Renaissance Italy’s wealthiest groups competed for power in many ways, amongst them through women’s jewelry. It was a complex Game-of-Thrones-esque time, when many different ambitions came into play — the moralizing Franciscans who preached against conspicuous displays of wealth, the male merchants who often vied with the nobles for political control, and the elite women whose pathetically limited agency in their own lives made them especially interested in showing off their status by the ways they adorned themselves.
The shadow-side of this was of course the groups of people considered polluters, whose existence those in power used and abused to showcase who the Important People actually were. Jewish people and prostitutes were among the shunned, and they had something in common: although considered problematic (the former because they weren’t Christian and the latter because they weren’t obeying Christian sexual morality), they both performed social services their wealthy neighbors wanted — Jewish people (unlike Christians) were allowed to lend money, and prostitutes would have sex with men (who otherwise would have needed to wait until marriage in their late 20s).
You can trace the dynamics of power play by looking at the role women’s ear-rings took on, and I do this here by looking at three different paintings. In many parts of Italy, ear-rings were only worn by Jewish women in the 1300s, and thus they were considered “bad” by the Franciscan moralists. The painting from about 1370, showing the famous reformed prostitute Mary Magdalene, with ear-rings. Here, the jewels signified corruption. By the next century, the 1460 painting by Giovanni Bellini has the Virgin Mary presenting Jesus at the Temple — of course, this was a Jewish setting, but the Christian painter wanted to promote Mary’s holiness, and thus depicted the Virgin with her earlobe enlarged and deliberately jewel-free. The final sample is from about 1500, when wealthy Christian women wanted to vaunt their specialness in ways new to them: ear-rings became a mark of the in-group. And thus, in this last painting (by Gian-Francesco de Maineri) , Mary gets to wear an ear-ring.
Source(s): Diane Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City,” _Past & Present_ (August 1986), pp. 3-59. Painting images all from Wiki, first to last, Angelo Puccinelli, Saint Jean-Baptiste et sainte Madeleine; Giovanni Bellini, _Presentation at the Temple_ (1460); Gian-Francesco de Maineri, _Holy Family_.
