolan Florence, appealed to many Anglo-Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its detailed descriptions of Renaissance Florence, Romola served as a sort of guidebook, its narrative providing both real and virtual travelers with an informative and easy-to-follow itinerary. But an especially popular edition, published by Tauchnitz in Leipzig beginning in 1863, further engaged travelers, who extra-illustrated it with photographs of the popular art and monuments that were part of Elliot’s narrative. Examination of dozens of these volumes, as well as contemporary sales accounts, diaries, letters, and popular press, reveals that some travelers chose each photograph individually, while others bought pre-assembled sets; the volumes were then fitted with decorative endpapers and specially bound with stamped and gilded parchment or vellum in local stationary shops.  Less expensive than a painting or sculpture, and more personalized and portable, these volumes allowed travelers to carry home Renaissance Florence, as a souvenir of their journey to be paged through for years, as a statement of their erudition to share with others who might not make such a journey themselves, and, of course, as a reflection of the market for Italian Renaissance art and culture in the late nineteenth century.

Although Boston-born sculptor Florence Freeman (1836–83) is little known today, she spent most of her career as a member of the Anglo-American community in Rome. The discovery of a chimneypiece she exhibited at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876—one of only three identifiable sculptures by her hand—is the basis for an analysis of her life and work, her connections with other artists and with actress and benefactor Charlotte Cushman, and her death, demonstrating how a woman could position herself to have a fulfilling life as an artist in late nineteenth-century Rome.

Working in the physics laboratory at Wellesley College in early 1896, a team of women faculty and students, led by Sarah Frances Whiting, carried out some of the first successful x-ray experiments in the United States.  Whiting's experiments were the first in an undergraduate institution, as well as the first by a woman, and they reveal much about the role of Wellesley in the history of science education.  Photographs made from the original glass plates were recently rediscovered in a campus building slated for demolition; they are published here for the first time.

This essay looks at the life of Jane M. Healey Jackson (1829-1916), the wife of sculptor John Adams Jackson (1825-1879).  Unlike the dealers selling historical art analyzed elsewhere in this volume, Jane actively cultivated and entertained a lively social network in order to promote her husband’s career as a contemporary artist to American travelers in Florence and citizens in the Boston area and elsewhere.  With evidence from letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and a rich autograph album, this essay tells the story of a purposeful domestic life in concert with her husband’s profession, and as such it can serve as a potential model for the study of the many other women abroad who have escaped notice. It illustrates both the network and the endeavors of a sculptor’s wife abroad, working to promote her husband's career and their social status in Florence and beyond.

The English aesthete Sir Horace Walpole (1717—97) is well known for advancing the eighteenth-century Gothic revival in England through his architectural and literary efforts. In 1747 he bought and began to rebuild Strawberry Hill, his home in Twickenham outside London; its crenellations, turrets, and stained glass derive ultimately from earlier Gothic buildings and stood in sharp contrast to the solid classicism of contemporary English architecture. He employed similarly fantastic textual elements in his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) and play The Mysterious Mother (1768), with their disconcerting but decidedly Gothic themes of prophetic death and mistaken identities on one hand and incest on the other. This essay examines a related and in fact earlier aspect of Walpole’s Gothic sensibility: his attraction to Florence and its Medici rulers, particularly Grand Duchess Bianca Cappello (1548—1587), lover then wife of Francesco I de’Medici. Although Walpole’s attraction to Bianca echoed, in some ways, that of his contemporaries, the multiple objects he acquired as tangible manifestations of that attraction demonstrate the especially strong hold her strikingly Gothic biography exerted on him throughout his life.

Like so many late nineteenth-century New Englanders, the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts were fascinated by Italy. Many of the women artists who went to Italy before, during, and after the American Civil War came from Salem, including the sisters Abigail Osgood (1823-1913) and Mary Elizabeth (1825-1902) Williams, known collectively as the Misses Williams.  The sisters were middle class and unmarried, and needed their art to be self-supporting; Italian travel allowed them to create complex paintings and projects that culminated in the establishment of a successful studio selling Italian art and objects from their Salem home in 1886.  They created their own paintings, sought out buyers, entered exhibitions, accumulated objects, and even researched art history, much of it with a focus on supplying middle-class women like themselves with fashionable objects to fill their homes.  Their success as women who made and marketed art for and to other women distinguishes them both at home and abroad and demonstrates a new and gendered market that promoted an understanding of Italy and its cultural history in the greater Boston area.

In Florence as elsewhere in early modern Europe, love and desire were rarely part of marriage decisions. Attitudes toward the adulterous behavior that often resulted from these decisions were reflected and reinforced in texts like Celio Malespini’s Ducento Novelle (1609). His cryptic reference to an unidentified palace hung with horns and strewn with excrement builds a context for late sixteenth-century Florentine
attitudes toward adulterous wives and cuckolded husbands. Outside evidence proves that this palace belonged to the Venetian noblewoman Bianca Cappello. Born in 1548, she eloped to Florence with the socially inferior Piero Buonaventuri, conducted a fourteen-year- long affair with Francesco de’Medici, bore his son while Francesco was still married to his first wife, and finally married him in 1578 only to be quite
possibly poisoned by her brother-in- law Ferdinando in 1587. So it is no surprise that both scholars and the general public gravitate to the sensational when discussing Bianca, from the time of Malespini onward. His casual reference to her defiled palace, implying her prostitution and her husband Piero’s impotence, helps us better understand late sixteenth-century Florentine attitudes toward adultery and cuckoldry.

