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Speaker: Ulinka Rublack (I Tatti / Cambridge University)
This paper asks how materials, things and people were connected during the sixteenth century. It focuses on cloth and clothing as integral to many exchanges in everyday life, which carried expectations of loyalty, created communities, or became significant to those who sought to challenge social obligations. This deep connection of dress to social life explains why it had psychic relevance, shaping inner lives and the imagination. Coats functioned as a particular material threshold for Renaissance men and could become especially significant for artists who claimed a new social role. This manifested itself in Albrecht Dürer's career during his time in Venice in curious as well as typical ways. Dürer worked in Venice in 1506, in the middle of his career. In his letters, he twice sent greetings from different coats to his humanist friend. I explore why coats might have taken on such significance and their intimate connection with regimes of Renaissance male recognition. This methodically cross-fertilises the 'material turn' with the history of masculinity and emotions.
Ulinka Rublack is Professor of Early Modern History at Cambridge University and Fellow of St John´s College. Her recent books include The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight For His Mother (Oxford University Press: 2015), and Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford University Press: 2010). She has edited Holbein´s Dance of Death for the Penguin Classics Series and co-edited The First Book of Fashion: The Book of Clothes of Matthäus and Veit Konrad Schwarz for Bloomsbury (2015). Her monograph Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Rublack´s books are translated into six languages and her book on Johannes and Katharina Kepler inspired a novel, a film and a new monument for Katharina. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded the German Historikerpreis in 2019.
Image: Parmigianino, Portrait of Pier Maria Rossi di San Secondo (detail), 1535.
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