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

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 3I
fifteenth-century Neapolitan Giovanni Pontano in a treatise on the
five social virtues connected with the spending of money for one's
own private enjoyment. The very idea of writing on the virtues of
spending money was generated in a market economy where people
were becoming more than a little heady about the exhilarating pleasures
of possessing things. One of Pontano's virtues, conviviality,
has already been mentioned; another is splendor. Splendor consists
in furnishings, utensils for everyday use, ornaments, and personal
adornment. Pontano emphasizes the moral quality of possessiveness
itself, tempered of course by moderation and appropriateness.
The beauty of all these things, he argues, excites admiration for the
possessor of objects; moreover, this beauty consists not in utility and
inherent value of materials but in rarity, variety, and craftsmanship,
and in the pleasure they give the owner. In short, Pontano defines
possessiveness as an ethical principle and then translates the ethical
principle as an end in itself into a principle of beauty, thus endowing
possessiveness with an aesthetic as well as an ethical quality.92
A new dynamic thus came into play in the Renaissance luxury
marke that engendered a proliferation of objects and an increase of
their variety-indeed, that redefined the very concept of luxury.
This new situation in the marketplace opened up incomparable opportunities
for artisans-from painters, sculptors, and architects, to
modest potters' inducing them to take the initiative with new ideas
to shape taste and so arouse demand yet further, thereby, to an extent,
getting a certain control over demand. This is the dynamic behind
the growth of the maiolica industry traced in the early part of
this article. In a sense, the material culture of Renaissance Italy generated
the very first stirring of the consumerism that was to reach a
veritable revolutionary stage in the eighteenth century and eventually
to culminate in the extravaganthrow-away, fashion-ridden,
commodity-culture of our own times.
In Renaissance Italy, however, these first stirs of consumerism
hardly anticipated the kind of absurd and wasteful emulation that
Thorsten Veblen encapsulated in his concept of "conspicuous consumption"
to explain this kind of behavior in the modern luxury
market. These Renaissance habits of spending cannot be explained
away as simply the conspicuous expression of wealth, for many of
these objects-like maiolica and even paintings-were in fact rela-
92Francesco Tateo, Umnanesimno etico di Giovanni Pontano (Lecce, 1972) 171-77.
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