2022 Holbrook Lecture by Elizabeth Currie

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Callan Steinman. I'm Curator of Education here at the Georgia Museum of Art. And I'm so pleased to welcome you to today's program, which is the virtual edition of our Holbrook lecture this year. Thank you all again for being with us today. I'm now going to hand things over to Dr. William Eiland, Director of the Georgia Museum of Art, who will begin today's program. Good afternoon, and I join Callan in giving you a warm welcome to a special presentation of our annual lecture honoring our founder and first director Alfred Haber Holbrook, who gave his collection of American art to the people of the state of Georgia through its flagship university, with the understanding that the university would provide housing for a museum. And so the University of Georgia did provide part of a building back in 1948 in the basement of the university's old library with a couple of galleries upstairs. That building today houses the administrative offices of the university. According to the former director of the museum, Bill Paul, at a party for Mr. Holbrook on his 99th birthday, he remarked, President of the University, Harmon Caldwell, promised to build a museum for my collection, and he's dead now. The next president of the university, O.C. Adderhold, also promised to build a museum for my collection, and he's dead now. Then Mr. Holbrook turned to the then president of the University of Georgia, Fred Davidson, and said, Fred, I have to say, you're not looking too good. Thanks to Mr. Holbrook's generosity and persistence and his love of the visual arts, we have that building today with a collection of over 17,000 objects and a mission to which we are wholly dedicated. We are Mr. Holbrook's legacy. And I must say, Mr. Holbrook, you are still looking good. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Bill, for that introduction to our lecture today, and also thank you to Callan for organizing all of our programming here at the museum. I'm Ashlyn Davis, the peer curatorial research assistant here at the Georgia Museum of Art, and I'm going to introduce Dr. Curry today. We are so glad that Dr. Curry graciously agreed to deliver her lecture over Zoom. So before we begin, I'll say a few words about her. Elizabeth Curry is a lecturer and author based in London, specializing in the history of fashion and textiles. Curry completed her PhD in art history at the University of Sussex in 2004, and has since held curatorial positions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum Royal College of Art. She is a member of Connecting Collections, a research and teaching project driven by the collections at the Universities of Manchester and Melbourne. Curry has published widely on dress, gender, and Renaissance decorative art for general and specialist audiences. In addition to her contributions to the catalog for Wealth and Beauty, Pierre Francesco Foschi and Painting in Renaissance Florence, her scholarly work includes the edited volume A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion, The Renaissance, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence, an essay on Bragadoscio, A Brief History of Swagger, and the exhibition catalog Fashioning Masculinities, The Art of Menswear, for the show that has just opened at V&A, in addition to numerous other V&A publications. Curry teaches at Central Saint Martins and the V&A, and is currently working on their collection of 20th century textiles, as well as developing her research on early modern masculinities. So in other words, Dr. Curry is very busy. And now I'll say a few words about her lecture this evening. Caravaggio and his followers are famous for what art historians have sometimes described as low-life genre scenes, portrayals of street life and taverns featuring a cast of characters, including soldiers, beggars, prostitutes, and fortune tellers. From the mid-16th century onwards, the same groups appeared in numerous other art forms, indicating the power they held in the early modern cultural imagination. Curry's lecture this evening, Everyday People, Dress and Art in Early Modern Italy, which is based on research for a forthcoming publication, focuses on styles of clothing, materials, and accessories, in order to show how stereotypes develop surrounding physical appearance. Drawing on visual sources, social histories, surviving garments and textiles, Curry looks at how dress can shed light on contemporary perceptions of social groups who are often marginalized and offer vital clues about their lived experiences. And now it is my pleasure to hand things over to Dr. Curry. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ashlynn, for that introduction. I'm really delighted to have been invited to give the Holbrook Lecture this year, and I'm very grateful to the director and members of staff at the Georgia Museum of Art who've made it possible for me to share my research with you in this webinar format today. A lot of my prior research into dress history has focused on the Florentine elites in the 16th century. So the kind of individuals who we can see in portraits, whoops, I was trying to share, there, in portraits in the current exhibition at the museum, Wealth and Beauty on the Art of Piero Francesco Foschi. So when we look at images like this, luckily we're able to identify the sitters, sometimes less so if they're female sitters. And in addition to the portraits themselves, we often have household inventories that give us really detailed information about the clothing that these people would have worn. Sometimes we can add to this personal correspondence that gives us details about the use of clothing in everyday life and for special occasions. So when I've done research into these kinds of elite figures, I was really interested to discover the amount of time, energy, and money that people devoted to their wardrobes. And in some ways, this isn't really surprising because we're looking at a period when people really thought that they could read other people around them through their outward appearances. So I began to wonder if maybe it might be possible to learn more about other social groups who've left really very little written traces of their lives by looking at clothing and textiles. So