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Staging the Table with Deborah Krohn
149 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to Deborah Krohn, Associate Professor and Chair of Academic Programs at Bard Graduate Center, about the recent exhibition Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800 at Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Staging the Table explores early modern dining practices through illustrated manuals featuring instruction and carving and napkin folding. The books are considered alongside early modern material artifacts such as table linens and carving knives, as well as modern napkin folds based on period designs.
Show notes, links, and transcript available on The Recipes Project.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Around the Table' Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
This is Around the Table, a new podcast from the Recipes Project.
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Speaker
I'm your host, Sarah Kernan.
00:00:16
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Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.
Interview with Deborah Crone on 'Staging the Table' Exhibition
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Speaker
Today I'm speaking to Deborah Crone, Associate Professor and Chair of Academic Programs at Bard Graduate Center, about the exhibition she has curated, Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800.
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The exhibition at Bard Graduate Center Gallery explores dining practices through illustrated manuals featuring instruction in carving and napkin folding.
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The books are displayed alongside early modern material artifacts such as table linens and carving knives.
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as well as modern napkin folds based on period designs.
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Debra, thank you so much for joining me today.
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My pleasure.
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So staging the table has so many different components, including physical and online exhibitions, a catalog, a symposium, performances, lectures, workshops.
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The project also pairs text with imagery and material objects, including modern reproductions.
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and interpretations of really exquisite napkin folding.
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This comprehensiveness is so helpful for conceptualizing the early modern table.
00:01:31
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Could you talk about how you developed the idea for staging the table and how it came to encompass so much?
Culinary History and Recipe Books
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Sure.
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So like so many of our projects, it came really out of a very long-term interest in culinary history,
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as well as the history of books and print culture in early modern Europe.
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And I had been teaching classes for a number of years where I was using recipe books as primary sources to try to understand cultural history, the culture of the table, food production, food distribution, images of food and still life painting in more prescriptive,
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texts like herbals and, you know, botanical treatises, anything that had to do with anything that was potentially edible and recipes of all kinds, cosmetic recipes, as well as culinary recipes.
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So really that whole sort of very, very broad group of ideas and material things and images.
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And I had written a previous book about a 1570 cookbook, Bartolomeo Scopi's Alphera,
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And that was, that really sort of got me into book history in a major way because I kind of, as an art historian, trained as an art historian, I realized after being really sort of gripped by the incredible illustrations in this recipe book that in order to actually understand what they were doing there, I had to read the book.
Carving Manuals and Exhibition Insights
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And then, you know, sounds pretty,
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But for art historians, I dare say it is not always obvious to read the book.
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And then once I'd read the book, I realized, well, you know, why it is, what kind of additions are there and how many times was it published?
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So it sort of was like almost like following a breadcrumb trail to get, to use a food metaphor, to get to the whole.
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And after I'd written that book, I realized that there was a lot of other stuff that was similar to,
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carving manuals that were by the end of the 16th century, very specific books that were, didn't have any of the other kind of stuff that was in these larger recipe compendia and that were much more focused.
00:03:56
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And I just started kind of collecting references and exploring those and realized that there was a lot of copies of these just in the New York area, because part of the exhibition at Bard Graduate Center is part of a program that we call the Focus Project, where faculty
00:04:11
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It's mainly faculty and postdoc curated exhibitions that are done as part of a curricular enterprise within the teaching structure.
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And we're not really supposed to borrow stuff from faraway places.
00:04:29
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You know, we're really supposed to keep it as local as possible.
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So I realized that there was this kind of treasure trove of these carving manuals really at five or six libraries in the tri-state area around New York.
00:04:40
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And that it would be really potentially very, very good to develop it into an exhibition.
00:04:46
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So that's a kind of long winded answer
Legacy and Accessibility of the Exhibition
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to your question.
00:04:49
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That's great.
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So by the time this episode is released, the in-person exhibition will have ended at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery.
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But the catalog and all the digital components, like the online exhibition and the YouTube videos are all still going to be available.
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Before we actually turn to those lasting components, I just have a few questions about the physical in-person exhibition.
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Sure.
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So staging the table showed how dining at elite early modern tables was really a multisensory experience.
