Renaissance interiors are conventionally depicted by scholarship as sites largely secluded from society and therefore relatively cut off from broader historical and cultural narratives of change. My essay set out to challenge these assumptions and to show how between 1400 and 1600 the urban houses of the elites played a crucial role in the performance of sociability. Through a comparative study of written sources, visual representations and objects, it showed how sociable entertainment can provide a key to an understanding of the emergence of new domestic material and cultural forms in the Italian Renaissance. This essay mobilized little-known written sources and objects to draw a first view of Renaissance domestic sociability. It was particularly innovative in the way it addressed the relationship between people, objects and spaces within sociability practices; the role of women in the interaction with objects and within rituals and performances of sociability; the ritualization of domestic sociability through an exploration of games and home visits.

My essay was grounded on primary sources ranging from private correspondence, domestic inventories and account-books, conduct books and household management treatises to visual and material evidence. My research was further disseminated through papers presented at: Società Italiana Storiche (SIS) international conference, Florence, November 2003; La maison lieu de sociabilité, colloquium, Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot, Paris, May 2004; Articulating meanings in late medieval and early modern interiors, AAH conference, University College, London, April 2003; A Casa: People, Spaces and Objects in the Renaissance Interior, International symposium, AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic interior, V&A and Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, May and June 2004