to think about whether we could recenter these kinds of social categories in our historical understanding by focusing on the clothing that was linked with them. And some of you might be familiar with the kinds of groups that I'm going to be talking about because their presence in works of art in the 16th and 17th centuries becomes very prominent. So I'm going to show some examples here of the kind of people that I'm interested in. So first off, we've got Anibal Carracha's The Butcher Shop. And we can see here alongside the tradespeople the figure of a soldier or a Swiss guard on the left and he's reaching into his purse to make a payment. And behind him in the background, we can see an older woman who's possibly a household servant. Then again, in Caravaggio's The Card Shops, we can see a well-dressed man on the left and we can see next to him two people who we might call bravi. So I'm going to come back to that term in a minute. And the figure in the middle, in the background, it's been convincingly argued that he was probably intended to be read as a Roman imam. Here, another Caravaggio. We can see the two pilgrims kneeling down at the front. And then again, in this final example, we have Nicolas Regnier's Card Shops and Fortune Teller. So here, Regnier has conflated two very popular scenes. So people playing cards with a Romany fortune teller. And we can see two of these bravi, these flamboyantly dressed young men. We can also see the Romany fortune teller and we can see two women playing cards and they're probably intended to be courtesans or prostitutes. So we know who these people are partly through their gestures, their actions, what they're doing. Are they playing cards or telling fortunes? But we also know who they are from what they're wearing. So their clothing is very important, but how realistic or authentic was it intended to be? Now, there are various reasons why images of non-elite social groups became so popular in this period. And one is that they actually mirrored real life and social developments that led to the growing visibility of these people, particularly in urban centers. So for example, long periods of warfare and changing military practices increased the demand for part-time foot soldiers and mercenaries. And these young men, they were generally tended to be quite young, then had to seek alternative forms of employment during periods of peace. And often they would find themselves employed in the households of noblemen or aristocrats. They essentially became kind of heavy men where they protect the interests of the nobility. And they would wear household liveries that were generally quite brightly colored and striped as these young men do in another Caravaggio, the Calling of St. Matthew. They sometimes wore leather garments. So we can see, for example, here the man who's hunched over the table on the far left is wearing a leather jerkin. So these young men would normally have been known as bravi or described as bravi. The issue of increasing visibility also applied to pilgrims and beggars. So Rome had a highly mobile populace. And this was augmented with a sort of constant swell of pilgrims that increased particularly during jubilee years. So those of 1575 and 1600 attracted vast numbers of pilgrims. The 1600 jubilee year is supposed to have drawn 536,000 pilgrims to the city of Rome, which was four times the number of usual inhabitants. And here we can see this engraving of the blessing of crowds in St. Peter's Square really gives a sense of the kind of massive thronging of people and the swell of numbers of pilgrims in the city. And some of these pilgrims might have been viewed with suspicion because they were conflated with beggars. And this is an etching by Jacques Callot on the left. And we can see the central figure is called the kind of beggar baron. And he's drawn together a mass of other people who are following him. So there's this idea that they're kind of consolidating amongst themselves. And we can see some pilgrims behind him. So the pilgrims are recognizable by their rosary beads, by the scallop shells on their hats and by their pilgrim staves. So capturing realism or representing different facets of realism attracted both artists and patrons. For artists, it offered the possibility of experimenting with new techniques and subject matter. And although the outcome wasn't always well-received, famously so in the case of Caravaggio, for example, the artist and art historian Giovanni Baglioni famously criticized the depiction of the pilgrims' muddy feet that we can see here in the foreground of the painting. And he also took against the tattered and cap or coif worn by the female pilgrim, as we can see it has a hole there. And he thought that these details were somehow irreverent. Inventories of paintings in Roman palaces, however, demonstrate the popularity of scenes of taverns, card shops, musicians, and street sellers. And the same figures appeared in poems, plays, other kinds of performances, sometimes even opera, suggesting the fascination they held to the early modern Italian elites. However, we do need to be a bit wary about reading these images as authentic depictions of closing. Although it's suggested by Giovanni Pietro Bellori, the 17th century artist and biographer, that Caravaggio's model for his fortune teller was a Romani girl that he encountered in the street, many of these images were primarily based on earlier artworks. So the growing popularity of costume books and collections of prints depicting social groups such as tradesmen and street sellers fostered very long lasting sartorial stereotypes that perhaps bore very little resemblance to the groups that they supposedly depicted. And we can trace this through the increasingly standardized image of the Roman woman. So this example here is the kind of first that I found, but I'm sure that maybe Rosso Fiorentino was basing it on an earlier image, I just haven't found it yet. But this is his Christ in Glory from 1528, and the contract for the work called for many and diverse figures which signify or represent the people. In his description of the painting, and I'm modifying, modernizing the language slightly here, Giorgio Vasari said that it included African figures, Romani people, and some of the strangest things in the