Materialized Identities 1450-1750

Veils

Feathers

Gold

Veils

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This project engages with the agentive qualities of matter. It will show how affective dimensions in history connect with material history. And it will explore the religious and cultural dimensions of the use of objects and materials.

Feathers

This project charts the spectacular sixteenth-century rise of feathers as dress accessories.

In 1500, few men and women except mercenary soldiers would ever have worn feathers. One hundred years later, feathers had become indispensable to achieve the “gallant” look.

Glass

Fragile in its materiality but transparently solid in its appearance glass was a major sector of artisan craftwork in Renaissance Venice. It's glass production lies at the crossroads of cultural and material flows between the East and the West.

This project investigates how the combination of both material features and transcultural flows contributed to shaping a specific Venetian identity..

Gold

Thanks to its ability to take on multiple forms and reveal its artifice and potential in both solid and liquid states gold is an ‘entangled’ matter that, in the early modern period, was combined with a whole range of objects, artefacts and materials.

Veils

Omnipresent and ephemeral at the same time, veils and veiling lay at the intersection of various cultural and societal tensions affecting moral concerns.

They are an ideal research object through which to inquire about codes of social and moral distinctions. Moreover, veils assume an important place in the period’s artistic production.