by Jon Lackman | 15 February 2007 | Architecture, Conferences, News, Renaissance
Contributor Ross Finocchio writes:
This year I had every reason to think that getting to CAA would be a breeze. After all, I live in New York. Although February can be brutal here, what could be worse than the deep freeze that covered Boston during the ’06 conference? The answer turned out to be stinging ice chips that fell for hours today, making even my short trip to the Hilton feel like an exercise in masochism.
Comfort, I hoped, could be found in the Italian Renaissance interior—the subject of a well-attended afternoon panel. Deborah Krohn, an historian of art and food, warmed the room with her paper on Italian kitchens. She began with those depicted in the first printed cookbook, a 1570 volume published in Venice by Bartolomeo Scappi. More treatise than cookbook, really, Scappi’s text offers principles of design and domestic staffing as well as lists of essential utensils. All this in addition to recipes and illustrations stressing the beauty of the properly proportioned and inventoried kitchen. Krohn concluded with a brief history of kitchens in museum period rooms, down to the set of Julia Child’s cooking show now in the Smithsonian.
Margaret Morse moved us out of the kitchen and into the portico, examining the treatment of this room in patrician homes in 16th-century Venice. As the most public part of the palazzo, these central halls was designed to dazzle visitors, and so were embellished with costly polished terrazzo floors, gilded furniture, tapestries, and paintings. Many of the latter, observed Morse, were of the moralizing religious type, making the portico also a site for private worship.
The session ended with Susan Wegner’s discussion of her upcoming exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, “Beauty and Duty: The Art of Renaissance Marriage,” Is it valid to unite objects from different cultures and centuries in a period room format, following the Cloisters model? Her exhibition aims to put domestic art of the Renaissance into context, and so she argued that “the potential benefits of learning and enjoyment offered by even a fragment of a period room outweigh the risks of misrepresentation. Within an enveloping environment that unites tempera painting, carved wood furniture, and stuccoed and painted ceilings, viewers could gain impressions of relative scale, relish contrasting textures, and understand how meanings expressed within works play off one another, sacred against profane.” Here, here!
Great talks, I thought, that made braving the elements more than worthwhile.
