The reviewer apologizes for the tardiness of this contribution.

In Luxury and the Ethics of Greed, editor Catherine Kovesi gathers a multidisciplinary group of scholars to probe the “complex world of aspirational consumption” on the early modern Italian peninsula (xvi). The site, the chronology, and the type of consumption: all three framings entail significant historiographical claims, which Kovesi presents in her introduction. If the claims are not novel, they nonetheless have a certain weight when presented together. Kovesi stakes out the primacy of the peninsula, observing “that, within the boundaries of western Europe, Italy...might be considered the cradle of modern consumer society” (xviii). [1] To underline the novelty of the Quattrocento, Kovesi lays out semantic evidence of conceptual change, [2] and builds on that to contest long-standing chronologies associated with work by John Brewer and Neil McKendrick, Jan DeVries, and Maxine Berg. Finally, focusing on the cultural economy of aspirational consumption, Kovesi locates the novelty of Renaissance luxury in the expansive purchasing power of artisans and merchants, a power understood as a threat by the elites who still, despite the editor’s best efforts, command space in this collection. Both the act of purchasing and the objects purchased “encode complex cultural meanings” about status, role, and ethics (xx). The result is a gloriously thick reading of Renaissance material culture, the nourishing of desire, and the emotional affordances of objects.

Kovesi’s four titled sections move smartly from verbal representations of consumption, where moral evaluations are always in play; through material embodiments in an entrancing variety of objects, where ethical dilemmas are mostly implicit; to the artisanal skills, moral challenges, and public relations contests that animated fake luxuries. The reader’s journey through the volume is correspondingly complex, as the unstable semantics and riotous materiality of “luxury” demand. The ingathered authors do not enunciate a unitary cultural, political, economic, or ethical resolution of the luxury “problematic.” Rather, not only the volume’s contents, but also its very structure set up occasions for dialogue that promise to make Luxury and the Ethics of Greed of interest to both europeanists and globalists.

Section I, entitled “Luxury and Greed: Defining the Terms,” stands apart from the others by concentrating on semantic change and continuity. That structural plan--that the volume should move from phenomena of language, to human relations with stuff, to conclude with the complexities of fake stuff--is a key indicator of the collection’s provocative intelligence. In her introduction, Kovesi alerts readers to luxury’s complex history (xviii). Now, in the opening article, she qualifies that history as ‘squalid’ (4). “Luxury” (luxus, luxuria) was for ancient Romans a derogatory term that identified the vulgar excess of social upstarts. In medieval Latin, the word luxus disappeared, and the discursive field of luxuria narrowed radically to “lust,” chiefly sodomy (5). In the long fifteenth-century, that medieval use persisted as humanists in Florence recovered the classical meaning and put it to use to justify sumptuary laws and moral judgements. [3] The humanists also recast the concept as positive, and even, on occasion, as the equivalent of morally respectable terms such as “splendor” and “magnificence.” This linguistic instability reflected confusion, as the changing economy created new patterns of consumption that “needed to be defined, categorized, theorized, theologized, and contained where possible” (4). We might wish that the Accademia della Crusca had prepared and repeatedly revised a long dictionary entry, but Kovesi concludes her first chapter by noting the Accademia’s repeated refusals over the course of the seventeenth century to admitlusso into the Vocabolario.

Dante wrote before the re-invention of the word lusso and his use of lussuria is completely medieval. Nonetheless, the commanding place of greed in the Commedia makes the poem a prime site for display of the moral dilemmas thrown up by the changing economy. Lino Pertile’s contribution, “Dante’s She-Wolf: Luxury and Greed in the Divine Comedy,” opens with a master class on Dante’s worldview. Pertile then articulates in two powerful close readings the ideology and anger behind Dante’s attack on the grasping political ambitions of the “new men,” and on their wives’ corresponding loss of traditional female virtues. Through the figure of his ancestor Cacciaguida, the poet yearns for the revival of an aristocratic world, for the “pre-capitalism” of feudal society (40-41). The critical importance of this chapter--a point too obvious for Pertile to mention but perhaps worth pondering here--is that intimate acquaintance with the vernacularCommedia blossomed right across the Renaissance: the commentaries did not stop. Dante’s “conservative, even reactionary” stance of c. 1300 haunted the long Quattrocento’s approach to the “new market forces” (41).