This article and the associated maps and timeline use Anne Whitney’s letters as the framework for an examination of the art and life of an American artist abroad. It illustrates Whitney’s first sixteen months of travel through these and other contemporary sources to visualize her movement and activities through space and time. This project seeks to revise the impression of Henry James’s “white, marmorean flock” as a collective and look at Whitney as an individual with unique reactions to Italy, informed not only by the celebrated works of art and architecture around her but also by the experience of life abroad in all of its complexity.

The sculptor Lorado Taft (1860-1936) wanted all Americans to experience great works of art in their school and museum collections.  But Taft also had a very particular definition of art; for him, art meant sculpture in the classical tradition by the great Ancient and Renaissance masters.  He expressed this pedagogical agenda with great enthusiasm and persistence over his long career and he took part in a variety of popular activities to bring art to the wider population.  Primary among these were his many lectures and publications, as well as his never-built Dream Museum of plaster casts, his peep shows, or dioramas, of famous artists’ studios, and his children’s play, The Gates of Paradise.  With the use of such diverse media – literary, visual, and performative – Taft sought to elevate understanding of the past as a means to cultural betterment for schoolchildren, using the collecting and display of art to make a better world.

Despite the great emphasis on the material culture of Renaissance Florence – in both surviving objects and documents, as well as secondary literature and, by extension, this essay – it is important to remember that the basic furnishings of urban dwellings were similar throughout much of early modern Europe.  While allowing for changes due to regional materials and taste, the increased movement of both objects and artisans made these similarities even more widespread.  They provided a recognizable and eminently appropriate setting for the great emphasis on family life that flourished during this time.  As the examples cited here indicate, these were functional and often didactic objects, and a great many were also aesthetically pleasing.  They enforced familial and personal identity, social standing, and domestic roles; without them, our understanding of family life, and especially the lives of the women who lived so closely with these objects, would be much less vivid.

Emma Conant Church (1831–1893) was an American artist who had a successful career painting both original works of art and Old Master copies in the United States and Europe. She became part of the sizable foreign artist communities in Paris and Rome, where American artists, and particularly female artists, attracted much attention. In the era before originals and photographs were widely available and affordable, women like Church enjoyed great success – and an emancipated lifestyle – by catering their artistic production to the needs of travelers who sought out souvenirs of their time abroad.

If the Renaissance truly was, as Jacob Burckhardt famously alleged, a remarkably accepting time for bastards,  we should know far more about figures like Antonio de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of Florentine Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici and the woman who became his second wife, Grand Duchess Bianca Cappello. Yet Antonio has been only a minor figure in Medici studies. He does, however, become more three-dimensional when seen within the context and contents of his home, the Casino at San Marco in Florence. The Casino contained a performance space, the setting for the numerous entertainments with which Antonio was associated, as well as a wide range of objects, from alchemical supplies and porcelain plates to rhinoceros horns and a vast array of portraits, both Medicean and more broadly European. The activities that took place at the Casino, and the objects that filled it, reflected Antonio’s life as an impresario, experimenter, and aesthete, a man who was denied the ducal throne but who nonetheless impressed and influenced those around him. The Casino was critical to this; it gave him a way to manipulate his public identity and affirm his princely identity to the outside world.

During the Fascist era large families were encouraged by the Italian State, and in particular by its leader, Benito Mussolini, through a carefully orchestrated and meticulously documented campaign that involved public policy, propaganda, and art. Much has been made of Mussolini’s demographic legislation, and its impact – or lack thereof  – on the Italian population.  But modern scholars have overlooked one important aspect of this campaign: the brief revival, beginning in 1938, of the Renaissance custom of presenting new mothers with tin-glazed earthenware, or maiolica. As in the Renaissance, this maiolica was occasioned by Italy’s population crisis. However, the Renaissance tradition was domestic; family members presented maiolica to encourage, celebrate, and commemorate pregnancy and childbirth, and to serve as decorative yet functional objects during the birth ritual. The Fascist tradition, on the other hand, was public, and part of the State-sanctioned activities promoting large families.

Maiolica, or tin-glazed earthenware, flourished in 15th- and 16th-century Italy. Marvels of Maiolica explores the rich history of these beautiful wares and the key role they played in Renaissance society. Apothecary jars, serving plates, bowls, vases, and other pieces were often painted with scenes from classical mythology, history, or religion and were a testament to their owner’s erudition. Maiolica was also used for floor tiles, devotional objects, and gifts to celebrate betrothals, weddings, or births. With color illustrations of highlights from the Corcoran’s William A. Clark Collection, this authoritative book is addressed to students and scholars alike.