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2. Catholicisms
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
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Pietro Agnesi liked to dress elegantly, favoring bright colors and precious textiles such as velvet and silk. His wardrobe was filled with modern-cut tailcoats (marsine) and jackets (giubbe), which were rather long, in the Parisian style. He certainly had black velvet sets for occasions on which they might be required, but he was normally seen in sets of white, ash-grey, silver, blue, azure, scarlet, or dark red (rosso sangue), most of them embroidered with silver and gold arabesques. His tailcoats were enriched by frogs and braids, a specialty of Milanese artisans. With friends at home, he would normally wear lighter silk jackets in various shades of green, decorated with floral patterns . Pietro’s outfits must have stood out in Milan, where the older aristocracy was used to dressing in a relatively simple and understated way. The clothing in the aristocratic portraits of the 1730s is still reminiscent of the austere and black-dominated fashion of the seventeenth century, when the city elite was bound by the rituals of Spanish etiquette. Indeed, high-ranking magistrates were still proudly exhibiting their Spanish robes as if the 1707 change of power from Spain to Austria had never occurred. Apparently the distance from the court made modifying their dress code less relevant for the Milanese elite, so much so that, when the new governor, the Prince of Löwenstein, arrived in 1717, the Milanese authorities organized a visually stunning representation of social order through an impeccable, though not much appreciated, Spanish ceremonial. A general reorientation of taste among the Milanese elite became apparent only toward the end of the 1730s, with French fashion becoming increasingly popular. This meant longer jackets, lighter colors, and plenty of gilt decorations. In this rush to dress conspicuously, the patrician elite could be equaled or even surpassed by wealthy bourgeois like Pietro. Hence the 22 chapter two Catholicisms attempts by the local authorities to enforce specific regulations that prevented the members of families like the Agnesi from dressing too ostentatiously and forbidding the women from using pages to carry the trains of their dresses. The elite considered restricting the consumption of luxury items as key to their mercantilist policy; it also preserved the meaning of these items as markers of social status.1 Unlike French fashion, a proper education for his children was something that a new man like Pietro could not easily buy. In fact, it was unusual for wealthy families, even among the aristocracy, to invest in educating many of their children, let alone girls. But Pietro did fund the education of his children generously, and he was attentive in spotting their abilities and helping them to make the best of them. Since infancy, the Agnesi children had been taught by private tutors, their progress followed by the professors and ecclesiastical scholars who frequented the house and enlivened its conversazione . As they reached their teens, the boys entered religious colleges while the girls continued their studies at home under the supervision of the best available tutors. Apparently it was one Abbé Niccolò Gemelli who first noticed Gaetana’s remarkable talent for Latin. He had been hired to teach the classic languages to her younger brother Giacomo and prepare him for early entrance to college. It turned out that Gaetana was able to memorize an impressive proportion of the lectures just by overhearing them while playing in the same room as her brother. Pietro reacted to the news promptly and asked Gemelli to take the girl under his wing until he could find other qualified tutors to teach her. It was under the tutelage of this abbé that, in the summer of 1727, Gaetana translated and declaimed a Latin oration in defense of the right of women to study the arts and sciences without any limitations. A lawyer by the name of Ludovico Voigt, later a teacher at the public schools in Milan (Scuole Palatine), first introduced Gaetana to the elements of German and Greek. Meanwhile, Pietro’s firstborn son was sent to the College of San Giorgio at Novi, a prestigious institution run by the Somaschan fathers. Prestigious, that is, among those that would accept commoners as their boarders.2 The educational institutions of the peninsula went through major reshaping during the early modern age. New elites and new political forms emerged from the crisis of the republican institutions of the Renaissance city-states. These centered on the figure of the prince, and were constituted 23 catholicisms [18.232.179.191] Project...