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Domestic space and identity: artisans, shopkeepers and traders in sixteenth-century Siena

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2010

PAULA HOHTI
PAULA HOHTI*
Affiliation:
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, PO Box 4, FIN-00014University of Helsinki, Finland
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Abstract:

Historians of early modern Italy have traditionally viewed the city's public spaces, such as streets, quarters, taverns and marketplaces, as the chief locations in which claims to identity were launched into the broader urban community. Recent studies on the domestic interior, however, have shown that the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century urban space was much more complex. In this period, private urban houses became sites for an increasing range of social acitvities that varied from informal evening gatherings to large wedding banquets. Focusing on this ‘public’ dimension of the private urban house, this article explores how the middling classes of artisans and shopkeepers used the domestic space to construct identities and to facilitate social relations in sixteenth-century Siena. The aim is to show that in providing a setting for differing forms of economic and social activity, the urban home together with its objects and furnishings may have provided an increasingly important physical location for craftsmen, shop-owners and traders to negotaite individual and collective identities within the broader communities of the city.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 37 , Special Issue 3: Locating communities in the early modern Italian city , December 2010 , pp. 372 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 For early modern Italian artisan groups and issues of their occupation, status and internal stratification, see, for example, Cavallo, S., Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities (Manchester, 2007)Google Scholar; Romano, D., Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (Baltimore and London, 1987)Google Scholar; Datta, S., Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History (Aldershot, 2003), 96–12Google Scholar.

2 See Cohen, Elizabeth and Cohen, Thomas, ‘Open and shut: the social meanings of the cinquecento Roman house’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 9 (2001–02), 61–84CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

3 In his study of artisan ritual behaviour, David Rosenthal, for example, argues for the importance of the neighbourhood as a physical and rhetorical space in which artisan community could shape itself. See Rosenthal, D., ‘Big Piero. The empire of the meadow, and the parish of Santa Lucia: claiming neighbourhood in the early modern city’, Journal of Urban History, 32 (2006), 677–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For studies on identity in early modern Italy, see chapters in Trexler, R. (ed.), Persons in Groups: Social Behaviour as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Binghamton and New York, 1985)Google Scholar, particularly R.F.E. Weissman, ‘Reconstructing Renaissance sociology: the “Chicago School” and the study of Renaissance society’, 39–46.

4 For an exception, see Haines, M., ‘Artisan family strategies: proposals for research on the families of Florentine artists’, in Ciapelli, G. and Rubin, P. L. (eds.), Art, Memory and Family in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2000), 163–75Google Scholar. Haines points out that studies on the middling classes of artisans in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy are scarce because, on the one hand, technical difficulties involved in the study of non-patrician segments of society have discouraged projects involving families of the lower classes while, on the other, research on the labouring classes has typically concentrated upon the social and economic world of the city's most numerous workforce. For studies of the ‘middling sorts’ in early modern Britain, see, for example, Barry, J. and Brooks, C. (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, M.R., The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkley, Los Angeles and London, 1996)Google Scholar.

5 The economic and social status of sixteenth-century Sienese artisans and shopkeepers is discussed in P. Hohti, ‘Material culture, shopkeepers and artisans in sixteenth-century Siena’ (unpublished University of Sussex Ph.D. thesis, 2006). For the relationship between status and wealth in early modern Siena, see also Hicks, D., ‘Sources of wealth in Renaissance Siena: businessmen and landowners’, Bullettino senese di storia patria, 93 (1986), 17Google Scholar; Isaacs, A.K.C., ‘Popolo e monti nella Siena del primo cinquecento’, Rivista storica italiana, 82 (1970), 77Google Scholar.

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8 S. Cavallo, ‘The artisan's casa’, in Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis (eds.), At Home, 74–5. Historians generally assume that a separate dining table and table accessories were rare among the urban lower classes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. See, for example, Piponnier, F., ‘From hearth to table: late medieval cooking equipment’, in Flandrin, J.-L. and Montanari, M. (eds.), Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present (New York, 1999), 344Google Scholar.

9 The evidence comes principally from inventories of 82 Sienese artisan and shopkeeper households, included in the files of the local Office of the Wards. These are preserved in the Archivio di Stato (hereafter ASS), Siena, Curia del Placito [Carte processuali e inventari] (referred to hereafter as CDP), 648–748 (1500–53). Similar changes within the domestic interior have been identified for middling classes in later periods. See, in particular, Nenadic, S., ‘Middle-rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, Past and Present, 145 (1994), 122–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For consumer behaviour at the middling levels, see also Weatherill, L., ‘Consumer behaviour and social status in England, 1660–1750’, Continuity and Change, 1 (1986), 191–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For the social function of the sala, see, for example, Ajmar-Wollheim, ‘Sociability’, 206–21. Some events took place in the bedroom, especially if the occasion was connected with the birth of a child. See Musacchio, J.M., The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London, 1999)Google Scholar. Visitors were occasionally also taken to the bedroom. See Burke, P., The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 137–8Google Scholar.

11 See, for example, CDP 684, no. 10 (1532), 3r. Some inventories listed basins described as ‘da lavar mani’. See, for example, CDP 733, no. 240 (1550), 5r. For hand-washing rituals, see Piponnier, ‘From hearth to table’, 343–4.

12 For a relatively standard kitchen at this social level, see, for example, the inventory of the grocer Pietro, CDP 699, no. 40 (1537), 2r–3r. Different types of cooking utensils are discussed in Piponnier, ‘From hearth to table’, 339–46; for the foods consumed by the lower classes, see A. Grieco, ‘Food and social classes in late medieval and Renaissance Italy’, in Flandrin and Montanari (eds.), Food: A Culinary History, 302–12, and Grieco, ‘Meals’, in Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis (eds.), At Home, 251–2.

13 CDP, 733, no. 273 (1549), 6r–v.

14 Ibid., 6r–v.

15 Some of the most valuable objects were stored in the bedroom, because it was the place safest from thieves. See, for example, the chests of the bedroom in CDP 733, no. 273 (1549), 9v, which contain Una salettiera di marmo messa a oro and other valuables.

16 CDP 699, no. 18 (1537), 1v: Due tazzoni di cristallo dorati. The same inventory also includes two salettieri di cristallo (2r).

17 Cristallo-glass was originally imported from Venice. For the differences in price between common glass and luxury glass, see McCray, W.P., Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: The Fragile Craft (Aldershot, 1999), 77Google Scholar. At least one example of a crystal tazzone that circulated in Siena in the period, decorated with the Sienese Colombini arms, survives in the collections of the British Museum. See Thornton, D.: The Scholar in his Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London, 1997), 83Google Scholar. For Renaissance cristallo-glass, see also Lindow, J., ‘For use and display: selected furnishings and domestic goods in fifteenth-century Florentine interiors’, in Olson, R.J.M., Reilly, P.L. and Shepherd, R. (eds.), The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, special issue of Renaissance Studies, 19 (2005), 644–5Google Scholar.

18 For examples of decorations, see CDP 733, no. 273, 6r–v and CDP 733, no. 215 (1549), 1r; CDP 746, no. 457 (1551), 2r. For the presence of hangings, paintings and portraits in Renaissance interiors, see N. Penny, ‘Introduction: toothpicks and green hangings’, in Olson, Reilly and Shepherd (eds.), The Biography of the Object, 581–90.

19 CDP, 733, no. 240, 4v.

20 Ibid.

21 CDP 733, no. 273: 6v; CDP, 746, no. 457, 2r.

22 For credenze, see, for example, V. Taylor, ‘Banquet plate and Renaissance culture: a day in the life’, in Olson, Reilly and Shepherd (eds.), The Biography of the Object, 623, and Grieco, ‘Meals’, 249–50.

23 CDP, 725, no. 70 (1547), 1r–v.

24 CDP 706, no. 120 (1542), 2r: Uno bancho ad uso di credentia.

25 Corazzini, G.O. (ed.), Ricordanze di Barolomeo Masi calderaio fiorentino dal 1478 al 1526 (Florence, 1906), 245–6Google Scholar. For veglie and wedding celebrations at the lower levels of society, see Matthews-Grieco, ‘Marriage and sexuality’, 104–19.

26 R. Liefkes, ‘Tableware’, in Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis (eds.), At Home, 254.

27 Translation taken from Welch, E., ‘Public magnificence and private display: Giovanni Pontano's De splendore (1498) and the domestic arts’, Journal of Design History, 15 (2002), 4, 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pontano defined ‘conviviality’, or dining informally with family and friends in a relaxing atmosphere, as one of the most highly regarded domestic virtues associated with spending money. For the discussion of Renaissance palace interiors and the concept of splendour, see Lindow, J.R., The Renaissance Palace in Florence: Magnificence and Splendour in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Aldershot, 2007)Google Scholar. Ajmar-Wollheim demonstrates the care with which houses were prepared for visits. See her ‘Sociability’, particularly 208–9. For a contemporary visitor's response to an elite palace interior, see R. Hatfield, ‘Some unknown descriptions of the Medici Palace in 1459’, Art Bulletin, 52 (1970), 232–49.

28 For this point, see Cohen and Cohen, ‘The social meanings of the cinquecento Roman house’, 62.

29 The significance of family name and political position in Sienese society in the period are discussed, for example, in Isaacs, ‘Popolo e monti’, 49–69; Ascheri, M., ’Siena nel primo quattrocento: un sistema politico tra storia e storiografia’, in Ascheri, M. and Ciampoli, D. (eds.), Siena ed il suo territorio nel rinascimento (Siena, 1986), 1–55, especially 33–40Google Scholar. On the increased use of surnames in Siena, see also Cohn, S., Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800 (Baltimore, 1988), 146–58Google Scholar.

30 All four men appear in the Sienese tax registers without family names, calculated with the total wealth at 175–320 lire. See ASS, Lira 122 (1531): 124r (calzolaio 175 lire); ASS, Lira 132 (1549): 20r (barbiere 250 lire), ASS, Lira 132 (1548), no. 161 (rigattiere 320 lire); ASS, Lira 132 (1549) (sarto 300 lire).

