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

How would the history of seventeenth-century Romans appear from the point of view of the things in their possession? This is the central question of Renata Ago’s meticulously researched book, the result of a fine-grained study of a large number of account books, inventories, wills, testaments, memoirs, correspondence, and other notarial records that document the interactions of Romans with a myriad of things. Ago takes readers into the homes and through the everyday lives of the Roman ceto mediocre, a “middling” class of lawyers, artisans, and merchants whose consumption habits often have been understood as emulating tastes and styles of the aristocracy. She shows that the framework of emulation is too narrow for understanding early modern Romans’ relationship with their possessions.

Romans did not own many objects, but they interacted with them in a surprisingly rich variety of ways. Whether artifacts or agricultural produce, things could be used as currency, to pay for food, clothing, work, or medical or legal expenses. Precious objects such as jewelry, silverware, or embroidered fabrics were pawned to the Monte di Pietà, or loaned out, to receive an income. Furniture, clothing, and tools for work were often borrowed and sometimes acquired. Roman homes did not normally have a kitchen, yet some Romans owned crystal glasses, porcelain or fine ceramic plates, silverware and tableware. They purchased books to cultivate their religious devotion or to learn how to write a letter, or—in the case of novels—just to be fashionable. They collected landscapes, paintings of flowers, or natural curiosities to show their fine tastes and love of novelties. In all these transactions, things came to be imbued with meaning that transcended their material value and even the original function for which they had been acquired. Especially when passed on to the next generation with a view toward maintaining the family’s lineage, objects came to represent the identity of their owners as material expressions of their spiritual and social lives.

It is in this sense that Gusto for Things is a study in material culture, intended as “that part of the culture that is objectified in things, that requires things to materialize its own existence” (p. 3). It should not surprise anyone, then, that Ago’s history of objects is not a history of any specific object and that it does not engage with questions of expertise or technical production. In her analysis, the culture that expressed itself through things is captured in the untranslatable notion of gusto in the book’s Italian title, which misses the effervescence of the equivalent English in favor of a more intimate sense of sensual pleasure, visual delight, personal style, and good taste. It was because they found pleasure and delight in handling and looking at things, because they exhibited their tastes and styles through their possessions, that Romans treasured objects and attributed to them a value that was not directly related to their worth in the marketplace.

As Ago shows in gentle polemic with historians of consumption, the number of things owned was not related to the owner’s wealth. Women, for example, were generally less wealthy than men, yet they normally owned more, less valuable, things. The history of objects that Ago tells points to an interesting disconnect between ownership and usufruct, with women often being usufructuaries of jewelry and clothing in their husbands’ possession.

Ago draws her conclusions on the significance of things in the lives of seventeenth-century Romans by availing herself of quantitative analysis. Readers are treated to several tables that list the number and type of objects in various inventories and that give sudden immediacy to the gusto for things that early modern Romans cultivated. While lingering on the sniff boxes, spinets, spyglasses, clocks, wolf’s teeth, rosaries, pearls, tin flasks, perfumes, silk flowers, candleholders, umbrellas, dolls, fans, mirrors, swords, mortars, washbasins, braziers—the list could...