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Timothy McCall (Villanova University): 'Dyes that Kill and Mordants that Bite: The Centres and Margins of Luxury in Renaissance Italy'

The fabrication and display of aristocratic clothing generated social conflict and facilitated the brutal consequences of oligarchic rule. These factors continue to mask these effects for historians today. Insisting on the importance of the raw stuff of fashion, this paper seeks to critically interpret the materialities of Renaissance array. I investigate the procurement, manufacture, and display of fashion’s materiality, though not at the expense of the craftspeople who worked it, or the subjects dominated by those it adorned. 

I will explore the myriad, dynamic, and interdependent links between the materiality of clothing and the representation and operations of aristocratic power. We will see high-stakes blustering and threats over woad plants, essential for blue-dyed clothing. We survey other colorants including the more familiar cochineal, and also logwood (from Campeche, providing avidly sought-after lustrous blacks), as well the essential mordant alum. The ruthless siege and sack of Volterra, orchestrated by Lorenzo de’ Medici and executed by Federico da Montefeltro in 1472, was motivated by Medici desire to monopolize the supply of alum, which held fast the luminous crimsons reserved for nobles and their adherents in Renaissance Italy. This paper will demonstrate the vital importance of fashion’s raw materials, which, as we shall see, for Renaissance lords were worth the price of violence, death, and destruction. 

Timothy McCall is Professor of Art History and the Bernard Lucci Endowed Chair in Italian Studies at Villanova University, where he directs the Art History Program (in the History Department). Tim’s research centres on Italian Renaissance courts, and on visual intersections of power and gender (particularly masculinity) more broadly, in addition to histories of fashion and material culture. 

This event is part of the series A Material World: Work v. Play, which brings together academics and heritage professionals from a wide range of disciplines to discuss issues concerning historical objects, their materials, forms, and functions, as well as their conservation, presentation, display, and reconstruction.


Organisers: Rembrandt Duits (Deputy Curator, The Photographic Collection, The Warburg Institute) and Louisa McKenzie (The Warburg Institute).

ONLINE ATTENDANCE FREE VIA ZOOM WITH ADVANCE BOOKING

image: photograph ©️ Gordon Plumb

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