Undecorated: Early Modern Italian Villas as Racial Casts
When they were not preoccupied with laborious errands, early modern domestic workers and enslaved peoples recuperated in the basements, mezzanines, and garrets of their patrons’ opulent palazzi and villas. In contrast to the spaces used by the masters, the servants’ spaces were far from luxurious. Frequently used both as service and storage spaces, the domestics’ quarters and passageways were tiny, murky, and crowded. They were also undecorated (Figure 1). Unlike the formal spaces in the palazzi, service hallways, mezzanines, and garrets did not have mosaic floors with “square and circular labyrinths on which the youth could play,”[1] and lacked frescos and paintings that illustrated “the tales that poets make for moral instruction, like that which Daedalus painted on the gates to the temple at Cumae, showing Icarus in flight.”[2] Hidden from sight, they were designed and built without consideration for their occupants’ spatial amusement, instruction, comfort, wellbeing, and visual delight (Figure 2). These were what Swati Chattopadhyay calls “small spaces.”
Figure 1. Detail from an undecorated wall from the Villa Farnese in Caprarola. Photograph by author, 2024.
Figure 2. Undecorated, dark, and minute service hallway in the Villa Farnese in Caprarola. Photograph by author, 2024.
In this article, I disclose the Italianate material affiliation between the small spaces’ undecorated walls, ceilings, and floors and their occupants’ racialized bodies. Catholic humoral theory was the hinge that affectively connected empty walls to othered persons’ bodies. Undecorated walls and floors conformed with their marginalized residents, in comparison to how sumptuously decorated halls were considered suitable to the patron’s personal and familial (patrilinear) magnificence. In turn, “race” in the early modern period surfaces as strongly connected to lineage (genus), gender, and class for the distribution of resources and power. Given that the affiliation between the undecorated spaces and the othered individuals was material and somatic, fresco painting and architectural ornamentation can be considered racecrafting practices that sorted commodified persons while the undecorated rooms can be thought of as racecraft devices and tools. Just like modern medicine and art use the chemistry of plaster cast slip to form clay and flesh, early modern undecorated and isolated spaces were employed to fix the fluctuating humoral balance of racialized bodies, i.e., “to keep ‘them’ in ‘their’ place.” Working with Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields’ notion of “racecraft,” which notes how racialization unfolds on the ground through bodies and “physical terrain” while it “originates not in nature,” I approach the early modern Italian villas that discriminatorily allocated space, delight, and humoral health as architectural “racial casts.”[3]
Differently put, the lack of wall, floor, and overall decoration was intentional and symptomatic of the architecturally internalized and insidiously perpetuated racecraft. The boarding of servants and the enslaved in undecorated spaces was appropriate because these marginalized local and foreign peoples were often regarded as irremediable “brutes.” Othered individuals were often termed “irremediable” due to how early modern Italian elites saw and “read” their cultural habits, beliefs, gestures and postures, attires, and physical bodies. Geographically and culturally repositioned bodies and somatic markers came together under the Italianate elite suprasystem that interpreted the foreign bodies according to Italianate conditional codes of behaviour, appearance, and understanding of humoral theory. This process (re)constructed the various foreign and marginalized identities as per the local conventional hierarchy, which due to its reliance on Catholic humoral theory was deemed “natural.”
So, what was the early modern Italianate body like? Early modern humoral bodies were understood as physiologically framed by the flow of the four humors –blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm– set on their temperamental path by the coinciding location of a person’s birth, lineage, climate, culture, and religion. One’s temperament could be tweaked but not completely overridden, and thus bodies that were seen as “biologically” predisposed to certain habits, behaviors, and beliefs divergent from the Italo-centric social and cultural model were deemed innately imbalanced, flawed, and, when convenient, intrinsically “irredeemable.” For instance, the early modern designation, “Moor,” used to construct and other the perceived ethno-racial identity of a group of foreigners, workers, and enslaved peoples, including Arabs, Berber Muslims, sub-Saharan Muslims, Muslims generally, and Africans more broadly, was also used to label these individuals as irrational “brutes” that may “instantly turn violent.”[4] “Naturally,” then, decorations and ornamentations that aimed to instruct, delight, and rectify one’s humoral balance and temperament were thought of as redundant apropos select “unrefined” bodies. In his 1615 treatise L'idea dell'architettura universale, architect and theoretician Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548-1616) explicitly described the relationship between ornament, body, and race. In his words: “the use of orders and ornaments is widespread among most of the more cultured and civilized people and nations,” while “the caverns of the troglodytes in Ethiopia” lack ornaments of any kind.[5]
“Fresco painting and architectural ornamentation can be considered racecrafting practices that sorted commodified persons while the undecorated rooms can be thought of as racecraft devices and tools.”
As Scamozzi claimed, ornaments, decorations, and various other architectural embellishments were suitable to “noble” beholders with sensitive and composed bodies amenable to medicinal, intellectual, and moral ameliorations. For example, the early modern architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) claimed that beauty, ornamentation, and structural and wall embellishments are the most effective means of generating and cultivating architectural aptness, longevity, and health in buildings and inhabitants. In his architectural treatise, De re aedificatoria (1443-1452), he wrote:
There is one particular quality that may greatly increase the convenience and even the life of a building. Who would not claim to dwell more comfortably between walls that are ornate, rather than neglected? What other human art might sufficiently protect a building to save it from human attack? Beauty may even influence an enemy, restraining his anger and so preventing the work from being violated. Thus, I might be so bold as to state: No other means is as effective in protecting a work from damage and human injury as is dignity and grace of form. All care, all diligence, all financial consideration must be directed to ensuring that what is built is useful, commodious, yes–but also embellished and wholly graceful.[6]
Alberti’s and Scamozzi’s ideas did not exist in a vacuum. Early modern Italians broadly considered art and architectural ornamentation and what we today would roughly refer to as “merely form” and aesthetics as entwined with “intellectual essences,” “substantial values,” and ethics. “Form” in paintings, frescos, reliefs, and sculptural objects ran deep and possessed quintessence(s) that expressed themselves through visual and material manifestations capable of corrupting or protecting adjacent bodies and objects. In addition, a spectrum of influences prevailing between corruption and protection ensued from ornaments and embellishments entangling bodies and buildings. While existing on a fluid spectrum, such influences were not thought of as relative, i.e., provisional and constructed. On the contrary, they were thought of as deterministic and universal, subscribing to beliefs about the humoral body via the Catholic God.
In the Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre et profane (1582), Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1522-1597), who was present at the Counter-Reformation’s Council of Trent (1545-1563), noted the healing power of images to support Catholicism’s continuous use of icons and frescos and counter the Protestant disapproval of the use of visual representations.
Physicians made analogous arguments. Gulio Marcini (1558-1630), a Sienese doctor and personal physician to Pope Urban VIII, in his treatise on the therapeutic and prophylactic agency of images and art, Considerazioni sulla Pittura (c.1618-1621), claimed that images and decorations were active agents with remedial virtues that needed to be properly organized and allocated throughout a palazzo or villa. He wrote, for instance, that religious images should find their place in the patron’s bedrooms, mythological narratives should occupy the ground-floor rooms, and that images of military deeds and valiant heroes should be relegated to the meeting spaces.[7] Within this framework, landscape images, representations of the seasons, and pagan deities were imagined as instilling cheerfulness that alleviated intellectual melancholy. Religious themes engendered piety and images of the Madonna were seen as particularly apt for (elite) feminine spaces. History paintings were believed to foster civic ideals by encouraging one to emulate tradition and were thus understood as suitable for the patron’s rooms, especially those in which the patron received their devotees. As early modern historian Michael Bury writes, what guided Mancini’s allocation of representational subject across the early modern villa was a “pharmacological concept,” which distributed decorations according to the architectural program, specific users, and “upon which kinds of habits and feelings it was thought appropriate to encourage and or discourage in the individual spectator.”[8]
In other words, according to Mancini, the art and architectural ornamentation and decoration of country estates such as, for example, the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este (1509-1572), were supposed to be selected and designed according to the bodies, habits, and humoral balances of their users. Suitably then, in the Villa d’Este, the grandest room of Cardinal Ippolito’s residence–the Sala del Virtù (Hall of Virtues)–had a vault decoration featuring twenty scenes representing the Virtues, punctuated by medallions of illustrious figures, including portraits of the Este family. The Hall of Virtues was also famous for having been decorated with gold (Spanish Leather) imported from Burgundy and Spain between 1555 and 1568.[9] And, comparably, in the Villa Farnese in Caprarola, commissioned by Pope Paul III, born Alessandro Farnese (1468-1549), there is a Sala del Mappamondo (Hall of the World Map), which comprises a grandiose map of the world, portraits of the explorers Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512), and Vasco da Gama ( -1524), and maps of Judea and Italy, which all together testify to the Farnese’s aspirations and convictions. On the world map, the four continents are represented as four women adorned and robed in suggestive ways. Europe is portrayed as a positively racialized white woman holding the cosmos in her right hand and America as a negatively racialized black woman holding and unknowingly wasting an upside-down overflowing cornucopia (Figure 3).
