Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome by Renata Ago (review)

In Gusto for Things, Ago turns her considerable acumen and archival expertise to the household possessions of “the middling sort” of Romans, contributing to a now-considerable literature on material culture. Baroque Rome pulsed with luxury consumption, and Ago shows how the evolving taste for fine things pervaded many levels of society, not only the nobility. Using 200 wills, inventories, and account books, she argues that seventeenth-century Rome’s economy was prosperous, not stagnant, particularly if consumption rather than production is used as a measure.

Her work draws both on anthropological discussions of material objects that emphasize their cultural construction and on the importance of a cash economy in “liberating” objects from their role as a medium of exchange (15–16). This shift was still incomplete in Baroque Rome. How, then, did a given possession—a book, say, or a bedstand—change from a simple holder of exchange value to a holder of symbolic value, worthy of being recorded, named, and transmitted independent of its monetary worth? What drives an owner to initiate this transformation? These questions lead Ago to extended studies of such items as artwork, books, jewels, and dresses, the ones most commonly named in wills. Thirty-three black and white plates of genre paintings by Annibale Carracci, Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio), and others evoke the objects discussed, including dishes, furniture, musical instruments, and work tools.

Fine-grained statistical analysis allows Ago to distinguish trends by age, wealth, and gender. One of her many trenchant conclusions concerns the universality of a drive for immortality through unique possessions. An ever-broader swath of Romans sought to preserve family name and reputation by making some of their things inalienable, often real estate but sometimes moveable goods. Testators ordered heirs to liquidate other resources mainly to protect the main investment: “The movement of some goods was only the means for guaranteeing the stability and prospective inalienability of others” (61).

The women in the sample, unsurprisingly, were poorer than the men, owning fewer paintings and almost no books. Yet, overall, they owned more things, and their homes were more crowded with objects. In this context, however, the limits of the documentation sharpen, as Ago duly notes: The law strictly separated the property of husbands and wives, though in practice they mingled in the home. Inventories of personal possessions therefore often give an incomplete account of a home’s contents; a woman might have had ready access to her husband’s plethora of books, paintings, and jewels. Such methodological insights are among the book’s highlights.

Of value to historians of art, economy, gender, and material culture, Gusto for Things enriches our sense of the material world and the values of ordinary Romans in the time of Caravaggio and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, contextualizing that age’s great art collections and museums in a broader social milieu.