A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance

Herman Roodenburg, Herman Roodenburg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781474233200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

We know the Renaissance as a key period in the history of Europe. It saw the development of court and urban cultures, witnessed the first global voyages of discovery and gave rise to the Reformation and Counter Reformation. It also started with the 'invention' of oil painting, linear perspective and moveable type, all visual technologies. Does that mean, as has been suggested, that the Renaissance stands for the 'ascendancy of the eye'? If so, then what happened to the sensory extremes which the famous Dutch historian Johan Huizinga still perceived in the 15th century? Did they simply disappear? Or is there another history to be told, a history of a surprising continuity, not only of the sense of hearing but also of the 'lower' senses – those of taste, smell and touch? And was the Renaissance not first and foremost a time of deep sensory anxiety? This volume, assembling nine outstanding specialists, seeks to answer these questions while offering a lively and 'sensational' portrait of the period. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

CHAPTER ONE

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The Social Life of the
Senses: Architecture,
Food, and Manners

NIALL ATKINSON

In a story recounted by Franco Sacchetti (c. 1330–1400) around the turn of the fifteenth century, the wife of a Florentine wool worker would rise from bed on winter nights to spin thread (Sacchetti 1996: 655–60). Next door, the painter Buonamico Buffalmacco was having trouble sleeping. Separated only by a simple brick partition wall, the noise of her labor kept him awake all night, so he decided to teach her a lesson. By making a hole in the wall he was able to watch her movements as he poured salt through a slender hollow reed into the evening meal that simmered by the fire. At the taste of it, her husband flew into a rage. So Buonamico put even more salt in the next day’s meal, which led to a beating so loud that the whole neighborhood heard her shrieks. Rushing in as a good neighbor, Buonamico tried to convince them, in vain, that their saline problem resulted from the wife’s weariness from producing nighttime piecework. But several evenings of variously over and under salted meals later, the confused husband finally agreed to stop his wife’s nighttime spinning and Buonamico was finally able to get a good night’s sleep.

The dynamic interplay of the senses that drives this narrative reveals a great deal about social life in the Renaissance. It demonstrates how the senses could both hinder and facilitate the formation of social relationships, a topic that was at the heart of larger debates about how such relationships should be organized. Any straightforward appeal Buonamico might have made to his neighbor would likely have fallen on deaf ears unless he was able to show how the wife’s nocturnal aural assault was directly connected to her husband’s offended taste buds. And in order to do so, he secretly watched her while ruining the taste of the dish with a spice that she could not smell. He then relied on the husband’s full access to and control of how his wife’s body could be touched.

That all the senses were inextricably intertwined in social relations seems a far cry from the hierarchy of the senses that occupied the intellectual discussions of Renaissance humanists. This hierarchy has, in turn, dominated academic discussions about how the Renaissance paved the way for the ocular-centrism that pervaded Enlightenment discourses of knowledge. In the debate about the perception and understanding of truth and beauty, Renaissance theorists had to contend with Plato’s insistence that sight was the noblest and most accurate sense and Aristotle’s contention that learning was primarily an acoustic experience (Panofsky 1969: 120). Taste, touch, and smell, however, were usually understood as the baser elements of human experience. Although such arguments concerned the potential transcendence of human perception from the materiality of the world, they should not be misrecognized as the only pronouncement of how the senses were understood or experienced. For those hopelessly bound to the material world, the senses were a much more integrated system that needed to be both disciplined and celebrated in the formation of what we recognize as modern civil society.

Even in the most mundane domestic conditions, there existed an implied sensorial hierarchy. As a painter, Buonamico produced objects for purely visual consumption. His neighbor, however, was engaged in a practice whose tactile nature was considered appropriate for women. In her study on the sense of touch, Constance Classen quotes two texts, one from the fourteenth and one from the seventeenth century, that describe the arduous tasks and drudgery of female domestic labor common to both poor and middle-class women. In both texts, textile work constitutes an important wifely duty (Classen 2012: 78). The association of certain tactile forms of labor with the bodies of women, which moralists assumed were more “naturally” connected to the lower senses, is a common theme throughout the period (Classen 2012: 77–85).

