FT: Lavish gifts and nuptial politics

Lavish gifts and nuptial politics

By Ariella Budick

Published: December 17 2008 22:50 | Last updated: December 17 2008 22:50

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Could the timing of the Metropolitan Museum’s Art and Love in Renaissance Italy have been more serendipitous? The exhibition delved into the esoterica of 500-year-old wedding rites just as the issue of marriage itself surged into the news, with demonstrations and counter-protests all across America. This show lifts the curtain of rhetoric, looking back towards the makings of modern marriage.

What can an assortment of majolica, glassware, paintings and jewellery tell us about today’s nuptial politics? Plenty, as it turns out. This romantic yet hard-nosed show offers an illustrated social history through objects: gold, blue and green plates ornamented with allegories of love or portraits of the betrothed; pitchers uniting two families’ coats of arms; gold-encrusted caskets and jewels. Wedding gifts did not merely decorate the newlyweds’ palazzo or announce their clans’ intimidating wealth. The excess had a legal function: to make the fact of marriage irrefutable, to prove that the union they memorialised really had taken place.

‘Portia and Brutus’ (c1486-90)

What constituted marriage – whether it was an informal exchange of oaths in the vegetable patch or a ballyhooed procession – remained very much in doubt throughout the 15th and into the 16th century. Before the Council of Trent in 1563 the only requirement for marriage was a declaration of mutual consent, and that could take place in a stable, a tavern or a blacksmith’s shop. Balconies beckoned as places for the exchange of vows, as one contemporary chronicler explained: “With the assistance of a ladder, the groom, flanked by witnesses, reached the bride, and facing each other they pronounced the formula of the ritual, balanced in an equilibrium as unstable as the tie that thus bound them.”

Instability led to catastrophe in the infamous Florentine courtroom trial of Giovanni and Lusanna in 1455. Lusanna, a tailor’s widow, insisted the two were married. Giovanni averred they were not – indeed, he declared his intention to wed a daughter of the Rucellai family. And despite witnesses who swore they had heard the words and seen the rings exchanged, the powers ruled against her. Given such confusion and occasional deception, it was helpful to have a houseful of stuff and a herd of guests to prove a conjugal event had taken place.

The memorabilia often emphasised affection. A couple embraces on the surface of an ornate jar. His legs flop over her lap, his hand clutches at her chest. He leans his face dangerously close. A banderole curls around them with the Italian words “I so e piu felice de questa terra” (“I am the happiest man on earth”).

Countless plates feature two hands clasped in friendship, and some are accented by the word fede (faith), the chief marital virtue. Two-handled cups, from which each member of the new couple would sip, bore romantic inscriptions. “Not being able to is putting an end to me,” reads one fiancé’s frustrated in­­scription. On another cup a frolicking cupid hoists up a heart pierced by an arrow. The words winding round him say: “I give you this, beautiful one, as a token of my love.”

Marital proof: bowl (c1530)

If only real life had been as romantic. Love rarely ventured into the glacial terrain of marriage. For the less well off, betrothal usually involved a fee paid to a broker and a deal made before the affianced were old enough to speak. Among the wealthier classes, the institution was an even colder calculation, cementing dynasties and ensuring the continuity of wealth and status. While poets sang amorous lyrics and artists conjured sentimental scenes, real unions were governed by dowry negotiations and strategic alliances. The proof of a marriage’s success was not happiness but heirs, whose status and destiny were mapped out years before their birth.

Among the Met’s showpieces is a circular painted wooden tray celebrating the nativity of Lorenzo de’ Medici, born into splendour although he had to earn his moniker “the Magnificent”. On the roundel’s front, a host of knights on horseback pledges allegiance to the infant’s future renown, represented by Fame, a sword-wielding woman with wings. On the back, the coats of arms of his parents’ dynasties – the Medici and the Tornabuoni – encircle his father’s motto, “Semper” (Always). The tray is a memento of a scion’s birth, but also a certificate testifying to a marriage meant to keep Florence firmly in hand.

While most of the objects here were chosen more for their historical than for their aesthetic interest, there is a feast for the eye in the last room, which is devoted to the 16th-century Venus and her earthly counterparts. Titian has her blindfolding Cupid in one painting and, in the great masterpiece from the Prado, sprawled across a crimson coverlet as her lover serenades her on the organ. If Titian’s goddess is soft and fleshy, Lorenzo Lotto’s looks translucent, as if moulded in porcelain. These sensual deities held out a promise of love even to those bound for arranged marriages.

In its sly, scholarly way, Art and Love points out that marriage has always been a fluid institution. The Met never mentions gay marriage, of course; the Renaissance would have found a same-sex ceremony preposterous. But the implications of all the deluxe paraphernalia is clear: that to consider marriage as a fixed and timeless practice is to miss its history of adapting to society’s inconstant needs. At the same time, by documenting the rights and privileges that marriage can confer – the degree to which it binds people to the social order – the show explains why the current debate simply cannot be willed away.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008