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And every part of the meal from the food to the napkin folding, the room and table decorations, even the small details like the carving knives, that those could really...
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represent or highlight a family or a specific event or a theme.
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And every aspect of the meal could be highly manipulated to a really dramatic degree.
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This exhibit really hits home
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that the table encompassed so much more than just the food that was on the table.
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And there's really a wealth of extant material culture to examine.
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Could you talk about this for a moment, reflect on this for a moment?
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Sure.
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Probably more than a moment.
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Yeah.
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So the table was a really important space because in the early modern period, there wasn't that much else to do besides work,
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sleep and eat.
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And so a lot, I think a lot of social life came, came down to what happened around the table, whether it was in a very illustrious banquet in an aristocratic or princely home or, or castle, or even in a modest home in, in a town or, you know, perhaps even in the countryside that meals were central to people's lives.
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And so,
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understanding how important that was, I realized that it would be really interesting to pull together as much information as I could about that event.
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And one parallel that became really evident to me when I was preparing the exhibition was thinking about the table as a kind of a wondercommer, a chamber of wonders.
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You know, there's been a lot of attention amongst art historians and historians of material culture to look at this phenomenon in the early modern period of these collectors' cabinets where all kinds of objects were thrown together for private consumption and enjoyment.
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But these were really the nucleus of the modern museum.
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And it struck me that the table was also a place for display and contemplation
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and kind of socializing around a group of objects in the same way that the Kunst und Wunderkammer was.
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But the table was in motion.
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It was set up and put away.
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Tables were not permanent pieces of furniture.
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They were trestles and they could be taken down.
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There wasn't a dining room for a lot of this period, right?
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Not a set place in the home where dining took place.
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It was usually in the biggest room there was when it was a banquet and then it became something else afterwards or the next day.
Dining Artifacts and Historical Experiences
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So, you know, these were not kind of permanent spaces, but they were nevertheless very important.
00:08:27
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So I wanted to get a sense of what these spaces looked like.
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A lot of people think about and talk about the culture of food and dining and a lot of the objects as ephemeral, as things that sort of come and go.
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They're not around.
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They're not lasting.
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And I find this word somewhat problematic because they are
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a lot of the objects themselves were ephemeral, but then there's ways to kind of access the experiences that people had through texts, through images, through prints, through objects that, you know, and through recipes and all of that.
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So, so really I was trying to kind of presuppose that the table is a kind of space for all of these activities.
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And, and it's, it's also doesn't come out so much.
00:09:14
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I mean,
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In an exhibition, you have limited space to explain all your ideas, right?
00:09:19
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You have these labels and labels are amongst the most frustrating things for somebody to write because they have to be really short and there's so much that you wanna kind of cram in.
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An object does speak a thousand words and for a label, you often only have 150 and how you can possibly do that.
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So my labels are a little long
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But that's actually what's on the website.
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The labels are there.
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They've been slightly edited to be sort of in conjunction with the online exhibition, but that information has been preserved on the website.
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So, yeah, I mean, that's sort of the idea of bringing together the, especially the knives, some of the carving knives and the linens is to just give people a sense of like the look and feel of this in a material sense.
Craftsmanship in Napkin Folding
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And, you know,
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The one thing that you can't have in an exhibition in a museum is food.
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So how to get around that, you know, that's another topic we could potentially talk about that, you know, in another part of this, but that because it's a huge subject.
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But I don't know.
00:10:26
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Does that answer your question?
00:10:27
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Yeah.
00:10:27
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Yeah.
00:10:29
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I was able to visit the exhibition a few weeks ago.
00:10:33
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Oh, great.
00:10:35
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You should have gotten in touch with me.
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I was really struck by just seeing some of these objects in person, especially the table linens, seeing the napkins.
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That's not something you usually...
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see on exhibit in too many museums.
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So being able to see those and then see the modern reproductions or interpretations of these Renaissance and early modern napkin folds was so fantastic.
00:11:05
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And seeing how they repeated a lot of these same ideas and themes like
00:11:10
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sugar sculptures that I think might be a lot more familiar through people who look at these recipes and see recipes for how to mold things out of sugar paste.
