BEST goldthwaite The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica 1989

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 25
possessions; and they were one of the prestige items a citizen was
likely to take with him (even ifhe had to borrow them) when he travelled
into the countryside to serve out a term of office as a local governor.
Moreover, diners now ate off their own plates rather than
feeding themselves from a common plate shared with others, and
plates were changed in the course of a meal. Italians sought to impose
rules on the entire organization of a meal, including the order
of courses and the setting of the table; and tracts on the subject appear
and reappear from the later sixteenth century onwards, particularly
in Rome and Venice. 7 So, too, the napkin came into its own, the
indispensable item in each diner's place setting as the essential utensil
in the liturgy of table ritual; and as the symbol of everything that this
new social ritual came to stand for, it was glorified into a veritable
spectacle by being shaped into all kinds of elaborate forms.72
Vespasiano da Bisticci's description of the elegant merchanthumanist
Niccolo Niccoli at table reflectsomething of the social
snobbery that Italians were already in the early fifteenth century beginning
to attach to dining habits and to the setting of the dinner table
itself: "Of all men ever born he was by far the cleanest, in his eating
habits as in all else. When he was at table he ate from the most
beautiful antique dishes, and he drank from cups of crystal or some
other fine stone. To see him at table, as old as he was, gave one a sense
of refinement. He always insisted that the table cloth before him be
of the whitest, like all his other linens. Some may be astonished to
hear that he possessed such a vast quantity of tableware, and to these
may be answered that in his day things of this sort were not so much
in vogue or so highly prized as they have been since. . ." (and the
author here is writing only one generation after Niccoli's death in
I437).
71 Christoforo Messisbugo, Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchio generate
(Ferrara, I 549); Eustachio Celebrino, Opera nuova che insegnapparechiare una mensa .
(n.p., n.d., but later sixteenth century); Vittorio Lancellotti, Lo scalco prattico (Rome,
i627); Antonio Adami, II novitiate del Maestro di casa (Rome, i657); Francesco Liberati,
II peifetto Maestro di casa (Rome, i658).
72Elvira Garbero Zorzi, "Cerimoniale e spettacolaritA: ii tovagliolo sulla tavola del
principe," in Sergio Bertelli and Giuliano Crif6, eds., Rituale, cerinioniale, etichetta (Milan,
i985) 67-83. This volume explores various aspects of food, table settings, and table
manners in Renaissance Italy. These studies take as their point of departure the work of
Norbert Elias (who did not deal with Italy) and try to push his argument into the realms
of anthropology to uncover deeper social meanings. Zorzi's article, however, is the only
one firmly anchored in materials of the epoch.
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