world. So it seems that the figure of the Romani woman here on the right with her back to us became the source for the image that was then used in many costume books later on. So we can see perhaps the first example of this in Ferdinando Bertelli's costume book from 1563. And this is a really early example of this new genre, a kind of compendia of all the different clothing of different countries and times. So Bertelli was a Venetian publisher, but the engraver of the images to this volume, Ener Vico, was a very prolific artist who worked in Florence, and we can assume that he probably would have known Rosso Fiorentino's painting. Now, interestingly, Ener Vico doesn't identify the woman in this figure, in some of the other images he has a little plaque with the name on of who they're supposed to represent, but we can see from what she's wearing. So the cloak that fastens draped over one shoulder, the head wrap here, the pilgrim flask, the contrapposto stance, the ankle bracelets, and so on, are all intended to identify her as a Romani woman. And 15 or so years later, we see her reappear in almost the same form in Hans Weigel's Trachtenbuch, which was published in Nuremberg. So we can see that this sartorial stereotype is crossing borders. And we can see her again later on in this engraving by Girolamo Porro, which is supposedly enumerating all the different deceptions that are practiced by beggars. And the Romani woman is here on the right in the middle, and I've just enlarged the detail. But we can see that Porro then makes it, you know, changes it slightly by adding stripes to her cloak. And stripes were often a form of decoration that was associated with clothing that came from beyond Europe. Now, during this talk, I'm going to look at three of these different social groups in a little bit more depth. So I'm going to look at prostitutes, Romani women again, and think about household servants. And I'm going to focus on the clothing and textiles that were associated with them to illustrate some of these stereotypes and how they developed, and to see what this very particular kind of material culture might be able to tell us about the lives of the people represented. So Cesare Vecchia's costume book, this is really one of the most well-known of these costume books. The first edition dates from 1590. And here we can see two images that he includes of different types of prostitutes. So on the left, we have the meritrici pubblica, so we could call them public prostitutes or street workers. And on the right, we have cortigiane moderne, so courtesans who would normally have had a more noble clientele and might have been more financially independent. However, scholars have shown that there was often quite a bit of overlap between these two categories. The lines between them were not that distinct always. Cesare Vecchia's images, however, do suggest that they wore quite different clothing. So both of them are quite striking in terms of their dress. But here on the left, the street worker is wearing these kind of semi-transparent skirts. She's wearing high-heeled shoes or choppines that lots of different women in Venice wore, but rarely do we see them on display so much. Whereas the cortigiane moderne is wearing more luxurious clothing in that it's layered, so more expensive. And she's carrying gloves, which is a sort of sign of refinement. She has brocaded silks here. So more kind of expensive dress. Although admittedly, the material possessions of many prostitutes would have been extremely limited in literature and moral discourses, they were frequently characterized as avid consumers of fashion. So a typical narrative suggested that women were lured into the profession by the promise of fine clothes. It's certainly true that these women often received payments and presents from clients in the form of clothing. Now, several household inventories survived belonging to cortisanes from this time, and they show that they could indeed be fashion setters, owning garments that were made of fine materials in the latest styles, as well as some other rather more intriguing items of clothing, such as long cloaks or mail dress, which probably were partly intended to help them move around the city more freely in disguises. The potential similarities between the clothing of so-called honest and disreputable women were a long-standing cause of anxiety. And so suntory laws were passed in Rome in 1532 and 1567 that prohibited prostitutes from dressing like other Roman women. The laws banned prostitutes from wearing abiti alla romana, so clothing in the Roman style. Rather frustratingly, the laws don't tell us exactly what that meant, though. And they were also banned from wearing a particular type of veil known as a lenzuolo, so this translates literally as a sheet, so a long veil, thought to be the style that Raphael includes in his famous portrait of La Donna Velata. So if prostitutes were caught wearing these types of dress, the items were to be confiscated and they would be fined. So from this strategy, we can see that in Rome, during these decades at least, the idea wasn't to mark out prostitutes by making them wear a distinctive badge, which is what happened in various other Italian cities, but rather to prevent them from wearing the kinds of clothing that women of higher social status would have been wearing. And these images that I'm showing you now suggest that here the suntory laws may be impacted on, had an impact on changing styles. So we can see on the left in this watercolour, a courtesan wearing a shorter veil, which contrasts with the longer one, the lenzuolo worn by citizens. And we can see in a later costume book, this is a kind of later edition of Vercellio's costume book, the very same veil here, we can see the belt as well. So it seems that this is, the engraving is possibly based on this watercolour, but it seems that possibly prostitutes were then forced to develop a new kind of veil, which then did mark them out from Roman citizens. Caravaggio followed in a very well-established tradition of including contemporary or nearly contemporary dress in his paintings of biblical settings, a practice that was sought to increase the didactic function of religious images, because it meant that the viewers could relate much more directly with