Courtly Mediators is more than a study of objects moving between the Islamic world and Italy during the Renaissance. It is a study of the multisensorial world of Italian Renaissance courts in which objects originating from outside the Italian Peninsula, and Chinese porcelain in particular, take center stage. The past three decades have seen an increase in studies dealing with material culture from the Islamic world in Renaissance Italy, from importation to collecting practices. Yet Courtly Mediators offers a fresh and novel perspective on the subject, taking it into the realm of sensorial and spatial studies and weaving it into the theoretical art historical framework of the Italian Renaissance. It does so by subverting the usual focus on paintings, artists, and patronage as the main definers of Italian Renaissance art and repointing the light to the array of artifacts coming from China and the Islamic world—their paths, materiality, roles, and perception.

The book principally examines the courts of Naples and Ferrara at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. The objects are first encountered as mediators of diplomatic exchanges. They are then followed throughout their new life into collecting spaces, courtly studioli, and spezierie, where the responses of visitors and successive owners to their materiality, functionality, and artistic merits are carefully examined. Chapter 1 analyzes the objects that reached Italian courts as diplomatic gifts from the Ottomans and Mamluks. Naples, a city that has long been seen as a peripheral player, here emerges instead as a major hub of diplomatic, cultural, and material exchanges. The objects, having served to mediate peace or trade treatises, are examined in their metamorphosis into material memories of such power struggles, becoming part of stately visits and ambassadorial reports.

Chapter 2 deals with the mobility of motifs and the terminology used to define them in contemporary sources as well as modern historiography. It presents, though without dwelling much on it, an extraordinary piece of evidence about “Turks” working in “gold and new things” in fifteenth-century Venice, thus adding an incredibly rare and precious element to the much-debated topic of foreigners working in Venice. Chapter 3 explores the so-far-unknown collection of Chinese porcelain of Eleonora d’Aragona, Duchess of Ferrara (1450–93), comprising over 170 pieces, thus emerging as the largest European porcelain collection of the time. Eleonora’s collection acts as a case study to investigate the material and sensorial approaches to porcelain in Italy and how artifacts moved along global as well as local routes.

Chapter 4 continues the exploration of the porcelains in Ferrara during the reign of Eleonora’s son, Alfonso d’Este (1476–1534), and the intersensorial dialogues these sparked. We are taken into Alfonso’s camerini and are immersed in the interplay of light between the ceramics and the alabaster walls. Guardarobieri, humanists, and artists are all players in a complex acquisition and designing scheme. Titian becomes the procurer of ceramics for his patron’s studiolo and not simply an isolated artistic genius. Artworks such as Bellini’s Feast of the Gods are set back into their original physical context, surrounded by stones, gems, coins, and porcelains that might have inspired their material imitation and rendering in the painting itself. Chapter 5 focuses on courtly spezierie and the presence, origins, and uses of apothecary jars, or albarelli, in the court of Ferrara and Naples. The objects are the cue to delve into the role of collecting spaces as places for knowledge exchange. Objects are followed from room to room, unveiling the fluid nature of courtly spaces where light, touch, and smell all played a part. Medicines, confectionaries, and aromatics permeate the spaces with their fragrances.

The book presents compelling new archival material, highlighting both the diverse nature of Renaissance material culture and its local ramifications. If the Islamic world plays a relatively small role in the book, the attention paid to the material and multisensorial implications of the objects and their spatial relationship with their environments provides an innovative reading of Italian Renaissance courts. It ultimately offers a methodological framework that overturns any lingering understanding of the Italian Renaissance as monolithic, strongly asserting its multicultural and global character.