Jones and Stallybrass 2000

Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

fashion: both rapidly changing surface and enduring depth (made-ness)

livery: people paid in clothing / cloth / materials instead of cash

"Livery acted as the medium through which the social system marked bodies so as to associate them with particular institutions. The power to give that marking to subordinates affirmed social hierarchy: lords dressed retainers, masters dressed apprentices, husbands dressed their wives. But livery, as it dignified the institutions to which it identified people as belonging, also dignified the participants in such institutions. This mutually supportive interplay of loyalties is what was seen as being at risk by writers attacking sartorial anarchy, the tendency of modern Englishmen (and women) to dress as free-floating individuals rather than as representatives of groups defined by shared labors or loyalties." (5)

The currency of clothing

decline in marked livery, but "payment in things remained central to early modern economies throughout Europe" (18)

payment in livery, but more than monetary value; "livery was a form of incorporation, a material mnemonic that inscribed obligations and indebtedness upon the body. As cloth exchanged hands, it bound people in networks of obligation." (20)

"Renaissance clothes were piecemeal assemblages of parts, every part exchangeable for cash until completely worn out. (Even when worn out, linen provided the valuable rags used to make paper.) Livery as a memorializing system can be set against borht the circulation of clothes outside the structures of court, household, and guild and the translations of materials from one garment to another, from overgarments to undergarments, from gold to gold thread back to gold again. Inventories, wills, and pawnbroking records constantly remind us not only that clothes were transmitted, but that they could be disassembled into their parts." (22-23)

pawning; "Money was transformed into things; things were transformed back into money. It was in things that the Renaissance stored up material memories, but it was also those things that would, when required, become commodities again, exchangeable for cash." (33)

Composing the subject: making portraits

portraits "are as much the portraits of clothes and jewels as of people -- mnemonics to commemorate a particularly extravagant suit, a dazzling new fashion in ruffs, a costly necklace or jewel. While the modern connoisseur searches the faces for a revealing feature or for the identity of the sitter, the pictures themselves give a minutely detailed portrayal of the material constitution of the subject: a subject composed through textiles and jewels, fashioned by clothes." (35)

Holbein's portrait; "the construction of the portrayed subject through prostheses, the attachable/detachable parts,the clothes, furniture, books, scientific and musical instruments that animate the subject." (49)

"Portrait painters composed identities for their sitters not only by condcentrating on the nuances of faces but also by combining an international range of substances for artwork, material objects, and garments to represent those sistters' positions in a world of complex economic and political circulation." (49)

Arachne's web: Velazquez's Las Hilanderas

Velazquez, Las Hilanderas (The Spinners); spinners in foreground, tapestry lit in background; has led modern critics to privilege the high art of the tapestry (made primarily by men) over the low art of the spinning (women's work)

Arachne; Ovid is sympathetic to her, Sandys's translation makes her into a political/sexual agitator; Browne pastoralizes her

"The power of Velazquez's painting is its power to rematerialize the processes through which the symbolic is manufactured." (103)