However, Sacchetti’s story also points to the complicated ways in which gendered sensual hierarchies were never fully fixed. Although Buonamico produced objects for visual and intellectual contemplation by others, his own immediate experience of painting was profoundly tactile, from the grinding and mixing of pigments to the application of color with brushes, knives, and hands. Similarly, the wife’s tactile investment in the wool industry placed her within the complex production of fine cloth that caressed the bodies of the upper classes and marked them as objects of visual consumption in an emerging market of sartorial style. Painter and spinner were caught within a similar sensorial nexus.

In the Renaissance, elite society was beginning to distinguish itself from what Classen calls the sensual promiscuity that would come to define lower-class sensibilities. This did not mean that the hierarchy of social groups was simply grafted onto a hierarchy of the senses, but that the senses were redefined to comprise a social hierarchy within themselves. Everyone listened and ate, but they did not hear or taste in the same way.

THE RENAISSANCE OF THE SENSES

Buonamico’s story sets out, presciently and ironically, important ways in which sensorial relations were mediated in Renaissance social life. Walls were never absolute barriers so the noise of the woman’s spinning problematizes the degree to which architecture ought to function as an acoustic barrier, as well as the need to design dedicated spaces for human domestic and commercial activity. Teaching one’s neighbors about how certain behavior was disrespectful to the sensibilities of others was emblematic, therefore, of a growing concern about the need to enforce manners generally throughout society as a remedy to less-than-ideal living conditions. Unsurprisingly, the Renaissance witnessed a proliferation of treatises that dealt with all manner of subjects that were supposed to mediate social interaction, not least among them architecture, food, and manners. These works reveal an increasing self-consciousness, on the part of elites, of their relationship to style in all aspects of social life, and the senses, therefore, would be at the center of this refashioning of the body and its surroundings.

The emerging Renaissance palace provided the setting for an ever more sophisticated culture of social interaction, where an increasingly choreographed social life was transformed into a performative event. François Quiviger has shown, for example, how the Renaissance banquet aestheticized taste and smell, the lower and more intimate senses, by integrating them into the visual and aural dimensions of the larger socially disciplined sensorial apparatus (Quiviger 2010: 153–65). As a result, the three thematic pillars of this chapter—architecture, food, and manners—present fertile ground for exploring the multiplicity of the sensory worlds of Renaissance culture. All three were critical parts of the material substructure of social relations that defined such divisions as class, age, and gender.

BODIES, BARRIERS, AND THRESHOLDS: THE SPATIALIZATION OF THE SENSES

Recent theoretical writing has made the case for the way in which architecture is always experienced by the body’s entire sensorial matrix and ought to be designed in accordance with general rules that enhance rather than restrict or overwhelm that experience (see, for example, Pallasmaa 2005). However, less attention has been paid to the degree to which people in Renaissance Europe were intimately aware of how the spaces they inhabited affected their sensual well-being. Regulating excess in the realm of the senses was already considered a fundamental function of architecture as it organized and regulated domestic life. Such regulation was rendered in dramatically sharp relief when such functions collapsed completely during the Black Death of 1348. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s eye-witness description of the devastation suffered by his native Florence, he outlines two different reactions to the plague that emphatically deploy the architectural metaphor (Boccaccio 1993: 6–14). His text pressed readers to think about their own physical, moral, social, and political relationships to the walls that enclosed them, the barriers that protected them, and the thresholds that connected them. In the first instance, people locked themselves up within houses that were plague-free and lived a moderate, elegant, but closeted lifestyle to protect them from infection. They partook of the “daintiest fare and the choicest of wines—all in strict moderation.” They hoped that depriving themselves of seeing the horror first-hand or even hearing stories about the world of terror that lay beyond would protect them from getting sick (Boccaccio 1993: 8–9).