00:11:21
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But actually seeing these sculptures in essence out of linen, repeating that same idea and having the same visual impact was really stunning.
00:11:31
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Right.
00:11:31
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Well, we were really fortunate to be able to have some reconstruction folded
00:11:38
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linen centerpieces made by Joan Saas, who lives in Barcelona and whom we flew over for the first week of the exhibition so he could bring some of his amazing creations.
00:11:50
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And he really has recreated these based on the very limited information in the treatises.
00:11:57
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You know, they explain how to make the basic folds, but they don't explain, you know, the step-by-step of how to take these basic folds and make a crab or a
00:12:06
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you know, a double headed eagle or a turkey or some of these fantastic objects that he that he has created.
00:12:14
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So, you know, that's that's a part of it, too, understanding the kind of ingenuity and the craftsmanship that went into it and all of what people sometimes refer to as tacit knowledge.
00:12:25
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Right.
00:12:25
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You know, you can you have these books and there's information in them.
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But what does the information actually tell you?
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How far does it take you?
00:12:33
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What other types of
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of pedagogical
Team Effort and Contributions
00:12:37
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support would be needed to create these objects.
00:12:41
Speaker
And that's something that's very hard to kind of communicate that in an exhibition.
00:12:48
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But that was a big part of the research process for me was trying to think about how you might make these things and what kind of training and how that training was communicated.
00:13:01
Speaker
I guess you saw some of the wonderful frontispieces from
00:13:04
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the carving manuals where there were pictures of these men who were caught in the act of teaching.
00:13:12
Speaker
And sort of depicting that pedagogical moment is something I found super interesting and something you don't often see in other types of imagery and visual material from the period.
00:13:25
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Teaching is not something that's easy to represent visually.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:13:29
Speaker
And so that was something that I mean, there you could there is a whole history of it.
00:13:34
Speaker
And that would be a whole other interesting topic like, you know, Bolognese, 14th century legal scholars, you know, tombs with pictures of, you know, people standing at a cathedral teaching there that they exist.
00:13:48
Speaker
But it's a very specific kind of iconography.
00:13:50
Speaker
So, you know, that was just like one of the many things that interested me about these books.
00:13:57
Speaker
how did you actually decide on what items to include in the exhibition?
00:14:02
Speaker
Was there really, was there anything you really wanted to include, but couldn't?
00:14:06
Speaker
I mean, yeah.
00:14:10
Speaker
If you, if I could have made a wishlist of everything I wanted from every museum in the whole world, yes, there would have been lots of things I would have borrowed from the, you know,
00:14:19
Speaker
the, the, the, the Kunstkammer in Vienna and, um, you know, the V&A and any other number of European museums that have fantastic examples of this.
00:14:29
Speaker
Um, so yes, but, um, I did, I think I did manage through the generosity of the Metropolitan Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, which both of those, um, have great collections of cutlery that's completely understudied and it's usually not out in the galleries.
00:14:46
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It's hidden away in the storerooms.
00:14:48
Speaker
Um,
00:14:49
Speaker
So I was able to find examples of objects that were illustrative of this culture and which helped me to tell the story in ways.
00:15:00
Speaker
So yes, I think that everybody, every curator would say that there are things that got away.
00:15:05
Speaker
But given the limited kind of construct of this exhibition, I was very pleased to have the loans that I got and to be able to kind of
00:15:18
Speaker
make them carry the sort of messages and the meanings that I wanted to convey.
00:15:24
Speaker
So, you know, that's important that you have ideas and then you have to find objects that you can use to kind of illustrate those ideas.
00:15:33
Speaker
I think the process is different than if you set out to do an exhibition of, you know, Impressionist painting, for example, where the objects speak for themselves.
00:15:42
Speaker
There's
00:15:43
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There's the early, middle, and late style.
00:15:45
Speaker
There's all kinds of thematic ways you can organize a show like that, but it's basically paintings by an artist.
00:15:52
Speaker
Whereas here, an exhibition that involves all these different kinds of things, I think, involves really figuring out what the narrative is and what the basic ideas are that you want to communicate and then finding ways to do that through the objects that are available to you.