Figure 3. World map with racialized representations of the continents in the Sala del Mappamondo in the Villa Farnese in Caprarola. Photograph by author, 2024.
Art historian Frances Gage, whose research focuses on the affective and physiological properties of early modern images, frescos, and paintings, summarizes the meanings and powers early modern Italians ascribed to art and architectural decorations, ornamentation, and objects. In her words:
Early modern men and women attributed to paintings in collections and domestic contexts effects similar to those that they produced in public contexts: over and above instructing, delighting, and moving their audiences, they possessed the potential to transform beholders, effect conversion, imprint or alter the body, repair broken lives, restore the sick, soothe the soul, or prevent harm from befalling individuals and communities.[10]
From this we may infer that assigning undecorated spaces to domestic workers and enslaved peoples signified an intentional and comprehensive lack of architectural care for the occupants’ civic instruction, delight, moral transformation, religious conversion, “repair,” and spiritual and physical health, to use Gage’s summary. Moreover, by omitting ornamentation, undecorated spaces did not merely disregard their occupants but purposefully affixed and fastened their bodies to their “naturally” realized exploitable societal roles. In that sense, undecorated rooms functioned as bodily extensions and racial casts. Withholding the possibility of amending one’s humoral balance, undecorated spaces were spatial apparatuses designed to maintain an othered body in their presumed subservient “brute” state to edify the conventional societal hierarchy.
Premodern and early modern art and architectural historiography have traditionally ignored the study of undecorated spaces. Secondary literature on the ornamentation and decoration of early modern Roman villas has thus far developed along two axes: (i) research that overall recognizes the material agency of early modern artistic, architectural, and artisanal objects and (ii) studies that divide the early modern material heritage into objects that possess “artistic” value (and belong to art and architectural history) and things that have “magical” powers (and thus fit with cultural and folk histories).[11] Both types of scholarship, which either unite or divide “low art” and “high art,” “efficacious objects” and “aesthetic legacy,” “artifact” and “art,” overlook undecorated spaces, deeming them insignificant. In this manner, these undecorated rooms, hallways, and stairs, alongside the persons that occupied them, remain outside of history. They also remain inaccessible on site to both scholars and tourists alike (Figure 4).
“Placing the category of the “undecorated” alongside the decorated begins to open early modern art and architectural historiography to the otherwise hidden histories.”
Figure 4. Blocked door behind a fire extinguisher and a golden rope crowd barrier. The obstructed door leads to the foiled corridor and servant stairs in the Villa Farnese in Caprarola. Photograph by author, 2024.
While the doors remain shut, placing the category of the “undecorated” alongside the decorated begins to open early modern art and architectural historiography to the otherwise hidden histories of racecraft, suppression, opposition, dissent, and a multitude of thus far effaced lives and practices of labor.
Citation
Dijana O. Apostolski, “Undecorated: Early Modern Italian Villas as Racial Casts,” PLATFORM, December 2, 2024.
Notes
[1] Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), 298.
[2] Alberti, On the Art of Building, 299.
[3] Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012), 18.
[4] Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 44-45; Ella Shohat, “The Specter of the Blackamoor: Figuring Africa and the Orient,” The Comparatist 42 (2018): 158–188.
[5] Vincenzo Scamozzi, The Idea of Universal Architecture: Venetian Architect, The Architectural Orders and their Application, ed. and trans. Patti Garvin, Koen Ottenheym, and Wolbert Vroom (Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Press, 2008), 48, 76.
[6] Alberti, On the Art of Building, 156.
[7] Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla Pittura, ed. Adriana Marucchi and Luigi Salerno, vol 1 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1956), 143-144.
[8] Michael Bury, “Giulio Mancini and the organization of a print collection in early seventeenth-century Italy,” in Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500-1750, ed. Christopher Baker, Caroline Elam, and Genevieve Warwick (Aldershot: Ashgate & The Burlington Magazine, 2003), 81.
[9] Andrea Bruciati, Villa d’Este (Milano: Skira editore spa, 2024), 42-43.
[10] Frances Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 10.
[11] Gage reviews the available literature showing how scholars such as Hans Belting, Alexander Nagel, and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, among others, ascribe to an evolutionary history of ornament and images where the existence of artisanal artifacts was either threatened or merged into the “art object.” At the same time, thinkers like Fredrika Jacobs and Michael Bury recognize how widespread the belief in the agency of images was in early modern Italy, regardless of whether an object was perceived as folk or elite. Gage, Painting as Medicine, 3-5.