“Others found the contrary view more enticing … that the surest remedy was to drink their fill, have a good time, sing to their hearts’ content, live it up, give free rein to their appetites … day and night would find them in one tavern or another, soaking up the booze like sponges, and carousing all the more in other people’s houses,” now abandoned by ruined families (Boccaccio 1993: 9). These reactions reveal how a decimated architecture no longer facilitated the proper interaction of the social body through the proper regulation of the senses. Instead, homes were either transformed into sensory deprivation chambers or spaces of unrestrained and distorted sensual excess.

In these two examples, opposing rituals of eating are the fulcrum around which a dysfunctional sensorial world was negotiated. The Swiss humanist Johann Wilhelm Stuckius, in his encyclopedia of banquets (Antiquitatum convivialium, 1597), notes that meals pervade the entire range of human activities so that practically nothing happens in public or private, religious or secular life, without one (Jeanneret 1991: 37). What was particular to this period was the more concentrated attention to the spaces dedicated to such social activities.

Most domestic residences in an Italian city, but throughout Europe as well, would have contained multiple dwellings, where several family groups would have shared things such as front doors, staircases, and landings, a situation that provided the setting for Buonamico’s restless nights (Dennis 2008b: 9). In a letter dated March 1550, the writer Anton Francesco Doni gives a vivid sense of what it was like to live in the tenements of Venice, the crowded blocks that housed the vast majority of the city’s poorer and transient population. He heard one neighbor successively play the lute, the harp, the flute, and the bagpipes. His room was so small that he could at the same time be “writing, at table, in bed, or sitting in front of the fire, not to mention in the shithouse.” From his window he could recognize all manner of foreigners by their distinctive clothing and strange manners (cf. Rublack 2010: 126–75). At night he is bombarded by the sounds of the street—wretches passing up and down singing lewd songs—and the noises of next door—the scissors of a tailor, the incessant cough of a toothless crone, and the shouts and shits of his ailing neighbour, whose apartment rivals the stench of a corrupted grave. In the morning, he hears the barges and gondolas on the “fetid, vile canal, with people shouting and braying with coarse and disjointed voices” (Chambers et al. 1992: 181–2). For Doni, who moved in literary circles and had close ties to both leading artists and political figures, such accommodations would not have been his natural surroundings, so he was free to turn squalor into humor. However, his text vividly portrays the unwanted sensorial intimacy that weak architectural barriers could not properly regulate. Spatial design was at the root of sensorial health.

In contrast, the ideal world to which Doni’s readers aspired was supposed to be divided into distinct zones for the health and beauty of the city. For example, the noise of industry was not considered healthy for nobles, according to Giacomo Lanteri, who encouraged them in his treatise of family management (Dell’economica, 1560) to seek spaces of quiet and tranquility outside the city. Because nobles pursued a tranquil lifestyle, their dwellings should not be located along busy main thoroughfares and urban piazzas. Instead, they should find solace outside the city walls. It was acceptable, however, for merchants and artisans to live with the noise of commerce and industry precisely because they engaged directly with it (Dennis 2008b: 9). Noise, therefore, was a hierarchical phenomenon whose negative effects were only damaging to the delicate sensory apparatus of the upper classes. However, even though Lanteri himself was a nobleman, mercantile trade and manufacturing were still assumed to be an important part of the urban matrix. One of Lanteri’s interlocutors notes that in Milan, where merchants and their workshops line the main streets, it actually makes the city more beautiful and delightful in the eyes of those who behold it (Lanteri 1560: 26). Cities were, by nature, heterogeneous entities but Renaissance theorists were increasingly concerned primarily with the rational spatial organization of the disparate elements of which they were made, which appealed primarily to the eye (cf. Atkinson 2012).