Peter Howard’s proximity to Pertile makes “Language of Luxury in Renaissance Florence,” a gift for the engaged reader--another instance of the volume’s craft. Set out, like Pertile’s, in four parts, Howard’s essay traces the emergence of a new “ethics of wealth” by following trails of discursive “slippage.” His examples, provocatively chosen, include sermons by Florentine archbishop Antonino Pierozzi, OP; one dialogue by layman Poggio Bracciolini (the well-known De avaritia) and another by Lateran Canon Timoteo Maffei (an untitled defense of Cosimo de’ Medici’s extravagance); and layman Niccolò Machiavelli’s “second thoughts” about wealth and display in Chapter XVI of ThePrince. So carefully traced, these slippages grow electric once Machiavelli joins the conversation, especially since he neglects the expected vocabulary. The Middle Ages recognized that magnificence “encouraged risk”: does Machiavelli foresee the ruler courting martyrdom in his ill-advised “sumptuousness” (65)?

In Section II, “Consuming Luxury,” considerations of class and gender drive four essays, two on food and drink, and two on clothing. In the initial essay, “’Taste of Luxury’ in Renaissance Italy: In Practice and in the Literary Imagination,” Laura Giannetti rejects the received wisdom that certain foods were forbidden to peasants, whose rude “taste” couldn’t appreciate them. Literature, she proposes, suggests otherwise. The history of taste, especially as traced in comic genres, is revelatory: Giannetti proposes that class hostilities, by bowing to social accommodations, subsume changing values. Thus, literary sources allow us to see the “subtleties, tensions, and rough edges” of prescriptive texts (90). Giannetti positions herself right on the border of discourse and matter.

Rebecca Earle does, too, as she neatly solves a historical puzzle in “Chocolate in the Historical Imagination.” How did chocolate come to be perceived as a luxury (i.e., a moral danger) to nuns in Mexico City, when evidence shows its use across the social spectrum in both the Americas and Europe? The answer rests on the “triple association” of chocolate with Catholicism (sensuality), Spain (laziness), and women (sexual excess) in the minds of French and British observers. Noting the appearance of chocolate ice cream in Naples, [4] Earle urges that Spanish Italy be brought fully into the story of moralized chocolate.

Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli focuses on extravagant tastes in fashion. Her “rare and precious” archival sources describe decorative dresses owned by middle-class and upper middle-class women. Drawing on documents that record women’s applications for permission to keep their beloved finery, Muzzarelli reports on the requisite descriptions of the permitted garments. But what descriptions! What weaknesses of our imaginations they reveal! What heartbreaking bonfires of the vanities must have occurred to ensure that none of the literally unimaginable and inescapably eccentric splendors catalogued in these fourteenth-century records remains, even in artwork! It is a lovely bonus of this essay that just like Earle’s contribution on chocolate (above), and Salzburg’s on luxuries of the poor (below), Muzzarelli makes absence a spur not only to deeper archival study but also to renewed reflection on historical method.

The Venetian res publica of nobles was transfixed by conspicuous consumption in the form of official robes. In “The Pressures of Magnificence: Senatorial Dress in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Jola Pellumbi documents the economic hardship of dressing a dogal, which required the“lavish use of material” and “costly fabric,” not to mention expensive red dyes and “ermine, sable, miniver, and minx” fur linings (136-137), all intended to “distinguish the patricians who were permitted to enter the Venetian Senate from those who were excluded” (139). The “unapologetic[] superflu[ity]” of senatorial sleeves, in particular, distinguished “a dogal” apparel. Thus, Venice reframed the rankest luxury as the most compelling necessity. Because evidence of the robes’ extravagance is readily available in period portraits, Pellumbi focuses on the witness of household inventories. There, she notes, the word “luxury” does not appear: it was, perhaps, too “precarious” (161).

The three essays gathered in Section III, “Disseminating Luxury,” take on gender and class. Rosa Salzburg provides the volume’s sole foray into the (only apparent) oxymoron of impoverished luxury, defined simply as “indulgence in non-essential goods” by the poor (169). Salzburg turns to her signature subject, life in the piazza, where street-sellers disseminated “affordable luxuries” such as ribbons, combs, soap, rosaries, and even printed paper fans (175), and where public healers, street-singers, and mountebanks performed a “spectacle” of luxury (178-179). Her invaluable archive, the matriculation records of the Florentine guild of doctors and spice dealers (1492-1600), identifies the street-sellers, allowing Salzburg to sketch a general profile of a mostly male, itinerant group, with a desperate fringe of the elderly, the young, the disabled, and the female destitute. Salzburg cautions that the majority, undocumented, “operated outside guild control” (181) and so remain invisible to us. She invites readers to imagine “the broader experience of increasing luxury consumption” (184), as wealthy and poor shared public spaces where radically different economies of acquisition played out.

