The Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) was one of the founders of the Jesuit mission in China. When in China, Ricci discovered that if he presented himself dressed as a priest he was not afforded social legitimacy in elite and court society.1 So he decided to dress as a Confucian scholar, thus ‘translating’ his social position into Chinese. This reference to dress is of a piece with Ricci’s work as the first translator of the Confucian classics into Latin and of Western classics, such as Euclid’s Elements (c. 300 bce), into Chinese in collaboration with the writer, mathematician, and politician Xu Guangqi (1562–1633). As a ‘Western Confucian’, Ricci embodied a hybrid identity where dress acted as the material mediator of cultures, locations, and geographies (Figures 8.1 and 8.2).

There is a scene in Il Gattopardo ('The Leopard', 1958), the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), in which the character of Don Calogero, who represents the new aspiring bourgeois class, is invited for the first time to dinner at the Prince of Salina's summer residence. The Prince, who is also the narrator of the novel, describes Don Calogero's arrival with a high degree of stylistic virtuosity. Don Calogero - we are told - is the only guest who is not appropriately dressed for the occasion. In fact,he is wearing a formal frock-coat since he wants to show the aristocratic Salina family that he is wealthy enough to afford one. The Prince, however, is wearing an afternoon suit, as he has always done at his rural retreat in order not to embarrass the locals. Don Calogero's outfit is a real 'catastrophe' not so much for its fine fabric as for its cut, which reveals his stinginess and lack of style as he has chosen an incompetent local tailor instead of relying, as the true aristocrats did, on a more expert and expensive tailor based in England. In addition to this fault, the Prince remarks that not only are Don Calogero's shoes wrong but his shirt-collar is shapeless, details which act as clues to his defining trait: his hopeless lack of refined manners and elegance, despite his newly acquired wealth.

The Macchiaioli and the unification of Italy

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the term 'Italy' was an abstract concept that intellectuals and artists since Dante had used to describe their imagined homeland rather than a political reality. The first group of artists who presented themselves as linked to the nation were the Tuscan Macchiaioli, whose emergence was made possible by the Prima Esposizione Italiana ('First Italian Exhibition') that was held in Florence in 1861, a matter of months after unification. (The name 'Macchiaioli' was taken from macchia which means 'sketch' or 'sketch technique'.) It was at this exhibition that, for the first time, artists who were living and working in different parts of the Italian peninsula were grouped together. As is well known, the centuries-long fragmentation of the Italian states and the numerous foreign dominations had signifi- cantly contributed to the absence of a 'national' art or culture. Moreover, the divided state of the peninsula did not facilitate exchanges between different regions. Not surprisingly, many nineteenth-century artists who, with unification, wished to expand their boundaries and horizons considered Italian life and art to be marked by cultural provincialism.