The famous call, made nineteen years ago by Appadurai and Kopytoff, that students of material culture should study the 'social life' of things has, until now, had a limited effect upon students of the Italian Renaissance. The essays in this book - part of the recent burgeoning interest in Italian Renaissance material culture - rise to Appadurai and Kopytoff's challenge, examining the 'lives' led by objects in late medieval and Renaissance Italy: their creations, lives and subsequent after-lives.

Note from the Series Editor. Preface. Introduction: Toothpicks and Green Hangings: Nicholas Penny. Part I: The Creation of the Object: Patricia L. Reilly. What You See Is What You Get: Colour In Italian Renaissance Istoriato Ware: Steve Wharton. 'Sculpsit Cellinius Neptunam': The Biography of the Neptune Fountain in Cellini's Vita: Victoria C. Gardner Coates. Part II: The Life of the Object: Rupert Shepherd. Banquet Plate and Renaissance Culture: A Day in the Life: Valerie Taylor. For Use and Display: Selected Furnishings and Domestic Goods in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Interiors: James R. Lindow. Fragments from the 'Life Histories' of Jewellery belonging to Prostitutes inEarly-Modern Rome: Tessa Storey. Part III: The After-Life of the Object: Roberta J. M. Olson. The Icon of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome: An Image and its Afterlife: Kirstin Noreen. One Pontile, Two Pontili: The Choir Screens of Modena Cathedral: Dawn Cunningham. The Afterlife of an Early Medieval Chapel: Giovanni Battista Ricci and Perceptions of the Christian Past in Post-Tridentine Rome: Ann Van Dijk. The Scrittoio Della Calliope in the Palazzo Vecchio: A Tuscan Museum: Andrea M. Galdy. Index.