ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on material culture as a point of entry into a wider understanding of the Renaissance as a period of global circulation of technological and artistic knowledge and innovation. It centres on pottery relying on coloured glazes – slipware and maiolica – and ‘imitation lacquer’ or lacca, two Italian artisanal productions of non-European origins that took root on the peninsula in the ‘long Renaissance’ – roughly speaking between the early fteenth-and the late sixteenth-century, crossing regional boundaries within the Mediterranean in continuous processes of cumulative innovation and creative emulation, ultimately providing evidence for wide long-term connections between dierent regions in Europe, Africa and Asia. These productions will be explored through a new lens, what I have proposed we might call ‘material mimesis’, whereby an art engages in the cognitive imitation of another materially and technologically, bringing to light knowledge exchange and cross-cultural interconnectedness in the longue durée. The artefacts under scrutiny are distinctive for their physical complexity, made up of a multi-layered structure, highlighted by their brilliant nish, designed to engage with light. They also stand out by virtue of their durability, both in the sense of mastering impermanent substances to achieve a new physically stable whole and in the temporal sense of longue-dureé stratication. Thus the focus on objects built by using technologies relying on layering will be proposed as a way of interrogating the macro-narratives, and a materiality-based approach will be used as a means to help disrupt rigid geographical and chronological classications. This is a new perspective on globalization that is aligned with the emphasis on the multiscalar (Feinman this volume) and networks (Knappett this volume) by focusing on the material culture aspect, yet it also provides a new dimension to globalization thinking. Thus, instead of considering those objects that physically moved from one geographical, temporal and thus cultural context to another, this chapter focuses on those that without travelling embodied within themselves cross-spatial, crosstemporal and thus cross-cultural knowledge, being as they were intrinsically constituted of culturally multi-layered know-how that developed across time and space. To put it metaphorically, instead of looking at well-travelled, ‘globe-trotting’ artefacts, carrying a passport with multiple stamps, we will explore objects embodying a global DNA.