them. What made Caravaggio's approach unusual, however, was that several of his female models were prostitutes, ones who were possibly recognisable to his patrons and his public. Giulio Mancini, one of Caravaggio's most reliable early biographers, complained in 1619 that the Madonna in his Death of the Virgin Mary was based on what Mancini said was a dirty prostitute from the Ortaccio. So the Ortaccio is a kind of garden of weeds, is the name of the ghetto for prostitutes that was established in Rome under Pope Pius V. And the model for several of Caravaggio's paintings has been identified as Maddalena Antonietti, including in one of his earliest religious subjects. The penitent Magdalene. Known as Lena, Maddalena Antonietti was a prostitute who is also believed to have been one of Caravaggio's lovers. So the painting shows her in elements of contemporary dress, but with various additional characteristics that I think serve the devotional purpose of the image. So here we're witnessing the moment of her religious conversion and her renunciation of her previous dissolute life. And this is manifested by the kind of discarded jewelry on the floor and particularly the broken strand of pearls that we can see next to her. And in a way, her hair is coming undone, it's falling down and her shirt is falling off her shoulders. So she's literally kind of coming undone in a way that's suggestive of her anguish and her spiritual state. She's wearing a silk damask gown and various scholars have pointed out that the vase motif on the front of her skirt here echoes the glass receptacle containing perfume or oil on the floor next to her. And this is a reference to the ungent that used by Mary Magdalene to anoint Jesus's feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee. So I think that this visual pairing of the two vases would have had increased significance to a public that was literate in the language of 16th century textiles. So by Caravaggio's time, these very large scale motifs were hardly worn in dress fabrics. And there came to be for the first time a very clear distinction between the types of patterns that were used for dress fabrics and those that were used for furnishing textiles. So popular patterns for dress often included variations on floral designs, perhaps stylized pine cones and so on. And while it is possible to find silks with vase motifs, they appear to be mainly reserved for ecclesiastical purposes such as altar cloths or vestments. So here we can see a piece of silk damask from the Cleveland Museum of Art that's really very similar, I would say, to the vase in the Caravaggio painting. And it's a vase with five carnations in it. And you can see it from the dimensions that a single repeat is on a very large scale. So this would hardly be practical for the purposes of dressmaking and wouldn't be legible, say, for example, on the bodice of a garment. And we can identify numerous other religious textiles in museum collections today. So here, for example, this altar cloth from the V&A, we can see in the central motif is exactly the same vase with five carnations. And then again, on the right here, we can see another fragment from the V&A's collections which shows slightly different vase here that with a fountain of life and the Holy Spirit at the top here. Now, the Greek name for carnation is dianthus, meaning flower of God. And we see vases with carnations sometimes in Italian religious paintings that symbolize divine love. Obscured by another swathe of fabric, we can't see the contents of Caravaggio's vase, but it does seem very likely that the fabrics depicted in his painting, in this painting here, were meant to heighten the religious meaning of the image, reminding viewers of the rich vestments and hangings that they were accustomed to seeing in places of worship, rather than being an attempt to create an accurate representation of late 16th century dress. It's often impossible to know where the items of clothing depicted in paintings actually existed, but this does seem to be true of a dress that appears in two other compositions by Caravaggio. It is widely, but not unanimously, been argued that the model in this case was another courtesan named Filide Melandroni. In Martha and Mary Magdalene here, we see her wearing a purple silk sotana with detachable red sleeves, and the gown is decorated with bands of metal lace along the front and running down the skirt as well. And the same gown can be seen in Caravaggio's St. Catherine of Alexandria. So here again are the bands of metal lace and here at the front. So this suggests perhaps a garment that the artist had in his workshop or one owned by Filide herself. So Caravaggio's household inventory lists some studio props, such as a mirror shield, so the like that we can see here in this painting, and also a pair of drop earrings, which sounds as though they might have been worn by models in paintings. We also know that Filide wore an overgown, a type called a zimara, with some similar characteristics. It was made of purple wool and it was decorated with metal braid or lace. And it was borrowed from another woman called Caterina da Sora, who accused her of not returning it. And so this dispute is how we know about the dress. Filide went on to own various garments herself, made of expensive silks and other materials, as listed in the inventory taken at her death in 1618. Now this type of decoration was particularly popular and we can see various examples of it here, different typologies in museum collections now. It was so popular that it too was prohibited by Pope Sixtus V as part of his clothing reforms in 1586, which banned both real and false gold and silver lace. So these were often types of braid rather than more technically complicated bobbin or needle lace, so they were quicker to make and they would have been cheaper. Given that this was a way of engaging with fashion at a lower cost, it was a form of innovation that obviously appealed to many women, both moral and immoral ones. And it's a reminder that papal attempts to distinguish between the two were ultimately ineffectual. So similar tensions between sartorial segregation and assimilation characterized my second study on Romani women. The first apparently eyewitness description of Romani people in Italy comes from 1422 