Ada Palmer: belief

Transcript context

…Why do we think of velvet as the cloth of the Renaissance? I think more of brocade as the cloth of the Renaissance. But certainly, there were major technological advances in velvet production and a number of other very high-end fabric production in the Renaissance. It’s actually quite clear from recent examinations of sketches of machines — like those of Brunelleschi — that they pretty much did figure out how to make industrial mass-production looms. They could have switched over to making cheap cloth at enormous volume the way we did in the 19th century, but that wasn’t what the Renaissance did or wanted. The Renaissance wanted super high-end cloth. When you compare the actual costs of fabric, buying a suit of very nice clothing made out of good-quality Florentine brocade with velvet trim cost as much as buying a luxury sports car, and you have one outfit or two outfits. You have your Sunday outfit and your regular one, and you wear them all year, and then you get the next year’s fashions. A huge part of the purpose of it is to display social status by showing the high-end things. So, we associate with Renaissance affluence and the Renaissance’s biggest industry — the one that’s the equivalent of the auto industry — the development of these extremely high-end luxury things that you then show off on your person every day. What is it about Renaissance annotations of Lucretius that’s more interesting than Lucretius himself? What do they add?…

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