Objects and Spaces of Encounter in Renaissance Italy

文艺复兴时期意大利相遇的物体和空间

• 批准号: AH/X007065/1
• 负责人: Mary Laven
• 金额: $ 102.49万
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FX007065%2F1
• 关键词: Objects; Spaces; Encounter; Renaissance; Italy

This project for the first time places foreigners, migrants and minority groups at the centre of the long Renaissance in Italy. It explores the complex ties and interdependencies supporting cultural production in this period, unsettling long-held assumptions about what was 'Italian' about the 'Italian Renaissance'. Moving beyond the study of specific minorities (e.g. Jews, Greeks, Black Africans), it investigates the fundamental diversity and connectedness of Italian society and culture. Our research holds that every aspect of the Italian Renaissance resulted from an encounter, and that within each encounter, every actor possessed a varying level of 'belonging' and conversely of 'extraneity' (Cerutti, 2012). This conceptual model allows us, first, to recognize the contribution of foreigners, migrants, and minority groups to Renaissance cultural production; second, to identify these contributions as fundamental to the social fabric of Italy, where 'the diversity of urban populations was hard-wired into the lives of whole regions' (Rubin, 2020); and third, to integrate those contributions into wider patterns of cultural exchange and production across the peninsula.We focus on objects and spaces which reveal the influence of foreign actors, materials, designs and production techniques on the culture of the Renaissance. Objects (such as Turkish rugs, German bedclothes or garments made of 'damask' or 'scotch tweed'), contextualised using archival, textual and visual sources, evoke material exchanges, sociability, and the layering of real and imagined interactions. Spaces of encounter (workshops, inns, fairs, churches) frame the human and material contacts underpinning the Renaissance and allow us to assess levels of extraneity and belonging, as they varied by circumstance and place.Our project guards against the conventional skewing of Italian history towards Venice, Florence and Rome with fresh research on less-studied coastal and frontier regions of southern, central and northern Italy. The timeframe, 1450-1650, covers a period of exceptional mobility, resulting from the persecution of Jews and Muslims in the Spanish kingdoms, the slave trade, the Reformations, religious wars and shifting European-Ottoman relations. We expect this new history of the Renaissance to be unfamiliar, unsettling and uncomfortable. It engages with structures of inequality and discrimination inherent to Renaissance Italy while teasing out the potential for intercultural collaboration and innovation within that hostile, prejudiced world. By revealing the creative consequences of migration and multiculturalism, we challenge one of the key myths of 'western civilization'.Our work thus presents a new critical approach to the Italian Renaissance. The field, long defined as the study of the intellectual and artistic output of humanist scholars and elite artists, has faced recent accusations of irrelevance and narrow elitism. We argue, by contrast, that the astonishing cultural production of the period was neither narrow nor elite, but germinated in its very encounters and interdependence with richly diverse networks of minority groups.The project is timely. It answers a pressing need to demonstrate the diversity and connectedness of pre-modern communities and to recast European history in the light of Brexit, BLM, and the decolonization of the curriculum. It also deploys innovative historical methods to challenge old assumptions about national identity and the nature of creativity. In a famed costume book of 1590, Cesare Vecellio attributed the dazzling array of clothes in Italy to its defining mix of peoples: 'For this reason, it is no wonder that we can see a greater diversity of dress here than in any other major nation or region.' By studying the fecundity of encounters, we aspire to paint an alternative picture of the Renaissance in Italy, enriched by minorities, migrants and outsiders.

该项目首次将外国人、移民和少数民族群体置于意大利漫长文艺复兴的中心。它探讨了支持这一时期文化生产的复杂联系和相互依存关系，打破了人们长期以来对“意大利文艺复兴”的“意大利”假设。它超越了对特定少数群体（例如犹太人、希腊人、非洲黑人）的研究，还调查了意大利社会和文化的基本多样性和连通性。我们的研究认为，意大利文艺复兴的各个方面都源于一次相遇，并且在每次相遇中，每个演员都拥有不同程度的“归属感”，反之亦然的“外来性”（Cerutti，2012）。这个概念模型首先让我们认识到外国人、移民和少数群体对文艺复兴文化生产的贡献；其次，将这些贡献确定为意大利社会结构的基础，在意大利，“城市人口的多样性与整个地区的生活密不可分”（Rubin，2020）；第三，将这些贡献融入到整个半岛更广泛的文化交流和生产模式中。我们专注于揭示外国演员、材料、设计和生产技术对文艺复兴文化影响的物体和空间。物品（例如土耳其地毯、德国床上用品或由“锦缎”或“苏格兰花呢”制成的服装），利用档案、文本和视觉来源进行语境化，唤起物质交换、社交性以及真实和想象互动的分层。相遇的空间（作坊、旅馆、集市、教堂）构成了支撑文艺复兴的人类和物质接触的框架，使我们能够评估外部性和归属感的水平，因为它们因环境和地点而异。我们的项目防止意大利历史的传统扭曲威尼斯、佛罗伦萨和罗马，对意大利南部、中部和北部较少研究的沿海和边境地区进行了新的研究。 1450 年至 1650 年这一时间范围涵盖了一段异常流动的时期，这是由于西班牙王国对犹太人和穆斯林的迫害、奴隶贸易、宗教改革、宗教战争以及欧洲与奥斯曼关系的变化而造成的。我们预计文艺复兴的这段新历史将会是陌生的、令人不安的和不舒服的。它涉及文艺复兴时期意大利固有的不平等和歧视结构，同时梳理了这个充满敌意和偏见的世界中跨文化合作和创新的潜力。通过揭示移民和多元文化主义的创造性后果，我们挑战了“西方文明”的关键神话之一。因此，我们的作品为意大利文艺复兴提供了一种新的批判方法。该领域长期以来被定义为对人文主义学者和精英艺术家的知识和艺术成果的研究，最近面临着无关紧要和狭隘精英主义的指责。相比之下，我们认为，这一时期令人惊叹的文化生产既不是狭隘的，也不是精英的，而是在与丰富多样的少数群体网络的相遇和相互依存中萌芽的。该项目是及时的。它满足了展示前现代社区的多样性和连通性的迫切需要，并根据英国脱欧、BLM 和课程的非殖民化重塑欧洲历史。它还采用创新的历史方法来挑战关于民族身份和创造力本质的旧假设。在 1590 年的一本著名服装书中，切萨雷·韦切利奥 (Cesare Vecellio) 将意大利令人眼花缭乱的服装归因于其独特的民族组合：“因此，我们在这里看到的服装比任何其他主要国家都更加多样化也就不足为奇了。”或地区。通过研究遭遇的丰富性，我们渴望描绘一幅意大利文艺复兴时期的另类图景，由少数民族、移民和外来者丰富。