Luxury Consumption and Elite Lifestyles

doi:10.1017/9781009151016.015

9 - Luxury Consumption and Elite Lifestyles

from Part IV - Shared Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 March 2023

Annette Rathje

Edited by

Elizabeth P. Baughan and

Lisa C. Pieraccini

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Elizabeth P. Baughan: Affiliation:
University of Richmond, Virginia
Lisa C. Pieraccini: Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley

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Summary

This paper compares how ideas of power, rank, and status were communicated in Etruria and Anatolia in the Orientalizing period by the use of material items and images. By employing and exhibiting specific objects, elites used a non-verbal language to communicate with each other across frontiers in the Mediterranean area as well as to show their wealth and their sophistication in their own surroundings. Trade networks have been discovered, analyzed, and exhibited on various occasions in the last decade. However, we now have to deal with the significance of the selection, collection, and use of certain luxury items to the ostentation of accumulated wealth that are better known from the courtly societies of the Near and Middle East. The desire for possessing these items can be perceived in personal or private as well as social terms. As many of the items belong to the sphere of banqueting, it is mandatory to link the two worlds in question vis-à-vis this praxis of consumption and social events.

Keywords

trade banquets exotic imports emulation sphinx Egyptian blue Vulci Caere princely tombs

Type: Chapter
Information: Etruria and Anatolia
Material Connections and Artistic Exchange
, pp. 166 - 181

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009151016.015 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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