00:16:10
Speaker
Could you tell us a bit about the team of people who helped you put together Staging the Table?
00:16:15
Speaker
Sure.
00:16:16
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Well, first I should mention the two designers, the designer of the book, Jocelyn Lau, and the exhibition designer, Ian Sullivan, because they really helped me to kind of make my visualization that I had in my mind come to fruition.
00:16:33
Speaker
That was really important.
00:16:34
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I had very specific ideas of how I wanted
00:16:37
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this material to be displayed.
00:16:38
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And both of them were incredibly good listeners, but, and creative.
00:16:43
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And so they kind of work with me and we, it was a really good team.
00:16:46
Speaker
I think that was part of it.
00:16:48
Speaker
But then beyond that, you know, we have the whole installation team and my, and the students who over a period of three or four years actually was drawn out because of COVID.
00:17:00
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The exhibition was originally supposed to take place in 2021 and was delayed for two years.
00:17:06
Speaker
And,
00:17:06
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Honestly, that was a kind of godsend because it would have been a totally different exhibition if I had mounted it in 2021.
00:17:15
Speaker
So as a result of that, multiple generations of students got to work on it in the context of the two-year MA program that we have.
00:17:23
Speaker
And they contributed through their research, both directly and indirectly, to parts of the exhibition.
00:17:30
Speaker
One really specific way that they contributed was through
00:17:34
Speaker
an amazing website based on a deck of playing cards published in 17th century London that we were not able to borrow from the Beinecke library, but we used a digitized copy of those decks of cards and they created this fantastic website that brings food.
00:17:57
Speaker
And that was the brief was find recipes that
00:18:02
Speaker
the carving animals and fruits on these cards could have, how they would have been made.
00:18:10
Speaker
And so they use the cards as a kind of way of getting into the whole period in terms of food.
00:18:16
Speaker
So that's one very specific way in which other people contributed to the exhibition.
00:18:23
Speaker
And then, you know, then of course there's the usual, the editors and, you know, the people that work with you
00:18:30
Speaker
to make sure that your labels make sense and are clearly expressed and don't have too many convoluted sentences and all of that.
00:18:40
Speaker
So I guess you don't mean really that, you mean more sort of an intellectual collaboration.
00:18:45
Speaker
Well, those are all people I was thinking of.
00:18:49
Speaker
You also, there were also people who popped up in the exhibition itself, like Ivan Day.
00:18:56
Speaker
Ivan Day, absolutely.
00:18:58
Speaker
With his, well, recorded the audio recordings of reflections about different appropriate food history commentary.
00:19:06
Speaker
And then...
00:19:07
Speaker
Syoss's napkin folding and his workshop and involvement in that.
00:19:12
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, those people, both of those people, I was, I was obviously aware of their work and Ivan and I have known each other for maybe 10 or 15 years.
00:19:21
Speaker
And I've, I've been to various conferences and over the years have really come to understand the incredibly unique way that his knowledge and experience can be activated for an audience and the ways that
00:19:38
Speaker
that kind of practical understanding of things is so key to bringing the period alive and bringing the objects alive.
00:19:46
Speaker
And so I was really thrilled that he agreed to come to New York and see the show and comment on it and bring his reproduction set of knives with him and some other objects that he used for some of the programs that are, I think you'll have links to those on the podcast.
Multisensory Experiences and Symposium
00:20:07
Speaker
But, but yeah, I mean, he, his knowledge contributed both in direct ways and in indirect ways as well in terms of my own kind of study and research and, and coming to understand this in the way that I, I did to put together the exhibition.
00:20:25
Speaker
So we, we, we stand on the shoulders of all of these people as we do our research.
00:20:30
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:20:32
Speaker
Well, speaking of all these other people who do this research, could you speak a little bit about the symposium that was associated with the exhibition?
00:20:42
Speaker
I believe it was called Instruments of Dining and also the other events like settings and sounds and how they complemented and added to the exhibition.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:54
Speaker
And for our listeners, all these programs are going to be linked in our podcast notes.
00:20:58
Speaker
Great.
00:20:59
Speaker
So...
