THE ORSINI AND THE AESTHETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

This article presents three case studies on three Roman gentlewomen of late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, examined through the lenses of their inventoried goods and individual expenditure. Although enjoying very different personal statuses (the first one is a widow with grown-up children; the second is a childless widow; and the third is a newly married bride) the three of them share a common keen interest in the managing of things and the furnishings of their private apartments. But while the first one seems to be only interested in affirming her control over the family objects and spaces, the other two appear to be especially driven by the aesthetic quality of their choices. Generally excluded from the possibility of exercising magnificence, which was a public and political virtue, they nonetheless had the option to express their taste for beautiful and fashionable things. Combined with the growing offer of objects and exotic merchandise this sparked the consumer's revolution which many recent historians have been investigating. But it also produced new forms of misogynist discourse.