In fifteenth-century Tuscany, the multi-purpose urban town house bedroom was in transformation from a sparsely adorned chamber to a materially rich spatial environment teeming with a new population of lively pictorial figuration in the painted furnishings and pictures. Alluring bodies–human, animal, hybrid mythological, allegorical, diabolical and sacred, sculptural–were activated within intricate settings and entertaining episodic narrative. These dynamic representational bodies, with their articulated limbs and animate faces, engaged with the people who circulated within the room, face-to-face, with a multiplication of staring eyes. Pictorial figuration transgressed the porous body boundaries of viewers and lodged in their minds as sensory images, activated day and night, in sight, thought, memory, and dreams. This saturation of enlivened imagery, I will argue, is the historical context for the extensive interactive scratching found on domestic furnishings in the period, particularly on historiated cassone chests. Centered in the paper will be a cassone panel in Cleveland representing the annual Florentine palio horse race.

The act of drawing, which we generally associate with works on paper, could cover any surface in the Renaissance studio, from the back of paintings to the plaster of the walls. Here, preparatory studies for larger compositions could be intertwined with experimental sketches, playful caricatures, childish doodles, pen and brush trials, geometric shapes, inscriptions, forming a multilayered temporal palimpsest. The surviving fragments of this widespread drawing practice, traces of which can be found in the studios of some of the major artists of the Italian Renaissance, from Bellini to Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian, have long been studied mainly from an attributive perspective, aiming to distinguish the hand of the master from that of the assistants. The present paper intends to analyze this surviving evidence as a whole, in order to consider the act of drawing in a broader sense and in dialogue with vernacular drawing practices that inscribed graffiti in private and public spaces of the Renaissance city.

During the 1600s, Palermo’s Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri functioned as the Spanish Inquisition’s headquarters and prison in Sicily. During this period, hundreds of prisoners accused of crimes and heresy against the Catholic faith marked the Steri walls, leaving inscriptions and images that reference early modern popular culture while also testifying to their own personal and collective experiences of unfreedom. Often, the graffiti was scratched and etched into the walls with mixtures of food, clay, and bodily fluids; some of the drawings respond and relate to one another, expressing communicability and relationality in defiance of the spatial restrictions and rules of the prison, as well as the Inquisitorial tribunal and its attempts to police unorthodox behavior and beliefs. This presentation analyzes the Steri graffiti through the lens of Nicole R. Fleetwood’s concept of “carceral aesthetics,” considering how art-making in prison is shaped and formed by the effects of penalization on experiences of time, space, and matter. Writing and drawing on the walls constituted a form of sociality and a world-building exercise for the prisoners at the Steri, through which they re-conceptualized the same walls which confined and separated them into a communicative interface, enacting a collaborative form of carceral aesthetics.

Although the critical assessment of what has been for a long time considered vandalism has greatly evolved, the study of graffiti and other marks on works of art represents a litmus test of sorts, one that reveals biases and blind spots in the practice of art history. There is a growing recognition of graffiti, in particular as a historical source and as part of a process of “patrimonialization.” But, besides a graffito’s content (for instance, recording an event), the action itself deserves to be interrogated. Taking as starting point a graffito on Baldassare Peruzzi’s frescoes in the Villa Farnesina and its survival and conservation, this paper will reflect upon what can be gained from approaching such uninvited marks on Italian Renaissance works of art as worthy of interest and consider what frameworks and critical methodologies can be deployed in order to approach this phenomenon in fruitful ways. This issue has important implications not only for the discipline of art history itself, but also for conservation practices as well as for questions of presentation and museological interpretation.