Timothy Wilson, analyzing the success of a novel art form, the “historiated” pottery vessel (295), hypothesizes that “when we find [heraldic] impaled arms on a domestic object, the starting point, almost the default supposition, should be that a woman may have been the recipient or commissioner” (211). In a sure-footed, exciting argument, Wilson recovers the role of elite women in fostering and disseminating such high-end pottery as a “serious art form.” Maiolica was, he proves, a specifically female area of artistic patronage and intimate gift-giving. Wilson even includes a lesson on how to read coats of arms for gender (see esp. 202-204 for Wilson’s admirable care with these gendered attributions). Maiolica gifts often took the form of table services, for use in “female spaces,” such as rural retreats (196) or to mark female life-events, such as births (199). They were not “typically” wedding gifts, Wilson cautions (202), but usually intimate and occasionally diplomatic gestures. Even when men were nominally giver and recipient, women’s “interventions” secured the gift by demonstrating care for the commission (207-208).

In “Luxury, Technology, and the Diplomatic Gift,” Sean Roberts explores the problem of luxury is “positional extravagance” in diplomatic situations (217). The best gifts combined luxury and utility (219). Roberts analyzes two test cases in which aspirational peninsular statelets sought to impress the fabulously wealthy rulers of empires (219). What “efficacious” gift could possibly remedy such an unequal situation? Evidently the technology of print and the presentation of other technologies through print was the answer. Thus, Mehmed II received a printed copy of Valturio’s De Re Militari(221)--not a luxury manuscript; Bayezid II received a printed copy “beautifully decorated by hand” of Berlinghieri’s Septe Giornate della Geographia (228-229). In both cases the message seems to have been the marvel of the multiply-reproduced copy as much as the utility of the contents. In these cases, “diplomatic equality” was inscribed in the “utility, ingenuity, and artfulness” of the gift (232).

Section IV, “Faking It: The Pretense of Luxury,” consists of two essays. The first addresses the techniques of making simulacra; the second explains why we are wrong to think that cheap simulacra were consumed only by non-elites. In “Material Fictions of Luxury in Sforza Milan,” art historian Timothy McCall, drawing on records from Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s court, ambitiously takes up gems, metals, and dyes. He aims to contribute to the history of greed’s changing moral profile (240) by describing the making, display, regulation, and evaluation of a wide range of simulacra, and then analyzing two “case studies” to suggest the conditions of labor in the Sforza fakery workforce. McCall does not use the term “fakes,” however; he speaks of “fictive analogues” (240), “material fictions” (241), and “affordable surrogates” (245), noting a wide range of techniques and laws to protect the buyer, and observing the laws’ lack of concern for duped audiences (245). Those audiences, however, made their own evaluations. Even more, they could trade insider information about simulacra. The presumption that ostentation not only staged but created power was effectively undercut by the power of knowledge, which “could serve as a sort of secret, as insider information valued within courtly networks” (262). One recalls the gossipy world of Castiglione (where human fakes cause anxiety, but material ones, not so much), and the social capital that accrued to those in the know. Pulling all the technical, legal, historical, economic, and theoretical parts together, McCall explains how fakery works in such images as Bevilacqua’s Madonna and Child full length devotional paintings, which incorporated such enormous numbers of sequins, spangles, glass stars, and painted fabrics that ornament achieves structural significance (255-256). The two case studies, packed with evocative detail, give a feel for the information collecting of merchant-embroiderer Niccolò da Geranzano and the fabric hunting of merchant-buyer Gottardo da Panigarola. Lords sought to save money where they could, and hounded their shoppers to create those savings; and just as eagerly they wanted “to know when [their] rivals were likewise skimping” (262) and expected merchant-embroiderers to suss out those situations. Perhaps, muses McCall, we see here an “early form of aristocratic cost-benefit analysis” (269).