00:21:01
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I wanted to do something for a symposium that would kind of be accessible to a larger audience than simply the four or five people that might be interested in early modern SB books.
00:21:15
Speaker
I mean, I know that there are a lot of people and that they're probably all listening to this and thinking, well, like, why not just do programs that are geared to us?
00:21:25
Speaker
But part of it is the person who's the head of our
00:21:30
Speaker
public programs and research program, his name is Andrew Kircher, really was very encouraging in terms of trying to open it up to an audience, which I really appreciate.
00:21:40
Speaker
This is something that a lot of places in thinking about public humanities and other ways of engaging a broader public with kind of research projects, right?
00:21:50
Speaker
So that's kind of the bigger background.
00:21:53
Speaker
So the symposium, I invited a scholar who I'd met at various conferences, Molly Taylor Pileski, who works on dining at the German courts in the 17th century.
00:22:06
Speaker
And she gave an archivally based paper that was very interesting and really spot on in terms of the courts and the types of things that would be happening based on these archival sources that she's researched.
00:22:20
Speaker
And then I had the music side of it.
00:22:24
Speaker
Well, then Ivan, of course, because for the evening program, that was the settings and sounds.
00:22:28
Speaker
And the symposium did different lectures where he was talking about ways that objects.
00:22:34
Speaker
And he made this wonderful sugar sculpture, Tatsa, that he demonstrated its use and showed us some cutlery from the period.
00:22:44
Speaker
So he did a lot of really great, very hands-on things.
00:22:47
Speaker
And then the music, that came about because...
00:22:50
Speaker
One of the carving manuals and folding manuals that became kind of the protagonist of the exhibition was something compiled, translated from the Italian in the 1640s by a German Baroque literary figure named Georg Philipp Harzdorfer.
00:23:09
Speaker
And Harzdorfer, I'd never heard of him before.
00:23:12
Speaker
I was engaged in this project, but he's actually an incredibly important person for other
00:23:19
Speaker
publications and activities, among which he wrote the first libretto for the first German opera that was produced in the early 1640s.
00:23:28
Speaker
And so I started digging around and finding all kinds of fascinating stuff.
00:23:33
Speaker
And in almost all of the images of dining and banqueting from the period, you see musicians and a number of the images in the show and some of the prints.
00:23:42
Speaker
And I wanted to try to imagine what it would sound like to be at a meal.
00:23:48
Speaker
and to have the kind of music that would be played at a banquet at the table.
00:23:54
Speaker
And Andrew Kircher has a lot of contact in the performance world and was able to create a relationship between a wonderful early music group called Sonambula and specifically the person who is the sort of director of Sonambula, Zabith Weinfeld.
00:24:13
Speaker
And together we kind of crafted a program
00:24:16
Speaker
where they actually went back and found the score for some of the music that was connected to one of the events that's pictured in one of Harstdorfer's books is the banquet to celebrate the Peace of Westphalia, which is the end of the Thirty Years' War that took place in Nuremberg in 1649.
00:24:34
Speaker
So we went back and found some of the music, and she was able to play a snippet of it live for the event.
00:24:41
Speaker
And that was something that was really significant for me, was to put together
00:24:46
Speaker
the kind of soundscape as well as the tablescape for these events.
00:24:51
Speaker
And that was the idea of it.
00:24:53
Speaker
And there were some other music, Telemann and some other more well-known kind of table music, Tafel music that she found to play for this.
00:25:02
Speaker
So, you know, a kind of involving people in what the term Gesamtkunstwerk, you know, sort of total work of art is something that often is used in conjunction with German opera from the 19th century.
00:25:15
Speaker
But it was really the case that these banquets from the 17th century were total works of art with the food, the visual stimulation, music, and then sort of poetry and recitation and emblematic literary inscriptions that apparently would appear on a lot of the
00:25:38
Speaker
sculptures made out of food or made out of sugar or linen.
00:25:42
Speaker
So there were all these elements and dimensions that I, that I, you know, couldn't really, even in an exhibition communicate to say nothing of in, you know, a monograph.