and it states that one Andrea, a Duke of Egypt, stayed in Bologna for around two weeks with an entourage of around 100 people. And it took a few more decades for Romani people to kind of percolate into the visual arts and literature, but they can be regularly seen in works from 1500 onwards. In costume book images, we often see them, as in these two here, we often see them wearing a striking disc-shaped headdress. We can also see them wearing this headdress in a slightly earlier etching of the Roman Colosseum where we can see kind of family groups sitting, standing on horseback with children wearing this headdress. But we also see women wearing this kind of head wrap that I showed you earlier, a shawl that's kind of tied around the head. And given that by this point, Romani people had made their home in Italy for generations, these head coverings were possibly a form of adaptation to Italian fashions. Legislation against the Romani took very different forms across Italy, but in 1631, Pope Urban VIII introduced a law that suggested a policy of assimilation. So the law stated, Romani women must lay down their Romani dress, or rather destroy it, so that it is no longer suitable for use on pain of public whipping and permanent exile. This penalty will be applied to any person found with any Romani clothing, whether it is his or whether it came into his hands. However, I would argue that the popular typologies of head scarves in the paintings of fortune tellers can hardly be read as realistic depictions of Romani clothing styles. So there's a clear tendency in Baroque art to show off different types of visually appealing fashionable needlework upon the clothing of fortune tellers. So I'm showing you here a detail of a shirt from the Museo del Tesuto in Prato in Tuscany that shows the kind of counted stitch embroidery that was very, very detailed, painstaking, slow work that is typical of the kind of high-end linens that we now find in museum collections. And it's quite similar to the type of embroidery that we see on the neck of the shirt in Caravaggio's second version of his fortune teller. Or alternatively, we can see deep bands of embroidery with very Renaissance-style ornament. So I'm showing you, again, another example from the Cleveland Museum of Art. This embroidered band here that quite mirrors the example of Manfredi's fortune teller. And alternatively, we find examples of drawn work and cut work and other kind of prized embroidery technique. And we can see a very similar kind of shawl wrap on the head of a fortune teller painted by an artist in the style of Bartolomeo Manfredi. If we look closely at the embroidery on the linen shirt of Caravaggio's fortune teller from 1594, we can see it on the right here. Both in terms of the material of the shirt, it's a very fine linen, and the intricacy of the design, it's very high quality. And we could even compare it with one of the portraits in the Pierre Francesco Foschi exhibition currently on show at the museum. Admittedly, this is a few decades earlier, but the fineness of the linen on the shirt worn by the woman in green, and also the type of embroidery that's decorating the shirt is simpler than Caravaggio's fortune teller. The fortune teller's decoration, the pattern is the kind of arabesque motif that was very, very popular and fashionable at the time. And we can see these kinds of designs in pattern books that were aimed at elite women and a very popular genre of printed book in the 16th century. And there are, again, a couple of these books on display in the exhibition now. As I said at the start, clothes were not merely a demonstration of wealth and status for the Italian elites. They also had social, cultural, and emotional meanings. And I'm keen to think about how these different aspects of dress featured function further down the social scale. So although the primary evidence is often rather scarce, if we think further about the way that clothes were acquired, how they circulated, how they were laundered and exchanged among poorer social groups, it's possible to gain some insight into these experiences of social difference and segregation. So various prejudices developed in the 16th century around the Romani people's lack of industriousness. So one allegation was that they stole clothing rather than making it themselves, even though they were associated with very distinctive typology of dress themselves. Now, in a well-managed home, the production of many items of clothing and their laundering were female tasks. So at a very kind of high end, women would have been embroidering. But further down the social scale, women often spun thread for domestic consumption and also for financial gain. And these were practical skills that also acted as emblems of female virtue. So while more elite women might be depicted making lace or embroidery, honorable women further down the social scale were often shown spinning thread with a distaff. So interestingly, this example here by Christopher Vyditz shows a Morisco woman in Spain with a distaff. So spinning thread, and we also see her cleaning her house. So a kind of honorable woman in all effects. However, these kinds of attributes were almost never shown in characterizations of Romani women. Interestingly though, a trial against a Romani man near Padua in 1583 offers some evidence that counteracts this narrative. So as a mark of evidence of this man's good character, the court was informed that his wife and sister-in-law spun thread for various different people in order to gain a living. So we know that some Romani women certainly were involved in these occupations too. A further way we could think about how Romani women or people experienced urban life is through their access to key resources, such as the water needed to keep clothing clean. So Stefano della Bella's print of the Temple of Vespasian shows a group of figures in the foreground intended to be Romani families. So here I'm showing you a detail. I've zoomed in and we can see the women with their distinctive head wraps. We can see the number of children around them, which are all markers of Romani people in visual arts at this time. There were few communal public laundry spaces in Rome, and it was a concern that social stigmas linked with some of the women that used them might bring others into disrepute. And this was partly because it was not unusual for prostitutes to take in laundry to earn extra money. One project to remedy this was the building of a new laundry under the patronage of Pope Sixtus V, the Felice Laundry. And a fresco that no longer survives at the site shows a group of virtuous women doing their washing in a very safe, enclosed space. So della Bella's image rather contrasts with this. So the women on their own seem to be in a rather marginal position. Apparently they're not doing their washing, they're doing it in a rather isolated area so that they can avoid attention and not risk the fines that were meted out to people who use drinking water fountains for washing clothing. They're hanging out, they're washing next to the Temple of Vespasian, which was opposite the ruined Temple of Castrum Pollux. So here we can see the three columns of the Temple of Castrum Pollux. So it's possible that they did their washing here. There was a drinking fountain that was intermittently in use during the period. We can see the jet of water, we can see people filling up their receptacles, and you can also see cattle drinking from it so that it's kind of marshy around here. So they might've done their washing here and then walked over to the Temple of Vespasian to hang it out. So it seems to have a little bit of veracity to the image. It's interesting that in Paul Brill's representation here, we can see Romani women in the foreground mixing with other social groups. So here they're no longer alone. They're talking to possibly pilgrims. We can see a beggar here, we can see the innkeeper, and we can see animal herders. But it's interesting that these figures in the foreground, all of a certain social category, are separate from the more finely dressed men who are touring the site. Now, the final group of people that I'm going to focus on is a slightly broader one. So it comprises servants and attendants. And in this case, I'm going to look at the work of a single artist who was active in the second half of the 17th century. So that's Mattia Preti, who was born in Calabria, but he worked in Naples, Rome, and Malta. And he was very much influenced by Caravaggio, and he was also influenced by Venetian art in the second half of the 16th century. And like many artists of this period, his works abound with depictions of servants and attendants. And many of his canvases show small boys who are usually dressed in rich court liveries, and they're depicted as household servants. So here we can see a small boy pouring wine in a manner that some of you might be familiar with, as it recalls another famous image. So writing about Mattia Preti, Paul Kaplan has noted, 16 of his canvases depict African figures of this kind. These children are often beautifully painted, but they're stock characters from Preti's repertoire, and do not imply any particular link to actual African Europeans. So far, I've identified at least 22 paintings by Preti, including figures of African origin. So although this is a small proportion of his overall output, which numbered hundreds of paintings over a very long career, it's nonetheless striking. When they're not clothed in late 16th century fashions, their garments seem to be an imaginary combination of characteristics that were intended to set them apart, either in terms of geography or chronology, often drawing on established sartorial stereotypes. For example, the use of stripes that I've mentioned before to suggest textiles that were woven in centers around the Eastern Mediterranean or in parts of Africa, such as Ethiopia, which had a reputation in it as a textile production center that was specialized in a range of techniques and fabrics. Some of them are very highly prized. So the clothing of the child on the left in this rather unusual scene of the penance of St. John Chrysostom. Here we can see this child with this clothing that is really quite unique. It's a horizontally striped garment of kind of tunic that looks as though it's made with metal threads, and it has a short cape over it, which seems very impractical. It has these buttons that go up at the back. It's, again, this kind of imagining of biblical clothing, I think. As Paul Kaplan mentions, Preti was inspired by Paolo Veronese, whose religious paintings, particularly of banqueting, contain a host of different figure types, often with numerous pageboys, as can be seen in his Feast in the House of Levi. So here we can see some household servants here, here wearing pink, and again here, for example. So Veronese similarly plays with different types of clothing, interspersing contemporary fashions such as ruffs with less structured garments and decorative features such as stripes intended to evoke a biblical setting. So if we turn to his composition of the marriage at Cana, we can solve the puzzle of the garments in the penance of St. John Chrysostom, as it becomes apparent that the clothing of the kneeling water-bearer here, so I've zoomed in on the detail on the left where we can see the young boy, the page, holding a glass of wine, which obviously Preti was referencing before, and we can see the water-bearer here. This outfit with vertical stripes here and bare legs has been reworked in Preti's painting clearly to pay homage to Veronese's work. So this painting by Preti was done in 1640. He visited Venice in 1630, and he's obviously inspired by an image that was created 80 years earlier. And yet Preti did have very close contacts with African Europeans. Describing its painting of Pontius Pilate washing his hands, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acknowledges this possibility in its database, which states that he based his use of such African figures on Renaissance precedents, although Preti executed this work in Malta, an island with a particularly multiracial population due to its centrality in the Mediterranean slave trade. So Preti moved to Malta where Caravaggio had sought refuge in 1607 to eight in September 1661. In the 17th century, enslaved men and women were brought in large numbers to the island located between Sicily and North Africa, many of them from Turkey and different parts of Africa. The men were often forced to work on the galleys, a particularly brutal fate, while others, both men and women, were sent into domestic service. Now, several archival documents tell us about Mattia Preti's life. We know, for example, that in 1668, there were at least three enslaved servants in Preti's household. These included 18-year-old Giovanni Cesare, 17-year-old Pietro Albo, and a three-year-old girl named Innocencia. So two of them were renamed after Mattia Preti's parents, Cesare and Innocencia. In the documents, they're described as Ethiopian, although this was a term that was used very imprecisely at the time. That same year, they were granted their freedom on the condition that they continued to work in Preti's household for the following 15 years, so that would have meant that Innocencia could have spent the whole of her adult life as a free woman. Other enslaved servants who worked for Preti came to Malta from Turkey and North Africa, and one of them, Giuseppe Cianferli, was a member of Preti's workshop and became an artist in his own right. So works by him in Malta include a supper at Emmaus at the Grand Master's Palace. There is unfortunately, and not surprisingly, no documentary record of their clothing, but it is reasonable to suppose that they dressed in the same way as most household servants, so in cheaper, simpler, probably slightly more old-fashioned versions of their employers' garments. And they certainly wouldn't have worn the type of expensive court livery that Preti depicted. By consistently portraying African Europeans as attendants, outsiders, or onlookers, Preti relegated them to narrative devices in which distinctive clothing played its key role. So in contrast to this, a single but illuminating example illustrates how actively engaged they would have been with Italian clothing cultures. In a court case dating from 1673, Giovanni Cesare, who by that point was 23 years old, gave evidence about two other servants also living in Malta, who originally came from Africa. So another man named Giovanni, and Maddalena, who had become, the two of them had become engaged. And Preti's servant, Giovanni Cesare, bore witness, as he said, as a matter of conscience, that although the other Giovanni had even given Maddalena a handkerchief as a sign of his commitment to get married, this was impossible because this other Giovanni had already had a wife in Messina in Sicily. However, the latter defended himself a few days later, saying that although he had at one point told some other people that he was married to a woman called Flavia in Sicily, it wasn't in fact true. He had just initially hoped to bring her with him to Malta. Now at all social levels, handkerchiefs were frequently engagement gifts and numerous portraits show elite women holding handkerchiefs, possibly representing love tokens. In this unusual painting, which has sometimes been attributed to Domenico Fetti, the handkerchief in the girl's hand stands in for the object of her affections, who perhaps she is dreaming about. We can see a half smile playing at her lips. At a time when marriages could be held binding, even without a legal ceremony and families further down the social scale might not necessarily be able to afford a notary, the gifts exchanged during a period of betrothal were incredibly meaningful and they symbolized the pledge a couple had made to one another. Giovanni Chiesera evidently fully understood the nuances of this and the social and emotional significance of this small square of linen. So to conclude, by focusing on dress in each of these cases, we can learn something more about the images themselves as well as the people they represent. The relationship between clothing and a sense of self and status was vital in this period, even for less wealthy members of society. In life and art, dress was a mechanism to understand and sometimes willfully misunderstand others and as such, it should be foregrounded in our reading of these images. We've learned that members of these social groups were often closely associated with the artists themselves, despite a tendency to other them in art and that although the visual typologies of dress illustrated in this talk often seem to remain static over long periods of time, the actual clothing of the individuals depicted was far more adaptive and sometimes less distinctive than representations suggest. Wherever possible, it's illuminating to juxtapose images with surviving garments and textiles and to think about patterns of use to gain a better idea of how dress reflected the lived experiences of everyday people. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Curry. Fascinating talk and such a wonderful sort of context to interpret some of the works in the Foskey exhibition which depict very different types of people but it's really interesting to learn more kind of about sort of the broader context of how clothing functions during that time. I'd like to open it up to our audience. We have about 10 minutes for questions if anybody has questions for Dr. Curry and again, you can put those in the Q&A box and we'll get to as many as we have time for. I had a question to start us off. I was wondering about the sanctuary laws you mentioned, how long were those in effect for? Well, sanctuary laws, this is kind of the golden age of sanctuary laws in the 16th century but they go on for centuries beforehand and afterwards. And each city in Italy has its own type of sanctuary laws. People who've looked at them in a very kind of broad way have suggested that they weren't affected by the particular government at the time. So it's not that more democratic republics had fewer laws or more laws. It seems to be, it seems to have changed with different rulers and particular social groups were very much targeted in order to, you know, the kind of groups that I'm looking at were targeted so that they were made distinctive and people could see them and distinguish between them and kind of people of higher social status. But there was also an attempt to stop people wearing certain colours and certain, to differentiate between all sorts of social categories between people who lived in the country and people who lived in cities. And I mean, they're interesting because there were so many of them, but yet they seem to have been very unsuccessful. So they kept on introducing them again and again. So they obviously to some extent were working but they clearly give us an idea about people's attitudes at the time towards clothing and what it meant. Yeah, it's fascinating. Thank you for that. We have a question from Caitlin in the audience who's asking if you could elaborate on the striped textiles and asks, were they a marker of an origin of North African weaving? Yeah, so striped textiles are used. You do see striped textiles obviously in Italian dress, but not as frequently as you see other types of motifs. And so often stripes are used to depict other people from other countries, or stripes can sometimes have negative connotations too. And so I think they're used quite generically to represent clothing maybe from centers in Africa. So as I said, Ethiopia was particularly renowned for its different forms of weaving. Ethiopian textiles were prized also because they produce a type of textile with a pile, so like a velvet. So that was not a striped textile, but it is often associated with textiles from North Africa and ones around the Mediterranean Basin, as well as further South in Africa. So that is partly what it's denoting, yeah. Great, thank you. I have another question about the color pink. I was just wondering, as you sort of mentioned in a couple of different instances in your talk, and it definitely is a recurring color in the Foskey exhibition here. So I was just wondering if there's like any significance to that color or sort of special things about the color pink at that time. Yeah, so obviously different shades of pink and the kind of closer they get to red suggest that they might've been made with more expensive ingredients. So it's partly a representation of the wealth, it reflects the wealth of the owner. Obviously a very kind of bright, true color that's even and refined is one that's very prized. It certainly doesn't have the kind of gendered connotations that we have now. So the associations of pink with women's dress, although I suppose in the Foskey exhibition though, you obviously have a female portrait with an amazing pink dress. So maybe it's a bit more skewed to female portraiture in that instance, but it was very much something that dark pinks and reds were associated with men as much as with women in this period. Yeah, we do have a lovely portrait of a woman in a pink dress. I think actually more than one, but there is also a portrait of a man just like swathed in this beautiful bright pink garment. So not only women wearing pink. Yes. Let's see, we have one more question from Brianne Sharp who asks, are you familiar with Rosica Parker's the subversive stitch? And if so, have you found it helpful in your work on early modern textiles? Yes, I mean, it was a book that I read as a master's student and was kind of bowled away by it because it's such a great take on kind of rethinking the meanings of embroidery and the kind of agency or not that women embroiderers might have had. And I suppose now that I'm thinking about people further down the social scale and they're not, you know, they're less portrayed doing embroidery and they're more doing more kind of basic tasks like spinning threads and so on. But that's definitely a kind of seminal text that I have used over time, yes. This is from Sarah McCarroll and she says, this is a costume history question. There's a portrait of a young man weaving a wreath of flowers in the exhibition and he's wearing slashed trunk hose, but it appears that his hose are, he's wearing slashed trunk hose, but it appears that his hose are also slashed. I hope I'm saying that right. I've never seen that treatment before. Was this a common treatment? And what might we be seeing in the slash? Is this an elongated shirt tail or something else? Yeah, I know the portrait that you mean, and it's quite hard to see because his hands are sort of superimposed over the hose. So you can't quite see the detail of it. There are other treatments of hose that are like that. So there's a combination of kind of two layers of the britches and then the stockings underneath. I think they are quite unusual. And if the questioner means that the stockings themselves are slashed, I'm not quite sure that I've seen that, but, and it's all different sort of shades of gray. So, and I haven't seen the picture in real life, unfortunately. So I think that's probably something I'd have to look at it very closely. But if you look at, for example, work by Andrea del Sarto, or other images of men by Bronzino, painted portraits by Bronzino from the same period, I think you might find slightly similar treatments of stockings and britches at this period. But I don't think it's, I think it's part of the, so I guess the question is asking, is that the kind of shirt poking through? I'm not entirely convinced by that because I think that would be white. So I think it's part of a, it's a lining maybe, or a facing, but it is curious. I definitely know what she means. It's unusual. Thank you for that. I just popped a link in the chat of the image that we're talking about. Would somebody, would this man wearing this outfit, would his shirt have been that long? Like all the way down underneath? Okay, thank you, yes. Okay, so I was thinking about that kind of, the wrap at the side, kind of at the top of his thigh, which is also unusual. No, his shirt normally wouldn't have been that long. So men's shirts, yeah, probably wouldn't have had that much volume. So I think that is a lining of the stocking that's poking through. Yeah, but it is unusual. Thank you so much for that. So yeah, if there's no other questions, I think we'll wrap things up. Thank you so much, Dr. Currie, for being with us today. You're very welcome. And sharing your knowledge and your scholarship with us. It's been wonderful. I did want to remind everybody who's here, if you're in the Athens area or in Georgia, this, the exhibition in question will be open just through this weekend. So it closes on April 24th. However, if you will be in Florence, Italy in 2023, 24, we're delighted that the exhibition will be traveling to the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. And it'll be on view November 27th, 2023 to March 10th, 2024. So it will be on view in Italy later next year. So thank you all so much. Have a wonderful afternoon. And thank you again, Dr. Currie. Thank you. Bye all.