31 For the Sienese Lira and the economic level artisans, see Hohti, P., ‘The inn-keeper's goods: the use and acquisition of household property in sixteenth-century Siena’, in O'Malley, M. and Welch, E. (eds.), The Material Renaissance (Manchester, 2007), 242–59Google Scholar; and Hohti, P., ‘Artisans, pawn-broking, and the circulation of material goods in sixteenth-century Siena’, in Ascheri, M., Mazzoni, G. and Nevola, F. (eds.), Siena nel rinascimento: l'ultimo secolo della repubblica, II. Arte, architettura e cultura, Acts of the International Conference, Siena (28–30 Sep. 2003 and 16–18 Sep. 2004) (Siena, 2009), 271–81Google Scholar. For the origins and general character of the Sienese Lira, see also L. Banchi, ‘La lira, la tavola delle possessioni e le preste nella Repubblica di Siena, Archivio storico italaino, series 2, 7, 2 (1868), 53–88; Catoni, G. and Piccini, G., ‘Famiglie e redditi nella Lira senese del 1453’, in Comba, R., Piccini, G. and Pinto, G. (eds.), Strutture familiari, epidemie, migrazioni nell'Italia medievale (Naples, 1984), 291–304Google Scholar.

32 For the furnishings of his shop, see CDP 733, no. 240, 1r–2r.

33 CDP, 746, no. 457, 5r–8v.

34 For a discussion of artisans’ income, see Hohti, ‘The inn-keeper's goods’, 247–53.

35 CDP 692, no. 3 (1535), 1r.

36 Bonelli-Gandolfi, C., ‘La legislazione suntuarie negli ultimi centocinquanta anni della repubblica’, Studi senesi, 10, 35 (1920), 243–75 and 334–98Google Scholar.

37 For second-hand objects with the previous owner's coat-of-arms, see Matchette, ‘To have and have not’, 714. The meaning and regulation of coats-of-arms in the Renaissance is discussed in Brown, P. Fortini, ‘Behind the walls: the material culture of Venetian elites’, in Romano, D. and Martin, J. (eds.), Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore, 2000), 316Google Scholar.

38 CDP 725, no. 70, 1r: una spalliera di tela dipenta con sue arme cioe con arme di detto Girolamo di braccia 6 in circa; CDP, 733, no. 240, 4v: uno spechio quadro con armatura dorato and uno tondo da riscappata con arme inverniciato; CDP 746, no. 457, 2r: arme dorate della sua casa. Their cases were not unique: see also, for example, CDP 725, no. 142 (1548), 1v: Una tela con larme di cristofano e di fratia da tener sopra la credentia.

39 Revealed by both fiscal sources and baptismal records. ASS, Lira, 112 (1509), 37v, and ASS, Biccherna, 1134, 24v.

40 Cristoforo Messibugo, a high official at the Este court, for example, recommended that silver ewers and basins should be placed at the most important tables, while bronze and other cheaper wares could be used for the rest. Liefkes, ‘Tableware’, 255. For the ways in which hierarchies were expressed in social situations, see Ajmar-Wollheim, ‘Sociability’, 208–9. Hierarchies were also expressed by the diversity of food, see Grieco, ‘Food and social classes’, in Flandrin and Montanari (eds.), Food: A Culinary History, 307.

41 For normative texts devoted specifically to good manners, see D. Romagnoli, ‘“Mind your manners”: etiquette at the table’, in Flandrin and Montanari (eds.), Food: A Culinary History, 330–8. Popular versions in the vernacular, based on manuals of conduct, may also have been circulated in the sixteenth century. See Bell, R., How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago and London, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Corazzini (ed.), Ricordanze di Bartolomeo Masi, 245–56. The flute-player Paulo also had a table with plinths to be ‘raised up and down’, possibly according to the importance and the rank of the person who was seated on such a chair. See CDP 722, no. 4 (1546), 1r.

43 Brenda Preyer, for example, shows that colleagues were often invited at home for meals. See Preyer, ‘Planning for visitors at Florentine palaces’, 371. For the meaning of personal relations and social networks in the Renaissance period, see, for example, Weissman, ‘Reconstructing Renaissance sociology’, 39–46. The importance of credit relations in the early modern period is discussed by Muldrew, C. in The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the links between identity and social networks in Renaissance Italy, see Romano, Patricians and Popolani.

44 According to his inventory, he was married to Mona Calidonia . . . figlia di Agniolo Berti; see CDP 725, no. 70, 1r. For the Berti family and their connections to political factions, see Ilari, Maria (ed.), Famiglie, località, istituzioni di Siena e del suo territorio: indice di armi e di fonti documentarie dell'Archivio di stato di Siena (Siena, 2002), 45Google Scholar.

45 Dennis Romano discusses how Venetian servants used luxury goods to create social ties. See Romano, , ‘Aspects of patronage in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993), 712–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.