00:25:53
Speaker
So that was really what I, I tried to use those programs to do was to bring in all this other content and to kind of, you know, obviously one could quibble endlessly about authenticity and,
00:26:09
Speaker
You know, that's another that's a whole other
Catalog Design and Favorite Exhibition Pieces
00:26:11
Speaker
conversation.
00:26:11
Speaker
But I think in terms of just getting a broader sense of it with the with the proviso that it's not completely authentic and it's impossible to to go to a situation where you have complete authenticity in any kind of reconstruction or recreation.
00:26:28
Speaker
But it at least provides a sense of what that experience would have been like.
00:26:34
Speaker
If we could switch gears now to the catalog.
00:26:37
Speaker
Sure.
00:26:38
Speaker
I absolutely love this catalog, actually.
00:26:42
Speaker
I don't normally say that about catalogs.
00:26:44
Speaker
They're usually really large and unwieldy and not exactly the most easy books to use.
00:26:51
Speaker
But
00:26:52
Speaker
This is really so manageable to hold and to flip through.
00:26:57
Speaker
It's such a beautiful book.
00:26:59
Speaker
It's so evocative of the text of the period from the exhibition.
00:27:03
Speaker
It uses both red and black font throughout, like is so often the case with these early print books.
00:27:12
Speaker
There are decorative elements that are really evocative of the woodcuts found in books at the time, the different sorts of typefaces that you often see.
00:27:22
Speaker
So I really just love the visual aspects of the book as well.
00:27:26
Speaker
But it's also such a valuable thing.
00:27:30
Speaker
scholarly resource as well.
00:27:32
Speaker
And I was wondering if you had actually visualized this exhibition as a book or a monograph before an exhibition, because this catalog actually reads so fluidly, more like a monograph than an exhibition.
00:27:49
Speaker
Well, first of all, thank you.
00:27:51
Speaker
It's wonderful to hear that because those are all things that I was very, very engaged with
00:27:58
Speaker
sort of making happen in this.
00:28:01
Speaker
And to answer the question, I mean, you know, it is a monograph.
00:28:04
Speaker
A lot of catalogs are multiple authors.
00:28:07
Speaker
And part of this focus project idea is that it's a way for faculty members to deploy their research in a way which is more public facing.
00:28:21
Speaker
In a sense, I did think of it as a monograph, but I wanted it to be written for a broader audience.
00:28:28
Speaker
When I first started thinking about this, it was sort of amorphous.
00:28:31
Speaker
Once I got into it, I realized how significant visually it would be for an exhibition.
00:28:40
Speaker
So the exhibition is now digitized and it's freely available online.
00:28:45
Speaker
Could you tell us a bit about the process of digitizing a physical or in-person exhibition and some of the challenges associated with that, as well as some of the benefits you see?
00:28:57
Speaker
Sure.
00:28:58
Speaker
I mean, the benefits are pretty clear because an exhibition is around for a limited number of months and then it disappears.
00:29:07
Speaker
So having some permanent record of it is really important.
00:29:10
Speaker
And it's really nice because it's actually, it's so sad to think about the end of an exhibition.
00:29:16
Speaker
You know, you work so hard on these and then they inevitably come to an end.
00:29:21
Speaker
So it's really great that it exists in the digital form.
00:29:26
Speaker
So in order to create that, we have two wonderful digital people at BGC, Jesse Morandi and Julie Fuller.
00:29:35
Speaker
And I worked really closely with them to figure out how to organize it into some form, choose the order that the objects would occur in.
00:29:45
Speaker
But the process was pretty straightforward.
00:29:49
Speaker
We used the images that we had, digitized images, because of
00:29:54
Speaker
because of the book and the book illustrations, uploaded them and uploaded the label material.
00:30:00
Speaker
And Jocelyn Lau, who had designed the book, created the design for the website so that it was kind of a seamless transfer of all the graphic
00:30:11
Speaker
details that you mentioned that were so important in the sort of look and feel of the exhibition.
00:30:16
Speaker
So in this case, the online version does capture a lot of those aspects that you mentioned, the mixed typefaces, the color scheme, and all kinds of the quirks of early letterpress printing, which was what we really wanted to communicate that.
