By Giulia Graziano
From the 5th October 2006 until the 7th of January 2007, the Victoria & Albert Museum hosted the exhibition At Home in Renaissance Italy that we have visited with the privilege of being guided by the curators Marta Ajmar Wollheim and Flora Dennis. As they have explained, the aim of the exhibition is that of establishing a contact with the reality of domestic daily life in Renaissance Italy. This is, in fact, an aspect which has often been shadowed by the great works of art of the period. The exhibition thus represents an attempt, through the display of objects of common use and domestic art, to reveal the role that the domestic sphere and the time spent in it played in the Renaissance. According to the curators, this has been possible by reconstructing the details of daily actions, or domestic “rituals”, and through the right disposition of the items in the exhibition space.
The exhibition is thought as a visit into a noble Renaissance house through the most important spaces for the family: the sala or living room, where guests were hosted and parties and meals were organised in special occasions; the cucina or kitchen, were servants used to work incessantly; the camera da letto or bedroom, an intimate family space associated with events like birth and death; and the scrittoio o studio, a uniquely male space reserved to the pleasure of studying and reading, but also business. For each space two versions have been reconstructed that reflect respectively the Tuscan style and the Venetian style, that during the Renaissance and after remained the most influential artistic and decorative currents in Europe.
Furniture, paintings and objects are displayed in the exhibition according to a fragmentary style that reflects the actual difficulties encountered by the curators in finding original pieces of Renaissance Tuscan and Venetian furniture. Renaissance style, in fact, had so much influence in the following centuries, that many copies have replaced original items of their time.
The modality of the display also aims at showing the artistic nature of objects of daily use like plates, linen, mirrors, pots, books, carpets and tapestries. In Renaissance houses we can find some of the ancestors of modern objects of common use, but the relation between functionality and art is very tight. Indeed, the distinction between decorative art for domestic spaces and fine art for public spaces had not yet taken place. In parallel, it is necessary to rethink the relationship between domestic and public spaces: nowadays we normally conceive the two as fundamentally separated but the two are strictly connected, instead, and in the Renaissance the exchange between the two domains is constantly highlighted by artistic work.
Art does not have only an aesthetic function: Flora Dennis points out that the aim of the exhibition is that of revealing the contextual significance of artistic works.
Art is part of the Renaissance home, and in this space it carries specific functions that go beyond the simply decorative one. First, art stands as an indicator of social status as it reflects the continuity of the family across time and space. Moreover, art has, especially in religious images, a function of devotion and protection. Religious rituals and prayers are private actions, and of everyday life: each hour has its prayer and each event (birth, marriage, death) has its ritual. It is thus through the right placement of objects in the space that it is possible to understand their meaning and value in their original context. In this way, the statue of John the Baptist, originally kept in Palazzo Girolami in Florence on a simple pedestal, reveals its real nature, its natural glance, only when laid high on the wall fountain of the Tuscan sala: its glance, from introvert and melancholic as it is seen on a low pedestal, opens up revealing a smiling and protective expression.
“Looking at art in its context is fundamental to understand its deep meaning” says Flora Dennis. Reconstructing the context means determining the role of an object in space and time. The statue of John the Baptist was once put up high in the sala – explains Flora Dennis – and this enables us to understand its protective role towards the family. Another example is that of the camera da letto or bedroom: a space open only to the family and, just in occasions like birth and death, to intimate friends. The bedroom, in fact, and in particular the bed, is a fundamental point of connection between past and present: it has the role of representing the continuity of the family in time.
The exhibition fully respects the spirit with which art was conceived in the Renaissance by switching the focus from why things are what they are, to how things are what they are. It is, indeed, the processes and the modalities through which we live our time and space that ultimately reveal who we are and the true meaning of our actions.
The exhibition has been visited by the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano during his visit to London.
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