In “Cheap Magnificence? Imitation and Low-Cost Luxuries in Renaissance Italy,” Paula Hohti takes Quattrocento dilemmas forward into the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Drawing on “household inventories, sumptuary law records, and account books” (279), in addition to technical know-how from the Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio (281; cf Vasari at 293), she makes the case for the increasing artisanal skill of the imitations. These fakes were convincing enough to be “perceived as a threat to the social order,” as the concerns of educators and moralists (286), not to mention the authors of sumptuary laws (288), make plain. At times, however, imitations simply helped to meet demand when supply was short (292). Hohti concludes by arguing that elites and non-elites appreciated imitation luxuries not just for their affordability, but also for their technique and naturalism (294). Perhaps, Counterreformation values further shaped the moral discourse condemning material aspirations: Silvio Antoniano’s eloquent lament about “the democratization of luxuries” (quoted on 286) comes from his book on children’s education, a book in which Carlo Borromeo had a part.

Luxury and the Ethics of Greed has no concluding chapter. Perhaps a rethinking of the “ethics of greed” or of the “cultural economics” in light of the evidence presented would have made a telling conclusion. The greed that underwrites luxury resounds in the book’s early chapters; it fades to perfunctory, however, in some of the later ones. Economic choice as cultural dialogue, however, pervades the collection, and the metaphor of dialogue, or better, conversazione, might conclude strongly. There is, perhaps, a further concept still to be pinned down. Kovesi mentions the “phenomenon of luxury” (xviii). I’m not sure that luxury is a single phenomenon, but a massive cultural shift was indeed organized around material goods. The material basis of luxury, foregrounded in parts 2, 3, and 4, reveals strong emotional attachments to things, [5] from pears to sleeves. Readers might find it useful, in fact, to approach a sequential reading of the chapters with an eye on the “feeling” words found in documents, so as to gauge the emotional stickiness that accrues to desired and beloved objects.

Kovesi’s introductory jousting--to defend regional, chronological, material, ethical, semantic, and economic claims--clarifies the significance of the volume. Possibly a further item of significance remains to be stated. Current scholarly trends conceive of consumption not in regional but in global terms; not with a focus on the fifteenth century or the eighteenth, but on the sixteenth and seventeenth; not with concern for subtle ethical shifts, but for the registers of colonial merchants, the legal codes of empires, and the local, constant, variegated, and un-subtle violence underlying it all. This scholarship is immensely important, but we should not imagine that Kovesi steps quietly aside from the trend in order to re-instate a neo-Voltairean claim about the world-historical importance of the Italian Renaissance. [6] Luxury and the Ethics of Greed will be fun for Renaissance specialists and their classrooms, but it also contains methodological and conceptual riches to interest the globalists.

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Notes:

1. Cf. Richard Goldthwaite, “The Empire of Things: Consumer Demand in Renaissance Italy” in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, eds. F.W. Kent and P. Simons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 155-175; Lauro Martines, “The Renaissance and the Birth of Consumer Society,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 193-203.

2. Catherine Kovesi, “Luxury in the Renaissance: A Contribution to the Etymology of a Concept” In Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors. Eds. M. Israëls and L.A. Waldman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2: 236-242; eadem, ““What is Luxury? The Rebirth of a Concept in the Early Modern World” Luxury: History Culture Consumption 2 (2015): 25-40.

3. E.g., Castiglione, Il Cortegiano 4.4, although peninsular sumptuary legislation itself goes back to the thirteenth century: Catherine Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200-1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).

4. Melissa Calaresu, “Making and Eating Ice Cream in Naples: Rethinking Consumption and Sociability in the Eighteenth Century” Past & Present 220 (2013): 35-78.

5. Cf. Samuel K. Cohn, “Renaissance Attachment to Things: Material Culture in Last Wills and Testaments,” Economic History Review 65 (2012): 984-1004.

6. Cf. Bruno Blondé, Bruno and Wouter Ryckbosch. “In ‘spendid isolation’. A Comparative Perspective on the historiographies of the ‘material renaissance’ and the ‘consumer revolution.” History of Retailing and Consumption 1, 2 (2015): 105-124; Catherine Kovesi, “Defending the Right to Dress,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in Global Perspective c. 1200-1500, eds. G. Riello and U. Rublack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 186-209; Francesca Trivellato, “Renaissance Florence and the Origins of Capitalism: A Business History Perspective,” Business History Review 94 (2020): 229-251.