Lanteri advised that the most healthy and pleasant part of the home should be reserved for the master and that women’s quarters should be as isolated as possible so that they could not be seen by outsiders, even in their gardens. Servants should be ensconced, naturally, in the most wretched part of the house. They could be summoned to receive orders by a system of handbells that highlighted the household’s acoustic hierarchy and reduced the need for unseemly shouting, now considered inappropriate for the cultured classes (Romano 1996: 17–18; on the use of handbells, see Dennis 2008a).

According to Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), the organization of a household had to mediate between degrees of encounter and separation, relative visibility and audibility based on gender, status, and familial relations in spaces of work, sociability, and intimacy. Grandmothers needed nearly complete solitude while men were to be protected from the noisy hordes of children and housemaids. However, servants had to be close enough to their stations to be able to readily hear commands (Alberti 1988: 120, 149; Dennis 2008b: 10–11). Noisy kitchens should not be so far from the guests that the hot food arrives cold to the table: “those dining need only be out of earshot of the irksome din of scullery maids, plates and pans” (Alberti 1988: 148). Palaces had to be designed to hide certain sights, sounds, and smells in order to create zones of sensory and social order that reflected the competence and status of the master (Romano 1996: 17–18).

If sound was a crucial component in the design of the domestic sphere, rooms were increasingly linked visually to the activities performed in them and the behavior expected of those inhabiting them. Both Alberti and the architect Filarete (1400–69) called for schemes of wall decoration that were relevant to the activities they housed (Filarete 1965: 129 [f. 74v–75r]; Rosenberg 1982: 531–3). Such a design ethic was concerned with compelling and reinforcing certain codes of behavior. Therefore, the visual and acoustic organization of domestic space appealed to the two senses humanists believed to be the most equipped to perceive beauty.

DISCIPLINING AND AESTHETICIZING THE SENSES

The design evolution of Renaissance palace rooms coincided with the emergent literature on manners and behavior that grew up around Baldassare Castiglione’s treatise on the ideal courtier (Il cortegiano, 1528; on its European fame: Burke 1995). Such texts served the purpose of aestheticizing visual and aural perception as a means of elevating and disciplining the lower-order senses, since they could not, in practice, ever be avoided. All of this assumed that what people saw and heard would affect how they acted with others—eating, dancing, playing, and conversing. Not only was beauty thought to induce good behavior, it signified moral virtue and could not be present without it. For the social life of the senses this is crucial, since it was precisely the display of those materially bound senses that could make the meal so unappetizing to those who had to watch and listen.

One of the most widely read and translated texts on the subject was Erasmus’ treatise on manners for young boys (De civilitate morum puerilium, 1530), which played a central role, according to Norbert Elias, in the emergence of modern civility (Elias 1994: 47–182, esp. 47–52, 60–9). It outlined a basic system of manners, while Castiglione’s text described a more refined behavior proper to a more erudite intellectual world, enclosed within the Renaissance palace. Erasmus’ text circulated in a more prosaic world of practical guides that would have found a receptive audience throughout Europe. In it, Erasmus locates the major sites in which proper behavior is required—on the street, in the church, at banquets, and in the bedroom, the most important spaces of Renaissance social life.

Erasmus makes all kinds of pronouncements about the natural but less than exquisite sights and sounds produced by the body. Prescriptions for meeting people on the street demanded a sensitivity to the way in which one’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Entering the Sensory Worlds of the Renaissance
• 1 The Social Life of the Senses: Architecture, Food, and Manners
• 2 Urban Sensations: Attractive and Repulsive
• 3 The Senses in the Marketplace: Sensory Knowledge in a Material World
• 4 The Senses in Religion: Towards the Reformation of the Senses
• 5 The Senses in Philosophy and Science: From the Nobility of Sight to the Materialism of Touch
• 6 Medicine and the Senses: Physicians, Sensation, and the Soul
• 7 The Senses in Literature: Renaissance Poetry and the Paradox of Perception
• 8 Art and the Senses: Representation and Reception of Renaissance Sensations
• 9 Sensory Media: The Circular Links between Orality and Writing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright