Art and Love in Renaissance Italy Curatorial Talk Part 1 of 3

Good morning everyone. It's wonderful to be here to introduce the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, which just opened in the B Galleries, so you'll all have to trudge up those great hall stairs, and will be on view there till February 16th. I just have to say that I walked up 82nd Street this morning and looked at the banners and thought, wow, what a museum, what we have going on right now, incredible. Our exhibition investigates the extraordinary works of art with secular subjects that were produced for the Renaissance home. Most of them commissioned or created to celebrate the great ritual moments of people's private lives. Betrothal, marriage, and the birth of a child. We try to give as full a picture of these commemorative works of art as possible, ranging across all the media, ceramics, glassware, jewelry, boxes, great cassone chests, works of art on paper, paintings, portraits, and other kinds of paintings, while integrating the paintings and objects and considering them all at the same time. You probably all know that in general, Renaissance marriages and the establishment of a family didn't have much to do with love. It was a societal, rather than an individual affair, having to do with families rather than romance. But that doesn't mean that the emotions of love were discounted. On the contrary, love in all of its manifestations, sensual, sexual love, chivalric, platonic love, painful, unrequited love, and plain old tender love, all of these were endlessly discussed in poetry, prose, music, and illustrated in all of the visual arts. So we've expanded the boundaries of our selection to include many works that take up these themes. We tried to look at the objects and paintings in the round, and by that I mean that we wanted to know what they told us about the society for which they were made, but also how our own expanding historical knowledge about family, marriage, women's role in the household, children, all of that based on the last 30 years of very intensive research, how that research helps us better understand the imagery and forms of these objects. So our goal was to move back and forth freely between the objects and the historical record to see how they might illuminate one another, but at the same time never losing our focus on these as marvelous objects of incredible aesthetic impact. Which brings us to our first two slides. From my point of view as a paintings curator, the exhibition was really inspired by a group of paintings in the Metropolitan Museum's own collection, above all the two that you now see on the screen. On the left, the birth tray, or Desco d'Aparto, that was made to commemorate the birth of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Lorenzo de' Medici, in Florence in 1449. And on the right, Lorenzo Lotto's magnificent Venus and Cupid, painted in northern Italy, either in Bergamo or in Venice in the late 1520s, and almost certainly in celebration of a specific marriage. Indeed, the Met's own collections form the core of the exhibition, with 64 objects from nine curatorial departments, including European paintings, Esda, Lehman, Medieval, but also the Costume Institute, and Musical Instruments. So I want to pause here in my remarks to say that this exhibition really reflects an incredible team effort. I want to say a few words of thanks here. First, I want to thank my co-authors, of whom Linda Wolk Simon, the curator and a curator in Drawings and Prints, was the curator of the second section of the exhibition, that devoted to profane love or erotica, and was also an important author. We can thank her for the very racy material that is now on view in the B Galleries. And other authors from the MMA staff include Everett Faye, Wendy Thompson, Jesse McNabb, Ken Moore, and Eve Strassman-Flanzer. I thank them all. I also want to thank, across the board, my colleagues in those nine curatorial departments, who helped us with our investigation, and very generous offers of their time, their expertise, and in the end, of course, their objects. The editorial department shepherded through the very complex catalogue, under the direction of Jane Bobco, Cynthia Clark, and Gwen Radzinski, and then the logistics of transportation, installation, handled by Aileen Chook. The remarkably elegant installation is designed by Michael Langley and Connie Norkin, and the exhibition was installed by the technicians of the various departments, and the contribution of Jenna Wainwright, and the other installers. The first section of the exhibition is devoted to those objects that were actually made to commemorate betrothals and marriages, and then, in a separate gallery, the birth of a child. On the left, you see a fantastic Deruta vase, double-handled, with dragons on the handles, which is one of a type called a Coppa Amatoria, literally a lover's cup. Here we see Cupid holding a heart that is pierced by an arrow, and that's an image we see when there's discussion of painful love, or also just the effects of Cupid, who, of course, shoots his arrows out blindly in every direction. The wonderful inscription on the banderol, and we've had so much fun with these inscriptions, says, I give you this beautiful one as a token of my love, for the love I bear thee in this fine cup. We have to think of the bride and groom, each sipping wine from this cup during the wedding ceremony itself. The glass on the right is a very important, rare piece of Venetian cristallo glass, enameled, that was made for a specific historical wedding that took place in 1495 in Nuremberg. So, in fact, it's also a demonstration of the luxury trade in goods. We still go to Venice to get our best glass, and there, in 1495, this German family has commissioned two beakers for this wedding in 1495. The images on it are of a Saint Michael and a Saint Catherine, and then a coat of arms of the Beham family. And, in fact, we know that it was made for the wedding of Michiel Beham and Katerina Lachnerin. We also looked hard at themes and images that go across all of the media, and I just wanted to show you two of them here. There are some wonderful cases in which we bring together ceramics, and glass, and jewelry, and so on, to show how the images travel from one media to the other. These two wonderful pieces of ceramics, the one on the top from Montelupo, and the one on the bottom from Faenza, show the fayday motif, the clasped hands, and the top one actually has the word fayday on it. That could represent two moments in the wedding ceremony. The first, which was actually a contractual moment, and you remember that renaissance marriages for people on a certain level of society involved a lot of transfer of property, with the dowry of the wife going to the husband's family, and the husband's family committing itself usually to decorating the rooms in the home that they would share. And that moment could involve a contract with a notary, in which the husband's father and the bride's husband would clasp hands. That would be the moment of the contract. Of course, it still happens today, a hand clasped like that. But it could also be the moment that is called in Italian sources the toccamano, the moment when the bride and groom clasp hands and exchange rings, and that for them is the ritual moment in which they can be declared married. And there's a fantastic inkwell in the exhibition, which may have been made for this contractual moment, which has an inscription on it which says, I give you my hand, give me the fede, the faith, give me your faith. But because that word was also used for the rings of clasped hands, it really probably meant to them, here's my hand, give me the ring.