00:30:33
Speaker
So I'm glad that came through.
00:30:35
Speaker
Well, final question.
00:30:37
Speaker
Did you have a favorite book or object from staging the table?
00:30:43
Speaker
Hard question.
00:30:44
Speaker
Who's your favorite child?
00:30:47
Speaker
Let's see.
00:30:49
Speaker
A favorite single object?
00:30:51
Speaker
Gosh.
00:30:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:54
Speaker
Or a couple, if you can't really choose.
00:30:59
Speaker
One of the napkins that we borrowed from the Met, it's a napkin that was from 17th century Harlem or Belgium, sort of that area that has a wonderful kind of label that's sewn onto it with a series of names of...
00:31:19
Speaker
different family members over several generations.
00:31:21
Speaker
And it's an American family.
00:31:22
Speaker
That's how it got to the Met.
00:31:23
Speaker
And it's actually in the American wing at the Met.
00:31:25
Speaker
It was donated by an American family along with a lot of other objects.
00:31:31
Speaker
But the fact that this napkin had such an important status in the family that it became this kind of locus of these different memories and the kind of set of names on it.
00:31:45
Speaker
I found that just so moving to see how
00:31:48
Speaker
something that many people would consider a kind of humble object, a napkin, became really the bearer of memory and transmitting family, you know, the family history.
00:32:01
Speaker
So that object to me was just like a really important thing because, you know, these napkins, people had hundreds of them in the early modern period, literally hundreds because they were used constantly and they were really,
00:32:18
Speaker
you know, necessary to, to this, the rituals of dining and they do survive, but people don't really use them anymore.
00:32:30
Speaker
They're too much work.
00:32:32
Speaker
I think when you start asking questions and talking about this, so many people, when I was doing tours of the exhibition would say, oh yeah, I have all this big box of, of, of linens from my grandmother, but I never use them because they're so hard to wash and, you know,
00:32:46
Speaker
an iron.
00:32:47
Speaker
And so, but these are really sort of humble material objects.
00:32:52
Speaker
And, and so that's something that's, that was one of my favorite objects.
00:32:57
Speaker
And then I'll have to say some of, some of the books that just the illustrations, there's, there's one illustration of a carver and he's standing in what looks to me very much like a Kunstkammer.
00:33:09
Speaker
And I think it's kind of riffing on this, the theme of the Kunstkammer, you know, that,
00:33:13
Speaker
I found that actually at the very end of my research process and we didn't have time to even borrow the book.
00:33:17
Speaker
So I have a reproduction of it.
00:33:20
Speaker
And one thing, I'll just say this really quickly.
00:33:23
Speaker
In the exhibition, we also have a lot of reproductions because when you're doing a book exhibition, one of the challenges is you can only open a book to one page.
00:33:30
Speaker
But what I chose to do is to attach all of those reproductions with nails to the wall so it looked sort of like the workshop and so that the visitor wasn't deluded into thinking these were actual objects.
00:33:41
Speaker
I wanted it to be really clear what was a reproduction and what was an actual object.
00:33:46
Speaker
So this image of the carver in his workshop that looks like a Kunstkammer
00:33:52
Speaker
to me, made that exact connection.
00:33:54
Speaker
And instead of having precious objects like jewels and cameos and ancient sculpture that you'd see in a Kunstkammer illustration, they're carcasses of animals and carved fruits.
00:34:08
Speaker
And I think it was actually humorous.
00:34:11
Speaker
I mean, whoever made that had a sense of humor about the sort of visual tradition that was being quoted.
00:34:18
Speaker
And that, so that to me was, it's a favorite object because it seemed to kind of embody some of, you know, some of my ideas about the exhibition.
00:34:25
Speaker
Well, Debra, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about staging the table.
00:34:32
Speaker
It's been a really wonderful opportunity for me to reflect as the exhibition's coming to a close and to think about some of the themes.
00:34:40
Speaker
And I really appreciate your interest.
00:34:42
Speaker
Great to meet you.
00:34:43
Speaker
Thanks to everyone for listening today.
00:34:46
Speaker
Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode.
00:34:51
Speaker
I'll see you again next time on Around the Table.