Adorned Hands: Male Identities and Ring Wearing in the Italian Quattrocento

Abstract

Focused on the fifteenth century, "Adorned Hands" considers different typologies of historic rings with the purpose of revealing the context in which they were crafted, collected, and gifted in the Italian city-states. Rings are polyvalent carriers of cultural significance that, like other items of sartorial display, were coded with meaning for their contemporary viewers. Religious men’s hands were adorned as sites of sacrality, labouring to glorify the Latin church and their deity. However, many men of the church were also sons of elite families, joining the competitive collecting and displaying of luxury wealthy men engaged with to tacitly represent their brilliance: financial and cultural wealth. Such collecting targeted men of lower socio-economic status who elite men sought to dominate and dim. These common men as ring owning or wearing are challenging to find in the historical record. However, through exchanging rings as marriage tokens, or wearing mercantile signet rings, a narrative can be drawn about how men outside of elite families participated in visual splendour and practice of adorning their hand. Through conducting object-biographies, the histories of the rings can be extracted, which are supplemented with documentary evidence that provide lived examples of fifteenth century men and their rings.